Edinburgh Sucks! | It woz us that dun it

Lawrence Marshall

It woz us that dun it - sayz laybur

By The Basa ⋅ April 30, 2007 ⋅

Portobello Labour councillors are grasping at straws to get their names in the paper as the Labour meltdown approaches on Thursday and the story in today’s Evening News shows just how desperate they really are.

Now they are dissing a local pressure group of over 300 persons. Portobello Campaign Against The Supperstor (PCATS - http://www.pcats.org.uk/) which fought long and hard to have a superstore built on the old Scottish Power off Portobello High Street questioned the NuLabour leaflets being distributed in the area and one member of the PCATs group put out their own leaflet with some home truths:

NEW LABOUR FANTASY

Our Councillors claim in their election leaflet to have “seen off the threat of the Portobello Super Store”. Cllr Child has stated this in the past in an email but this is the first time she has touted this fantasy publicly. Let’s
get the facts right from the people who actually stopped the superstore. We first decided to hold a public meeting and asked, because we had no funds, Cllr Marshall to hire the Portobello Town Hall (he could get it free). He said that it was not worth our while to start a campaign or even hold a meeting .The subsequent meeting was the biggest ever and the crowd were 100 per cent against a Superstore except Cllr. Marshall who had the brass neck to turn up at the event and try to hog the microphone .It had to be wrestled away from him by one of our PCATS women!

PCATS (Porto Campaign Against the Superstore) was formed and we had a meeting with Marshall, Child and Cllr Davies, Chair of Planning. We were told that our appeal would not succeed and “we should consider co-operating with the developer” over peripheral details. Our request for financial assistance was met by a loud No from Cllr Child. (This from a woman whose council subsequently spent £7million on an ill thought out congestion scheme; and blamed the public for kicking out the plan in a referendum. A similar amount was also wasted on a housing stock transfer referendum. And needless to say the Council can always find money for the really important things like pay increases and (WAIT FOR IT!) redundancy payments in case we are churlish enough not to re elect them! Any pretence that the Council was against the Store vanished when they ducked out of putting a retail argument at the first Public Inquiry meeting in the Town hall with the official reporter.

Then in the midst of our campaign we discovered that the Council had hatched a plan to buy out the lease on the Pitz, mini soccer site, move it to the golf course, move the public library and the community centre to the promenade next to the Sports Centre, and sell off all three sites for PRIVATE housing. We argued successfully to stop this as it would compromise our appeal by allowing the developers to argue that the relocation of these facilities and the erection of housing would make the Store site more a central part of
Portobello

We managed to raise over £23,000 to successfully defeat the developers. Our Councillors attended many of our fundraising events; not to help in any useful way but to be seen and pretend to be on our side. Nobody was fooled by this faux, and somewhat distasteful, display of “friendship”.

The Superstore battle was won by PCATS and the community, despite the actions and inactions of the Council or its local representatives. Their machinations in relation to PCATS and the developers has left a nasty suspicious taste that won’t go away.

Personal P.S. Casting a disinterested eye over the New labour pamphlet I am intrigued by some other of their promises eg “NEED FOR GOOD AFFORDABLE HOUSING Very laudable but when did the Council last build council houses? In 1987 that’s when. Is Cllr Marshall proud of this particular record? LEISURE OPPORTUNITIES and EXCELLENT SPORTING FACILITIES; How have they hoped to achieve this? Surely not by trying to sell off Meadowbank stadium and Portobello golf course for PRIVATE housing ?.

Child then wrote an open letter to her online bruiser at TalkPorty (who refused to print the the leaflet above) Bob Jefferson, variously known as Nazi Bob (See EdSucks passim) or Dalriada Drunk and leaked it to the press to show her one-sided bias.

So now the Evening News runs a one-sided story without a byline. Maybe they should have did a bit more digging rather than fawn over the Porty Coonsillors and their Goebels’.

So it was all down to Child and Marshall - the community raising the huge amount of money and taking the protest to a public enquiry had nothing to do with it. I think I’ll run out and vote for them right now - coz it wos dem dat did it, right enuf!

More Info: Block on Porty superstore bid ‘down to city’