14 November (Part 1) - You don’t need to wear a red rosette to care
There was a time when I had to be careful with money but I began to see the
back of those days by the end of the 1970s and now see myself as reasonably well
off. Unfortunately some people never make that breakthrough and have to struggle
through life at every stage. Not all of them are the proverbial lazy scroungers
and it seems to me that there is an injustice somewhere that contrives to push
people who are a bit down on their luck a bit further down than they were
before. It’s not turned me into a Socialist because my three score years and ten
and a half has taught me that Socialist governments lead to more poverty not
less. In the
words of Cabinet Member Leaf you cannot deliver effective front line
services unless you are solvent.
Nevertheless I remain very much aware that there are social injustices and
sometimes not being lucky in life leads to ever more bad luck, which is why I
felt I had to say something about the lady who through no fault of her own finds
herself caught in the middle of a parking pickle in Gravesend. She is not a
friend in the accepted sense of the word, I know only her first name and a rough
idea of where she used to live but she is someone I have chatted to from time to time over several years.
By highlighting her plight here I hoped that some kindly soul at Bexley Council
might agree to knock some heads together. Just a couple of hours after the blog
was published I got a phone call, it was from a Councillor who felt much the
same about the situation as I did. He said he could promise nothing except that
he would check through the facts and do his best to resolve the situation. One
cannot ask for more than that.
The call came from a Bexley Conservative Councillor so maybe it proves that you don’t
have to be a Socialist to have a social conscience.