Who you vote for is going to be based on what happened with the Ricoh? Ineresting. I would have thought public services, health and education would be the basis for that but each to their own i guess.
What really winds me up is the nonsensical, simplistic argumenst that it's an either/or.
Things are always presented that way, too. 'Let's slash the heritage budget by 70%, save the schools!' No matter that said budget is so miniscule you might get ten minutes worth of heating in a classroom out of it, no matter that certain costs then have to be absorbed elsewhere.
But they're the simplistic arguments put out - as if the fabric of society is wholly dependent on a hospital, and not on the society around it. Think it's irrelevant? Think again. Prior to all this nonsense, when things became commercially confidential, then the total expenditure of visitor day and overnight trips in Cov & Warks in 2009 was £1.3billion. We'd lost £0.1billion of that, too, over the previous four years. The point of this is to showthe figures are not insignificant
This is the quantifiable measurement too. Now personally I am not keen on economic measurements on the social - I'd rather look at the studies that demonstrate how such activities contribute to general well-being, and also the sense of place that thus contributes to a definable identity and makes people a) want to visit and b) want to live somewhere - both key. It's here that the argument is spectacularly ignored as people race for an 'I'm alright Jack' principle that doesn't consider the longer term impact. Cynically you could ask why a politician looking for election should look to the longer term. This is harder to measure but, again, studies that show cities that neglect a history and its leisure assets suffer longer term due to the blurring of identity that makes a place somewhat lost, it becomes a mere space on a map.
Then we look at the general practice. Are you really going to assume the Ricoh is the only decision made in this way? It's even cross councils and the insidious creep towards closed doors decisions gets greater and greater. We supposedly live in an information age, but it's easier to find out decisions made in the 1970s than today.
In a wider context, to accept decisions made in haste it is to condone the savage wasting of cash on populist arguments of nothing, where the 'freedom of information' hides behind the facade of commercial confidentiality.
If the council is misinformed here, why should it be well-informed anywhere else? Not being keen on an enquiry is nothing to do with the lack of desire to know more, as politicians should be accountable - that is their role. My only fear is that any enquiry will re-enforce the Status Quo and condone such practices. The pre-judging and trivialising of elements of social provision is exactly why we slip backwards, ever closer to nothing. Condone the ability of elected representatives to play fast and loose with
your assets, and you probably get what you deserve further down the line.