They say a week is a long time in politics! Today I wanted to highlight a few things that have been in the press over the last seven days.
Wokingham Borough Council issued a press release last week stating that Berks and Bucks FA will be taking over Cantley Park’s football facilities – as was reported in this paper.
However, when I queried the decision as councillors had not seen the proposals or the business case, particularly the lack of transparency and democratic process, officers at the Wokingham Borough Council denied that a decision had been made.
If a decision has not been made, why is the Liberal Democrat run Council publishing a press release saying it has?
This suggests the outcome is a foregone conclusion.
And if a decision has been made, it raises serious questions about a lack of democratic oversight over the authority agreeing leases of publicly-owned facilities, while officers tell us the process is still underway.
Amid the confusion over whether or not the Council has decided on who will run the facilities, the Conservatives have argued that the chaos will damage residents’ trust in the administration’s ability to make fair and proper decisions.
It is not the first time the Liberal Democrat administration have presided over a similar fiasco. Just like the debacle over the removal of the public litter bins in July 2023, we’ve got the Council pressing ahead with a decision behind closed doors, announcing it in a press release, and then denying that a decision has been made.
Turning to the economy, this week the Office of Budget Responsibility has described the UK’s economy as “vulnerable”.
This is not a ringing endorsement for a Government that has just celebrated one year in office.
The OBR Chairman also said, “The UK public finances are in an unsustainable position in the long run. The UK cannot afford the array of promises that it has made to the public.”
After a year of Labour we are left with a failing economy with GDP down last month, borrowing costs at the highest sustained levels in decades, unemployment up, wealth creators and businesses leaving.
When the Conservatives left office we had the fastest growing economy in the G7.
Labour have bounced from one bad policy to the next leaving the UK’s economic outlook bleak. This is bad news for us all.
Finally, the Reform Party have been campaigning to scrap the two-child benefit cap – which is odd, because their leader campaigned for it in the first place.
Indeed, Nigel Farage has said he wants to bring in policies that are pro-family.
A damascene conversion? Not necessarily.
As The Times reported last weekend, in 2014 when Farage was the leader of UKIP, he proposed a two-child limit to benefits claimants. This suited Farage and UKIP when he was courting Conservative voters. Now a decade on, and he is going after Labour’s so called Red Wall voters, he has changed his tune. Along with calls for nationalisation he is also promising to lift this cap as well as making numerous other spending commitments -promises we can all take with a hefty pinch of salt.
Cllr Pauline Jorgensen is the leader of Wokingham Conservatives
