Please note that the post below was published more than ten year ago on 21st November 2009 Nick Herbert MP, shadow cabinet member for the Environment, Food, and Rural Affairs, was in Cumbria this morning to see the areas affected by the flooding. He writes on Conservative Home about his visit. Here is an extract. I’ve been in Cumbria today to see the areas affected by the floods. I arrived early in Keswick where I met officials from the Environment Agency. Although the river levels had fallen considerably and homes were no longer flooded, the damage to homes had been done. And the water which had got into houses wasn’t just from the river – it was foul water which had risen from the drains. I talked to fire crews who were pumping flood water back into the river, and discovered that they were from Tyne & Wear and Lancashire. They had been called in at an hours’ notice and had been working on the scene ever since, staying at a local hotel. You cannot fail to be impressed by the...
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And if you won't either stand yourself or vote for one of those who does, you are really not in a good position to complain if you don't like what happens.
I guess you would rather everyone voted BNP to stick two fingers up at the rotten rotten corrupt system than withold a vote for a proven useless politicians.
Precisely to stop a situation, where we would be 'governed by our inferiors', it is crucial that faith is restored in the political system. The next Parliament will be composed of a new set of politicians. The quality of those politicians will depend on how the likes of you and I vote. I shall be voting for Chris Whiteside and a Conservative Government, to clean up the mess this present Government has made. In returning power and responsibility to individuals and communities faith, in the system can be restored. It won't be an easy job but Chris Whiteside and his colleagues have the determination and integrity to make a jolly good go of it. It is time for change. It is time to reclaim politics for the people.
chris whiteside is as bad as the rest of them, makes a few sensible noises but ultimately does nothing to get problems resolved. Being elected as an MP won't change that.
We live in a one ideaology state. Real power is exercised in this country by people who are unelected.
When Chris Whiteside or any other politician decides to take on Press Barons like Murdoch, the IMF or unelected Eurocrats then maybe I'll believe there is a choice to be made.
If you don't think standing for election as a Conservative in a constituency which includes former mining areas - and going around with a blue rosette on campaigning in those areas - constitutes putting one's head above the parapet, then you don't have the foggiest idea what you're talking about.
Actually, going around knocking on doors wearing ANY party's rosette during last year's local and Euro elections after the unsatisfactory behaviour of some MPs took a certain amount of guts.
I certainly would not encourage anyone to vote BNP.
I do not accept that the evidence gives any credence to the idea that I don't achieve anything when elected to positions which provide the power to do so.
At the end of my sixteen years as a district councillor and four as a parish councillor in the distrit where I previously lived, I could have spent hours taking you round my previous ward and pointing out literally hundreds of things I had personally helped to create or save, from two sets of CCTV systems to a woodland park, from ancient monuments which had been protected to areas of Green Belt not built on, from safety railings to repainted street signs, from a bus lay-by to improved drainage.
That ward is of course hundreds of miles away from West Cumbria, but one of the things I pushed for and successfully set up can be see without a twelve hour round trip from Copeland at this URL:
http://www.stalbans.gov.uk/environment-and-planning/planning/planning-applications/planning-applications-search.aspx
It's a system for viewing all aspects of planning applications online so that residents and applicants alike who would find it difficult to visit the planning office during working hours can see what is proposed as it affects them. I pushed extremely hard for this while I was Planning Portfolio holder, secured political support and the necessary resources, and that council was one of the first to offer this service.
One difference between my previous authority and Copeland BC is that for most of my time there no party had overall control, and for three years my party was in control.
Any good councillor can get things done while your party has a majority. Achieving things in a hung council is ten times harder but it can be done.
But if your party is in a minority, as the Conservatives are on Copeland BC, you are totally dependent on your political opponents to achieve anything, and others can claim a share of the credit for anything you do.
Even with that situation my credit ledger of achievements in Copeland is not entirely blank - for example I can point to contributions to the council's hospital campaigns, several areas cleared of litter, some planning issues addressed, some lighting and pothole problems fixed at least temporarily, a number of public drains cleared to reduce flooding risk.
Getting anything done in local government is a slow and frustrating process, and even more so if one is in opposition. But if you think you can do better, stand yourself and let the voters choose.
I think there is a distinction between being dependent on your opponents to get anything done, which is the inevitable consequence of being in the minority, and the situation where the majority chooses to make it impossible for the minority to get anything done.
Now if the majority really is foolish enough to make it impossible for the minority to achieve anything, that would certainly be an example of democracy functioning badly.
It is mercifully rare, but this sometimes happens. Read Thucydides if you want to find some historical examples of early democracies in which the majority imposed complete tyranny on the minority. Or for a less extreme example, study the functioning of local councils in Northern Ireland in the years leading up to the troubles.
I am not suggesting for one moment that the majority in Copeland is anything like as sectarian as that. All I am saying is that an opposition party can only achieve what we can persuade our opponents to support. I would have thought was a statement of the obvious.
Then you wonder why the majority of the population have contempt for Councils.
If certain 21st century US and British leaders had paid a bit more attention to some of the lessons you can learn from Thucydides perhaps they might have looked a bit harder for alternatives to the invasion of Iraq.
And yes, I have serious problems with aspects of the way Copeland Council operates. One of the reasons we support the "choosing to change" process is in the hope that this may improve some of those aspects.
As for Copeland BC, nothing will change until there is a clear out of the Senior Officers and Councillors become more attentive to what these lunatics are doing.
You didn't attribute the quote, for which I cannot entirely blame you since both Friedriech Hegel and George Bernard Shaw appear to have said it.
Though I disagree with them.
So far as your second sentence is concerned I would not sign up to the language but I certainly agree that councillors need to pay more attention to what officers are doing.