AIE The Quean of the Midlands 27 November 2007
I am told by a local follow who has lived in this part of the world for a very long time that Nottingham used to be referred to as "The Queen of the Midlands". However, that was before the rot set in. And a lot of the rot is the result of government action since the war. It's not only the present Labour Lot, but they have certainly kept up the slow degradation of this country. Now, I am a child of the 1930s and remember when Law and Order had a meaning. Nowadays judges, magistrates et cetera are simply not allowed to punish wrongdoers. The police too, have been mutilated and if a copper nowadays acted as they did when Law and Order had a meaning, they'd get the sack , and probably be prosecuted, to boot.
I am a Londoner and have only been in this part of the world since 1997. I describe myself and my elderly mother (since passed on) as "asylum seekers from a Heathrow flightpath". This is the truth as we moved from Hampton on Thames to get away from the appalling din that we were subjected to on a daily basis. Wollaton Park is (almost) "perfect peace". The Ring Road is only half a mile from this house and we can hear the noisy toys that ambulance and police drivers love to play with. But airborne noise is close to zero. The occasional daytime chopper and light private plane is all one hears from this house. And by eight PM, the local roads are as peaceful as anywhere in the country.
You may think that the title of this essay has a spelling mistake. Not so!. Look in any decent dictionary and you will see why I use the word "quean". Nottingham Council spend most of the money that they raise from the areas where people own their own houses, on places like St Annes where the riff-raff live. I don't think it is all the Council's fault because there is so much Westminster legislation to control what the Council may do with our money. Councillors are simply not allowed to represent their electors; there's even an Act of Parliament restricting what Councillors may do, and how they may represent the views of their citizens.
It is a sad fact of life that some people will be clean and civilised under almost any form of restriction. The opposite is true as well; some folk will be slovenly and a disgrace to the title "human being". I suspect that early 1930s Germany had a similar problem and put the Nazis in power in the hope that they would 'sort the country out'. But Hitler had other features to his agenda that were not nearly so desirable.
A further problem has emerged. Britain is now paying for its Empire. We are besieged by hoards of people who have an entirely different lifestyle to the natives of this island. Enoch Powell foresaw the problem and got sacked by Edward Heath for airing his forebodings. I suspect that Ted Heath realised his stupendous error towards the end of his life. He died just ten days after the "Rivers of Blood" speech was proved to be right with the London bombings. I don't like coincidences, and I suspect that this was NOT one, but it hastened the end of an already sick man.
This estate recently had some money spent on pavement and kerb repairs. But it is a cause of speculation as to why they left the second-worst road to the end, and then pleaded that the money had run out. The worst road is outside of a school, so it probably attracted more attention than this and an adjacent road that were not touched. One local wag suggested that Nottingham City Council will have to raise a World Bank Loan to repair this road and its mate
Since the estate was built in about 1928, the only work that has been done is to this road is the filling in of potholes followed by the filling in of more holes where the pot-hole-filling had decayed.
I have a letter scanned in on this PC that shows that the Council are honest about this estate. The letter is addressed to me at the "Wollaton Park Pothole Estate". If you don't believe me, I will attach a copy to a reply email to anyone who makes a request.
I mention "Law and Order" above. Let me give three examples of what I mean:
1 Before leaving Hampton I was friendly with a retired Chief Superintendent. The man was later to become the initiator of the Metropolitan Police Flying Squad. He told me that in the 1920s in the east end of London where he was a serving constable. He would take off his tunic and hang it on a gatepost and with his bare knuckles he would thrash a local villain until he pleaded for mercy.
2 In Nottingham a copper known as "Tug Wilson" caught a youth flashing his credentials outside of a girl's school. The story as I was told it was that Tug marched the lad down the road into the Station and pulled down his trousers, He then grabbed the offenders penis and gave it a sharp rap with his truncheon against a hard table, It makes your eyes water to think about it! "You won't be doing that again, will you sonny?" The lad was then chucked out on to the street with his trousers round his ankles.
3 I was friendly with an ex-warder who served in the Prison Service at Lincoln Goal. This chap told me that he was so disgusted with the treatment that the inmates got, that he resigned and went back to being a carpenter. He told me that "the Cons get more entertainment that i get at my week at Butlins". Is there any wonder that the prisons are so overcrowded?
I've strayed a long way from
"Nottingham Council", haven't I?
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Today it is Thursday 21 February 2008. Recently in the Nottingham Evening
Post the salary of the Chief Executive of the Council was disclosed. He
gets £180,000 per annum. You notice that i didn't say "he earns".
Just think about that remuneration; if he puts in 52 week a year (and I'm
being generous) he gets three and a half thousand pounds a week. I'll be
generous again and say that he puts in a fair amount of overtime; let us say he
does fifty hours a week. That's sixty nine pounds an hour. I know
that there are higher paid people on this planet, but for a so-called Public
Servant, it's obscene. It's more than the Prime Minister gets paid (that
is £187,000 a year)
And the lousy service that Nottingham gets, he deserves the minimum wage. As I understand, he and the Leader of the Council just can't stand each other. Simply refer to the Evening Post again and the absurd situation a month or so back when someone from Central Government had to intervene to slow down the rot. An insider told me that both men have an enormous ego and both seem to think they are the bees knees.
There is one thing that we do get from the Council, and that is lots of promises. If only they were kept ! For instance we keep on being given dates when we will be getting a CCTV camera on the main point of this estate. Had they been in operation six months ago they may have detected the vandals that burnt down the local medical centre. It's about three years since the proposal was put, and almost the last part of the story was when one of the Resident's Committee spotted a hole being dug in the tarmac outside of the little shop on 'The Green'. Had this lady not been observant, we would have had a pole and a camera that kept a watch on the bedroom over the shop.