Frank Branston - Blogging for a Better Bedford

My wife and I always enjoy our walks round the borough. I am not sure some of our staff do, because they give me an opportunity to see things which I might not otherwise notice.
A walk up the river path to Queens Park drove home that message that while my efforts to reduce graffiti in the town centre have borne fruit, in many cases they have displaced the activities elsewhere. There was a massive graffiti attack under the bridges from the County Bridge and under the railway bridge, and a colossal amount of litter along the towpath.
And while I often drive across the bridge from Ford End Road to Midland Road, from a car one doesn’t see the state of the gap between the old bridge and the new extension. I saw them last Sunday and by Monday I gave orders to get the whole area cleaned up.
But the message needs to be got across, not just to Queens Park but to other areas, that they need to take ownership and responsibility, not just leave it all to the council.
I also wonder why many councillors are prepared to allow their wards to let the borough down. They get an allowance of more than £80 a week and they have council phones and email. They should get on to the officers and demand action themselves. One man (and woman) can’t see the whole borough. That’s what local councillors are for.

With the elections in full swing there is much backbiting and muck throwing, all those things which turn the ordinary voter off local politics.

For instance, the political group leaders told the BBC that I was abrasive, broke promises, didn’t care about the environment and whatever else they could think of. Naturally their leaflets say the same.

At other times a different picture emerges. All the group leaders on the council have signed a letter agreeing that Bedford is a very well-run council. Possibly they argue that this is no thanks to me but at least they cannot claim that I have done any active harm.

The reality is that one of my opponents, Tory group leader Nicky Attenborough has twice been a member of my cabinet for a total of two-and-a-half years. My Labour opponent is Randolph Charles; I have had Labour members on my cabinet (and Tories) ever since I was elected.

The Lib-Dems haven’t been on my cabinet, and have shifted heaven and earth to make it seem I rejected them but in fact they were offered seats but decided they had more to gain by turning them down and hoping that I would make a mess of things. So they are reduced to pointing at potholes (again) and trying to claim they are my fault instead of pinning the blame where it lies. With the county council whose responsibility it is to provide enough funds to get the job done.

Sometimes it seems like a miracle that anything gets done in local government because there are so many diversions from the main aim, which is to improve the borough in which we live.

For instance, all this week there has been more work on the unitary issue, a new Comprehensive Performance Assessment (CPA) and, of course, the small matter of a mayoral election plus elections for other council seats.

Despite the apparently bizarre decision by the Government to allow both the county and our applications for unitary status to go forward, we are still working on the basis that a) we will win and b) it will be possible to beef up the applications of Mid and South Bedfordshire so that they also gain unitary status as Central Bedfordshire.

The investigation and interviews for the CPA went well and we have high hopes that the borough will move up from its present position of ‘good’ to the top grade of ‘excellent’.

When that happens it will be even more difficult for the Government to submerge an excellent, directly-elected mayoral authority into the county council which has only just achieved the minimum standards.

It would be nice (for me, especially) if the verdicts on these two issues were to come out before the election on May 3, but the Government has told us not to expect it before summer.

I grieve to have to tell you that Michael R Peters, owner of the shop of that name in Tavistock Street, died on Sunday.
Mike was a wonderful man. As a shopkeeper he was considered one of the best, if not the best, independent electrical retailers in the country. In the early days of Sky TV Rupert Murdoch himself visited Michael R Peters shop to award prizes for the way he sold SKY aerials and set boxes.
Michael also loved Bedford. He was a member of the Business Improvement District Board and his contributions to debate invariably went straight to the heart of any issue.
Bedford, his industry and I will miss him greatly.
My sympathies go out to his wife, Mary.

I spent Saturday morning sitting cross-legged on the carpet of what I believe is Bedford’s biggest public building in decades.
It was the Queens Park Sikh Temple, or Gurdwara.
Although it isn’t quite finished it is worth going to see, with its granite facing and marble trimmings. Looked at from high, say from the top of the Town Hall or the multi-storey car parks, there is a riot of domes.
Most of the interior is taken up by a huge meeting hall which must be able to take the best part of a thousand people, with more in the gallery which runs round the hall.
So much for the Riverside Square architects who go on about skylines and ask whether buildings ‘respond’ to their neighbours. The grudwara doesn’t and there is no reason why it should.
It cost £5 million, about a third of which came from public or charitable funds. The rest came from the generosity of Britain’s sikhs. It will be the fourth biggest gurdwara in the country.

I looked forward to this week’s BoS for more than the normal reasons. I wantred to see what the comments were on my April Fool spoof the previous week. They were all good humoured, which is good. An April 1 spoof should be enjoyable whether you spot it or are briefly taken in.
April Fool spoofs are fun to write. The first two I did were for the separate Bedford and Mid-Bedfordshire editions. The Bedford one was to announce a statue swap between ourselves and Bamberg: they would get our John Bunyan and we would get their Bamberger Rider for a year. The way to catch readers unaware is to put in some spurious estimate of the cost. It’s guaranteed to enrage them and the Town Hall switrchboard had to fend off complaints from people who had just had their rates demand.
The Mid-Bedfordshire spoof was that that Sandy television mast had developed a lean and students were going to climb it that morning to re-enact the Renaissance Italy experiment that proved that solid objects fall at the same speed regardless of weight. That was also a success in that the body that owned the mast turned up on the morning of April 1 to prevent the students’ supposed climb from going ahead.
Another rather successful spoof was the supposed plan to divert the Ouse round the boundaries of Bedford and convert the riverbed into a motorway going through town. One person, recalling it recently, said she had thought it was a jolly good idea.
The Guardian scored such a hit with its San Seriffe mythical country that it kept the joke going for several years despite the fact that most readers by then knew it was a joke. It even sold advertising on the back of it.
I was rather taken with this idea, and I spoofed that the diary of a Saxon monk called Bede (hence Bede’s Ford) had been discovered. There were lots of references to local politicians in it and we sold a fair bit of advertising, so much, in fact, that I had to write much more than I had intended. As a result one would have to have been a very thick reader not to have realised it was a spoof by the time one had finished reading it. It breached the rule that ‘brevity is the soul of wit’.
Lots of people believe that the spoof of the cruise liner coming up the Ouse to Bedford was a BoS one, but it wasn’t. I think it was the Bedfordshire Times and it was so successful that the then mayor complained at not having been made aware so that he could have gone down to the river in his robes to greet the ship. All credit to the author.
When I ran BoS I insisted that April Fool spoofs could only be run when April 1 fell on publication day. The now defunct Bedfordshire Herald disregarded that rule and ended up with Easter egg on its face. The paper came out on Thursday which was March 30. Their spoof was that the world’s biggest Easter egg was to be paraded through the town on the Saturday which was April 1.
The streets were lined with mothers and toddlers awaiting the Easter Egg that never came and the paper was inundated with furious complaints. It had to publish an apology to its readers.
It’s all right to fool adults, but not children.

Now that all the candidates for the post of Mayor of Bedford have declared, I can see what I’m up against.
There are no surprises. The three main political parties were boud to stand. I assume Justina McLennan (Green) is standing on an anti-Nirah ticket. I have a lot of sympathy with the Greens nationally but obviously not locally where they seem to have been hijacked by the ‘animal rights’ lobby.
I am glad to be the only Independent. Last time there were four of us, which was a bit chaotic. Now, if you want local government to be free of party political interference, you have just the one choice.
Soon you will be receiving a copy of a council booklet in which each candidate can set out his (In fact, mostly her case as three of the five candidates are women) case. The fact that I come first in the booklet is nothing to do with the fact that I am mayor nor was there any favouritism. The position was decided by lots. At the last mayoral election I came last or next to last so it has averaged out.
I should also point out that all the candidates have to pay their share of the cost of the booklet. We are not electioneering at the expense of the council taxpayer.