... 4 More Years; So The Chant Went Up

Just before the election there was an interesting letter from a Mr David Walker in the Daily Mail. The letter was entitled Paper Tigers and included a paragraph.

“But any idea that the local press these days acts as a check on councils and the police must be based on TV detective series like Morse, Frost and Midsomer Murders, in which every local newspaper has a crusading editor or reporter determined to root out scandals.”

It continues

“Due to cutbacks, reporters long ceased to attend council meetings, so our elected members are no longer subject to scrutiny. All we read now are bland reports and back-slapping information issued by the council’s press office. The paper relies on the police to inform it of any local incidents, and it’s not uncommon for even major ones to fail to appear in print”

SHMD News is a paper published by volunteers whose wage is wholly dependent on the sales of adverts exceeding the cost of publication. Cutbacks do not affect us attending council meetings or reporting on them.

Tuesday night saw the first meeting of the new council with an agenda that included the mayor making. Congratulations to the incoming Mayor Cllr Philip Fitzpatrick and Deputy Mayor and Consort Cllr Janet Cooper and her partner Mr Dennis Fitzpatrick.

It was disappointing to see the “public” gallery consisted of only three people, although the number of empty chairs were, I assume, for the invited guests of the Mayor Making which followed. The meeting started with an opening by Retiring Mayor Ricci which included recognition of the Tameside citizens recognised in this New Year’s Honours list.

In addition to the MBE awarded to Chief Executive, the MBE was awarded to Sandra Marston from Denton for services to the community in Tameside and to Anthony Chaba, also of Denton, for services to Minority Ethnic Communities in Manchester. Mr Peter Fish of Hollingworth was awarded the British Empire Medal for services to the elderly in Hollingworth, Hyde and Glossop and Mr Alan Humphries, a retired Police Officer from Stalybridge, was awarded the Queen’s Police Medal to recognise his distinguished service in neighbourhoods across the region.

Cllr Kieran Quinn was invited to give an opening address which was based on the message “Hard work pays” and broadly consisted of a summary of how 52% of the electorate agreed seeing through the propaganda by opposition candidates and believe that Tameside Metropolitan Borough Council works hard on their behalf.

From our efforts in voting at the last election we, the people of Tameside, were rewarded with 17 TMBC Labour councillors and 2 Conservative councillors to represent us over the next four years.

166,895 people had registered to vote out of this 56,987 people choose to vote. There are two ways to look at these results.

The first option, not mentioned in Cllr Quinn’s speech is that roughly 34% of those registered to vote took the time to vote.

Labour took the largest percentage of those who voted with a result of roughly 50% of the people who could vote.

When looking at only the last part of the data it looks quite impressive, our council was elected by roughly 50% of the residents of Tameside.

The second option is to express the disappointment that only 34% of those who could, did actually vote and roughly 17% of those who did vote elected Tameside Labour; meaning our council, the seat of power in Tameside and our tenth of the Greater Manchester Combined Authority, was elected by less than 20% of our residents.

To arrive at the conclusion that 52% of the people of the Nine towns of Tameside believe the council works hard on their behalf is naive at best and disillusioned at the worst. Any good politician can juggle figures to match their intention but no-one can deny that 28622 out of 166895 is not 52%.

The conclusion of the speech itemised a number of ways which indicate how TMBC Labour see that the leisure review, the bin swap scheme, the re-opening of the old Ashton Baths, the new council offices, the Ashton hub of excellence, general education standards are all successful solutions solving problems.

I wonder if 52% of the residents would agree with their conclusions.