Democracy in practice

At tonight's ward surgery we had 3 young people, accompanied by a youth worker, who came to find out just what goes on. I'd warned them that sometimes we don't have anyone come to the surgery and then we use it as a time to catch up on information we need to share and decisions we need to take. Tonight started like that, and the young people sat with us while we debated how to move on after our consultation on possible parking bays on Cedar Crescent. We concluded that we need some further information from Stockton Council's enginneers. The young people decided that we had done the right thing in consulting and then taking action on what we'd heard.
One resident who did venture in through the rain tonight was more than happy to have the young people sit in on her discussion with us. The state of the surface on a footpath near her house was the main concern. John was able to explain something of how the repairs and resurfacing of footways and highways is prioritised and we promised that we'd find out where in the hierarchy that particular footway sits at the moment. Sadly, many of the tarmac footways in Eaglescliffe were constructed at around the same time and are now all showing their age but the budget won't allow resurfacing of them all at once so the area is going to look a bit tired and shabby.
There won't be any increase in our budget from central government while the Brown-Darling gang are borrowing record high amounts. How can any country claim to be an advanced economy when it's running on borrowed funds? How can it be reasonable to borrow nearly 60% of our Gross Domestic Product? And now it's not them who'll suffer the consequence but every child growing up in Britain today who won't have quite as good an environment as they could have had if the people in charge hadn't let them down.