Frank Branston - Blogging for a Better Bedford

…Spend, spend against the dying of the light.

With apologies to Dylan Thomas, that is about what the county council is determined to do.

What it is determined not to do is leave any of its thin reserves of cash - which isn’t its cash, but the taxpayers’ - to the incoming authorities which are about to usurp it. It intends to use money left over from projects which it has no time to carry out on a series of farewell events which would make a billionaire blink.

In case you didn’t get your BoS this week, these include: 24,000 trees in the Marston Vale with an upkeep fund for five years, medallions for sale to staff and members at a subsidised price, a farewell banquet, a farewell concert in which a Bedfordshire children’s choir will sing (but there won’t be room for their parents who will get a DVD of the event), a hagiography of the council’s 121 year history which will, of course, be scrubbed free of any of the untoward events which might have justified its publication; a banquet, a flag lowering ceremony at which the army’s Minden Band will play. This, says Madeline Russell, county council leader, will be free. Does that mean they will play for free of merely that there will be no charge for the people watching?

And so it goes…(more apologies, to the late Kurt Vonnegut this time).

Of the above, I suppose no one would begrudge the Minden Band, especially if the climax were to be to hand over the flag to representatives of Bedford Borough and Central Bedfordshire; that would be quite a graceful gesture.

But you are as likely to find grace in an ice-skating elephant as this lot.

Bedfordshire on Sunday does not often publish editorial comment but its call for a taxpayer’s march on County Hall has merit.

It would not only draw a line in the sand for the county council but also the successor councils in case either of them felt inclined to pay ducks and drakes with taxpayers’ money.

SUNDAY - Today’s Remembrance Day service at the Embankmnt war memorial went off reasonable well today despite the fact that the actual order of service and the published order only randomly coincided which occasiuoned a good deal of head scratching and brow furrowing as people thumbed the leaflet trying to find out where they were. And the two minute silence was about doubled because the bugler who was to sounf the Last Post was out of eye-line with the parade marchal.

These things happen on live occasions. At least the weather remained dry.

There was a curious incident over the weekend. I was called on Friday by a reporter from the Mail-on-Sunday purporting to be interested in views I had expressed in my blog of a few days previously concerning the creation of a ‘remembrance season’. His questions seemed a bit vague and roundabout until he showed interest in how many councillors would be taking part in the parade.. Apparently somebody had phoned the newsdesk and said something about me banning it because there were not enough councillors attending.

I was mystified, although I knew the afternoon remembrance service at St Peter’s Church had been cancelled because the congregation had been getting smaller over the years, but that had nothing to do with me. He rang off saying there didn’t seem to be much to it.

I dismissed it from mind until later that evening when I discovered that the Mail on Sunday was trying to get a picture of me which indicated it still thought it had a story. Next morning my solicitor, Nic Davies, and I emailed a letter to the Mail on Sunday making it clear I had nothing to with the cancellation of the St Peters service and that I would not take kindly to any suggestion that I had stopped a commemoration of Remembrance Day.

There was nothing in MoS next morning so I assumed it had gone away, but after the parade I was accosted by a couple of chaps who said they were from the Daily Mail and had been sent along because they had heard the same story.

I pointed to the hundreds of people participating and they agreed that it didn’t look like I had cancelled the parafe. I told them again about the St Peter’s service and they said it sounded as though the two parades had been confused.

When I saw them later it was apparent that they had sought out the parade marshal who had told them that the borough in general and I in particular ‘could not have been more helpful to them’. So they went back to the Daily Mail offices in Kensington without a story but a couple of free cups of coffee leaving me wondering who had gone to so much trouble to pass on this dud tip without even an elementary checking of the facts.

Not so long ago the term ‘half-breed’ used to carry implications of degeneracy. The mixed-race person could not be trusted and was far inferior to people of pure race. Re-read your old Biggles books if you don’t believe me.

The implication fuelled many books and films, particularly westerns and the Nazis referred to them as ‘mischlings’ (mongrels), particularly those with Jewish genes. Hitler also called the Czechs a’a mongrel race’.

Anglo-Indian met with contempt from both sides of that racial divide although Anglo-Indian women are at least as intelligent as. and often more beautiful than, either their Anglo or their Indian counterparts.

Even when it come to pets, pure-bred dogs (for which read inbred) are favoured over mongrels despite the fact that the latter are generally more intelligent and certainly healthier, as anybody who watched that dissection of Crufts breeding policies a couple of months ago will reaslise.

Now we have a half-breed President-elect of the United States of America in Barack Obama - and who would doubt his moral and intellectual superiority over George W Bush? - and a half-breed Formula 1 World Champion in Lewis Hamilton.

And, as writer Simon Hoggart has pointed out, Tiger Woods is also of mixed race.

The day of the mischling has come, and as one of them I feel a quiet inter-racial pride.

Phew! What a sporting weekend. Bedford’s Paula Radcliffe comes back again by winning the New York marathon, Biggleswade’s Victoria Pendleton wins three cycling golds and Lewis Hamilton from just down the road in Stevenage sneaks the F1 World Championship.

An amazing record for this small corner of England.

All I need now is for Barack Obama to win on Tuesday. OK , I know it’s not sport but what a week it would make it for underdogs, a black President of the USA and F1 world champion, and victories for two women, Pendleton and Radcliffe. It might make me forget the financial situation for a few hours.

As everybody else has had their four penn’orth on the subject of Jonathan Ross and Russell Brand, I might as well add to it.

I don’t have much to say about Brand except that anybody who can label his autobiography ‘My booky-wook’ isn’t worth taking seriously.

Ross, however, I have always looked upon as the kind of person who is a bully when he thinks he can get away with it and a sniveller when he can’t. In ‘They think he’s all over’ he regularly tried to humiliate guest sports people who are rarely verbally dexterous; on his chat show he brown-nosed any halfway famous actor.

When he tried to bounce Ricky Gervais, the star The Office responded with a crisp four-letter word which was bleeped out but it reduced Ross to snivel-mode.

The item for which they got their come-uppance was revolting by any standards. What is cutting-edge humour about phoning an old man and boasting of have had sex with his grand-daughter, adding in a bit of graphic detail?

If the pair of them never darken my television screen again I won’t miss them. Unfortunately I doubt I’ll be that lucky.

I nearly ducked out of the Astroblast event at Bedford School this morning (Sunday). I’m glad I didn’t.

One of the advertisers was called ‘Green Witch’*. I though it was probably a new age or hippy organisation and the appearance of the publicity leaflets wasn’t reassuring. But when I gave them closer scrutiny it looked much more interesting: atronomy, rocket demonstrations, lectures on meteorites with samples for sale. So I went along to open it and, unusually for me, I stayed for the lecture by the Open University’s Monica Grady on meteorites.

There were all sorts of interesting things on sale, including astronomical telescopes. I was suprised how cheap they were. A beginner’s telescope cost about £40, and the most expensive, which included a computer to direct you to the stars you wanted to examine, less than £900 although I suppose you could spend a lot on accessories.

As I write, I might be tempted to return to watch rockets being fired from the gounds of Bedford School.

Did you know - and I didn’t - that the world champion rocketeer is British? The championship involves firing a rocket which converts to a radio-controlled glider once its fuel has been burned. The controller has to land it as close as possible to launch point within three minutes. Apparently they can ascend as high as 10,000ft although in deference to Britain’s crowded skies they are usually limited to 5,000ft.

The things one learns by being mayor!

*I still don’t know why Green Witch but I assume it relates to Greenwich Observatory.

I attended a dinner at the Luton Hoo hotel on Wednesday. The hotel itself was as lavish and spectacular as I had heard. The meal was OK, the main course being breast of corn fed chicken.

I wondered, by no means for the first time, what happens to the legs?

I prefer chicken legs to breast meat; it’s moister and tastier but it’s always that boring breast that’s served up. Chez Branston there is competition for the legs and wings.

Has a new breed of restaurant chicken been bred with four breasts and no legs and if it has could the genetic modifiers breed one with four legs and no breasts? There would be ready buyers from those who like their chicken to taste of something.

And can anyone tell me where the brown meat goes. Please don’t say it’s wasted in cat food.

A few days ago I dropped in on the last chairman’s reception at County Hall hosted by the council’s last chairman, the amiable Robin Younger. In his valedictory speech he dwelt on the dubious claim that Bedfordshire had been the fastest improving council in the country.

It was unfortunate that he picked on the Youth Offending Service to illustrate his point. It was, he said, the best Youth Offending Service in the country.

The borough has had somebody looking into the county’s accounts, including this wonder among YOSes and he discovered that the county does not know how much it is costing. It could be anywhere between £2,500,000 a year and a million pounds more. I make that a margin for error of 40% and wonder in what sense an organisation so ignorant of its own finances could be said to be the best Youth Offending Serice in Bedford, let alone the country.

It also leaves me wondering what other skeletons are going to come rattling out of the county’s ample cupboards over the nest few months, and even more on what the county could have based its unitary bid if it had so little knowledge of what one of its smaller departments was spending.

I don’t know what other plums Robin plucked from his speech; when he started praising former chief executive Andrea Hill I felt a compelling urge to be elsewhere.

One of the privileges of being Mayor of Bedford is the Mayor’s Charity.

Not receiving it, you understnd, but giving.

When I was first elected in 2002 I targeted £60,000 in my first term of office. I didn’t get there but just over £48,000 was still a good sum to give out, mainly to youth groups of various kinds. One of my first, I remember, was for Stepping Stones, a youth outreach service of the Philharmonia. I raised £12,000 for them and their charismatic youth leader to encourage young people to make music.

One of the donors, businessman, farmer and former high sheriff of Bedfordshire Clifton Ibbett, was sufficiently intrigued to watch them in action with some lower school kids and was himself converted to classical music and the Philharmonia, using it to raise money for his own charity, the Road Victims Trust which helps people bereaved by road accidents as he himself was.

I raised a similar amount for the Phoenix youth theatre group and also for a junior section of the Distant Thunder marching band which recruits mostly from the more deptived areas of the borough.

Some of the money comes from the annual ladies’ and men’s golf tournaments at Mowsbury, some comes in random amounts when I am asked to speak to various organisations and some in the form of donations out of the blue.

By far the biggest contributor has been former Grand Prix driver Jonathan Palmer. For each of the past three years we have held a track day for 60 people at Jonathan’s Autodrome at Thurleigh. They are so popular that if we wanted to open the books for the next one as soon as one is over we would fill half the places immediately. This year’s track day raised almost £10,000 and it looks like we will end up with a total of between £20,000 and £25,000 for the year.

My main recipient this year is East Anglia air ambulance which can fly in where ordinary ambulances can’t reach and get victims - whether of accidents or heart attacks or other injury - to hospital in minutes. I knew this would be close to Jonathan’s heart as his own son’s life was saved by an air ambulance. The service covers four eastern counties with two helicopters and rescues an average of five people a week - a number set to increase. It receives no state or lottery funding and is financed by voluntary contributions.

At the end of this year’s track day on October 18 I was able to present a cheque for £15,000 for the air ambulance to Sam Whitbread, Lord Lieutenant of the county and ‘president of the air ambulance court’. It was one of the largest single donations it has ever received and I still have money to spare for other charities. So in this my second term I look likely to be able to beat my £60,000 target for the four year period. Certainly the total raised so far in 2008 has beaten the record for any one year.

And because it is a charity it gets the benefit of a refund of the tax from donors. All the money goes to benefit local people through various projects and not a penny is deducted for running costs.

If you feel like donating, send your contribution, however large or small, to me at The Mayor’s Charity, Town Hall, St Paul’s Square, Bedford, MK40 1SJ.

If you and the Home Secretary are astonished about the police statistical cock-up, I am not. I have known for many years that police statistics are as dodgy as a 24carat gold watch for a fiver.

I have in my writing days occasionally joked about the one really efficient department at Police HQ is the highly-trained section of police statisticians ready, willing and able to produce any result the police want at a drop of a hat. It can most often be seen at Christmas. If the police want to prove that drivers are not heeding warnings about the dangers of drinking and driving, they can keep their police cars out of sight but near rural pubs; if they want to prove they are working they put them further away. The statistics department will then paint the required picture.

It used to be very common for police forces to doctor their clear-up rate by persuading felons to ask for dozens of cases to be taken into account in exchange for lenient treatment, thus getting lots of unsolved crimes off their books. After a few exposées in the press that scam died down (unless anybody wants to tell me different).

The easiest way of ‘proving’ that violent crime is rising or falling is to do precisely what the police are now accused of doing. The lower down the criminality scale, the more incidents, so there are more common assaults than there are actual bodily harms, more ABHs than GBHs, more GBHs than attempted murders. So, if you want to prove knife crime is going down you lose the marginal incidents into the lower category; if you want to prove they are going up, you put them in the higher category.

I realised this when the first crime stats came out following the abolition of capital punishment. There was no increase in firearms murders or murders in the course of robbery, the categories for which offenders could be hanged, but there was said to have been a large increase in the number of attempted murders. A police spokesman commented that it was only poor shooting that had prevented greater loss of life. And indeed, it was amazing how many short-sighted gunmen had suddenly emerged on to the streets.

One potential compensatory factor for Bedfordshire Police is that maybe it owed its position at the bottom of the police league table to an honest statistics department.

I have commented in the past on the way what was once Remembrance Day has become the ‘Remembrance Season’.

What used to be contained on the nearest Sunday to November 11 is now spread over three weekends: the preceding Sunday commemorating the Scots soldiers buried at Foster Hill Road Cemetery who died of ‘flu before even seeing action, Remembrance Day itself, this year November 9, then Armistice Day on November 11, then the Kempston Commemoration the following Sunday (November 16).

This year it has started even earlier. On Wednesday October 22 we had the launch of the poppy appeal with a parade of standards, the deputy Lord Lieutenant of the county, and - I have to admit - me publicly launching the appeal, bizarrely standing either side of a wire mesh figure decorated with poppies. Later a piper played a lament, invocations were recited and standards lowered. From October 22 to November 16 - that’s 25 days.

In previous years I have visited the poppy shop to support the launch of the appeal but as far as I know this has been the first operation of its kind.

Perhaps the Royal British Legion felt the need to put on an extra show to commemorate the 90th anniversary of Armistice Day when the guns fell silent over the battlefields and I can hope future years will see a slimmed down, simpler ceremony. As is often said of funerals, they are for the living, not the dead and it seems to me that the further we get away from the events that are commemorated the more elaborate the commemorations become.

There was one senior serving army officer at this event. From the expression on his face his views mirrored mine. No doubt these thoughts will make me unpopular in some quarters but I imagine a celestial Tommy Atkins viewing these activities with a cynical laugh before turning away to light his Woodbine and scrounge a mess tin of tea from an equally cynical comrade.

Remembrance Day should be commemorated with due solemnity on the correct date. As somebody once pointed out, there are times when less is more, and this is one of them.

BoS’s John Ball takes the mickey this week because I mistakenly listed Michael Bailey’s dress shop in Harpur Street among those leaving or threatening to leave the town centre.

Fair enough. I let Ball know about the errror in this month’s council newspaper Bedford News because I would have otherwise had to wait a month to correct it.

But there should also be a mea culpa from the editor. This week’s letters web page repeated errors which I had had to correct a mere week earlier, errors of fact, not interpretation.

A letter writer accuses the borough of setting a business rate which drover Clayton’s menswear shop out of the town centre. Further down the same letter implies that the borough is responsible for the rent.

Neither is true. As I had pointed out before, business rates are set by the Government which receives the money then reallocates it elsewhere. Bedford gets only a fraction of each business rate pound.

And Bedford doesn’t set business rents; that’s down to the landlord. In Clayton’s case, we have offered to meet the increase in the rent for two years to keep them in the town centre. Sadly, the company seems determined to move to Hatters if it can get planning permission.

We have also made a similar offer to tailor Michael Waterton, but it is now committed to move outside Bedford entirely. Discussions are ongoing with Beavis.

The editor pointed out quite rightly that I had broken my own rule by making an assumption. He has also broken the rule I used to operate, that misinformation in a letter is still a mistake and ought to be edited out before publication.

IT is a relief to be able to report that Bedford has no exposure to the Icelandic bank meltdown. Nor, as far as I am aware, have any other Bedfordshire local authorities. It seems we all learned the lesson of the Band of Commerce and Credit International collapse some 15 or 20 years ago in which South Bedfordshire caught a cold.

Bedford did have some money in Iceland three years ago. That was about the time we reached the conclusion that we could do better managing our finances in-house than pay fund managers. Our in-house investment manager, Barry Keyte, consistently produced better results than the City professionals.

He has been on holiday during this traumatic week but as I piece together the story, his department noted that Iceland banks were offering very favourable rates of interest. Well aware that our instructions were not to take risks with taxpayers’ money, and of the finance mantra that higher returns mean greater risks, the money was moved to a safer home.

Bedford taxpayers have had many reasons to thank Barry and his team, and this is the latest and biggest.

As far as I am aware to date, the only public organisation in the bororugh to have funds frozen in Iceland is Bedford College. It will probably get back all or most of its £2million eventually, but may have to wait a few years.

I went to the funeral yesterday of Tara Winter, a lawyer in her forties I would guess. She had killed herself in her home in Adelaide Square three weeks earlier.

I had known Tara some years ago when she occasionally dealt with legal matters for Bedfordshire on Sunday of which I was at that time, chairman and chief executive. She came from a Northern Irish protestant family but was entirely behind Sinn Fein and supporter of a united Ireland. She rejected stereotypes.

Tara was also the friend of some of the women at BoS, bolshie types like her. I remember the first time I met her. She came into a pub with two of her chums, each dressed in black bomber jackets and jeans. I hailed them as ‘Hell’s intellectuals’ and they looked pleased with the apellation.

She got married and went to Australia to join her new husband but it didn’t work out. I wasn’t aware she had returned until I was on the stage at the High School during a prize-giving ceremony and to my astonishment saw her in the audience. She had become a High School governor, which was a bit of a surprise for a self-proclaimed leftie.

That was several years ago and I never saw her again but heard she had been doing a lot of work on familty cases at Luton.

The funeral was well-attended by the legal establishment of the county as well as her friends and her family over from Ulster. Afterwards there was a lot of saddened speculation as to what caused an intelligent, attractive and witty woman to do such a thing. Her parents said she had spent a week with them walking in Donegal a few days before she died and that she had been cheerful and in a good mood.

Some said she felt oppressed by the terrible family cases she had to deal with. Nobody I talked to knew whether she was in any sort of a relationship.

My view of Tara was that for all her feminism what she really wanted was to settle down with a loving family of her own but that sort of love never came her way. Perhaps when she returned to Adelaise Square after a week of warmth with her family, the bleakness of her own life depressed her and led to her despair. But I don’t really know more than anybody else. The sad thing is that all the people at her funeral would have been eager to help if they had known how.

As one of the two remaining ‘Hell’s intellectuals’ said: “Such a sad waste of a talented life”.

The Bedford - Milton Keynes canal took a big step forward at Wednesday night’s meeting of Bedford borough council. Members voted for a proposal which could see the first cut built one year from now.
Balfour Beatty, the company dualling the A421 to junction 13, will need clay soil to build the embankments alongside the new road. The easiest and cheapest way would be to dig what is known as a ‘borrow pit’ in the council-owned Berry Wood, Wootton, which is near the line of the road. This would leave a hole in the ground which would soon become a lake. On the table were four alternatives as to how this might be paid for: Balfour Beatty could pay £100,000 cash for the soil and do minimal remedial work, or it could build some infrastructure which could lead to the lake becoming a leisure amenity and harden up the access which its lorries would use to make a road into the wood.
Or - Option 4 - in return for the soil it could cut the first length of the canal, up to 500 yards. The canal scheme envisages the canal being built in stages to match development so this would fit neatly but would the council wear it?
Prognostications were not good. Rumour said the Conservatives were split and the Lib Dems wanted the £100,000 to be shared between councillors to spend in their wards.
The question was due to be settled in secret because money was involved. My first step was to mention to some councillors that I would oppose going into private session. They agreed that the debate should be settled in public so when Speaker Anita Gerard proposed clearing the press and public - normally a formality - nobody seconded her.
Proposing option 4 I pointed out that a few weeks earlier the minister in charge of waterways had attended a meeting of canal supporters at the offices of Kempston Council. So impressed had he been with the hard work and enthusiasm of the canal supporters that he agreed to promote it in Whitehall. How would it look, I asked, if as soon as there was an opportunity to actually do something on the ground we ran away from it? How would it play when we asked Milton Keynes and Central Bedfordshire, both of whom publicly supported the project, to do their bit.
I acknowledged there was a risk that the canal might never be completed and doubted if it would be finished in my lifetime, but that was no reason turn our back on this opportunity,
To my surprise, nobody spoke against, perhaps because they were exhausted by the previous item, a 40 minute totally pointless debate about sport. There were some abstentions among the Liberal-Democrats and one Conservative, but Option 4 was accepted with nobody voting against.
Getting it done will require the Bedford-Milton Keynes waterway group to get planning permission and technical details approved by September 30 next year. By Christmas 2009 the first length of the first new canal to be built in Britain in 200 years could be cut.
And nobody would have forecast that six months ago.

I have just received as a present a bottle of ‘thousand-year-old’ Icelandic water. I’m impressed, but then isn’t ALL water a thousand years, or a million, or a billion years-old?
I suppose they mean it comes from ice laid down as rain or snow a thousand years ago and not having passed through the bodies of countless animals, human or other wise, since then.

Patrick Hall, MP for Bedford and Kempston, is rounding up letter writers to inundate me over my failure to immediately adopt his pet scheme of finding temporary transit sites for travellers. One of the irritating things about these letters is that they seem to believe that he is the only one thinking about the problem.

It all stems from the public meeting on September 11 when he once again trotted out his scheme. I had to point out that, like most issues involving travellers, it wasn’t quite as easy as it sounded, but I outlined the various moves we were making which at last seemed to be having some success.

Here is my speech almost in its entirety:

‘I welcome this meeting as an opportunity to respond to people who, in understandable frustration, accuse the borough council of doing nothing to deal with this summer’s incursions on to council-owned land by travellers.

Although travellers are a problem common to all local authorities with open land within their boundaries, there can be no doubt that in Bedford this year the problem has gone beyond the norm of a few illegal encampments a year to what appears to be a concerted invasion of groups of travellers.

Last week I asked Chief Inspector Mark Everett how many illegal encampments there were in the borough at that time. The answer was six. That goes well beyond the norm.

I would not want you to believe that it is only within the past week or two that the borough has tried to get something done. The first item in my personal file regarding illegal encampments this year is 27 of March. That was when Iain Wright, under secretary in the department of communities and local government, attended a meeting at the home of the chairman of The Wentworth Drive Action Group. Patrick Hall was present as were three councillors and a senior officer of the council, Gordon Johnston. Inspector Mark Everett of Bedfordshire Police also attended.

It was pointed out that the borough could not simply round up the travellers and move them out of the borough. For each eviction a process had to be gone through involving the borough, the county council, the education department and the Primary Care Trust, all charged with making sure they were fit to be moved. Only after these hoops had been jumped through could we go to court to get an eviction order.

But, as we know, no sooner had they been moved on than they would find another open space in the same area and the whole weary process had to be gone through again.

All of this was wearing down the various agencies involved and the process was getting slower and slower. In the county there was a split between two departments as to who had responsibility. One of them was normally stood down during school holidays so that caused yet more delays. The PCT was also getting battle weary.

The answer, I suggested to Mr Wright, was that an eviction order applied within the borough should be valid for a period of time anywhere within the borough – say a year. Mr Wright appeared to like the idea and said he would report back. Nearly a month later I received a reply which said that the Government Task Force looking at the problem had concluded that present powers were sufficient. It referred to a traveller family in the North Yorkshire Area where a troublesome traveller group, which had persistently breached a High Court order, had been served with an ASBO. Iain Wright recommended going down that route.

Two things wrong with that: One was that this family had been a nuisance in that area for nine years before the ASBO was served. Second, it lasted only a month before a court ruled that ASBOs were not designed for this set of circumstances and it was rescinded.

We have been told that more transit sites are the answer. They may well be, but they are certainly not a quick answer. For a transit site to be designated it has to go through the planning procedure. People will remember the furore among the people of Bletsoe when it was proposed to build a privately-owned site in a field next to the village. If there is one thing you can guarantee it is that the mere mention of a potential travellers’ site will unify a community in opposition. Getting planning permission for a travellers’ site is a long haul, at least two years and usually more. A planning appeal is a racing certainty. The people who are suffering from these incursions cannot be expected to continue putting up with them while the planning process is wending its leisurely way.

Even emergency transit points require planning permission. We are looking at possible sites in the ownership of borough and county council but you won’t find any communities willing to host them within their boundaries. Nevertheless, the borough does recognise the necessity to define a transit site for 15 family pitches, while remembering that the government will require regular expansion of the numbers catered for.

After this bleak picture I can tell you that there is some light. We have consulted other authorities for their experience and advice, and last week this produced some results. Police do have powers to move travellers more quickly on under certain circumstances. These are known as s61 powers and can be applied when there is a threat of public disorder or an impairment of the right of the public to go about its business in peace. Using this, the police warned the large illegal encampment on Goldington Green to move on within 24 hours and they did so, splitting into two groups. One went into a car park in Mowsbury Park where their presence made it impossible for members of the public to use it. They too were told to be off within 24 hours and they went.

The other group got across defences on Longholme Way because bollards needed to complete them had not yet been installed. I asked the police to use their s61 powers here as well but they said that as there was no threat to the public and no houses nearby, that illegal encampment did not qualify. Still, two out of three in three days wasn’t bad going and, even better, they haven’t come back.

We are also looking for the enquiries that have to be made before an eviction to be streamlined. This is in relation to powers of the local authority, not the police. As I have already told you, there are many hoops that have to be gone through and there has been a tendency for this to be done one after the other. We have found that other authorities have a process in which the enquiries are carried out in parallel and reckon to be able to close an illegal encampment within four days.

Finally, it is my intention that from April 1 2009, when we become unitary, we will have a traveller’s department of our own with a remit to take enforcement action. They will have until April 1 2009 to establish a best practice procedure including identifying emergency and transit sites.

The most important thing is that the word gets out among the travelling community that Bedford will not tolerate a repeat of this year and if you camp here illegally, don’t bother to unpack.’

Present at that meeting was Mr Cliff Codona of the National Gypsy Council who lives in this area. Before the meeting he told me he knew of 50 pieces of land in the county owned by gypsies who would be delighted to use it for a transit site if they could get planning permission. I asked him, to let me have a list of all those in the borough. I haven’t heard from him since.

Identifying a site is not the end of it. There is still the local community to deal with. It only needed a passing mention in the press that council-owned land at Cople might be suitable for locals to start protesting. There was also mention of a stub end of the road near the new Wells and Young distribution plant near the A600 at the southern edge of town as a temporary site. I said that Wells and Young might have something to say about that and might feel the need to double their security (A friendly police officer told me I shouldn’t have made that last comment). I am certain that a so-called ‘temporary’ site would cause at least as many problems as it solved.

The borough is caught between the desire of its residents not to have to put up with traveller sites - legal or illegal (and the cost of clearing the latter) - and the Government’s determination to coerce local authorities into providing them.

Patrick Hall seems to have picked on this as a suitable campaign. I wonder if he’s right.

As an old hack always interested in language usage, I have noticed it is commonplace for the ‘liberal’ professions to use slightly disparaging terms about their own work.

Writers nonchalantly talk of ‘knocking out a piece’ as though it is something they do between more pressing matters. Photographers refer to themselves as ’snappers’ and the results of their work as ’snaps’.

I heard one new to me at the opening of the Eric Seeley 40th exhibition at the Eagle Gallery in Castle Road, which celebrates his 40 years as a professional artist. Of another painter he said: “He certainly knows how to push paint around”.

The only one of these ‘professions’ - more accurately ‘trades’ - not to do this are actors. They take themselves rather too seriously hence the description (which most of them hate) as ‘luvvies’

Sorry I haven’t done a lot of blogging just lately but I have been laid low by a chest infection which seems to visit on an annual basis bringing with it bouts of deep, racking coughs, sweating and temperature. At its outset this week I had to leave the Philharmonia concert for the Mayor’s charity half way through Tchaikovsky’s Symphony No 6 (Pathetique); it would have been rendered even more pathetic by a mayoral coughing fit.
I trace this back to the hot summer of 1976 and the old Newnham open air swimming pool which was, naturally, packed. I distinctly remember diving in and swimming through a murk of goodness knows what. It was shortly after this that I went down with bronchial pneumonia which kept me off work for seven weeks and these regular bouts seem to date from as I don’t remember them before that time. In these litigious days I should probably have sued the council but in those simpler times we were happy to have an open-air pool as an amenity and the odd incident of cholera was just part of the fun.

II have been spending a little time with the Sindaco (Mayor) of our Italian twin town of Rovigo. It has lots of similarities to Bedford.
For a start, it is quite an old town but in historic terms it bears the same relationship to the nearby city of Padua as we do to Cambridge. Padua has a famous university and many wonderful buildings; Rovigo also has a university but not so famous. It is a centre for music and has its own opera house (you can’t push the parallels too far). It’s a rugby town and has a rowing and canoe club.
Rovigo may have its opera house, but he and his colleague Giovanna were most impressed by our riverside gardens. In Rovigo, he said, developers would have seized it and built houses over it. I told him there would be a riot if anybody tried that here.
Just like Bedford Rovig has a hung council and the Sindaco has to do his best to keep several opposing factions happy at the same time.
Sindaco Fausto Merchiori, a former school headteacher, had never been to England before, let alone Bedford, but he quickly felt at home. His first official visit was to Goldington Road to see the Blues play Exeter. We gave him an exciting match even if it wasn’t crowned by victory, and when Bedford scored a try he was up on his feet, arm in the air in triumph.
He brought with him one of his cabinet colleagues Giovanna Pinede on what was also her first visit to Bedford although she has been in England several times..
I was pleased to discover that Fausto’s view of twinning was much the same as mine, that twinning is for people and businesses and professionals, not politicians although some exchange among them is inevitable. I said we limited our twinning to Rovigo and Bamberg, although there were towns in Poland, China and India which would have been happy to twin with us. Our taxpayers would look upon it as junketing at their expense.
Similarly Rovigo limits its twinning to Bedford and a German City and a village in the dirt poor African state of Burkina Faso to which the people of Rovigo are encouraged to give aid. Perhaps we might do something like that in Bedford.
Fausto and Giovanna were delightful and sincere people and we hope to arrange a business exchange next year.
And, my goodness, they do work hard. A working day starting at eight in the morning and ending after midnight appears to be not uncommon. I must say I wonder how necessary that is, During the unitary battle there were some long hours worked at Bedford Town Hall but if I had to work those hours regularly I would wonder what our council officers were doing.
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