Blogger Humiliates Town Councillors Into Resigning 227
Dr_Barnowl writes "In an occurrence first postulated in sci-fi and later lampooned by stick figures, it seems that a blogger has actually been responsible for the mass resignation of elected officials — a British town council — largely by calling them 'jack***es' and Nazis. What's next? The deposition of a president with 'your mom' smacktalk?"
CounCILLors! (Score:5, Informative)
They're councillors. As in, people on a council.
Counsellors are a different breed of people altogether, like Troi.
Re:Can we get rid of the US Congress so easily? (Score:4, Informative)
To be fair, looking at his blog (see here [blogspot.com]) he's not exactly clear about his allegations. Having read his droolings, I firmly believe that people would quit working for a council to avoid having to deal with that paranoid mental case.
Re:Can we get rid of the US Congress so easily? (Score:5, Informative)
His concerns seem valid. There looks to be manipulation of the planning system for personal profit by a councillor who is also a property developer.
Re:A link to the blog please.. (Score:4, Informative)
from the article [blogspot.com]
Re:Can we get rid of the US Congress so easily? (Score:5, Informative)
You are correct, they resigned because of sustained pressure not just from this blogger but from local press and constituents (voters). They are just blaming the blogger to elect sympathy (no pun intended).
Re: Thats so not what its about (Score:5, Informative)
First of all, I live in Somerton, and its not a backwards place like Kupfernigk is trying to make out.
We are just a normal town, and from the sounds of things Kupfernigk has probably hardly ever been to Somerton and thinks the have the right to criticise what they no NOTHING about!!
This isnt about blogging. A lot of people here think that some members of the council were out to make money, and there are strong rumours that local people were trying to get them kicked off the council, so they ran instead.
Re:So? (Score:3, Informative)
It is a bad thing - an extremely bad thing. There are processes for removing councilors who are doing a bad job, acting illegally or who lose the trust of the people who voted for them.
According to the blog [blogspot.com] they resigned to "rapturous applause" from the citizens. It was one man blogging, apparently leading to lots of face to face discussions. If they could refute the things being said about them I'm sure they could have done so instead of resigning.
So it would seem that they didn't resign because of one man, they resigned because of what many people found out from one man. It was the many that caused them to resign.
Why the stars? (Score:1, Informative)
Perhaps you think Jackass is ruder than it was intended. It just means male donkey. Probably because in the US arse is pronounced the same as ass resulting in confusions between donkeys and bottoms. Wars have been caused by less!
Completely wrong (Score:3, Informative)
BTW who told you his allegations were unfounded? As for why he doesn't stand for election himself, it's because a campaign of intimidation has been aged against him - it's documented on his blog and believe me, anyone who lives in this part of the world knows this kind of thing goes on and can well believe it. I suggest that, just as British posters do tend not to pontificate about US politics, you keep your US=centric views out of this case. Because you do not understand UK local government at all.
Re:This blogger was lucky (Score:3, Informative)
From another post of mine:
Meanwhile here's more absolute proof that I'm right. A case summary by the Law Lords.
http://74.125.77.132/search?q=cache:3u0QFtSeHFsJ:oxcheps.new.ox.ac.uk/new/casebook/cases/Cases%2520Chapter%252026/Spring%2520v%2520Guardian%2520Assurance%2520plc%2520and%2520others.doc+england+truth+%22absolute+defence%22&cd=49&hl=en&ct=clnk&client=safari [74.125.77.132] [74.125.77.132]
Re:Revealed as feeble... (Score:2, Informative)
Having said that, I agree with your overall point--they should've been able to respond to what was said, it's not like you can't issue a press release.
Re:Can we get rid of the US Congress so easily? (Score:4, Informative)
I've heard of no councils that have reduced bin collection to every 2 weeks - only certain 'luxury pickups' like garden waste (leaves, hedge trimmings etc.) and certain recycling pickups; so definite citation needed here
Credibility fail. Literally five seconds with Google would show you that this practice has become commonplace across the UK in recent years, usually against public opinion. The details of which recycling is collected vary by local council, but reducing general rubbish collections to biweekly is almost always involved.
This does make things somewhat unpleasant in terms of smells and pests at certain times of year. IME, the worse problem is that it means if a council miss your collection one week, you wind up with an entire month of rubbish to go in the (typically small) bin, which just doesn't fit. Then the council may refuse to collect excess waste (or you get fined via the legal system), and often there is no useful process of appeal: if the bin men say your bin wasn't out, that's it, even if it clearly was and they've made the same mistake several times already. I'm writing from personal experience, but I'm hardly the only one who's mentioned this problem on local forums around where I live.
The man wasn't arrested for leaving his bin open - he was fined, for over-filling his bin. It was a bit specific to the letter of the law, but its not outrageous to draw the line where they did
That rather depends on whether the council are doing a decent job otherwise, doesn't it? As I noted above, they frequently don't, but now instead of it being their problem, it has legally become yours.
There are numerous other minor abuses going on, e.g., if you get home from work on collection day and find one of your recycling bins/boxes hasn't come back, you can get another one free, but some places charge a lot of money to replace the general waste bin under the same circumstances. Once again, containers not being put back outside your home after collection is a common problem—we've had four or five instances in the past couple of years—and to a household on a low income, the cost of replacement just so they can use the bin service they're already paying through the nose for via Council Tax, is a lot of money.
Defenders of such policies usually seem to mumble something about not having hypothecated taxation, so just because we have a dedicated Council Tax that goes to our local authorities and just because those local authorities are legally responsible for providing waste collection services, that doesn't mean you're entitled to actually get a working service or any minimum standards just because you pay them thousands of pounds a year in tax. Seriously, I've been told this many times, and it seems to be the best they've got. What happened to no taxation without representation? Why aren't our representatives up in arms over this sort of failure to provide essential basic services?
Re:Can we get rid of the US Congress so easily? (Score:4, Informative)
I've not spent 5 seconds with Google
Perhaps you should. In the time it took you to write those words, you could instead have typed "bi-weekly bin collection UK", clicked the search button, and found numerous articles immediately, from all over the country, showing the current situation. (I'd find you some summary statistics, but strangely, neither local councils nor the central government people promoting this arrangement are going out of their way to acknowledge how widespread it has become and the level of dissatisfaction it has caused.)
I have spent almost 30 years living in the UK. I have friends in virtually every region of the country and can tell you that I know no-one who has bi-weekly general waste collection
You have friends within virtually every local council area in the country? Is that like having 600 Facebook "friends" or something?
Or are you trying to generalise from one person's limited experience—your own—and assuming that just because you haven't experienced this at all, no-one else has either?
I wouldn't call 4 or 5 instances a common problem in, at least, over 100 collections.
You might if each of those occasions meant that for the corresponding type of waste you had no collection for a month, and possibly for another 2–4 weeks more depending on how long it took for a replacement to be delivered since the collection people won't accept any non-standard containers for "health and safety" reasons. Put another way, someone with that failure rate has sub-standard waste collection for approximately 50% of the year.
Also, please give evidence of low income families being required to pay for a replacement for a bin that the council lost.
In my city, as far as I've been told by the council, everyone has to pay to get their black (general waste) bin replaced if it goes missing for any reason. The low income part is only relevant because if you've got around £50 to spare it's an irritation while if you've got around £50 to buy food this week it's a bit more than that.
However, if any of the various kinds of recycling bin or box used in our area go missing, the council replaces them free of charge, albeit often with a delay before the new one is delivered.
Council Tax (really, more than £2,000 a year? Where do you live?)
In a detached house in East Anglia. Ours isn't quite that much (though it's not far off these days), but I think one or two bands further and you're past that mark, and last time I checked we were actually a little below the national average rates for each band.
I'm not saying bin collection is perfect, but you seem to have gone way over the top in your post.
I'm biased, but then again, I've also been repeatedly screwed. Our Council Tax has gone up while the level of service has gone down. We've had so many missed collections that formal complaints resulted in the collection people having to call a supervisor every time they wanted to mark one of our bins as not being put out. And while we personally have never lost the one bin you'd have to pay for, we've had the other one not come back on collection day twice, and as I write this we have neither of the two boxes we should have any more and the Council won't replace them because they're moving to a new system with a third bin instead in a few weeks, so basically for about two months we are missing half of our collections.
This sort of mess is precisely the kind of thing normal people with real lives and time-consuming jobs shouldn't have to worry about, yet here I am, so annoyed by it that I'm debating the subject with a stranger on Slashdot. I shudder to think how much time I've used chasing up the council each time something has gone wrong. This is the sort of stuff that should Just Work, and it's what local councils are for. If they're