Tuesday, 3 December 2019
from 19:30-21:00
Cranbrook Education Campus
Tillhouse Road,
Cranbrook,
EX5 7EE
Daily Archives: 18 Nov 2019
A former Lib Dem urges people not to vote Lib Dem
Vote anything but Claire Wright (Independent) in East Devon, get Tory. Get Tory, get Putin and Trump.
” … the Lib Dems are again trying to lure voters from the centre left with big promises. This time, instead of talking about tuition fees, they say they will revoke article 50.
Everyone knows this will never happen: even the Lib Dems themselves. But they know this message will take votes away from Labour, and Lib Dem-friendly tactical voting tools are advising voters to vote Lib Dem in seats where, based on the 2017 election results, only a Labour candidate could beat the Tory. In many constituencies, a vote for the Lib Dems is in effect a vote for the Conservatives. …
… Her party is not focused on reversing generational injustice; on the contrary, it has enabled it. The Lib Dems – with Swinson as a coalition government minister – were happy to work with the Conservatives to slash benefits, cut social care and play havoc with the health service. Their political conscience only seemed to return when Brexit threatened their world view and their interests. Ideologically, they largely overlap with the vanishing “moderate” wing of the Tories – whose MPs are now defecting to the Lib Dem party. Many of my peers who fell for Cleggmania in 2010 say they’ll never vote Lib Dem again.
Today’s young people deserve better than we got. When I see younger people taking action on climate change, I feel proud. Your vote is powerful. So powerful that university lecturers who encourage students to sign up to vote are facing harassment.
A decade is a long time and also isn’t. I signed on for a bit, got a job, became a writer, got married. Loved ones died and new loved ones were born. Many of us are still in debt. Many of us don’t own a house. That’s life. But life intertwines with politics. And on 12 December you have a choice that could shape yours, for better or for worse.”
Our NHS
“Yorkshire schools will not get back millions lost in trust’s collapse”
“Schools in Yorkshire that transferred millions of pounds to a multi-academy trust before it went bust will not get the money back, the area’s schools commissioner has confirmed.
Wakefield City Academies Trust (WCAT), which ran 21 schools, was accused of asset-stripping after it moved its schools’ reserves to centralised accounts before admitting new sponsors would need to be found for them days into the new term in September 2017.
The schools commissioner for Lancashire and West Yorkshire, Vicky Beer, has written to MPs confirming that the trust entered liquidation and was closed on 24 October this year.
“I advised previously that any remaining monies would be determined at the point of closure and that there were still costs to be met including pension liabilities and outstanding invoices,” she wrote.
“These costs have now been met and balances cleared. Unfortunately, this does not leave any remaining funds to distribute amongst the previous WCAT academies and their new trusts.” …”
“New hotel or extra council tax must pay for Exmouth seafront revamp”
It appears someone may have been recording the meeting, so detailed are the comments. Does this rule Ingham and Blakey out of being involved in any planning application due to predetermination?
Apparently, Mr Hemmingway said Exmouth has to move from Facebook to TikTok and Ebay to Depop …
“‘Blackmail’ anger as district leader tells Exmouth to back new seafront hotel or pay more council tax for regeneration costs.
Failure to back a new seafront hotel to fund Exmouth’s regeneration could end in higher council tax, the district leader has warned.
Ben Ingham, East Devon District Council (EDDC) leader, sparked anger and accusations of ‘blackmail’ when he told Thursday’s seafront regeneration public meeting it was ‘dangerous’ to dismiss a concept to build boutique accommodation on the final phase site.
Cllr Ingham was accused of ‘foisting’ a new hotel on Exmouth and blackmailing the town to accept – using threats of higher council tax if residents failed to support a new build.
The EDDC leader’s comments were made during a presentation led by seafront designer Wayne Hemingway.
Cllr Ingham said: “We have done phase one and two, which has cost quite a lot of money. We have to cover our backs, having done that, and there are two ways.
“We can build a hotel and sell it and pay off all those debts. That would be a quick way of doing it. Personally, I am dead against that because then you no longer own that.
“If you have to do something like that perhaps you want to do it as a lease over a number of years, then you get that back. Then you have made money and all of us can take advantage of that in future projects.
“Or the money that’s already spent, we can all chip into. We have only got so many options. It’s up to you to help us to decide and as to whether we would ignore you, if you say you really don’t want a hotel that would be really dangerous.
“If that’s what you want, and you want higher council tax, we can do that.”
He added: “I am just saying, somehow or other, we have to complete this. It’s taken a long time we have made some commitments.
“Personally I wouldn’t have started the journey from where we did and we wouldn’t be where we are now, but the fact of the matter is this is where we are, and I’m saying if you don’t want a hotel we have got to come up a really good idea to replace it and when you listen to what Wayne has told us, I have gone from thinking from the beginning of this year ‘there’s no way we should have a hotel’.
“I met Wayne and listened to what he said and I thought ‘Ben you have got to think again because what he’s saying makes a lot of sense’.
“And I much prefer that from burying my head in the sand and thinking we can do something else where a lot of people, one way of the other, are going to have to pay that bill.”
Mr Hemingway said attracting the under-25s and under-35s, and their disposable income, was the way forward for Exmouth seafront’s survival, and building boutique accommodation on an area within the final redevelopment site would encourage Millennials and Gen Z to spend and stay.
He said overnight beach stays will fit in with the aesthetics of the ‘meanwhile space’, (Queen’s Drive space) which has become ‘embedded in the community’ benefiting the town.
“Don’t assume the accommodation will be a block,” said Mr Hemingway. “The whole point of the hotel is open space and the fluidity.
He added: “The opportunity is that you haven’t got a hotel that is fit for purpose in this town – and that’s the opportunity. And you have got space to put it there.
“Even with that hotel there, you have still got two-thirds of that bit of the site still for open space for kids to play. The worst-case scenario is, it will leave you with two-thirds of the space.”
Mr Hemingway said the decision to build boutique hotel accommodation lay with the community, not him as designer, adding ‘nothing that’s being proposed here is weird or dangerous – it’s just life.”
He said: “We are totally open to your responses. I can absolutely guarantee there’s no closed shop here. It’s a robust discussion between where the money comes from and what everybody wants. But do think about what people have been saying, and thinking, about the future. The taste of the world has never changed as much as it has at the moment and it’s changing for the better.
“You are not investing £18million and that fantastic – then you change it in three years and change is good. Change should be good in places like this. Young people want change.”
Mr Hemingway added: “It was Facebook and now that’s for the old people. Then it’s Snapchat and that’s gone. Then Instagram, now its Tik Tok and once it was eBay and now its Depop and that’s fantastic.
“And if you don’t know what Depop is and you don’t know what Tik Tok is, then great because young people do and life’s got to move like that, and it will continue to move like that – forever – so do something interesting.”
He said: “Using that space for a little bit of commercial and a lot of social is really where we are trying to go with it.”
Kevin Blakey, EDDC portfolio holder for economy, said: “The whole point to that hotel is this open space and the facilities that are going to go on there, whatever they maybe post-consultation, they have got to be paid for somehow.
“The district council owns the land, the district council wants to see very good quality facilities for a great many people in this space but we don’t have a magic money tree.
“We have to do something commercial to pay for it rather than borrowing, or higher taxation.
“The point is to make this place sustainable commercially and physically in the long term.”
“Boris Johnson’s Conservative party has received cash from 9 Russian donors named in a suppressed intelligence report”
Vote Tory – get Putin!
“Boris Johnson’s Conservative Party has received a surge in cash from nine Russian donors, who have been named in a suppressed investigation into Russia’s attempts to undermine democracy in the UK. …
The report by Parliament’s Intelligence and Security Committee identifies close links between major donors to the Conservative party and the Russian government, the Sunday Times reports.
The report was due for publication this week but was blocked by Johnson, due to reported fears that the information would damage his chances of winning the upcoming UK general election.
Among those donors named in the suppressed report are Alexander Temerko, who worked for the Russian defence ministry and has previously boasted that the prime minister is his “friend”.
Temerko donated more than £1.2m to the Conservatives over the past seven years.
Other Russian donors to the Conservative party include Lubov Chernukhin, who is married to Vladimir Chernukhin, a former ally of Putin.
Chernukhin previously paid £160,000 for a tennis match with Johnson and former prime minister David Cameron and has donated more than £450,000 in the past year.
The committee also reportedly heard concerns about the former Russian spy Alexander Lebedev, who owns the Evening Standard and Independent newspapers.
Lebedev is not a donor to the Conservative Party. However, his son Evgeny is a close friend of the prime minister and has repeatedly hosted him for parties at his castle in Perugia Italy, while Johnson was mayor of London and Foreign Secretary. …”
East Devon Watch 