Dad's Army at public meeting

My column in the Herald Express Thursday, November 10, 2011

WHEN the coalition galloped madly into Westminster with David Cameron, Nick Clegg and dear old George Osborne at the head of the eclectic horde, I really did worry that we were slipping into some sort of neo-feudalism, as we were scattered in all directions.

Poet David Neita warns us to 'mind the gap' as he observes the widening divide between those who have so much and those who have so little.

As the coalition marches on it seems to me that the gap is indeed getting wider and wider. Part of that widening may well sadly lead to the re-emergence of the feudal class system.

Prime Minister John Major sought a more egalitarian society and part of that thrust was an attempt to make the honours system classless.

Out went the Medal of the Order of the British Empire Medal (BEM) and those deemed worthy were made Members of the Order of the British Empire (MBE). Well, it seems David Cameron wants to re-introduce the BEM because not enough MBE awards were being made for folk who do so much for their communities. Hmm.

Rather than go back to what many described as a 'working class award', I would have thought that simply awarding more MBE gongs to deserving tireless folk who do so much for others would do the trick.

I am sure Mr Cameron is keen to recognise the contribution that all those in his curiously named 'Big Society' should feel we are all in this together, but I worry this may not be the best way.

One thing I do know is that people do indeed quietly beaver away and so often their work is not recognised or acknowledged.

Too often it is not until they stop doing what they do that heads come up like startled meerkats and notice things are not quite as they were!

One such local hero is Bob Brewis, who until last week or so was the chairperson for the Preston Community Partnership.

Bob has been unwell and therefore decided to hand the reigns to others. He has done so much for Preston, for Paignton and indeed for the whole of Torbay.

Gesche Buecker is the new chairman and presented Bob with flowers at the recent public meeting held in the ballroom at Oldway.

Now about that meeting! My reason for being there was to keep the pressure on councillors before too much damage is done by the thoughtless planting of traffic meters.

When the parking meter issue came up you could almost touch the energy in the room.

People were on their feet and forcefully attacking the proposals. Numerous people thought that we should be pushing on with regeneration rather than making Torbay a place that people simply don't want to visit and be penalised by draconian parking charges. Others thought the planting of meters on Preston seafront was yet another tax on local people.

Sadly from where I was sitting the meeting suddenly started to look like a scene from Dad's Army with Cllr Robert Excel suddenly looking like Corporal Jones while Cllr Chris Lewis took on the role of Chief Warden Hodges!

The 'audience' were being told not to panic by Excell/Jones, Lewis/Hodges went for a show of hands and the community voted against parking meters on Preston seafront, leaving Corporal Jones scratching his head!

But all credit to Robert Excell, because he knew the ride would be bumpy but was still brave enough to face the crowd.

But here's the thing. The meeting was both packed and buoyant, demonstrating that a community can gather in a meaningful way.

This was the sort of thing that I did suggest mayor Gordon Oliver might want to think about on a monthly basis.

The thing which caught my attention at the Preston partnership meeting was the energy and constructive comment.

We all need to engage and I truly believe that we ARE all in this together, though perhaps not quite in the way that Mr Cameron keeps bleating on about!

Watch the birth of a new day

From the Herald Express today.................

FRANK SOBEY: Forget the gloom, think positive .Thursday, October 27, 2011 Herald Express

I DON'T know why I start the day listening to the BBC Radio 4 Today programme because it all too often raises my blood pressure to a ridiculous level.

So much so that the other morning I wanted to scream to the harbinger of doom, John Humphrys, that we all know how bad it is but don't need his negative rhetoric early in the day to mercilessly hammer home the message.

Yet still if I am still asleep at 6am it is his highly-paid voice which bounces reality off the bedroom walls and plunges me into the day.

But it does also drives me rapidly from the bed and out of the house with my energetic dog for our daily pilgrimage to the paper shop, since it is my wife that in truth is the Today fan.

Often the wind is off the sea and I really cannot think of a better sensation than the salty air at dawn.

Of course it's not just dear old John who hammers home a message of gloom. David Cameron isn't too far behind with his daily litany of tighten your belts 'cause it's getting worse.

My worry is that both of them either consciously or unconsciously help to develop a feeling of national negativity that might unfortunately become a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Sometimes we just really need a positive message to beef up flagging spirits. While we do of course need the news, we don't need a negative spin which feeds the ego of an overpaid presenter at the expense of folk fighting the reality of a new day.

When our affluent political leaders say it's going worse and that we are all in it together it we know that simply isn't true.

Those who have will not be in the same place as those who have not. They never have been.

So even though the days might seem dark that is absolutely no excuse to walk around looking glum or, as I often say, walking around with a face like a slapped kipper!

We need to buoy each other up and look for the positive rather than the negative. We should look for the best in each other and not the worst.

Let's celebrate success and hold a helping hand out when others need support. Don't count the cost or keep a score, just go for it.

Going for it is exactly what Torbay has done with the new £4million-plus Parkfield youth centre on Paignton seafront.

If you have not had a look, then do. I had a tour the other day and was simply blown away. So when people say nothing is happening in Torbay point them in the direction of Parkfield.

As a one-time climber I can tell you the climbing wall is one of the best I have seen. The BMX track is of an international standard and the skate park is simply stunning. There you go John Humphrys, start the day by telling everyone there is a new super-duper facility just opened for young people in Torbay which is breathing new life into the community.

One feature of Parkfield is the fact that all the staff will be Duke of Edinburgh's Award trained, adding to social inclusiveness.

As you doubtless know, you cannot gain a DofE Award without working as a team and helping others. For all those participating there are many older folk helping and that really does offer a brilliant shared social profile, in my opinion.

Now here is something really positive for you all to do when you have the time. At this time of year the sun rises over the sea and if you really really want to feel the energy of life get down to the beach just before dawn.

Sit quietly, wrapped up warmly in a picnic blanket, suck in a lung full of the sea air and watch the birth of a new day. Just do it.

The problem with mixed messages

This is my columnist contribution in the Herald Express 13th October 2011

Too often these days the message is mixed and outcomes curiously confused. Unpacking the rhetoric can be tedious and disorientating. Keep that in mind for the moment.

You see there are, it would seem, things that everyone should do at least once in a lifetime. Famous on the ‘must do list’ might be walking the Camino de Santiago, the Hajj and perhaps a visit to the Wailing Wall. All have a spiritual energy and of course there are doubtless so many others.

Another ‘must do’ with less spiritual energy is to attend a full meeting of Torbay Council! That was exactly what I did a couple of weeks ago and suggest that you might also like to experience that cathartic event. Watching our elected members ‘strut their stuff’ really is quite something. It’s an eclectic mix with a blend of serious stuff and curious comedy.

Each member has a microphone with a red light that flicks on when the civic chairman gives them the floor. The cross party black humour can be tedious but then there are the moments of sheer joy such as a senior member jumping up to second something that hadn’t been proposed, only to be batted into the long grass by the restless chairman!

I was in the sparsely populated public gallery (rows of chairs at the back of the ballroom) with, I think, eight or nine others. My fellow travellers included two young political hopefuls, a former mayoral candidate, two folk I didn’t know and small selection from the Kitsons Top Fifty club.

Now back to those mixed messages. Torbay subscribes to the commissioning model when it comes to local government services. Commissioners are highly paid senior council officers with an annual pay cheque of between £100,000 and £120,000 plus benefits. Part of the commissioning process has been the delegation of services to private companies like the English Riviera Tourist Board, under the direction of CEO Carolyn Custerton, with its own allocated budget to market Torbay.

You could have knocked me over with a fluffy magenta feather duster when during the Council meeting £250,000 was magically snatched out of the reserves for tourist marketing via our mayor and the Torbay Development Agency. That had me scratching my head. Do we now have two agencies marketing tourism?

Hmm. Mixed messages.

Still keeping in step with the tourist theme (must be all that glorious sunshine the other weekend!) I stumble across another mixed message. During Nick Bye’s Mayor’s Vision I followed, via the free cd, the prophetic footprints around Paignton that eventually end up on the harbour. The ‘Vision’ was for a harbour that suddenly became a honey pot for tourist activity. It’s actually quite famous for watersports already. No matter. The whole area is of course, in keeping with the dear old town plan, a conservation area.

You can imagine the surprise just over a year ago when two giant ugly containers landed outside the crab factory where the south quay meets the east quay. The locals, including harbour officials, protested pointlessly to Planning. Added to the summer ambiance is the smell of crab offal and the joy for tourists of watching living crab slaughtered in the open air. This aquatic abattoir is the latest tourist attraction adding a macabre balance to the numerous local eateries. Having said all that I am quite partial to white crab meat with a sprinkling of vinegar and black pepper served on a bed of fresh salad lightly tossed in olive oil!

So here is my thing. We really should say what we mean and really mean what we say. These are confusing times and we are too easily at the mercy of political spin. I know that dear David keeps banging on about us all being in this together but I sense a mixed message. Most of us are certainly in it; but all in it together? Well I am not too sure about that!

When the late summer sun hammered down on Torbay the other weekend it delivered a very clear message: Torbay, the English Riviera / Agatha’s Riviera is a stunningly beautiful place. So let us have a little joined up crystal clear thinking and celebrate what we are lucky enough to have!

We'll all take the pain!

FRANK SOBEY: We'll all take the pain of meters .Thursday, September 29, 2011 Herald Express
ON THE evening of Thursday, September 29, I plan to be at the Oldway public meeting when our councillors debate the placing of yet more parking meters around the town centres and shoreline.

I write this having just watched the hugely expensive Torbay Council-sponsored TV advert promoting late season holidays on the English Riviera, so let me start there.

Whether you like it or not we live on the coast and by its very nature is therefore a 'honey pot' for tourists.

What we have not had for the past four or five years is a sunny summer.

Most places can seem somewhat sad in the rain but a beach is particularly pathetic.

While the harbingers of doom bang on about how hopeless it all is, you must agree that we do live in a stunning beautiful area that springs into life when the sun beats down.

Sky Atlantic is still screening the television diary Fish Town, which tracks the lives of Brixham folk around the harbour.

Sad that it is only on the expensive pay-to-view Sky Atlantic because the filming is stunning and the narrator spins the yarn in elementary verse.

The sun seems always to shine and I do believe that even the seagulls are flying upside down!

It's this, I believe, that has prompted our mayor Gordon Oliver to stump up an additional £250,000 to promote tourism. Hence the little film.

The screening now, it seems, is to capture the late season business although I was a little curious about the waterslide shot because it is, of course, closed at this time of year.

Having said that, it is really good to see lovely film clips of the English Riviera on TV as a thirty-second advertisement.

The film is buoyant and that is how we must be if we want to retain our tourist business in these troubled times.

Part of that buoyancy is down to the local population and whether we make the visitors really welcome.

Having local folk walk around with faces like slapped kippers doesn't get the best reaction from people who have travelled many miles to holiday on the friendly English Riviera.

Now about that welcome.

The reason that I will pitch up at the parking meter meeting is because it seems to me that we are spending hundreds of thousands getting people to visit and then metaphorically take the foot shot as we make them angry by blatantly stinging them with painful parking meter charges.

But, of course, it isn't just the holidaymakers who take the parking meter pain since the local population get to share.

A local legal-eagle is looking at the relevant statute since our executive seem to be using parking meters as a means of revenue collection rather than traffic control.

That being the case, we have one part of the administration saying to people please come visit whilst another department is making them very unwelcome!

Of course, it isn't just about tourists when the parking meters start to spread like some alien life form.

It's hard enough these days to hold a community together around the centre of a town.

The evidence is the sad empty shops that look hopelessly like the mouth of a man in need of a dentist after years of oral neglect.

We've spent, again, hundreds of thousands on town centre managers and consultants.

We watched our Prime Minister ' launch' shopping guru Mary Portas on some sort of spiritual retail journey around the towns and cities in the hope of regenerating the flagging fortunes of the high street.

So what do we do on the English Riviera / Torbay/ Agatha's Riviera?

Parking Meters! Outstanding! You couldn't make it up.

One of the planned pitches is on the road around the west side of Paignton harbour.

The harbour economy is fragile and for the local businesses parking meters will be both catastrophic and pointless.

Catastrophic because for many a business it will be the final nail in a cheap coffin.

Pointless because people will simply not park there and so the machines will stand idle as a monument to the commercial corpse.

So, let us celebrate what is good, push forward socially cohesive and economically viable initiatives, but most of all have a council with its eye on the ball.

DON'T SIT THERE - GET UP AND GO!

I was the guest speaker this morning at the Peter Jones Enterprise Academy based at South Devon College.

“The Peter Jones Enterprise Academy is an opportunity for aspiring entrepreneurs to realise and achieve their business dreams.
Set-up by Peter Jones, CBE, star of ‘Dragons’ Den’, the Academy was the first to offer further education courses in enterprise and entrepreneurship in the UK where students are actually required to set up and run their own business.”

My thing, obviously, was about the life of Harbour Sports from the idea, the creation, the life pattern up to and including today.

The today is the interesting part as the national economy balances on a knife edge. Today Nick Clegg will address the Liberal Party at their annual conference and bang on about the economy. Meanwhile TV star and shopping expert Mary Portas is galloping around the country attempting to stimulate life into lifeless high streets.

These are hard times and the increasing trend if for people to hide indoors and sink into the virtual world offered by the Internet and countless television channels.

Certainly we have noticed reduced footfall and a reluctance take hands out of pockets!
But taking hands out of pockets is what needs to happen for all sorts of reasons. Unless the economy lifts then we will head for curious places.

Now, whilst I was banging on about Harbour Sports I suddenly slipped into a sunnier place where people got out and did rather than sat down and watched. Windsurfers, surfers, kayakers, sailors, hikers, climbers and in point of fact people that got out and did.

You see, if the body and spirit is active then the mind will follow. SO GET OUT AND DO – LIVE THE LIFE – MAKE IT HAPPEN.

frank

Are we really all in it together?

This is a cut and paste from my fortnightly column in the Herald Express today...

WE KEEP being told about the Big Society and my question remains the same: What Big Society?

David Cameron and his band of Eton College Old Boys keep banging on about how we must all pull together and how we are all in this together and yet, to me, the evidence is stacking up against that battle hymn.

We are told they have been handed the empty coffers and devastating debt by the previous administration.

But what must be clear to anyone with half a brain cell that poor old Gordon Brown was just the silly sausage who got left with the useless parcel when the music stopped in the international game of financial pass the parcel.

When he opened his cleverly-wrapped parcel he found it full of junk bonds, worthless mortgages and other dubious financial goodies. Had David Cameron been in that seat at the time, he too would have been clutching that nasty little goodie bag. But he wasn't.

Some bright spark suggested that never in the history of man has so much been taken from so many by so few.

It is worth looking at where our elite group of political leaders came from and where the money came from which supported and still supports them. So when George Osborne famously said what he wants is what we want, and that he wants for his children what we want for ours — we're all in this together — I wanted to cry.

So what do you think of the Big Society in Torbay? Remember that we are all in this together, are we not?

Tell the man who has just lost his job that we are all in this together. Tell the parent struggling to buy food as prices increase and fuel prices escalate that we are all in this together.

Tell the young people who left school last summer and still can't find work that we are all in this together.

Tell the young graduate with a good degree and now a Masters, yet can't find a job, that we are all in this together.

Tell the Torbay citizen looking at high council wages for senior staff, the bonuses still being paid to bailed-out bankers and the manipulation of curious business deals locally that we are all in this together.

Being a sad soul I sat, the other night, through a meeting of our local transport committee which had been opened to the public.

The purpose of the meeting was to look at the ludicrous proposal to stick even more traffic meters in popular areas.

Has no one told these people that you have to plant before you harvest?

Stripping yet more money from the people will accelerate decline. What worried me a little was the rabbit-like look in the eyes of a number of councillors.

Gordon Oliver wandered in during the meeting and sat quietly in the councillor corner. At the end of the meeting he was ambushed and asked suddenly to comment.

Gordon spoke for about 15 minutes, wandering loosely through the fact the country was short of cash, that Torbay was something or other (I couldn't understand that bit) and that hard times were ahead; which perhaps accounted for the rabbit-like look in the eyes of his fellow councillors, although not in the eyes of the council officers.

Therefore Mr Cameron, Clegg, Osborne and Cable, are we really, really, in this together, and is the Big Society not quite what we think it is as funding is yet again cut from another charity?

I was asked the other day how I would get the economy running again, and my response was to tell them to go and buy an ice cream.

You see, in order to buy an ice cream a commercial exchange has to take place.

The ice cream seller now has income and the ability to buy more stock.

People see you eating the ice cream and do the same. Suddenly the ice cream seller is busy and has to employ people to help him.

He buys more stock from the local producer who in turn can buy a new machine from the factory that was about to make people redundant.

Now that is what I call a Big Society!

They say that pride comes before a fall.....

So let me tell you about something that could have been nasty but turned out to be very funny and somewhat humbling. I'm getting older by the day and because my mind, according to my daughter, is saying one thing and my body another things don't always turn out the way they should. Jess noticed the problem watching me run upstairs. I have always found it almost impossible to walk up stairs and always want to take them three at a time. My mind accepts that but these days my body simply can't facilitate! The mind says three whilst the body says two and down I go in an undignified heap.

In attempt to keep breathing I walk/jog the dog through the woods when I can. I say when I can because the kids also want to do the same and of course I stand back, usually with gratitude and let them do the business.

Anyway on this slightly damp afternoon I jogged around the local woods that too few people share these days. Now if it is damp I tend to put on my ancient mountain boots for added traction. But this day I didn't bother because the effort was simply too much.

So I'm coming down this steep bank and lose my footing. I don't fall but do crash out onto the path in front of a young maid walking a large brown Labrador. Nice dog and attractive maid offering the ideal macho moment. Having regained my balance I brush the leaves and twigs from my hair and smile confidently. She asks whether I am OK; obviously concerned for this curious geriatric semi-jogger. Of course, in a very masculine way, I confirm my fitness to jog on.

I don't get very far before slipping on the wet mud and diving headlong into a dirty ditch next to the path. For a little while I remain still amongst the roots, brambles and smelly water waiting for the pain to come. My embarrassed dog has wandered off, obviously not wanting to be associated with the ageing idiot in the ditch. The Labrador lady arrives and expresses immediate concern for my well being.

I gingerly lift myself damply from the ditch and all seems well other than a few scratches, some minor bleeding and throbbing shoulder.

But all isn't well and I ask her, somewhat pathetically, to help me search for the missing pieces of my over inflated ego in the hope of regaining something of my lost dignity........she laughs and wanders on whilst I gather my hound and limp pathetically home......

I think that I could still hear her laughing when I eventually staggered out of Occombe Woods...

I will leave you with that image!