Previous stories: 16 - 31 October 2007
Next Stories: 16 - 30 November 2007

CLIVE GRUNSHAW: FALSE CONSULTATION CLAIM?
15/11/07: Local county councillor Clive Grunshaw has been selected by Labour Party members to fight the new seat of Lancaster and Fleetwood at the next General Election. But despite some impressive credentials, his selection may irk some local residents with long memories after his involvement in plans to end some local services such as Greaves Nursery and Bowerham Long Stay Children's Unit.
Clive worked as a dockworker in Fleetwood before attending Lancaster University as a mature student, where he gained two degrees.
He's worked as a Personal Assistant to Joan Humble MP and a lay tutor for a trade union. Currently, he represents Fleetwood residents on Wyre Borough Council, where he's Leader of the Labour Group, and Lancashire County Council. He has also been involved in efforts to reclaim derelict land as green spaces and is chair of the Biodiversity Group, credentials which Labour is sure to hope will sway Lancaster's growing Green vote in his favour at the next General Election.
In the run-up to Clive's selection, the local Labour Party says it conducted an extensive "Have Your Say" consultation campaign, asking voters which issues mattered to them. Anti-social behaviour, transport and the environment emerged as the biggest concerns locally.
However, we should perhaps take Clive's claims about the results of consultation with a pinch of salt. Back in 2005, when Greaves Nursery in Lancaster faced closure, he claimed the result of a consultation with local people about the plans was overwhelmingly in favour of closure. Lancashire County Council has now admitted that the majority of people who responded actually favoured keeping the nursery open.
Lancaster's Green Party discovered a report to the Council's Education Overview and Scrutiny Sub-Committee which showed that 219 out of 227 parents and other residents responding were opposed to the closure.
Clive has also been involved in other closure plans of services in the Lancaster area, which Lancaster MP Ben Wallace severely criticised last year, accusing the county council as seeming "to put itself before services."
Clive said of his selection: "I am delighted and privileged to have been chosen to contest the constituency where I have lived all my life. I am keen to start campaigning to remind people of the good things this Labour government has achieved. I'm confident we can improve people's lives further by getting to grips with anti-social behaviour, the environment, improvements to the highways and inward investment."

PARLIAMENTARY CANDIDATES SELECTED
14/11/07: Now that Labour have selected Fleetwood councillor Clive Grunshaw as their parliamentary candidate, (should Sun newspaper owner Rupert Murdoch instruct Gordon Brown to call for a general election), all of the main local political parties now have their ducks in a row. Boundary changes mean that Lancaster will form part of the new Lancaster & Fleetwood constituency, with the current MP, Ben Wallace, leaving us to contest Wyre & Preston North at the next election.
Labour candidate Clive Grunshaw is currently a Lancashire County Councillor for Fleetwood East. Born and raised in Fleetwood, where he is also a councillor on Wyre Borough Council, you can read about his many achievements on his county council webpage.
Conservative candidate Eric Ollerenshaw is currently a conservative councillor in the London Borough of Hackney where he is also a board member of the London Development Agency, although you won't find any mention of this on his campaign webpage where even he seems to be under the impression that he is local and a teacher! Hmm. (You will do a bit better at Wikipedia).
Liberal Democrat Stuart Langhorn actually is local and a teacher. Currently he is a Lib Dem councillor on Lancaster City Council (Lower Lune Valley). He stood for parliament in the last general election where he significantly increased the Lib Dem share of the vote. You can find out a bit more about him on his website where he is actually quite modest about the many local causes and campaigns he champions.
Green Party candidate Gina Dowding also lives locally and was one of the first Green Party councillors ever to be elected in the UK. She achieved national fame in 2002 when she blew the whistle on the Council's secret decision grant rate relief to Heysham nuclear power station. Her action won her a brief suspension - and resulted in the city also receiving an additional payment from British Energy to cover the interest on the debt. She was re-elected with a huge majority. She stood down at the last election to make time to care for her severely disabled elderly parents and her two children. You can read more about her on her webpage.
UKIP have selected Fred McGlade who is currently a PhD student at Lancaster University researching the British Army Film and Photographic Unit. He has stood for UKIP in the city council elections (Caton) to no avail. Contact details are here. Our apologies, we have no picture of Fred to date, but as you can see from this UKIP blogger's account, he's a politician of conviction.

SANTA CLAUS IS COMING TO TOWN!
8/11/07: Santa will be visiting Lancaster on Sunday 18 November, escorted by the Cairngorm Reindeer, to make sure that everything is on track for Xmas, that we are all being very, very good and to switch on the brand new Xmas lights at 5pm in Market Square Lancaster.
From 2pm The Bay Radio Roadshow will entertain the crowds in Market Square. Then at 4.30pm     Santa's procession will commence from the Marketgate ramp on Common Garden Street and will proceed via King Street to the traffic lights at Waterstones where it will turn into Market Street and proceed into Market Square for the switch on at 5pm. At this time the Reindeer will be rested in their pen in Market Square for around 20 to 25 minutes allowing plenty of time for viewing.
Then at 5.30 the reindeer will return to Marketgate Car Park via Market St, Penny St and Common Garden Street.
One way to be very good this Xmas is to give money to good causes instead of buying trashy rubbish destined for landfill. See if you can make a deal with a friend to both give donations to needy and worthwhile causes as symbolic gifts to each other – or ask your friends if they wouldn’t mind giving small donations to a cause you care about instead of giving you stuff you won’t use.

STEVE WRIGHT:
ALUMNUS POLITICAL PRISONER REVISITS LANCASTER
8/11/07: Alumni of the University, from back in the 70s, might remember a postgrad called Steve Wright. A pleasant, family guy, I remember him worrying us a bit in the bar one night back in 1977. “My phone is being bugged”, he said. “I think I’m being followed”. (We thought that he was going paranoid). Just a few days later though, in the middle of night, the Special Branch came to his house and dragged him away, in front of his horrified wife and their child. They took all the papers in the house. Simultaneously they went to his office on campus and forced university staff to give them entry. The current Vice Chancellor would doubtless have held the door for them, but the VC at that time, Charles Carter, was the real thing and he went ballistic, phoning the Home Office through the night to protest this invasion of the University and desecration of academic freedom. Then he phoned the national press and media and the story went round the UK.
Steve was researching ‘New Police Technologies and Sub-State Conflict Control.’  The raid was carried out at the behest of the USA’s National Security Agency, who instructed British Police to carry out the first political raid on a British University.  He was eventually released and faced lengthy court proceedings, with the University’s backing. Much of his thesis work was never returned.
In 1985, he became Head of Manchester City Council’s Police Monitoring Unit, watching the local police force to promote democratic police accountability. Working in the wake of the British Miners’ strike, which revealed new policing methods, the unit was caught up in some of the cause-celebres of the day, including the Northern Irish Shoot to Kill Policy – the Stalker Affair.
He went on to become Director of the Omega Foundation in 1989, working with Amnesty International and the European Commission to track the transfer of military security and police technologies to the torturing states.
During this time he began writing for the New Scientist, the Guardian and Le Monde Diplomatique.
In 1998, Steve authored the European Parliament’s widely influential STOA report on the Echelon Global Spy System which revealed the extent to which all communications are read by Yorkshire’s Menwith Hill station, which taps two million calls an hour.
The US ‘war against terror’ and its human rights fallout has pre-occupied him ever since and he became chair of the trustees of Privacy International in 2004.
His current work covers information warfare, new border control technologies (he is a trustee of the Mines Advisory Group) and the emergence of weapons of mass paralysis.
Professor Steve Wright will be returning to Lancaster to talk about his Lancaster experience and its impact on his life and work next Tuesday 13 November at 4pm in the Cavendish Lecture Theatre, in the Faraday Building, Bowland North. The free talk has been arranged by the Politics Department and all are very welcome to attend. 

VIRTUAL-LANCASTER GUIDE TO LOCAL ECO-ACTIVISM
8/11/07: Virtual Lancaster volunteer Tamar Newton has worked long and hard compiling a list of all the local groups involved in environmental / pro-sustainability campaigns and activities. It’s a long list, and we hope it’s comprehensive. She has attached a bit of information about each one and contact details too. There’s something for everybody! (And so many cycling organisations we had to give them their own page).
Please have a look at it and let us know if any of the info needs updating, or if you think a group is missing.  You can check it out here.

BIOFUELS – GREEN SOLUTION OR ECO-DISASTER?
8/11/07: Biofuels are being heralded as the ‘green’ replacement for oil-based fuels and governments and corporations are heavily promoting and subsidising biofuel production as the ‘green’ transport fuel. However there’s a world of difference between fuel produced from waste fats such as chip oil, and the exponentially expanding global production of alcohol based fuels from crops such as corn, palm and soya.
The claim is that using bioethanol or biodiesel in vehicles reduces the amount of crude oil (a non-renewable resource) we burn, which means less carbon dioxide is emitted globally. This is a step to reduce the effects of global warming.
“Unfortunately, in order to grow the crops for biofuels, millions of hectares of rainforest have already been destroyed and land formerly used to grow food has been commandeered”, says Lancaster Climate Action member Jo Ptarmigan. “Rainforests play a crucial part in reducing the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, so destroying them could irreparably upset the balance of gases and cause runaway global heating”.
The growth in the production of biofuels has helped to push the price of some crops to record levels.
 United Nations expert Jean Ziegler has condemned the growing use of crops to produce biofuels as a replacement for petrol as a crime against humanity.
He called for a five-year ban on the practice.
Within that time, according to Mr Ziegler, technological advances would enable the use of agricultural waste, such as corn cobs and banana leaves, rather than crops themselves to produce fuel.
Deekpak Rughani, from Biofuel Watch (www.biofuelwatch.org.uk), will be visiting Lancaster next Thursday 15 November to give two public talks about the social and ecological impacts of biofuels.
To find out more, come along to Lancaster City Library at 7.30pm or the Institute for Advanced Studies, County South, Lancaster University at 3.30pm. The talks are free and all are welcome.
See also coming next week in Virtual-Lancaster our own Biofuels report (a simple guide), including an interview with local musician Ben Ruth, whose van runs on waste cooking fat (and whose band runs on beer…)

LAWSON’S FIELD: O & S UPHOLD CABINET DECISION
8/11/07: The City Council’s controversial decision to market Lawson’s Field in Scotforth as a potential supermarket site was upheld by the Overview & Scrutiny Committee last week. The decision was called in on the grounds that there had been inadequate consultation, with Green Party councillors proposing that the “decision to sell land at Lawson's Bridge should be deferred until the completion of the Local Development Framework land allocation process. This will enable formal public consultation and independent
scrutiny to take place, should the Council propose, on planning policy grounds, to allocate the land for development.” However they won no support from the other parties at all. Conservative leader of the council Roger Mace reiterated his statements from cabinet – that he believed that there had been adequate public consultation – despite the fact that the plan was only made brought to the public’s attention 3 days prior to the cabinet meeting, and the report containing it was actually restricted from public viewing until the immediate outcry forcerd it into the open. Virtual-Lancaster asked him, “Can you clarify what steps, if any, you, as leader of the Council,  have taken or overseen to consult with public on this issue?
Can you clarify what processes you would consider to be essential for a councillor to pursue in consulting with the public?  (For example, do you  consider it appropriate to contact stakeholders or not?)
How should the results of any such consultation be collated, analysed and presented to be acceptable as hard evidence?”
Cllr Mace replied, “The Cabinet's decision on Lawson's Field was in implementation of a previous decision by Council, taken in February by the previous administration. As it implemented a Council decision, there was no requirement for further (sic) consultation to take place. 
“My comment on public consultation arose from the large number of e-mails and letters received by me on the subject - which made it difficult to believe that "consultation" had been inadequate. “However, many of these e-mails were making points potentially relevant to a planning process, and not points relevant to the asset management process in which Cabinet was engaged. Cabinet's overriding duty to the electorate of the whole district was to take the decision it took last month to set the marketing process in motion, but the potential planning objections to development of the land are well known, and will be tested in due course in the time honoured way.”
Clearly, Cllr Mace, as Leader of the Council, does not seem aware that he has any requirement himself to consult with the electorate of this city. And where he has received mail, which he does, apparently, consider to have been a ‘consultation’ (albeit a completely passive one) he is not aware of any ethical requirement to collate, present or act on the results of that ‘consultation’.  And why should he? All he need do is collect his allowances, follow the advice of  officers and put in a good word for his leafy constituency in Nether Kellet, now and then. If South Lancaster should be tarmacked over – what of it? Sadly our council is led by a person whose interests are miles away, rather like an absentee landlord.
Cllr Langhorn proposed “That the Chief Executive be requested to review procedures for placing items on the forward plan and remind officers of the importance of it as a document for pre-scrutiny and the need for transparency.”  In other words, 'we’ll let it go this time, but, err.., don’t do it again'. It was unanimously carried. 

VC STILL WORKING ON CV
8/11/07: Lancaster University’s Vice Chancellor Paul Wellings will not be moving to Sydney U as VC, we read in SUBTEXT. The post has been awarded to Michael Spence, currently a Fellow of St Catherine's College, Oxford. Change is still in the air however. The VC has been around for a few years now and a move is becoming essential if the old CV is to stay shiny.

COUNCIL FACES COSTS ON PLANNING DECISIONS
8/11/07: Lancaster City Council was ordered to pay compensation to residents of Green Street, Morecambe, whose houses it compulsorily purchased for a development that didn’t develop. It was originally thought that the land would be needed for a car park, but the scheme was reduced – and the houses were then sold on by the council to a developer – at a £100,000 profit! The ombudsman found that the council had failed to inform householders of their rights and had not kept records of its discussions with them or given them any written confirmations. Payments of £46,000 have been confirmed to date and more may be eligible for compensation.
The council also has been ordered to pay £87,000 costs for refusing planning permission to retrospective applications for two chicken breeder sheds and an egg collection shed at Carlow Wood Farm in Burrow in the Upper Lune Valley.
The case went to a public inquiry, where the inspector said that the council had opposed the plan on grounds of odour, but the reasons were not complete or substantive and were not supported.
Planning Chief Andrew Dobson (whose recommendation that the applications be approved had not been accepted by the council) said in his report that when excercising their democratic right to refuse officers’ advice on a planning matter, councillors need to be careful that they can base their decision on sound planning grounds that can be defended at appeal.
And presumably they should  prepare hard evidence for their case to rely on.

STUDENTS PROTEST AGAINST "CAREERS IN KILLING"

1/11/07: Yesterday (Wednesday) afternoon a group of Lancaster University students entered the Great Hall on campus in order to protest the inclusion of weapons manufacturer BAE Systems in this year's careers fair.
Two students distributed leaflets in the foyer of the building detailing BAE's dealings with repressive regimes around the world, its close ties with the British government, the collapse of Serious Fraud Office investigations into its corrupt payoffs on the Al Yamamah contract in Saudi Arabia, and its increasing influence in educational institutions in the UK.
A further four students entered the hall and stood in front of BAE's stall with a banner reading 'Get a career in killing with BAE Systems'. They handed out leaflets and explained to students around the stall why they were there.
The demonstration was peaceful and the students left after approx. 15 minutes inside the hall.
The banner was then hung above the foyer and the group vacated the building. They moved on to Alexandra Square, at the centre of the university campus, and held a 'die-in' around a banner reading 'BAE Systems: A job to die for'. Many students stopped to ask about BAE and the protest. Shortly afterwards, two students re-entered the careers fair and hung the banner from a balcony overlooking the fair.
The group, (who don't wish to be named, given the university's track record of persecuting studing protesters through the courts) say that they were aware that there were a number of companies known for abuses participating in the carreers fair, but they selected BAE Systems because of its close ties with Lancaster University. The university is a shareholder in BAE Systems, and the Management School offers students the 'BAE Systems Certificate in Management', a course funded by and run in conjunction with the company. The group hopes that yesterday's 'Hallowe'en Fun' marks the beginning of a sustained campaign against the university's investment in BAE Systems.
Lancaster University students are not the only students to object to BAE Systems invasion of universities. Tom Taylor, a Loughborough Systems Engineering student, was awarded a prize for his final year project which was well received with 91%.
The prize came with a cheque for £100.
Tom said, "the cheque did not come from Loughborough University, instead it came from BAE Systems, a company not pointing entirely in the right direction on Tom’s Moral Compass. I feel it’s dirty money, and my acceptance of it would compromise my moral standing.
"My course at Loughborough University was Systems Engineering MEng, a course based in Electrical Engineering but with lots of optional diversions into areas such as Human Factors, Renewable Energy. All of this has an overriding holistic approach - understanding how everything interacts and fits together in complex systems. It turns out students with a ‘Jack of All Trades’ mentality, something which suited me quite well."
but:
"Loughborough University Systems Engineering is completely in the pocket of BAE Systems. BAE Systems dominated the steering committee for my course, had a large research and development base on campus (the Systems Engineering Innovation Centre - SEIC), and a permanent liaison to the 90% of my course that were BAE sponsored.
"Certain elements of the course were tailored to BAE’s requirements. A compulsory module in Avionics in the fourth year resulted in approximately 50 hours of my teaching time being about military attack systems, namely targeting systems, communications and munitions. Clearly used to complaints from a minority about this, the lecturer (ex-BAE Systems), prefaced this section with a disclaimer that “if you don’t like it, you can go and complain to your students union who will do nothing.”
"Why is this a problem? I believe that university should remain distinct from industry. I did not pay £1100 a year for a 5 year graduate recruitment session. Moreover, I believe that university should be using its neutrality to promote ideals about the world we wish to live in. Researching clean energy, improvements in healthcare and communications for all. Not more effective ways of wiping bearded folk off the planet.
"It is certainly a personal view, and I respect others have a different line, but I resent being subjected to BAE’s influence and coercion on a daily basis with no alternative."
So Tom donated his prize to the Campaign Against the Arms Trade. You can read his blog here.

DIVERSITY RADIO: NEW POLISH LANGUAGE SERVICE

1/11/07: From next week Lancaster & Morecambe's community radio service Diversity FM will be launching a brand-new bi-weekly radio show in Polish. The show will air on Mondays and Thursdays (tbc) and will serve as a demonstration of the station's ongoing commitment to serve the whole community of the Lancaster and Morecambe district.
Volunteer presenter Dariusz Kabzinski promises to bring a programme of Polish music and news to the area’s growing Polish population with two very distinct programmes - one targetted at young people aired from 7-9am and one for the older population in an evening slot.
The shows will include items of local interest, local and national news and also news from Poland, a diverse mix of music from Poland, information on how to access services and education and will even offer some basic English language training.
Speaking about the new service Dariusz said, “There is now a very large Polish population in the Lancaster and Morecambe district but many Polish people still keep themselves to themselves.
"They are naturally wary of authority figures because of previous experiences in Poland and there are other social problems associated with being an immigrant. I hope these weekly shows will help Polish people integrate into the local community more.
"I want to encourage both them and local people to come together so we can benefit each other through employment, social and cultural opportunities.”
Angela Metcalf, Volunteer Coordinator with Diversity FM, said, “We are really excited about launching this new service for the Polish community and are extremely pleased to be able to support them through the radio and hope that the regular service will offer them a fresh link both to their home country and to the local district. It is for very this reason that Diversity FM was developed, to act as a tool to promote social inclusion and community cohesion.”
The new service can be heard on 103.5 FM along with the rest of Diversity FM’s daily output 24 hrs a day 7 days a week and also online at www.diversityfm.co.uk, where you can also find full programme schedules.

Previous stories: 16 - 31 October 2007
Next Stories: 16 - 30 November 2007