Matt
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Unlike the local Tories who insist on needing a load of pomp and circumstance locally by inflating their presence with a series of appointed officials to fill a glaring hole in the distinct absence of any senior politicians, the Labour party doesn’t need a vocal and visible chairperson to do the dirty bidding of local officials too scared to actually break their nice-guy images and speak out against those they disagree with directly.
[quote quote=145180]Seriously, does anyone know who the local Chairman of the Labour Party is … is he/she a Momentum left winger or an anti-corbynite like Ian Lucas?[/quote]
Forget your login details Idris?
https://www.wrexham.com/forums/users/idris/repliesJust another ALIAS.
Well first off this has nothing to do with scoring party political points. If you read all my views on the Bryn Alyn school thread, I hold equal levels of concerns with the way funding has been handled at the Welsh Government level which is obviously Labour ran, as I am with the council, which is not.
I think you are fully aware that if Labour or any of the other anti-austerity parties were actually in charge of the council at the moment there would have been a greater opportunity for them to actually explore a more full budget offering that addressed the potential shortfall in individual school budgets.
It’s a cynical & cheap move by the Tories to suggest opposition councillors should spend all their time & resources hammering out a blow-by-blow counterpoint budget when they are far better off spending their time and resources serving their ward constituents and the town in general. It is entirely acceptable in my book for the opposition parties to put the original budget through scrutiny and raise red flags over areas they have major concerns with.
It was plainly obvious and played through on budget day that the 2 Indy groups and the Tories were all going to vote the same way anyway – there were hardly any genuinely true independently minded councillors who could have had their opinions swayed. There is definitely some kind of whipping system within the 2 Indy groups, which is ridiculous as that excludes them from the very notion of being independent. So you pretty much know the original budget is going to be passed otherwise the ruling Executive has effectively lost power.
Anyway, perhaps if Wrexham council was ran on some kind of purely technocratic basis then I’d expect every single group within the full council to produce rival budgets of a high specification and then everyone would vote on the best option, but that’s just not how it works.
The exec board had paid help from external consultants to put together the Difficult Decisions consultation that formed the basis of the budget. Then even then there were errors in it and things that were completely unclear, so I don’t think there’s any top class budget-making ability going on in the town.
All matters of the budget-process aside – many of us responded in the strongest way possible to the consultation that schools were at risk of being dangerously underfunded under the proposals. Only a serious intervention from headteachers and managers/governors etc… where they stated a budget freeze would provide an untenable situation meant that they even improved the funding allocation to schools slightly & that was still found to be inadequate.
Now this is where I come from, I’m expressing my concern as a very worried parent of a school age child and this letter that has come into circulation from other local schools is signalling alarm bells about what the current situation might be in my child’s school. I am desperate to know if they are also on the brink of running out of money to buy books and pay for teaching staff. I’m sure a lot of other anxious parents are currently feeling the same way as I do. If it was a Labour Council in Wrexham giving our kids the short shrift, I’d also give them absolute hell. I was extremely critical of the now defected Labour members who threatened to close down Plas Madoc who of course I had no foresight that they were in fact going to do so at the time.
Not everything in life is cheap political point-scoring. The fact of the matter is there are a number of us in Wrexham desperate to ensure that the social welfare of the town doesn’t go downhill any further. We need to fight tooth and nail for the lifeblood of this town.
That includes finding a way to get someone to actually listen and do something about the schools before we end up with yet another generation of poverty and social inequality, with too many young people ill equipped with the basic skills to get on into the world of work and make a reasonable living and not have to rely on handouts.
For them not to have to look over the border into the pretty well to do counties of Cheshire & Shropshire & see that kids there are getting given a much better standard of education, essentially in the same country of the UK, but really a world apart.
You do have to wonder what public reaction there is going to be within wards for any councillors who currently sit on the board of governors for their local schools, if they voted for such an austere budget for education and it ultimately leads to a critical budget shortfall within their school. What happens if the school has to cut staff members? What if it leads to a failed inspection and ending up being put into special measures?
Surely that is a direct conflict of interest with protecting the best interests of the school and its pupils and teachers. If any major shortfalls and failures do occur then I would expect these councillors to be held directly responsible and resign from their governor position OR force through emergency provisions at councillor level to ensure all schools are met with adequate funding for the forseeable future.
There is a list of interests for each councillor on the Wrexham council website to see which are school governors and the voting record on the budget vote is also publicly available. No doubt we are going to be finding out very soon which schools are going to see budget shortfalls within the next few years. Then inspections they just keep coming. Tick tock, tick tock.
[quote quote=145149]Who cares? But the man does make a valid point. What happened to that budget? That was the one I was looking forward to viewing![/quote]
It is a shame that the Plaid budget never came to fruition, I’d have been very interested to see the proposals. But at the very least despite only having 3 councillors all of whom were newly elected last year they have made a lot of noise & enhanced the levels of scrutiny involved against the Executive Board. So they are serving a decent purpose & trying to fight for the townsfolks corner regardless of whether or not you agree with Plaid on a national level.
The fact that they have dared challenge Councillor perks such as Ipads, free parking, increased pay in times of vicious cuts against the rest of us has really raised the hackles in the likes of the Tories & Clr Pritchard’s Indy grouping. They have faced some blistering attacks both publicly & or then covertly by cowardly people without “cojones”, either through fake troll profiles on Wrexham.com pretending to be ‘concerned citizens’ or dubious Twitter/Facebook accounts. Or in this case we have councillors issuing jibes behind newly appointed Conservative Chairmen.
So yea Don Sturgeon might just be Don Sturgeon, but strings are being pulled from elsewhere.
Well, turns out that whilst Don may actually be a real person. The actual author of Don’s words has been called into question.
I’ll leave people to draw their own conclusions on that one. Wrexham.com is now the official reporting epicentre of the political fallouts in the town.
[quote quote=145127]He is the lovechild of Donald Trump and Nicola Sturgeon.
[/quote]Haha, that is a much better answer than the rather drab & disappointing find after doing my homework of who the actual person is.
Actually p*ssing myself laughing at the fact that the local Tory Chairman Don Sturgeon has the gall to criticise Plaid for not turning in their own alternative budget and choosing to support Labour’s alternative budget, which makes sense as in Wrexham there is a progressive and cooperative understanding between left-aligned parties. Yet the Tories also failed to turn in their own budget and rode on the coat-tails of the Independent budget because it was that austerity packed it did a better job of being full-on Tory than the local Tories would have been able to muster themselves.
Anyone ever wonder why a local Tory Chairman needs to take petty pot shots to get a local press mention? It’s because ONE HUNDRED YEARS no Tory MP Wrexham. Who needs a chair of something that doesn’t ever officially exist. “Who are ya?”
Triumphant Conservatives blast local Plaid Group ‘all talk and no budget’
[quote quote=145102]“1 simple statistical fact – Maelor School free dinners children – 4.6%. Bryn Alyn – 19.9%, Clywedog – 19.4%, Rhosnesni – 25.1%”
As Helen says, parents are prepared to send their children to schools further afield in order to ensure a good education. The statement above also shows that those are also of the more affluent parents as they have not added to free school dinner statistics.
This does not bode well for town schools. The children have nothing to aspire to. Caring parents who made wrong choices will continually kick themselves for doing so.
In my opinion, it all went wrong when the word ‘SUPER’ in schools was deemed to mean excellent.[/quote]
The whole picture is completely damning, poor parents can’t afford the additional transport costs to send their kids to the better schools that are outside of their catchment area and means they are forced to take a worse education option. It’s ridiculous that town centre and suburban children are having to go to rural schools to get their education. There’s surely an argument for actually investing locally in the town centre schools and reversing the exodus.
There’s actually an aspirational working environment emerging in Wrexham with all these new financial service providers – of course Moneypenny, Thomson Reuters on the industrial estate and the Development Bank of Wales setting up here and I imagine the town’s long term goal is to build quite a cluster of these professional type services alongside other entrepreneurial start-ups. However, in order to build this up, they need to attract the professional workers who have the skills to fill these posts. As it stands the middle of Wrexham will be an undesirable location to relocate to housing-wise if they have families and children and there are no conveniently placed centralised secondary schools. Not everyone is prepared to do a daily large school run or pay for extra transport costs to get their kids to school, so will consider jobs in other towns/cities instead. It also forces everyone further out and pushes up rural affluent house prices further, which in turn makes the overall rush hour traffic worse as there are countless people commuting into town and countless people doing a school run out of town. The establishment of 1 or 2 schools of excellence in the middle of town would provide a strong economic pull factor. The establishment of stronger centralised schools would also link in with the strong Tertiary ecosystem currently in place in town (Cambria/Glyndwr) as perhaps they could follow up a strong apprenticeship style skills programme from 14 up (subject to Welsh curriculum restrictions) all the way through to finding them a placement and hopefully a permanent job with a decent set of skills to get on in life. I appreciate these are all by and large ideals, but there has been nothing solid put forward either by the council or the Welsh assembly to actually help get our local failing schools and “educationally poor” children out of trouble.
Of course the real kick in the face was the fact that the SUPER schools were meant to be all that in terms of hype, but were just a move to bump 3 school sites into 2 without any real thought about what this might do to the local education ecosystem. I have noticed that pupil numbers in Rhosnesni have dropped right off down from 1,150 before the “disaster inspection” down to 647 in total in 2017! That figure has almost halved and if things carry on and people don’t want to take their children there due to its awful reputation then the school will be forced to close down and the council will then be faced with expensive transport costs of sending the underprivileged children to other schools across the county, of who won’t like it one bit as they’ll be worried about their standards slipping, but it will be forced on them.
Bringing things back on topic, of course the Labour budget got voted down & the dreadful austerity one passed.
Rob had tweeted the Lab Budget votes with Plaid, Lib all supporting Labour. The 2 “independent” groupings & the Tories voting against. Then the reverse votes on the original budget.
VOTE: Labour alternative budget voted down – main budget proposal likely to be voted through in a tick with the reversed votes! ( For 16 Against 30 Abstain 1 ) pic.twitter.com/CsQPRqEvOH
— Wrexham.com (@wrexham) February 21, 2018
What I don’t understand is how 5 elected councillors couldn’t be bothered to turn up to such a crucial vote, including the Deputy Leader. It’s a complete farce.
It was also noted that there was a lack of strong public opposition except the musical protest outside, but that’s because everyone has grown so tired & apathetic of the dire situation in hand. There is nothing to be done about the current councillor configuration for years, but the disdain & sneering & bickering is just too much for most. I read along all the live Tweets on Wrexham.com with almost disbelief that these people are responsible for our lives with the petty personal digs they come out with & squabbles & rivalries they get involved in.
Then I read up the full report after & you don’t even need to read between the lines about what is being said, in very plain language the ruling coalition had zero interest in the substance or effectiveness of alternatively proposed ideas. They just adopted personal attacks stating ideas were dangerous and insulted experienced councillors of many years as if they didn’t know what they were doing.
What personal pugilists like Clr Pritchard fail to realise is that by belittling council members standing up for the welfare of their local communities, by finding ways to protect child welfare and looking at ways to maximise funding for local public transport for at risk rural areas that are in real danger of being cut off, that he is actually belittling hundreds of local voters who voted for that councillor & also anyone within their wards.
These type of councillors are on our side & I am finding it very hard to believe that any of the Independents who claim to be responsible for the best interests of their constituents remembered that today as they all swung a collective axe on public services across the county along with the austerity & poverty craving Tory party.
I am officially declaring the notion of Independent councillors in Wrexham dead today (with the exception of the sadly sidelined non-aligned). If it wasn’t already obvious leading up to this point, this menacing alignment of independents and Tories is bad for this town – there is not one single good thing about it.
How much longer will people put up with a broken town centre, broken roads, broken schools, a broken public transport infrastructure, broken people slumping like zombies? Corporate Crooks extorting money from people dropping cigarette butts in the town centre whilst the rest of Wrexham remains filthy with dog faeces everywhere & the highways just strewn with litter. How is that system dealing with the littering & cleanliness & hygiene of the area in any way, shape or form?
Masquerades put out over fancy arts centres & distractions about parking spaces all designed to divert everyone’s attention (myself included) away from more serious & very real issues afoot.
Yes, welcome to Wrexham everyone – unsatisfactory and in need of improvement. We need to be put into special measures.
It is all a bit of a farce, I’m starting to build up a mental map of potholes across all of Wrexham that have been there for months in some cases, I am literally now subconsciously swerving them, which is ridiculous as some of them mean having to move slightly across to the other side of the road as it is like manoeuvring round a parked car or moving out to pass a cyclist which obviously creates increased hazards as this is only feasible when it is safe to do so without oncoming traffic. Now I imagine loads of other vehicles who also don’t want to end up with crocked wheels will also be doing this and this just leads to slowing down of traffic flow or increased risk when drivers on the other side of the road aren’t expecting more “racy” drivers to suddenly be coming partly into their lane to avoid damage when they can’t visibly see what is being avoided. It’s all gone a bit wacky races AND then you hit a new pothole and fret over whether or not it’s battered your vehicle and you add it to the list.
If I had the time I’d go an photograph some of the worst offenders to make sure they have been reported, but I just don’t have the time.
