This coming Saturday will be High Street Saturday, which is a new campaign day that aims to celebrate our town centres and high streets. As part of the day, people are encouraged to pledge to shop locally, share photos and messages online using #HighStreetSaturday, and to encourage local councils like Crawley to make good use of the Future High Street Fund. This is a fund that is provided by the Government to help make high streets and town centres fit for the future.

Henry Smith MP has welcomed the news that a good cause in Crawley has received funding from players of the People’s Postcode Lottery.

For many years, I’ve seen political ping-pong at both national and local level, but often the full facts are not being disclosed when politics is spun. For example, last week we had a press release issued by Crawley’s Labour council where the Cabinet Member for Housing was taking credit for a 1% annual rent reduction for our council tenants.

Last week was potentially the start of a major realignment of our party politics. Time will tell, but we may be seeing a tectonic shift. A healthy democracy needs viable alternatives that can govern effectively and a politics where everyone in society feels there is a credible and respectable voice for them.

Protests over Climate Change have been in the news recently. What gets less media coverage is the Conservative Government’s strong record in reducing the UK’s CO2 emissions and their very green environmental agenda.

The Government’s recent Rough Sleeping Strategy actively plans to halve the rates of rough sleeping by 2022 and to eliminate all rough sleeping completely by 2027. The implementation of the Strategy is to address the causes of rough sleeping in order to prevent it from happening in the first place, and to help get people who are sleeping rough into accommodation. Additional funding is being made to local Councils to intervene sooner in homelessness cases, such as Crawley Borough Council, who are the statutory authority in Crawley for homelessness.

We can often see opinion pieces presented as fact, as well as claims/denials and impending warnings of doom presented as news. Outlandish claims may not always be fake news, as on rare occasions they could turn out be true, as after all, a stopped clock is right twice a day.

Political extremes are not healthy and I welcome that there is no far-right elected representation in the UK, but the far-left are becoming increasingly powerful which should concern us all. Since Jeremy Corbyn became Labour Leader in September 2015, the far-left have been tightening their control over one of the two main parties of government, with moderates either dropping out or being forced out.
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One of the advantages of living in a large town like Crawley is that we have a large number and a wide variety of facilities for our leisure time. Over the last 20 years I’ve seen a considerable improvement in what Crawley has to offer.

By the time this is published, the parliamentary vote on the EU withdrawal agreement between the UK and the EU should have taken place with the outcome known. By far the best outcome for the country would be for MPs to back the deal. This would respect the democratic verdict delivered in the referendum and provide for an orderly exit from the EU. Prolonged uncertainty is not good for our economy and it is worth noting that the business community are very keen for the deal to pass.