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Talk about democracy in action, Year 10ers will be in the council chambers at Devon County Hall tomorrow talking about the future of rubbish in the sixth (count them) Don’t Let Devon Go To Waste summit.
The green young things will represent where they’re from and be accompanied by their own recycling officer and will take part in workshops debates and what nots and even listen to a chat about the zero waste society by David Santillo, senior scientist of Greenpeace International Research Laboratories. (Apparently, he thinks it’s doable, just like the paperless office…)
Breathe a sigh of relief, democracy may be saved – the results are in of the UK Youth Parliament members for Devon after the Bigger Voices, Better World elections.
From the 20,000 votes cast, 12 young people were elected - three Members of UK Youth Parliament, three Deputies to support them and six Members of the Young People’s Shadow Executive, a body which is involved with Devon County Council’s top decision-makers.
According to the press release, ‘the UKYP has been active in Devon for seven years and is a voice for young people on local, regional and national issues with 400 Members (MYPs) nationally’.
Devon County Council’s Executive Member for Children’s Service, Cllr John Smith, told the PRSD: ‘Each of the candidates has shown tremendous skills in communication and campaigning, and they were all highly committed to their manifesto pledges to make life better for young people in their area.’
Of course, being part of the process may hasten the onset of cynicism, but we hope not, and we look forward to hear about their time in office.
Discover your youth representative below
SOUTH HAMS, EXETER AND TEIGNBRIDGE Member of UK Youth Parliament
Annaliza Palmer – 14yrs
Kingsbridge Community College Deputy Member of UK Youth Parliament
Levi Roper – 15yrs
Kingsbridge Community College Members of Young Peoples Shadow Executive
Emily Lewis 15yrs
St Margaret’s School, Exeter
Becci Crocker - 14yrs
West Exe Technology College
NORTH AND WEST DEVON AND TORRIDGE Member of UK Youth Parliament
Alex White – 15yrs
Chulmleigh Community College Deputy Member of UK Youth Parliament
Rowan Perrior – 12yrs
Okehampton Community College Members of Young Peoples Shadow Executive
Gregory Checkley – 16yrs
Park Community College
Becca Grose – 16yrs
South Molton Community College
MID AND EAST DEVON Member of UK Youth Parliament
Brittany Munday – 14yrs
Exmouth Community College Deputy Member of UK Youth Parliament
Kate Knight – 13yrs
Kings School, Ottery St Mary Member of Young Peoples Shadow Executive
Elsie Powell – Smith – 16yrs
Colyton Grammar
‘Living Here… West of the Exe’ celebrates sense of place. It is all about uncovering what is special in Exeter on the west side of the river. In days gone by St Thomas, Exwick, Cowick and Alphington were places in their own right, set apart from Exeter by the River Exe. Each ward has its own history and identity. Today they are neighbourhoods in a growing city. This Royal Albert Memorial Museum (RAMM) initiative includes partnerships, events, activities and a new interactive website.
The Living Here website is interactive. People are invited to share stories, memories, snapshots, research and observations of life in those neighbourhoods. It is both a virtual museum and a shop window to promote and celebrate activities taking place in the ‘real’ world, west of the Exe. It’s also a great way for RAMM to keep in touch with the community while the museum building is closed for major refurbishment.
Community contributions, sharing, discovery and queries are starting to build up since now. The site is still ‘under development’ but is live and available for a sneak preview. More functionality will be added and a few tweaks made before the official launch in early spring. Living Here is intentionally eclectic and maybe a little quirky. Visitors to the site are unlikely to agree with everything they find, but a range of views makes for an animated and interesting experience.
Sarah Scaife, the RAMM Curator of West Exe to the PRSD: “The site is about local history and much more. You’ll find pieces on wildlife, the landscape, art, and activities. It’s a place for communities to share, discover and debate. Have a look and see what you think. Enjoy browsing the site and watch it grow over the coming months. We’d be glad to hear your comments.â€
Renewable energy is big in Devon and the South West and head honcho at RegenSW, Matthew Spencer, is bullish about facing up to the EU’s tough 15 per cent proposed energy targets for the UK by 2020.
“This is big news for South West England’s 250 renewable energy businesses,” he told the PRSD.
“The region is in a strong position to benefit economically from this new drive on low-carbon energy because of its early leadership in the renewable sector.
“This decision should make it easier to attract new investment and meet our existing targets for renewable power and heat generation from within the region. However, for it to work we need to accelerate the momentum we have in the south west on onshore wind, and we need new policy from national government to support renewable heat, and offshore renewables.â€
According the the RegenSW press release, the south west already has targets for renewable electricity and heat agreed in the draft Regional Spatial Strategy. And they want a few changes to meet the 2020 targets: Higher rate of approval for onshore wind schemes in the region; long-term financial support for renewable heat; award leases for offshore wind in the south west; and greater financial support for the deployment of wave energy converters.
Who’da thought that a top-notch restaurant for the gentry of Dartmouth would be out to tackle social exclusion (err, if your name’s not on the list you’re not coming in?).
The new eatery and training centre, which will create jobs and raise skills, will be at the former St Barnabas Church (the Cypritic Saint is pictured above) and is the project of social enterprise charity Training for Life.
This is what it said in the press release: “The restaurant and training facilities will occupy the front of the St Barnabas site while the remainder of the building is being regenerated by a partnership of Signpost Housing, South Hams District Council and Training For Life. This will provide 10 flats, managed by Training For Life, specifically for homeless people or those at risk of homelessness, some of whom are expected to work in the restaurant or use the training facilities.”
Gordon D’Silva, chief executive of Training For Life, told the PRSD: “Our whole approach is built on the conviction that sustainable jobs with appropriate personal support and development is the only way to secure a move away from dependency on state benefits into a more productive and meaningful way of life. St Barnabas will be an exciting and innovative means of squaring that circle, working in partnership with the local community.”
It’s Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender (LGBT) History month in Exeter in February. This is the fourth year that the national Month has been staged, and this year the events will include drop-in sessions and a lecture.
Executive Member for Culture, Councillor Sheila Hobden, said: “Because lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people can be, have to be, or are made invisible, theirs are a secret history. Devon County Council will be playing a part in ensuring this history is now documented.â€
February 2: Drop in session at Cowick Street, Exeter 10am - 4pm
Visit Devon County Council’s Community Roadshow. Find out how to access the archives to research LGBT heritage with staff from the Devon Record Office and the Intercom Trust. Add your own story with the Curator of West Exe (from the Royal Albert Memorial Museum) to the new Living Here website, for neighbourhoods and communities of interest West of the Exe in Exeter – part of the RAMM Living Here initiative
February 9: Drop in session at the Guildhall shopping centre, Exeter 10am-4pm
As above.
February 9: Lunchtime lecture. LGBT Hidden Histories. Exeter Central Library, Music Room 11am-2pm. FREE.
Lunchtime talk exploring Lesbian, Gay, Bi and Transgender histories in Devon and the importance and difficulties of researching LGBT heritage through archives.
Guest speaker Sue Sanders, Co-chair LGBT History Month (National), will be discussing the hidden history and visible benefits of getting involved.
Refreshments will be provided. To book a free place contact: katherine.weston@devon.gov.uk or phone: 01392 384253
February 27: Seminar: “Not Offensively gay: Perceptions and expectations of student-teachers in Englandâ€. Room 1G. Queens building, University of Exeter 4pm.
A seminar to mark LGBT History month at Exeter University. Speakers: Nick Givens and Dr David Nixon.
A week or two ago Devon based celebrity chef and farmer Hugh Fernley-Whittingstall began his ‘Chicken Out’ campaign. The aim of the project was to show the great British public the cruel and dank conditions in which the usual supermarket £2.50-£3.00 chicken is reared.
Hugh carried out his own experiment, rearing a shed of intensively housed broiler hens; killing off at the drop of a hat those who did not meet weight targets (talk about the death of size zero…) and those that were injured. At one point the Devonian chef was in tears at the thought of killing another chick – and the country no doubt wept with him.
However, perhaps the most interesting part of the ‘Chicken Out’ campaign was based within a local Axminster estate. The community worked together, with a little bit of Channel 4 money behind them, to clear a vegetable patch and build a small hen house with a wire, “free range†run. Then, over a period of months, veggies were grown, chickens were reared: all became food.
It all seemed vastly empowering, the community, proud together working in the fields and growing their own food. Until you think there is a fairly upper-class man behind this. Until you see the bolshy single mum, Hayley – the most vocal member of the estate growers group – heading off to Tesco to buy her cheapo chickens, two for a fiver. Affordable and so tempting when you’re on the dole, no doubt. And therein lies the question: are the working-classes priced out of the revolution?
We can look back over the course of history and see the middle classes controlling political change. After all, those who have money have time and, often, have education to go with that time. Lenin could write Iskra, read Marx, flee Russia and return because he was not toiling on the fields all day, or working in a factory. Che Guevara was a doctors son, and a trained doctor himself, versed in political thinking through extensive reading an ailing child. How many poverty-stricken working class children would have lived through these childhood illnesses? Even the miner’s strike of 1984 only occurred because a middle-class government attempted to close down the pits, not because of the low pay and life conditions which had been tolerated for years, because people were too busy working to revolt, to reliant on the wage they brought in to revolt.
Capitalism is clever: it tempts us all with the lure of cheap. We are all so busy consuming we forget to be political, to force change, to dream of anything but our new television (flat screen, digital ready). Asda gave the working woman a £5 trouser/shirt combo this week, and who wouldn’t consider that quite a bargain? Who wouldn’t buy to full, fat chickens for £5, as well? Particularly those of us to whom £5 represents most of an hours work or a large chunk of their weekly benefits.
We are bludgeoned daily with the little things, the stigma of poverty, of drug use, of drinking more than one small glass of red wine in the evening, of eating too much or too little, of spending too much, house prices, football teams, being responsible for ones actions, the NHS. All the while there is celebrity, so close you can almost touch it; just get on Big Brother and it is yours. Then you can have it all; the money, the beauty, the time.
And there it is: time. Hugh Fernley-Whittingstall, well intentioned as he is, is a celebrity chef, a farmer he gets paid a lot of money for doing relatively little work. I was talking to someone the other day who spent ten hours a day putting frozen peas in to their compartment for British Airways in-flight meals, for minimum wage. Ten hours a day, of mind-numbing pointless pea scooping…
It is no wonder there is no sign of the revolution, we’re all too busy relaxing, drinking or sleeping to revolt. We’re all priced out of it.
You have just a couple of days to take in the last of Farmhouse Breakfast week at Occombe Farm, which culminates on Sunday January 27 with a guided walk around the nature centre followed by a hearty Occombe Farmhouse breakfast in the Bake House Cafe.
The farm will also be organising a couple of master classes in conjunction with the Soil Association in an attempt to bring back forgotten skills (like being civil, understanding apostrophies, and espousing feminism). There will be an introductory bread course with Emma Parkin of Emma Bread. And a hands-on hedgelaying course with the Countryside Rangers. Both of these one-day courses are £50, or free if you join the Soil Association (single membership starts at £2 per month, if you pay direct debit, yada, yada, yada, so it could be quite a bargain - you might even save some bread ((not very ho ho))).
And, there’s all that other nature stuff going on: building bird-boxes & lady bird hotels, rummaging through rockpools, racing trilobites on the beach, getting creative in a scrappy workshop, taking part in the Big Garden Bird Watch, joining in the Occombe Easter Egg Challenge and so on and so forth.
Living Here… West of the Exe celebrates sense of place. It is all about uncovering what is special in Exeter on the west side of the river. In days gone by St Thomas, Exwick, Cowick and Alphington were places in their own right, set apart from Exeter by the River Exe. Each ward has its own history and identity. Today they are neighbourhoods in a growing city. This Royal Albert Memorial Museum (RAMM) initiative includes partnerships, events, activities and a new interactive website.
The Living Here website is interactive. People are invited to share stories, memories, snapshots, research and observations of life in those neighbourhoods. It is both a virtual museum and a shop window to promote and celebrate activities taking place in the ‘real’ world, west of the Exe. It’s also a great way for RAMM to keep in touch with the community while the museum building is closed for major refurbishment.
Community contributions, sharing, discovery and queries are starting to build up since now. The site is still ‘under development’ (January 2008) but is live and available for a sneak preview. More functionality will be added and a few tweaks made before the official launch in early spring. Living Here is intentionally eclectic and maybe a little quirky. Visitors to the site are unlikely to agree with everything they find, but a range of views makes for an animated and interesting experience.
Sarah Scaife, the RAMM curator of West Exe writes: “The site is about local history and much more. You’ll find pieces on wildlife, the landscape, art, and activities. It’s a place for communities to share, discover and debate. Have a look and see what you think. Enjoy browsing the site and watch it grow over the coming months. We’d be glad to hear your comments.†Check out the Living Here site, for loads of fun-type stuff.
Rik Mayall as a plastic surgeon? Well, yes – and it’s award winning. A TV advert for the Don’t let Devon go to waste campaign, which features the former Kevin Turvey as a plastic surgeon has won an award as the best TV ad of 2007 in The Drum. Pretty good going, ehh? Watch it below and find out more on the Recycle Devon site.
Welcome to the People's Republic of South Devon. Your subscription will begin with the next newsletter. Keep up to date by visiting the blog regularly and make sure your voice is heard. Many thanks, The People's Republic of South Devon.
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Welcome to the People's Republic of South Devon. Your subscription will begin with the next newsletter. Keep up to date by visiting the blog regularly and make sure your voice is heard. Many thanks, The People's Republic of South Devon.
Accessibility Options
To adjust the text size of this site please click the icons below.
