Alternative York

I’d like to congratulate CoYC on, for the first time I can recall, using their brains when it comes to getting a result.

How clever of them to ask the travellers to move their horses on to the site of Disasterthorpe, no doubt in return for a discount on their Council Tax bills (Oops! I forgot they don’t pay!), to deter dog-walkers from using the fields.

Now this tactic isn’t bad at all. I certainly won’t let my dogs loose on the field while those horses are there. Not just because I’m fearful they may take a fatal kick, but because I don’t want my dogs coming back telling me they’ve swapped a juicy marrowbone for a bag of clothes pegs!

Seriously though, what happens when the time comes to ask the travellers to move on with their horses? Where do they go? CoYC won’t have thought that far ahead, which makes plenty of sense, as Galloway will be long gone by then, probably in Barbadosthorpe with his share of the pickings from this truly scandalous affair.

Anyway, I have an idea for myself and my fellow users of the common land that is about to be “ecologically cleansed” by the conspirators of JRF and CoYC. It involves 100 dogs with diarrhoea, a skip, a hosepipe, and a trip to Stirrup Close in Foxwood to “ecologically renovate” an area that, though already full of bullshit, may further benefit from some organic canine fertiliser. Our dogs need somewhere to shit - why not on the doorstep of the man who will benefit most from Disasterthorpe?

Galloway has shit on our doorsteps, it’s a fair trade off if you ask me!

See you soon…

Things are starting to happen folks - well maybe a tiny bit!

By the way Mr Bayley, if you are planning on asking your secretary to send me a standard reply then please don’t bother. I would like you to either answer all of my points or admit that you can’t do so.

Guess what I got this morning?

Thank you for your e-mail. This will be referred to Hugh Bayley MP In the near future.

Best wishes,

Denise Bowgett
Assistant to Hugh Bayley MP

I shouldn’t have had such high expectations should I?

Oh, and in response to those who have asked why I did not mention Bayley’s blatant lies and spinelessness about the Post Office closures; I didn’t see the point - everyone knew about it anyway!

I will keep you informed when, and if, the Right Honourable(?) Mr Bayley responds to my e-mail.

See you soon…

I have sent this email (very slightly edited out of respect) to my MP, Hugh Bayley. I have told him I have published it online. I await a reply.

Dear Mr Bayley

Despite coming from a working class background I have never been able to associate my values and ideals with those of the Labour Party. When I first became politically aware in the early 1980’s I associated the Labour Party with public unrest, strikes and even worse, Ben Elton!

My father wouldn’t speak to me for months after he failed dismally to shoot down my teenage theory that Margaret Thatcher was offering the average man far more opportunities to prosper than Michael Foot or Neil Kinnock. He still clung to the idea that being wealthy was only marginally worse than being Hitler and that all money and property should be distributed equally between those who got up at 5am and went to work, and those who got up at 5pm to check they hadn’t soiled themselves and to open another can of Special Brew.

Now my reference to Special Brew was not a gratuitous dig at street drinkers and the fake disabled who claim benefits; it was in fact an introduction to my main gripe about Alistair Darling’s budget which, I suppose, can be looked at in two ways.

1) POSITIVELY: It is the final nail in Labour’s coffin and has guaranteed that they will be booted out of office at the next General Election

or

2) REALISTICALLY: The so-called, self-styled, party of the working class, the Labour Party, have sold out on the people who created them and, in a country where the cost of living continues to rise, have taxed by stealth the only pleasures left to the average man, a few pints of beer after work or a bottle of wine with his wife on an evening.

The Labour Party claim that by raising the tax on alcohol at 6% above inflation - and then by 2% above inflation for each of the next four years, that they are tackling binge drinking and addressing health concerns. This is not true. This disgraceful tax on responsible adults enjoying a legal pastime to help them unwind after a hard day (which is needed to try and take away the pain of the other increases in household costs under Labour) will boost Treasury coffers by £635m annually by 2010. I wonder what that money will be spent on? Tax relief for working families? The elderly? Housing for indigenous Britons? Health care for the poor? Better policing? Education? If so then maybe, just maybe, there can be some justification for the tax increase. In reality, however, none of this money is likely to be used for anything that will benefit the average family, unless, of course, that family happens to be from eastern Europe or Africa and is coming to Britain to escape whatever imagined horrors they are leaving behind in their homeland. Or perhaps to ease the awful life of a drug addict who has been failed so badly by society, and to whom we should all be in debt?

The main reason I don’t believe that this tax increase is specifically designed to tackle binge drinking and alcohol fuelled violence is because I can still go to my local One-Stop shop and buy a 2-litre bottle of “White Petrol” cider for £1.29, but I can’t buy a bottle of good quality wine at all because there isn’t enough room on the shelves for it in between the rows of liver-destroying liquid chemicals and the aforementioned Special Brew.

Now I always try and read between the lines of anything political and I think I have sussed out this policy. By making drinking in pubs unaffordable it should reduce the amount of alcohol related crime in the streets; thus negating the calls for more police on the said streets and justifying officers spending their shift doing racial awareness workshops instead of nicking scumbags.

It all starts to make sense doesn’t it? Once all the pubs have closed down then the empty buildings can be turned into hostels for the “White Petrol” brigade or be used to house even more foreigners! Genius! Mr Bayley, please have a walk down Lawrence Street, a street you should be familiar with from your time as an under-graduate at the University of York, and look at the boarded up pubs that can no longer survive because of your government. I was shocked to discover that you studied Social Policy at York as I, as a mature student, am also studying the same subject. I hope that my studies will help me bring far more benefits to society than you have as a Labour MP. I won’t even mention your voting record on war in Iraq compared to your rhetoric!

Anyway, at least Labour have defeated the Conservatives in one way. A pint has gone up by 25p in Fulford Conservative Club. I won’t be paying that so you win, I won’t drink in there other than when I have a snooker match. Unless, of course, you are planning on taxing indoor sports too?

By the way Mr Bayley, if you are planning on asking your secretary to send me a standard reply then please don’t bother. I would like you to either answer all of my points or admit that you can’t do so. I have published this email on my blog Rustneversleeps and will publish your reply, should I get one, in the public interest of your constituents.

Please would you also add me to your mailing list for your e-bulletin of all the great things that Labour are doing for the residents of York?

Regards

Steve Bradley

I haven’t been online much this week but tonight when I logged on to the interweb to catch up on the world I couldn’t believe some of the stuff that’s been going on in York - most of it beyond belief!

In no particular order of unbelievability I will start by mentioning the story in The Press that claims that many City of York Council workers are facing compulsory pay cuts. Now, if true, this begs a few questions - 1) Who will take the pay cuts? Those who graft or those who shuffle papers in their role as managers? - and 2) Why do they need to make pay cuts when they have £10 million coming in from the proceeds of their conspiracy with Joseph Rowntree Foundation to destroy Osbaldwick’s meadows?

I also discovered today that the residents of Peckitt Street are, quite understandably, pissed off with smackheads loitering outside their houses and being abusive when they attend some silly drug “support” centre at my old doctors surgery. Apart from the fact that these projects are about as useful to society as Paul Blanchard and his terrorist friends, it seems that their concerns are being taken into account because the centre is being moved to, surprise surprise, Walmgate! Proof, if it were needed, that CoYC is determined to rekindle Walmgate’s old image of being a slum. We already have YACRO, street drinking, feral youths, drug dealing in the streets and the oxygen thief who lives in my block of flats, so why not bring the smackheads here too? All that’s needed to complete the ensemble of sub-human life is a needle exchange at Brian Fletcher’s Post Office and Walmgate is the perfect compliment to the new doss house they can’t seem to build properly on Fishergate.

Thirdly, I had to physically contain the laughter when I read about York’s most customer unfriendly shopkeeper on Monkton Road. He might well be a complete bastard but I bet he doesn’t suffer as much theft and abuse as all the other shopkeepers in York’s estates who are plagued by youths and White Lightning connoisseurs as they try and make a living.

So, in reality, not a lot has happened this week in the great scheme of things, but what has gone on in smalltown York is well worth considering as it shows how little regard the council has for residents of the city. At least the shopkeeper is honest about maltreating his customers!

Oh and what’s this about the York Press being up for some journalism awards? There’s still eleven days to go until April Fools Day!

See you soon…

I think, if that’s at all possible, that I had a bit of an epiphany today. Well maybe a slight one - something definitely happened because I was that moved by it that I went to Virgin (or whatever it’s called these days) and opened the old wallet and spent some spondulicks.

What is for certain though, is that I now fully understand a period of my life that I went through in 1981. In 1981, apart from picking Aldaniti as the Grand National winner, I was a pupil at the Allertonshire School in Northallerton. I was the centre forward in the school football team, alongside a guy called Richard Wimmer (who was the coolest kid in our year but may be of more interest today if you Google his name alongside Manchester United and Italy) and life was pretty good for a young Bradders.

The Allertonshire had a “youth annex” which was basically a building next to the school where the credible kids went on a dinnertime. I went because Jennifer Matthewman hung around there with Andrea Oxendale (Wimmer’s bird) and I was convinced that Jennifer would spot me through the crowd of other pubeless first years and dump Barry Porter (left school by now - oh and cool!) and realise that, despite her having breasts that I was scared of,  I was the way forward in her life and would bring her immeasurable benefits that cool Barry Porter couldn’t possibly provide - looking back, Barry Porter was 4ft 3in small and very ugly; and had an even uglier little brother called Mark who was a complete tit end and once offered me outside after the school disco - in 1981 Barry Porter was still cool and though I was about the same height I was incredibly uncool because my mother still cut my hair and I liked The Who a lot.

You may now be wondering what this post is all about? Well the aforementioned youth annex had a jukebox which cost 10p to play a song. That 10p was the difference between one or two fish fingers or a mousse with your school dinner (apart from kids like me who got free meals because my dad was unemployed) - well I became a huge fan of a band who epitomised cool; and the 80’s (but you can only realise that now) and if you played the B-side of their hit single you got two tracks for 10p - irresistible!

Has anyone guessed which band I’m talking about yet?

I became mesmerised by the two songs on the B-side. The lyrics were amazing, even though I didn’t understand them, and the band were sooo cool it was compulsory to be a fan - Porter and Wimmer were, so it must have been the right way to think. Guessed yet?

If I may quote some lyrics that, to a thirteen-year-old boy searching for a kickstart in life, are possibly among the greatest pieces of modern British poetry, I hope, and even expect, that a little bell may ring in a few of your heads as you remember this group.

“But two o’clock has come again, it’s time to leave this paradise; hope the chip shop isn’t closed, because their pies are really nice. I’ll eat it in the taxi queue, stand in someone else’s spew; wish I had lipstick on my shirt, instead of piss stains on my shoes”

‘Friday Night and Saturday Morning’, only a little bit away from the title of one of my favourite films but the evocative images it brings are really bizarre. I almost feel thirteen again - I almost feel cool - isn’t nostalgia amazing?

Anyway the whole point of this post - when I started writing it about an hour ago - is that our life paths are set in stone during our teens, we just don’t always realise it until we are proper grown-ups! I was always gonna be one of life’s questioners and complainers!

Everyone of us has the same school memories I have. The key is what you do with them.

I haven’t done a great deal to be honest - though I must confess I loved listening to ‘The Specials’ and ‘More Specials’ that I bought on CD today and remembering how good it was to be a kid in 1981. The bassist, Stephen Panter’s, book, ‘Ska’d for life’ is down to chapter 6 and I haven’t even had a shit yet - my usual time to read!

I wonder what Jennifer Matthewman is up to these days?

See you soon…