Tag: Hastings Borough Council
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To our HBC councillors
Dear Councillor, if you’re reading this – I know you’re busy people. There’s a letter to you in the second half of the text. Feel free to scroll straight on down to the bit headed “Can we please re-discover that word “no”? Long-gone local authorities I remember when “the authorities” were in Wellington Square. If…
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Hastings connections
(Hastings loves fireworks) Hastings, UK, has twin town relationships with Béthune (France), Oudenaarde (Belgium), Dordrecht (The Netherlands), and Schwerte (Germany), and Hastings in Sierra Leone, West Africa. I think we’re twinned with the first three because councillors have friends or trade links there. I guess with the last one, it’s because of the name, although…
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Hastings needs a strong voice
On the probable demise of HBC, and a possible citizens’ answer In the first week of the New Year I said this on FB… I was in a towering rage. Sure, the utterly destructive nature of party politics in recent years had pretty much disabled our local council and yes, a dysfunctional council is hard…
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Hastings – How do we take back our town?
This week, a citizen who happened to be a councillor happened to be at an assemblies planning meeting I went to. She informed me that our borough council is doomed. ‘It’s done and dusted,’ she said. The last couple of years have been a rollercoaster of first-priority issues for anyone even remotely involved in politics.…
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Hastings: are we about to lose our council?
No, I don’t know either. I know there’s been talk about ‘unitary councils’ for some years, and that Labour has been making plans lately, which some have cynically suggested might enable them to cancel local elections that they are likely to lose. What came as more of a surprise to me, when I happened to…
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Why would anyone want to be a councillor?
I decided to go to a Borough Council meeting last night. Walking back afterwards with a member of Hastings Jews for Justice, who’d come along to find out what happened to the latest attempt at a ceasefire motion for Gaza, I said I’d be writing about what happened that evening and she asked me if…
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Why we all hate Southern Water
Over the last few years, as utility bills have pushed more and more of us onto the breadline, and increasing numbers are falling over the edge into destitution, Hastings has had numerous problems with both electricity and water supplies. Water is the big issue just now. In my part of town, the taps ran dry…
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Braybrooke – I will be voting after all!
I always write a blog about my ward’s elections just before voting day. I really thought I wouldn’t this year, local politics being as it’s been lately but – look, I’m doing it! This has been a very strange election campaign period for me – a few years ago, I would have been right in…
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Let more daylight in
Why are local politicians in Hastings putting their names to a Shon Faye event? What is the “sex doesn’t exist” / “sex doesn’t matter” / “it’s complicated” ideology that Shon Faye promotes? Just how convoluted is this? Let me attempt to put it a coherent sentence… Starting with Judith Butler, it’s a build-up of out-of-context…
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Activism works — here’s the evidence
I was a Green Party officer once. I was a trade union officer, and a member of a regional activist group in my union, and I have been a Labour Party officer. Every single time, I stood down from the roles I had because there was some politics that needed doing, and I couldn’t do…
Kay Green 