Jim'll Fix It

Sir Jimmy Savile is 8o today and the Yorkshire Evening Post has launched a front page campaign to have him made a Freeman of the City of Leeds. Assuming that its already not stitched up then the YEP gets what it wants.

And why not? Jimmy is a "colourful" character I grant you but he has done so much for Charity and Leeds In particular then it would be churlish not to.

The Lib Dem/Conservative/Green Coalition has already handed out "Freemans" to Jane Tomlinson, Fanny Waterman and Alan Bennett after years of Municipal parsimony from Labour ( Ok I grant you getting Nelson Mandela to come and accept in person was a coup....)

As a great living Loiner he deserves it as much as anyone. Jim, we should fix it for you....

Area Committee

By recent standards Thursdays Area Committee was short and good tempered. As usual we whinged about things we have no power over, whinged about things we do have power over but I suspect not the will to take on vested interests and yes, actually did a little bit of good along the way as well.

The Inner North West Area committee is very apolitical ( 8 Lib Dem, 3 Labour and 1 Independent) and when we argue it tends to be differing personality types rather than inter party.

We approved £10k for the Radio Asian Fever initiative which aims to proved a community radio station for the "South Asian Community" in Leeds. I did my Philidelphia Lawyer routine not objecting to the principle of the application but instead that we were going to spend £10k of tax payers cash on the basis of such a back of the fag packet application. We did approve a number of safeguards and caveats which left me feeling better.

We reached a messy compromise over the bid to fund (£4700) the consultation excercise over the Woodhouse Moor Lottery bid. Leisure Services has made it clear that it feels it already has enough consultation data. No one else in the Community including elected members agrees with them. A reluctant promise to do more has been extracted from the Department and I had a sly chuckle when I saw the committee agenda asking us to pay for the survey. My eye brows were also raised when the survey consisted of one side of A4 ask just two questions.

Any politican would tell you that if you distributed that to 5000 properties as the basis of a £1 million lottery bid then you would receive a very short shrift. Particularly in a post Woodhouse Moor car park fiasco environment. In the end we agreed to pay half the survey costs and were very rude about the survey setting up a Members group to write a better one (but isn't this what officers are paid for?)

I still think there is trouble ahead on this issue.

Also amusing was the failure of my friends from Marketing Leeds ( www.LeedsLiveItLoveIt.com ) to turn up.

Having failed to produce the requested report for us in time for the agenda they went further and decide not to send any officer along at all. Back in March Marketing Leeds incurred with wrath with a series of gaffs concerning the Headingley area. I will post on this seperately as I'm running out of patience with them.

My final reflection on the meeting was one I made in public. We spent 2 Hours dealing with issues broadly surrounding the Student Housing situation, 30 minutes arguing over £14k of area committee expenditure and spent just 10 minutes on the Little London regeneration plan ( £93 Million in PFI credits).

Of course no one from a deprived area like Little London comes and sits through 3 hour Council committees. While many middle class people from Headingley do come and quite rightly force Landlordism onto the agenda. I'm no better than anyone else, in fact I'm worse. But I do wonder if sometimes we have lost all perspective.

Park Life

Tonight is ( I think Dwali) and Monday Eid. The new Hindu temple behind my house has been decked out in lights for about a week and I paused for a moment to watch people today hustling and bustling in and out in preparation. They could have been people anywhere anytime preparing for a great Feast. If it is tonight then I shall miss the magnificant firework display they put on but I shall be at a collegues 60th Birthday.

Walking towards the Bus Stop I passed the Mosque on Woodsley Road. At this time of year its always rammed full. I failed in my mission to promote community cohesion by glaring at a taxi driver who had parked up against the Bottle Banks meaning I had to squeeze my far from slender frame in to get my Bordeaux and Rioja bottles into the bank. I shall remember my short temper next time I am quaffing said wine at a Dinner party discussing NuLabors demonisation of Muslims.

I mention these in passing simply because every year I promise myself to do more to get know the faith communities in my area and every year I do little or nothing about it. Here in Hyde Park the faith communities are behind most good things going on and what ever your personal religious views have done much over the last five years to promote community life in an area dominated by a transient population. As landlords start to dump stock in the area because of the Student mega blocks being built around the city centre I suspect the areas best long term hope is try and attract varying Asian communities inot the area given its proximity to the mosques and temple.

Buying my newspaper in the Post Office the Muslim propriator was congratulating a Hindu customer on becomming a Grandfather on Diwali of all days. He was beaming as were the kids in the street outside playing some sort circle game. Just for a moment the finally browning leaves on the ground were blown in a circle just like the children playing.

Its a twee piece of Fortune cookie wisdom which I should be afraid to type but I did reflect just for a moment that however alien festivals like Dwali and Eid are to my Anglo Saxon eyes, that our common humanity and desire to celebrate light in the darkness and new Births is so much great than what divides us.

Work / Life Balance

I am currently on a temporary contract with a Drugs project in Castleford. I went for 2 weeks in March to help out while they are short staffed and am still there 7 months later. For obvious reasons I can't go into detail but suffice to say they have had high staff turnover and shortages. The good news is that things are on the mend but never the less I have just gone down to 4 days a week at my request.

While the money has been nice I just can't function with a full time job and be a Councillor. I have been dilegently doing my paper work, ringing stuff into the Lib Dem office and doing email but for what ever reason the Council just doesn't respond in the same way as to phone calls in office hours and physical pressence in the Civic Hall. It shouldn't be that way but it is.

However my plan to spend Fridays in the Civic Hall in the ward or the office have fallen flat to date in that I have been so tired I have just slept. The good news is I have begun to plan meetings and visits to help provide a bit of structure from next week onwards. I have cheated slightly in that I negotiated a pay rise to kick in when I came back from my Conference holiday and used the money to work less hours instead.

The whole thing has made me think lots about the so called "work/ life balance" debate. Its very easy for me. I have no dependants, a smallish mortage and a back benchers councillors allowance. Put bluntly I'm middle class enough to be able to take some time off. I'm reading a book for the first time in months and feel less stressed already. But what about my neighbour on the minimum wage with 3 kids?

I'm from the "tribalist" tradition of politics that sort of sees membership of a political party as being a bit like a love affair. I'm deeply affectionate towards the Liberal Party but one of the handful of criticisms that I accept of it is that it has no (modern) critique of poverty. It is a middle class party.

You might reasonaly ask which one isn't and perhaps thats one of Britains problems. The Castleford experience has prompted me to do some deep thinking of late of which more later. The Irony/Hypocracy of the situation though is my thinking about poverty comes about because I'm rich enough to have the time to do it. Thats the dilemma of the political classes.