Tag: devizes guardians

There’s no fooling you; this headline is Mc-deliberately misleading! There’s not even a burger, just a clickbait sesame seeded pun. I had to grab your attention one way or the other because Devizes East has a town council by-election on 12th November. Such things rarely get a good turnout, but I met the clear favourite of this two horse race, whose surname happens to be MacDonald; that’s my excuse for the foolery, and I’m sticking with it….

It certainly didn’t feel like I was meeting a prospective councillor, in the Black Swan so close to Halloween, and nothing about it was in any way spooky! In my usual rush I hadn’t prepared any Robin Day fashioned questions, yet artless Devizes Guardian candidate Rosemary MacDonald had minimal sales pitch, and no matter how I phished for sensationalism, she certainly had no intention of returning potshots from the opposition.

I return to report my findings in all honesty (other than the slightly misleading headline!) that, as I suspected, Rosemary is the warm and friendly listener ideal for the position. Professionally, I refrained from inappropriately asking her for a cuddle, but even as a hugger, I wasn’t let down by both her welcoming personality, motivation and her experience! In reflection, I suspect Rosemary figured immediately this isn’t your typical political interview, and professionalism isn’t my forte!

Although neither of us wished to dwell on recent misinformation being spread on social media by the Devizes Conservatives regarding this by-election, it felt important to example it for the purpose of highlighting my ethos; I don’t require, welcome or find it at all necessary to involve national politics in local affairs.

Seemingly in desperation to retain the seat, it does appear unfounded claims and even baseless official complaints have been made by the Conservatives group, intentionally to discredit Rosemary personally, and the Guardians’ majority over Devizes Town Council, where it is that the realities of the issues highlighted are misinformed, or actually the responsibilities of Wiltshire Council rather than the town council. This highlights the often unscrupulous gameplay, generously funded by the national party, of councillors backed by this national party, praying on voter’s misunderstandings of which local tasks are assigned to which council; don’t be fooled, know your onions!

On the importance of keeping the dirty tactics of national politics out of town councils, Rosemary reflected, “personally I think it should, because the town council should be here to serve the people of Devizes, and the powers that the town council have are fixed. A lot of the party political issues are either at county level or national level. And so for Devizes, it’s a case of who’s going to do the best job for the town. There are great people across all parties who would do that, but I think when you’ve got a party political thing coming in from over the top, you’ve got expectations that you’re going to do things in a certain way. And I think the joy of the Guardians is they’re independent. We’re a loose coalition of people who all just want to put Devizes first, and that really appealed to me because I’ve had to spend my whole career being apolitical.”

Rosemary worked in Devizes for twelve years running the Wiltshire Community Foundation, where they set up different programmes to support people across the whole county. Later in our chat she exampled one known as One Degree More, a programme for young people to get bursaries. “I’ve had to work with whoever’s in power with the roles that I’ve had at the community foundation,” she explained, “and so I’ve had to work with Conservatives, Liberals, and Labour. So to me, the colour didn’t matter. It was a case of who was fighting for the community itself and who was going to make the best use of the opportunities that the town has.”

“The thing about the local political scene is it’s the end that matters. It’s what are we trying to achieve? And all the arguments seem to happen around the means of how we get there. And that’s fine. You should have a healthy debate and you need people with opinions different to yours, because otherwise you’d just all do the same thing and it might not work. You need people to question and challenge, and that’s absolutely right. But we all should be working from the same ends. There’s no point in having a combative approach. It’s more about, what are you bringing to the table, how does that work, and are you adding to the solution that we need to define?”

I should state that leader of the Guardians, Johnathan Hunter was also present. I assumed he was only here to get the teas in, but when he said, “just to chime in,”  he wanted to express how Rosemary’s agenda is all about community. “We’re not saying that we want to keep national politics out of Devizes,” he said. “What we’re saying is, let’s make sure Devizes has a local flavour and purpose. Where that clash comes with national parties is that there’ll be a percolation coming through from the party, a party purpose, which ultimately feeds into local issues and local people, which then discounts local people and local purposes. We always say, the Guardians first and foremost are your neighbours, your friends, local volunteers, working in the town, serving in the town.”

The idea, it seemed, is that local issues are not so overcomplicated it requires the time wasting bickering associated with national politics. I sighed at my own example, of Boris Johnson and Jeremey Corbyn unable to compromise, where proactive solutions  went out of the window. “That’s a really good example,” Rosemary praised, “in their case, they were arguing about the ends because they both wanted a different destination. And I think we don’t have space for that in Devizes. We need to agree on what we want to see. Because it’s not that difficult. Everybody wants a cleaner town, a thriving marketplace. They want loads of opportunities for their young people. They want to have an active, vibrant heritage and arts scene.”

Rosemary was keen to add her main reason for moving to Devizes was the arts and “all the things going on.” She spoke about driving here from Westbury to work on New Park Street, “and all I could think was Devizes is an amazing place. There’s so much going on here. And since I’ve been here, I haven’t been disappointed. I still haven’t been to all the things that I want to go to. So I’ve been dipping my toe into various things like the Food Festival, the Arts Festival, and carnival and Lantern Parade. I have yet to see the Confetti Battle because it’s never fallen when I’m actually in town. That’s something I would really love to see!”

We spent some time praising the town, whereby Jonathan did some history of the Guardians, expressed his dedication to the Guardians was due to their association with the community, and how Rosemary’s angle was centred around community matters. “Clearly we don’t have the resources of a national political party,” he said and explained they’ve not produced multiple leaflets due to waste; just one, summarising all they mean. “But what we do have is amazing people, friends and neighbours around us who do great things.”

This is where we continued onto Rosemary’s experience running the Wiltshire Community Foundation, and the support programs and bursaries it provided. I figured this funnelled into her pledge to youth projects and how her experience would be beneficial. “The thing is that knowing who to go to for funding is really important when you’re a small charity,” she said.  “I know loads about that because I’ve worked in that world for the best part of sixteen years.”

Being isolated and unaware of entitlements and benefits was one of many issues the foundation set to solve. Rosemary spoke about the Surviving Winter scheme, how leftover funds the elderly didn’t personally require were used in their partnership with Age UK and the Fire Brigade Warm and Well Team, who would do checks on older people. She talked fondly about a six million pound fund she set up for care leaders, “because when children leave care, they go from being fully looked after to £60 and living on their own. We asked the network of community foundations to come up with ways that they could support care leavers.”

Clearly, Rosemary has the relevant skills to secure varied projects, like the youth scheme. I wrongly called it a fund. “It’s not a fund,” she explained, “it’s about looking at youth and what’s available for them in the town; that partnership approach, and seeing where we can secure funding from. It’s very hard to raise funds from a town council, there are other ways of attracting investment into these things. And I see lots of things and I’m thinking, I know somebody who might want to help with that, and that’s my thinking.”

I proposed an importance of involving youth in the process, to which they agreed, and it so happened they were off to the Day Lounge immediately after our chat, to meet with a group of young people feeding ideas for a youth festival next summer. Jonathan suggested they could outgrow the space of the current Day Lounge, suggesting the centre was “only the start of it,” and praised the coming together of local businesses and the community to make the Day Lounge possible, when unfortunately there had been huge cuts to youth provisions.

I never wish to make the association with youth and antisocial behaviour, buy others do, and the Conservative candidate’s affluenza suggestion to throw more police officers at it when they’re short of budget as it is, has become central to the Conservative campaign. How do they feel about this?

“Antisocial behaviour I think is very complex and it’s a multi-age issue,” Jonathan remarked, “I’ve been personally talking to various people, different agencies, but young people get branded, you know. I’ve said this as a chair of a charity of homeless people, those people get branded as well. But it’s multi-dimensional. One of the reasons I’m so passionate about backing Rosemary’s candidacy, is because we need skilled practitioners in our midst who know what key to turn at the right time.”

“Young people need to be included and need to be the architects. So Rosemary’s pitch It’s all about listening and engaging, not just about young people, about a multitude of things. I think we’ve got to really tune into who those voices are that can enable this stuff. And from a political point of view in the council, there’s lots of myths and legends out there that other parties put out in terms of what the council can and can’t do. But isn’t it refreshing to have some engagement that’s local?”

“I’ll give you a good example. Rosemary’s campaigning at the moment with Fraser, her husband, because Rosemary wants to engage residents. Rosemary doesn’t want to go around putting leaflets through letterboxes and walking down the path to the gate again. Rosemary’s talking to people. And I think by doing that, we’re hearing lots of stuff from residents. What about this? What about that? How good is it that we’ve got an opportunity, somebody who’s prepared to listen and roll up their sleeves?”

Rosemary replied, “I had some great conversations this morning,” around the Eastleigh Road and Longcroft areas. “I was talking to all sorts of people as they were walking their dogs, and people who answered their doors and some were saying ‘I haven’t got time;’ that’s actually fine. I was just introducing myself, and others were like, ‘oh we’ve had your leaflet, and ‘I just want to say hi, you know, and ask if you’ve read the leaflet.’”

Rosemary spent some time expressing concerns for a lack of career opportunities, skills-based learning, local universities, and housing for the younger generation. “It makes it very difficult for young people to find their opening, to find their chance to go and see what the world of work is like and to learn how to be face to face with people. Because a lot of that’s a skill that young people are having to learn later on in life now. And that face to face experience is so invaluable. It’ll set them up for the rest of their lives. So we need to be doing something where we can provide more opportunities for young people.”

“We need housing that they can afford, which isn’t going to be sunk into rent,” Rosemary said, “which is non-recoverable. We need more shared ownership. I was delighted to walk through a housing estate off Roundway Park, and there are some shared ownership houses there which are out for sale and that’s good. And they’re lovely; but let’s have ten times that amount. We don’t just want retired people moving to Devizes. We need to have the whole fabric and the demographic in this town. Otherwise, who’s going to look after the old people?!”

“We need to invest more in our social housing agencies, you know, our social housing landlords, because they’re the ones who provide affordable homes and then, to use them, to have land that they can use to build places that are not stuck in the middle of nowhere. You don’t want them stuck in the middle of nowhere. You want the housing in the town where people can get around.”

Rosemary told me feedback from her conversations with residents included support for the town centre shops, anti-social parking and pedestrian crossings in the ward, and the possibility of a train station. “A Guardian perspective is we’re not sat on the edges commentating and throwing grenades in. We’re doing something about it. So speaking to enforcement, speaking to Wilshire Council, working together.”

Even if flexible at times, I came away thinking this was the most honest and open political interview I’ve ever done. While their manifesto existed purely from which derived from resident’s feedback, the balance of it was based upon Rosemary’s relevant experience to collate the responses and find the best solutions. At times so much it felt like the tables were turned and I was the one being quizzed for my thoughts on matters!

It differs vastly from the opposition’s less abstract agenda of things they felt the town required, such as pulling weeds from pavements. This brings into question if the Conservatives have engaged with public opinion on the same level, intend to get their gloves on and pull the weeds out themselves, or if it’s pie in the sky. Perhaps they’ve been too busy criticising and lambasting The Guardians to concentrate on public opinion? I could ask, would honour it, but being the candidate Laura has banned me from her Facebook page, I get the impression they do not welcome my correspondence. Alienating the public in this way is in stark contrast to a candidate willing to listen.

Jonathan spoke of The Guardian’s “holistic and collaborative approach, rather than cheap shots coming in,” in which he exampled their claim the Guardians “took the benches away. Actually,” he corrected, “the benches were taken away to be cleaned and then replaced immediately. So, you know, we’re not in that space. We are standing back and looking at the bigger picture, and that’s why we are so supportive of Rosemary’s campaign, because it’s bigger picture thinking, and it’s looking at that kind of engagement with the community.”

Jonathan could not stress enough the point that they didn’t want adversarial combat, “we see all councillors as colleagues, core collaborators, and friends, working together. That’s what we would always want. We don’t want to use language like opposition, because one has to then think, opposition to what? Opposing? What are you exactly opposing? Because all of our work is community-led, community-driven. Opposition is language from Westminster.”

That’s the whole point of having a party of independent councillors, isn’t it? Not for the want of trying to coax Rosemary’s personal political sway out of her, she didn’t give. She simply replied, “I can tell you, I am an issue voter. I look at the issues that I’m concerned about, and then I look at what the responses are from each party, and my vote on the national stage will be for the party that is going the way I want to see issues tackled. I don’t have a particular leaning, which is partly because during my whole career I’ve had to be apolitical. I haven’t had the luxury of being able to pin my colours to a particular mask and be absolutely certain that they are right on all things forever. I’ve had to work in the grey, I’ve had to work with people from many different parties, and I’ve never found it a problem because I truly believe that people don’t go into politics to ruin people’s lives. Everybody who goes into politics at whatever level, at least initially, they want to make people’s lives better.”

Thanks to Rosemary and Jonathan for their time, and to everyone else, I apologise if I brought you here thinking you were going to get a Big Mac and McFlurry in Devizes, but at least that was the only thing I was being deceptive about, unlike the Devizes Conservatives!

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