West Dunbartonshire Council claims on its (pretty hopeless) website that Transport Scotland provides information on Scottish Government trunk routes, which in West Dunbartonshire is the A82:
- Traffic Scotland website
It adds that West Dunbartonshire Council maintains:
- All adopted Roads & Footways
- All adopted Bridges & Structures
- Road Drainage
- Street lighting, Traffic lights and Road signs
- Public Car Parks
Now, that’s a lie. The truth of the matter is that it doesn’t. The Council, if like me you were out on the roads over the past week or so, is that West Dunbartonshire Council and the Scottish Government are playing us all for fools.
For the past 15 years, the SNP, Nicola Sturgeon, John Swinney et al, are supposed to have been running the country, and they have.
They have been running it into the ground.
I know that from time time we at The Democrat and our colleagues in other parts of the media have been accused of hyperbole, using words such as shock, horror, shambles, nightmare. That kind of thing.
OK, I have been from time to time as guilty of this as the next scribbler.
The SNP were the worst council we have had in West Dunbartonshire for many years, and the SNP government is the worst we have had since devolution.
If this ever needed proving then in their time in office, the SNP went above and beyond to prove it. It has manifested itself in the atrocious conditions we have witnessed over the festive season.
What a shower of chancers these people are. They want independence, but they haven’t a scooby about how to run Scotland.
All the smart ass jokes one hears in the pubs and coffee shops about them being unfit for purpose are bang on the mark.
The roads in West Dunbartonshire, flooded, pot-holed, closed to traffic and a danger to life mirror what we see on the Six O’Clock News each night. That’s in the reports from Ukraine, sadly. From the bomb-scarred street of Kiev and Odessa.
The council officers on £150,000 a year, including pensions, and councillors indeed such as the former SNP leader, Jonathan McColl, who was on £50,000 – strut their stuff, chest puffed out, in Church Street.
Their arrogance is almost tangible. Don’t blame us, they parrot from the gospel according to Nicola Sturgeon. It’s all Westminster’s fault, they tell us.
However in our heart of hearts, we know that it is not.
We voted for mediocrity when we voted the SNP into office five years ago.
It showed over the weekend when the roads crumbled beneath the wheels of our semi-submerged vehicles and it was only by good fortune and the power of prayer we survived even a short trip out to tell the tale.
West Dunbartonshire Council, their website tells us, are responsible for Traffic Regulation Orders which “impose traffic restrictions such as road closures, introduction or varying of speed limits, prohibition of turns (such as right turns and u-turns) and introduction of waiting or loading restrictions”.
But that too is a lie. When we needed traffic lights at the foot of Argyll Avenue in Crosslet after a schoolgirl was knocked down and injured and elderly visitors to Crosslet House care home were taking their life in their hands to get across the road, it took months to get permission from Edinburgh to go ahead with that.
Don’t laugh at what comes next. This isn’t funny. The next item deals with road faults and urges taxpayers, local, national and UK to “report potholes, blocked gullies and pavement issues”.
Does the mother of the person who wrote this stuff know he/she is out and about in the community?
There then follows advice on how to report a road fault.
There are five “useful links” for people to contact:
- Traveline Scotland (www.traveline.info)
- Transport Scotland (www.transportscotland.gov.uk)
- Roads Scotland Act 1984 (www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/1984/54/contents)
- Road Safety Scotland (roadsafety.scot)
- Sustrans (www.sustrans.org.uk)
- Society of Chief Officers of Transportation in Scotland (www.scotsnet.org.uk)
