Tree Line

Further evidence reached us today that Wirral Council operate a policy of “governance by social media “. By which we mean if you want a response from Wirral Council – don’t send an email , don’t make a Freedom of Information request , don’t make a complaint  , don’t ask a question at a Council meeting , don’t go to a councillor’s surgery .  No!  – send  your issues to any local blog  or set up a Facebook page or better still set up your own social media forum for people with a common concern and tell Wirral Council what you’re not happy about!.

Time and again we’ve witnessed local councillors and council officers only sitting up and taking notice when it interferes with the Council’s reputation management. And without blowing our own trumpet if there’s one local blog that likes to justifiably question reputations it is Wirral Leaks.  

So what started out as, in the scheme of things, a minor story about trees maintenance has , er, blossomed and taken on a life of its own. As case of mighty oaks from little acorns grow.

The tweet above was taken from today’s Wirral Council Twitter feed  (there’s also , unsurprisingly , a tweet about  streetlights) and it looks like they’re employing a full time tweeter. Could it be Martin Liptrot (sky) earning his £45K  we ask ourselves?. Whoever it is they seem to have taken to heart the big message from last week’s presentation from Ben Page  , Chief Executive of Ipsos MORI who conducted a (very selective) resident survey and presented his findings  on Wirral Council’s “Journey”.

For those of you masochists out there who enjoy watching professional PR schmoozers in action the full video is here :

However to save you the pain we can summarise his big message was about telling Wirral Council (and their partners) to communicate their successes (!) but most of all to just :

                                                  C-O-M-M-U-N-I-C-A-T-E ! 

Hence we presume the frenetic tweeting which will no doubt see a future compensation claim from the Council tweeter for Repetitive Strain Injury.

Meanwhile the last word goes to this week’s tree spotter  “Dad”  who writes :

I have been following this thread since it started and am quite amused by the content.

Today I came across the perpetrators of this heinous crime including their getaway vehicle in Prenton Hall Road.

If you zoom in you can see the large wood louse committing environmental crime ( is he holding a scythe? . If you zoom in even further, you still will not see any safety barriers. I am uncertain that these are the same tree fellers Wirral Council use, but still it’s amusing.

We think it’s actually a harness rather than a scythe and the trees certainly don’t look like those examples of pollarding in the Wirral Council tweet!

U-Turn On Roundabout = Dead End

Our further congratulations go to Leaky Awards winner Help Save Hamilton Square Birkenhead https://www.facebook.com/savehamiltonsquare/ as an increasingly desperate Wirral council sneak out the news on a bleak Friday afternoon in January that they’ve shelved their embarrassingly misconceived plan to turn the wondrous Hamilton Square into a not-so-merry-go-round.

http://www.wirralglobe.co.uk/news/14207993.Plans_to_open_up_historic_Hamilton_Square_to_traffic_are_shelved/

We are proud to have published one of the earliest objections raised to the harebrained scheme from the ever eloquent Dr.Robert Smith https://wirralleaks.wordpress.com/2015/11/12/squaring-the-inner-circle/

We live in hope that this U-turn serves as a further example that a) Wirral Council do not know what they are doing and b) they are currently desperate to maintain their reputation at any cost.

The current administration appear to teetering on the precipice. As we have commented before they may have the electoral mandate but they don’t have the moral authority to run Wirral Council.Indeed we have our doubts that if Lyndale School were currently up for closure that Wirral Council would go through with it – massive capital receipt notwithstanding.

The increasingly desperate PR stunts point to a council in crisis and the results of that ridiculous MORI poll they published yesterday just reinforces our belief that this  council is all surface and no substance

http://www.wirralglobe.co.uk/news/14205247.Wirral_Council_survey_highlights_residents__concerns_over_anti_social_behaviour_and_community_safety/

MORI’s chief executive Ben Page said: “I’ve looked at 100 or so councils during 30 years in this job. Wirral is not in crisis, it is clearly on the road to improvement.”

We’d just like to say that we don’t need a poll of a tiny minority of the local population to tell us that Ben Page is a bloody fool who doesn’t live on Wirral !.