Author: admin

At Thursday’s Planning Committee Gorse Hill Councillors Mike Cordingley and Dave Acton spoke passionately for residents against a proposal to host rock/pop concerts at Manchester United between the end of May and end of June each year.

United propose to host up to 7 concerts each year in this period including concerts on consecutive nights like we had to endure from Take That.

The planning committee and officers callously rejected our opposition. They rejected our claims that:

• residents are entitled to peace in the close season
• noise from the concerts and their dispersal would affect schoolwork at the most important time of the year
• concert dispersal is harder to achieve than football supporters, who are familiar with the area. Concert goers tend to be younger with more loitering in the area waiting for lifts with a tendency not to appreciate the noise they’re making, having being enjoying loud amplified music for the previous hours.
• that by allowing noise levels of up to 75db, they were ignoring planning guidance from the Noise Council that venues hosting more than 3 events a year should be limited to 15db(A) above background noise.

What were the reasons for rejecting residents’ objections?

Tory Councillor, Ken Weston said that clearly if residents were against the proposal, more of them would have written in. He believed this indicated that residents were not overly concerned.

Tory Chair of Planning, Viv Ward legitimately felt that United were important employers and generators of prosperity in the borough, but disdainfully suggested that since the stadium had been there for a 100 years, households knew what they were living next to. It’s hard to avoid the implication that she feels that by living near the ground we lose our rights to peace and quiet at the whim of its American owners.

The planning committee ignored the reasonable demand for peace at exam time and ignored the Noise Council’s guidance. When Tories say we’re all it together, what they mean is “put up and shut up”.

“Manchester United Football Club” by brent flanders, CC BY-NC-ND 2.0

You may have read in the press that Royal Mail has issued an injunction against a company that supplies post codes to Planning Alerts. See link.

Whilst this hasn’t affected the feeds coming from Planning Alerts to our site as they are are longitude/latitude based, it does look likely to affect the long term viability of Planning Alerts com. This is important as the Trafford Planning database has been upgraded and it therefore requires a Planning Alerts volunteer to upgrade their database to revise the feed, and frankly I think there has to be question mark over whether we’ll ever get the trafford planning applications coming through in a manner that can be mapped on google.

We’re still getting Manchester and Salford’s applications but I may have to rely on reposting the weekly list. Not as good but we’ll see.

Sorry for a highly technical update.

image source: screenshot by author of original site

The Tory loyalists have got themselves into a lather at Conservative Home. The charity commission have had the downright cheek to threaten removing the charitable status of two public schools: St Anselm’s in Bakewell and Highfield Priory in Preston. The Preston school does not provide any bursaries; its only claim to charitable according to the Independent being that “it kept its fees as low as it could”. Don’t Asda and Tesco make the same claim? Perhaps they should be given charitable status. St Anselm’s used 1% of its fees to provide a paltry two bursaries to two pupils, who I’m sure were heavily vetted.

The two schools have been given a year to sort themselves out. But even this generosity has upset the Tories. They consider the exclusivity afforded to public schools is a charitable aim in itself.

We live in a country that provides universal free education. I have therefore long held the view that private schooling in our country cannot be considered a charitable act and that therefore it should never be given the same status as legitimate charities such as Oxfam and Cancer Relief. My party has been far too timid in its approach. It pains me that these two schools will be able to negotiate the minimum changes to their provision to allow them to continue to receive a subsidy from all of us. The charitable status should have been removed from our elitist public schools long ago. But it’s clear that the Tories want to remove any expectation of bursaries or similar and consider the charitable status is their birthright.

Mike Cordingley

First published 14 July 2009

http://gorsehill-labour.blogspot.com/2009/07/public-schools-elitist-exclusive-and.html

Image source
Catholic Public School- Everyday Life at Ampleforth College, York, England, UK, 1943 D17372 – PICRYL – Public Domain Media Search Engine Public Domain Search