Lucky Col
Dance as though nobody's watching, love like it's never going to hurt

Friday, February 27, 2009

Nottingham's best interests at heart ?

From the front page of the Nottingham Evening Post:

Revealed

Dysfunctional, ineffective, meddling ... the findings city council tried to suppress


Quite strong stuff, yes ?

Simply, a number of years ago, the City Council decided to let an outside consultancy firm write a report on the top level of management, the report was a very critical of individuals and senior management in general and the report never saw the light of day, despite costing over £30k to produce. Over the last year or so, the Nottingham Evening Post has been trying to obtain a copy of the report under the freedom of information act, but as the report was never published, spiked in draft format, no luck. They've now been, ahem, leaked a copy leading to the aforementioned headlines.

The report is some three years out of date, the chief executive has changed at least twice since then, with most of those named no longer involved.

Isn't it hard enough trying to stave off the ignorant London based journalist w**kers, with their incessant digs at our city, without having to watch your back at the same time ?

I'm not saying that the local paper has to toe the party line, far from it, but dredging up stories three years old is hardly helpful.

Sites like "Nottingham City Council LOLs" don't help, but are explained with the line "Hmmm, from my experience working there I'd go along with that" (from here) leading to an observation the writer has nothing more than a Friday night's worth of chips on his / her shoulder coupled with an inability to just 'let it go'. "Inevitably my own experiences were limited to a particular backwater of the social welfare field". Were they ? Hardly a f***ing expert then, are they ?

And the less said about some of the retards on the Evening Post message boards the better. Living proof that if you give an infinite number of monkeys a keyboard, one of them will reproduce the complete works of Shakespeare, but give just one monkey a keyboard and he'll use it to write b******s to the Evening Post.

The council leader is seen as "a solution to the council's problems but also the creator of many of those problems". He has his heart in the right place but often gets involved in trying to micro-manage situations, setting unrealistic timescales and gets frustrated when these timescales aren't hit. Some harsh criticism for sure, but also an indication that here is someone trying to do the best he can.

But what is the Evening Post's role in all this ?

Bought out by Northcliff Newspapers (part of the Daily Mail group, gulp) in 1995, they have since had an anti-Labour stance on pretty much every major issue since, with this report no different. Also, being privately owned, they have the same objective as every other private company in the world, maximising profit for their share-holders. Not trying to get the best run City Council possible, oh no, money, sensationalistic stories to increase turn-over, sales and advertising revenue.

The City Council isn't perfect, but it's the only one we've got.

The Evening Post is far from perfect, and conveniently, I don't have to read its right wing bile.

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