Author Archives: Omnipresence

Planning gain? For whom? There is a phrase in planning that sounds almost reassuring: public benefit. It suggests that when developers are allowed to build hundreds, sometimes thousands, of new homes, the public gets something back. Better roads. More school places. Open space. Affordable housing. Health provision. A civic dividend, if you are still sentimentalContinue reading “Shrewsbury Gains. Oswestry Pays”

There comes a point when a town stops needing another reassurance statement, another community safety meeting, another poster, another “we take this very seriously” announcement, and another camera recording the decline in beautiful high definition. Oswestry has reached that point. This is the third part of our shoplifting and local justice series. The first lookedContinue reading “Oswestry on the Crime Ladder: The Case for Swift Justice in a Town Tired of Watching”

A follow-on blog by The Alternative Council First came the rising prices. Then came the locked shelves. Then came the anti-theft tags on everyday goods. Now, apparently, comes the next logical step in modern retail civilisation: shop workers wearing body cameras. Welcome to Britain, where buying a sandwich increasingly feels like entering a low-budget crimeContinue reading “The Evidence Is Everywhere. The Justice Is Missing”

There was a time when a supermarket worker stopping a thief would have been treated as a sign that at least one adult in the building still recognised the difference between right and wrong. In modern Britain, it can apparently get you sacked. Within days of each other, a long-serving Waitrose employee and a long-servingContinue reading “Shoplifting Britain: The Checkout Is Open, The Courtroom Is Closed”

A statement of purpose for a platform that keeps asking when councils stop answering Every town has them: the people who tell you not to worry, the paperwork is in hand, the process is being followed, the lessons will be learned, and the matter is, regrettably, rather more complex than ordinary residents might appreciate. StrangelyContinue reading “What Is The Alternative Council For?”

Shropshire Council has now managed the neat administrative trick of sounding anxious in private and ridiculous in public. Inside the building, staff are told the finances remain precarious and external scrutiny is intensifying. Outside it, the county has become fit material for Rotten Boroughs. “It takes a special kind of civic incompetence to turn aContinue reading “From Weekly Update to Rotten Boroughs: Shropshire’s New Standards of Failure”

Big salaries. Bigger mistakes. Smaller consequences. There is a curious habit in local government. When roads fail, budgets collapse, flagship projects stall, and residents are told to brace themselves for another helping of council tax pain, the people at the top somehow remain extremely well upholstered. In Shropshire, the public got emergency finance, stalled schemes,Continue reading “The Failure Premium”

There is a particular kind of civic cheek that deserves admiration only in the way one admires a burglar who leaves his business card on the mantelpiece. Shropshire Council has managed it with Shirehall. Its own papers say that Cornovii Developments Ltd, Shropshire Council’s wholly owned housing development company, was appointed to support planning andContinue reading “Shirehall: Write the Plan, Shape the Site, Then Call It an Open Market”

How to announce a financial mess, a near-9% tax rise, service offloading and overflowing bins in the tone of a woman opening a staff wellbeing seminar There are council documents that inform. There are council documents that mislead. And then there are council documents like this one, which perform a more specialised function: they takeContinue reading “The Newsletter of Managed Decline”

There is a mood in Britain now that the political class keeps pretending not to notice Not calm. Not consent. Not patience. Pressure. The sort of pressure that builds when people are lied to, overcharged, ignored, and then insulted with official language designed to make failure sound responsible. The country is being run, increasingly, byContinue reading “Public Patience Is Breaking”