Labour, Tories & Cannock Stadium

As a Cannock resident, I would like to congratulate Cannock Chase’s Labour-run council over their plans for the redevelopment of the site of the old Cannock Festival Stadium. Work on the site is to start in April 2015 and include a full-sized football pitch, five smaller pitches, allotments, children's play areas, outdoor gym and a community centre. This will provide an important facility for all people of Cannock and the plans can be seen to be promoting sporting excellence and positive recreational facilities for young people in the area and also a step towards promoting health and wellbeing at a time when there is concern about diabetes and obesity amongst the young.

For those who aren’t aware, after sixteen years of Labour control, Cannock Chase District Council went into No Overall Control in 2003, which paved the way for a Coalition between the local Conservative and Liberal Democrat councillors (yes, that again!). Over the next few years, the new council developed plans to demolish Cannock’s Festival Stadium, which had stood proudly at the Pye Green Road site since 1951, and sell the site off for housing development. The stadium had, for decades, provided not just sporting facilities for the people of Cannock but community facilities too – the nearby Blake High School (now the Staffordshire University Academy), for example, regularly used the stadium for its annual Sports Day. The move to get rid of the stadium was met with hostility and anger from local residents who valued the facilities the stadium brought to the town. Eventually the council got their way and the site was closed in 2008, the stadium itself demolished shortly after. However, the land never was sold off and has been left a derelict mess.

The 2011 local elections saw the end of the Tory-LibDem Coalition’s misrule when, despite remaining in No Overall Control, Labour formed a minority council, gaining a majority twelve months later. Since gaining a majority, the Labour council removed the site from the list of land available for housing and retained it as public open space for leisure and recreation. They then continued to develop plans for regeneration of the neglected stadium site and the final plans were those mentioned above. The plans were put before consultation in early 2013 and were given the go-ahead in November this year, with work to begin this coming April. The redevelopment has been met with a positive response from Cannock residents who are looking forward to the return of their cherished sports hub, albeit in a different form. The local Tories have objected to the plans, their leader whining last year that the consultation process was like “asking a child if they want a lollipop – they’re always going to say yes”. Let’s be honest, Conservatives don’t believe in public services and facilities for ordinary people and would rather line their own pockets by selling the site of for housing. Their sort are alright, Jack, they've got the money to go to private health clubs.

This shows a stark difference once again between the Labour Party and the Tories and Liberal Democrats (and I will include UKIP in this as most of their councillors were Conservative councillors at the time) who demolished the old stadium and desperately tried to sell the site off for housing development against the wishes and the interests of the people of Cannock Chase. The fact that the then council did this highlights the indifference and even contempt in which the other parties have shown to the people – young and old – of Cannock Chase.  

In fact, the Conservative and Liberal Democrat presence on Cannock Chase Council has been decimated as of the 2014 local elections with Labour gaining a commanding majority with 25 seats and UKIP now the official opposition with 6. The Tories only have 5 councillors and the Liberal Democrats (the largest party on the council as recently as four years ago) are left with 3 seats. This has been partly down to election results but also the defections of three Tory councillors to UKIP 18 months ago – UKIP became the official opposition this May when Jodie Jones left the Conservative Party to become an Independent in the wake of the party’s handling of her fiancé, local MP Aidan Burley’s stag party antics. The Liberal Democrat vote has been decimated in its traditional Hednesford stronghold (North, South and Green Heath wards) where all the seats are now held by Labour. Labour are also eating into the Lib Dem vote in the Rugeley wards (another area formerly of strong Lib Dem presence), particularly in the Brereton & Ravehill ward; the party paying the price for both their escapades alongside the Conservatives on Cannock Chase Council and for propping up the fundamentally right-wing Tory-led government in Downing Street.

Coming back off the tangent, the people of the Cannock Chase District/Constituency should be aware of the Stadium issue – and the entire saga surrounding it – and bare this in mind when they’re deciding who to vote for in both the local and general elections in May. The Tories (nor UKIP or the Lib Dems, for that matter) should not be allowed to gain control of the council, nor the Parliamentary Seat, ever again.

How Can We Solve The Immigration Issue?

Last Friday, David Cameron made a speech in the West Midlands regarding that well-discussed issue of immigration and, particularly, that of migration from the EU. His main announcement was a deportation of EU migrants who are not working after six months in the country. This, amongst other things, rendered his speech vacuous and disingenuous as he portrayed EU migrants as a feckless drain on the British taxpayer. This couldn’t be further from the truth; the vast majority of migrants from the EU come here to work – often with a job lined up – under the “free movement of labour”, which the Prime Minister stated in his speech that he believes in. These people have often made positive contributions to our society and economy and to label them as ‘scroungers’ is extremely misleading and will not bring immigration down.

Ed Miliband, on the hand, has jumped on a different, and more pertinent, issue regarding immigration from the EU. That is the issue of clothing retailer Next – run by Conservative peer and donor Lord Wolfson – advertising hundreds of jobs in Poland before advertising them to local people. Is it really any wonder that net migration continues to rise when jobs are being advertised in Poland before they are here? This is yet another example of employers hiring cheap labour from EU countries on short-term contracts in order to maximise their profits, which is sending both immigration and unemployment through the roof. Miliband has rightly said he will ban the practice of advertising jobs abroad before advertising locally and, coupled with his plans to introduce a living wage, this will see these jobs become more viable to local people causing immigration and unemployment to fall.

Now, the immigration issue is an incredibly complex one there are no hard and fast answers for how to deal with it. But once again, Miliband and Labour have real plans to improve things for the working people of the United Kingdom whereas all Cameron has is empty rhetoric and no serious answers to the problems of working men and women while leaving in place the structures that are causing these problems but benefit his party’s wealthy donors.