Ioan y Ffin
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Councils were forbidden by central government legislation from using the receipts from Council House sales to build more council houses; that was part of the rationale behind offering them at a discount. Westminster ordered the sale of local government property at a loss on purpose. The aim of encouraging people to buy their council houses was to eventually ensure the end of the concept that the state should provide housing. Nearly forty years on we are paying for it, big style.
It is not ‘Remainers’ who have been negotiating the deal, the Prime Minister set out her ‘Leave’ agenda at Lancaster House in a very public speech. it has been the Government and its Brexit supporting members who have led on the negotiations. Remainers have spent most of their time moaning powerlessly from the sidelines. If the Government had made a decent job of deal-making, then an agreement should have been sewn up some months ago. It is only their cock-ups that have opened up an opportunity for Remainers to build up momentum for a second vote or whatever other breaks that can be applied so the country has a chance to decide on our future.
Un-elected Fat cat bosses – we don’t have them in Britain, of course.
Greece bankrupt – Britain’s massive balance of payments deficit; without the City of London, we would have to be self-sufficient
Italy bankrupt – Britain’s massive public debt and the deficit, which we have supposedly been paying down since 2008
Spain bankrupt – Britain’s ever growing personal debt mountain
France on the brink of bankruptcy – at least the French manage to get their government to listen to the electorate. Vive les gilets jaunes!!
Mass youth unemployment – thanks to 50% at university, flexible labour rules, very weak trade unions, flat lining and falling wages, wage subsidies (known as tax credits) and zero hours contracts, we have managed to keep our youth unemployment rate low
€2.6 trillion quantitative easing debt to rollback somehowBrexiteers may think Europe is going down the pan, but if you compare the streets of towns across the UK with the streets of comparable towns across northern, western and central Europe, even Spain, Portugal and Italy, it is very obvious who is down in the dumps – us. Our Brexit leaders have had two and a half years to plan our exit from the EU since the 52-48 vote on 23rd June 2016 and the Brexit crew have turned the leaving process into the longest suicide attempt in history. Their Brexit plans have not worked out because they have been based on false premises, dodgy promises and wishful thinking. So much for having one’s cake and eating it, they are still fighting over the ingredients to go in the ruddy cake. It’s time to revoke Article 50 and putour thinking caps on before deciding what to do next.
The problem for Brexit supporters is that following their winning the referendum by a 4% margin in June 2016 : 1) Nigel Farage resigned from the leadership of UKIP and he and his party rapidly became a total irrelevance 2) Brexit supporting Tories like Boris Johnson, Michael Gove and Andrea Leadsom all stood for the Tory party leadership and then withdrew as soon as things got difficult 3) Boris, David Davies, Dominic Raab and Liam Fox proved to be all talk and no action once they joined Theresa May’s cabinet 4) the ERG were asked to put forward their own plans for Brexit but have suggested nothing of substance 5) the clique around Rees-Mogg shout a lot but don’t have the collones to actually take on the responsibility of government; it took them an age to actually organize a vote of confidence and they messed that up…these are just a few examples of where Brexit supporting politicians have been found wanting and not up to the job. They have made a total dogs’ brexit of the whole business over the past two and a half years and consequently we are in the position we are in today. It is now up to our MPs, including Mr Lucas, to sort out the mess the Government and its Brexit supporters have created. I am afraid Brexit voters have been let down and you have no one to blame but your political leaders here in the UK.
It is hardly onerous expecting users to contribute towards the costs of public services; country parks will and should continue to be subsidized by tax payers as a whole. as for the statement “why make people pay for the privilege of improving their mental health, fitness, and reducing the strain on the NHS.” it is not a privilege, it’s an imperative. it really is just a case of people having the wit to redirect their expenditure from unhealthy choices: alcohol, netflix/sky, takeaways, etc etc. towards healthier ones. the council can only do so much, unless we are going to ask people who make sensible choices to spend even more of their money and the council to allocate even more of its dwindling funds helping those who seem incapable of realizing what is good for them. the public purse already spends a lot in this area. as for dog walkers in country parks, if you have bought a dog, why should the rest of us subsidize even more its ruddy walks with you. we already pay to clean up the dog sh*t.
Traditionally Country Parks estimated the number of visitors by counting the number of cars parked and then multiplying that figure based on an ‘average number’ of persons per vehicle. Inevitably such figures were an estimate and possibly not a very accurate one at all. Obviously there will be fewer cars if parking is not free, but how are they counting the visitors now? They don’t have enough staff to monitor everyone coming and going. It is unlikely there are ‘clickers’ registering everyone who enters each country park? In short, it is dodgy data all round. Country Parks do cost money to maintain so it is only fair that those who use them contribute to their running costs; otherwise those that don’t use them have to contribute more.
The council is for Wrexham County Borough, not just Wrexham town itself. Most people seem to judge the council on this site by what is happening in Wrexham town centre. Firstly most people in the county borough live outside Wrexham town. Secondly most people in the county borough earn their living outside the town. Thirdly, a large number live their lives without going anywhere near the town unless they absolutely need to – there are some great alternatives nearby: Whitchurch, Chester, Oswestry… People seem to be under the delusion that Wrexham is somehow the most important place in the lives of people in the county borough – it’s not and in the 21st century, the place is going to have to work harder and more intelligently to be important in local people’s lives. it is just the biggest town, which brings benefits, but also a whole stack of problems. It would be interesting to know what people outside the town think – people in rural areas and villages across the UK have a totally different expectation of what councils do and can achieve compared to those living in urban areas – and that may be true for this area as well.
“If you look at a city it has a football club, it has a university, it has a hospital, it has a prison.
“We have all those institutions that make a city, so we need to be a city.” This has got to be an edited version of the full interview, surely? Let’s hope the Queen hangs on in there for a bit!! Not that she plans her life around Wrexham’s Local Development Plan, if she has got any sense.
