The Judge RANTS!
Date: 22/10/04
Kick It Into Touch!
Oh dear. I'm going to get a reputation if I'm not careful.
What with my remarks at "Opportunities To Be Knocked" and "Privateers Repelled!",
and a few snide remarks here and there, some of you may be thinking
that I have something against Wrexham County Borough Council.
Well, I mean, better poor democracy than none at all, but
goodness
knows they ask for what my friend Dylan of the band Hecate Enthroned
calls "a damn good slapping".
For years now, the Council has been forever pleading poverty. "We
can't fill in great big potholes in the road because we haven't any
money!"; "We can't give the kids somewhere safe to play because
we haven't any money!"; and, of course, "We're going to try to
con you into voting to privatise your own homes because we haven't any
money to bring them up to standard!"
Whine, whinge, wibble.
And yet, there has always been money for some things.
Like spending hundreds of thousands on tarting up parts of the
town
centre, especially (for reasons I can't possibly imagine) those
parts which happen to be visible from the windows of the Council's
executive offices, while other areas of the town centre lie derelict
for years.
Like turning three or four flourishing secondary schools into
two
gigantic 'superschools', a project which has now gone horrendously over
budget and seriously behind schedule.
Like planning to have a gigantic modern sculpture of a harp slap
bang in the middle of the roundabout on the western approach to the
town (luckily, this one was laughed out of existence before one of
those simpering con-merchants known as 'modern artists' was engaged to
do the deed).
And now comes the latest madness.
Wrexham Football Club is, not to mince words, up Shit Creek. It
has
been bought by a speculating asset-stripper from the Outer Darkness (or
'Cheshire', to give it its official name), who wants to sell off
the club's home, The Racecourse Ground, because it would be worth a
pretty penny for redevelopment for the sort of housing that local
people couldn't possibly afford. This, of course, is very worrying to
those who think that football matters, a group to which I once
belonged, before I allowed myself to grow cynical, or rather, grow
up.
So, supposedly to pre-empt this fate, the multi-brained
Executive
Board of Wrexham County Borough Council have now decided that they will
bid to buy the stadium...at an estimated cost to the taxpayer (that's me,
folks) of £1.5million.
Just to put this into perspective: the same Council claims that
the housing budget is currently in deficit to the tune of
£1.2million, and that estate offices will have to be closed,
services cut back and repairs and renovations not carried out in order
to get back on track.
And this self-same organisation now wants to spend much more
than
that on buying a football ground!
£1.5million of public money spent on bailing out a failing
private company which employs only a few dozen people; whereas local
small business are crucified by the business rates and the
all-too-often obstructive behaviour of the Council, and local
communities are starved of funds because, so they claim, there
is no money available.
"Ah, but", say the muddled mandarins, "we'll also be
looking for funding from the National Assembly and other public bodies!"
And where, pray, do they get their money from? Yep. Us.
So we are being forced to pay taxes to prop up a football club
which, if its weekly attendances are any guide, is actively supported
by only a tiny minority of those whose taxes will be used.
Please don't misunderstand me on this: I don't want to see the
football club go under. But it simply is not the place of a
taxpayer-funded body to go chucking our money at a football club at a
time when there is, according to those doing the chucking, insufficient
properly to perform the statutory duties which are a council's proper
function.
The local hack-rag is, of course, totally behind this idiocy,
and
even the otherwise-rational Assembly Member Dr. John Marek is
supporting it. And I daresay that anyone who speaks out publicly
against it will be deemed traitorous to the cause, such being the
ludicrous passions stirred up by a lot of men kicking concentrated wind
in a field.
I've no doubt it'll go through, but I've equally no doubt that
the
Council have forfeited what little right they still had to whinge about
being strapped for cash when it comes to providing the things which matter.
