Mike Causey – Wrecclesham and Rowledge
Waverley Borough CouncillorLocal People: Little Control
I have a habit of popping paperwork in my bag, so that when I next take a flight somewhere, I can use the time to get through articles, reports, and periodicals that otherwise I may not read.
This week it was the turn of the LGA publication First, and I was taken by a column on page 2: ‘Let local people decide‘.
“Research has found that while an average of £7,000 per person is spent on services like health, education and care for the elderly, only £350 is controlled by locally elected politicians.”
I’m certain that there are ways of interpreting “controlled by “, but in the main I agree with the thrust of this column. Whilst locally we approve a budget each year, we are massively constrained by statutory obligations. In order to outline this, tomorrow I’ll publish a breakdown of statutory vs discretionary services provided by Waverley.
What Sacrifice
For a third time in 2009 I find myself in European territory that was occupied by enemy forces in World War II, and this time at a particularly poignant time of year: both the end of WWII, and twenty years after the fall of the Berlin wall.
Only this morning I was stood with fellow church members in Farnham as we remembered the fallen who sacrificed their lives for our future and, now I am sat in Vienna, celebrating wonderful music and culture, with an immensely international audience, only a stone’s throw from where Hitler declared his Anschluss in 1938.
I am overwhelmed by the sheer number of lives that were claimed in the war, and feel somewhat undeserving of the very comfortable, safe and, privileged life I may now lead. Sat surrounded – literally surrounded – by Japanese, Russians, Austrians and Germans, I can really feel what a difference each and every one of those lives lost has meant for our generation.
We will remember them.
What is a ‘proper’ consultation?
As if our collective fury and cynicism hasn’t risen enough, we now have Sir Ian Kennedy to thank for taking it to that next level. What on earth do the government think they are doing by (a) appointing a Labour insider to the role of chair of IPSA, and (b) allowing him to make his first comments ones about not perhaps implementing all of the Kelly recommendations.
I am struck speechless by the madness, the foolishness, the idiocy of it all. And above all else, the arrogance of Prof Ian Kennedy to actually utter any opinion whatsoever until he has read and digested every last jot and tittle of the work done so far.
Finally, if this isn’t enough, he has the temerity to say that he thinks the work done so far wasn’t a ‘proper’ consultation. Excuse me? Where exactly does he attain the confidence to claim that he knows what a good or bad consultation looks like? In the light of the expenses horrors we have been hearing over the past months, does he not understand that we, the electorate, need to see an unequivocal acceptance of wrongdoing, whether personal or corporate, and the implementation of a regime significantly different from that of the present.
And not only that, but does it strike anyone in parliament, that the rules – whatever they are – stipulating what a consultation is supposed to look like, may not actually be the most appropriate way to consider the expenses claims of MPs and what true restitution looks like? Probably not.
Sigh.
On Referenda
Once again I find myself agreeing [almost] wholeheartedly with Melanchthon, a writer for ConservativeHome. However, on one point I may disagree with him, and so I have posted the following response to his article this morning:
We elect our representatives within the existing framework of sovereignty and law. If they wish to sign away the very legal and political framework within which we elected them to serve us, surely this would be solid and natural grounds for a referendum to establish the people’s view.
One could argue that a general election could do the same thing. Well, perhaps – but haven’t we had the perfect example of that being incorrect? A manifesto that explicitly guaranteed a referendum on the European Constitution was ignored. Unless manifestos are required by law (and enforceable by law) to contain specific policies and bills, which once elected the party will pursue, they are not considered by the electorate as worth the paper they are written on. (And by the way, that’s the tiny percentage of the electorate that actually read them, not the masses that think they know what they contain by way of the terribly biased interpretation of the mass media.)
Of course, there’s no way that a law could be sophisticated enough, or have sufficient teeth, to hold political parties to account to their manifesto, and we’ve learned anyway that our party leaders are not powerful enough to quell the mentality of ‘entitlement’ that pervades our political class. Entitlement to power; entitlement to expenses; entitlement to mortgages and property; entitlement to employ one’s family.
So, back to referenda – what part of the reality of our parliamentary democracy and the natural fragility of man’s honesty in the temptations of power, leads you to believe that referenda do not have their place?
Planning Applications 4th November 2009
(Click here if you want to go the Waverley planning search page, and select ‘Ward’ from the left hand list of options)
No new applications in the ward this week.
Let me be Frank
I believe that Radio 4 were appallingly in error this morning. Allowing the following statement to go unchallenged is a crime:
“3 people die in this country every day because of a lack of organ donors” according to NHS Blood and Transplant.
No matter what good intentions the Today producer, presenter and interviewee had this morning, it is no excuse for such an appalling error. It is absolutely wrong to say that 3 people die because of a lack of organ donors. That’s not why they die. They die because of the illness they contracted, or the organ failure they are experiencing, and that’s a tragedy. But to allow the above statement legitimacy is to encourage the deliberate twisting of fact to meet the preformulated ideological viewpoint of the programme, and to inject guilt into the hearer in order to increase the affect of the interview.
It’s a slippery slope, and allowing end-of-life issues to be so startlingly obviously distorted by way of this conversational terrorism, is an awful premise. Shame on you Today.
Who am I?
Having missed this morning’s service at Farnham Baptist Church due to taking part in the Loseley 10K run – do you see how I dropped that in? 
– I attended the 6.30 pm service this evening, and I am so grateful to have done so. Jonathan Shulver, one of our pastors, was speaking on contentment, and asked us ponder the question “Who am I?” This is a classic worldview question, and I knew that he would be referring us to considering our humanity in light of God’s sovereignty and his son Jesus Christ. However, I wasn’t quite prepared for the reminders he gave us, and am humbled by how much I need to be thankful to God.
As a follower of Christ, I am:
Dearly loved child of God
Someone for whom Christ loved and gave himself
Someone on whom God has lavished his grace
Someone chosen before the foundation of the earth to be blameless in God’s sight
Someone in whom God, the Holy Spirit, dwells
Heir of all things, in Christ
Waverley Borough Councillor for Wrecclesham and Rowledge since May 2007.