Accident on Rooley Moor Road

Dear Editor


Accident on Rooley Moor Road


The recent accident on Rooley Moor Road illustrates the problem of speeding on this stretch of road and the reluctance of Councillors to do anything about it. 

Indeed a proposed initiate by Councillor Biant to look at traffic on this road will make it more dangerous, making speeding more likely.  In January 2018 Councillor Biant commissioned a study in order to 'increase traffic flow' and to introduce 'a scheme ...........to formally promote any (parking restrictions) proposed'.  Speeding is not mentioned or considered in this study.

Highways will carry out the study and agree it with councillors.  Residents only get to comment AFTER the restrictions on parking are agreed.  The cost is £4,500.  All concerns by residents about speeding on this road are ignored.  We have asked for information about the survey and to make comments BEFORE proposals on introducing parking restrictions are agreed.  We have pointed out that removing parked cars from along the route will enable cars to go even faster.  The obvious fact that parked cars slow down traffic is even acknowledged in surveys carried out by highways on other roads.

The council, councillors and highway employees refuse to talk to us in any way or to businesses. Emails are not even acknowledged, let alone answered. They seem to have undertaken a vow of silence. What price local democracy and representing the concerns of residents? Who do these councillors think they are?

In respect to 'traffic flow', it only takes 90 seconds to travel the length of the road identified in the survey.  Traffic does not have to use Rooley Moor Road, it is not the main route into town from Norden or Bury.  Hold ups last for a matter of seconds.  Single and double yellow lines are not wanted by residents.  What is needed are measures to tackle speeding.  The recent crash was an accident waiting to happen.  Why are councillors ignoring our concerns?  They answer to the electorate, make sure do in the local elections in May.

Regards

Mick Coats

66 Rooley Moor Road

 

 

Half Bricks and Abuse of MPs

by Les May

HARRIET Harman has been at it again.  In last Saturday’s Times she was reported to have said that some MPs had changed their stance, presumably on Brexit, because of threats and abuse they had received.   But as is often the case with Harriet the story she is telling is a bit lacking in detail. Or to put it another way we have only Harriet’s say so for it.

As I pointed out recently, Luciana Berger has been repeatedly verbally abused and physically threatened, but the people doing it are not connected with the Labour party.  It’s not good enough for her to say that she believes that the abuse she received after the incident with the mural in 2018 came from ‘left wing individuals’.  Without some firm evidence I am not willing to believe claims of this kind.

This is a re-run of what we saw in July 2016 when The Guardian ran a story about a brick being thrown through the window of Angela Eagle’s constituency office after she declared her intention to challenge Corbyn for the Labour leadership.

According to the paper, ‘Eagle called on Corbyn to rein in his supporters, saying attacks such as the vandalising of her office were “being done in his name, and he needs to get control of the people who are supporting him and make certain that this behaviour stops and stops now.  It is bullying.  It has absolutely no place in politics in the UK and it needs to end”.'

What’s interesting about the Berger and Eagle cases is the lazy assumption that it is supporters of Jeremy Corbyn who were responsible and that he should somehow or other ‘control’ them. I’m a supporter of Corbyn, but if I write something to which you take exception, take it up with me, don’t try to blame Corbyn.

If you make lazy assumptions like this and are not meticulous in finding out the facts before rushing into print it’s easy to give the impression that Labour is a hotbed of bullying and anti-semitism.  Just because they print it does not mean we have to believe it. 

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And Now The Good News!

by Les May

THE 'Not So Magnificent Seven' were in the news again today on BBC2’s Politics Live programme, albeit briefly.  With reference to Angela Smith’s comment yesterday one of the contributors said ‘They’ve lost the keys to the bus’.   He explained what he meant by this by saying that the group had left Labour because they had recognised that the changes in the party that Corbyn’s election to the leadership had brought about were here to stay.


If this interpretation is correct then I think this is good news.  Whether it will see Labour MPs unite behind what used to be Labour’s core value, a commitment to social and economic justice, or whether some will continue their flirtation with the politics of identity, only time will tell.

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'We’ve Lost the Keys'

by Les May

I joined Rochdale Young Socialists in August 1960.  A month later, I was outside the Scarborough Conference demonstrating my support for a motion proposing unilateral nuclear disarmament.  Famously Hugh Gaitskell who was leader of the Labour Party at the time said;

‘We may lose the vote today, and the result may deal this party a grave blow. It may not be possible to prevent this, but there are some of us, I think many of us, who will not accept that this blow need be mortal: who will not believe that such an end is inevitable.  There are some of us, Mr Chairman, who will fight, and fight, and fight again, to save the party we love.  We will fight, and fight, and fight again, to bring back sanity and honesty and dignity, so that our party -- with its great past -- may retain its glory and its greatness.’

Labour was deeply divided over the issue, but it is generally accepted that Gaitskell, ‘lost the vote and won the argument’.  When he was challenged for the leadership by Harold Wilson, who presented himself as a ‘unity not civil war’ candidate and who shared Gaitskell’s scepticism about unilateralism, Gaitskell got two thirds of the vote, which at that time was confined to Labour MPs.

Sixty years later the arguments remain the same.   Is it Labour MPs who should determine policy and select the leader, or is it the wider membership of the Labour party?   Speaking today on BB2’s Politics Live programme Angela Smith, one of the ‘Not So Magnificent Seven’ who resigned from the party today, rather gave the game away when she said ‘We’ve lost the keys’.  Like it or not, after 2015 we have seen a power shift within the Labour party, away from MPs and to the members.

Unsurprisingly Labour members like it that way and are ready to be critical of their MP when they feel he or she is being less than supportive of Corbyn’s leadership and/or party policy.   They may have a point.  There are some constituencies which are ‘solid Labour’, but in most it takes a lot of effort by local Labour members to ‘get the vote out’.

Another of the MPs who left Labour, Luciana Berger, has successfully managed to conflate two quite separate issues; criticism of Corbyn and anti-semitism. Until they were withdrawn her local party was set to debate two motions;

'The UK is in crisis because of the appalling austerity policies of a government that serves the interests of the rich.  We need a Labour government under the socialist leadership of our twice-elected leader Jeremy Corbyn. Instead of fighting for a Labour government our MP is continually using the media to criticise the man we all want to be Prime Minister.

'The Tories are deeply divided, but millions are still suffering from their austerity policies.  We desperately need a socialist Labour government led by Jeremy Corbyn.  Our MP is continually criticising our leader when she should be working for a general election and opposing the Tories.'

Not by any stretch of the imagination can either of these be described as ‘anti-semitic’.  Nor do they seem to me to justify Chuka Umunna’s comment quoted in the Jewish Chronicle, ‘How about demanding her CLP treats her with the respect she deserves?’  Clearly Chuka still has not yet got used to the idea that Labour MPs are no longer in the driving seat.

That’s not to say that Berger has not been subjected to antisemitic abuse, she has.  But the evidence points to the fact that it is coming from people who have nothing to do with the Labour party.  This is what Wikipedia has to say:

‘In January 2013, it was reported that a Merseyside music promoter, Philip Hayes, had been convicted of a racially aggravated public order offence and fined £120 after an "antisemitic tirade" against Berger at the Liverpool Music Awards.

'In October 2014, Garron Helm, a member of the small neo-Nazi National Action youth group was imprisoned for four weeks after he sent an antisemitic tweet to Berger in August 2014, serving two weeks before being released.  Following the conviction, it was reported that similar messages to her were being posted on Twitter.  According to Berger in December 2014, "[a]t the height of the abuse, the police said I was the subject of 2,500 hate messages in the space of three days" using the same hashtag.

'During the 2015 general election, UK Independence Party parliamentary candidate for West Lancashire Jack Sen was suspended from the party after sending an allegedly antisemitic tweet to Berger.
Joshua Bonehill-Paine , a supporter of Helm, was convicted of racially-aggravated harassment of Berger in December 2016 and sentenced to two years.

'In February 2017, John Nimmo was sentenced to 27 months in prison after pleading guilty to nine charges, including the sending of death threats and antisemitic messages to Berger.’

What Wikipedia also tells us it that in March 2018 Berger used Twitter to ask Jeremy Corbyn why he had queried the removal by a local council of an allegedly anti-semitic mural in 2012.   Using Twitter to do this rather than speaking to him directly or writing to him, suggests to me deliberate intent to cause trouble for Corbyn. 

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The Gambia - quick update on progress!

by John & Sandra Walker

OUR most successful visit to Sohm, to date, will be the feature of a series of articles over the coming months.  The achievements of the trip, however, can be expressed in 10 headlines and photos, below.

1. Given a great welcome by the school.

2. Witnessed transformed classroom block, courtesy of the generosity of pupils from Beech Hill school, Luton and Redbridge Rotary Club.

3. Saw superb delivery of First Aid training to 10 adults and three pupils, plus the delivery of upto date stock of medical supplies, from the ever-excellent First Aid 4 Gambia.

4. Signed off plans for a new 30 metre hall and kitchen block - our biggest project yet - to be built this year.

5. Delivered £1k+ of stationery to meet all needs of 450 pupils and their staff for the next year.

6. Saw delighted pupils and teachers captivated by some Jolly Phonics DVD's, we took over - courtesy of some e.bay bargains in the UK

7. Picked up over 90 letters, drawings and photos from the pupils to take to their pen pals in Luton.

8. Sourced potential furniture - with ideas of how to pay for it - for the new hall, for next year.

9. Spoke to Banjul Rotary Club, about possible future co-operation.

10. Tracked down possible future training packages for the staff at Sohm Lower Basic School.

Future blogs will add flesh to the bones of the above achievements.

As ever, we welcome your comments and donations - to help us continue to change lives in the small Gambian village of Sohm.

John Walker 07954 153 305 Gambia stuff: www.SohmSchoolsSupport.org.uk @GambiaSchools Forest Gate stuff: www.E7-NowAndThen.org, @E7_NowAndThen

Decade of blacklisted workers fighting for justice

10 years on - blacklisted workers are still fighting for justice

Blacklist Support Group - 10th anniversary parliamentary event

Wednesday 6th March (5pm - 7:30pm)

Houses of Parliament 

Westminster

Hosted by: John McDonnell MP & Chris Stephens MP

6th March 2019 is exactly ten years since The Consulting Association blacklist of union members in the building industry was exposed.  BSG is holding a 10th Anniversary meeting in parliament to celebrate the successes of our campaign, but also to highlight the injustices that still need to be put right.  It started out as an industrial relations issue, it's now turned into a human rights conspiracy involving multinational companies and the police. 

We guarantee that important new information will be put into the public domain at this meeting.  We will be using this as a means of telling politicians what we want to see in future election manifestos. 

All blacklisted workers and supporters welcome.

Please circulate. 

More details to follow once speakers are confirmed (a small part of the meeting will act as the BSG AGM). 

Blacklist Support Group

book: http://newint.org/books/politics/blacklisted-secret-war/

video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eNcgrNs6pB8

facebook: http://www.facebook.com/groups/blacklistSG/

blog: www.hazards.org/blacklistblog

Dante's Inferno, Seumas Milne & Europe

by Brian Bamford 

'I've been wondering what that special place
in hell looks like, for those who promoted
Brexit, without even a sketch of a plan how
to carry it out safely.'  
                                      Donald Tusk.
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IN his book 'Movements in European History' [1921] D.H. Lawrence commenting on Dante and the Renaissance, wrote that in the time of Dante in the fifteenth century:
'Europe then was not like Europe now.  If a man were a Christian, all countries were his, for everywhere was the one Church of which he was a son.... What did it matter if a man were English or French or Spanish?  He was a European, a member of Christendom.  He travelled along the roads where all travelled, and on the full high-road every European was at home.... So the student leaving Italy would calmly take the great north road, to come home through the Alps to Germany, walking often on foot without any fears....  Nobody asked if he were English or Irish or German or Italian.  He spoke in Latin to the monks and was received as one of themselves.'

Similarly, A.J.P. Taylor began his book 'English History 1914-19145':
'UNTIL August 1914 a sensible, law-abiding Englishman could pass through life and hardly notice the existence of the state, beyond the post office and the policeman.  He could  live where he liked and as he liked... He could travel abroad or leave his country for ever without a passport or any sort of official permission.'  

 

Dante et Virgile  Capocchio, an alchemist, attacked by Gianni Schicchi, 

who impersonated the dead Buoso Donati to claim his inheritance, 

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In a way the European Union in the 20th century was an attempt to recover this lost world of the yesterday.  Perhaps it was a vain expectation given that since the First World War and the horrors that followed it, so many of us have now become hooked on the nation state.  There is not that many men like Dante knocking around these days or even a George Orwell, who may yearn to understand the bigger picture with a geo-political vision.

Instead today we're blessed with the likes of Chris Draper and Seamus Milne.  This week in Private Eye 'Ratbiter' pointed out that 'Any young supporter who voted Labour in the belief that the party was pro-European should have watched as their leader Jeremy Corbyn took his strategy and communications director Seumas Milne to an emergency Brexit meeting with Theresa May last week.'

Comrade Milne it turns out  'has opposed the EU as intensely as Tory Brexiteers Jacob Rees-Mogg and Boris Johnson-but for much longer'.  As a schoolboy Comrade Milne wrote a manifesto as a Maoist candidate in a mock election at Winchester College in 1974:  'We would withdraw from NATO and the EEC; that was a year after the UK joined the European Economic Community, as it was then called.'

'Ratbiter' in Private Eye claims that the schoolboy Comrade Milne of 1974 soon swapped his loyalties from Mao to Stalin, and when the Berlin Wall came down in 1989, Seamus switched his passions from Soviet communism to what 'Ratbiter' now calls 'the Russian gangster regime that succeeded it'.  Private Eye notes that Jeremy Corbyn took this public schoolboy Comrade Milne to meet with Theresa May rather than his Brexit Secretary, Keir Starmer. 

D.H. Lawrence in his work 'Movements in European History' writes that '[p]erhaps the most wonderful century in all our Europe's two thousand years is the fifteenth century. .. Then lived the greatest painters, great poets, great architects, sculptors, scientists and men of learning, such had not been seen before.'

Following the First World War the nation state with its frontiers and tariffs came to dominate the culture of Europe with what Benedict Anderson has called 'Imagined Communities'.  Then came the glorification of the nation state which ended up with the Second World War and the Cold War.

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