James Wharton MP

Tonight I attended a presentation by local resident Ray Wallace Thompson at Stockton Central Library, hosted by the Photo-Colour society.  It was a thoroughly professional display with a mixture of photographs Ray has taken over the years and a particularly interesting photo-essay.  Ray has won a great many awards for his work and clearly has a passion for beauty and great skill with a camera.  The evening was all the more poignant as it was Ray’s last and the final meeting of the society.

I attended the public meeting of Hartburn Residents Association tonight with local Councillors Ken Lupton and Terry Laing.  It was held at All Saints Church in Hartburn Village.  It is great to see a relatively young resident’s association doing well and lobbying hard in the interests of local people.  Tonight’s agenda was dominated by discussion about parking and the recent loss of trees in the village, which has understandably upset a number of residents.

There was then a talk by Hartburn’s Community Police Officer, PC Sarah Troy, which was informative and useful.  It was just the sort of community involvement from the police that we need to see and was certainly worthwhile.

Finally, just to round it all off, there was mince pies and mulled wine.  I am extremely pleased that I was able to attend and I gained a useful insight into local issues in the Hartburn area.

This morning I was on Matthew Davies’ Breakfast Show.  It is always good fun to do Radio Tees (Radio Cleveland!) and Matthew is a super host.  We discussed a wide range of issues, from multi culturalism and Britishness to Greek Island holidays and memories of the best teachers at school.  I was particularly pleased to be able to raise the issue of Ingleby Barwick’s schooling and Garden Grabbing in Eaglescliffe and Yarm whilst on air.

There is now an online “e-petition” to defend Parkview home in Thornaby.  I am usually wary of promoting these online petitions as it seems little more than a way for the government to gather up email addresses, which can then be used to promote Labour policies (in a non-political way of course), but for this cause I am prepared to make an exception!

If you support Parkview please sign up:
http://petitions.pm.gov.uk/Parkview/

This lunchtime I took Francis Maude MP, Shadow Minister for the Cabinet Office and Shadow Chancellor of the Dutchy of Lancaster, to visit “A Way Out” in Stockton.  “A Way Out” is a charity that helps young people and women to get their lives back on track, tackling drug problems and prostituion.

It was really impressive to get a look around their drop in centre and hear about the work that they do.  Above all there was a real sense of mission; the staff and volunteers were clearly all passionate about their work and as a result are achieving impressive results.  This is the sort of community based grass roots project that the government needs to be encouraging, rather than suffocating them with more and more red tape.  A major complaint was the need to jump through hoops and “tick boxes” for funding which meant that time, which could be spent actually making a difference, is being wasted on hitting often meaningless targets.

Francis seemed genuinely interested and hopefully some of the ideas discussed will find their way into the Conservative manifesto at the next election… time will tell!