The Judge RANTS!
Date: 12/05/04
Gapping The Bridge
I might sometimes be accused of making things up; you know, just
to
put something on here. But in my extensive experience, real
life is far too full of the bizarre to make invention necessary.
Here in Wales, one can always rely on the Labour Party in local
government; rely on them, that is, for that combination of the
self-serving, the arrogant, the corrupt and the downright bloody stupid
which has become the hallmark of the tin-pot dictatorships which so
many of our councils have resembled for so long.
I've mentioned before the
shenanigans over attempts by Wrexham council to blackmail tenants into
supporting handing over their homes to a private company. All I will
add to that at the moment is that the Council, as an act of pique
against the clear majority of the tenants who voted their pet scheme
down, has now increased our rents twice in less than a month and has
started to cut jobs and services. Anything, in fact, other than have
the balls to stand up to its political masters in Cardiff and demand
that the tenants' wishes be respected. Also, they have just re-hired,
at substantial expense, the same firm of consultants they used during
the balloting process to "try to find out what the tenants want".
If they can't figure it out by now, then there's no hope for them - or,
indeed, for us. Especially as the Council Leader's perks are just about
to be increased from about £10 000 a year to over £30 000. "I'm
worth it", she says. As Groucho said, "We know what you are,
we're just haggling over the price".
Sorry, I got sidetracked for a moment there. This is what I
wanted
to tell you about: the latest in sub-vegetable thought processes from a
Labour council in Wales.
In the village of Cwm near Ebbw Vale, there was a busy road. It
had
a footbridge going over it. The road was to be improved, and so the
bridge had to come down. The road was duly fettled up.
So far, so good: but then Blaenau Gwent County Council (Labour)
had
to replace the old footbridge which, being a product of a less
enlightened age, had no ramps or any other assistance for access by
disabled people or parents with prams and push-chairs.
A modicum of forward thinking, one would have hoped, would have
recognised the necessity for the new structure to have ramps so that
wheelchairs, prams, push-chairs and the arthritic could use the bridge.
The Council spent £500 000 of public money on the new
bridge...which has no ramps; indeed, not only is the bridge
reachable only by the steps which had been part of the old structure,
but the bridge itself has steps on it.
If you think that that is unsurpassable as an act of
civic
idiocy, get this: when people complained about there being no ramps to
the bridge, some fivepenny brain at Blaenau Gwent County Council
(Labour) came up with this little illogic bomb. The Council, he said,
had plans to put a ramp on one side of the bridge in due course; but they
didn't have the money to put a ramp on both sides.
Now, ponder this for a moment. Not for too long, though, lest
your
brains try to escape through whatever handy orifice that may come to
hand. There will be a ramp on one side of the bridge. So the
motionally-challenged will be able to get onto the bridge but won't
be able to get down the other side!
(See the story here)
Now, two alternative scenarios present themselves as a result.
In
the first, we may see all the wheelchair users and push-chair-bound
babes of Cwm shuttling up and down one side of the bridge like a cross
between the dodgems and a primitive computer game. Up they will go,
hour after hour, only to be faced with an impossible prospect on the
other side, and to forced back down whence they came.
The second picture is even more alarming. Perhaps one of the
unreconstructed Stalinists in Blaenau Gwent Labour Party had just been
watching his DVD of Eisenstein's The Battleship Potemkin for
the third time that month, and fancied the idea of bringing culture to
the proletariat by arranging a re-staging of the Odessa Steps scene right
there in Cwm! Oh, imagine the triumph of 'workers' art' as the
arthritic grannies and kiddies of the valley hurtle arse-over-tit down
the steps when they try to get where the bridge is supposed to let them
go! Might even get a photo in the Arts pages of The Guardian
(or, if not, at least The South Wales Argus)!
Either that, or this is another Labour council which is looking
to
make easy money out of the vulnerable. They could do this by hiring out
equipment to enable the ranks of the be-wheeled and hobbling to get
across. One may imagine the scene:
It is nine o'clock in the morning in the terraced house of Evan
Bevan, old collier, and his wife. Evan rises uncertainly from his chair
at the breakfast table, puts down his copy of The Western Mail,
and says, "Freda! Get me stick for me, girl, I've gotto go down the
Post for the pension".
His wife shuffles in with a stout wooden walking-stick in her
left
hand. In her right, she carries two lengths of thick rope and half a
dozen pitons.
"Now don't yew go 'urryin' now, lovely", she says gently
to
her scowling husband, handing him his stick. "Yew know what
'appened the last time you were in too much of a rush. Yew nearly
necked y'self!"
Evan grimaces at the memory as his wife tenderly winds the rope
around the top of his left arm and slips the pitons into the top pocket
of his shirt. "Aye, well, that bloody twitch in me 'and come back,
dinnit? Good job I wuz only three feet up at the time."
"Well, off yew go, luv", says Freda, helping him towards
the
door. "And remember, take yewr time!"
"Wonnave much choice", grumbles Evan. "There's only
the
one pulley workin' after them bloody kids put superglue on the other
one! The man from the Council tole me yesterday that it'll take 'em six
months to replace it, 'cos they 'ave to ask the Assembly for extra
fundin' for it, see?"
And, coughing gently from The Dust, Evan shuffles slowly up the
road to the bottom of the old stone steps at the foot of the gleaming
new bridge. There, a long queue of young mothers with push-chairs and
elderly ladies in wheelchairs waits for the rope to come back to this
side. There is the occasional crunch and crash from across the busy
road as someone else's hand suffers from "a bloody twitch". As
he gets his one pound coin fare out of his pocket, Evan hopes that they
were no more than three feet off the ground...
All joking aside, when are we going to rid ourselves of these
self-preserving nth-rate political hacks? They have reduced local
government in Wales to a level which isn't even funny anymore, falling
instead into my late mother's category of "too soft to laugh at".
There are local council elections coming up on June 10. I
daresay
that hardly anyone will bother to vote, and we will end up with
no-hopers like these for yet another four years. Blaenau Gwent
council has 30-odd members, nearly all of whom sit in the Labour
interest. I don't foresee that changing, somehow. It's all too sad for
words.
Truly, truly, we get the government we deserve.
