Support the Heart of Durham Appeal
The Heart of Durham Appeal aims to raise £47,923 to buy a 2D echocardiogram machine for University Hospital of North Durham, in Durham City.
The new scanner, which would be the hospital’s fourth, would be capable of performing hundreds of heart scans every month and could cutting waiting times from four-and-a-half weeks to three weeks. It would allow care to be expanded into communities across north Durham, boosting early diagnosis of heart problems and potentially saving lives A Valentines Day walk is being planned to raise money for the Heart of Durham Appeal.
Being the charitable chap I am, (That and the fact my girlfriends away, and my friend Thomas and I have nothing better to do) I’m going to be taking part in this three legged three mile walk to make a bit of a fool of myself as well as raise some money for a good local cause. If anyone in the blogosphere would be able to contribute to sponsoring we and the people of Durham would be very grateful. I’m sure we’d be able to get some funny pictures to make it worth the while…
If you can help, send me a tweet @Byrnetofferings or drop me an email.
The curious incident of Miss Shah.
Living in the north and being a member of the Conservative party’s earned me a lot of stick over the past year or so, from people who’ve all been tricked into turning commie by Che Guevara T-shirts and movies from a confused Michael Moore about made millions of $$$$$ out of the capitalist system and they get the impression we simply don’t care – which simply isn’t the case. I’m angry at the politicians and policies which have caused chavs to become stuck in a poverty trap. People aren’t born benefit scroungers. People who are stuck in the poverty trap human just like you and me. We have enormous low quality council estates, without existing job markets and without transport links. We created a benefit regime that penalises people who take the plunge of going into work, they all hit the north the most especially in times of recession. Is it any wonder that comments like this leave me fuming?
The North East has come in for a rough time over the last 30 years. The sad thing is that, during the miners strike, both sides were right in their own way. Maybe the industry needed to go. It was dirty, that’s a certainty, and the environment has improved. Even so, you have to sympathise with the miners, and other workers, who just wanted a job and to work - to support their families. It was during Thatcher’s time however that Sunderland got the Nissan car plant (a major employer and the most efficient car plant in Europe) and major shopping centres such as the MetroCentre, providing most of the employment for the region but the region still struggles and nothing has been done to help the region in the last 13 years, with money from Whitehall being wasted on ‘regeneration’ projects that have only put us into more dire circumstances and white elephants so that the folk down in London, those that ‘work in the’ political sector’ (That’s a shot at you Miss Shah) can claim they’ve done a good job.
I don’t think really think this is the fault of Miss Shah, she’s simply a creation of what our centralised political system in recent years has come to produce. When the people sitting in London never come into contact with local communities is it any wonder they’re so aloof and make comments like this? Is it any wonder that so many bad decisions get made that leave regions like my own up the creek? I don’t think I’ve ever heard a better argument for localism…
Are poor pupils conned into taking ’soft’ subjects?
There is a major problem in this country that the government advocates that all A-Levels are equal, despite the fact that numerous universities don’t consider this to be the case, and poor pupils are being conned by state schools so says the governor of Chelsea Academy which is a state school in London, at the front line of education, and he’s right. There have been studies of the relative difficulty of different A-Levels using a variety of different methodologies, and they all came to the same conclusion that some A-Levels are harder than others. Universities favour some A-Levels over others, many are very explicit in stating this.
The result of the current situation is a disproportionate impact on students from lower socio-economic groups who are much less likely to know any graduates other than their teachers, a significant proportion of these students come from families without university experience and are completely unfamiliar with university applications (i.e. aren’t aware of the existence of prospectuses, etc.) and take their primary guidance in choosing A-Levels from their teachers and college/sixth-form prospectuses which predominantly carry the official viewpoint about the equality of A-Levels.
This has a horrendous impact on students. Many will find themselves unable to do the courses they wish to apply for at university. Even if a small minority of students realize that their teachers might not be giving them an accurate picture they often have no better source of information. Try googling to find advice on which A-Levels to take, you’re not going to find any official government source giving you good advice.
A spokesman for the Department for Children, Schools and Families said: “These are pretty cheap and insulting comments. It’s easy to make sweeping, rhetorical flourishes about so-called ‘hard’ and ’soft’ subjects – but it is wrong to ignore the hard work of tens of thousands of teachers and pupils and misrepresent the state of education in this country.”
It is easy to make cheap platitudinous statements defending the government’s abysmal record in education (remember its slogan Education, education, education) but it is wrong to ignore the sensible argument that schools and universities are incentivised into giving pupils poor advice and to provide meaningless courses. The hard work of the pupils and teachers is irrelevant if it is directed (by the government) toward qualifications that mean so little and give them and the country so little benefit.
The question is, will that course be worth the student debt that’s been racked up and the time that could have been spent in vocational training with an employer? The current government wants to sell the delusion that a degree, any degree, is worthwhile. In fact, many graduates are unable to obtain what is traditionally seen as a graduate level job upon completing the course, and merely end up in clerical or administrative jobs that can be performed perfectly well by people with A levels or decent GCSEs.
The universities are not aiming to turn out people suitable for these jobs and this government is rapidly heading down the road of needing massive immigration in order to fill those jobs – which are essential, of course, but are likely to lead to the nationalism we’ve seen of late, and leave our economy in stagnation. The people to fill those jobs are highly unlikely to come from those doing media and business studies .
Here’s a thought though for those who want to they they aren’t soft subjects. Allow at least a pseudo market to set prices, and solve the question of ‘What is a good degree?’
Can Labour regenerate the North East?
This is an old report from Policy Exchange I dug out recently which chimes in well with the attempts to ‘regenerate’ Durham, with not just a poor method, but an undemocratic one.
We did not claim, and do not claim, that these towns and cities have not improved since 1997. A decade of strong economic growth means that it is almost impossible to find any place that has not improved. Nor did we claim that the regeneration money that has been spent has achieved nothing. It is almost impossible to spend billions and billions, year in and year out, and achieve nothing at all. But we did claim – and no one has disputed this – that, far from catching up, the places we focused on, towns and cities that experienced wave after wave of regeneration initiatives, have fallen further behind the national average. In contrast, towns that were successful in 1997, and not the subject of regeneration policies, have pulled further ahead.
Looks like a resounding no.
Democracy dies in Durham City.
We have the alteration of Durham Market Place finally taking place to the tune of £5m that nobody wants, and if we were to refuse to move the Lord Londonderry statue, we lose the money to develop the city with it; such is the way that regional development agencies work.
Harvey Dowdy, director of Durham City Vision, has been quoted as saying of the plan: “I am really pleased, but that’s tempered with having a deep respect for the opinions of the people. I think this is a compromise that will help the city move forward”. What compromise? The decision to originally make changes to the marketplace was decided by the ONE regional development agency, and when the public speaks up the council let them down.
The Labour council members have stressed the authority of their position as “elected representatives”, yet the decision has been passed onto an authority with very little knowledge of the area, never mind understanding the wishes of the residents of Durham. The decisions were referred to the Government Office for the West Midlands, which was chosen over that for the North-East for its impartiality, is that ‘Government speak’ for pushing through a decision which the public don’t want? The most recent leader in the Durham Times echoes the public outrage.
There was certainly enough evidence to show that the vast majority of the public are opposed to the scheme. At least 6,000 people have signed petitions against the proposal, and a 4000 strong facebook group, and I have no doubt they feel resentful that they would lose the money if they ever were successful – there’s plenty in Durham that needs work upon.
‘The Gate’ shopping centre in Durham has had a number of stores open up for short periods of time only to close quickly due to crushing rent, and lack of money of Durham shoppers, heck we even had a Waitrose manage to shut down in a city full of students.
Now, since other shops cannot stay open, Durham has had two Tescos open up either end of the City. I’m not going to pass judgment as of yet, but speaking to friends in Scotland, they may not be so cheap and friendly in the future. Durham needs regeneration, we need to stop overburdening our local businesses with regulation and corporation tax, and put money in the pockets of our local residents – not top down unpopular schemes. A bit of localism to return democracy to our area wouldn’t go amiss either… time to scale back the unaccountable regional development agencies.
Squashing the myths that the Tories will damage Surestart
I’ve not been surprised recently by the thundering rhetoric recently from piss poor journalists and Labourites on twitter about Tory policy on Surestart.– they’ve never let reality get in the way of one of their little rants, especially when it’s one about David Cameron.
What will be done to Surestart is scaling it back, and offering more directed support to those who need it the most, as in line with a report by Demos. Cameron wants more emphasis on health visitors, and to reverse the middle-class capture of some Sure Start centres, that was it’s remit at first and it did it well – its expansion was costly, pointless, and defeated what it was originally intended to do which was to help the poorest families out of poverty. The problem the Conservative Party face however, is dealing with the public perception that they want to slash funding and damage Surestart. Shappi Khorsandi was quick to bring it up on Question Time two weeks ago, and was quickly put in her place by Ken Clarke, but the question we must ask is how common is this view amongst the wider public?
There are some in the party that would abolish SureStart now, quoting the 1.5bn pricetag, and reports which show up it’s substantial failures and it’s a view that I sympathise with. Mike Denham is right to point out that on the question of removing child care for working mums, the NAO report says that most Sure Start centres charge parents for the service at around the commercial market rate – and is a good illustration of the middle class capture that the party seek to avoid. What we must do though, as Ken Clarke rightly points out today, is not to make save cuts on those that need support the most, and given the high satisfaction rate for Surestart centres amongst the poorest families that rely on it the most, it certainly wouldn’t be wise to abolish it.
The party’s current policy however, is one that must be touted, the abolishment of Surestart must be rightly pointed out as a myth, and we must show that when it comes to targeting the familes most in need, it’s one that we hit with a bullseye.