Peter Kent-Baguley

The Stoke-on-Trent PEOPLE'S PARTY was born in May this year. Representative's of New Labour's National Executive Committee waited until after the May local elections then came up from London to suspend the City Council's Labour Group chief whip, Cllr Reg Booth and myself, the Group's deputy leader, for abstaining in the Council's Budget meeting in March.

The Budget was clearly against the interests of the people. Also, it was obvious to anyone with the most elementary experience of budgets that the Labour Mayor's Budget would never balance in a month of Sundays.  We didn't even vote against; we just abstained. That was enough for the authoritarian Labour Party bosses to attempt to silence us.

Unfortunately for Labour, but fortunately for the people of Stoke-on-Trent we refused to be silenced. We left Labour and formed the PEOPLE'S PARTY.    

The PEOPLE'S PARTY recently welcomed Cllr Ted Owen from the thoroughly discredited, cobbled together Conservative & Independent Alliance, led by arch-political opportunist, Cllr Roger Ibbs. Ted is a thoroughly principled councillor, actively supporting Middleport residents in their struggle for a fair deal from the Council's Housing department.

Cllr Geoff Knight left the thoroughly moribound Liberal Democrat Group and will be able to put his considerable experience of education to good use as the PEOPLE'S PARTY member of the Education Committee.

Cllr Andrew Wragg left the increasingly ineffective Labour Group, and now represents the PEOPLE'S PARTY as Chair of the important Partnerships & External Funding Overview & Scrutiny Commission. 

The PEOPLE'S PARTY functions on several key principles. It is based on co-operative principles and practices, sharing, discussing and working towards a consensus. More councillors will be joining us shortly and a number of candidates have already been selected for the 3rd May 2007 City Council elections.

If you would like to find out more about the PEOPLE'S PARTY, please give me, Cllr Peter Kent-Baguley, a ring on:   01782 785270.

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The bottle kiln may well have been a purely functional structure, designed to draw coal-fired heat upwards through the stacked up pottery ware for firing, but certainly each of the forty or so surviving bottle kilns of the hundreds that were once a major ingredient of the potteries town scape, offer endless visual delights. I think it is safe to say that each is unique, highlighting the seemingly endless variety of shape and size, and, of course, infinite variety of brickwork bonding. Below is the bottle kiln at the derelict Falcon Works, Town Road, overlooking the Potteries Way.

It's good that the City has held on to four dozen or so as reminders of their past importance and artistic delights for the present. Of course, it would have been impracticable (not to say absurd) to have held on to most of them. The forces of production in a capitalist society are consantly changing. The pottery industry cannot be immune to those changes. Thus, the vast majority of the City's pottery production has been moved to the Far East - Indonesia, Malaysia, China - where, on average, the labour costs are (wait for it!) 1/40th of the costs here.

Spode has already moved its Royal Worcester production to the Far East. 50% of its Spode ware is already produced aborad and within months 100% of their ware will be foreign produced. That will happen whether or not the City Council extends the conseravtion area around the Spode factory. That will happen whether or not the Spode site is developed. 

The challenge facing the City Council is to ensure that the site is developed in the best interests of the City. That means at least three crucial conditions MUST be :

1     The historic buildings at the core of the site MUST not only be preserved but enhanced, particularly the museum, so that they are an important tourist attraction.

2     The major part of the site MUST be developed to provide significant additional provision for the benefit of the City's economy and culture.

3     All aspects of the development MUST offer the highest possible standards of design.

In short, what will be offered and seen MUST be the talk of the region if not the nation. This is a splendid moment for the City Council to usher in a new dawn of excellence by clear, cogent and courageous leadership of all stakeholders in the private, public and community sectors.

Our canal cruising in August proved to be an emotional journey. Freed of familiar daily routines I found no escape from what felt like a head-on confrontation with grief. The intense physical and emotional pain following the death of our son Joel on 24th November 2005 created a kind of paralysis. I carried on with my daily routines as best I could but I felt like I was functioning within a mental and physical strait-jacket. With the routines abandoned, the floodgates opened. As I have discovered from many other people who have lost children, the turbulence does subside but the landscape can never be the same. Only now, just over a year on, am I able to write a little about Joel's death. And the only reason I have written this piece is that just as I have been comforted by the experiences of others, maybe a grieving parent will identify with this and draw some support from it.