When the old Paignton Urban District Council paid £46,000 for the Oldway estate in 1947 they were purchasing an amenity for the people of Paignton and their descendants.
After sixty two years of inflation £46,000 is the equivalent of around £1.7 million, but that is not necessarily the value of the estate today. Far from it, Oldway is not being sold off as recreation land but with effective planning permission for housing and other commercial activities. That ought to make it worth up to 10 times as much.
For a comparison just look at the £12 million developers paid for the old South Devon College site at Torre. You could probably fit six similar sized sites on the Oldway estate with room to spare.
Shortly our estate agent Mayor will announce how much he has negotiated for the sale of the site. If it’s below its market value the people of Paignton are going to be very annoyed indeed and question why they have been sold short.
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And so begins the holiday as the Summer recess starts. Well not quite.
My Select Committee is still going to meet during the recess that will mean travelling to Westminster for the evidence sessions, but once that’s out of the way the holiday can begin. Well not really.
There are surgeries every week, meetings in Torbay with people and organisations who meet during the week when I am normally in London and meetings with people and agencies outside Torbay whose decisions affect my constituents, but after that I can go on vacation. Well not so quick.
Constituents will still be in touch with their problems and questions, lobbyists will continue to contact me, there is the first meeting of the new South West Grand Committee in a few weeks time, and there are the Party Conferences in September and October, and then there’s always the possibility of the House being recalled as has happened in previous years.
So the holiday is confined to two weeks where the diary has been kept free. That’s 14 rather than 82 days, but it is two weeks more than some constituents will have on holiday this year and for that I’m very grateful.
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My Lib Dem colleagues in Totnes are frantically trying to encourage members and supporters to vote for Nick Bye in the postal ballot for a candidate to take on Julian Brazil at the next General Election.
The view of political strategists inside and outside the constituency is that with four out of ten households in the Totnes constituency receiving services from Torbay Council, Nick Bye is the candidate who offers Julian the best chance of winning the seat for the Liberal Democrats.
Personally I think having an open selection like this to choose a candidate is a great idea, but sadly because of the expense one that is unlikely to be repeated in very many constituencies.
I would like to see my party do more in this direction to involve more people in the decision making process.
So long as the party controls the short-list I don’t see a problem with allowing people who may support another party from having a vote. It only backfires when you have a short-list such as the one the Conservatives have put before the electorate of Totnes.
It is a fact that it is much more difficult for a women to win a Conservative selection process than a man and here is a three person short-list where two women are likely to cancel one another out and allow the man to go through.
This is not my analysis but that of Robert McIlveen, an academic at Sheffield University, who has studied the way the Tories have selected candidates in 199 seats since 2005. His conclusion is that holding primaries helps male candidates.
He looked at the effect of holding a primary and found that women won only 18.4% of contests, but 37.3% of contests where only Conservative members have a vote.
So it will require some effort for either of the two women short-listed to break through, while only a small effort on the part of political opponents to encourage their supporters to vote for Nick Bye and fix the result that the Conservative Party has said it will abide by.
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Some view him as a lovable buffoon while others see him as a dangerous Old Etonian former Tory Shadow Front-Bencher. However you view him you cannot ignore Boris Johnson, the ex-MP and now Mayor of London.
He has just revealed that £140,000 for running our nation's capital as its Mayor is not enough and he needs a further £250,000 for writing a weekly article for the Daily Telegraph.
Boris described this payment in a TV interview as “chicken feed”. Now I write a fortnightly article and don’t even get a paltry penny, let alone a poultry morsel.
Boris explained that he didn’t see why on a Sunday morning “I shouldn't knock off an article - if someone wants to pay me for that article then that's their lookout and of course I make a substantial donation to charity”.
I think I could probably knock off an article on a Sunday or any other morning of the week for a quarter of a million!
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You’ve got to laugh. An internet publication recently ran a feature that allowed people to ask Lib Dem Leader Nick Clegg questions on-line.
Under the heading ‘ask Clegg’ one of the first messages was: “Ask him if he misses Foggy and Compo?”
Sadly, I didn’t get to see his answer.
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