There will be a Vote of No Confidence in the Leader and the Cabinet at Uttlesford on Monday, June 28th. The agenda for an Extraordinary Council Meeting has just been published and the MOTION OF NO CONFIDENCE can be read at the highlighted link to the Council’s website and also below. The meeting and motion […]

This updated version of my previous post was published today in the Comment column of The Bishop’s Stortford Independent.       ==========!!========== Wednesday, May 26th, 2021 was an extraordinary day in both national and local politics. It was, in my opinion, a day of rotten politics. At Westminster, the Prime Minister’s former chief aide, […]

The following cross-opposition party press statement was issued this morning in response to populism turned to lies from Residents for Uttlesford (R4U) about their role in the recently ended appeal hearings into Uttlesford DC’s refusal of planning permission for growth of passengers, planes and pollution at Stansted Airport. The R4U fairy story can be read […]

I had hoped to have a rest from blog posting and social media for the Christmas and New Year period. Unfortunately, a lack of transparency by the Council on Tuesday does justify a break from walking, reading, television, phone calls with family and sad self-isolation from that nasty virus. Well before Christmas, ten councillors from […]

Green, Liberal Democrat and Conservative leaders at Uttlesford today demanded in a public statement that the Residents for Uttlesford ruling group should come clean and explain why the Council’s auditors are refusing to sign-off the annual accounts for 2019/20. Liberal Democrat Councillor for Stansted South and Birchanger, Ayub Khan, was stone-walled at the Council’s Governance […]

Cllr Alan Storah Member of Uttlesford District Council for The Sampfords Ward May 2019 until October 2020 Alan sadly died suddenly in the past few days Alan was a mild mannered and kindly spoken man A former planning officer at Uttlesford until 2012 A planning spokesperson for the Residents for Uttlesford Party At his death […]

Around four years ago, I visited New Earswick on the outskirts of York to see an early 20th century housing initiative by the Rowntree chocolate manufacturers. The aim then was to build quality housing for the people of the chocolate factory. One-hundred and twenty years on, Uttlesford District Council wanted until recently to bring the […]

That’s the sign one weekend commentator suggested Boris Johnson should have on his desk at No. 10. “Not me, I’m not responsible for what goes wrong.” That contrasts with US president Harry Truman’s actual desk-top sign “The buck stops here”. Even Conservative MPs are now speaking out against a Johnson cabinet of incompetent people whose […]

The Government is expected to publish plans next month to re-organise councils in Essex. In my opinion, the time is not right for such an upheaval whilst local councils are still dealing the consequences of the current COVID-19 pandemic and the emerging economic recession. Reorganisation would be extremely resource intensive and an unwelcome distraction at […]

Last week I was invited to attend a protest at Stansted Airport by easyJet employees. They were angry at the airline’s threat to pull its ground operations out of Stansted, with consequential staff redundancies, whilst the company had been taking large amounts of taxpayers’ money from the government during the Covid-19 pandemic and had handed […]