At the weekend I was with Councillor Russ Cochran by the incomplete ponds in the centre of the new estate at west Durrington. Terry Woodjetts has done much to keep developers to their promises.
I campaign for the new SEND school to come to us rather than to Tangmere. The opportunity has been created because we never gave up the fight to save the site. With County Councillor Sean McDonald, and with Worthing Borough Council, we can be powerful when working together.
Tim Loughton MP and I will being having our regular meeting with Worthing’s Labour leader Rebecca Cooper. We can cheerfully compete at times of elections; we can and do cooperate in the interests of the public and the community most of the time.
Congratulations to the residents and the Worthing Homes team who enjoyed the Saturday Fun Day at the Maybridge Keystone Centre. Carly Tucker cares effectively about resident engagement. With other organisations, Worthing Homes staff did make it fun. The band was magnificent and outside the children taking penalty kicks could usefully join the England soccer team?
One current issue is the need for train travellers to get helpful authoritative advice and best value tickets when travelling. Example: a constituent went online to purchase a return ticket from Angmering to the cricket Test match at Edgbaston, Birmingham. Websites declared ‘unavailable’. Wrong.
Three cheers for Sharon at Angmering station. She managed to overcome the unavailability. Changing roles at stations may be worth considering. Do not remove the possibility of talking. Buying a travel ticket with the help of an interested human being is often essential. Do contribute to the consultation by 26 July.
Money matters but it is not everything. On Monday, West Sussex MP Gillian Keegan made a statement as Education Secretary about university courses. She thanked me for my contribution, agreeing on the importance of choice, lifelong loan entitlement, degree apprenticeships and about understanding there are many routes to success in life.
She added that five years after graduating from some courses, people are earning less than £18,000, lower than the minimum wage.
I had mentioned those who were awarded fourth class degrees (Lord Colin Cowdrey, C B Fry and Prince Alexander Obolensky) or failed to take a degree at all (including two governors of the Bank of England, Rabindranath Tagore and Sir David Stirling of the SAS).
Be cautious about relying on later earning to measure the value of a course. Poets, painters, teachers and ministers of religion, whether rabbis, imams or ministers in the Christian Church, do not show up highly on the earnings scale, but they contribute highly to society. Do not let an algorithm rate colleges, courses or universities.
Music and world affairs combined this week. The First Night of the 2023 Proms Concerts included Sibelius’s choral Finlandia. Church goers will know the hymn ‘Be Still, My soul’ that uses a serene section of the patriotic symphonic poem. It was the first music heard by the great peace maker Oleg Gordievsky when he had been smuggled out of Russia.
A member of the women’s orchestra at the Auschwitz extermination camp and a survivor of Bergen-Belsen, Anita Lasker-Wallfisch was 98 on Monday. Next day, with her cellist son Raphael Wallfisch, she came to Westminster to explain the inadequacy of the proposed Holocaust Memorial and Learning Centre. She spoke powerfully with Baroness Deech: the present proposal is too large for Victoria Tower Gardens and too small to teach succeeding generations about the ideology and practice of murdering people, an entire race for their religious heritage.
Later, I joined an important meeting on how to stop advertisement funded hate crime. Brands and their agencies do not know where half their spending ends up. Antisemitism and ad fraud go together. Action is needed to stop it. I will help.
