For Wisbech

COPIED and PASTED FROM THE OLD WISBECH COMMUNITY FORUM BLOG On a day when the nation remembers its dead , it is appropriate to think once more about Wisbech and what was to be 'the war to end wars' - The Great War. Earlier blog posts looked in particular detail at men from the Wisbech area who died in the war, such as Eric Gardiner and James Cole. We looked at the eventful war of March hero, Harry Betts, and reflected with sadness on the many young men from Barton School who lost their lives. Today's post is rather more random, but hopefully still relevant. The War Memorial itself was officially dedicated  on July 24th 1921. Crowds lined the streets, and family members of the fallen grieved again, before trying to get on with their lives in the harsh economic climate of post-war England. Crowds little smaller had turned out six years earlier to pay their respects to Wisbech's first war victim - young Daniel 'Dick' Walker, who had been wo...

It has been an interesting few hours in Wisbech politics . In fighting terms, there have been plenty of bruises, some blood on the canvas, a few low blows, one or two spectacular knock-outs and, to extend the metaphor, a couple of bouts where the opponents hid in the dressing room. One victor in particular is entitled to raise both gloves in triumph . David Patrick is a thoroughly decent man who has been subject to   some very underhand treatment in his time in local politics. He was hauled through a disciplinary tribunal which was gleefully engineered by opponents who used an autistic man as a proxy weapon in a battle over some unfortunate remarks on social media. In this campaign for District council he was subject to a bitterly personal attack published on behalf of – and those three words are important – his opponent Garry Tibbs. It has to be said that only 409 souls in the Kirkgate ward bothered to turn out and vote, but the majority of them voted for David. ...

There has been a great deal of huffing and puffing on social media about alleged electoral fraud in Wisbech local elections. There have been anecdotal evidence of people carriers drawing up outside polling booths not long after the end of the afternoon shift in local factories, and Eastern European residents being decanted into the polling booth, clutching electoral leaflets published by one of the parties. Perhaps the great conspiracy imagined by the writers of posts on Facebook and Twitter goes something like this: Latvian, Lithuanian, Polish, Bulgarian (you take your pick) residents shown how to register to vote. On the day, friendly local taxi drivers and political activists collect the voters from the factory gates and drive them to the polling station. So far, so good . Party workers offering transport to polling stations has been going on, if not for ever, then for as long as cars have been available to save people's legs. All within the bounds of accepted elec...

“Ahhhh – I love the smell of electoral outrage in the morning..” Yes, like the immortal Lt Colonel Kilgore’s beloved Napalm, there’s a smell wafting in the Wisbech breeze. The particular nasty niff in the air is the result of pre-election friction between the usual suspects – and one or two new ones. The election is on 2 nd May and is a double one. The first is entirely of no consequence as it   involves only the seats on Wisbech Town Council which, as far as I am aware, has a Mission Statement which largely consists of: (1) Playing silly buggers with the seating arrangements at Council meetings to ensure that anyone remotely critical of The Gang of Four who run things, has to sit in the naughty chair. (2) Making sure that nothing of any consequence is ever decided at said meetings, especially if it might interfere with the real power-broking which goes on in a local pub. (3) Promoting its own highly popular and successful version of BT’s Friends & Famil...

Does anyone remember Wisbech Community Forum? Don't be afraid to admit that you don't. It passed most people by, but it had a few loyal followers. I wrote it, but it fell by the wayside as I developed my crime fiction website Fully Booked and my last post was just after the 2016 referendum. I tried to get back into it tonight, and it refused to recognise me, rather like a forlorn child might refuse to acknowledge its father after years of desertion. Wisbech Community Forum is still there, in all its shabby glory, and if you want to see what it was about, then if you click the link, that should take you there. All bloggers feel they have something to say, and most of us are deluded enough to think that someone else might want to listen. If you look back to the last, dying words of WCF, you may experience a sense of deja vue . I was banging on about how ordinary people in Britain were being patronised, pitied and, to put it bluntly, pissed on by the Great and The Good. Peo...