NOTEBOOK by BILL HEANEY
Health boards were told by the Scottish government that no money was currently available for the building schemes. Again.
The Scottish government said a revised NHS infrastructure plan would be unveiled in the spring, but it is widely accepted that our elected representatives and the highly paid officials serving public bodies are short on vision. Desperately short.
Forward planning is not their strong suit. Confirmation of this is included in the report which will be published tomorrow by Stephen Boyle, the Auditor General. Read it and weep.
It puts West Dunbartonshire Council in yet another hard place.
Because they can’t fess up to things and want to keep details of everything and anything up their jumpers and out of sight from the people who pay their wages, they are in a serious financial fankle of their own making.
When the blunder over the boulders in Station Road emerged, for example, they said that could not be changed because the £20 million that Boris Johnston’s government put in our begging bowl for levelling up purposes had been “ring fenced”.
We were expected to believe the myth that the money could not be spent on anything else. Not even for keeping the Balloch Library open for people in one of the most deprived areas of the region.
Nor for allowing The Pavilion Cafe in Levengrove Park from having to put the key in the door for good unless they could pull a rabbit out of a hat and come up with £90,000 a year to keep it open.
The Council might have been able to do some of these things if they hadn’t bullied their staff and left themselves open to paying out around £1 million to a single person in compensation. Disgracefully, they didn’t do that.
They told the public, eventually, that it was a good idea to include a new health centre in the town centre regeneration.
But how could they include it if the town centre plans – such as the Charles Atlas type concrete boulders – were already being dipped into and had been bought and paid for with that money? That ring-fenced money.
I know they are not meant to be bedtime reading or thrillers or even newspapers, but has anyone read the West Dunbartonshire Council minutes recently, the Health and Social Care Partnership’s in particular.
Openness and transparency is what politicians tell us they aspire to, but James Joyce’s Ulysses in Gaelic would be easier to take in for the man or woman on the Bellsmyre or Brucehill bus, not that they are any less bright than the folk from other parts of this area.
It is all very well for the politicians to plead that the latest Scottish budget had to address an estimated £1.5 billion funding shortfall.
And that independent experts warned it was unlikely NHS Scotland would “survive” without extra funding this year.
Dumbarton Health Centre and the Rialto Cinema.
Dumbarton is not even on the list of NHS projects that have been “paused” or are facing delays. We’ll still be smelling the cannabis by the time they get around to building it, if at all.
Who is not tired of listening to politicians telling us that waiting lists for a range of treatments on the NHS have been growing amidst warnings that staffing levels are “dangerously low?”
NHS boards were told by Scottish government officials that building work on new projects could be paused for two years as a result of the spending squeeze.
Which has come about as a result of incompetence on the part of those who run our country and our public services.
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On top of banning journalists like me, West Dunbartonshire Council have taken to suspending teachers and banning books. They’ll be burning books in the town centre next.
It seems that a teacher at Dumbarton Academy wrote a memoir of his days at the school where he has been on the staff at least four times.
The teacher, highly thought of by most people I have spoken with and very good at his job has been suspended while the rumour mill keeps turning.
What happened? What’s happening now. The Council’s spin doctors refuse to comment. It’s costing us around £400,000 a year for a Public Relations team and this is what we get. No communications strategy was ever built on silence.
I think we would be better off with the Pavilion Cafe open or the Balloch Library open to the local residents.
Mind you, the Provost and councillors are taking public money under false pretences. They couldn’t run a bath.
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I have told you many times that a secret in Dumbarton is something you tell one person at a time.
It appears that the head teacher at the Academy has written a letter to parents warning them about the book mentioned above.
The letter was sent out in response to a Dumbarton Academy teacher writing ‘The (Mis)adventures of a Dumbarton Maths Teacher.’
Head teacher Alison Boyles says the school was unaware of the book’s existence.
“The book has been written and published without the council’s prior knowledge.
“The book contains views by the author that are not recognised or shared by the council or in any of our education establishments.
“There is no further information available for me to share due to the ongoing investigation but I wanted to update you personally and reassure you that I am happy to speak to anyone who may have particular concerns.”
The book is for sale on Amazon description reads: “In 1989, at the tail end of the Cold War, a phone call was made that would change the lives of many people in an area of Scotland, not very far from where the Nuclear Submarines were kept. Of course, it had nothing whatsoever to do with East/West relations at all. “It was instead, simply a call from Strathclyde Regional Council offering me a job at Dumbarton Academy.”
Which is funny depending on your sense of humour.
When contacted by a journalist, one of those to whom the PR people deign to speak, the spin doctors said they do not comment on individual cases, which begs the question what is an individual case?
That journalist was left to understand that the Council expects the “highest standards from all its employees” and takes swift action when it believes these have not been met.
I wonder if they would – they won’t, of course – care to tell the press and public what swift action it has taken over their bullying of a disabled employee which is about to cost us/not them £1 million.
We are supposed to live in a democratic country.
There has been no word of suspensions or anything like that but I suppose that too is being kept quiet in Secret Scotland. Until it comes out, of course.
The article confirms that “they” do not do individual cases. Yet look at how they go on about Gurpreet’s brother. That is an individual case. They ignore the fact that no one in Scotland has enforceable human rights under the mental health act which violates each and every one of those rights.
Good question. Of course their statement is nonsense just as is their ban of the book and the suspension of the teacher and the ban on me. I don’t think it has been delegated to head teachers to suspend their staff in these circumstances and I know for a fact that it has not been delegated to individual officers to ban me from sitting in the press bench (if there was one) at council meetings or to refuse to answer any questions The Democrat has other than to go through a tedious and expensive Freedom of Information process which can take weeks if not months to find out who is in a photograph issued by them, for example. Everyone else in the country believes the FoI system in Scotland is not fit for purpose except West Dunbartonshire Council. As for their spin doctors, do you think they did their training in Putin’s Russia or took their strategy from an old Stasi handbook? I think we should be told.