Today’s South Wales Argus reports that Caerphilly County Borough Council in South Wales has been grappling with the matter of ballgames[sic], leading to them being “band“
After her compulsory period of exile in Homophone Corner, Local Democracy Reporter Rhiannon James (or the Argus’ headline writer, if different. Ed.) also ought to ask bosses for a keyboard with a working space bar and/or a functioning spellchecker. 😀
Today’s Guardian reports that donations to the alleged natural party of government (©: the CONservative Party. Ed.) have declined by 40% in just 3 months (although in that quarter it still managed lay its paws on £3m.), according to the latest figures released by the Electoral Commission.
By way of contrast, donations to the Labour Party have risen by almost 25%.
During this time the Tories have worked their way through 3 prime ministers – the disgraceful Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson, one Elizabeth Mary Truss and now Goldman Sachs cheerleader Rishi Sunak – and two budgets, including a fiscal disaster from short-lived Chancer of the Excheqeur Kamikwasi Kwarteng.
The Tory spokesperson quoted by The Guardian seems to be very much on the defensive, if your ‘umble scribe’s reading between the lines is accurate.
The Conservative party only accepts donations from permissible sources, namely individuals registered on the UK’s electoral roll or UK registered companies. Donations are properly and transparently declared to the Electoral Commission, openly published by them and comply fully with the law.
If as stated the Tories are only accepting donations from permissible sources, that represents a quick volte-face from six months ago when, as Open Democracy reported, it was still donations from Russian sources linked to the gangster regime of Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin.
Bristol’s so-called Clean Air Zone, which has been long delayed and much contested, comes into force at the end of the month, with the usual doom-mongers predicting it will spell the death of the city centre and its shopping facilities in particular. Leaving aside those whose idea of transport policy involves sitting at the steering wheel of a mostly empty motorised three-piece suite, the scheme has caused some concern, particularly when coupled with the city’s dreadful public transport, exacerbated as it is at present due to a shortage of bus drivers.
A map of Bristol’s Slightly Less Polluted City Centre Air Zone is shown below.
Some might consider it timid and unambitious, especially if the aim is to get people out of their cars and walking and cycling (so-called active travel. Ed.) or using public transport.
The argument is that the city vastly needs to improve facilities for cycling and walking* – providing far more dedicated infrastructure for both – as well as doing rather more in the way of enforcement against pavement parking (posts passim). As regards public transport, millions of pounds in public money have been poured into the city’s bus network over the years (e.g. Metrobus) with very sign of improvement and with the whole system now suffering from a driver shortage, the area’s bus network is even more unreliable than it has ever been. As for local rail services, Bristol’s are a disgrace compared with other major cities. It took decades of campaigning just to get a reasonably frequent service on the Severn Beach Line, whilst improvements to services to towns and cities surrounding local authorities have hardly improved at all. Then there’s the long-running saga of the reopening of the Bristol to Portishead railway line, where in over 2 decades progress can only be described as sub-tectonic, i.e. the earth’s tectonic plates, which shift by mere millimetres a year, are outstripping the bureaucrats. Meanwhile, the country is also failing to deal with a record cancellations of train services.
Could these be the real reasons why Bristol’s implementation of a congestion charging scheme looks so timid and unambitious?
Looking around the country, Bristol’s congestion charging zone appears to be trifling, a mere inconvenience to the majority who can continue to drive without impunity, particularly when one looks at what is being proposed in Cambridge, for example, as shown below.
As can be seen, the Cambridge scheme covers most of the city’s built-up area, as well as some surrounding villages. It too has attracted criticism, with it being described as town versus gown and car versus bike, pitting the city’s ordinary residents against the dreamers in the spires of Academe.
Your ‘umble scribe just wonders what the reaction of Bristol would have been, had a Cambridge-style scheme been proposed for the city.
* = One of the biggest changes that the council could do to make walking a more practicable mode of transport would be to change the timings on pelican crossings so that the signals change to allow pedestrians to cross within seconds of the button being pressed. This was first suggested over 30 years ago by one of the city’s cycle campaigners, the late Chris Hutt of Cyclebag. The council is keeping it persistently out of sight, having filed it in its bureaucratic oubliette otherwise known as its extensive Not Invented Here filing system.
Judging by the home page of today’s Reach plc Daily Post/North Wales Live title, one could be led to believe that human trafficking and forced marriage are alive and well in Talybont north of Abermaw/Barmouth in Gwynedd.
However, it is only when one reads the article that it is revealed that brown envelopes of cash have been proffered, not marriageable women.
The front page has since been amended.
Those whose fingers get into a tangle will be familiar with the HTML 404 error code page, just one of a number of HHTP status codes, of which the 400 series deals with client errors.
A moment’s digital dyslexia this morning meant your ‘umble scribe was treated to Shropshire Council‘s 404 error page, as shown below.
Umbraco is the open source content management system (CMS) used by the council to manage its website.
Your correspondent particularly likes the final line: “This page is intentionally left ugly ;-)”.
Computer scientist Brett Victor has an artistic 404 page, which pays homage to surrealist artist René Magritte.
However, my favourite 404 page of all time assumes the persona of Marvin the Paranoid Android from Douglas Adams’ Hithchiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. Although the original 404 page linked to from this post has now disappeared, Reddit has a full transcript of the text that used to appear on that page.
The world’s top greenwashing event COP27 is currently taking place in Sharm El-Sheikh in Egypt.
To give an idea of the under-achievement of previous UN conferences on climate change, it’s worth pointing out that activist Greta Thunberg is boycotting the event, stating that it will be an opportunity for “greenwashing, lying and cheating“. Greta is famously critical of politicians as her “blah, blah, blah” speech showed.
Anyway, in anticipation of a lack of any serious commitments and outcomes from the world’s political elite allegedly having a conferenceshores of the Red Sea, here’s a reminder from the past, in the shape of Ronnie Barker’s Ministry of Pollution sketch from the second season of The Two Ronnies, first aired in 1972.
Your ‘umble scribe likes to think he was properly brought up: polite, courteous, not swearing people, particularly women, and such like. As regards swearing, his sister has more than once revealed that when she and my late father were on a bus once, he admonished fellow passengers for swearing because women were present.
As regards swearing, step forward over-promoted former fireplace salesman “Sir” Gavin Alexander Williamson CBE MP, the dishonourable member for South Staffordshire who has been inexplicably elevated to cabinet rank (again!) as Minister of State without Portfolio, who appears to have been taught and abide by completely different standards of social conduct to those of your correspondent.
News has emerged over the weekend that Williamson sent ‘expletive-laden’ text messages to the then Conservative chief whip Wendy Morton all moaning about not being invited to attend the late queen’s funeral.
According to the messages published by today’s Sunday Times, Williamson accused Morton of exploiting the Queen’s death for political purposes, particularly as he was out of favour at the time with the English Empire’s shortest serving ever prime minister, one Elizabeth Mary Truss, now safely removed from high office and returned to the back benches.
The actual words quoted by the press reveal that Williamson has a fine command of monosyllabic swear words having their roots in Old English (which some still call Anglo-Saxon. Ed.), particularly ones beginning with f and s.
Not only did Williamson use foul language towards a woman, but this morning his cabinet colleague Oliver Dowden (also inexplicably honoured with a CBE like Williamson. Ed.)defended Williamson on Sky News’s Sophy Ridge on Sunday programme, claiming Williamson’s offensive text messages were sent ‘in the heat of the moment‘.
I blame both of their sets of parents.
German newspaper <a href="https://www.welt.de/regionales/bayern/article241937155/Urteil-Buerger-duerfen-Falschparker-fuer-Anzeige-fotografieren.html".Die Welt states that it’s so obvious: people wanting to report an illegal parker just pull out their smartphone and then send the picture to the police. However, two men in Bavariahad trouble with the state’s data protection authorities. A court has now decided who acted corrected.
Anyone who sends photos of illegal parkers as part of a report to the police does not normally violate data protection legislation. This emerged on Thursday from two landmark rulings published by the Ansbach Administrative Court. With these the court agreed with two men who corroborated their reports of parking infringements on footways and cycleways with photos. For using this they received a warning and a fine of €100 each from the Bavarian State Data Protection Office (LDA). Both objected and went to court with the support of Deutsche Umwelthilfe e.V. (DUH)
The administrative court combined the two procedures in a joint hearing because of the identical questions and ultimately ruled that the procedure involved lawful data processing. However, the actual statement of is not available. The verdicts are of fundamental significance from the legal point of view, but are still not absolute.
The DUH, which supported one of the two plaintiffs in a test case, welcomed the verdict. “Illegal parking is no trivial offence, but endangers people who are travelling by bike, wheeled walking frame, wheelchair or pram”, commented Jürgen Resch, its Federal director. “The authorities should not take action against civil society commitment, but rather take consistent measures against blocked footpaths and cycle paths, illegal parking in front of dropped kerbs or at junctions; and do so not just in Bavaria, but nationwide.»
The crux of the proceedings was the question of whether digital transmission of the photos constituted lawful data processing within the meaning of the General Data Protection Regulation since there must be a legitimate interest in forwarding the image files. On the other hand, data transmission and processing must be necessary.
Accordingly, the parties to the proceedings before the court argued about whether the plaintiffs had to be personally affected by the parking violations and whether a written or telephone description of the facts including the vehicle registration number, was not sufficient. In addition, the LDA pointed out that other data such as other cars with registration plates and people can often be seen in the pictures. In reply, the plaintiffs stressed that the police had asked them to document the parking situation as accurately as possible with photos as evidence.
The LDA stated that once the judgment’s statement of grounds was available, it would examine whether the decision was an individual case or whether a reassessment of the use of photos in public places that was critical for data protection had been initiated. In addition, it wants to agree clear and uniform guidelines with the police regarding which information is required when reporting illegal parking and which communication channel should be used.
The disgraced former Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, one Matthew John David Hancock, has lost the Conservative Party whip for agreeing to take part in trash TV show I’m A Celebrity… Get Me Out Of Here!, The Guardian reports.
Tory chief whip Simon Hart is quoted as saying, “Following a conversation with Matt Hancock, I have considered the situation and believe this is a matter serious enough to warrant suspension of the whip with immediate effect”.
The dictionary definition of a celebrity is someone who is famous, especially in areas of entertainment such as films, music, writing, or sport. Unless politics has become a branch of the entertainment business, classifying Hancock as a celebrity is a tad far-fetched, even though politics has previously been described as show business for ugly people.
Your ‘umble scribe would contend that Hancock is no celebrity. However, what he does have is notoriety, particularly from his term of office as health secretary. In June 2021, after it was shown he had breached COVID-19 social distancing restrictions by kissing and embracing an aide, Gina Coladangelo, in his Whitehall office, Hancock resigned as Health Secretary, having been caught not only cheating on his wife, but also breaking his own social distancing rules. At the time Ms Coladangelo was a non-executive director at the Department of Health and Social Care. She was also an old college friend of Hancock’s from his time studying PPE at Exeter College, Oxford.
However, Ms Coladangelo’s appointment to the DHSC is not the only example of Hancock’s cronyism. There was the revelation of his ownership of shares in a family company used by the NHS, not to mention the award of an NHS contract to a neighbour. Furthermore, Hancock is the member of parliament for the West Suffolk constituency, which includes Newmarket, capital of the country’s horse-racing business. One of the reasons the pandemic took such a strong hold in the country was the delay in locking the country down, which allowed such superspreader events as the traditional March Cheltenham Festival to take place.
Of course, Hancock is not the first MP to be lured onto I’m A Celebrity. There was of course the notoriously useless Right Dishonourable Member for Mid-Bedfordshire, one Nadine Vanessa Dorries. Dorries also famously lost the whip for appearing on the show (where she famously ate ostrich anus in the bushtucker challenge. Ed.), apparently for committing the ultimate discourtesy of not informing the whips’ office of her absence from Halitosis Hall. However, this disciplinary action did not do much to dent her career prospects as she was subsequently and inexplicably elevated to the cabinet position of Secretary of State for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport by disgraced former alleged party-time prime minister Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson.
Come the next election, will the good burghers of West Suffolk decide that Hancock belongs on a show entitled He’s A Calamity… Get Him Out Of Here!?
Update 5/11/22: Hancock’s decision to take part in the show and leave his constituents without parliamentary representation while he earns a fat fee – rumoured in the media to be £350-400K – in addition to his £84,144 p.a. salary as an MP has not gone down well with some constituents, The Guardian reports.
p>Bristol Green Party is currently collecting signatures for a petition seeking to ban pavement parking within the city. It’s a major problem, particularly in those parts of the city where streets are narrow and footways (aka pavements. Ed.) are even narrower.
Pavement parking makes it hard to walk safely, especially for those with disabilities, those pushing prams and buggies and those with low vision. People in wheelchairs or on mobility scooters are also badly affected. On top of this, the city is supposed to be promoting what’s called active travel, i.e. walking and cycling, as opposed to the use of tinned 3-piece suites, particularly those powered by fossil fuels.
The text of the petition is as follows.
To: Bristol City Council
From: [Your Name]
We’re calling on Bristol City Council to take action on pavement parking in Bristol by:
1. Using its existing powers to ban pavement parking in Bristol now, where it can and where it’s needed; and
2. Calling on the Government to strengthen councils’ powers to ban pavement parking where bans are needed.