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Surrey Children at risk of serious harm: Ofsted

Ofsted has found that Surrey is putting its children at serious risk: Click here for the article Ofsted finds Surrey seriously lacking

And what is being done about it? Excuse mongering, blame mongering, and finger pointing. With the constant finger pointing you would think they are developing arthritis of the index finger. Instead, they index all the reasons they have to cut the budget. How about they start by selling off the 400 plus properties they have that are doing nothing, as well as the County Hall building that isn’t even in Surrey? What is really most important here?

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The Gravy Train is Ending

Whilst there have been numerous articles highlighting the outrageous borrowing of Surrey Heath in the last 6 months to use taxpayer money to compete with taxpayer businesses, Parliament is now going to shut it down. Thanks to The Times for their research and work into this, as the time has come to close the loophole of this scam and stop these idiots from wasting our money…

Wasting our money? These Conservatives have splashed out over £100M on a washed up mall, a store (House of Frasier) filled with asbestos, and a low-budget retailer (Matalan) in its last throes of life.  Camberley & the Mall has got to have the largest collection of charity shops and nail boutiques in England, just charming… And where did they manage to scam this money from? From the Public Works Loan Board, set up to fund public works, not stupid property gambling investments. In the previous Times article, they showed that it would be a better investment to put the money on the 2:15 at Ascot.  When a government goes out and uses taxpayer monies to compete with taxpayer businesses, what is the difference between that and state-owned and controlled businesses (aka Communism)? Ah right, turns out there isn’t any…  They’ve managed to out-Corbyn Jeremy Corbyn…

And the worst part is that retail is changing so drastically, that the washed up mall will be totally scrubbed out of business inside 10 years. But by then the current thieves will be gone to their new consulting jobs paying 10 times what they get now…  Why do you think the previous owners, Capital & Régional were so happy to off this turkey?

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The Grenfell scab is torn off…

The Grenfell disaster has been a long time in the making, and it is a direct result of the “strong leader” problem of local government. Tearing this scab off cost 80 people their lives, and we will never hear the end of it until the system is changed…

But why would I say this is such a clear indicator of the problem endemic to the system? Well a few “strong leader” types made all the decisions here, all whilst getting paid £67K a year to do nothing for their residents. They made the “simple” choice of saving the council a bit of money (not a lot) and cladding the tower in much cheaper fire stoking materials instead of actual fire-resistant materials. Oh didn’t they do good? Certainly justifies the big salaries… But the amazing thing is that the other “strong leaders” in Councils across the country made the same “simple” decisions, hundreds of them.  They made the same “simple” choices and not surprisingly all their apartment towers were equally flammable, and now thousands more have had to be evacuated.

So, when it goes down, where are the leaders? For 4 days they are no where to be seen, “simple”… When they do show up they take none of the blame for anything and essentially throw it all off to the London assembly and the central government.  The common response for all the “strong leaders” everywhere: don’t show up for 4 days, then blame everyone else and then quit… The only part they got right was the quit part…

If it were just this, that would be one thing, but we see the same problem in countlesss other areas. “Strong leaders” do what they think is best, but there is nothing they do that could be remotely considered “best” for the rest of us. They borrow £2,000 from every citizen and buy shopping malls and don’t tell anyone, spend £187M putting in street lights and then turn them off to save £21K, charge you for taking your trash to the tip that you already paid for, fail completely at building sufficient housing, and then give themselves raises for the great job they’ve done. As long as there is no local representative democracy, you will get what you get…

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Strong Leader/Weak Leader

So, it is time to move on to the real issues that make British politics work the way it does, and what needs to happen to fix it…

Single biggest issue in local government is that it is run using what is called the “strong leader” system.  This is as opposed to the “weak leader” system at our federal government in Parliament. So, you say why it is called “weak leader”? Well, our current prime minister (as do all of them) serves at the pleasure of her party MPs. At any time, if 15% of those MPs give letters of non-support to the Backbench 1922 Committee, then she’s out. Or at least there is a leadership re-election, but no one fights that sort of thing, it would be too humiliating.  Truth is that there are already 15% of the MPs that want her out, so her life expectancy as Prime Minister will be short…

This, however is the most effective form of Parliamentary democracy. Why? Well, simply because the Prime Minister has to truly listen to the views of the other MPs, or she will be out. Arguably, the current Prime Minister didn’t listen real well when she decided to call an an unnecessary election, or else there wouldn’t have been one…  The result? Chaos, confusion, and the advance of the unthinkable: another party running things. In the history of politics, this will go down as the greatest screwup by any major country politician-ever…  But the system??? It protected us from any extension of her folly and foolishness, and it is now time to get on with it…

 

 

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Not me mate…

So, our mayor Valerie White has been bitten by Twitter… Turns out she didn’t  intentionally post the story about the Asian Escorts moving into Camberley, especially in her role as Mayor of Surrey Heath. But the story very definitely did come from her account…

The lesson? No matter what your kids tell you about how much they think they know about Social Media, don’t believe them, find out for yourself or you will pay dearly.  Unless,of course, you actually don’t mind this sort of thing, then you get what you get.  Was Valerie misquoted? No. Did she intend to promote Asian Escorts in Camberley? No…  Does she regret that someone could do that to her? Absolutely yes. If you don’t know what you are doing on Social Media, Get some help…

On the bright side it gave me the chance for a very pleasant chat with Valerie today…