Boston after dark -

"It depends how you look

at it"

says council leader

Yesterday we heard from Councillor Mike Gilbert after our comments regarding November’s planned protest march through Boston to highlight the impact of migration on the town.
We were so busy on Friday, that we missed another fascinating insight from council leader Peter Bedford on the Peter Levy Show on BBC Radio Lincolnshire.
Mr Levy does not sound comfortable during interviews like these – as though a wrongly pgrased question might get him into trouble with his Auntie.
He first played a chunk of a previous interview in which he gave the protest organiser Dean Everitt quite a hard time, compared with the comfier ride he gave Councillor Bedford.
Highlights– if they might be called that – of Councillor Bedford’s interview included the following …
• The issues being raised should be dealt with in Westminster or Brussels, not Boston.
• Migrants were great asset to farmers, who couldn’t operate without them these days. Q: British people don’t want to do these jobs, do they? In a lot of instances, no they don’t. Q: One farmer said that if they turned up he would take them. Is the problem with the British workers not wanting these jobs? “It seems to be perceived that the packhouse work and everything these days has become a migrant work job, and that’s totally wrong, because in the major packhouses around the Boston area there are still Boston people and, you know, should I say British people, working in those packhouses alongside the migrants. The skilled agricultural labour - in the main the tractor drivers and everybody else - are still English people. It’s a fact that our population have got to get used to the fact of starting to apply for such jobs again.”
• “As a council we don’t walk away from the fact that there is an awful lot of them come and we have to work around that. We are in talks with the Home Office and trying to get Boston classed as a special case because of the amount that have arrived. Hopefully, we will be able to make some announcement on that front shortly, but that is with the Home Office at this moment in time.”
• Q: Is the feeling that Boston doesn’t belong to Bostonians any more, and that they are outnumbered, a racist or a fair observation? “I think to a degree that is being racist.”
• “Mr Everitt talks about people not being able to go out at night in the town, well, that depends on your outlook. I walked through town with my wife on Saturday night after a concert in Boston Stump and everybody was well behaved. We never saw an issue at all. So it’s how you want to look at things.” Boston Eye says: Critics might say that Councillor Bedford’s stroll through town was a little early in the evening, which was why things seemed so peaceful. His concert began at 7pm and must have been over before 10pm. At that time of night the town’s clubbers haven't even hit the streets – but come back an hour or two later …. and how you look at things may be completely different.
• Q: Boston people feel as if their town has been taken away from them …Peter Hitchens in the Mail on Sunday used the word’ swamped.’   I wouldn’t use the word swamped - we’ve got an awful lot - and I think that we’ve got to accept that they are here, they’re here to work. There is a certain element - obviously the same as our population – that don’t seem as though they want to work, or can’t get work but in the main, the majority of them are here to actually work and benefit themselves.
• Q: Is the town blossoming and benefiting from those numbers? In certain areas, yes. From the White Hart hotel in High Street all the way down to Haven Bridge and out to the old London Road, there were five years ago many, many empty boarded-up derelict shops. There’s only two now left. All the rest have been refurbed and opened mainly by the migrant community, so they are now paying their business rates and everything for the benefit of Boston.
• Q: Do you welcome the protest march?  No, because the last thing Boston needs is that type of thing, that type of march. If they want to march against a migrant population it should be at the powers that have the final say on that sort of thing, on immigration policy. But Boston has recovered from the town centre riot of about 2006 I think it was. We have recovered and we are forgetting that sort of thing and trying to build … Q: So the protest is a mistake …? I think so. Q: Are there now sufficient numbers here? Would you like to see more, or would you like to say we’ve got enough now? We have enough. There is no doubt about that. We have enough, but as the EU law is at this moment in time we have no say in the final numbers that arrive here.
• Q: Did the Hitchens article hit the nail on the head …? It didn’t do Boston any favours at all. In my mind he came with one mindset and that was just to put all the negatives in the paper and nothing which are positives.
Mention of the ripple effect of the Mail on Sunday’s Peter Hitchens brings us back to the starting point, and another issue which he raised in e-mails with Boston Eye after Councillor Bedford invited him to revisit Boston and hear from locals working to ease the problems caused by migration.
“I am slightly baffled as to what right or authority he has to invite me anywhere” said Peter Hitchens. “I am also puzzled as to what authority he has to make these comments. Does he - on this or any other matter - speak for the people of the town? Did they elect him to behave in this fashion? Do they wish him to continue to do so?”
Interesting.
So how much can a “leader” truly be considered to be speaking for the people of the borough whose council he controls?
At the May elections, Councillor Bedford was elected in the charmingly rural Coastal Ward - about as far away from the real Boston as you can get. The ward includes his home village of Freiston, plus Butterwick, Benington and Leverton. He polled 789 votes – 41.5% of the 1,903 total - which is a healthy figure, and well above the rest of the field, including his fellow Tory Raymond Singleton-McGuire, who received 426 votes.
But the total of votes cast in the election was 28,292 – so overall, Councillor Bedford's backers represented a drop in the ocean.
Subsequently, he was elected leader of his eighteen Tory group peers, who then voted to assure his place as leader of the council.
Not exactly a ringing endorsement for someone who claims to speak for the borough, is it?
Not only that, but the Conservative election campaign was conducted under the leadership of Councillor Bedford’s Coastal Ward colleague, Councillor Singleton-McGuire, who subsequently – and inexplicably to many – then stepped aside.
Whilst people don’t vote presidentially in local elections in the way that they do at General Election time, the local outcome for some must have been equivalent to supporting David Cameron - then seeing Ann Widdecombe waltz out of the front door of 10 Downing Street!

You can write to us at boston.eye@googlemail.com   Your e-mails will be treated in confidence and published anonymously if requested.
Our former blog archive is available at: http://bostoneyelincolnshire.blogspot.com