This announcement appeared in the Warrington Guardian on the 31st December and time is running out for residents to make their views heard.

 It has come to my attention that some householders on Booth’s Hill Road and in Highfield Road were not individually mailed a copy of this proposal. If you have any views, for or against the proposal, it is vital that you write to the Borough Solicitor, Tim Date, as instructed on the notice.

 Please bear in mind that only traffic issues or issues of due process are relevant. So if you know of accidents or near misses that would have been avoided with this measure, or you feel you have not been adequately informed about why the measure is proposed or what alternatives have been investigated these are all valid reasons to write in.

 Do not bring in other matters such as the potential impact on the price of your property which are not valid Traffic reasons for supporting ot objecting to this proposal.

If you don’t want to write, just fill in the survey on the left and we will tell the Council what you think.

When a General Election is coming up, or at times of national crisis, anyone who is politically active and aware should check to see whether their chosen allegiance is still appropriate for them. Under our electoral system those who decide to switch their vote, in constituencies which have a sufficiently close balance of votes between the major parties, have a massively disproportionate effect on the outcome of the election. Warrington is just such a constituency.

I am very happy to see that I will not be switching my allegiance, I will be campaigning more strongly than ever for Warrington South to return  Jo Crotty as the Liberal Democrat MP for the constituency.

How can I be so confident? It is because Nick Clegg has published the principles that will underly the party’s election manifesto – Four Steps to a Fairer Britain. I urge everyone to read it, particularly if you voted for Helen Southworth, the somewhat ineffectual New Labour MP who has decided she has had enough of Parliament and has abandoned the seat. I think you will find the political realism and commitment to fairness you might have hoped the current government would deliver in Nick Clegg’s principles.

Labour have now chosen a candidate to fight the seat – a serious policy wonk called Nick Bent. Rather than choosing a local candidate they have chosen a Manchester and London based lifelong politico, who should at least make for an interesting election.

I told you all a few days ago about my wife’s very unfortunate experience while buying a car. It hasn’t been recovered yet so may be lost for good, or may return in a state we will not want to buy it in.

However, in order to tax the car we needed an insurance certificate. Our own insurer would take a couple of days to turn that around, but they have a scheme with car retailers where they will give anyone seven days insurance in return for the opportunity to quote for the policy and will provide a valid insurance certificate by fax.

Even though we are already insured with this company, we had to take advantage of the offer to tax the car. Imagine how surprised we were when our own insurance company was quoting us a price which is almost £200 cheaper than they are currently charging us. To be fair this was for a stripped down form of cover with a high excess and no frills. Nevertheless when I checked I found we could save over £100 with our own insurers for cover comparable to what we have now.

It has clearly become normal business practice to overcharge existing customers so long as they remain captive and don’t ask for a reduction. Banks leave savings in accounts paying next to no interest, utility companies don’t offer the best tariff, insurance companies and phone companies don’t offer the deals available to new customers. Sadly the only way to avoid this, as a customer, is to check, check and check again. If you don’t have access, or are not confident using the Internet this isn’t easy. If that is the case it is a good idea to get a friend or relation to help you.

And where does all this overcharged money go? To shareholders, and in political donations to parties willing to allow companies to continue exploiting us…

Source

The Tories clearly intend to fight this election by blaming Labour for the budget deficit. Nobody disagrees that our national deficit and debt are serious issues that the next government will have to address, but is it fair to blame Labour?

David Mowat and I had a brief discussion at the 2007 local election count. I suggested that National Debt was substantially below what was left by the Tories in 1997, he claimed it wasn’t, it was higher. Neither of us had the facts, but now, two years later, I have found them, and they come from the newly independent Office for National Statistics which is regulated to ensure its political impartiality.

The graph shows that in 2007 I was right, and the Tories accusation that Labour didn’t put money aside for a ‘rainy day’ was wrong. Labour paid off National Debt for its first four years in government and then borrowed, they would say prudently, to invest in hospitals, schools, universities and transport.

While that investment may not always have provided the best value for money at least it was there. I remember the worn out schools, inadequate hospitals and clapped out railway system the Tories left at the end of their period in office. I have no faith in the Tories’ ability or willingness to protect these vital public services.

The graph also shows the shocking extent of the bail out for the banks. If you remember the queues outside Northern Rock branches, imagine what it would have been like if that had been every bank. Imagine if your money stopped coming out of the cashpoint and your savings disappeared. That was the cataclysmic situation that our government and most other governments in the developed world faced when the modern banking system was in danger of collapsing

Weakly regulated international financiers, who benefited from the deregulation encouraged by Mrs Thatcher and Ronald Reagan, had invented means of lending money backed by assets that didn’t exist. Real people borrowed that ‘imaginary’ money to buy overpriced houses and consumer durables, that didn’t turn out to be all that durable. So as consumers spent money that wasn’t really there, often on manufactured items from China which were cheap enough to keep down inflation, a day of reckoning had to come. The graph shows how devastating that day of reckoning has been and how much the government has had to put into the banks to prevent collapse. The recession triggered by this disaster has inevitably led to much higher spending in addition to the money the government had to lend to the banks.

Politicians will oversimplify and distort this story. So far only Vince Cable has been straight with electors about the nature of the problem and the difficulty of resolving it. If ever there was a national disaster that called for a government of national unity, this is it, and neither of the old political parties that rely on passing power between themselves every decade or so, is offering that. A vote for the Liberal Democrats is the only vote for real change, I hope I will convince you of that in the coming months.

 Happy New Year

 Bob

Thank you nPower! I have just had my monthly combined electricity and gas charges reduced by almost a quarter.

What is shocking however, is the fact that I had to gather my bills and current meter readings then check the u-switch web site to find out that my own energy provider, nPower, offers a tariff which is almost 25% cheaper than the tariff I was on and that switching to that tariff will save me over £400 per year. Of course it wasn’t in their interests to let me know that I was paying them a lot more than I needed to. It was only when I contacted them, threatened to leave and was put through to their charming “customer retention” branch in Durham did I get the help I needed to reduce my bill.

This is all part of the botched privatisation of the utilities, which put the interests of shareholders above those of energy consumers.

The consumers who suffer most are the poorest members of the community who often rely on pre-payment meters and pay considerably more for their power than  better off people who can set up direct debits.

There is also the counter intuitive higher charge for the first units consumed, which replaced standing charges, with additional power costing less. If we had tariffs that made the first units cheapest and put up prices as we consume more energy it would provide a much higher incentive to conserve energy and reduce CO2 emissions.

Former Tory minister David “Two Brains” Willetts, has conceded that the privatisation of water was a “privatisation too far”. Perhaps he should concede that the energy privatisations have been badly handled too.

In Lymm we are suffering unnecessary additional disruption because recently reconstructed roads are to be dug up again by Network Gas, because the utility companies were unable to coordinate their service replacements with the major road works that closed off access to the village centre for over 6 months.

At a more trivial level n-Power still can’t manage to send a single meter reader to read my gas and electricity meters even though both readings appear on the same bill paid by a single direct debit. How is that efficient?

n-Power have also got into trouble for sending a packet of energy efficient light bulbs to every customer at the very last moment before an already discredited scheme for reducing CO2 emissions comes to an end, rather than putting the money into other, more effective, measures for reducing their customers’ bills.

Happy New Year everyone – and see if you can make it even happier by reducing your utility bills.

On New Year’s Eve, David Boyer, Warrington’s head of sustainable transport responsible for our roads, spent a couple of hours looking around Lymm with me.

He has promised to look into a wide range of issues, which I raised with him. Like all Warrington Directorates, his is under very severe financial pressures. There simply isn’t enough money in our budgets to satisfy all legitimate residents’ expectations. In the current financial climate this isn’t going to change in the near future. So we concentrated on things that can be done with relatively little money, many of which involve better joined up working, redeployment of existing staff or can be funded out of external sources.

We looked at the parking situation opposite the Coop convenience store in Cherry Lane to make sure it is improved when the site opposite is redeveloped.

There are many signs around the village, including road nameplates and traffic signs that need to be removed, improved, mended or cleaned

On some of the newer developments including, Cherry Fields, Heatley Mere and Longbutt Lane, there are parking and adoption issues that need to be resolved with the developers.

Much of our street lighting is worn out damaged or just patched up. A Borough Wide scheme to improve street lighting is being considered since I have campaigned on this issue over the last two years. We may be able to get substantial government assistance if we consider a PFI (Private Finance Initiative) scheme to install modern highly energy efficient lighting across the Borough. I don’t like PFI because it offloads problems onto future tax payers, and is often an expensive way of doing things. However if this is the only way to stop Warrington’s lights going out we must consider it.

We also looked at some of the speed and traffic calming issues along the A56 which will be considered in the current speed limit review and the planned work on Higher Lane next fiancial year.

I will let you know what emerges from my discussions with David. Please let me know what your priorities would be for improving the street scene in Lymm.

As the New Year rolls in, and we enter what could be one of the longest election campaigns in my lifetime, you can expect to be bombarded with figures.

David Cameron will behave as though he is the Prime Minister elect, though he will be careful to always add that the electorate must have its say. David Mowat will try to convince you, similarly, that he is the next MP for Warrington South.

If Warrington South was such a safe bet for the Tories in the coming election Fiona Bruce wouldn’t have opted for the safer seat of Congleton rather than fighting the constituency she fought before and where her business is based. The truth is that she performed very poorly in Warrington in the last election and the Tories have been flat lining here since 1997. The real battle has been between the Liberal Democrats and Labour, with the Liberal Democrats consistently taking Labour wards and benefiting from the Labour decline.

This is why I keep saying that Warrington South is a three way marginal. The Conservatives don’t want you to know this, they and Labour prefer you to think it is a two horse race between the two old discredited parties. A message that would be more convincing if the Conservatives had managed to achieve as little as a third of the vote in any of the last three elections in Warrington South.

 In fact since 1997 it is the Liberal Democrats who have been taking votes and Council seats from Labour in Warrington. This graph shows the results of the last three General Election campaigns in Warrington South and projects the probable position in 2010:

It is clear that the votes of the three major parties are converging. If you extend the trend lines to 2010 you will see that the result here is likely to be too close to call. So with both the Conservatives and the Labour previous candidates having run away, to another constituency or from Parliament altogether, neither of those parties is at all confident that they can take the seat.

By contrast the Liberal Democrats have been working hard in Warrington for a very long time and have the confidence of many voters. The voters keep confirming that confidence, most recently in Whittle Hall. We are now only one seat away from overall control of the Council and we know that Jo Crotty has as good a chance of representing Warrington South at Westminster as any of the other candidates, she will do an excellent job there and she deserves your support.

David Cameron has said some nice things about the Liberal Democrats and the decreasing policy gap between us and the Tories. Beware!

“The Liberal Democrats exist to build and safeguard a fair, free and open society, in which we seek to balance the fundamental values of liberty, equality and community, and in which no-one shall be enslaved by poverty, ignorance or conformity.” Preamble to the Federal Constitution

I have no doubt that David Cameron believes in all of these, but I have serious doubts about his party. The Tories have always been late converts to progressive politics. If they had had their way in history there would be no National Health Service, the BBC may not exist in its present form and we would not see the degree of equality of opportunity in education that so many benefit from today.

Labour by contrast have believed in progressive politics and have historically brought about many of the social reforms we value. However neither Labour nor the Tories have managed to run the country effectively for more than a few years.

This has been due to the contradictions in the two parties, one funded by the Unions, the other by offshore billionaires and home grown millionaires. The extreme views of some of their back benchers, MEPs and supporters leave me in no doubt that neither currently deserves unfettered power.

If you believe in the values in the LibDem constitution, the most effective way to ensure that those values are reflected by the next government will be to back us in the General Election, whenever it comes.

As I have said before, in the three way marginal, which Warrington South now is, the voters will have the opportunity of voting for real change at the general election by returning Jo Crotty to Parliament to help ensure that neither of the old and compromised parties can carry on with the same old politics.