Dear Mr Denham,
Your Visit to Exeter on 31st March 2008
I am writing because I fear you have lent your support to a City Council which may have given you a false impression. As a floating voter without party political allegiance, who owes his education to a scholarship granted by the strongly Labour London County Council, I am appalled by the way New Labour and Exeter City Council are treating the less privileged in today’s society.
According to the local paper, you were meeting Labour councillors, activists and supporters in the newly created Summerway Park, complete with MUGA and cycle track/footpath.
Were you told that Exeter City Council destroyed a brilliant and outstanding Community Amateur Sports Club for children by taking their two courts from them in order to make them public – a plan which has failed spectacularly? At a cost of less than a thousand pounds a year to the public purse, volunteers have given over £10,000 of services annually to the community for decades. The City Council sees the former figure, but is plainly blind to the latter, and now appears incapable of sustaining this highly successful and proven partnership with Volunteers. It has withdrawn unilaterally, seriously damaging community.
In today’s (Saturday’s) paper, we learn that the local primary school, Willowbrook, has failed its Ofsted examination and has been put under special measures. Our local secondary school, St James, was in a similar plight for the last two or three years, but has now emerged. Ours is clearly a locality with problems, and Exeter City Council has been withdrawing support from well established, successful children’s organisations managed by volunteers, thereby increasing deprivation.
The Labour City Councillor for the ward claims the Council "are using our powers
and resources to tackle the anti-
The abolition of the 10p tax band nationally, and the Labour controlled Exeter City Council’s blatant support for those with money while wiping out bases used by Volunteers to serve the community, is sending out the wrong message. Government should support ALL the people, not just the privileged.
If you dismiss this email as unhelpful without clicking through www.ivorytowerexeter.co.uk you will have missed the point. The Club and I are immensely constructive towards the community and supportive of government, which we wish was less remote, but Exeter City Council refuses to deal with us, and has made issues personal instead of facing up to our comments and queries. This small website is backed up by a much larger one which has now become a valuable resource.
We have two short videos on YouTube, one of which was shown on national television in the Five News programme. Sadly, an Exeter City Council spokesman made demonstrably false statements in reply, which is totally unworthy of a public authority. Nowadays, no one seems to care. Please have a look at them if you have time – just over four minutes in total.
As a cabinet minister, please, please use your influence in favour of equitable government. If you can also encourage Exeter City Council to stop undermining national Labour policies regarding children, health and sport, you will gain our eternal respect. So far, we haven’t been able to do it.
Yours sincerely,
Jim Harle.
Rt Hon John Denham MP’s Visit to Exeter
The email below was sent by Jim to the Secretary of State for Innovation, Universities and Skills, the Rt Hon John Denham MP, on 28th April 2008, following the minister’s visit to Exeter in support of Labour candidates in the imminent local City Council elections due to take place on 1st May.
The site chosen for the meeting, which was notified solely to Labour supporters, was the new Summerway Park, where all traces of the Club had been annihilated. Were Labour Councillors trying to show what a magnificent job they had made of the old school playing field?
Over a month has passed with neither an acknowledgement nor a response to this email being received. This seems par for the course with modern government, which dismisses or appears ignorant of the views of the electorate except where they happen to coincide with government’s own wishes.
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