Welcome to my blog. I am a former local journalist who now works in PR and a Conservative and community activist in Woking and Horsell. This blog will keep updated on local issues as well as my interests and quirky news stories.
I am going to spell it out – I’m no fan of the Liberal Democrats. In Woking, they have some very decent and good individuals – and like any organisation, a few not so decent ones – but come election time, no-one does nastiness and opportunism in quite the same magnificently shameless manner.
One of the local Lib Dems I do admire is Knaphill county councillor Diana Smith, whose latest website entry I’m happy to link to even as a Tory blogger. I took part in the campaign to unseat John Doran in Horsell and am delighted that Ben Carasco is now our councillor but I think that he and his colleagues have a huge job waiting for them at county hall. Perhaps they should read Cllr Smith’s website entry to understand why.
Yes, it’s written by a political opponent – but even allowing for that it flings the door open, for any Conservative councillors at Kingston who needed it, on how a significant proportion of the population views Surrey County Council. It’s difficult to argue with some of her observations and although it gets a little hysterical over Angela Fraser, learning and understanding from your competition and opposition is a key political skill – without this empathy, how can you ever hope to out-maneouvre them?
The problem at Kingston is that we Tories don’t have to out-maneouvre anyone because of the sheer size of the majority. A lack of necessity for political cunning breeds a lack of necessity for radical thinking and these thumping majorities can – but don’t have to be – unhealthy. True, the Labour government has squeezed Surrey as a county until it sqeaked and then squeezed some more. True, the pension scheme is a huge financial burden and true, Cllr Andrew Povey could bring a more in tune and modern outlook to the political leadership.
But there is a truly massive task ahead and the entrenched culture of the place will take some steely leadership, determined patience and least one critical event to begin to address. The people of Surrey deserve better than what has been done in the past and the Conservative Party has been charged – whatever we might think – with delivering change.
The first step should be that county hall itself – the symbol of old-style Tory dominance – be abandoned and the administration move itself into Surrey, finally, after 120 years.
