GREY SKIES hung over the Borough this afternoon as residents prepared to usher in tomorrow’s New Year, and the morning mist, which stubbornly refused to move from low lying regions, obscured a previously visible horizon.
The conditions perfectly expressed the political weather that lies ahead.
Borough councillors face an ominous task in 2011, paring back overheads and public services to achieve almost 30 per cent cuts over the next two years. Few residents are likely to be happy as the axe falls; but the majority of Canvey Beat readers agree: deep cuts are necessary, and members should not increase Council Tax or Business Rates to lessen their impact.
Two years of imposed frugality lie ahead, and the heady days of high-spending, easy credit and the belief by some that the State was obliged to finance their jobless lifestyles to match those of their hard-working neighbours is fast disappearing. Together with tonight’s New Year we usher in a return to personal responsibility – and personal obligations to society at large.
In 2011, Canvey Islanders will re-elect their Town Councillors – or choose to replace them with others more attuned to the times and the island’s needs. In the three years of its existence, the Town Council has been a testament to how over three-quarters-of-a-million pounds of precious islanders’ money can be squandered.
Despite having been provided almost £800,000 by islanders, Canvey Island has nothing to show for it – apart for some High Street planters; numerous hanging flower baskets and Town Council plaques; a handful of Town Council notice boards and hundreds of dead trees that could not grow in the local soil conditions. And we should not, of course, forget Nero’s fiddle that the Town Council lavishly played at its many public ‘celebrations’ while the local Citizens’ Advice Bureau and the Castle Point Car Scheme, supporting impoverished and disabled residents, begged for funds.
The Town Council has had no money to support island charities; establish its own subsidised local transport scheme (like other parishes) or cement the community together by bridging the ever widening gap between older island residents and its displaced youth. While other parishes’ community spirit emanates from their Town Halls, the Canvey Island Independent Party (CIIP) has used our civic amenities to promote its own brand of divisive politics and spend its precept, provided by islanders for the benefit of the community, upon costly borough assets (like Canvey Lake) that were once funded by all Castle Point Taxpayers. Islanders are now forced to continue paying the same amount of Castle Point Council Tax and, in addition, pick-up all of the costs associated with those bottomless-pits.
In three short years, the CIIP’s incompetence has virtually bankrupted our virgin Town Council and left no room for assisting residents through the hard times that lay ahead. Nor have they left any funds for anyone else to do so.
In 2011, islanders need to take-back their Town Council and install a new regime whose members can sort-out the financial mess that the CIIP has created and steer its councillors towards creating a parish council that islanders can be proud of.
A parish council that serves the community that finances it – and not a handful of self indulgent politicians trying to recreate an old Canvey Island District Council that its residents cannot afford…
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