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| A ROYAL BOROUGH GEM |
The Dame recently paid a couple of visits:one to have her poor old ticker checked(bad luck, Pooter...it's in fine fettle) and it filled her with real pride.
The staff and their skills are second to none, yet even this piece of medical magnificence lacks certain vital medical equipment due to lack of money.
So how can it be that the thick end of £27 million can be spent on a mere road, yet Chelsea & Westminster has to rely on the Friends of the hospital(excellent local charity) to fund raise.
In the picture below you can see what happens when a leader looks to burnish his image with multi million pound idiocy.
Anyone who has been down Exhibition Rd will see that it's filthy and dangerous.
Localism is meant to be a way of devolving decisions on major local spending to residents.
But localism can only ever work if residents have control over how their money is spent. Left to councillors.... waste follows....
That applies as much to the £27 million Exhibition Rd, as the £100 million Holland Park School or the £1 million a year Opera Holland Park Opera.
Were residents given the option they would have scrapped Exhibition Rd saving £27 million and enforced the Government limit on new schools of £33 million, saving nearly £60 million on Holland Park School.
And OHP would have been told to find its own funding and stop leeching off the taxpayer.
The only way localism will work is by pushing councillors out of the way and letting local people decide...
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| A £27 MILLION EXHIBITION OF LOCAL WASTE |
The Dame is on the ball as usual. Thank goodness her ticker is OK.
ReplyDeleteThe values of public service must be brought back to the Council of Kensington and Chelsea. We hope that the new Leader, Cllr Paget-Brown, will make progress in this direction.
ReplyDeleteFor too many years the Council became a legacy machine for the self obsessed Cllr Cockell and the ego queen Cllr Moylan. Public money was squandered on "personal" legacies like Holland Park School and Exhibition Road.
The Council has lost its way. Wrong people in the wrong place. Cllr Cockell must be one of the most destructive local Government Leaders ever to have been elected to Office
ReplyDeleteIs the point of local councillor's not to represent public interest? Clearly if the current representatives are failing to do that, the local residents need to modify their lemming like voting behaviour. The trouble is it doesn't matter which way you vote, it is always politicians that get elected. Until there is a groundswell of candidates (probably independents) of altruistic intent both seeking and gaining office little will change. Until then it is down to blogs like this to instigate debate and call our representatives to account.
ReplyDeleteCongratulations dear Dame on the outcome of both your visits to the Chelsea and Westminster Hospital. But local government does not fund hospitals; that is done through general taxation. To improve funding for hospitals we need to re-allocate resources (e.g. forget about Trident and give the money to the NHS) or raise general taxation. You are right to blame councillors for a lot of things, but under-funded hospitals really aren’t their fault.
ReplyDeleteLocal Government is not supposed to fund Opera either. But K&C spends £1 million every year of Council Tax on Holland Park Opera
DeleteAnd the Dame never said it was. What she said, if you consider her words of great wisdom, was that Central Government should implement a system whereby local residents took decisions as to how major money was spent locally. In that way they could block idiotic schemes like Exhibition Rd and ask residents whether they would prefer the intended saved expenditure to be diverted to something of a practical nature....like our wonderful hospital.
DeleteIn may be innovative...but thats the Dame all over!
In other words truly involve residents.
17:13
ReplyDeleteOh, don't be a spoil sport!
Labour and Conservative Councillors love puffing themselves up at the Holland Park Opera and a £1 million is a small price of other people's money to pay to keep their pompous egos sated.