Frank Branston - Blogging for a Better Bedford

There’s not much that’s routine about being a mayor. On Saturday morning I fulfilled a long-made promise to join Debbie O’Regan’s Pride in Bedford day at the Slipe in Queen’s Park. There was a good crowd and I was set to help digging the seasonal pond. And what’s a ’seasonal pond’? I hear you cry.

It appears to be a shallow mud pool which is boggy in summer and fills up with water in winter and is sown with plants that can live in either condition.

I shifted a few sods before going to see what else was happening. A team from Bedford sub-aqua club were fishing piles of junk out of the river, mostly bikes plus a shopping trolley, a couple of cash boxes and assorted detritus. Youngsters from the Viking Canoe club were paddling up and down the river collecting rubbish which they loaded into a bigger canoe and brought back for disposal. Others were combing the banks for more rubbish. Two trucks were used to cart the rubbish away.

I was torn between admiring those coming out to help and anger at those who gtreat an attractive area of Bedford as a rubbish tip but it was a great community event and went on all day and my congratulations to Debbie for organising it and thanks for the people of Queens Park for taking part. Especially those who provided a delicious lunch of sandwiches, samosas and pakoras

In the evening a community event of a different sort, a black tie St George’s Day Ball at the Park Inn. Organiser Nick Kier reminded us that the event was started 15 years ago by the late and sadly missed Dave Ledsom and that it had now raised more than £300,000 for local charities.

Chief beneficiary this year was Anglian Air Ambulance which had also been chief beneficiary for my Mayor’s Charity when we were able to hand over a cheque for £15,000. The St George’s Day event raised double that but it is still only a fraction of the £3million the service needs every year, every penny of which comes from fund-raising events and nothing from the Government.

Through all the heavy weather over the past few months the good ship Unitary Bedford has remained remarkably stable.

Members had expected to go into unitary with much the same team as got us there but it hasn’t worked out that way. Shaun Field is retiring as chief executive and is being joined by his deputy Gordon Johnston and the head of human resources and DSD Roland Simmonds.

The reduction in the number of council seats has made it inevitable that as many as half the existing councillors will be gone after the elections on June 4.

And then there is the sad loss of Chief Education Officer Graham Last and on Monday the equally devastating news that Labour group leader Dave Lewis had died suddenly.

Despite all this there has been no panic at Borough Hall. Our ability to take these shocks on the chin bodes well for the future.

It used to be complained that the Conservatives had hijacked the Union Jack. Then it got further hijacked by the BNP.

Now Castle Conservative candidates have hijacked St George. Anybody less like knights in shining armour than Andrew McConnell and his fellow candidate David Fletcher is difficult to imagine but on April 23 they put out a leaflet wishing everybody a ‘Happy St George’s Day’. Their leaflet contains the peculiar sentence: “David and Andrew are both proud to live in the ward they call home”. It would be difficult to be proud of living in the ward they didn’t call home, wouldn’t it.

The leaflet carries a few ‘facts’ about St George. As it happens virtually nothing is known about him, not even if he ever existed and if he did what exactly he did to merit his halo.

The two unlikely lads have included ‘Cry God for Harry, England and St George’ from Shakespeare’s Henry V. Shakespeare was born and died on April 23 but our present April 23 doesn’t correspond to his. Seventeen days were taken out of the calendar a century later to bring it into line with the true year.

McConnell has shown his gallantry by threatening Marrgaret Davey with a libel action over some petty point in a letter she wrote to the Times and Citizen. If St George had been of that mind he would never have made sainthood, unless it was as the patron saint of shysters. Anyway, McConnell’s claim is rubbish.

Cycling on the pavement is an offence, but not one to which the police pay attention even though it almost always comes up on meet the public sessions. “What do you want us to do, tackle burglars and drug dealers or people cycling on the pavement”? is their usual response as though the issues were mutually exclusive.

Yes, it does seem a petty matter. The problem is that by now cyclists appear to think it is their right to dominate the pavements. I have occasionally remonstrated and, of course, my reward has been the torrent of filth that passes for repartee these days.

The consequences can be serious. Last year a cyclist shouted out to pedestrians that he was coming through, collided with one and killed her. Some years ago, Cllr John Mingay was hit by a cyclist in Harpur Square, was concussed and passed out at a council meeting. Shame on all of you for thinking it was just a ruse to get out of a boring meeting.

Today I was backing a car out of my drive. As usual, I looked out for pedestrians before moving. What I had not seen was a cyclist moving at speed on the pavement and only realised he was there when he shouted as he swerved and pedalled on looking back at me angrily.

I wonder what the police attitude would have been had I knocked him off his bike? He had no right to be on the pavement and I had no reason to believe that he would be there, but would the police have ‘done’ me for careless driving. Is it another case of immunity for the law-breaker and responsibility for the law abider?

I was on my way back from Boulogne when I got the shocking news of the death of Labour group leader Dave Lewis.

Dave was ‘Old Labour’ to his fingertips and for that he was admired by many people, including me. We liked the fact that he would have been unrecognisable to the sharp-suited political machine operators whose day would seem to be over. It was a shame he did not live to see that Labour’s political verities come back into fashion.

Dave did not approve of directly-elected mayors because he saw them as being anti-democratic. We had a few arguments on the subject with me arguing that at least people knew who the mayor was and therefore who they should vote against if they did not like what he did.

To Dave it was anathema thet the mayor, albeit elected by general vote, could decide to ignore a unanimous vote against him (or her) at full council unless it was on certain issues outside the mayor’s remit.

Despite these arguments, Dave and I got on pretty well when he got back on the council after a few years in the doldrums. Although we certainly did not agree all the time we got on pretty well and I was able to help him with a number of issues on behalf of the citizens of his beloved Kempston.

My sympathies go to Mary, his wife, and his family.

I see a familiar name in among the foothills of Labour’s email scandal - that of Andrew Dodgshon, former Labour county councillor, former Labour apparatchik, former partner of Harpur Labour councillor Colleen Atkins. He is now a press officer for the giant Unite trade union.

He isn’t one of the villains of the pieces which have upset Mid Beds Tory MP Nadine Dorries - although ‘upset’ may be the wrong word as she seems to me to be having the time of her life.

Labour got itself into this mess through jealousy of the right wing bloggers who are making waves on-line. And that is a familiar story. Labour has always had problems understanding why Tory propaganda works so much better than theirs. The reason is simple enough, Tory mavericks roam free. From Beaverbrook and Northcliffe to today’s right wing bloggers they push right wing propaganda without being controlled by the party. So their wilder excesses can be dismissed with a shrug by the Tory machine which nevertheless gains from their general rightwards thrust.

From the days of the Daily Herald onwards, Labour has always tried to control its own media support and gets into a strop when it can’t. Political journalists will remember when Blair sneered at The Guardian saying he preferred to ‘read Labour papers’. As Blair was sucking up like mad to Murdoch and the Daily Mail at the time his comment was read and quoted with incredulity. And althoughn the pre-Maxwell Daily Mirror was strongly Labour the party was always moaning about it.

The Guardian’s thrust is to the Left but it can’t be controlled by Labour and Labour doesn’t understand that the Guardian’s independence is far more helpful to it than slavish adherence to the party line.

If Labour had cut loose these independent left-wingers and let them get on with it this scandal wouldn’t have had legs. But it is because they stayed within the Labour ‘family’ (giving a new depth of meaning to the phrase ‘disfunctional family’) that it has come so badly unstuck.

Amazing, isn’t it, how these former county people unerringly aim for the wrong end off the stick.

Former county leader Madeline Russell told a reporter who asked for a comment about the behind the scenes state of County Hall (now Borough Hall) that they were first criticised for spending too much money, now for not enough.

What they were criticised for was spending £250,000 on a series of parties and events to mark the end of the county council, money which would have gone a long way to replacing the worn industrial carpet which is being held together by gaffer tape.

And a letter writer in BoS says we ought to have found out about the state of the building before we moved in. I agree. Unfortunately as we were barred from the building until a few days before moving in on April 1 we weren’t able to make a survey.

I’ve always said that the only really efficient county department was its spin machine. It’s still working, I see. Probably we’re lucky that Damian McBride only became available after the county shut up shop.

A couple of blog entries ago I set up a ‘Fascism watch’ to mark the progress of this country’s descent into it.

During the G20 conference we saw the police in paramilitary mode, with balaclava masks covering their face, heavy helmets and long truncheons which they used indiscriminately. Even apart from the unfortunate Mr Tomlinson, the description of how they moved into the climate camp late at night when there were no witnesses, hitting at anybody who raised his head, should send a shiver down one’s spine.

Closer to home is the case of Sally Murrer, a journalist in Milton Keynes with good police contacts. Thames Valley Police harried her for more than a year, following her, intercepting her communications until they almost reduced her to a nervous breakdown. Then, having done their best to destroy her, they announced they would not be pressing any charges.

Among other things, Parliament exists to protect our liberties but these days MPs are whipped into line to back those who tread on them in the name of security. Who will protect us from our protectors?

While not approving of the way the two Labour reprobates tried to smear several Tory politicians there is poetic justice in the fact that Nadine Dorries was one of their targets.

Mad Nad has shown herself all too willing to strike out at those she considers her foes without bothering to check facts, as recently when she alleged that I was involved with property developers over Nirah. I challenged her to make her meaning clear, since when nothing but silence.

One does, of course, have to accept her assurance that what was said about her is ‘100 per cent lies’. The actual details of what was alleged are obscure but it seems to be that she had an affair. Even if it were true - which it obviously isn’t, because she’s said so - so what? She’s divorced; is she supposed to live like a nun?

She’s not my favourite person by a country mile but if that’s the substance of the allegation it is a lot of hot air.

I don’t normally read the online editions of newspapers. As an inveterate paper and ink man I prefer the feeling of newsprint between my fingers if not the ink on them.

So it wasn’t until a day-or-so ago that I read the Times and Citizen’s on line April Fool’s spoof. The story was that I planned to install people moving gravity tubes to transport people from Town Hall to and from Borough Hall on the other side of the river.

I wonder if the author of the spoof got the idea from a piece of installation art at Tate Modern a year or so ago where they had a network tubes which carried people from different parts of the gallery to the floor of the Turbine Hall. I thought then what a great idea it would be to have just such a human transportation system in Bedford. Entry ports would be high up in the multi-storey car parks and the tubes could whizz people to various points in the town centre. Then I thought about the problems of people shooting out at the end at high speeds or, worse still, fatties like myself getting stuck half-way.

This is the point of an April Fool spoof, the reader has to think for a crazed moment it might just be true.

Media April Fool spoofs became popular after the BBC allowed Her Majesty’s broadcaster Richard Dimbleby to do a piece about spaghetti trees in Italy. The spoof showed tresses of spaghetti hanging from the branches before being harvested by merry peasants. Many people were taken in and scoured the garden centres for spaghetti trees.

The reason it was so successful was that nobody could envisage Dimbleby, father of broadcasters David and Jonathan, playing a joke on the public. Dammit, the man had been anchorman for the coronation of HM the Queen just a few years before.

Decades ago The Guardian was one of the first newspapers to spot the commercial possibilities of April Fool spoofs. It invented a tiny island country called San Seriffe and ran an advertising supplement about it. To get the joke one had to be familiar with printing terms and typefaces such as Bodoni and Gill Sans which became names for geographical features or island worthies. The supplement garnered lots of spoof ads from genuine companies and must have made The Guardian a mint. But the paper went against the spirit of April Fool spoofs when it carried the ‘joke’ on for a couple of years and even revisited it this year.

Among the most successful April Fools in Bedfordshire on Sunday were two in the same year. April 1 was the date we chose to launch a Mid-Beds edition. It was not long after twinning between Bedford and Bamberg was announced. The Bedford edition ran a story that there was to be an exchange between the two towns of their most iconic statues. John Bunyan would go to Bamberg for a year while the Bamberger Reiter (Bamberg Rider) would occupy Bunyan’s plinth. The cost of this was put at £5,000, resulting in a tsunami of angry calls to the Town Hall from ratepayers protesting at this gross waste of public money. One local businessman facing bankruptcy said sadly to his solicitor: “I am doing my best to stave off bankruptcy so I can pay my taxes and look what the council does with my money”. His solicitor silently referred him to the dateline on the top of the page.

For our Mid-Beds edition that same year we said the Sandy television mast had developed a lean like that of the Tower of Pisa and two physics students intended to reproduce Galileo’s experiment of dropping differently weighted balls from the top to see if they descended at the same rate. Two officials from whoever owned the mast spent the morning on Sandy Heath waiting to stop it.

We followed this on the next April 1 to fall on a Sunday with news of the discovery of the diary of the monk Bede, after whom Bedford is said to be named. It was very successful commercially, so much so that it justified a four page pull-out. Bede was a priapic, smelly monk with a scatalogical sense of humour and contempt for local politicians whose names were suspiciously similar to those of actual counterparts, but because so much space had to be filled it became a chore to write and prabably a bore to read.

THe most successful spoof in Bedford had a cruise ship coming up the Ouse. The paper carried a picture of it at the Town Bridge. The then mayor of Bedford, Cllr JIm Brandon, was reportedly angry that he had not been informed so he could turn out to greet it in robes and chains.

There have been many people over the years who have congratulated me on the success of that one. I accepted their plaudits without telling them they had got it wrong. It was the Bedfordshire TImes, not BoS. After all, I reasoned, the BT had pinched enough of my ideas over the years.

Bedford’s most disastrous spoof was produced by the now defunct Bedfordshire Journal. Its publication day was Thursday and April 1 was Saturday. So desperate was it to have a spoof that it did one about the world’s biggest Easter egg due to pass through the town on Saturday.

It was too successful. Parents lined the High Street with their toddlers in the rain awaiting the promised procession which, of course, never came. The Journal was inundated with calls from furious mothers whose anger was not allayed by learning it was a joke. The paper printed a slightly shamefaced apology in its next edition.

If I had thought of it in time, I could have blogged a spoof on April 1, the day the borough took over County Hall, reporting the discovery of an expensive carpet carrying the county logo which had been bought after the abolition of the county had been announced.

Or perhaps not. Nobody would have believed it; too far-fetched.

WE opened the Bedford Gallery on Tuesday after more than 40 years of disuse.

This listed building has served many purposes including. Now it is a gallery for visiting art exhibitions. Its first show is called Treasures and consists of part of the Cecil Higgins collection not see since the Cecil Higgins was closed for refurbishment to start about 18 montrhs ago. The items on display were of a quality that justified an exhibition of its own in Tate Britain for four months. During that time it was seen by 250,000 people.

It’s on two floors. The ground floor has pictures by famous artists such as Turner, Millais and Sickert, and objets d’art and other interesting objects such as a cutlass said to have belonged to the pirate Edward Teach, better known as Blackbeard. In the basement are some of the Higgins substantial collectrion of prints including one by Robert Rauschenberg. To my delight, the caption card revealed his name was orginally Milton Ernest.

When I formally declared the gallery opened, I pointed out that it was part of our planned cultural quarter. The residential and commercial part has been built with the residential substantially let. The archaeological garden showing traces of the walls of Bedford Castle are also open. To come will be the refurbished Cecil Higgins Art Gallery and the Museum of Bedford. The whole project will cost £10 million and £4 million is already spent or pledged. A small but high-powered fund-raising committee, chaired by Lord Lieutenant Sam Whitbread, is charged with raising the rest.

The comments of the many visitors were nothing but complimetary and I hope my readers will take the opportunity to visit.

SO the first day of unitary is over, and very encouraging it has been too.

I went in to Borough Hall - formerly County Hall - at 9am to find my office. Overnight the county council signs had come down and borough signs had gone up. Borough flags were on the flagpoles. Everywhere there were friendly smiles as I introduced myself.

Later the borough management team hosted a series of get togethers with the staff. More smiles. More people saying they were looking forward to the new set up and working together. One lady said after meeting Frank Toner, our director of Adult Services, that in 2o years working for the county she had never met her director. Others were fed up with the uncertainty of the past three years and just wanted to be able to get on with their job. And still others said they had been encouraged to make things difficult for the borough.

Many of the staff had never been to the members area where the receptions were being held, perhaps because of the excessive security. At the Town Hall one needs a swipe card and ID to get past the public area, but after that staff can wander round at will.

At Borough Hall one has to use an electronic card to move between floors and sometimes within floors. The whole place reminded me of a prison on lock-down. Was the county’s paranoia a consequence of the building or was the building a consequewnce of their paranoia?

God knows how much was spent on security but certainly more than has been spent on staff working conditions. There are acres of threadbare carpet held together by gaffer tape, and sometimes even the gaffer tape is being held by more tape. The management and members areas have been fairly recently decorated and the reception looks smart. Some of the rest of it looks like an Eastern European office building from the days of Communism.

Local government buildings are never luxurious but people are entitled to work in reasonable surroundings. It will take a long time to make good the lack of maintenance but we will make a start.

And, you might ask, where is THAT carpet. Apparently it’s been put in storage to stop people snipping souvenir squares out of it. It can stay there until we put it on display in our projected Museum of Bedford.

What astonishes me about the rows over MPs expenses is the sheer scale of them. Apparently the AVERAGE is £144,000 a year.

I have known some of Fleet Street’s most creative expenses artists - including one who invented a surreal story about his 4-wheel srive getting stuck in the desert and having to buy a piece of rope so it could be pulled out by a camel. The entry on his expenses sheet read ‘money for old rope’.
Even his mind would have boggled at the scale of an MPs expenses.

OK, let’s say that some might legitimately charge for a pied-de-terre in London if the alternative was a long late-night commute home, but you can get a perectly decent one bedroom flat in London for about £15,000 a year.

Jacqui Smith paid her salacious old man £40,000 a year to manage her office. Believe me, there are political anoraks in London who would pay to work in the House ofCommons but let’s say £35,000 for the sake of argument. With the flat that’s £50,000 a year. Another £30,000 for somebody to run the constituency office and we’re up to £80,000. How do they spend the other £64,000 or £1250 a week, more if you alllow for lengthy vacations?

It’s all part of a merry-go-round of hidden privelege, on a smaller scale than Sir Fred Goodwin’s pensionn but of the same metal.
And people are getting fed up with it.
For those who may be encouraged to ask what I get for being mayor, it’s £60,000 a year. I charge no expenses but rail or air travel and hotel expenses while on council busines are met by the taxpayer.