NOTEBOOK by BILL HEANEY
West Dunbartonshire Council will begin naming businesses who fail to pay their debts.The new policy will mean any company which has avoided paying Non-Domestic Rates (NDR) and ignored reminders will be added to a public list online.
The firm’s name, type of business, address, default period and total amount due will be published on the Council website with the first details published week commencing 28th January.
The new approach is intended to encourage business who have ignored repeated reminders to work with the Council to take advantage of the supports available to them and settle their bills.
It will also allow residents to make informed decisions about the businesses they engage with, says their press release.
Whatever next, the ducking stool, the stocks, debtors prisons, the workhouse, deportation?
For more information call 01389 737788.
If you’re lucky you won’t have to wait any longer than half an hour for the phone to be answered. It might never happen though, as so many people know to their cost.
The above is contained in a press release from West Dumbarton Council dated January 16. They can’t even get the date right.
This is begging bowl politics.
But that’s what happens when you live in a parallel universe as they do.
What a shower of tossers, knuckle scraping ignoramuses they are.
Insensitive doesn’t cut it with these people.
They are in a league of their own. And it’s a long way from A Division.
Ordinary members of the public have already begun to call them bullies on social media.
But that is mild. Much milder than it should be.
Who do they think they are?
The answer to that is that these are the councillors local people voted for at the last local government elections.
Those people who didn’t choose to vote must surely be regretting that now.
Because when it comes to politicians, you get the ones you vote for.
With the announcement above, West Dunbartonshire Council are taking us back in time.
And it’s not to a good time, to when people were reduced to living “on the parish”.
That’s when they had to turn up to be assessed for tackety boots and shabby clothing which was all they had to wear in their state of abject poverty.
In Helensburgh, the Town Council used to put a list of the names of those who hadn’t paid their rent or rates in a glass case outside the council office in Sinclair Street.
Even those old dyed-in-the-wool Tories who took it down had some decency running through their veins.
It’s much the same now under the Labour government – and we are told it’s going to get worse. Things can only get better. Now there’s a joke for you.
They are proud of the fact that they are putting the country’s finances in order while leaving the rest of us in the scat.
I haven’t heard anything about what they are doing with their own incomes to help. When are they going to take a cut from their own inflated salaries? Imagine having the brass neck to pick up public money for doing what they do?
What do they do, by the way? Organise competitions to see who can pick up in-house awards such as ACHIEVE? What a load of baloney that is.
What do they ever achieve on behalf of the sorely deprived community here?
Pot-holed roads, back damp in social housing, homelessness, freezing homes and hunger?
They should be ashamed to call themselves Labour or SNP or anything at all for that matter.
They couldn’t lace the boots of the men and women who have gone before.
The spineless Labour councillors who resigned when they could’t get the candidate for Provost elected are giving Labour a bad name. Socialism? They couldn’t spell it.
Go to the West Dunbartonshire Council site on Facebook right now and tell them what you think. Go now. It’s high time someone shouted STOP!