Cllr. Gavin Ayling

Why on God’s earth would you set yourself on fire?

Suicide bombers, assuming they’ve got it right, are at least assured a quick death. But apparently one of the ‘South Asian’ chaps who attempted to attack Glasgow airport lit himself on fire before attempting to access the terminal.

Absolute madness.

I am not reassured, either, by the apparent good luck (from our point of view) and incompetence (from the would-be murderers’ point of view) as these are learning exercises.

Finally, if anyone says “Community Relations” again I will scream.

Message to stupid people: People with brown skin are not terrorists or even necessarily Islamic or sympathetic to terrorists.
Message to everyone else: Resist the urge to throw your cup of tea at the television next time a member of the ‘Muslim community’ is consulted.

I visited a constituent tonight who is disappointed with the result of a planning application. No formal objections were submitted but now that the building is going up the scale and impact on the property are becoming clear.

A few months ago another application was made in a different part of Shoreham and I considered that the proposal would be detrimental from a particular aspect (being deliberately vague here, I hope you understand why). Once it was finished, it turned out to blend in nicely and to have virtually no impact.

Conversely, looking at the plans for the constituent’s neighbour you’d think that there is no impact and there really is….

As I said to the lady today, if having sat on eleven Planning Committees since my election last year, I cannot predict accurately the impact of an application, what hope have the general public got? Worse, if we cannot accurately predict the impact of an application (and if Officers reassure incorrectly too), who should the general public rely upon for clear advice on whether a Planning Application will effect them?

I am learning more and more that nothing’s as black and white as I’d like.

During a week where wild fires have spread across Greece, literally unprecedented rain has affected England and killed four and where Italy and the surrounding area have experienced unusual heat, it is difficult to avoid the suggestion that climate change is having an effect. I still have a nagging doubt, but it’s meaningless to debate anyway in my opinion.

Interestingly, though, June’s Scientific American magazine has a passage which I think presents the barrier to solution quite clearly:

To accomodate the economic aspirations of the more than five billion people in the developing countries, the size of the world economy should increase by a factor of four to six by 2050; at the same time, global emissions of greenhouse gases will have to remain steady or decline to prevent dangerous changes to the climate. After 2050, emissions will have to drop further, nearly to zero, for greenhouse gas concentrations to stabilize.

Assuming the scientific community’s poor understanding of the climate is accurate then it is reassuring that the solution (technology) as proposed by the author (Jeffrey D. Sachs) costs approximately 1 penny per kilowatt hour. That’s on top of a current electricity price of approximately 8.1 pence.

I have long said that environmental-socialism is not the solution and I am heartened to read the technological-solution being espoused.

I have been in two minds about the smoking ban all along. It is possibly an intrusion into liberty but at the same time, how many of us object to other Health and Safety legislation where it prevents your job from harming you?

But again I am forced to question the legislation when Shisha bars are de facto wiped out. It seems madness to me that a business whose sole purpose is the smoking of tobacco in a social atmosphere will be forced out of business taking away, at a stroke, the business of the owner and a meeting place for people from different communities who are not so unhealthily obsessed with the drunk-culture (Did I just imply smoking was healthy? Sorry, I didn’t mean to).

My two-minded-ness continues.

In the meantime I shall enjoy the smoke-free atmosphere created and probably go to the pub more often.

Alistair Darling will take the most important cabinet job of Scottish Chancellor of the English Exchequer in Gordon Brown’s Scottish Raj Wednesday.

Scotland’s right to rule England on devolved matters is more and more a problem for Mr Brown but only while the English give him the grief he deserves.

Let us say it loud: The British Parliament should not rule England with Scottish and, when appropriate, Welsh and Ulster MPs. Call for an end to the Scottish Raj now.

I have been a Councillor now for a year and a month and a bit. I have been through long periods in my life of thinking I know it all. I hope this honesty grabs you.

In between these long periods I have had periods of what I shall call ‘understanding’.

In the last two or three months I have been experiencing one of those periods of understanding. And, surprisingly (to me) these revelations have come entirely from sources outside of the Council.

I’ve come to question (amongst other things) whether religion is always a bad thing, whether some aspects of my politics could do with softening (but not Cameronising), whether consultation has value (I believe it doesn’t generally, the way it is carried out by civil servants), whether corruption is so engrained that politics has any hope, whether it is a good idea to take time over things (I now think it is more than I did) etc.

I hope to explain this a little more coherently later on. In the meantime, I would welcome comments on any issue above and I’ll hopefully learn as much from those as I have from a couple of friends recently.

And thank you to those friends who will know who they are.

I have been a sunny, happy person of late and it has been difficult to raise my ire (no, that’s not a euphemism).

But that can always be changed by our favourite government. Today the secondary, primary, tertiary, third-stage, long-winded, nobody-will-listen-to-it-anyway consultation was started (see the Keep Worthing and Southlands Hospitals campaign website for details). The proposals as they stand will cost lives.

People will die.

Some child, elderly person, or unlikely middle-aged person will suffer an injury (58,000 attended Worthing’s A&E last year) and they’ll be just too far, or stuck in the traffic jam for just too long and they’ll die. People will grieve, people will be angry, but that person will remain dead and, shockingly, it will be spun by our government as the price of ‘reform’.

In a nutshell, Haywards Heath’s hospital (the Princess Royal) will close. That will mean the nearest hospital with accident and emergency facilities will be Worthing, Brighton or Redhill depending on the location of the injured and upon the next decision the Primary Care Trust will make; which of Worthing or Chichester will lose their A&E.

If we assume that it is Worthing and the Princess Royal that close that means that approximately half the 58,000 people who attended Worthing will now go to Brighton. I don’t know how many attended the Princess Royal, but if we assume it was only 25,000 (as the figures do not appear to be separated for the Sussex County (in Brighton) and the Princess Royal because they’re in the same NHS Trust). That means 41,500 more people visiting Brighton’s already-overstretched Accident and Emergency every year. That’s nearly 800 more people per week; who won’t, incidentally, be fitting neatly into the low-demand periods of time.

So A&E in Brighton will be overstretched, people without private transport (and even some with) will consider not making the journey, and some won’t make the journey: Three cheerful ways to die because this government has not forced PCTs to manage their finances better despite extraordinary amounts of extra ‘investment’.

I feel sick; So should Patricia Hewitt, West Sussex PCT and Tony Blair/Gordon Brown.

I feel sick.

And we have Jeremy Paxman who, for all his critics, does it to every political wing!

This from today’s Telegraph:

South of the Tweed, the backlash is starting

By Alan Cochrane

A weekend in England is all it takes; all it takes to confirm that “they” are not going to put up with “it” forever. “They” are the English and “it” is devolution.

Now, you may think you’ve heard this before; after all, people like me have been hunting for the English backlash ever since the Scottish Parliament opened for business.

And, frankly, it has been a long time coming. But coming it most definitely is. I was talking to a senior MSP yesterday and his assessment was an accurate one. “They (the English) seem to have gotten really annoyed about this student fees business.”

Last week’s announcement by Fiona Hyslop, the new SNP Education Minister, that, henceforth, Scottish students - and only Scottish students - would be excused their back-end payments for attending Scottish universities, appears to have been the last straw south of the border.

Perhaps it’s because of the manifest unfairness of it, certainly in a British sense, or maybe it’s because it primarily affects their off-spring - anything that hits your kids always brings a more emotional response - but the English taxpayers appear to have taken more exception to this bit of business than much else that’s happened in the last eight years.

And it has allowed them to add it to their long list of other “grievances” where the largesse of the devolved Scottish administration has given the residents on this side of the Tweed a better deal than those south if it. Things like free personal care for the elderly, free eyesight checks,
free bus passes and free access to better drugs.

All of this on top of what is seen as a small army of Scots in the Cabinet and, from June 27, a Scot as their new prime minister, without, it seems, so much as a by their leave.

Some English commentators claim that the incoming Nat administration in Edinburgh is bringing forward new acts of discrimination as deliberate provocation. They’re not. It’s not provocation, merely recklessness.

The Nats are determined to shore up their vote wherever they can - at the taxpayers’ expense, of course - and the students’ fees decision will do them no harm at all with the youth vote. Ditto with the so-called “grey” vote, following the announcement that free personal care allowances are to
be uprated. However, if in buying those votes, the Nats infuriate the English, then they’re not going to lose sleep over it, now are they?

All of which made my trip to Birmingham recently all the more interesting. There, in the tranquil surroundings of the house where Elizabeth Fry founded what we now know as the Quakers, I came face to face with the other side of the devolution coin - the English nationalists.

Mind you, the leaders of Campaign for an English Parliament are an incredibly mild-mannered bunch of revolutionaries. They are, also, extraordinarily polite.

In spite of all the slings and arrows that devolution has thrown their way, they bear no ill-will towards the Scots; they just want their own piece of the action. They acknowledge, as do most opinion polls, that the majority of Scots reckon that bones of contention such as the West Lothian Question should be addressed.

They have a long and hard fight on their hands, much of it down to indifference from the English media.

The reason I was in Birmingham was to make a programme about the demands for an English parliament for BBC Scotland, which is to be broadcast today.

Incredible as it may seem, there has not been even the slightest flicker of interest in this perfectly legitimate cause from the various arms of the BBC in England. Needless to say, however, one of the staunchest supporters of the Campaign for an English Parliament has been Alex Salmond.

I cannot imagine that this apathy from mainline broadcasters and newspapers will last, especially as every day of the Nationalist administration in Edinburgh appears to bring with it a new sense of outrage
from the ordinary voters of England.

• Home Rule for England is on BBC Radio Scotland at 11.30am today and is repeated at half-past midnight.

See, told you we’re not bad guys.

I would take issue with the author’s implied blame of Scottish Nationalists. The problem is most definitely Scottish and English British Unionists, not Nationalists of either country. The Scottish Nationalist Party should not be blamed for using the power it has been granted in favour of Scottish people — it is the lack of similar power for England that gets my back up.

And now be aware of another blogbreak of perhaps up to a week!