Chris Whiteside's Blog

I didn't always agree with Lady Tessa Jowell but she was a very brave and dedicated public servant who spent her life helping others and epitomised the value of respect of people of different views which is in such short supply these days. I am very sorry to heat that she has lost her battle with brain cancer. Rest in Peace.

The Copeland local committee of Cumbria County Council (consisting of all county councillors representing divisions within the Borough of Copeland) will be meeting on Tuesday 15th May at Cleator Moor Civic Hall and Masonic Centre. The agenda and supporting papers can be found here . Items for consideration include: 2018/19 LOCAL COMMITTEE DEVOLVED BUDGET - HIGHWAYS To consider a report from the Executive Director – Economy and Infrastructure This report presents the Highways Devolved Budget Finance report combined with an update on the Highways Programme, detail of which is contained within the attached appendices. COPELAND HIGHWAYS WORKING GROUP - 11 APRIL 2018 The major issue arising from this item is a recommendation not to proceed with the Beckermet Experimental Traffic scheme. AREA MANAGER'S REPORT for COPELAND To consider a report which brings together information from across the Community teams including Community Development, Libraries, Archives, Public ...

Adam Langleben was a Labour councillor in Barnet until last Thursday when he lost his seat. He is also Jewish. Adam has written a powerful piece in the New Statesman about the problems which Labour experienced in Barnet because of perceived Anti-Semitism which you can read here . It concludes as follows: " there is a small but very vocal hard-left group within the party – certainly not the majority even within Momentum – within which this sickness festers, and it is to these people that Jeremy Corbyn needs to clearly state: this is not in my name ."

Any women who are concerned about the national breast screening issue should call the national helpline 0800 169 2692. Information on the symptoms of breast cancer is available on the NHS website at https://www.nhs.uk/conditions/breast-cancer/symptoms/ .

The next meeting of Cumbria Health Scrutiny Committee will be held at 10.30am in the Council chamber at County Hall in Kendal (NOT in Cumbria House Carlisle where it usually meets) next Monday, 14th May 2018. The meeting is open to the public. The full agenda can be found on the County Council website here , but it includes the following items: 7. HealthCare for the Future of West, North and East Update : to consider a report by the Chief Executive, NHS North Cumbria Clinical Commissioning Group 8. Eating Disorders in Cumbria : to consider a report by the Cumbria Partnership Foundation Trust 9. North Cumbria Primary Care Collaborative - Alliance Model Update: to consider a report by the Programme Director for Integrated Health and Social Care – North Cumbria University Hospitals NHS Trust. This report provides a progress update on the ‘alliance’ model being developed with a number of GP practices in North Cumbria. 10. Future of Mental Health Services : to receive a pre...

The government has defeated amendments to the Data Protection Bill which would have forced it to re-start the Leveson inquiry by nine votes. MPa voted 304 to 295 against a proposal from Ed Miliband for a "Leveson 2" further inquiry. A second amendment from Tom Watson which would effectively have implemented Section 40 of the Crime and Courts Act and thereby put most newspapers in the position of having to pay the legal costs of both sides in any complaint, even if they won, was dropped. Since Ed Miliband was throwing accusations of broken promises around and questioning whether this was an honourable course it is worth seeing what the 2017 Conservative Manifesto on which Tory MPs were elected had to say on the subject: “Given the comprehensive nature of the first stage of the Leveson Inquiry and given the lengthy investigations by the police and Crown Prosecution Service into alleged wrongdoing, we will not proceed with the second stage of the Leveson Inquiry into th...

"Just think about that for a moment. The Tories - the TORIES! - are on the side of a free press and Labour aren’t. And this time I can’t even blame Corbyn ..." ( Former Labour MP Tom Harri s commenting on amendments tabled by Labour MPs Ed Miliband and Tom Harris which would in his opinion, and mine, have been a serious blow to freedom of the press in Britain.)

While looking for something else on the Spectator website I found a piece by Nick Cohen about those in the West on both left and right of the political spectrum who are not nearly sceptical enough about the Putin regime which I found particularly apt. Despite having been written last November, before the Salisbury poisonings, the latest round of bloodshed in Syria, or news that Putin's regime attempted to intervene on Jeremy Corbyn's behalf in the 2017 UK general election, the article " Putin's cranks and creeps are winning the day " is both thought-provoking and topical. There is no reason why Britain and Russia have to be enemies. Our countries were allied in more wars over the past two hundred years or so than those in which we fought, most recently in the second world war when many British sailors - my uncle among them - risked their lives in dire conditions to take Russia war materials to help their heroic resistance against the Nazi threat. And under a...

Proposed changes to the Data Protection Bill would further erode press freedom and have a severe chilling effect for the news environment in the UK. The new clause 20 would mean that normally, those publishers that were not regulated by a recognised regulator would have to pay both sides’ legal costs in a data protection claim, whether they won or lost that claim. The inclusion of Condition A has been widely interpreted as ensuring that news organisations structured along the lines of the Guardian and the Observer should be excluded from the scope of the broader clause. This clause was not discussed with Guardian News and Media and we disagree with attempts to impose a selective sanction on the media. There is an important debate to be had about press standards, but the Data Protection Bill should not be used as a vehicle for imposing an unfair and partial system on publishers.  " While the model used by the Scott Trust is recognised in the amendment as maintaining high s...

I attended the annual meeting of Copeland Borough Council today as an invited guest. There were actually three meetings: one to deal with various items of business, including particularly a response to the Boundary commission proposals for elections to Copeland Council; one to confer the status of Honorary Alderman on two distinguished servants of the people of the borough; and the annual meeting to elect a new Chair and Deputy Chair and appoint councillors and co-opted members to committees and outside bodies. One of the items of business was an updated code for dealing with unacceptable conduct by councillors, members of staff and members of the public which came from an all-party committee and was adopted with all party support (Conservative, Labour and Independent.) I was shocked to hear how much it has cost the council dealing with complaints over this council term. If I heard the mayor correctly, Copeland Borough Council has spent resources equivalent to £180.000 including of...

This Wednesday, 9th May 2018 MPs will be voting on a number of proposed amendments from MPs, similar to those previously put forward by the House of Lords but later removed, to change the Data Protection Bill so as to force the government to proceed with a further round, sometimes called Leveson 2" of press investigation and regulatory measures. This would be a disaster for freedom of speech and the press in Britain and I hope and pray that MPs will vote against it. Let me be completely candid - our press in this country is frequently awful, and I agree with many of the criticisms of the press in Nick Davies's excellent book, Flat Earth News . I can only imagine one way that our press could be worse - if it was under more state control. However imperfect journalists and newspapers are - and believe me, I'm not disputing that they make too many mistakes - even well-intentioned attempts to improve journalism through state action are playing a very dangerous game for ...

"If the press is ' drinking in the last chance saloon ,' a wise government will think long and hard before calling ' Time .'" ( Eric Pickles MP , now the Rt Hon Sir Eric Pickles, responding the early 1990s to a warning from the then Culture Media and Sport Secretary David Mellor that the popular press was drinking in the last chance saloon.)

The first piece here is "Laudate Dominum" by Mozart, with the solo part sung by Barbara Hendricks, and the second is the Hallelujah Chorus from Handel's Messiah. The chorus part in both pieces is sung by Capella Istropolitana.

There are two things which usually happen at every set of local elections, and three things which always happen. The first thing which usually happens is a serious bloodbath for the candidates fielded by whichever party is in government, which usually loses hundreds of councillors. The second thing which usually happens is that the main opposition party gains hundreds of council seats. Even opposition leaders who went down to a catastrophic defeat at the subsequent general election have often gained hundreds of councillors in local elections. The third thing associated with council elections, and this one always happens, is that instead of inviting senior councillors who might be expected to have a closer idea about the issues involved in these LOCAL elections, on TV to talk about the results from the perspective of each party, the TV channels always invite MPs or someone from party headquarters. The fourth thing, and again this always happens, is that the party representatives...

“ It’s insupportable for a party to field openly anti-Semitic candidates. It’s unacceptable for Labour MPs to call the Conservative Party “ institutionally racist ” on national television. It’s unbelievable to look at the racist Twitter feeds of Labour supporters on the appointment of Sajid Javid as Home Secretary. It’s intolerable to have plausibly-deniable arms-length Labour-supporting thugs vandalising Tory offices and sending hate mail to Tory candidates. So, “decent” Labour members, learn this. You can tell yourself that you’re moderate, you can repeat ad nauseam that racism (and especially anti-Semitism) can’t have anything to do with you ' because I joined the Labour Party to fight that sort of thing,' you can look on in shocked disbelief as your internal Corbynite opponents delegitimise your centre-left position in exactly the same way that you’ve spent decades delegitimising mainstream Tories ( this is the key point I suspect you’ll never learn, to be hone...

The North West Evening Mail today ran a headline in their digital edition which said " Fears of Berlin style wall splitting Ulverston come true " As Humbert Wolfe wrote many years ago (There were not many lady journalists when Wolfe wrote this. but the quote is equally applicable to men and women.) What the NWEM describes as a "Berlin style wall" in that headline is merely a metaphor for an election result - to be precise, that Labour won the three seats on South Lakeland Council representing Ulverston East while the Conservatives won the three seats representing Ulverston West. So anyone who saw the headline and feared that Ulverston has its' own budding Donald Trump putting a physical barrier through the town does not need to worry ...

On a day of mixed political fortunes around the country the Conservatives in Cumbria have made modest but positive advances in the two local authorities which had elections yesterday. Carlisle In Carlisle just one seat changed hands: New Conservative councillor Rob Currie won Yewdale ward from Labour, converting a Labour majority of 276 in 2014 into a Conservative majority of 91 yesterday. Congratulations to Rob and his fellow Conservative councillors elected or re-elected yesterday. Commiserations to candidates who were unsuccessful. Carlisle City Council remains hung, with 25 Labour, 22 Conservative, four Independent and one Lib/Dem councillors. Full Carlisle results can be found here . South Lakeland District Council South Lakeland District Council (SLDC) had gone through boundary changes and therefore had an unusual "all out" election with every seat up for grabs instead of a third of the seats coming up at a time. Many of the wards have been merged so th...

James Bickerton has an interesting article on the Reactions site which argues that political extremism - e.g. talking about your opponents in the language of hate and threats of violence, defending those who actually use violence - has ceased to be unacceptable in Britain. The article begins as follows: " We used to pride ourselves, in Britain, on not doing political extremism. This was something that took place overseas, to be learned about from anxious BBC reporters. The appeal of radical left and radical right, or anyone else who waved their flags a little too aggressively, was largely lost on us. Men with silly uniforms, and sillier ideas, were ignored if they were lucky, and mocked if they weren’t. Of all the nations of Europe few rejected the zealots as resolutely and comprehensively as Britain. This, I regret to say, is no longer the case ." Sadly he is able to present evidence to make a strong argument in support of that view. You can read his article here...

“Jeremy Corbyn was supposed to come here tomorrow for a victory speech. We want him to come to Barnet anyway, to apologise to Jewish Labour activists.” ( Labour councillor who lost in Barnet , according to Steve Hawkes on Twitter.) Postscript - the defeated Labour councillor who said this was Adam Langleben, who is himself Jewish, and repeated the call on Iain Dale's LBC show as you can see and listen to here .