Wokingham Borough Council’s Cabinet Reshuffle

Wokingham’s cabinet reshuffle has seen Cllr Angus Ross (right) take over responsibility for the controversial waste collection scheme from Cllr Gary Cowan (left).

With the “unfair” election behind him and, despite his belief that voters were mean to him, his overwhelming majority intact, Wokingham’s Tory council leader David Lee has reshuffled his top team. This is presumably a search for a little inspiration, following the last lot’s sparkling success in alienating vast chunks of the populace.

The most notable change is the jettisoning of two of the executives who were arguably the most damaged: Cllrs Gary Cowan and UllaKarin Clark.

Cllr Cowan’s performance regarding the new waste system was something of an unmitigated disaster. From day one the scheme was clearly flawed, and when those flaws became clear he alternated between joining his fellow cabinet members in the bunker, and giving disastrous interviews on BBC Radio Berkshire’s Andrew Peach show. I can’t decide which was my personal favourite moment: his 9m long bin bags, or his insistence that four different sizes of bags all across the borough were the result of a single defective batch.

This one isn’t a surprise for me. The scheme was unpopular and unsuccessful, and Gary was the council’s face of it. Losing two seats might not seem a huge setback, but it will have been a blow to David Lee’s ego. I expect Gary has taken the bulk of the blame, so his absence from the top table is no great surprise.

His replacement is Angus Ross, the former executive member for  planning (I think). I don’t honestly know much about Cllr Ross, he’s not been a particularly high profile member of the executive, so I’ll be interested to see how he performs now he’s been thrust into the spotlight.

The departure of Cllr Clark is, to me, equally unsurprising. Her brief of Internal Services included the library service, and with the announcement of who it’s being sold off to expected pretty imminently, it’s going to become a political hot potato (I say that because I’m going to make it a political hot potato).

I’m sure Cllr Clark is perfectly capable, but her defence of the library privatisation plan has been less than robust. She was the respondant to the petition against the plans, and her conduct was shambolic. She and her colleagues spent the debate chastising those who signed the petition, rather than taking the opportunity to explain, defend and persuade. And when the time came for voting on a motion, she was wholly unprepared and the executive had to write one there on the floor of the chamber.

But it’s the choice of her replacement which is the most interesting part: Hillside’s newly re-elected Cllr Pauline Jorgensen. This just might be the first piece of sound political manoeuvring I’ve seen on David Lee’s part, and an excellent choice. Cllr Jorgensen is sharp, keen and will make my job significantly harder. I know this because I’ve already had many debates and discussions with her on Twitter. I disagree with the vast majority of her policy positions, but I won’t deny that she’s very capable, and I hope she’ll raise the quality of debate in the chamber.

In other news, Cllr Keith Baker has added planning to his pre-existing highways brief, so please direct all planning permission complaints thither. Given that Cllr Baker is one of the highest profile executive members, readers might wonder at the consolidation of roles in his portfolio, but I would imagine David Lee decided that he needed someone who would be able to defend the building of 13,000 new homes by 2026.

Newcomer to the executive Cllr Alisatir Corrie takes on Matt Deegan’s brief for the regeneration, after Matt stood down in May, and Cllr Charlotte Haitham-Taylor has taken over on Children’s Services from Rob Stanton, who remains deputy leader. The cabinet in full is as follows:

Council Leader – Cllr David Lee (Norreys)

Deputy Leader – Cllr Rob Stanton (Finchampstead North)

Highways and Planning – Cllr Keith Baker (Coronation)

Finance – Cllr Anthony Pollock (Shinfield South)

Health and Wellbeing – Cllr Julian McGhee-Sumner (Wescott)

Internal Services – Cllr Pauline Jorgensen (Hillside)

Regeneration and Affordable Houses – Cllr Alistair Corrie (Evendons)

Evironment – Cllr Angus Ross (Wokingham Without)

Children’s Services – Cllr Charlotte Haitham-Taylor (Shinfield South)

Thames Valley Police Commissioner – Labour Nomination Hustings

Tim Starkey and Jon Harvey- the two shortlisted candidates for the Labour nomination for Thames Valley police & crime commissioner.

Last night, Wokingham Labour Party held a hustings for the two shortlisted candidates for the Labour nomination in November’s elections for the Police & Crime Commissioner of the Thames Valley region. The two candidates are Tim Starkey and Jon Harvey, who not only have satisfactorily near-rhyming names, but who both have shiny websites so you can read up on their policies.

It was a fairly well attended affair, with party members present from Reading East, Bracknell and my own Maidenhead as well as Wokingham, and the questioning was lively. It was, I thought, an excellent hustings.

Both candidates were well qualified for the job, and were brimming with ideas of how to improve policing in the Thames Valley. Tim is a barrister, who has worked in prosecution and defence, and a former Lib Dem parliamentary candidate who defected to Ed Miliband’s Labour in protest against the coalition policy. Jon is a lifelong Labour man with experience working as an adviser to police forces and politicians, and a town councillor in Buckingham.

One of the most positive things to come out of the hustings, I feel, is a very genuine belief from both Tim and Jon that a Labour candidate can win this. I think the local elections two weeks ago were something of a game-changer. Whilst Labour progress in Wokingham was a little stalled, elsewhere across the Thames Valley area we made big gains. And here we have something to offer.

One of the most interesting ideas I heard was from Tim. It’s number one on his list of five pledges:

“To restore officer numbers in the Thames Valley to 2010 levels could be paid for by a rise in the police precept of £4 a year for band D properties. I believe this is a price worth paying. “

I reckon he’s onto something. I believe that people are quite happy to pay taxes, if they can see where those taxes are going. And £4 per year is a small price to pay for a full-strength police force, and the piece of mind that would provide residents.

Jon touched upon another policing matter, of equal importance I would say to the drastic cuts in numbers: police privatisation. Back in March it emerged shockingly that two police forces had already offered major contracts to private security firms, and that others were considering following suit.

He also showed this worrying image:

Police privatisation is a serious threat. It also seems to be Conservative Party policy. Like Jon, I think that a great many ordinary residents of the Thames Valley area would find the idea of a private security guard patrolling their streets very worrying.

Like I said before, Labour do have a real shot at this. And though I haven’t made up my mind yet whether I’ll vote for Tim or Jon, I know whichever of them wins the selection, they would both make an excellent candidate and an excellent Police and Crime Commissioner.

Wokingham Tories to close Fosters care home

Despite the valiant efforts of residents, their families and Labour’s Greg Bello, Wokingham’s Conservatives have decided that they WILL be closing down.

As I predicted, so has it sadly come to pass. Not even two weeks on from the local elections, and all of the bad news, all of the unpopular decisions that the local Conservatives sat on during the election campaign are coming out. First off the blocks? The council will be closing down Fosters care home.

I’ll admit it, this one hurts. Elderly and vulnerable residents will have to move to other care homes in the Wokingham area, which will be a very traumatic process causing harm to their physical health and entirely possibly deaths as a result of the stress.

And that’s not even considering the harm to the families of residents, as well as the staff who face job uncertainty in an already terrible economic situation.

It also hurts, because my friend (and Labour candidate for Bulmershe & Whitegates) Greg Bello has been working hard campaigning to save Fosters. This went beyond just an election issue, when I spoke to him the other day he was genuinely upset that this decision had been taken.

The thing that really grates, though, is the habitual dishonesty which seems to have surrounded the decision. I did quite a bit of canvassing over in Woodley, and we were pushing hard on the Fosters issue, warning people that it was under threat. The Tories’ response was that no decision had been made. Except, that doesn’t seem to have been true, does it? Whether or not the official decision-making process had been gone through, the Tory administration already knew what they would decide.

This is the Conservatives’ modus operandi. They know that some of their plans are going to be unpopular, so rather than try and explain their reasoning they keep it secret until after the election, so it won’t damage their chances or risk their hegemony. They did it with the libraries last year, only announcing that they were selling off the service a week or two after the election, with no prior mention given in campaign materials. They did it with the new bins scheme, suppressing news of the scheme and leaving a situation where an unfit scheme was rendered worse by lack of awareness of it.

If you’re interested in reading more about how Wokingham Conservatives do business, it’s worth reading this blog from a (non-partisan) local resident about how they (specifically council leader David Lee) lied about housing policy and their core strategy, back at the 2010 local elections. I wish things like this would get a wider airing, because if people knew what was going on I think they’d be shocked and appalled.

But the nub of this issue, here and now, is that some of the most vulnerable of Wokingham’s citizens are going to suffer because the council wants to pay less for their care. That, to me, is disgusting. My grandfather suffers from dementia and a few years back had to go into residential care. Initially there was some trouble, and he moved through three homes before he was settled, and the physical impact of the stress on him was heartbreaking to see.

I shudder to think of the damage that this short-sighted decision will cause to so many.

A Pot to Piss In

The boarded-up toilet block in Twyford, and the sign pinned to the door.

The elections are over, but the problems assailing Wokingham borough are still here. Despite the fact that local Tory leader Cllr Lee reckons that the results were terribly unfair on his party, they are still in control and their unpopular, controversial and unworkable policies roll on unhestitatingly.

And we’re still resisting them.

Case in point, the closure of public toilets across the borough. Despite the problems raised, despite the objections from the elderly, the disabled, those with children, the council remain convinced that the local loos scheme is an adequate replacement for the closed public toilets blocks.

We, the local Labour party, have raised in conjunction with other local community groups a petition against the policy, calling for the council to reconsider. Attention has largely been focused, so far, on Wokingham town centre and Woodley. But recently the prospects for public conveniences in those places have increased: Woodley Town Council have their eye on money from development to re-open the toilets, and certain executive council members have been hinting that the Wokingham town centre regeneration will include new toilets.

So with these developments, the petition appears to have more significant for other areas of the borough: for Winnersh,  Finchampstead, and Earley- and the northern parishes. Twyford and Wargrave, which I consider “my patch”, also have closed-down toilet blocks. They sit, boarded-up and half-derelict, whilst an inadequate agreement with local businesses replaces them.

The petition has crossed the requisite number of signatures, and will be presented to the council at its meeting next Thursday (24th), and will trigger a debate at the meeting on 19th July. It will be interesting to see whether this follows the pattern of the previous debate, on library privatisation, where the Conservatives were disdainful and dismissive of the signatories. I don’t suppose they will change their minds, but at least they won’t be able to ignore it.

I fully expect that Cllr Lee’s favourite excuse will make an appearance. It’s already seen an outing this week in the Twyford Advertiser, which referred to “Cllr Lee’s cash-strapped council“. I’ve already laid out how Wokingham’s “worst-funded” status is more than mitigated by its high council tax take. And the idea that we are too poor to provide public toilets is patent lunacy.

I will be there in the public gallery of the council chambers both on Thursday, to see the presentation of the petition, and in July, for the debate. I would urge any residents who have become disillusioned and sceptical of the Tories’ methods and attitudes to join me there. You never know, we may even force them to deal with Wokingham’s problems, rather than simply insult its people.

UPDATE: It’s been brought to my attention that, in much the same manner as their Woodley counterpart, Winnersh Parish Council are planning to build a public toilet. The difference here is that Winnersh is doing it out of its own budget. So it seems that the the slack left by the borough council’s cost-cutting abdication of responsibility is being taken up further down the chain at the parish council level. Wonderful.

Wokingham Councillor quits Lib Dems to sit as Independent

Sue Smith with local Lib Dem leader Prue Bray, after winning her Loddon seat back in 2010.

The voting might be over and done with, but the excitement isn’t over yet in Wokingham. Only a few hours after the votes had been counted and as the local Lib Dems were celebrating gaining a seat from the Tories, I spied this tweet:

Resigned from LibDems after nearly 30 years. National party not one I joined. Will complete term as Ind councillor.

— Sue Smith (@suehardingsmith) May 3, 2012

For a little background, Sue represents Loddon ward on Wokingham Borough Council, the same ward in which the Lib Dems narrowly held a (different) seat this week despite their sitting councillor Phil Challis (another Lib Dem who I believe is privately less than thrilled with the national situation) standing down. I imagine that put the dampeners on her former colleagues’ celebrations at having bucked their party’s national trend.

I can’t really argue with Sue’s decision- I myself have been incredibly disappointed with the national performance and actions of her former party, and I’m not even a member of it! She claimed on Twitter that she had decided to resign after the Health Bill passed, but delayed her announcement to reduce the damage in the local elections. I’m not entirely sure how that works, given that in the event she made the announcement only an hour after the polls had opened.

Sitting the remainder of her term as an independent councillor will see her in the company of Charvil’s new representative Nick Ray. I still know unsatisfactorily little about him, but it will be interesting to see whether the  left-leaning Cllr Smith will be able to work with him.

I certainly think that the celebratory tone of Tory councillor Paul Swaddle was scraping the barrel a bit:

@BBCBerkshire have you heard a Lib Dem (Sue Smith)has just resigned from Group and gone Independent wiping out gain.

— Paul Swaddle (@paulswaddle) May 4, 2012

Whilst what he says is true, technically, I find it hard to believe that Cllr Smith will now be voting with him and his party. She describes how she joined the SDP thirty years ago, and is disallusioned with the coalition and presumably the right-wing leadership of the Lib Dems nationally. If her response is to join with the Conservatives, then I’ll have to seriously consider my future commenting on Wokingham local politics, because it will make no sense at all.

So what impact does this have? Well, I don’t want to say none, but… The thing is in Wokingham, that to a large degree you’re either Tory or you’re not. Cllr Smith’s political beliefs don’t seem to have changed, rather her tolerance for Clegg and co playing human shield for the Conservatives has been exhausted. Honestly, despite his meaningless apologies to unseated Lib Dem councillors, I can see this sort of thing becoming much more common across the country. And given the general political positions of many of the local party’s members, maybe even in Wokingham too.

Arrogance and Sour Grapes

Cllr David Lee: “It’s so unfair!”

I was expecting (and, I believe, even predicted) that we would have to endure some mad post-election nonsense from Wokingham Conservatives. But I’d expected the announcement of a policy that had gone utterly unmentioned throughout the campaign, and on Monday.

I suppose that’s still a possibility, but I hadn’t expected council leader David Lee to immediately start talking utter rubbish to the press. That probably shows that I should reassess my standards. Anyway, as soon as the results were in,  the Tory group leader was saying this to the Wokingham Times:

“I’m a bit down because I think it would be difficult to do any more than we have done. We have definitely suffered a but from the whole waste thing. In all honesty, I think it’s rather unfair. We could’ve just done nothing, which is what a lot of people seem to think, and hike up the council tax.“

It’s unfair, he says. I don’t know about you, but I read that in the voice of Kevin the Teenager (from Harry Enfield’s Kevin and Perry sketches).

All through the local election campaign, I was saying that the Conservatives were out of touch with ordinary people. I was saying that they didn’t understand, and worse didn’t care, about what the council was doing wrong. The Conservatives continually maintained that I was wrong, but I hadn’t expected their boss to go and out prove my point so spectacularly comprehensively immediately after the election was done.

Let’s just recap. The Conservatives lost two seats in Wokingham in the elections, one in Charvil and one in Winnersh. They still have a majority of 16 on the council. It was not the mass rejection of Tory councillors I had been hoping for, but I reckon Cllr Lee knows his party was largely saved by an abysmal turnout.

But the arrogance of refusing to admit that the council did, or could have done, anything wrong was something I hadn’t anticipated at all. Call me naive, perhaps.

Just for contrast, at the adjudication of questionable ballots for Remenham Wargrave and Ruscombe yesterday, one voter had placed a tick in the box for sitting Tory councillor John Halsall, along with the comment “Could do better“. John’s response was to nod sagely, and admit “That’s true.“

David Lee thinks that there was nothing else he and his colleagues could have done. He quotes the council tax freeze, but still won’t admit the stealth taxes that many residents quickly rumbled him on. He seems to think that the new scheme is entirely fit for purpose, and presumably that the execution could have been better.

But he misses the main problem with the waste scheme: he didn’t ask anyone in Wokingham what they thought before he launched it. People don’t like being taken for idiots, and that’s exactly what David Lee has been doing. That is why he lost two seats, and that is why he was lucky not to lose more.

David thinks it’s unfair. Well, I agree. I agree: it’s incredibly unfair that Wokingham doesn’t have someone more humble, someone willing to listen and improve, and in short someone more worthy to lead it than him.

Wokingham Election Results – An Analysis

The results of Wokingham’s 2012 local elections are in…

I’ve had a few hours now to reflect on the results of the Wokingham local elections, and to do some some fancy arithmetic with the numbers to get a full picture of how the votes played out across the borough.

There were a total of 31,630 votes cast between the hours of 7am and 10pm in the borough as a whole. I don’t yet have the information on turnout, but it doesn’t seem terribly good- probably around 30%. The weather contributed to this, doubtless, but there has been a slump in turnout across the country.

Here is a table of information on the election, showing the number of seats won by each party, the gains that it means for them, the total votes they received, and how that stands as a percentage of the overall vote (Note: I’ve rounded the percentage figures to one decimal place, which is why the total comes to 100.1%).

	Seats	Gains	Votes	Percentage
CON	13	-2	15,345	48.5%
LD	4	+1	7,643	24.2%
LAB	0	0	3,862	12.2%
GREEN	0	0	2,378	7.5%
UKIP	0	0	1,733	5.5%
IND	1	+1	496	1.6%
Spoilt	-	-	183	0.6%

There were 18 seats up for election this year, which is a third of the council, and the Tories lost two. Somehow (think #wokyrubbish) the Liberal Democrats managed to buck the national trend, and actually gain a seat in Winnersh. The independent Nick Ray (about whom I know embarrassingly, well, nothing) taking Charvil from Tory incumbent Emma Hobbes was the shock of the day really.

Firstly, I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t a little disappointed. I had held private hopes of Labour winning a seat- Greg Bello came agonisingly close in Bulmershe & Whitegates, and I maintain he would have been a superb representative. I’m also disappointed that I came third after a candidate who did no campaigning at all, but I did significantly increase my share of the vote. Thank you to everyone who came along to help me campaign, and especially to everyone who voted for me.

The results show, I think, Labour as the solid third party of the borough. The Greens get fourth place, largely out of the number of candidates they stood (they didn’t poll badly, but only Marjorie Bisset in Shinfield South posed any serious challenge). I’m still waiting for any signs of this supposed UKIP breakthrough.

There are several lessons I take from these results with regard to improving Labour’s performance. The first is that we need to stand a full slate of candidates. We can’t be seen as a credible challenger in the borough unless we’re fielding candidates all across it.

Secondly, there was a distinct lack of canvassing all across Wokingham. I worked hard knocking doors and distributing leaflets, and so did my opponents (well, one of them did). But many of the returned Conservative councillors didn’t do a thing by all accounts. There are so many votes that are there to be picked up, if only we could run even a minimal campaign- and not to mention a get the vote out operation.

The next election isn’t until 2014, so that gives us two years to look at what needs to be done, and take steps to do it. Labour is here in Wokingham, and we’re not going away any time soon.

Wokingham Local Election Results 2012

Bulmershe & Whitegates

Greg Bello (LAB) — 750 votes (28.4%)
Lesley Hayward (LD) — 976 votes (37.0%)
Bill Khan (UKIP) — 137 (5.2 %)
Mohammed Parvaiz (CON) — 660 votes (25.0%)
Adrian Windisch (GREEN) — 106 votes (4.0%)

Liberal Democrat HOLD

Charvil

Emma Hobbs (CON) — 382 votes (43.2%)
James O’Callaghan (GREEN) — 44 votes (5.0%)
Nick Ray (Ind) — 414 votes (46.9%)
Malcolm Storry (LD) — 42 votes (4.8%)

Independent GAIN

Emmbrook

UllaKarin Clark (CON) — 1,202 votes (55.9%)
Suresh Jeganathan (LD) — 291 votes (13.5%)
Steven McMillan (UKIP) — 330 votes (15.3%)
Paul Sharples (LAB) — 313 votes (14.6%)

Conservative HOLD

Evendons

Dianne King (CON) — 967 votes (50.2%)
Steven Scarrott (LD) — 388 votes (20.1%)
Anthony Skuse (LAB) — 286 votes (14.8%)
Mike Spencer (UKIP) — 278 votes (14.4%)

Conservative HOLD

Finchampstead North

Martyn Foss (GREEN) — 124 votes (8.4%)
Mike Gore (CON) — 1,038 votes (69.9%)
Tim Jinkerson (LAB/CO-OP) — 193 votes (13.0%)
Roy Neall (LD) 121 votes (8.2%)

Conservative HOLD

Finchampstead South

Roland Cundy (LD) — 345 votes (24.1%)
Ian Pittock (CON) — 843 votes (59.0%)
Matthew Valler (GREEN) — 241 votes (16.9%)

Conservative HOLD

Hawkedon

Guy Grandison (CON) — 688 votes (42.7%)
Peter Jackson (UKIP) — 142 votes (8.8%)
John Prior (GREEN) — 97 votes (6.0%)
Anthony Vick (LD) — 407 votes (25.2%)
Neville Waites (LAB) — 278 votes (17.2%)

Conservative HOLD

Hillside

Helene Cherry (GREEN) — 241 votes (11.4%)
Pauline Jorgensen (CON) — 1,062 votes (50.5%)
David Sharp (LAB) — 317 votes (15.1%)
Keith Yabsley (LD) — 465 votes (22.1%)

Conservative HOLD

Hurst

Paula Montie (GREEN) — 79 votes (10.1%)
Wayne Smith (CON)  – 562 votes (71.5%)
Paul Trott (LD) — 83 votes (10.6%)
Umesh Ummat (LAB) — 62 votes (7.9%)

Conservative HOLD

Loddon

Tom Clark (LAB) — 303 votes (14.8%)
Tom McCann (LD) — 846 votes (41.4%)
Bill Soane (CON) — 751 votes (36.8%)
Julia Titus (GREEN) — 132 votes (6.5%)

Liberal Democrat HOLD

Maiden Erlegh

David Hare (LD) — 528 votes (24.9%)
Nicholas Marshall (GREEN) — 238 votes (11.2%)
Ken Miall (CON) — 966 votes (45.6%)
Jacqueline Rupert (LAB) — 373 votes (17.6%)

Conservative HOLD

Norreys

John Bray (LD) — 268 votes (13.7%)
Mary Gascoyne (LAB) — 315 votes (16.1%)
Emma-Louise Hamilton (GREEN) — 120 votes (6.1%)
Keith Knight (UKIP) — 212 votes (10.8%)
Malcolm Richards (CON) — 959 votes (49.0%)
Robin Smith (IND) — 82 votes (4.2%)

Conservative HOLD

Remenham, Wargrave & Ruscombe

Martin Alder (LD) — 248 votes (18.1%)
Matthew Dent (LAB/CO-OP — 172 votes (12.6%)
John Halsall (CON) — 937 votes (68.5%)

Conservative HOLD

Shinfield South

Marjory Bisset (GREEN) — 473 votes (31.4%)
Charlotte Haitham Taylor (CON) — 893 votes (59.3%)
Imogen Shepherd-Dubey (LD) — 141 votes (9.4%)

Conservative HOLD

Twyford

James Ewan (GREEN) – 118 votes (6.5 %)
Lindsay Ferris (LD) — 1,011 votes (55.3%)
Richard Fort (LAB) — 159 votes (8.7%)
Sam Hawkins (CON) — 527 votes (28.8%)

Liberal Democrat HOLD

Wescott

Stella Howell (UKIP) — 135 votes (10.1%)
James Leask (LD) — 158 votes (11.9%)
Kazek Lokuciewski (GREEN) — 187 votes (14.0%)
John Woodward (LAB) — 166 votes (12.5%)
Bob Wyatt (CON) — 679 votes (51.0%)

Conservative HOLD

Winnersh

Mark Ashwell (CON) — 961 votes (38.2%)
John Baker (LAB) — 175 votes (7.0%)
Tony Pollock (UKIP) — 183 votes (7.3%)
Rachelle Shepherd-Dubey (LD) — 1,183 votes (47.1%)

Liberal Democrat GAIN

Wokingham Without

Thomas Blomley (GREEN) — 178 votes (9.3%)
Pauline Helliar-Symons (CON) — 1,268 votes (66.0%)
Elaine Spratling (LD) — 147 votes (7.7%)
Graham Widdows (UKIP) — 316 votes (16.5%)

Conservative HOLD

Five reasons not to vote Conservative today (or why Eric Pickles is wrong)

Nope, sorry Eric! Wrong on all five counts!

I wasn’t going to do any more election blogging, but when I saw Eric Pickles “5 Reasons to vote Conservative today” post on ConservativeHome, I just couldn’t help myself. Here are each of Eric’s points in turn, why he is wrong, and why you shouldn’t vote Conservative in the borough of Wokingham today.

1) Conservatives deliver better quality, better value local services… More Conservative councils have frozen council tax this year than Labour councils.

Yes, Wokingham have frozen council tax. But that freeze was made possible by a one-off grant from central government. This will almost certainly not be repeated next year, which means that council tax will have to go up by at least 2.5%- just for funding to stay at the same level.

And that’s even before we get to the massive stealth tax that the council introduced under the guise of a new rubbish scheme.

2) Conservative councils have been at the forefront of the transparency agenda, opening up their books and finances to public scrutiny.

Transparency my foot. Do you remember the budget? Do you remember how the council executive only released it the statutory week before the vote, whereas other authorities had released it months earlier for scrutiny by residents and opposition parties? And maybe you remember that it was simply voted through, with a minimum of debate, and no opportunity for proper examination.

Judging from this, the Conservatives were going all out to make sure there was no public scrutiny of how they were spending public money.

3) Councils account for a quarter of all public spending, and need to do their bit to help pay off Labour’s deficit.

This doesn’t play too well next to council leader Cllr David Lee’s near-constant bleatings about being the worst funded council in the country. If we’re supposed to be cutting back even harder, why does he always seem to be begging for more money? Also, the notion of there being no money left sits ill next to Eric Pickles’ slush funds for weekly bin collections and short-term tax giveaways- all of which seem calculated to give the Tories something to crow about at election time, having achieved nothing all year long.

Don’t believe the lies.

4) Conservative councils are cutting municipal non-jobs like town hall ‘pilgrims’ and waste like town hall pravadas.

I’m not sure who exactly Wokingham have been cutting, but they don’t seem to have been left with a particularly brilliant crop. The local government officers in charge of the bins, in particular, don’t seem to have covered themselves in glory of late.

And as for these “town hall pravadas” (I can only presume he means “pravda”, a reference to the newspaper of the Soviet Union), one of the biggest complaints about the new rubbish scheme was that nobody knew it was coming. People didn’t know there was a new scheme, and they didn’t know their collection day had changed.

I guess we can thank the Tories for that, then.

5) This Government is devolving significant new powers to local councils…Conservatives can be trusted to use these powers well.

You’ve got to be kidding me? Trust them? I don’t trust them with the powers they’ve got at the moment. So far, Wokingham Conservatives have:

• Introduced a completely unworkable bin scheme as a cover for a stealth tax.
• Launched a plan to sell off the libraries, without asking anyone.
• Closed all of the public toilets in the borough.
• Threatened to close and sell off care homes.
• Wasted £90,000 on a PR exercise, and God knows how much in the end on the regeneration of Wokingham Town Centre.
• Ignored the views of residents at every turn.

Would you trust them with more power. I wouldn’t.

Please, don’t vote Conservative today. Send a message that Wokingham deserves better, that it deserves a council that will listen to it, and act in its best interests.

An Election Day Letter to the People of Remenham, Wargrave & Ruscombe

Dear residents

Today is the day; election day. And the polls are now open, the ballot papers are now read, and I sincerely hope that somewhen in the next fifteen hours you will all be making your way to the polling station to cast your votes.

I have spent the last few weeks working hard, talking to you and distributing leaflets, and offering my policies and stances on the local issues that matter to you. I sadly haven’t managed to speak to all of you, but most of you will by now have seen my leaflet. And if you haven’t, and would still like to, I have made it available online here.

I wanted to take this last opportunity to simply remind you of the importance of your ballot paper. When you stand in the polling booth, you will hold in your hands the power to influence the course that your local government takes. And it is your local government. I know it hasn’t always felt like that, I know that the council haven’t listened to your views, your concerns, your opinions.

But the ballot box is the one thing they cannot ignore.

I have laid out the changes I would make, and how I would conduct myself differently if elected as your councillor. I would put your views and interests first, and I would push the council to consult more and listen more.

The disaster that has been the new rubbish scheme has shown what happens when council stagnates. There is no meaningful debate of ideas, and the assumption that those in power are right presides. The new scheme has been proved ill thought out from the start, and the Conservatives must accept blame for it.

I humbly ask you, today, for your trust, your support and your vote. Throughout this campaign I have tried my utmost to maintain an atmosphere of honesty (I was not afraid to hold my hands up when I got things wrong) and keep the focus on local issues that are within the ambit of the local authority. This is what I would strive to maintain in office.

With that said, I invite you to examine my policies once more. Besides my leaflet, I have made my own views and policies fully available on this blog, and you can read through those blogs here.

I thank you for the time you have invested in reading this, and all of the thousands of other words I have written.

Matthew S. Dent

Labour and Co-operative Party candidate

Remenham, Wargrave & Ruscombe