Here’s a quick summary of news, events and casework for January 2008, published 31st
31st – Nottingham Development Enterprise;
29th – Visit 3 Council facilities to judge “Contributing to Equality and Diversity” GEM Award;
25th – Glenis Willmott MEP attends Nottingham East Labour Party;
23rd – Development Control Cttee. discuss Alexandra Park eco-housing application;
22nd – Mapperley & Sherwood Area Cttee.;
22nd – Executive Board;
14th – Lord Lieutenant visit Oxclose Lane Police Station and Bestwood estate;
11th – Nottinghamshire Local Govt Leaders Group;
10th – Forum theatre event – “Foundation Stone”;
6th – survey Thorneywood Mount residents over possible measures to promote bus usage;
There is a separate blog available. Here are the entries for January 2008.
Placing faith in used car salesmen
Tue 29th Jan 2008
A pleasant day today. Meeting candidates for awards for the special work they do for the City Council.
Starting with the youth worker who helps young gays, lesbians and trans-sexuals. Making a good success with a new post.
Then to meet the manager of the Indian Community Centre. Popular, assured and innovative.
Finally to Trading Standards, where one of the Council’s staff is using her native Polish to help the new workers in the city. The culture in Poland has been one of mistrust in authority, and a consequent high levels of trust and dependency on everyone else. It transpires many new Polish workers are seeking help from Trading Standards cos of the trust they placed in what they were told by the people who sold them their second-hand cars. Yep, some new Polish immigrants are placing more faith in used car salesmen than the local bobby.
Meanwhile, Trading Standards are looking forward to the new legislation on trading which kicks in in April. The legislation, driven by European politicians, requires traders to take a broader responsibility for the sales they’re making. The Nottingham office has in recent weeks twice had to get traders to take back mobility scooters that they’d sold to people who were blind and who were never going to be able to use the machines.
Ad-hoc journalists & happenstances
Tue 29th Jan 2008
Twelve students from a local university degree course in journalism visited The Council House on Monday to find out about the City Council and local politics.
I asked how many of them had any regard for politics and only one put their hand up. I know, I know, But I recovered by explaining that only journalists were held in lower regard by the public.
Still they are to be admired for their ability to craft articles under pressure. I am jealous. Publishing stuff on my blog 24 hours after the event isn’t just down to meetings.
But you wonder why they bother getting trained when Monday’s Trevor MacDonald’s programme suggests they could just go on the Apprentice instead, lose (I think) and do a TV piece on feeling unsafe walking on the streets at night instead.
ITV’s ad-hoc journalist “didn’t take long” (said the narrator) to find a shrine to a teenager shot dead in the recent past. Well maybe, but the walk from Long Eaton (where the ad-hoc journalist lives, a town in Derbyshire which abuts Nottingham), to the site is over 7 miles. Some happenstance, that. Didn’t take long? Surely an hour and a half’s hard walking.
There were 3 ad-hoc journalists in the programme, and they all said they found the streets creepy cos they were empty. Well, there were cars passing by, but I think most can recognise what they’re saying.
Surveys of public opinion in Nottingham remind us that Nottingham does have a problem to tackle. Intriguingly, data suggests that our public find rubbish & litter lying around more of a problem than teenagers hanging around on the street. We have made measurable progress on these concerns in the last 2 years but we know we have more to do. It underlines our drive to become England’s cleanest major city, on which we are soon to make an announcement.
The TV programme chose London, Liverpool and Nottingham to make their point. But it seems, they could just have easily chosen a rural English town. The BBC held Question Time in Salisbury in Wiltshire and I was amazed at how anxious the audience were about crime. Panellist & former Blur bass player, Alec James, tried to put the issue in context (crime is down from the record levels achieved etc.). He then suggested that fear of the streets might in part be generated by what hacks like the co-panellist who works for the Daily Mail publishes in their tabloid papers.
Crime is down; the fear of crime not, apparently. But in a survey yet to be published, we are aware in Nottingham that the numbers of people who want us to act on crime as a priority has fallen. Surveys of how people feel are proving valuable to proving perspective and guiding action & policy.
Back in Salisbury, other members of the audience were backing the notion of it being OK to fake a religious belief to get a child into a particular school. Yet levels of attainment are way up on a few years back.
Countryfile visits deepest urban Nottingham
Sun 20th Jan 2008
Nice moment on BBC’s Countryfile today, when they featured some of the more challenging pupils from year 10 of my school, learning at (and even helping to manage parts of) the St.Ann's Allotments, in my ward, which happen to be the largest and oldest allotments gardens in the world.
The allotments have been awarded £2 million from the Heritage Lottery Fund to be refurbished and improved.
Celebrating Operation Kingdom
Mon 14th Jan 2008
Today, Nottinghamshire’s Lord Lieutenant visited the Bestwood estate in Nottingham to acknowledge the work of the Police, Nottingham City Council and other public agencies in bringing a criminal organisation to justice.
A police operation was launched in 2005 in a bid to stop organised crime on the Bestwood estate. Since the Bestwood gang were taken off the streets, people talk of the estate being liberated.
Operation Kingdom was launched in 2005 to encourage people to look after their neighbourhood and build community relations, and to ensure the community, Police, City Council worked in partnership.
Effective community activists are playing a key role in giving new life and new hope to the estate and two activists were visited at home during a tour that started at the local Oxclose Lane Police station. Representatives of the Prince’s Trust attended to see if they could play a role. The tour finished at the new SureStart centre serving Bestwood.
Nottingham has also seen a massive turnaround. Crime is down 20% over the last four years and gun crime has fallen by 74% between 2003 and 2006.
Value-added adding value
Sat 12th Jan 2008
More good news for Nottingham and my secondary school with the publication of national leagues tables on Thursday.
Nottingham made better relative progress against the country as a whole. Judged by a “combined value-added” (CVA) rating (which measures progress given the social and economic challenges the pupils of a school face), Nottingham is ranked 28th out of 149 nationally for progress at its secondary schools and 10th out of 149 for progress at key stage 4 (years 10 & 11).
The combined value added rankings show my school (where I'm Chair of Governors), serving probably the most challenged cohort in the region) in the top quarter by CVA ratings; and in the top twentieth for progress during key stage 4.
So more help for the children who need help most.
Early league tables did not have a value-added system and of course there's some criticism of how this can be measured. Now a national system is published, it's a shame that they are not explored in news coverage for the insight they might offer and rather than the cliches often used such as in the local newspaper's editorial that still appears to think making progress is just a matter of exhortation.
Brinks of Apocalypse
Tue 8th Jan 2008
It’s seems to be a time for reflecting on how close we come to disaster.
The Mirror leading on the conflict between US Warships and Iranian gun boats - “Two Mins from War”. And BBC 1 running “Thirteen Days” - the movie on the 1962 Cuban missile crisis (“You'll never believe how close we came”). Most concerning was the documentary shown on Channel 4 on Saturday - “1983: Brink of Apocalypse”.
If a Russian lieutenant-colonel had not ignored defence systems telling him that 5 nuclear missiles had been launched against the Soviet Union, a massive nuclear strike by the Soviet Union against the West would have been launched and millions of people would have died. Knowledge of how a war might start led the officer to conclude that this was not an attack - why would the West start a nuclear war with only 5 missiles? - and the world was saved. For this, the officer was not thanked - instead he was relieved of his duties.
Remember the date - September 26th, 1983 (probably better known as the day and Australian yacht won the Americas Cup).
But that wasn't the end of it. A combination of aggressive speeches by Reagan ("the evil empire") and aggressive actions by the USA (invading Grenada), combined with Soviet vulnerability (guilty of shooting down a Korean civilian 747) meant that by November an already suspicious Soviet Union thought an attack was imminent.
A NATO exercise - "Able Archer" - that simulated a nuclear war, heightened tension further. The high level of radio messages caused concern. Every message transmitted started with "exercise only" 3 times over, but it didn't help. The Soviets had assumed all along that a military attack upon them would start under the cover of a military exercise.
The best write-up of this episode & the documentary is in, of all places, the Daily Mail.
Meanwhile, I cast my mind back to 1983 and what we were doing politically. Protesting against the siting of Cruise & Pershing 2 missiles in Britain & Europe. Ridiculing "Protect & Survive". Campaigning for nuclear disarmament. Attending mass national rallies. Watching "The War Game" in meetings (cos the BBC thought it too frightening to transmit). Reading E.P.Thompson's polemics. Attending debates where earnest people explained the significant measures in place to ensure that a nuclear war could not start by accident.
Well, now we know that however earnest, they could not know how things could go so wrong. And it seemed the events and a briefing whereby advisors talked about winning a war with 150 million American dead convinced President Reagan that a change was needed.
And a preview of an American equivalent of "the War Game" - The Day After - helped him to be convinced. The events portrayed shocked him. In the way, at public showings, "The War Game" shocked us.
Before the BBC broadcast "The War Game" in 1985, I seemed to recall that they made a new documentary - showing London being destroyed. Experts were in the studio to discuss it - and they were in stunned silence at the end too.
Vivit Post Funera Virtus - Be good!
Mon 7th Jan 2008
Fans of Brian Clough have raised the money for a statue of him to be erected in Nottingham City Centre. And today, 3 designs have been unveiled for people to choose from. Comments can be made on the fans’ website.
Brian Clough was made a freemen of Nottingham. He was a football genius that made Nottingham Forest European Champions twice in the seventies. Everyone who met him has a story to tell. And he helped the Labour Party, especially in the eighties.
He held a set of beliefs and values. And if he gave you an autograph, he signed it “Be good” – a very worthy exhortation.
The City of Nottingham’s official motto is “Vivit Post Funera Virtus” meaning “virtue outlives death”. Cloughie said it in much plainer English.
Bus Gate
Sun 6th Jan 2008
My local MP came to campaign in my ward today. We chose to survey a largely residential street (Thorneywood Mount) which suffers high volumes of traffic.
Consistently, a significant number of residents complain about the traffic using the street and at the last election campaign, every third house or so had a black & white poster protesting at the “rat-running”.
Nottingham was the first city to use digital cameras to measure average speed and then fine those who sped. Now, Gov’t is allowing the Council to enforce bus lanes and the issuing of fines for this type of office by the Council is to start soon.
So we intend to introduce a traffic prohibition that only let buses through enforced by digital cameras and the new ability to issue fines. Buses are affected by the volumes of traffic - we think 5 minutes or so in the morning inbound rush hour, and by 8 minutes on the outbound rush hour. Such a scheme - a bus “gate” would be the first in Nottingham.
Today, we announced the idea to residents and issued a survey to collect opinions and comment. We’ve already got views from around 1 in 6 households and look forward to receiving more replies. The official route for agreeing the scheme is to first win council backing for using the available budget for promoting bus usage and then for the council to run a formal consultation process. So the scheme is still around a year away, even if residents say they want it. More said “yes” than “no” today, but radical proposals like these do require some contemplation & consideration.
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