Tax and Sleaze
Friends and readers. We now pay 38% of our income in taxes of one form or another, this is as much as we paid in the dark days of the 70s.Of course the average working person as usual will be hardest hit, and with the pensions running into crisis may have to work on past the current retiral age to give themselves a decent pension.
Now we also see the people’s party caught up in sleaze, selling peerages for cash and denying they knew anything about it,if you believe that you will believe anything. Patronage is nothing new but we were promised a new start under Labour, but of course that has not happened, and sleaze has returned with a vengence. So what do the ordinary party members think or are they relevent now, as it would seem that rich unelected donars can demand a covert seat in government.
Tony Blair’s final days in power is now tainted as was John Major’s final days this lead to the tories being destroyed at the polls, will the same thing happen to labour. We do not have to look to national government to find sleaze, for instance former labour group leader Keith Geddes received a consultancy contract from his cronies worth £90,000 pounds Trevor Davies private business dealings are worth closer scrutiny, John Mulvey another former group leader was given a contract to look at poverty, Elizabeth Maginnis and her close ties with the Waterfront’s chief executive.
It seems two fingers are been shown to the voters as our rulers weave their tangled web, of course panic may well be setting in as the voting system changes for the next council elections and feathering the nest is the order of the day. These so called councillors have been hiding under the labour flag using their positions to enhance their earnings and social standing, they are worse than the tories, because you expect it from them, but from the peoples party you expect better.
But many of them will try to cling on to power promising better days and more of them, but if the electorate has any sense, they will toss them out of office and return their own candidates so at least they will have an opportunity to get accountability and straight answers.
Greater Pilton has such an opportunity, we at PiltonSucks.com hope you take it and return your own candidates emptying the old guard who have for so long taken it for granted  that the punters will vote for them because they always have. But times change and new people emerge. As you would expect PiltonSucks.com follows local issues closely and have in the past been to a number of public meetings and listened to the concerns on the various issues discussed.
We have spoken to local people who have become increasingly sceptical and angered about what is going on and we have heard a couple of names put forward as contenders in the coming local elections. As we travel round the area One person in particular has been mentioned freqently, we would not wish to put undue pressure on him by asking if he would be prepared to stand or even name him on this site, but he is well respected in the community and we have spoken to him over the phone, in fact as recently as Thursday 16-3-06 and asked him if he would be interested in standing if he felt the community would support him. His reply which he said we could publish was to say that at the present time he had no plans to stand and was quite happy to be a community activist,although at times he felt some issues could be dealt with a more delicatly.
He also mentioned that he has been reading our site and expressed concern about our anti bullying campaign and in particular the case of the MUIRHOUSE TWO which he felt was if our facts were correct-and they are- should be dealt with at a local level with local elected members taking a bigger interest.
So Friends and readers you can see although we are surrounded by tax and sleaze there is still a window of hope there are people prepared to come forward and be counted despite the possibilty of being excluded, communitys are not without people who do think that it may be time to change both direction and priorities. These people who ever they are should not be ridiculed and rubbished and dismissed as trouble makers, remember your history if it were not for people fighting the status quo were would we be now, still serfs tugging our fore lock to some pompus stuck up twit, come to think of it history has a habit of repeating itself if it is not nipped in the bud.Â