What have the ConDems done for us? : 13 May 2010

Did you hear David Cameron and Nick Clegg joking about sharing the same car to come to the Thirsk and Malton “bye-election” to save petrol? So now we know: there is now very little difference between LibDems and Conservatives.

On Ryedale Council, there has been a de facto coalition between Conservatives and LibDems for many years. Both party leaders meet behind doors in what is in fact (but not in name) an informal cabinet, which then forces controversial decisions through the formal Committee process.

So what has this Ryedale Conservative-LibDem coalition achieved?

• The appointment of a chief executive on a city-style salary in excess of £100K in the mistaken belief that the quality of an officer depends on the amount of the salary; 
• The reintroduction of a city-style pyramid office structure with a new highly paid tier of senior officers, in place of the previous flat structure which was designed to save money;

• The reduction of early lower paid front line staff to accommodate the new highly paid tier of senior officers;
• The imposition of city-style car park charges, a cumulative increase of over 60%  in 5 years, which forced the FitzWilliam Estate to take back the lease of Market Place Malton, at the cost to the Council in terms of loss of income of over £40K annually;
• Until a year or so ago, the acceptance of Environment Agency plans for the abandonment of flood defences in the lowland country village and farm areas, so as to allow the rivers  “to reconnect with their natural flood plain” and hold back flood waters from towns and cities – instead of dredging the rivers.

• An obsession with city-style superstores, regardless of their impact on local business and town centres, and also of the way supermarkets strangle farm incomes, reducing hard working farmers to penury, and so threatening our country way of life;
• A proposed local plan (LDF) which presents Malton/Norton as the “capital” of Ryedale, and seeks to turn it into a little city, with plans for 2,164 new houses (62% of all new houses for the district in the next 15 years), and for new city-style superstores which exceed, in terms of floorspace, the recommendations of the Council’s own consultants by almost three times;
• A proposed Strategic Traffic Assessment  which, whilst accepting that all the important road junctions in Malton are already over capacity, seeks to load them, city-style,  not  only with traffic from the proposed new supermarkets and 2,164 new houses, but also with traffic to be generated from a new grandiose city-style 110,000 sq.ft shopping centre to be built between the river and Butcher’s Corner

We will be told that these are only local issues and we should only look at the national picture. The Conservative leadership in particular seems to think that we are all so much woolly backs that, if they painted a pig blue, we’d still vote for it.

It is time to show them they are wrong. The way local politicians manage local government reflects on the local political parties who select candidates for election as MP’s. The reputation of local political parties is therefore relevant to a national election.

Both political parties in this coalition need to be told that enough is enough. That message should be made clear on every doorstep. A vote against these two parties will not change the government, but it will show them our very real concerns.

I shall vote for John Clark. I may not agree with much of what he says, but he is the one candidate who can be relied upon to ask awkward questions.