Views from Frank Adam in Sedgley:

Bury South Labour Party

- Frank's Column, October 2007

With a view to local campaigning, but it is also pertinent to the national campaign, we went round Sedgley this September photographing the Labour Council and Government's achievements of the last ten years. 

It totted up to nearly sixty snaps of: refurbished & rebuilt schools at tens of millions;  new traffic islands, white lining and other road signs and safety;  the re-tracking of the Metrolink;  and a miscellany of fences and ginnel bars to improve council estates,  the walk- in health centres, and refurbishment of the police stations and libraries.   On the Labour Council's last budget of last March, we in Sedgley are at last getting slip roads to ease congestion at the Grand Lodge.  

Our next budget will be the Tory Council, " We shall look around to save money," exercise as Cllr Bibby put it on taking power last May.   Do not be surprised if nothing wil be done other than subside into decay.   These hundred years, Toryism is the penny wise, pound foolish of Scrooge.

This is the result of getting excessively protest vote minded over Iraq and letting the Lib Dems con people that they can smash the mould of British politics.   The only thing the Lib Dems achieved   by pulling the rug under  the Callaghan Labour government was to let Margaret Thatcher and the cynics smash British manufacturing.   Lib Dems have no content, no direction, and no achievements - apart from letting Tory cats get the social cream entirely to themselves under Mrs T...; and now in Bury.

The press and quite a few who should know better if they ventured North of Watford, have dismissed this all as 'waste' or 'nothing-in-particular'!   If it reflects the pattern over the UK then it amounts to a great achievement in making life better for all - and if it has cost - "The labourer is worth his hire," and we do not get what we do not pay for.   During the Thatcherite decades nothing was done by way of maintenance and improvement, "to cut bureacracy;"  and so we now have high house prices because social housing was knocked off cheap;  and no preparations to speak of for the forthcomng crash of the oil era, while the North Sea oil profits have been salted away as private speculation.

Our vision depends on prosperity which depends on energy.   Replacing fossil carbon energy with hydrogen is not too difficult.   It just needs the sort of political will and organisation the Dutch display over sea defences, and the Israelis over planting forests.   The outline is in JBS Haldane's 1923 Cambridge lecture:  he foresaw that after coal wind farms along the coast - and we may add off shore - will power electrolyser stations on the coast extracting hydrogen by distilling and electrolysing sea water whenever wind [and tide mills] can.   The hydrogen will then be stored and piped to industry and heating when we want it.  Farms will operate burning their waste in gazogenes to power their machinery and tractors.   Farming oil berries in Africa will definitely put earned investment into the

Third World and pull the rug under political and religious extremists.

                          

-  FDA