Tuesday, May 08, 2007

Back to the grind

After 10 days at home running election campaigns and then doing things that have no political connections whatsoever, I am heading down to London, no doubt waiting to be met by an inbox bursting with emails that will take me most of the week to sort. Our office also has a meeting this afternoon with the big boss.

One thing I forgot to mention in previous blog entries is that we outpolled Labour in Blaydon constituency. I don't have the figures on me at the moment but I'll post them up soon.

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Sent via BlackBerry

1 comment:

George Dutton said...

Taken from Tartan hero web site...

"Just arrived home and what do I find... a parcel from CoSLA - the local government association in Scotland. Only last week I received a large C4 envelope with one A4 sheet letter from the CoSLA President Pat Watters congratulating me on being elected as a councillor. Today, the 'welcome pack' is a purple plastic folder with three sheets of paper in it... yes, I know you might think that's information overload for the average local elected member but remember the SNP are now the largest grouping of councillors, so automatically the IQ doubled overnight (not saying what to mind). Oh and a pen. And a mouse mat. But don't forget the pen."

"All in all, postage alone, to me, was over £2 in one week - with the total message that CoSLA is here to help me as a councillor. Now there are 1222 councillors in Scotland - £2444 in postage to send four bits of paper, a plastic folder, a mouse mat and a pen. The total cost of the plastic folder, mouse mat and pen would probably have added another £1500. So were are talking about £4k of CoSLA's budget being used in seven days for two communications of roughly the same message - any of which could have been communicated electronically, and the 'freebies' not even needed."

"I'm serving notice that this kind of waste can't go on. All the more ironic that CoSLA is proclaiming that Councils are rising to the waste challenge. The sooner CoSLA is shaken up the better!"

http://tartanhero.blogspot.com/