TerryI feel sorry for Mark Stevens. First Ray Wall tells him he misunderstood his attempt at an Irish accent, now you are telling him he doesn't exist, he writes badly and this might mean he is Irish too. It's not hard to find two people with similar beliefs in Ealing or even on Ealing today who think that Labour have made a mess of our streets again, or that Southall suffers more from Labours mass immigration policy than other parts of the borough or that Labours policy of handing out benefits to as many people as possible during their term in office was a bad idea. Neither is it hard to find two people who leave out full stops or question marks. We all text now and some of us are on twitter where we pick up bad habits. I haven't got time to go through all of what Mark Stevens has said so I will accept that you have done this and found similarities. I did read what you said and what keith said, and thought Keith might be closer than he realises. Your Style of writing is very similar to Cllr Lauren Walls style plus how she talks and you both seem unhappy for anyone to criticise this useless labour council, though I'm sure Lauren has better things to be doing with her time. I have cut and paste something Lauren wrote some time back to demonstrate how easy it is to find two pieces by two different people that are very similar. Before i show you that, If you look at how often i come on here over a 12 month period, i can go months without coming on here and then be on here regularly for days at a time. My apology to Stephen Sears was an genuine apology because what i said was wrong. I made a full apology and fully withdrew my comments. As you have compared me to Mark Stevens, would you do me a favour and compare my apology to Ray Walls. Which one would you say was an actual apology and which one was no where near an apology. Here is the piece written by lauren on Neil reynolds blog. Colm, Grow up! I wouldn’t presume entitlement to explain why a group, that I wasn’t part of at the time, might have supported your £50 pre-election bribery. However, I would not be surprised if they had been hoodwinked by your party’s mis-selling of what you did. Suffice to say that the current Labour Group contains a great many members who did not support your reckless scheme in any shape or form. You got this passed via Full Council rather than the usual Cabinet decision making process. It appears that you did this so that you could by-pass Scrutiny and get your vanity project through with little examination or potential exposure of the misuse of public money it was. You effectively misrepresented the £6.5m sum you spent as a ‘windfall’ you had received, whereas in fact it was reserves built up over a period of 10 years or so, paid by honest, hardworking people of this borough, who certainly had not given it to you to be used for your own electioneering. You had no business case for it, and the fact that you never set any measurable performance indicators that could demonstrate whether your extravagance had had any success/failure at meeting its core objectives just proves you had no interest in whether this substantial spend represented value for money for Ealing council tax payers, despite your claim that value for money for tax payers was one of your priorities. As to the car park you mention, I am not a Southall councillor but it does not take too much imagination to realise that investment on such a project will form a capital asset that could translate back to capital for residents should the council be minded to sell it on behalf of residents in the future. A car park should also provide a revenue stream for council tax payers as users will be charged. These features stand in stark contrast to your frivolous £6.5m spend which delivered no capital asset, no revenue stream, and failed so miserably to meet your vague aspiration to make a ‘demonstrable’ difference to the local economy. And no, I would consider part of a scheme to regenerate an area with so many problems to be a bribe, particularly not three years away from the next local elections and where the local people have so often rejected representation from any Opposition candidates
Colm Costello ● 5047d