Frank Branston - Blogging for a Better Bedford

I hope all my readers have had a happy Christmas and I wish you all a prosperous 2009 against the odds.

People who know me will be surprised that I was in church on Christmas Day morning but, although an atheist, I have never minded going to church for a good reason, weddings, funerals, Remembrance Sunday or a good musical experience.

It was the latter reason that saw my wife in St Paul’s Cathedral having been told that the Sung Eucharist service was something to behold.

The music itself, provided by the cathedral choir and a marvellous organist was as promised. All was well until the Dean’s sermon. He started off with one of those intimate little tales which are supposed to lead listeners painlessly to the major issue. In this case it was a woman’s courage in being a judge in a beautiful baby competition (Don’t blame me; I didn’t write his sermon; it would have been a lot better if I had). So far so soporific but I sat up when he attacked Charles Wesley for committing a heresy. For a senior man of the church to be calling one of its most revered figures a heretic gave promise of entertainment not on the programme. The offence lay, the Dean said, in Wesley’s carol ‘Hark the Herald Angels Sing’.

As that was one of the carols to come later it seemed like inviting somebody to dinner with the sole purpose of abusing him.

And what was the Dean’s complaint? It was Wesley’s use of three words ‘Veiled in flesh’ (the Godhead see). The Dean almost shouted: “He (i.e. Jesus) wasn’t veiled in flesh - he was flesh”. He said when the carol was sung he would keep his mouth shut on that line and called on the congregation to have the ‘courage’ (his word) to do likewise.

The following line of the carol included the words ‘Hail th’incarnate Deity’. According to my dictionary ‘incarnate’ means made flesh. But regardless of definitions, in a world where mad dictators like Rober Mugabe sentence his people to death by cholera, the Middle East is in permanent flames, the world’s second most poulous counntry is in the brink of war with another nor far down the list, both of them possessing nuclear weapons, defining the refusal to sing three words of a Christmas Carol as an act of courage is a good example of the current malaise in the Church of England.

It is said that by Christmas 2020 the Church will have lost ninety per cent of its adherents. If this is the best it can do, I’m not surprised.

Regrettably, we had to get home to cook Christmas dinner so I never got to hear whether an unearthly hush enveloped the cathedral when it came to these words. If I had been there I guarantee people would have heard one atheist singing them hot and strong and stuff the Dean and his measly courage.

Of three multiple traders listed on the news as at risk of going bust at least two have branches in Bedford town centre. And this is in addition to Woolworth.

No doubt the council in general and I in particular will be blamed for the rash of empty premises, but wnat is one to do about international retailers going bust except grit one’s teeth and carry on with plans to improve Bedford’s infrastructure and the general attractiveness of the town?

More people coming to live would help but the big developers have put everything on hold. The borough is not a housing authority but we are working on plans to increase the number of homes in the borough by nearly 300 provided we can get round the bureaucratic tangle put in place by the last Conservative government to reduce council housing. One might have thought that a Labour government would be happy to cancel these rules, but they haven’t.

With a social housing waiting list of more than 3,000 even an extra 300 homes only makes a small dent, but in the words to the advertisements, every little helps.

There’s something about this time of year that renders me dilatory when it comes to blogging. Maybe it’s all those Christmas cards to write and shopping to do.

It’s even worse when, as yesterday, I finally get down to it, completing a long blog to cover events of the past few weeks, then hit the wrong key and wipe the whole lot out. Try as I might I couldn’t restore it and uttering some unChristmassy imprecations, I decided to give up for the day.

In the past, when I wrote a regular weekly column, the option of giving up was not available. One had to deliver. At the moment I have a monthly column in the council’s Bedford News, but as it has to be written at least two weeks before publication day and avoid controversy, it is difficult to get the adrenalin flowing when one knows the subject matter may be out of date by the time it is published.

Next year I will also be doing a monthly column in the Bedfordshire Times and Citizen, but press day will be much closer to publication day so it can be that much more immediate. I can also be more controversial. Bedford News is paid for by the taxpayer, which is one reason why non-controversiality is required.

The T&C column will be bringing a 40 year cycle back to starting point. It was July 1968 when I first came to Bedford as chief reporter of the Bedfordshire Times, then the area’s premier newspaper. It wasn’t long before I started a political column called Left, Right and Centre aimed at poking a bit of fun at local politicians as well as making some serious points. I hope I will manage to achieve the same in the T&C column.

Looking back, 2008 has been the most difficult year of my six as mayor. Gypsies and travellers, credit crunches and, most sadly, the unexpected deaths of two people I liked and admired.

There has been a good deal of politicking over the gypsies and travellers situation. For politicians to complain about politics is as pointless as sailors complaining about the sea. It is the element in which we live. Itris slightly annoying that some people have been working hard to give an impression that nothing is being done when I know the truth. I sometimes have to make a choice between appeasing critics by telling them what is happening, and feeding the well-honed traveller intelligence network with information about what steps we are taking to prevent a resurgence of what we have seen in 2008.

I am happy to report that a gypsies and travellers officer has been appointed and he is busy informing himself on best pracitice; I have spoken to the police about how to speed up action on travellers who are making life difficult for local people, and other bodies about short-cutting the labyrinthine processes the Government has prescribed for dealing with illegal incursions.

A lot of work has been done on finding the authorised site that we are required to do. We have looked at the whole emergency site issue and as far as we can discover no other authority in the country operates in the way suggested by our critics despite us asking our local MP to use the resources of the House of Commons to find them. Nevertheless, we have made some progress along these lines as well.

It may be dangerous to predict, but I think we are going to see a different picture in 2009 if we get targeted by travellers again.

The credit crunch has hit Bedford as it has every other community in the country, producing delays in the Town Centre West Scheme and Riverside Square. On the positive side, both developers say they want to stay in the game as soon as the financial situation loosens up. We have shown our faith in Town Centre West by buying up some of the properties which will be needed at a cost of £1.3million.

Another scheme that has been a bit nerve-racking is the completion of the Western by-pass. The A421 to A428 leg will be completed in 2010 (possible even late 2009) but it needs the A428 to A6 stretch to make it work and initially we got very little support from the government for our application for funds. Ironically, the slump may have come to our rescue because the Government is looking for projects to get the economy moving again. We have hopes that the second leg of the bypass may be one of them.

The major news politically has been the unitary battle. The delays caused by the county council’s legal actions have given us very little time to make the change work smoothly yet an enormous amount of progress has been made in the six or seven months since the issue was finally settled.

Our priority will be education, education, education (where have I heard that before?) and we have some exciting plans.

The end of the year was made utterly sad by the deaths of lawyer Tara Winter and businessman David Ledsom. I was away when Dave died and when I got the news by email it left me so shattered that for some nights I could hardly sleep for thinking about it.

It was a dreadful thing to happen. I have suggested that there should be some kind of permanent memorial to a man who did an enormous amount for Bedford, much of it unsung.

So we come to the year’s end, and my next entry will probably be in 2009 unless something happens between now and then that I absolutely have to comment on.

I wish all my readers, and even those who don’t read me, a happy Christmas and the sort of 2009 I wish myself, successful and progressive.

Lights are up in the High Street, two days before my prediction of Saturday.

The fact that a recession has put a stop to virtually all development doesn’t mean we are stopping planning for when it’s over.One lesson of the last few months is that when the circumstances are right one has to get moving at high speed to get facts on the ground before things change.

So the borough has just spent £1.3million buying properties for the town centre west project. If we had waited for the recession to be over they would a) be more expensive, and b) time would be lost in negotiations.

Similarly, we are looking at the future of the High Street once the town centre west scheme is under way. It is difficult to realise how much that connects the town’s history. It was a through route in Saxon times, 1500 years ago, and many of the building follow Saxon batterns, long narrow plots where there would have been shops, stores and houses on the High Street frontage with backs leading into smallholdings.

There are no building of that age left, unfortunately, but fully half the 120 buildings in the High Street have some form of architectural protection. The ambition is to pedestrianise the High Street and by means of careful improvements bring out the street’s noble architectural heritage and encourage new individulat businesses.

On Friday this week I formally reopen the refurbished Church Square but last night we were also considering plans for revitalising Silver Street which will include a piece of public art at the eastern end, clearing away the clutter that exists now and having a coffee stall and council information point in the middle. A series of mosaics will tell the story of the street which once included the jail where Bunyan wrote The Pilgrim’s Progress, a police station, jewellers shops and, in the mists of time, a mint, hence the name.

Further along the line are plans to refurbish Allhallows and deal with the conflict between delivery lorries and street furniture in Harpur Street North.

The mysterof the the missing High Street lights has been solved. Apparently the Government’s health and safety bods had decreed that such illuminations had to be capable of standing up to the sort of gales you only get once in a hundred years.

Our staff felt these were not so didn’t put them up on the grounds that we would be having new lighs next year anyway.

Enquiries showed we could get them this year. I pushed through an order so by next weekend there should be new lights in Bedford High Street.

So, not only will there be lights, there will be a new display.

I go away for a couple of weeks holiday and come back to find Christmas has been cancelled - by order of our health and safety department.

I cannot believe it was impossible to ensure the safety of our High Street lights. It is a year since one fell down causing the current alarm. Wasn’t that enough time to find out what went wrong and put it right in time for this year?

Anyway, my first action on my return has been to say that Christmas must be resumed as soon as possible and preferably sooner. The second is to find out whose lack of initiative led to this happening and cancel the next GLOOM day, the only day on which they are offcially allowed to have fun.