Residents Associations crypto-trotskyists or fascists?- warns Surrey's Leader !27 March 2011
...news greeted with incredulous hilarity by residents
At the Surrey County Council meeting last week, where he used his party's absolute majority to kick debate on pay-and-display into the long grass, Leader Andrew Povey made an extraordinary statement. As reported in the excellent Surrey Advertiser (p3: "Leader's slur on members an 'abuse of position'" - the headline in the online version has since been changed), he likened Residents' Associations to 'potential BNP members or Trotskyists.' There are just 8 Residents' Councillors contrasted with his Party's 54, but clearly they have not been as submissive as Dr. Povey demands of his own councillors.
Are civic-minded residents attending last week's AGM really trotskyists or BNP members? - Dr. Povey warns
The politicos just don't get it. Card-carrying members of the centrally-organised national political parties seem incapable of realising that most good folk tired of politics and politicking years ago. They began turning to associations of residents who cared not a jot, and asked not, how a person voted at an election. They just wanted to get on with things for the benefit of their locality without the claptrap and zealotry of politics. That is why, even in Surrey, a bastion of conservatism in its best sense - with a small 'c', membership of the Conservative Party has declined markedly over the decades. It is why the combined membership of residents' associations in the parliamentary constituency of Esher and Walton, for example, is more than four times the number of card-carrying members of the biggest national political party here. It is why in Thames Ditton alone the local Conservative Association has declined from a membership of over 2,000 in 1952 (more than the members of the entire constituency these days), to the point where it is so small as to face the prospect of being wound up with the other area party cells into just one for the constituency. During which time the membership of the Thames Ditton and Weston Green Residents' Association, which carries no political baggage, has risen to over 1,100 households and 2,300 members. Molesey accounts for about 4,000. In all, the Residents' associations in Elmbridge number around 12,200 active members..
When residents bought the Advertiser from our little Post Office in the High Street on Saturday, the Leader's statement was read not with outrage but with guffaws of hilarity, tinged with humane sympathy for a man who has clearly been under a lot of stress lately. How out of touch with reality can you be?! Earlier in the week, some 70 rather nice, intelligent, residents attended the Residents' Association Annual General Meeting. They are the kind of people who enjoy gardening, clear their snow, pick up litter instead of dropping it, give time and effort to the community, and are concerned for their villages. It came as something of a shock to now realise that they are all potential BNP members or Trotskyists - Dr. Povey is not sure which. A real eye-opener. One will look round very carefully in future!
To understand the basis for Dr Povey's assertion one needs look no further than advice leaked from what we are informed is the unacknowledged "Office for the Suppression of Dissent" in the Surrey Conservative Party, headed by a shadowy figure known as 'The Whip.' He is believed to have a strong connection - possibly identical - with the man responsible for Highways in the county and for steamrollering along the policy of pay-and-display which is causing concern to trotskyists and BNP supporters ordinary residents everywhere. One cannot vouch for the provenance of the information, which may have no substantiation whatever, but in the accompanying photo gallery, we take you on a humorous tour of the highly suspect trots and fascists of the Thames Ditton and Weston Green Residents Association.