Barnet Eye Round Up - Another victory for Rog T !!!!

Firstly lets deal with the victories. Lets take a visit to the Finchley Conservatives website. We've made mention here several times that Mike Freer has hijacked this site. Far from being a nice potted guide to the works of the Finchley Conservative association, it has morphed into the "Mike Freer" website. Now if it wasn't for the fact that Finchley was the constituency of Lady Thatcher, Great Britains first female Prime Minister, I might understand it. Not a picture in sight, just a single sentence on the homepage. Now if I was running the site, I'd have a page dedicated to this towering figure, but clearly Mike sees himself as a more important figure. If you click on his map of the constituency, you get a map of Barnet. It seems that our Mike has plans !!!! Now proof that Mike Freer is reading the Barnet Eye can be found on the Local Campaigns page. On Saturday I took Mike Freer to task for being lazy. I mentioned amongst other things that one of his local campaigns was a straight link to the Tory Central website with no comment. Another link didn't work. Fine evidence of his much vaunted hard work. Well it seems that unlike "Lazy Mike Freer", hard working Rog T gets results. These two rather embarrassing local campaigns have disappeared !!! It may not be much of a victory, but it shows that we're taken seriously by Mike.

Next, lets take ourselves off to the Barnet Council Press release Library. There is a truly bizarre release from Mr Freer.

A Burnt Oak park received some tender loving care yesterday as part of Barnet Council’s week of action in the ward.

Council ground maintenance teams spent a day at Watling Park off Watling Avenue, cutting back brambles, pruning hedges, tidying flowerbeds and picking up litter. The spruce up was part of the council’s second Clean, Green and Safe Week, in which council officers, along with partner organisations, tackle issues important to local residents such as crime, anti-social behaviour and health related matters.

Following October’s highly successful week of action in Child’s Hill, this week’s programme of events, running from 26 – 30 January, once again includes the removal of graffiti from hotspot areas and Barnet Police working with the council’s Priority Intervention Team (PIT) to remove abandoned vehicles from the ward.

As part of yesterday’s activities, pupils at Barnfield Primary School received a visit from the council’s Trading Standards team and London Fire Brigade, explaining the importance of not playing with fireworks and discussing how to take precautions against fire in the home.

Other events during the week will include the partnership-run mobile youth centres, the Rolling Bass and Rolling Bass Max buses, visiting several locations across the ward along with the handout of free door locks to vulnerable residents and fire safety checks within their homes.

Leader of the Council, Councillor Mike Freer said:

“The week of action in Burnt Oak is not only an opportunity for residents to partake in a number of organised activities but for residents to tell us what issues are important to them and what they would like to see improved in their community.

“Council officers will once again be out engaging with residents to build on the success seen in Childs Hill and ensure Barnet remains a clean, green and safe borough to live and work in.”

For more information on how to become involved in your area contact: Lorna.minney@barnet.gov.uk, tel: 0208 3597726 or visit www.barnet.gov.uk

Now I don't know about you, but I thought "cutting back brambles, pruning hedges, tidying flowerbeds and picking up litter" was what the council was supposed to do all the time in it's parks. If Mike Freer thinks that doing this is worthy of a press release, he's lost the plot. It's called Parks Maintenance and it is one of the many functions of the Council. I find it rather strange that the children of Burnt Oak are visited in February to tell them not to play with Fireworks. Surely November is the time for that? To quote Brian Coleman "Bonkers".