Previously Don Foster had held the Parliamentary seat for the
Liberal Democrats with a majority of over 12,000 while his Party had controlled
Bath and North East Somerset council with another handsome majority. In the recent
elections the Conservatives blew away hopes a new Lib-Dem candidate with a swing
of 15,000 plus votes and took control of the Council with many Lib-Dem
councilors losing what they once thought was political office for life. Throughout
the whole area the voters gave them a massive thumbs down. It wasn’t a bit of
pinprick disgust here and there. The electorate turned their backs on them
wholesale so let’s take a look why.
There were many policy issues in recent years that taken together
caused deep disenchantment and despite Liberal Democrat seemingly do-good
intentions began to smell of serious arrogance. Their councilors took on an air
of aloofness to various public concerns. They simply appeared to be unable to
listen. Understand the nature of public disquiet. In recent years, as part of a
so-called money saving exercise, they began closing the great majority of
public toilets in the City of Bath and throughout smaller towns in the area,
doing it without any form of public consultation. They simply didn’t think to
ask anyone. It never entered their heads that large numbers of people who might
be disabled or had urgent medical reasons for needing to use them would be
seriously disadvantaged. Instead they privatized their use, handing out the
contract for servicing them to a company who’d charge them for use and if you
didn’t have the right coin with you at the time wherever you were you could be
in serious trouble.
This may seem a small thing only it wasn’t. It created genuine
inconvenience to many people disadvantaged by age or medical reasons. No
consultation, no consideration of a very personal interest. To save money
employing their own maintenance staff they simply closed or privatized toilets
and too bad about that. It was a similar situation in the Council’s hiring out
of public spaces and amenities for private use to make extra cash. Parks and
Gardens were given over to private events from which the local public was
forcibly excluded by private stewards on gates or the fencing off of spaces in
parks. Those who’d paid money for their upkeep out of their rates were kept out
with all the unpleasant arrogance of private property. Kept away and kept out
with their pleasure in being able to use what they’d rightly thought of as
being a civic amenity available for their use now taken away. It went down
badly with people and stank.
One of the worst assaults on public sentiment however was the extraordinary
Liberal Democrat policy of extensive long term road-works both within the City
and many other small towns in the area and here let me say immediately that my
use of the word extensive is no exaggeration. The Council took a decision to
kind of modernize and make kind of pedestrian friendly a vast swathe of the
main London Road leading east out of the City while at the same time adopting
the same style for a main route leading south-east towards Bristol. Contracts
were awarded for these ‘improvement’ schemes to the same company which alas, in
the early stages of works announced it was bankrupt leaving huge swathes of uncompleted
works and chaos in crucial areas of road traffic movement. Most unfortunately
it seemed, the road works arm of the company had transferred most of it assets
to other areas of business leaving it unable to complete the huge program it had
signed up for. These now incomplete schemes left the transportation system of
the City in a diabolical mess with gigantic traffic queues endlessly clogging
up the City throughout the day and Council seemingly unable to rectify the
situation. Excuse me… Don’t blame us for it all!
The fury of the motoring public of Bath knew no bounds, particularly
when, immediately prior to the elections, the Liberal Democrats published a leaflet
saying how well they’d done with local road traffic improvement schemes,
promising many more and especially infuriating, guaranteeing they’d turn
crucial areas of road space over to cyclists, naturally saying nothing of
course about how their schemes of recent years had completely stuffed up road
traffic in the City. The leaflet, showing the grinning face of the Council Leader
along with a photo of the new Lib-Dem Parliamentary candidate with the arm of
the former MP round his shoulder was like waving a giant red rag to a bull.
Motorists throughout the City were infuriated, particularly when for the last
six months there’d been little sign that the works would be completed. Both
areas mentioned above resemble gigantic coned off drilled out building sites
with great quantities of material strewn just about everywhere. In the London
road, amazingly, completed works show a vast extension of pavement area for
pedestrians and a serious narrowing of the roadway from four lanes down to two
and furthermore the works having been completed at one end have now extended
east towards the City! More interesting than anything perhaps in respect of
these works is that for months on end while negotiations between the Council
and the ex-company dragged on, no constructions workers were to be seen anywhere
doing anything to the palpable fury of tens of thousands of motorists.
On election day then with the Liberal Democrat controlled Council
trumpeting its pride as responsible custodians of the City’s road traffic, its
inhabitants saw fit to tell many of its councilors exactly where they could stick
it!
In this respect I have my own small contribution to make. Interested
in the fact that for many years the Council Health and Safety Department has
allowed various Polish shops within its area of control to sell perishable
meat, fish and dairy products without labels in English stating their content,
sell by date or storage instruction, this being a criminal offence, I decided
to make an enquiry and telephone a Liberal Democrat councilor whom I thought
might provide some advice. After a brief conversation my enquiry was brought to
a halt by the good lady’s insistence that I address her as COUNCILOR… Councilor
this and councilor that but insistently and most definitely as COUNCILOR in a
splendid, entirely unselfconscious manner. I didn’t pursue the enquiry with her
but noted that in the elections the public had booted her out on her arse!
In Bath and North East Somerset, with its toilet closures and road-works
the Liberal Democrat Council had literally pissed all over the people, and with
the elections my friends the people had actually pissed back all over you! It wasn’t
an accident. That’s what you got for your stupidity and arrogance!
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