Re~Stirred Forum

On another thread, Gerry told us that he bumped into Shafique Shah who told him that he had declined the Audit Committee Chair role after others had turned it down. Well it turns out they he had initially accepted the post. He lasted four days before resigning. Couple this with the abolition of Randal Brew's Finance role in Cabinet it's worrying that Labour don't appear to be able to find anybody who gives a monkeys about the council's finances from within their ranks.

This post and two others have been merged with this thread from "Cllr Shah Deceives Gerry" to start a new thread while refereeing to this existing thread is unnecessary.

Are there any accountants in their ranks? I imagine it is a nigh on impossible role to do with any diligence without pretty sound financial savvy.

Odd way of thinking given that very few people were ever involved in developing atomic bombs. Though I must ask whether you would have preferred that Britain [and the US] did not develop nuclear capability and allowed the Soviet Union to have an uncountered nuclear arsenal?

This is OT, but...

It's not the number of people involved in developing them which is this issue. I was talking about people's attitudes to scientists. They were no longer seen, by many, in quite the same positive light when people realised they had invented such an efficient killing machine. News headlines in my childhood were often dominated by threats of proliferation and test ban treaties. And of course the opposition: Ban the Bomb, CND, the Committee of 100, and Aldermaston marches. That was a new and negative reaction to science. It worries me slightly that you don't see that. Are your generation unaware of what nuclear bombs do?

Why is the City Council building an atomic bomb?

Is the issue the Shah resigned or that he deceived Gerry?

Fair play to him for accepting he's not up to the role. He went before he messed up and is concentrating on his ward. This is how it should be.

Let's see which local councillor, elected on local issues, is capable of dealing with city finances. No pressure there then.

Deception is never good.
 

I'm not sure he was accepting he was not up to the role. It sounded more like he wasn't interested in it. I do recall that when that Cabinet post for Finance was created senior Finance staff at BCC were most pleased. Now they'll have the challenge of trying to cope with the free-wheeling thoughts of an open-plan Cabinet without anyone in Cabinet either having budgetary responsibility or even charged with keeping an eye on these matters. It was financial issues that were at the root cause of many of the problems from the last Labour administration - social services was a good example of a department where financial management was completely dysfunctional. It looks like Albert has learnt little whilst in opposition and will undo the progress made by the Coalition in short order.

Because it is more trustworthy than the Ministry of Defence, and has better budgetary control.

Don't think I'd entrust my life [or anything else really] to anyone at the city council...

Given that atomic bombs have only been used twice in 67 years, I wouldn't describe them as being particularly efficient at killing. The proportion of people killed in armed conflict since 1939, by atomic weapons is tiny. So if you really want to get wound up about weapons, I suggest you write to the manufacturers of AK-47s.I would suggest that nuclear bombs do precisely nothing - or rather they keep the peace. That they have such destructive potential is exactly why nobody is willing to use them other than in retaliation at a previous nuclear strike. As you know it is MAD - and this kept the Soviet Union and West in a cold rather than a hot war. Similarly India and Pakistan have mostly avoided open conflict since acquiring their nuclear capability. And as long as Britain has a nuclear arsenal it is unlikely to face direct, conventional military threats from other nations. So I would suggest nuclear weapons have a very positive impact.

I still don't see why people inventing the bomb in the 1940s has any bearing on the safety of mobile phone masts in the 2010s, especially when there is precisely nothing linking bombs and masts together. You might as well say that since colour televisions were brought in after the bomb, they too must be a sinister cause of cancer.

Not interested is as bad as not capable,  both qualify as not up to it.

Would he have been more accepting of his cabinet failure under a fair vote of the labour group rather than the personal gift of the Supreme Leader.

Did the other six cabinet losers all get a committee chair? Is that how it works?

There's no reason to doubt Wiki:
"Within the first two to four months of the bombings, the acute effects killed 90,000–166,000 people in Hiroshima and 60,000–80,000 in Nagasaki, with roughly half of the deaths in each city occurring on the first day. The Hiroshima prefecture health department estimated that, of the people who died on the day of the explosion, 60% died from flash or flame burns, 30% from falling debris and 10% from other causes. During the following months, large numbers died from the effect of burns, radiation sickness, and other injuries, compounded by illness."

That is a very very effective killing machine. The fact that it may have ironically stopped wars because everyone is so frightened of it is accidental (though fortuitous).

You seem deliberately to misunderstand arguments. Why? My simple point was that the postwar generations had less trust for scientists than their predecessors, because science had produced this monstrous method of death. The fifties, in many ways a happy era, were destabilised by the fear of the bomb. And I think that fear has lessened because of our distance from 1945, so the sometimes rather naive progressive faith in science has reasserted itself. That was all.

I was making a comparative judgment.

Whilst bearing in mind that the atomic bomb was not available until the end of the war, it was only responsible for about 250,000 deaths of a total of 75 million or so during the second world war. Tens more millions of people have died in conflict since them, all killed by conventional and not atomic weapons. Of course, every single death - let a lone a quarter of a million - is a tragedy, but it seems clear to me that atomic weapons have nothing to do with conflicts starting and tens of millions of people can be killed over relatively short periods of time by conventional means. Had the Americans not forced the Japanese surrender by dropping the bombs, the conflict would have gone on longer with land invasions and inevitably thousands of deaths [perhaps more than were killed by the bombs]. The underlying problem is not the posession of atomic weapons, but the conflict itself.

To claim that atomic weapons prevented war by accident is simply counter-factual given that mutually assured destruction was official policy throughout most of the cold war and drove the development of atomic weapons.Perhaps you believe this nonsense, but you apply it in a very convenient manner. I imagine you have a modern refrigerator, washing machine, radio and possibly colour television. You obviously have a computer and internet access and use electricity from a power grid in part fed by nuclear power stations. You have written about having a car and having undergone an operation, which would have involved a number of technologies developed since 1945. In other words - you seem to trust scientists enough to accept any and all technology that makes your life easier and more pleasant. Conveniently your alleged distrust is aimed at rather obscure targets whose removal is unlikely to affect you personally [the removal of one mobile phone mast is unlikely to make a vast difference]. I suppose you draw some sort of parallels between the radiation from nuclear weapons and mobile phone masts - even though these are completely different types of radiation. The radiation associated with mobile phones is likely to be as "dangerous" as the radiation in radio signals or indeed visible light. Your microwave is certainly more dangerous.

Having gone to one of my Liberal Democrat friends last night, I asked him what is going on in Labour, (I find that the Conservatives and Lib Dems, tend to know what is going on in Labour before ordinary labour members know) he told me that Councillor Shah had never accepted any position in the council and had only applied for a cabinet position, so how he could resign from something he never had my friend could not say.

My Lib Dem insider told me that the position had been offered to a sequence of councillors that had turned it down.

He also mentioned that that maybe councillor Shah's face did not fit the new Cabinet line up or that Councillor Shah may have become too powerful for others to accept.

My opinion is that something might be wrong in the Labour Group and that a bit of pressure has to be released.

Labour now have to implement a sequence of cuts in the city and to live up to the pledges that they have made to the citizens of Birmingham.

We all know what the result of the Lib Dem's broken promises was but we do not know what the result might be if Labour now break their promises.

In 2014 Labour defend 21 seats, they will not lose all of them but in 2015 the additional loses will mean that the progressive coalition will be back in power.

Sir Albert will not survive that shock, so he needs to enjoy his power and autocratic rule.

According to the Post


Sounds like Gerry is the victim of a cross-party deception. There is hope for political co-operation after all.

Do the lib dems know when cllr Shah will start his leadership challenge? 

Derog, this is pointless, and I'm stopping here. I'll make two points only.

1. This started with a mobile phone past proposal and Brigid's reaction. I'm not saying she was wrong. I'm not saying I think they're dangerous. I just mentioned that I'd offered political advice: that even if you think people are wrong, they're your constituents and you need to help them.

2. I've tried to give you a history lesson about postwar attitudes. I was there. I was brought up in a very political house. I can remember the endless TV news programmes about nuclear weapons in various ways: test ban treaties, proliferation, CND, Aldermaston marches. I'm just telling you that it changed attitudes to scientists. If you don't want to believe it, that's your right. It's just what happened.

That's it, because this is way OT, and every simple sentence I write seems to wind you up to think it says three things that it doesn't. I wish we had met, because my posts seem to start an antagonism in you, which I think would disappear if we actually talked face to face over a pint. But there we are.

Gerry,,who was this lib dem you spoke to?cllr shah try serving the people of BG who have elected you!no good just showing your face around election time!

KINGB, don't start again, you first go on about Councillor Aikhlaq drop into one of his surgeries, they are advertised on the Birmingham Council website and speak to him, let him know what meetings and people you would like him to meet.

Councillor Shah as you know is available every day for residents to meet him and tell him their problems and is devoting himself to his ward and the deprivation brought about by the last 8 years of coalition mismanagement in Bordesley Green half a million wasted on Neighbourhood Management in Bordesley Green to achieve a statistically worse deprivation position then before, £300,000 spent on a skate park on Whitacre Road, which after 5 years has still not opened and an additional £60,000 has had to be spent to fence it off and repair the vandalism.

KINGB, I am prepared to work with you to, improve Bordesley Green regardless of politics just tell me where to meet you.

You can ask any Lib Dem or Labour person in that ward and they would all agree that no matter what Gerry goes on about, he is genuinely committed to improving people's lives and where we live.

Forget the politicians they will look after themselves it is people like us KINGB that need to keep on volunteering to help the old and vulnerable in this Great City of ours.

This is indeed true, agonisingly so.
As someone who has spent his time working to deliver worthwhile social policy rather than the dross Labour entertained and the Tories continued I have always believe in policy in practice, the last council had a poor understanding of its assets and its natural resources.

For that reason whenever I take campaigning contracts I only choose candidates that I believe act to make a difference, or know how to; so far the only major party I haven't helped is Labour...but then I did study Labour policy at Uni....

He doesn't use the word but it looks like MM supports quotas.

http://martinmullaney.blogspot.co.uk/

Seems like he doesn't really believe it himself. He's just using diversity as today's stick to beat Labour with.

Cllr shah says he never accepted position..cllr ward says he did and later resigned...who do you believe??

Who cares? The point is that they can't even agree amongst themselves.

Exactly my point,,and we are stuck with them to run the council,,will end in tears

The definitive list is on the council democracy page and is the same as Barnardhobbits.

The only changes that might come about are if Cllr. Yvonne Mosquito is elected in November as Police and Crime Commissioner. So Ladywood District Committe Chair would be vacant as well I assume she would resign her council seat for Nechells.

Deaths and resignations we await.

still no sign of a Lab nominee for Selly Oak district...