From the Liberal Democrat’s experienced elected Westminster representative, Alan Reid MP, to the Labour party’s candidate for Argyll and Bute at the Scottish Election 2011, Mick Rice, have come onslaughts on Argyll and Bute Council’s flawed school closure proposals.
Alan Reid, Liberal Democrat MP for Argyll & Bute, called on Argyll & Bute Council to re-examine all the calculations of pupil journey times in its school closure consultation document.
Mr Reid says: ‘The Council say that, if a school is closed, no pupil should have to travel more than 45 minutes to their new school. However, it is obvious to anyone who knows Argyll & Bute that many pupils would be faced with a journey time over 45 minutes if these 26 schools closed.
‘The most ridiculous example is Luing, where the Council want to close the only school on the island. Pupils would be faced with a journey by bus and ferry of well over 45 minutes. It is absolutely ridiculous to even think of closing the only school on the island.
‘If the Council calculates the journey times properly, it will take many of the schools off the closure list’.
And Mick Rice goes in for kill with: ‘The SNP control the education portfolio – their Councillor would have approved the release of the closure proposals. Yet the SNP now take credit for pressing the ‘other councillors’ for a delay.
‘But the delay has really occurred because the proposals were based on wrong information. The future birth predictions are incorrect. Some of the travel to school distances are wrong. The calculation for rural support grant is also being questioned. This has led to mass opposition from communities right across Argyll and Bute.
‘We know that the Council wants to close 26 primary schools and merge them with 20 existing primary schools.
‘There are 80 primary schools in total in Argyll and Bute so 34 are unaffected.
‘Unless we know why the 34 are excluded there will always be the concern that they have had preferential treatment’.
Now there’s a new angle on the issue.
Is Mick Rice going to turn out to be a lateral thinker? Things could get interesting. He is certainly not one to shy away from a ding-dong.
Three cheers if our Unionist politicians are prepared for a ‘ding-dong’ and point out the shambles the SNP are responsible for .
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Isn’t Scotland a great place – better even than the early USA as a land of opportunity. Someone can come here and within a matter of weeks be starting on the possible path to be First Minister of our nation. What a welcoming and liberated nation we are. Makes you proud to be Scottish!
On lateral thinking – the request for an explanation as to why some schools were excluded has been in for some time and the inforamtion will be released with the papers for the next Council meeting. I think we need real lateral thinking and constructive engagement from our putative First Minister and our pro/anti (delete according to latest wind direction) Trident replacement MP.
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If you are ever looking for an truly assinine comment you can always depend on Kintyre 1!
If he genuinely believes that the SNP are responsible for the present budget situation in Argyll, or elsewhere in Scotland, then he is a greater fool than I have previously thought and I can assure you I started withhim fairly far up the scale
One mightwonder why the Argyll & Bute Council are faced with the horrendous and clearly unwelcome prospect of looking at closing a tranche of rural schools. Cash strapped is one phrase that comes to mind and the necessity of balancing a budget might be another imperative. Clearly the Liberal Democrat members of the Council will have put forward many constructive cash saving proposals to bring to the table and as for the Labour Councillors?
Where are they exactly? The Labour Party appears to have totally abdicated local government in Argyll in recent years between councillors that simply went AWOL and those who hide their affiliations elsewhere.
As our councillors battle to find solutions between the mess left by Labour at Westminster -”no point in looking for the money -we have spent it all” and the cuts proposed by Alan Reid and his friends presently “sorting it out” somehow the feeling that “we are all in this together” rings more than a little false.
Nobody would or could pretend that our council are without fault and surely the consultation process will resolve many of the genuine criticisms that exist but to see such a couple of chancers, particularly when we know where they are coming from, trying to screw political advantage from such a situation is likely to give a few of us the dry boak. No community wants its school to be closed and to try to set communities against each other is fairly contemptible.
When some of the threatened schools are saved , as surely they must be, where do Messrs Reid and Rice suggest that genuine savings be identified? What services do they think should be cut?
How about Trident for starters? That might release a lot of government funding. Mr Reid apparently believes that what we spend on that hideous system keeps a school open!
As for Mr Rice and his ding dong: is that not what Lesley Phillips used to say?
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