I don’t know about Mayor Nick’s claim that we need friends in high places, but a former High Representative joined me last week on a visit to Kents Cavern.
Lord Paddy Ashdown, recent United Nations High Representative to Bosnia, was in town to look at some of the ideas around for regenerating the local economy.
Kents Cavern wants to become an International Centre of Excellence for the study of Stone Age man. Such a centre would broaden Torbay's offer for Further and Higher education study to both domestic and overseas students, while maximising the economic benefits to Torbay of our UNESCO Global Geopark status.
Paddy knows that tourism dependent economies need to broaden their offer and think more about hospitality and not just bucket and spade tourism. This would include heritage, education and the creative industries that Torbay is well suited to host.
Like tiny green shoots breaking through after a long winter there are many examples of businesses and activities trying to adjust to new economic conditions. They should be encouraged as much as possible, especially where ownership is held locally.
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The average bill for South West Water customers is £490 when the national average is £343.
Adding £1.50 a year on everyone else’s water and sewerage bills to peg back our own to the national average is not a lot to ask. In Devon and Cornwall we each pay more than £1.50 a year in taxes to maintain national assets such as art galleries, museums and national parks that we may never get to visit, so shouldn’t the rest of the country pay for our and their coast-line?
Following my successful push for a debate on the subject of our high water bills the Prime Minister has indicated he wishes to meet with me and other South West Lib Dem and Labour MPs who have been campaigning on this issue for a long time.
While this is a hopeful sign and it comes on top of the recent Anna Walker Review into water charges that singled out the South West as requiring special help, I remain a little cautious. I remember raising this very issue with Tony Blair over a sandwich in the Drum Inn at Cockington during his first term as a Labour Prime Minister. He didn’t get it so it will be interesting to see if Gordon Brown is any different.
So despite my caution, the chance of actually getting something done about this 20 year gross injustice to the people of the South West has never been higher.
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Tony Blair’s evidence to the Chilcot enquiry was a reminder that the motion he placed before Parliament calling on the House to support the invasion of Iraq was only carried thanks to the support of Opposition MPs. 139 Labour MPs rebelled to join all 62 Liberal Democrats, some rebel Tories and a few others who would otherwise have won the vote and stopped the invasion. Had we succeeded history would have been very different.
Now some of those MPs who voted for the illegal invasion, that has seen around 150,000 innocent lives lost and 2 million people displaced from their homes, are trying to rewrite that history. They are saying the invasion was to remove Saddam Hussein from power when the motion before Parliament at the time said no such thing.
Others are claiming that they were fooled into voting for a war by the ‘evidence’ shown to them. They overlook the fact that they had access to the same documents and briefings as those who were not persuaded by the ‘evidence’ and voted against the invasion.
Judgement is what this is about. The judgement displayed by the party leaders, individual MPs and those who advise them. It is perhaps also about the judgement of the press when most of the newspapers enthusiastically backed Blair at the time.
Through the current hearings we seem to have revealed that truth was the first casualty of this war. I hope the conclusions of the enquiry will endorse the truth and help to ensure we never go to war on a false premise and against international law ever again.
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In the week that the Ipad was launched – the latest bit of interweb tech wizardry – I came across a website that really shows the value of new technology.
At http://heatmap.egovtoolkit.co.uk/ you will find the reams and reams of data collected on local councils and their performance turned into easy to read graphics. These show the good, the bad and the somewhere in-between performances of local councils in England and Wales across a range of services that they deliver.
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An urban myth doing the rounds is the one about British troops suffering greater losses than any other force in Afghanistan. The Times recently published some statistics on casualties and the number of troops the US, UK, Germany, France, Italy, Canada, Poland, Netherlands, Turkey and Australia each have on the ground.
It is certainly true that those troops engaged in provinces that border Pakistan have suffered more deaths and casualties, and British troops are in such an area, but the figures show the country that has lost the most lives as a total of the number of troops deployed by a long way is Canada. Canada has provided just over 3 per cent of the coalition forces but recorded over 8 per cent of the coalition losses.
The US, with around 5 times as many troops as the UK in theatre has suffered 5 times as many losses.
These silly myths that circulate without any statistical evidence to back them up do nothing to help our armed forces on the ground, and unnecessarily compound the worries of their families at home.
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