The community can SAVE CLEEVE HILL GOLF COURSE. But don’t expect Tewkesbury Borough Council or any local politicians to do it on their own

I was deeply saddened to read the news this week that Cleeve Hill Golf Club is set to close at the end of March 2021.

Reading the comments on the Facebook Page Save Cleeve Hill Golf Course that has been set up to try and save this well-known local community resource, I could feel the passion and frustration that is already tangible amongst a great many people, whilst from a very different perspective understand fully why the decision and circumstances that are publicly known today will come across as being so unfair.

Those of you who know me will be aware that Cleeve Common occupies a very special part of my family history. My father Chris was the Warden of the Common for some 15 years up until shortly before his death in early 2006 and I am a regular walking visitor myself, having only been for a circular walk with my new pup early this past Sunday morning.

I was also a Tewkesbury Borough Councillor for 8 years and Chair of the Licensing Committee for 4 of them. Whilst I don’t agree with the conclusions or views from the Council I have read publicly, I am well aware of how such decisions these days will have been reached and what factors are likely to have motivated them.

On the Council’s side of the ‘problem’, the current Leaseholder has given notice or taken the opportunity not to renew the Lease (Which regrettably makes a lot of sense). The Council has commissioned a report that says the Golf Club and Course isn’t commercially viable. The Council has concluded that the Clubhouse is beyond a sensible cost for renewal and repair.

But it’s what the Council isn’t saying publicly about their longer-term plans for the Clubhouse site which should really be the starting point for any public interest about the way the decision has been reached – especially in such challenging times for the hospitality and leisure industries.

With the prospect of such a well-known public facility about to be closed, everyone with an interest in Cleeve Hill and the Golf Club has the right to be sure that there isn’t some hidden agenda or longer-term plan at work that is being sold to us as something else as it is convenient and politically expedient to do so right now.

Tewkesbury Borough Council would do well to formally assure the Public immediately that there isn’t any plan for the value of the Clubhouse site to be realised in the future by allowing private development to take place in a process that will benefit the Council financially or in some other way.

To be fair to Tewkesbury Borough, ALL Councils are struggling financially for a range of reasons. Some are local and of their own making. But many are handed to them by the Westminster Government and are therefore not theirs to own.

Right across Local Government, Councillors and Officers have simply lost sight of the fact that they are there to manage public assets like these in our best interests and that Councils are not a business that they can or should even try to run like it is something that they personally own.

Meanwhile, on the Public side of ‘debate’, Cleeve Hill Golf Course is a community asset. Golf Courses are popular and financially viable all around the Cotswolds and the Gloucestershire area. The Course is a landmark and part of our local history and is arguably unique. The Golf course could be better utilised to give local people – and especially young people more constructive things to do.

But the numbers of fee-paying players who go through the Clubhouse and on to a Course like Cleeve Common, in this state and in this location is probably smaller that it may to appearances seem.

The Clubhouse itself is not used regularly in the way that it could be by significant numbers of local people as a pub or destination, and certainly not now during these times that the Government response to Coronavirus continues. Could you really look back to cold, dark misty winter nights on Cleeve Hill and say that this is somewhere that you would then definitely want to be?

Painful as it is to write, the reality is that Tewkesbury Borough Council has already indicated that it will not subsidise the Golf Course. We must all be big enough to recognise that there is a case to be argued that if the Council were going to subsidise anything, there are likely to be other public services that local Public money should be used to prioritise within the local community first.

Equally however, none of us would knowingly invest money in any project that would not command a realistic return. With the cost of modernising and refitting the Clubhouse likely to be the reason why the Council’s Consultants have concluded that it would be better to pull it down, you might begin to see that the Council would probably want to have any investment returned in full in what might be little more than a ten-year period.

Put it this way, if the work considered necessary to re-let the Clubhouse and Course commercially were £400,000.00 up front, the £769.23 per week repayment cost before interest, added to the existing c.£1000.00 per week rental fee would simply make the prospect of taking on the project commercially absurd, when you put it into the perspective of the impact of Coronavirus, The Lockdown and everything else.

Whilst what I have written above is intended merely as a quick guide of the likely mechanics of what is going on, it certainly doesn’t make the decision or any of the unseen influences upon it feel in any way right.

What it does do is suggest strongly that petitions and banging on the doors of Councillors and the Tewkesbury and Cheltenham MPs will ultimately prove not to be enough to yield any meaningful fruit – no matter how sympathetic they or any other local person of influence may be minded to be about saving the Clubhouse and the Course.

If you genuinely want to save Cleeve Hill Golf Course, the community made up of people with an interest in using it will need to come up with an alternative solution to the one that our local Councillors and the Officers that advise them have tabled.

It will have to be one that really works.

It is likely that the Golf Course and the Golf Clubhouse can and will only be saved by a community based, not-for-profit approach such as a social enterprise.

Any kind of commercial or ‘profit-making’ approach without a ridiculous amount of risk and accepted loss is extremely unlikely to be viable in any way.

Whether right or wrong, the starting point for any valid discussion with the Council would be the general understanding and acceptance on the part of everyone who wants to save Cleeve Hill Golf Course that the only thing that can be expected as a minimum will be the good will of the Council to keep the Golf Course open as a Public Community Asset. There must be recognition that any acceptable plan is unlikely to have any additional financial cost to the Council involved.

Crowdfunding is an option to cover remedial work and repairs – especially as the site and location is so popular. This project would have significant attraction if it was marketed just right.

But if there is a genuine will amongst the local community to not only save Cleeve Hill Golf Club and the Clubhouse, but to actually see it thrive, then everyone who wants to see it open and there to use will also have to be both a user and evangelist of the facilities that are on offer. Everyone must make sure that no matter whether they are golfers, a youth group or a local group of ramblers, the operating company that takes over runs and promotes the whole thing and manages this fabulous community asset as both a facility and experience that is accessible to all and is open and ready year-round for everyone to use.

There isn’t much time. To save this resource, a sensible and non-combative dialogue needs to begin with Tewkesbury Borough Council right now, so that the Council has the chance to make clear what they can and can’t do. The Community will then be better placed to consider, put together and then table a proposal and take the steps necessary that might then lead to a 2021 win-win for users, the Council and of course, most if not all of those who are currently facing the loss of their jobs.

The people who use and love the Golf Course and the Common may not have the skills and experience to tackle this issues and drive forward as individuals alone.

But working together, it is almost certain that all of the skills, experience and motivation necessary to save Cleeve Hill Golf Course already exists.

Power and decision making should be as local to people as possible. It’s because it isn’t that so much with Public Policy is wrong

It’s been a long time since we have had government in the UK that has been competent enough to look proactively at changing things for the better, if that change would itself compromise the desire of politicians to endlessly keep increasing their control.

For decades, since the seismic changes that accompanied the end of Empire and the onset of the Cold War age following the end of the Second World War, the incompetency of generation after generation of Westminster politicians has seen power hoovered up and removed from the hands of local people. However, rather than holding on to it themselves centrally, politicians have passed more and more of their responsibility onwards to an outside power called the EU which has successfully indoctrinated the political classes across an entire continent into thinking that the creation of a supranational state is the ultimate tool of localism.

SPOILER ALERT: It is not.

I have been a Eurosceptic since I was a teenager, but gained no pleasure from seeing the debate unfold in public and the damage that was done from the moment that David Cameron committed the UK to a Referendum on Leaving the EU. It was unexpectedly won by those who identified with the localised side of the argument rather than the nebulous way of thinking that big (and centralised) is always best for everyone.

Remainers often cited the inability of Leavers to tell them what benefits there would be to Leaving the EU as clear evidence that there was no question to answer and that the UK should Remain a Member. Yet they overlooked that they couldn’t give a plausible argument that it was in our collective interest to stay.

The argument for Leaving the EU that was never heard and which should have underpinned everything, is power should be kept as local to voters as possible. Then decision making is kept real, in touch with the issues and our local communities are always kept at the centre of what politicians do.

When people can access decision makers easily and see that they themselves have the power to influence the decisions that are important to them, they are much more likely to be and to remain engaged. They will be much less likely to be disenfranchised from a political system that in its current form today is seeking to remove the power that remains in local hands and move it further away into the hands of highly political regional mayors.

The genuine change or reset that is coming in the near future (rather than the one that some are falling into the conspiracists trap of believing has been created by deliberate design) will create a massive opportunity to restructure, reform and relaunch government and the public sector comprehensively across the UK. It will be the chance to get every kind of pubic service working as they should for us all.

The real opportunity for improvement in the way that decisions on public policy are made in the future will be the voluntary return of power to the lowest tier of government that it is possible to do so, thereby ensuring that genuinely local decisions are locally made.

By local, this means a real shakeup of Town & Parish, District & Borough and County Councils with the disbanding of so-called Unitary Authorities and the list of powers these lower tiers of Government have redirected to the lowest level possible.

The responsibilities lower tier authorities have now should be topped up by the return of everything that has a very localised impact. Power must be returned to the local government structure and directed away from Westminster where it has been sat and used without appropriate care and consideration for too long.

It is no longer acceptable that laws effecting the lives of everyday people locally that were created by bureaucrats in London (or Brussels), who have a one-size fits all mentality are made and then only interpreted by officers and rubber stamped by councillors – who often believe they have no other choice – even though it is the will and needs of voters that they are there to respect.

The contrary argument is a good one. That there simply isn’t the funding available for these lower tiers of Government to exist and function now as they once did.

Yet the economic argument is now a hollow one as the technology that we have available dictates that very local authorities no longer have the need to retain the massive administrative or executive functions that they once did.

Whilst cost cutting means that pooling technical delivery services such as environmental health services or bin collections make sound economic sense, there is absolutely no reason that decision making has to be run or modelled in the same way.

That is before you cross the Rubicon and tackle the question of the what the financial impact of the local Government Pension Scheme on local Council Budgets involves and the savings and therefore money it would provide for services to be resumed that have been stopped today.

If we have a Westminster government that treats the whole of the Electorate as the adults that we are, it stands to reason that the same government must also treat the politicians within the localised tiers of government as adults too.

The additional powers that local Councils would have right down at neighbourhood and village level would immediately see people and more suitable candidates for elections becoming reengaged.

The real change that must come to make the difference at local level (at the very least) is the removal of political parties from the electoral process and action taken to prevent outside influence and money from holding sway.

It is not only possible and practical for independent candidates to run their own election campaigns, but would also be a highly democratic step to require that those seeking election to Councils of any kind are able to communicate and connect with the electorate during a campaign without the support of a national brand.

The current approach only ensures that we have too many people representing themselves and the interests of ‘their people’ instead of us all throughout government at every level.

We must take the coming opportunity to work to elect the right people to public representative offices of every kind and support this process by removing all of the tools that make it easy to place power in the wrong hands with the massive cost to us all that then involves.

There’s nothing humane about algorithms being used to make life judgements and the A’ Level grade fiasco should be a lesson to us all

Regrettably, at the time of a National Crisis, it seems that the only thing original about the Johnson Government, is its ability to repeatedly mess things up.

I would like to be able to say that they have a legitimate excuse for doing everything that they have done since the Covid Pandemic came into view. But they don’t.

Whilst many still believe it right to support the Government because that’s what you should do, the real story and the different truths that have ridden shotgun with the creation of this chaos will come to light, either when the public files are opened or this stupid political clique is replaced by people who know what politicians are actually supposed to do.

Of all the mistakes Johnson and his cronies have made so far, the one that illustrates the abject disconnect from all forms of decision-making-responsibility, that is endemic within this political culture, is that of using an algorithm to produce grades for our 18 year old, end-of-school students, who inevitably see their A ‘Level grades as a pivot point where the success or failure of their entire lives is mapped out.

Before school closures that were neither necessary and certainly weren’t thought through, the GCSE and A ‘Level exams process in the UK was already arbitrary in the extreme, overlooking the reality that many students are not academically inclined and of those who appear to be, some will never be masters of exam technique.

But to then completely dehumanise the process and use an algorithm to make decisions when another flawed political choice meant that exams in the summer of 2020 could not be completed, is injustice of an extraordinary kind.

Algorithms are great for working with numbers and sifting data of a numerical or quantitative kind. But they are next to useless where qualitative data or the real idiosyncrasies and circumstances of life and human existence are concerned.

The only shortcut this route was ever going to provide was one treating all A ‘Level Students as if the history or chronology of the events leading them here; what they did and how they did it, was identically the same – not to mention anything already discussed above.

Yes, the Universities application and offer process is constrained by numbers every year. But Covid and the ridiculous steps that the Government has already taken meant this was never going to be a ‘normal’ year, and factors such as foreign student numbers no longer being as certain as ‘normal’ would have meant there are vacancies that our commercially focused Universities need to fill to make the sums add up – no matter the usual grades requirements involved.

There is no algorithm that can fairly explain or make account for the peculiarities of any individuals circumstances. It is both lazy and distinctly harmful to surrender human decision making to a machine when that machine can only ever account for the level of detail or data that it was programmed with.

Parents are naturally beside themselves right now and many have good reason to be. Young people who were about to break free of the perceptual barriers and ties of their background have been binned just because our politicians are not up to the job and incapable of thinking in a different way.

But the real travesty beyond that we can only hope public pressure will force Johnson to fix, is the reality that algorithms are already playing a massive part in the formal electronic or -online’ relationships that we have everything. From our use of social media, to how our job applications are managed – giving recruiters an irresponsibly easy time to check that boxes are ticked, but nothing more.

Algorithms and the people who use them to cut corners to make business processes ‘more efficient’ to cut costs, are not only playing a massive part in the dehumanisation of relationships that has accompanied the internet age. They are also rejecting people whose circumstances a computer code will inevitably overlook, whilst denying the benefit of added value to businesses that were always a major consideration of the employing managers before the created quasi sectors of HR and Recruitment evolved – and still would be if they realised what a con and all-round injustice these algorithms and employing the services of the people who use them involve.

This corner cutting is pernicious and whilst the improvement in technology to improve the user and end user experience is always something that we should aspire to, it should not necessarily mean that the advances are used to cut costs and jobs if that is what it can do.

The quality of the relationship with people, the product and the all-round experience will always be compromised if not lost by prioritising Tech above all things.

Money or cost-saving should never be the basic law governing business, when everything that we do in any business is ultimately always and universally about people and thereby the human relationship.

Process is the only thing holding government and the public sector together

You’re probably wondering why things don’t seem to be working as they should. Looking back at the Lockdown it’s easy to fall into the trap of thinking that the government is in control of everything that’s been happening and that everything that has happened has been the result of reasoned decision making at the highest levels.

Look more closely and you begin to see the mistakes. The errors in judgement. The key milestones when decisions were taken that have resulted in things taking a turn for the worse, for us all.

Without fail, these are the points where decisions have been made where there is no history to reference. Where no precedent has been set. Where none of the members of the Government have ever had reason to tread or cast a view before.

Where everything else that has taken place has been concerned, the decisions have seemed easy. Because there has been a guidebook, a framework, a way of doing things, or what is known as a procedure to address events of these kinds when they take place.

Events that fall outside the scope of procedure, where procedure is outdated or doesn’t cater for the needs of our 21^st Century World, require leadership skills that our Politicians and the people that advise them simply do not have. That is where everything to do with Covid and the Lockdown has begun to go very wrong.

People who are or have always been insulated from the ways of the world and the life experiences of the governed should never be given the responsibility to govern. Yet that is how our broken British Political system works.

published on Twitter at 6.44 on 20/07/2020

Earlier this week, one of the more in-tune MPs at Westminster, Tory Steve Baker wrote in a Tweet that ‘All our imaginations were unequal to the task of foreseeing the consequences of closing down a large proportion of our economy and society.’

Outside of Parliament and outside of the establishment, at least some were not so blinkered or deficient of the understanding and foresight necessary to know what the Government was about to unleash and how inadequate and destructive the financial remedies would be, that like the Lockdown, the Johnson Government imposed by choice.

If there had been a procedure in place to address a national crisis of the kind presented by the Covid Pandemic, the provision that was made may well have been better than what elected Politicians put together, making choices that have illustrated that they are well and truly out of their depth.

As with the off-the-shelf test and trace strategy that government failed to implement, there would have been a risk that politicians would think better of using it in the heat of the moment. But one can certainly live in hope that’s what their ‘decision’ would have been.

Instead, the rise of movements of those disenfranchised by the Lockdown and inadequacy of the financial remedies such as #ForgottenLtd and #ExcludedUK illustrate only the tip of the iceberg that exists in relation to the lack of provision and support for people and businesses that were stopped in their tracks and the disparity that exists between what the politicians believe and what is actually going on for people in the world outside Westminster.

When politicians of the level and ability of Steve Baker are putting their hands up and openly admitting that they are not capable of living up to the responsibilities of the jobs which many of them long coveted, it is quite clear that whilst this political class continues to run the Country, as a people, we will continue to be well and truly damned.

What Makes Anyone Racist?

Of the words and actions most noticeable during the riots, protests and unrest that has followed the death of George Floyd in the USA, it has been the trend to use some process of transference to make just about anything relevant to the anger that protestors have by branding it as being racist too.

A significant group of mainly young people rightly feel disenfranchised from a system that cares little about who they are, where they are from and what they do.

What they do not realise is that beyond Westminster and the Establishment system, we all feel this way. We just have a different way of looking at the World because we have had more time looking and thinking about it.

Groupthink has taken over to such an extent that racism, like many other isms that represent prejudice against certain groups is now being identified and attacked like it is a conscious, considered and deliberate dark political philosophy.

Yet racism and all these innate prejudices that so many of us unwittingly carry are a basic animalistic or intrinsic level reaction to difference.

Too many of us possess prejudices against others for the world to be as fair as it should be. But few are self-aware enough to understand and value the differences in the way that they feel about others and everything that appears to be outside of them.

We do not like anything that is different to the image and perceptions that we have of ourselves. As we look outwards. the easiest way to define or differentiate ourselves against others is by the colour of our skin.

But that same process works at different levels and in different ways with wealth, sexual orientation, race and nationality, level of education, social standing, demographics and even our view and approach to any gender different than ourselves.

Difference is important because it is the easiest way for us to define ourselves and our state of being against others who will then either elevate within our perceptions so that they stand above us and we look up to them – perhaps as celebrities and people we look up to, or we use as leverage to elevate and place ourselves above them and look down upon them – perhaps as if they have no value or do not qualify to have the same things or same experiences that we do in some way.

The recognition of differences between us and the process that goes with it runs like a background computer programme. No matter what anyone might say if they are challenged about the innate prejudices that they may or may not have, few will really be able to identify the real cause of what makes them prejudiced and the assumption will remain that it is either a cultural thing or they have been conditioned in some way.

Prejudice works in all directions too. A viral spread comes into play where the racism or prejudice about one will be mirrored towards everyone who looks or behaves similarly in some way.

The flow of prejudice is not one way and cannot be defined so simply as the oppressor is racist to the oppressed as the intrinsic reaction of the oppressed is to be equally racist about their oppressor(s) too. The harsh reality of what protestors are doing is that they are practicing an inverted form of racism and prejudice too which is invariably just as bad because they are accusing whole sets of people or professionals of being exactly the same, often in very sinister ways.

Confirmation bias is a big part of the problem too and steps in at every opportunity that it can. Any behaviour or action that can be interpreted negatively to reinforce that initial feeling of discomfort and doubt which was genuine, grows automatically and evolves itself at an emotional and therefore highly charged and dangerous level too.

As we look outside ourselves, it is rare that we realise or understand the way that we are constantly being conditioned by the media and by the world around us to think and behave. But it is the behaviour of the media that opens the floodgates that allow prejudices to come marching in.

The process is very nuanced and begins at a level where there is either extreme positive prejudice or on the negative scale, there is simply none.

Think in terms of how you view the actions, behaviours, misdemeanors and even crimes of the people who are most like you. Your family.

No matter what your family members do, can they really do any wrong? Would you stick up for family members and fight their corner because you know and trust that they are intrinsically good, no matter what they do?

If family are level 1, then your friends and the people you most closely align yourself are level 2 and within these groups you will overlook differences because whilst you have a good relationship, you see them as being the same as you. ‘You make allowances’ in the same or a similar way, and there is a bizarre reality that whatever you are used to in life becomes normality and it is everything else beyond that normality where your prejudices will be found.

As you look at what could be a series of many levels the differences increase too. We look for the easiest way to stereotype, identify and anchor those differences and skin colour is probably one of the easiest that we will ever identify.

***

When you have watched a video like that of the ‘arrest’ of George Floyd, it is easy to understand how so many can conclude that racism is a very conscious and highly malevolent act and that anyone who can be deemed to be racist must either be punished or have their behviour changed or doctored in some way.

As Hanlon’s Razor says, we should “Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity”.

Whether it is the people who project or behave in ways which we consider to be racist, or it is those who look on and accuse them of being racist, it is a hard truth to accept that it is mostly stupidity or downright ignorance that makes all of us prejudiced about others in some way.

Solving the problem of prejudice should never have been easier than it could be today.

But what we collectively fail to understand is that the championing of difference and the messages that are crafted to promote the interests of any group with the aim of promoting equality makes the differences between groups even more profound.

The message being heard is that we are all different and need to be the same. But it is the people who are not in these groups that are the ones who are wrong to be different and that it is they who must now change.

If we really want to have and experience the kind of equality between all peoples, all races and all groups in each and every way that we can, we will have to be led and inspired to understand, believe and live the reality that differences between us are nothing more than perceptions and that whatever they might be, we are all, collectively equal and we are fundamentally just the same.

It is all about creating a condition of familiarity and conscious acceptance of difference that can only be facilitated if we learn from every angle that the differences between all of us are no big deal from the start.