Paul Crossley

So its goodbye to the Year of the Pig and welcome into the year of the Rat. Here in Bath our East Asian Community have been building up their communiity group - BEACH - Bath East Asian Chinese - for four years now. They are very active and each year have a great new years celebration. This year at Twerton Football Club. We were treated to dancing from local children, a martial arts display from a Wu-Tan group and finally a dragon dance from a group from South Gloucestershire. And of course great food - courtesy of the Mayflower restaurant in Bristol. Bath is blessed with active groups from all its communities and events like this that bring people together are always good. I always get to the New Year party. The more New Years the better as far as I am concerned ;-)

Cadbury's - as readers of this blog will know - have decided to cease manufacturing at Keynsham and produce products for the UK market in Poland. And then they have the gall to attend a Carbon Footprint reduction conference as a speaker on the subject. So what about all those transport miles bringing chocolate bars to the UK? What about the destruction of a loyal workforce in Keynsham?

Lets get real, this is only about money and I think we need to check the integrity of big companies when they try and preach the clean, green agenda. Its a case of Walking the Walk as well as Talking the Talk. Check out the speaker list and see what you think. MacDonald's presumably now have a strategy to, in a short space of time, get to a point where they buy only sustainably farmed meat!

My personal response: I will not knowingly buy another Cadbury Schweppes product again.

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Here in Bath and NE Somerset the Conservative group have mastered spin and deceit into an art form. Recycling in our authority is one of the best in the Country thanks to years of hard work by the Liberal Democrats. The Tories won control last May on the back of two deceitful campaigns. They said we were planning to move to fortnightly waste collections simply on the basis that we hadn't said we ruled it out!!! Our pledge was to move to weekly same day collection for all waste streams.

By that logic we could claim that the Tories intend to remove blue badge parking rights simply because they had not said they support them. Interestingly they did not say in their manifesto that they would be charging the disabled to park which is in their first budget.

Our waste aspiration has alwasy been based on Zero Waste Policy and NO INCINERATION and our aim is to be the No ! in the Country.

Since May the Tories have delayed the plans we had in place for food waste collection and same day collection, have removed some of the free trade cardboard waste collection and stopped using china cups for drinking tea and coffee at meetings. 

The waste lie continues from their group in the letters page so below is my response to the Western Daily Press.

Waste_letter_06.02.08.rtf

Lots of bits and pieces.....

CPA - Bath and NE Somerset is getting CPA'd in May. I am on the steering group making the preparations for the visit - partly because i lead the authority from 2002 to 2007 and partly because I am a peer member on Audit Commission inspection teams. We had two meetings this week to discuss prepartion, self-assessment, the tour, scores etc etc.

I think external inspection over recent years has certainly helped improve local governments despite the grid like nature of the final inspection score and a certain amount of arbitrary elements, it is, overall, sound and worthwhile. However as the whole process is confidential until the publication of the final reports it is difficult to talk about on a public forum. It would do Parliament and MPs good to be subjected to the rigorous external scrutiny that they insist local government has.

During the week visited Chesterfield where I provide mentoring support for the Lib Dem Leader Ray Russell. Chesterfield is a lovely little town and its fortunes have come on  in leaps and bounds since Ray and his Lib Dem team took over from decades of Labour rule and decline. Ray is managing a period of growth and change and regeneration and renewal very well. This visit was the last of my IDeA contract of mentoring support to both Ray.

Visted Marie Gutheridge the head of Writhlington - a fantastic school in Radstock. Here in Bath and NE Somerset - despite being one of the worst funded education authorities by central government we have one of the best education services. Mainly due to the fact of the high profile the Liberal Democrat dominated Council from 1995 - 2007 put on this service and the extra 6% funding on average we put in year after year. Now we have been awarded our first Building Schools for the Future money from government and its gone to Writhlington and their plans are very ambitious and exciting. The head is a real go-getter. The plan is tremendous.

The new Conservative administration put on what was termed a Budget Fayre this week. An innovation in terms of getting feedback from organisation and residents before the budget is finally set. Sadly it was too much presentation and not enough engagement and debate.

AND finally Rugby and 6-nations and the opening weekend all the fans had been looking forward to. What on earth happened in the second half at Twickenham? Before the game all the Welsh talk was on targeting Balshaw - and they certainly did. In the end Wales deserved victory but why oh why was the game not wrapped up by England in the first half. To use a well worn sporting cliches - it was a game of two halves!!