Frank Branston - Blogging for a Better Bedford

THERE seems to be a mysterious symbiosis between Private Eye and ‘Mad Nad’, as that august publication likes to call Nadine Dorries, MP for Mid Beds.

The first time the ‘Eye’ referred to Mad Nad she got right out of her pram and blogged a hysterical rant about the mag culminating in a mysterious final paragraph warning to me to be very careful what I said about her because her narks always took it back (I wonder why narks should think it worth currying favour with an obscure backbencher?).

After a further mention in the current issue of the Eye she has gone off on a different tack, crediting it with a doubling of hits on her blog.

I say well done “Eye’. Everybody should read Nad’s blog - if only to discover what a wonderfully modest and warm human being she is. No trace of rampant egotism ever crosses those electronic pages.

And there you are - I’ve said it openly. Her narks can take a well-deserved rest.

I don’t like my official Christmas cards to be too conventional. You know the sort of thing - a print of St Pauls Church or the town bridge covered with snow. I can’t even remember the last time I saw Bedford snow-bound.

This year I went for a photograph supplied by Martin Nellist of kites flying in last summer’s kite festival. It might seem odd - it probably is odd - to use a summer scene, but I liked the picture because it reminded me of the Russo/Jewish impressionist Marc Chagall, one of whose signatures was angels flying over sleeping towns. It appealed to me precisely because it was odd. If you get one I hope you like the picture - in which case it needs no explanation - or the explanation which I hope will add interest to the picture.

A fan of my blog - there’s got to be one - has asked me why no entry lately? It seems he can’t do without his fix.

I was tempted to ask if he thought I hadn’t got anything else to do, but it was well meant so I resisted. The reason is that I have been very busy lately with the application for unitary status for the borough.

It’s odd how the Government can take months or even years to put a change of policy into action yet demands of local government that when it (the government) says jump, all we ask is ‘How high?’

It has given a deadline of January 25, 2007 for councils seeking unitary status to get in its application. As that application must include estimates of how much would be saved (we say £26 million across the county if we got rid of the county council and we went into one unitary and Mid and South Beds combined to make another). To pluck a figure out of the air would be easy; to come up with a figure we could defend, is not difficult but takes time. I have been co-ordinating the written application, as well as talking to other councils and business people to see what they want us to do.

And all this just before Christmas; it’s a cruel world.

We will get the application in by the deadline and are confident that the case we present will be unanswerable.

And that will be without buying in a load of expensive consultants to write our case for us (the county has chosen Price Waterhouse Cooper, author of the notorious document on Nirah nobody has been able to see despite the fact that it was paid for by £70,000 of public money).

We are seeking outside expertise on some matters but we certainly won’t be shelling out £14,000 on a video to say how wonderful we are, unlike the county.

To the Corn Exchange, Bedford, on Monday to the annual sports awards.
Annual, so that means there must have been five since I was elected in October 2002, yet this was the first I had been to.
Well, let’s see. Last year I was in Australia at that time and the year before in the Antarctic, but I am not sure why I missed it the two previous years.
It was a fine occasion, well organised by Richard Tapley from our sport department and his team.
There were good speeches from Gail Emms, world mixed doubles badminton champion. and Martin Bayfield, former England, Bedford and Northampton rugby player who was sincere (especially about his affection for Bedford) and humorous at the same time.
Lots of prizes for sports organisations and people, and Gail Emms got sports person of the year. Now, how predictable - and well deserved - was that?
When I closed the event, I wondered how many other towns or boroughs could have put on such a tremendous show of sporting prowess. It made me quite glad that I am too old to indulge in sport or I might have been inspirred to train and break the habit of a lifetime.
My hearty congratulations to all involved.

WITH Nirah having got over one of its main hurdles supporters of the scheme can expect another blizzard of emails from the ‘animal rights’ activists. They have already posted the names and email addresses on their website with, of course, an injunction that everybody should be polite and not abusive, which is suspiciously like a technique of the magazine Private Eye where it is well understood that what they mean is the exact opposite of what they say.

At one of their rallies in Bedford a speaker with known criminal convictions for violence made unequivocal threats against me and other supporters of Nirah, noted by the police at the time.

While they might get sympathy for their anti-vivisection activities from many people, few support their hostility to Nirah. They claim it will be a place of vivisection despite every effort to assure them it won’t, including an ethics committee headed by respected academics opposed to vivisection. One admitted that whatever evidence we showed, she would not believe us.

They point to the fact that Nirah will collect venoms, saying it is cruel, although collecting venoms simply makes use of reptiles in-built defence instincts and attack mechanisms.

They sneer at the conservation aspects of Nirah saying the way to preserve species is to preserve their habitats which is like saying that the way to end evil in the world is for everybody to be good. They also claim that it is impossible to reproduce the habitats of endangered species.

As it happens there are two instances, both from China, which make the argument for conservation, one very close to the Nirah site.

About a century ago, a Duke of Bedford acquired a few rare Pere David deer from China and introduced them to Woburn Abbey park where they flourished. In China, however, hunting and loss of habitat had brought them to the edge of extinction. Late in the 20th Century, some of the Woburn animals were shipped back to China where they are now protected and thriving.

The other example with a less happy result is a freshwater dolphin called which lived in the Yangtze. It was last seen in 1980 and despite searches none has been seen since. It is probably extinct, either as a result of hunting or pollution. Had Nirah existed in time specimens could have been caught and reared in the Nirah biotopes, preserving the species.

With many thousands of freshwater aquatic species on the brink of extinction, the need for Nirah is clear - only the most mutton-headed follower of the ‘animal rights’ fanatics could think otherwise.

One of the emotive pictures they draw is of people ‘gawping’ at these creatures, which they find offensive. Presumably they think the creatures do as well, which is anthropomorphism at its most silly. If they are kept in congenial conditions and fed what they need it is daft to think it is going to matter that people are looking at them. There is a good explanation of captive animal instincts in the Booker prize winning novel ‘The Life of Pi’. I suggest they read it.

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THERE were some last minute glitches (see my post below) and it came a day later than expected, but at last the Nirah outline planning application is in.

The formal presentation came at a press conference today (Friday Dec 1) (I wasn’t invited, but never mind) but even 15 hours before it was possible that everything would fall down over an issue of definition of a science park. If that had happened I have little doubt that Bedfordshire would have lost the project to Liverpool.

Now we wait for the planning process to kick in. It will probably take six months to get a decision. There could, of course, be an appeal or a ‘call-in’ for it to be determined by Whitehall. At one point the county council was suggesting that such an event was more likely than not, but now it seems to have reversed its view.

The only tragedy is that, were it not for the events of earlier this year, planning permission might have been given by now.

Still, let’s be happy that this stage has at last been reached.

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