Business speak and buck passing
In the council meeting with City Fibre, the councillors voiced their constituents’ experience of the ongoing disruption caused by City Fibre, but they did not question the strategy and they allowed the managers to get away with management-speak and buck-passing.
Instalcom (the people digging up the roads), the Borough’s Highways Department (lack of supervision) and Reading Buses (needlessly closing bus stops and cancelling buses) should also have been there to face the music.
While Grain Connect explained they reinstate the road immediately after the work, City Fibre gave the excuse that they do the work more quickly if they left the works in place. It would make sense if they worked non-stop, but they leave cones and unnecessary temporary traffic lights in place when they knock off for the day.
In the days after the meeting, they blocked off much of the Basingstoke Road / Buckland Road junction, so Reading Buses closed the bus stops without adding temporary bus stops, forcing shoppers for Morrisons and Aldi to trudge a long distance to Whitley Park. The council owns some camera cars to enforce parking restrictions. Those cars could also be used to clear up road obstructions.
They talked about trenches in the road. In this day and age, they should be able to burrow under roads rather than digging them up. Too many roads were dug up at junctions and next to roundabouts, when they could move a few yards to cause fewer delays to traffic. One roundabout was badly signposted, forcing a bus to get stuck on the roundabout.
Other examples of bad behaviour included the destruction of a lamp-post in my street, a lorry waiting outside my house for half an hour with its engine running and a lorry with a Romanian number plate.
The meeting also discussed the leaflet delivered to residents. The managers should have displayed the letter from their computers. I think it looked like a sales document rather than a notice of disruption.
Mark Drukker, Reading
Nothing but the truth
In the Soviet Union there was a newspaper called Pravda (The Truth). It was regularly full of praise for – and photos of – the country’s leadership.
I found myself wondering if your most recent edition (week 4 to 10 July) had been inspired by Pravda when I spotted no less than 18 images of Reading’s mayor, and wanna-be Reading West MP, Rachel Eden. Plenty of images and plenty of praise.
Don’t get me wrong, I’d choose a Labour MP over a Tory any day (though I’d prefer a Green). It’s the fact that in the UK where we’re offered a ‘choice’ between two very similar brands (ie Tory or Labour) once every few years your newspaper decides to offer such a generous platform to a Labour candidate famed for her support of many Tory-light policies. Is it such an ask that your newspaper find stories about Reading’s real heroes and political leaders? I’m talking about those leading climate activism, women’s rights campaigns, support for refugees, efforts to safeguard the local NHS, trade union struggles and so on.
Presenting readers with so much non-critical coverage of Eden’s exploits only adds to the illusion that we are living in an active democracy rather than a capitalist two-party state.
Sam Wild, via email
Summer of discontent
Now that Heathrow has announced a curtailing of passenger numbers as it struggles to cope with demand, residents around the airport are wondering when a reduction in night flights will occur? The past few weeks have seen too many flights operating past midnight, with some even past 1am. This is unacceptable, particularly as flights begin to arrive again over some parts of London from as early at 4.15am. The many hundreds of thousands of people under Heathrow’s flight paths must not continue paying the price for Heathrow’s recruitment backlog – staff they were keen to fire at the beginning of the pandemic but have struggled to re-hire and train quickly enough to cope with demand.
As London and the Thames Valley are poised for record-breaking temperatures, we hope that the airport will reduce flights at these most disruptive times – when the heat means we are already having difficulty getting a decent night’s sleep.
Heathrow’s summer of discontent cannot be allowed to continue to impact such large swathes of the population.
Justine Bayley, Chair, Stop Heathrow Expansion
Sermon on the Parliament
Did a sermon by the Revd Les Isaac at a Parliamentary prayer meeting move Sajid Javid to resign as Health Secretary?
Saint Luke writes how the Apostle Paul preached at a centre of power in ancient Athens-‘The Areopagus’-almost 2,000 years ago.
Some listeners laughed at Paul while others reserved judgement on the resurrection.
A senior official called Dionysus responded to Paul’s message. The penetrating power of the preacher is not a new phenomenon by any stretch of the imagination.
We should not be surprised at all on hearing media stories about how a sermon appears to have impacted the timing of Sajid Javid’s resignation.
Do more MPs need to heed the spiritual or moral message delivered by preachers?
J T Hardy, by email
