A letter for the Free Market to deliver

Dear Taxpayer,

Once again, the Conservatives are demonstrating the insanity of their policies. This time it’s the forests and, surprise, surprise, they want to sell them! The idea behind this is apparently nothing to do with the budget deficit but to do with David Cameron’s “Big Society”, where he shifts responsibility from Westminster onto other interests.

In this case, his suggestion is that local community groups could buy up the forests and look after them themselves, as well as businesses buying them for commercial use. He never pointed out that private individuals might want to buy too, and for good reason. The average person wouldn’t be able to afford their own bit of woodland, however someone with a fair bit more money than the average person would. In fact, they could buy an awful lot of it and, if they owned an estate they could expand their lands significantly. Fantastic! - Now some wealthy people can buy our – yes, the taxpayers – land under the guise of “The Big Society” which you’ll remember, is where David Cameron flogs the country’s assets off to people who have lots of money.

Why should community groups have to buy it anyway? These communities pay tax already, some of which goes to the Forestry Commission, and their tax bills aren’t going to get any lower, even with this sell-off. David Cameron and his team are fairly smart, so they know that people will think like this too – so why is he proceeding?

Let’s think about this for a moment. The Conservative Party’s biggest donors are big businesses and wealthy landowners. Businesses and wealthy landowners are often to be found pushing for lower tax rates. The solution: a place where wealthy landowners, such as yourself, can invest in a renewable resource that just keeps on giving. You can buy some woodland and find that money really does grow on trees, just buy some woodland, wait for it to mature and then tear it all down. Not only that, but it’s exempt from inheritance tax, Capital Gains Tax and income from money made on this land is income tax free too! - Your won’t need to worry about paying the kid’s private school or university fees! Don’t worry folks, it’s all part of the Big Society, where David Cameron sells land to benefit Conservative Party donors.

What’s next? We pay for woodland through tax – it gets sold off, okay, we don’t all go for walks in the woods. Still, we pay tax for things like new hospital scanners, most of us are never going to have use them, but we still pay tax for them nonetheless. Will those be sold off too? Will patients with cancer have to pay to see if their tumours have shrunk?

The Big Society is a circus. We can see the animals are slowly being flogged off and the bears are dancing to a song of new promise to distract us from the elephant in the room, the real meaning of the big society. The ringmaster is David Cameron and we are the clowns.

Yours faithfully,

The People

Vandals, and other words pertaining to Fife Council

Published Dunfermline Press: 28/01/11

Sometimes I wonder if the Council puts any thought into what they’re cutting. Do they take us seriously? Really? I mean if they considered it fairly, would they have cut the hugely popular and successful music tuition programme down to the bare minimum? Even in the face of a huge public backlash and a musical protest, a number of councillors took advantage of the free concert before returning to their desks and doing precisely nothing about it. Did they listen? No.

Did they take the hint that young people’s educations shouldn’t be taken so lightly? No. Fife Council have announced that they propose to close the Ardroy Outdoor Education Centre too, an absolute gem of an establishment which does great work in giving young people experience of the great outdoors and of the importance of conservation. It means so much to the people who visit it – for some deprived youngsters, it’s their first proper experience of the real outdoors.

Teachers, pupils and parents have been contacting the Council, not only asking them to reconsider their decision but also offering two generations of testimonies to the Ardroy experience.  Some questioned how the council could afford £6.8million on a new museum for Dunfermline, when Ardroy costs the council just £250,000 per year. The Council replied that the outdoor curriculum was voluntary for schools and “a good number of Fife Schools already go elsewhere” – yes because, according to the Save Ardroy campaign website, the centre is booked “virtually every academic week through to June 2013” They then suggest that the Council would be free to invest in outdoor education at Lochore Meadows, on the edge of Lochgelly. Hold on a second - the great outdoors doesn’t have a toilet and a visitor centre to have your packed lunch in - where’s the real outdoor experience when you go home at the end of the day?

Nothing was said about where the £6.8million that is being contributed by the council to Dunfermline’s new museum is coming from. Nothing.

It gets worse too, this email was generic. The councillor who wrote this did not address all the points raised by the objectors and instead showed what he thought of the objectors by simply copying and pasting the same text time and time again. Do they take us seriously? Really?

Young people’s services are just too valuable to be cut like this. Outdoor education gives young people a chance to learn about ecology and conservation. Youth clubs give something to do for young people in some of our most deprived areas. The Scottish Youth Parliament gives Fife’s young people representation in politics and a real chance to make their views heard. With musical education is already on its way out, just how much is going to go and what are we going to be left with?

It seems to me that the Council just doesn’t understand, their generic reply email referred to the objectors’ “emotional attachment” – perhaps, but what this is really all about is making sure young people learn about living away from home, the environment, conservation, team-building, caring for each other. This is not just some emotional attachment; this is about twenty people’s livelihoods and the experiences of thousands of school children who all learnt valuable life lessons that couldn’t be replicated at school, or even at Lochore.  Living and learning together is an invaluable experience that no child should go without.

Overly Opinionated

Published 12/01/11 - Dunfermline Press

A few things around Christmas have got me thinking about society, the media and our wonderful ability to have an opinion on anything – regardless of how little information we have about it. For example, Frankie Boyle took a slating when he used racist terms in his show. Obviously that sort of language isn’t acceptable at all, and plenty of people complained about he was racist towards certain groups. He wasn’t, if you’d seen the show (and I bet a fair few of those complaining hadn’t), you’d know that he was in the middle of a routine about how little the media (and to a much lesser extent, society) seems to care about the innocent civilians caught up in the Iraq and Afghanistan conflicts. I believe that term was used to emphasise the fact that we don’t care about them as much.

This leads on to my second point, the Joanna Yeates case. Joanna’s landlord, Chris Jefferies, was released on Police bail on Sunday after being arrested on suspicion of her murder. Within hours the media was drawing attention to his scraggy hair, unusual dress sense and the fact he lived alone, demonising him to the public, portraying him as a potentially evil man. Have they not heard of Innocent until Proven guilty? They have no evidence - yet they can’t wait to imply he’s guilty, it’s shocking. Let’s wait and see if Mr Jefferies is arrested again, then let’s wait until after the jury has made up their minds. Then, and only then, we can properly make up our own minds. We seem to love making kneejerk reactions, it seems that everyone has to have an opinion even if they know very little – a look at few forums for national newspapers proves this, “I never watch [Boyle’s] shows, he’s disgusting”

Then again, people will soon have to make up their minds on who to vote for in the Holyrood elections in May. I think we’ve given the Government long enough now to have a fair shot at governing and we do have evidence to back up our judgements. The Lib Dems promised to vote against raising tuition fees – of the 57 present for the vote, just 21 voted against the rise. David Cameron said he would protect SureStart nurseries, yet it was reported this week that an English Council was planning to slash the scheme by 60% and that many more councils were likely to follow.

And now on an altogether different tangent, since it’s a new year I’ve been thinking about new year’s resolutions for some of the big names in politics at the moment.

Nick Clegg – Put some money away for your children’s university education...

Vince Cable - Stick to the dancing, since your policies are much like your dance moves: 1, 2, 3 – about turn! Oh, and stop declaring war on people.

David Cameron – Make the ‘Big Society’ work by doing something unpaid, being Prime Minister for instance, you have a rather large income as it is...

Lindsay Roy – Keep up the good work! Inside sources at the Labour party said they wanted a “Lindsay Roy – type character” to fight the Oldham East by-election.