Stop moaning and get on with the job!

Now the lacklustre election campaign is over, the victors are counting the spoils, and the losers are indulging in the usual damage limitation.
The big-time losers at both county and borough level are obviously the Boston Bypass Independents, and whilst there's little they can do to gild the lily, that hasn't stopped them trying.
Our only representative at county hall, Councillor Major (Rt'd) Ramonde Newell has pledged to keep up the pressure to bring a bypass to Boston - a "forgotten town" as he calls it.
We wish him luck - especially as ... if his quote in the local press is correct ... he wrongly believes that "the County Council runs the Highways Agency."
In fact, the Highways Agency is an Executive Agency of the Department for Transport (DfT) responsible for operating, maintaining and improving the strategic road network in England on behalf of the Secretary of State for Transport, and not subject to the whim of Lincolnshire County Council. Not only that, but a map of the agency's road network (below) does not show a single road managed by the agency in this county - they are all managed by the local authority.

BBI leader Richard Austin called his defeat an "advantage" for Boston. For once, we're in agreement with the respected and beloved leader, who goes on to say that he can now wholeheartedly give his time to the borough - which makes us wonder what he's been doing until now.
Meanwhile, the BBI's First Lady, Alison Austin, claims in a letter to the local press that the BBI's 31.8% share of the county vote means that it is still a force to be reckoned with - or should that have read a "farce" to be reckoned with. And as we predicted last week the age old excuse is that national issues took precedence at the election was trotted out in mitigation.
In another letter, the leader and his deputy Peter Jordan start their wholehearted attention to the borough by fanning the embers of an old debate which they term a "smear campaign" by two Better Boston Group councillors - Anne Dorrian and Brian Rush. "They accused us of 'doing a deal' with ... the leader of the county council, so we would not put candidates into the 2009 county council elections. We always said events would prove the truth. The elections have now been completed and the BBI have fielded four candidates."
Our memory of this debate was that the BBI was alleged to have said that they would not contest the election if they got a bypass. No bypass has been promised, and the BBI contested the elections.
The deal claim was also made on the Boston Bypass Pressure Group website, at the time it announced its disassociation from the BBI.
The website says: "At a meeting on June 25th (2008) between the Leader of LCC and the Leader and Deputy Leader of Boston Borough Council, a deal, arrangement, whatever you want to call it, was struck. What was the deal? In exchange for a date, route and support for funding the BBI would not stand against any conservative candidates at the next County Council elections. The deal was proposed by the Leader of the LCC and agreed upon. How do we know this? After a month's silence, the Leader of BBC at a meeting of the BBI executive encouraged them firstly to remove any reference to County Council elections from the BBI constitution and later informed the meeting of the above deal. This was confirmed a few weeks later when two councillors on two separate occasions challenged the Deputy Leader and were told exactly the same sequence of events."
You can read the article in full at http://www.boston-bypass.org.uk/page1.php
At the end of the day, we hope that now the dust has settled, the BBI can stop trying to convince everyone how popular and clever they are and simply get on with the job of doing the best for Boston.

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