The other morning I joined around seventy people for a
Torbay Business Forum breakfast at the Riviera Conference Centre. The guest
speaker was Kevin Foster MP and his topic was the first one-hundred days in the
House of Commons. As I am sure you are aware these are difficult times for a
politician and I found his grasp of core issues refreshing. I rather suspect
that he will keep the faith regardless of political pressure but of course only
time will tell.
Kevin Foster
As I say his theme was the first hundred days and I must
admit with a title like that I did look around for the executioners block and
axe! But this was not a scene from Hilary Mantel’s ‘Wolf Hall’ although he did
say that one his first day the new cohort were shown where to leave their swords!
What also interested me was the fact that the audience at the breakfast event did
not use this gathering as a platform for launching a series of prickly
questions. In point of fact there were very few questions and that did actually
make me raise an eyebrow.
For the past eighteen years the local MP was Adrian Sanders.
The period immediately after the May election will have been a curious road for
Adrian as he adjusted to a very different landscape. Before becoming an MP
Adrian spent twenty-one years working in the public and private sectors. That
is a considerable amount of knowledge and experience. You may be interested to
know that Adrian is still very much in business offering public relations,
government affairs and lobbying services (www.adriansanders.org).
He is very keen to help smaller organisational locally and his fee structure is
user friendly.
Adrian Sanders
I have a huge amount of respect for both Adrian and Kevin.
It is all too easy to look for the negative and indeed too often people seem to
gain enormous pleasure from criticising others. Kevin will certainly need
support from the community in the challenging days ahead and it is pleasing
that Adrian’s wealth of experience is still available.
One point made by Kevin Foster during his ‘first hundred
days’ talk was the nature of communication and how that has changed. He pointed
out that not so many years ago if you had something you wanted to tell your MP
then it meant picking up a pen and writing a letter. Of course you didn’t just write a letter you
then had to stuff it in an envelope, stick a stamp in the top right hand corner
and pop it in a letterbox.
These days that has all changed. Of course many people will
still write letters and to be quite honest I find that very exercise quite
cathartic. The advent of social media means that that an email can be dashed
off in seconds. There is also the facility for the use internet based sites to
simply write a quick note to an MP and press send! So easy to do and of course
too often the source emails that lack any thought.
I think that Kevin said he had something like two-hundred
emails immediately after winning the election. That comment made me shiver because
I suspect that quite important messages may have been lost in an ocean of
rhetoric. It is also true that too many email communications should really be
saved for a period of time and then read again before pressing send or indeed
deleting. That is certainly true when written in anger. As the blood pressure
rises we tend to lose the ability to reason.
One topic that might interest both of them, Kevin and
Adrian, is the rise in spam communications through the letterbox, email in box,
telephone calls and text messages. You may have read in the Herald Express
recently of a lady who lost thousands of pounds to a telephone scammer. These
nasty people are very clever but lack any integrity. We live in an age where
personal information is so easily available and it takes little effort to find
huge amounts of data about a person.
What really worries me is that whilst numerous people will
report scams many others will be too embarrassed to admit falling for these
malicious attacks. All this is not helped by isolation and we must look out for
the vulnerable. We need to put pressure on the decision makers in the hope that
there will be a more serious attempt to weed out these nasty people.
Keep the smile!
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