My week ahead, 7 - 12 September 2015

Monday 7 September, 10am – Meeting with ActivLives
4pm – Culture Portfolio meeting
6pm – Campaigning in South West Ipswich

Saturday 12 September, 10am – Labour campaigning North East Ipswich
2pm – Tour of Britain arrives in Ipswich Town centre.

A few weeks ago I tweeted that I found it surprising that the Suffolk County Council used their official twitter feed to promote County Councillors own twitter account that would obviously be political. At Ipswich Borough Council this does not happen and it seems similar with Central Government.

I was pleased to get a reply from both the Tory leader of the council, Colin Noble and the County Council Press team. The council gave a satisfactory answer, Colin Noble also gave the same explanation but could not resist the opportunity to have a quick snipe at me.

It seemed the reason given for use of councillors twitter names was so that they became more known to their constituents, I was happy with this answer and just hoped that all councillors would be treated equally.

The Suffolk County Council held one of their ‘Listening to you’ events in the Ipswich Town centre on Saturday and well done to them for promoting the event by using the twitter accounts of the Ipswich based Labour County Councillors along with promoting the Tory leaders twitter account.

So you can imagine how disappointing it was to see on Saturday that in 6 Suffolk County Council tweets from the event, the only name mentioned (and only twitter account included) was that of Tory leader – Colin Noble – no mention of the Labour Councillors present ( even if they were in the photographs) does make you wonder if the County Council twitter feed is there to promote the county or just its Tory leader? Certainly seemed strange that all the Labour Councillors seemed to be ignored?

They may have decided not to mention Ipswich Councillors names when the only Tory County Councilor in the town (I am told) was not present at the event.

The other story that is of much more importance is the continuing humanitarian crisis spreading over Europe as Syrian refugees make their way towards Germany – more on my view on this issue here – but it does seem now that even Tory Ministers including the Chancellor are stating we should do more, the only people who still seems set against taking anyone are UKIP and a large percentage of Tory activists – they can add Syrian refugees to their NIMBY list of council houses and wind turbines.

I do understand some of their concerns but when they use the pathetic excuse of stopping refugees coming here as they be ISIS infiltrators then you lose any little respect you had for their views.