David Clifford live and uncut (sorry for the poor sound quality - we're beginners at this)

Conservative Councillors are committed to Town Centre improvements and investment and have approved plans which set out an exciting vision to transform our town. You can see this and other documents at Improving Aldershot

It is vital we have experienced and committed Councillors elected for Aldershot that will ensure this vision becomes a reality.

ALDERSHOT Road Traffic Works

THE RUSHMOOR BOROUGH COUNCIL

ROAD TRAFFIC REGULATION ACT, 1984 (AS AMENDED) SECTION 14(1)(b)

(TEMPORARY PROHIBITION OF THROUGH TRAFFIC AND PROHIBITION OF WAITING) ORDER 2016

The Rushmoor Borough Council pursuant to arrangements made under Section 101 of the Local Government Act, 1972 with the County Council of Hampshire, intend, not less than seven days from the date of this Notice, to make an Order in accordance with Section 14(1)(b) of the Road Traffic Regulation Act, 1984, the effect of which will be to temporarily prohibit vehicles from proceeding along, and waiting, in the sections of road referred to in Schedule 1 below in order that highway maintenance may be carried out.
This Order shall come into operation on 1st April, 2016 and remain in operation until 30th September, 2017 or until the works have been completed, whichever is sooner.
(NB Reasonable facilities will be provided to allow access to adjacent premises while the work is being carried out)
SCHEDULE

1. Grosvenor Rd
From its junction with Church Lane East to its junction with Halimote Rd.

2. Eggars Hill
From its junction with Church Lane East to its junction with Manor Rd.

3. Church Lane East
From its junction with Grosvenor Rd to its junction with St Georges Rd.

4. Church Lane West
From its junction with Grosvenor Rd to its junction with Chasewater Crt.

Each carriageway closure is expected to last less than one week within the period given above. Footway works may take 6-8 weeks but diversions will be implemented accordingly.

Alternative routes will be signposted by the contractor for each road closure.

Residents will be informed by Hampshire Highways well in advance of the works. For information on the planned work start date and the works covered by this order, please contact Graham Sapsed at Hampshire Highways on 0300 555 1388.

A letter from my mate George

Dear David, Today I delivered a Budget that puts the next generation first and redoubles our efforts to make Britain fit for the future by: Cutting taxes so working people can keep more of the money they earn From April next year the tax free personal allowance will rise to £11,500, a tax cut for 31 million people that means a typical basic rate taxpayer will be paying over £1,000 less income tax then when we came into government. The higher rate threshold will also increase to £45,000, a tax cut of over £400. Freezing fuel duty to support household budgets and small firms. We have frozen fuel duty for the sixth year in a row, a saving of £75 a year to the average driver and £270 a year to a small business with a van. We’re also freezing beer and cider duty to back British pubs. Improving our schools so our children get the best start in life. We’re providing extra money so every school in England becomes an academy and we are going to put a new sugar levy on the soft drinks industry so they reduce the sugar content of their products to tackle childhood obesity. The money raised will be used to double sports funding in primary schools and fund longer school days in secondary schools that offer their pupils a wider range of activities, including extra sport. Introducing a new Lifetime ISA to help the next generation to save. We know people like the simplicity of ISAs so we’re going to increase the ISA limit from just over £15,000 to £20,000 for everyone. For those under 40, many of whom haven’t had such a good deal from pensions, we’re going to introduce a completely new Lifetime ISA. You won’t have to choose between saving for your first home, or saving for your retirement – the government is going to give you money to do both. For every £4 saved, the Government will give you £1. So put in £4,000 each year and the government will give you £1,000 every year until you’re 50. Cutting taxes for small businesses. 600,000 small businesses will now pay no business rates at all, an annual saving of up to almost £6,000, and a further 250,000 small businesses will get a tax cut on their business rates bill. We have also cut Capital Gains Tax to boost enterprise and cut Corporation Tax to support investment and job creation. This Budget puts stability first with long term solutions to long term problems. It acts now so we don’t pay later. Donate today to help us continue to deliver security, stability and opportunity for people across Britain. Yours, George Osborne Chancellor of the Exchequer facebook.com/GeorgeOsborneOfficial

Letter from my mate Dave the PM

Dear David, Today marks seven months since the General Election; seven months since the British people gave this government and this party an important responsibility: to deliver on our commitments for stability, security and opportunity for the working people of Britain. This year, we’ve seen more people in work than at any time in our history; more of our children starting university than ever before; more British entrepreneurs setting up shop than anywhere else in Europe. Because of your support, we are now able to deliver on what we said we would do in our manifesto – a plan for every stage of your life. We’re building a country that deals with its debts and lives within its means – taking Britain out of the red and into the black by 2020. We’re giving our young people the opportunity of the best possible start in life, with a million more children in good or outstanding schools, and the chance of a high quality apprenticeship or a University place when you leave school. We’re saying to those who get a job and work hard, that we’ll let you keep more of the money you earn. And to those who save, that we’ll help you buy that home of your own. We’re saying to working families that we’re on your side, by doubling free childcare and delivering a better, and truly seven day, National Health Service for you and your family. And we’re saying to those who have worked hard all their lives that you deserve dignity and security in retirement – so we’ll go on increasing your state pension and make it easier for you to pass on what you have to your loved ones. In all these things our aim is simple: a good life for you and your family. That’s what we promised and that’s what we’re delivering - holding firm to our pledges and paving the way for the brighter future people voted for. And let’s remember, as we work through our plan, that our goal is a greater Britain. Not just making good on our manifesto – but making Britain greater. Together we can build that greater Britain. Let’s get out there and make it happen. Yours, David Cameron Promoted by Alan Mabbutt on behalf of the Conservative Party, both at 4 Matthew Parker Street, London, SW1H 9HQ

A letter from my mate the Chancellor

Dear David,

The Autumn Statement I gave today delivers on the promise we made to the British people that we would put their security first:

• To protect our economic security, by taking the difficult decisions to live within our means and bring our debts down. The public spending plans I set out today mean we will reach a surplus of £10.1 billion in 2019/20 – that’s higher than was forecast at the Budget and means Britain will be out of the red and into the black.
• To protect our national security, by defending our country’s interests abroad and keeping our citizens safe at home. There will be no cuts in the police budget with real terms protection for police funding and we deliver on our commitment to spend 2 per cent of our national income on defence.

But this Spending Review does not just ensure the economic and national security of our country, it builds on that with:

• Full funding for the Five Year Forward View that the NHS itself put forward as the plan for its future with the first £6 billion delivered up-front next year.
• The biggest real terms increase to the basic State Pension in 15 years. Thanks to our commitment to the triple lock, next year the basic state pension will rise by £3.35 to £119.30 a week.
• The biggest housebuilding programme by any government since the 1970s with a doubling of the housing budget to over £2 billion a year. Our bold plan to back families who aspire to buy their own home will deliver 400,000 new homes by the end of the decade.
• The phasing out entirely of the local government grant. By the end of the parliament local government will keep all of the revenue from business rates. We will abolish the uniform business rate so councils will be able to cut rates to attract a new business to their area, but because the amount the government raises in business rates is much greater than the amount we give to local councils through the local government grant we will phase that grant out entirely and devolve additional responsibilities.
• A new apprenticeship levy to deliver 3 million apprenticeships. This will ensure large businesses share the cost of training people, but no business with a pay bill below £3 million will have to pay. We will also increase the funding for each apprenticeship to make sure these are high quality apprenticeships.
• Real terms protection of schools budget. We will maintain funding for free infant school meals, protect rates for the pupil premium, and increase the cash in the dedicated schools grant. We’re also going to open 500 new free schools and University Technical Colleges, and invest £23 billion in school buildings and 600,000 new school places.
• The largest ever investment in free childcare so working families get the help they need. From 2017, we will fund 30 hours of free childcare for working families with 3 and 4 year olds. We’ll support £10,000 of childcare costs tax free and to support nurseries delivering more free places for parents we’ll increase the funding for the sector by £300 million.
• The improvement in the nation’s finances used to help on tax credits. Because of the improvement in the public finances, the simplest thing to do is not to phase these changes in, but to avoid them altogether. Tax credits are being phased out anyway as we introduce universal credit.
• An average saving of £30 from the projected energy bills of 24 million households by introducing a cheaper domestic energy efficiency scheme.

Five years ago, when I presented our first Spending Review, our economy was in crisis and as the letter Labour left behind said: there was no money left. Our job then was to rescue Britain. Today, our job is to rebuild Britain. Build our finances. Build our defences. Build our society.

George Osborne
Chancellor of the Exchequer

Section 106 Contributions for Rushmoor.

Section 106 contributions 

         Very simply - money taken from developers to improve the local area. This is not a fund that gets accumulated. It is a fund to finance agreed projects in the area:

5.1    Information in this section relates to financial contributions secured by way of section 106 planning obligations.

Section 106 contributions received	Oct-Dec 2014	Apr 2014- Mar 2015
Contributions received (Rushmoor and Hampshire)~	£244,948.47	£1,174,183.19
Open Space (specific projects set out in agreements)	£26,485.00	£385,408.38
SANGS a) Hawley Meadows * b) Southwood II c) Rowhill	a) £28,340.00 b) £120,510.00 c) 0	a) £348,877.67 b) £278,980.00 c) 19,759.25.00
SAMM a) Hawley Meadows* b) Southwood II* c) Rowhill*	a) £3,105.00 b) £13,169.00 c) £0	a) £38,567.38.00 b) £30,512.00 c) £2,163.04
Transport (specific projects set out in agreements)*	£5,788.00	£146,055.68

~This figure also includes monitoring charges, interest and receipts for the Farnborough Airport Community Environmental Fund.

*Contributions relating to the Hawley Meadows SANG. SAMM contributions and Transport are paid to Hampshire County Council.

Twelve new undertakings/legal agreements were signed in the period October-December 2014. A total of 37 were signed in the year.

Farnborough Library set to transform into a new community hub

Thursday 30 April 2015

Farnborough Library will close for seven weeks from Thursday 4 June until Thursday 23 July inclusive, to allow refurbishment works to take place to provide a new community hub for local people.

The new-look building will accommodate a modernised environment, with the latest self service technology, allowing greater flexibility in the way customers access the service and releasing staff to help those requiring more support. There will be a purpose built space for people who currently attend Hampshire County Council Day Service for people with learning disabilities and space for people who receive a service from Parkside (formerly the local Mencap). Both these services will be relocating from Aldershot to Farnborough.

The building will additionally have new activity rooms, as well as a café offering light snacks and refreshments which is due to open in October.

A Hampshire County Council spokesperson said: "This is a very exciting opportunity for us to redevelop the Farnborough library building to provide multi purpose facilities for the local community. While we regret any disruption that may be caused as a result of the temporary closure, we aim to complete the works as quickly as possible and look forward to welcoming customers back towards the end of July in time for the school holidays. We have kept the closure as short as possible which will mean a small amount of disruption will continue after re-opening."

No books will be due back during the period the library is closed, and libraries in Aldershot and Fleet remain open. Books can be borrowed or returned at any library and can be renewed via our website or through our contact centre 0300 555 1387.

The transformation of the library building and the relocation of Aldershot learning disability day services to Farnborough Library is one of a number of similar projects taking place across the county designed to bring services for people with learning disabilities closer to the local community while providing improved facilities for local residents.

A note from Dave ....

David

Today I set out how we can secure a better future - and build a Britain that everyone is proud to call home.
A Britain where hard work is rewarded. Not a free-for-all, but a chance for all: the chance of a job, a home, a good start in life, whoever you are, wherever you are from.
I set out our Conservative commitment for the next five years.
If you want to provide for yourself and your family, you'll have the security of a job.
If you work hard and do the right thing, you will keep more of the money to spend as you choose.
We will cut income tax for 30 million hardworking taxpayers - increasing the tax-free personal allowance from £10,000 to £12,500, and raising the 40p tax rate threshold from £41,900 to £50,000.
For those wanting to buy a home, we will help you get on the housing ladder - with 100,000 new homes, available to first-time buyers under 40 at a 20% discount.
We will make sure every child gets a great education so they can reach their potential.
And for those retiring, we will make sure you get a decent pension and real rewards for a life of work.
A good job, a nice home, more money at the end of the month, a decent education for your children, a safe and secure retirement.
A country where if you put in, you get out.
A Britain everyone is proud to call home - and a long-term plan to get there.
So let's finish what we have begun.

Let's secure a better future for you, your family and for everyone.

PM David Cameron MP

1 Million Superfast Broadband Premises Passed

1 Million Superfast Broadband Premises Passed

Digital infrastructure plays a pivotal role in the Government’s long-term economic plan. Central and local government is therefore investing up to £1.7 billion to extend superfast broadband. In 2010, fewer than half of UK premises had access to superfast broadband. But this public investment, which we can only afford because we have taken difficult decisions on spending elsewhere, alongside private investment, means we have now extended access to 78% of the UK. And by 2017 95% of the UK will be able to access superfast broadband, benefiting millions of Britain’s homes and businesses.

The nationwide roll-out is on track to deliver our targets and today I am pleased to announce that the Government’s programme has now reached over 1million homes and businesses. These are all areas that the private sector would not otherwise have reached. Many local broadband projects around the country and the devolved administrations will be celebrating this achievement.

The current roll-out is expected to provide a £1.5 billion boost to local economies. By 2024, the Government’s current investments in faster broadband will be boosting rural economies by £275 million every month or around £9 million every day. Overall, the Superfast Broadband Programme will deliver returns of up to £20 for every £1 invested, promoting local growth and representing tremendous value for money.

Forty three projects across the regions targeted by Government are now “live” and around 40,000 premises are gaining access every week, double the number being reached in the spring. Current UK coverage of superfast broadband is the highest of the top five European economies and we also lead our European counterparts in terms of take up, competitiveness and pricing.

I firmly believe that this transformation of the digital landscape should reach every area of the UK. Focus is now on the “final 5%” – those areas in the hardest to reach places in the UK that are not covered by existing plans. £10m is being invested in a series of pilot projects across the nation to investigate the best way of tackling these areas. The findings will be used to help decide our future approach so that everyone can benefit from the transformation of the digital landscape currently underway. Backing businesses with broadband infrastructure means they can create more jobs. In turn, that means more people waking up each morning knowing that they have the security of a job.

I am determined to make the UK the best connected country in the world. I look forward to keeping you up-to-date on the progress of the Superfast Britain programme and all our future plans. 

Rt Hon Sajid Javid MP

Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport

Ham & Blackbird Development MUST be opposed.

Ham & Blackbird

The Council has recently received an application from Inland Homes (some have suggested to me a more accurate name would be Underhand Homes given their vandalistic tree cutting that left trees next to the road perilously dangerous) to build an obscene number of flats (62) with little parking on the site of the Ham & Blackbird. I have no big issue with knocking down an unsuccessful pub / restaurant, but I do object to gross over development by a developer who has proved very early they cannot be trusted: Please see:

http://cllrclifford.blogspot.co.uk/2014/03/test.html 

They have tried condescendingly to sweeten this poisonous application with a "community" centre and public plazas to try and make it sound so much better than it is, which in my opinion will simply be a future slum with people arguing with each other about where to park and neighbourhood noise. Am I exaggerating for effect? I think not and could take you less than 50 meters to dwellings that have exactly that problem now. I hope this time, unlike the last similar application, my opposition will be supported by the Planning Committee..

Click on the following link to see Inland Homes Proposal:

Ham & Blackbird Developer Presentation

Please support opposition to this application by submitting an objection at:

http://publicaccess.rushmoor.gov.uk/online-applications/applicationDetails.do?activeTab=summary&keyVal=N6WN7GNM0I401  

TAG consultation - Airspace Change Proposal (ACP)

© TAG Farnborough except Ordnance Survey data © Crown copyright and database right 2013

TAG Aviation at Farnborough are proposing a massive expansion of controlled airspace that will engulf the area a lot of us "free wing pilots" fly in. There is a website to view the proposals and to give feedback http://www.tagfarnborough.com/airspace-change-proposal/

Please take a look and post your objections before the end of the consultation process in May.

Our pilots have spoken to Blackbushe airport and they are not objecting because their aircraft use radio so can speak to Farnborough to get permission to transit the new controlled airspace.

We free flyers do not want to see more regulation and controlled airspace. We want less not more controlled airspace. Imagine us as the ramblers of the skies....

DC somewhere over France who have more free airspace

Tomahawk cruising - lost and down looking for road signs...

My mate Daniel Hannan MEP on the Nazi's

LEFTISTS BECOME INCANDESCENT WHEN REMINDED OF THE SOCIALIST ROOTS IN NAZISM

On 16 June 1941, as Hitler readied his forces for Operation Barbarossa, Josef Goebbels looked forward to the new order that the Nazis would impose on a conquered Russia. There would be no come-back, he wrote, for capitalists nor priests nor Tsars. Rather, in the place of debased, Jewish Bolshevism, the Wehrmacht would deliver “der echte Sozialismus”: real socialism.

Goebbels never doubted that he was a socialist. He understood Nazism to be a better and more plausible form of socialism than that propagated by Lenin. Instead of spreading itself across different nations, it would operate within the unit of the Volk.

So total is the cultural victory of the modern Left that the merely to recount this fact is jarring. But few at the time would have found it especially contentious. As George Watson put it in The Lost Literature of Socialism:

It is now clear beyond all reasonable doubt that Hitler and his associates believed they were socialists, and that others, including democratic socialists, thought so too.

The clue is in the name. Subsequent generations of Leftists have tried to explain away the awkward nomenclature of the National Socialist German Workers’ Party as either a cynical PR stunt or an embarrassing coincidence. In fact, the name meant what it said.

Hitler told Hermann Rauschning, a Prussian who briefly worked for the Nazis before rejecting them and fleeing the country, that he had admired much of the thinking of the revolutionaries he had known as a young man; but he felt that they had been talkers, not doers. “I have put into practice what these peddlers and pen pushers have timidly begun,” he boasted, adding that “the whole of National Socialism” was “based on Marx”.

Marx’s error, Hitler believed, had been to foster class war instead of national unity – to set workers against industrialists instead of conscripting both groups into a corporatist order. His aim, he told his economic adviser, Otto Wagener, was to “convert the German Volk to socialism without simply killing off the old individualists” – by which he meant the bankers and factory owners who could, he thought, serve socialism better by generating revenue for the state. “What Marxism, Leninism and Stalinism failed to accomplish,” he told Wagener, “we shall be in a position to achieve.”

Leftist readers may by now be seething. Whenever I touch on this subject, it elicits an almost berserk reaction from people who think of themselves as progressives and see anti-fascism as part of their ideology. Well, chaps, maybe now you know how we conservatives feel when you loosely associate Nazism with “the Right”.

To be absolutely clear, I don’t believe that modern Leftists have subliminal Nazi leanings, or that their loathing of Hitler is in any way feigned. That’s not my argument. What I want to do, by holding up the mirror, is to take on the equally false idea that there is an ideological continuum between free-marketers and fascists.

The idea that Nazism is a more extreme form of conservatism has insinuated its way into popular culture. You hear it, not only when spotty students yell “fascist” at Tories, but when pundits talk of revolutionary anti-capitalist parties, such as the BNP and Golden Dawn, as “far Right”.

What is it based on, this connection? Little beyond a jejune sense that Left-wing means compassionate and Right-wing means nasty and fascists are nasty. When written down like that, the notion sounds idiotic, but think of the groups around the world that the BBC, for example, calls “Right-wing”: the Taliban, who want communal ownership of goods; the Iranian revolutionaries, who abolished the monarchy, seized industries and destroyed the middle class; Vladimir Zhirinovsky, who pined for Stalinism. The “Nazis-were-far-Right” shtick is a symptom of the wider notion that “Right-wing” is a synonym for “baddie”.

One of my constituents once complained to the Beeb about a report on the repression of Mexico's indigenous peoples, in which the government was labelled Right-wing. The governing party, he pointed out, was a member of the Socialist International and, again, the give-away was in its name: Institutional Revolutionary Party. The BBC’s response was priceless. Yes, it accepted that the party was socialist, “but what our correspondent was trying to get across was that it is authoritarian”.

In fact, authoritarianism was the common feature of socialists of both National and Leninist varieties, who rushed to stick each other in prison camps or before firing squads. Each faction loathed the other as heretical, but both scorned free-market individualists as beyond redemption. Their battle was all the fiercer, as Hayek pointed out in 1944, because it was a battle between brothers.

Authoritarianism – or, to give it a less loaded name, the belief that state compulsion is justified in pursuit of a higher goal, such as scientific progress or greater equality – was traditionally a characteristic of the social democrats as much as of the revolutionaries.

Jonah Goldberg has chronicled the phenomenon at length in his magnum opus, Liberal Fascism. Lots of people take offence at his title, evidently without reading the book since, in the first few pages, Jonah reveals that the phrase is not his own. He is quoting that impeccable progressive H.G. Wells who, in 1932, told the Young Liberals that they must become “liberal fascists” and “enlightened Nazis”.

In those days, most prominent Leftists intellectuals, including Wells, Jack London, Havelock Ellis and the Webbs, tended to favour eugenics, convinced that only religious hang-ups were holding back the development of a healthier species. The unapologetic way in which they spelt out the consequences have, like Hitler’s actual words, been largely edited from our discourse. Here, for example, is George Bernard Shaw in 1933:

Extermination must be put on a scientific basis if it is ever to be carried out humanely and apologetically as well as thoroughly… If we desire a certain type of civilisation and culture we must exterminate the sort of people who do not fit into it.

Eugenics, of course, topples easily into racism. Engels himself wrote of the “racial trash” – the groups who would necessarily be supplanted as scientific socialism came into its own. Season this outlook with a sprinkling of anti-capitalism and you often got Leftist anti-Semitism – something else we have edited from our memory, but which once went without saying. “How, as a socialist, can you not be an anti-Semite?” Hitler had asked his party members in 1920.

Are contemporary Leftist critics of Israel secretly anti-Semitic? No, not in the vast majority of cases. Are modern socialists inwardly yearning to put global warming sceptics in prison camps? Nope. Do Keynesians want the whole apparatus of corporatism, expressed by Mussolini as “everything in the state, nothing outside the state”? Again, no. There are idiots who discredit every cause, of course, but most people on the Left are sincere in their stated commitment to human rights, personal dignity and pluralism.

My beef with many (not all) Leftists is a simpler one. By refusing to return the compliment, by assuming a moral superiority, they make political dialogue almost impossible. Using the soubriquet “Right-wing” to mean “something undesirable” is a small but important example.

Next time you hear Leftists use the word fascist as a general insult, gently point out the difference between what they like to imagine the NSDAP stood for and what it actually proclaimed.

Read Daniel's column in the Telegraph three times a week at : www.hannan.co.uk

Follow Daniel on YouTube at : http://bit.ly/EY23g

A humble footnote from David Clifford
My grandmother (affectionately known as Grandma Jackboots) who lived thru the war maintained to her dying day that Hitler was an evil "nationalist socialist".