There are some cynics out there who say all councils should be hung – but that is another story for another day!

However, the one thing that concerned Mr Pendle was the disappointing turnout in parts of Colne for the elections – in Horsfield and Vivary Bridge, only 34% of voters went to the polls, in Waterside just a third could be bothered to make the effort.

Mr Pendle trusts those who could not be bothered to go and vote are not going to start whingeing when they feel the council is not doing anything to help them – but he would not bet a penny on it.


LAST week, Mr Pendle said he was glad Pendle had not gone down the road of having an elected Mayor – something which just 12 areas in England have done since the option was introduced six years ago.

Now, it seems, the left-leaning think tank the Institute for Public Policy research says every town and city in England should have one – to "reinvigorate" local politics and to give central government assuarance it "could devolve powers to a safe pair of locally-accountable hands".

Really? Isn't it more likely to be the case that elected mayors would be largely unwanted by the public, with election turn-outs even lower than they are for council elections (see above), would be deeply distrusted by the people they were supposed of whom they were meant to be the "first citizens" and would be regarded as having their noses and hands stuck in the trough filled with their council tax?


THE years might roll by, yet people still retain the same strange habits which they and their equally strange friends find funny, but the rest of us find annoying and wishing we could punch those responsible on the nose – or on occasions such as this, in a more appropriate place.

Mr Pendle refers to the incident on Monday night when a streaker felt the need to parade across the Crucible Theatre in Sheffield prior to the last session of the world snooker final.

Why? It couldn't possibly have been because there were television cameras there, could it?

What tedious and tiresome individuals these people are. Such juvenile behaviour was not funny when the first streaker ran across Lord's in the 1970s (John Arlott's classic commentary – "What a lot of fuss over a little thing like that" – summed it up in a nutshell, if you will pardon the pun) and it has failed to get funnier in the 30-odd years since.

These people are nothing more than exhibitionists on an ego trip. It is time they got off, grew up and got themselves a life.