Mark Dodds

The Sun and Dove is shut now forever as the pub I operated for sixteen years. I was served eviction papers by Scottish & Newcastle Pub Company for 23 September 2 days short of 16 years since the day I signed the lease in 1995. The rent and beer prices were so high the business barely made any money. Which is a contributing factor to all problems the business experienced - right down to shaky service at times. If you can't invest in a premises it makes it harder to keep customers, harder to keep staff interested and tends to lead to a cruel downward spiral of disrepair and neglect. If you're interested in why so many pubs are closing all over the UK it's because of the beer tie. I've got a blog here [anotherdayanotherdollar.blogspot.com] which has a lot of stories and thoughts about it all but is not a timeline that's easy to read through. The Morning Advertiser, the publicans' publican's newspaper has an article about it: [bit.ly] The years of being in a pressure cooker made me have a nervous breakdown in 2007 - which you may understand to some extent affected normal service at the Sun and Doves for a whole couple of years - I was suicidal for a while. It was a grim period. But during my recovery and since I vowed to do something about this inequity and gathered together a bunch of other tied lessees and set up The Fair Pint Campaign www.fairpint.org.uk which has lobbied government for the end of the beer tie and has presented evidence about the pubcos to three Business, Innovation and Skills Select Committees who subsequently have recommended that pubcos be legislated against. IN the last two years I've been working on the foundations for The People's Pub Partnership: [bit.ly] It's going to take a couple of months for me to gather my things but PPP WILL happen. If you're interested to know more please do send a note to [email protected] with KEEP ME UP TO DATE in the subject - THANKS

I'd like that Mockney Piers, thanks, when the dust's settled eh?

I didn't come back to this because I've been busy... The Sun and Dove is shut now forever as the pub I operated for sixteen years. I was served eviction papers by Scottish & Newcastle Pub Company for 23 September 2 days short of 16 years since the day I signed the lease in 1995. The rent and beer prices were so high the business barely made any money. Which is a contributing factor to all problems the business experienced - right down to shaky service at times. If you can't invest in a premises it makes it harder to keep customers, harder to keep staff interested and tends to lead to a cruel downward spiral of disrepair and neglect. If you're interested in why so many pubs are closing all over the UK it's because of the beer tie. I've got a blog here http://anotherdayanotherdollar.blogspot.com/?zx=12aa159d191fe7f9 which has a lot of stories and thoughts about it all but is not a timeline that's easy to read through. The Morning Advertiser, the publicans' publican's newspaper has an article about it: http://bit.ly/nNANtb The years of being in a pressure cooker made me have a nervous breakdown in 2007 - which you may understand to some extent affected normal service at the Sun and Doves for a whole couple of years - I was suicidal for a while. It was a grim period. But during my recovery and since I vowed to do something about this inequity and gathered together a bunch of other tied lessees and set up The Fair Pint Campaign www.fairpint.org.uk which has lobbied government for the end of the beer tie and has presented evidence about the pubcos to three Business, Innovation and Skills Select Committees who subsequently have recommended that pubcos be legislated against. IN the last two years I've been working on the foundations for The People's Pub Partnership: http://bit.ly/qpe85z It's going to take a couple of months for me to gather my things (I have nowhere to live at the moment) but PPP WILL happen. If you're interested to know more please do send a note to [email protected] with KEEP ME UP TO DATE in the subject - THANKS

There's no need to spoof new mother. They do it authentically all on their ownsome.

What Becomes Of The Broken Hearted? Jimmy Ruffin

What Becomes Of The Broken Hearted? Jimmy Ruffin

Here's a piece that got onto BBC London: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-london-13392612

-- moved topic --

What with me being the publican as above I want to add comment on this BUT I can't gather my thoughts succinctly enough because I have to design a poster proposing setting up 'Friends of Camberwell Green' to display at the Farmer's Market tomorrow - on Camberwell Green - at the Farmer's Market. I'll be back. The meeting was marvellous though and I'm really proud to have been part of it. It's worth saying that the people objecting outside were plain wrong and I'll explain that when I have more time... Hope to see you at Camberwell Green tomorrow! http://www.urbanfarmersmarket.co.uk/ Meantime here's a pic of some of the steering group: http://bit.ly/ixzbUs

@prickle. Budgets for Free Schools are miniscule by comparison with Building Schools for the Future programme and are encouraged to be refurbishment rather than new build. Turning a school around is impossible without there being a willingness within the existing set up to remove the rot and impose a new regime. There is no mechanism for such change to take place within an existing failing school and the route this steering group is taking makes sense at the moment...

Thanks for coming back on this Fuschia. The politics of the situation are wrong, they always have been, that is not directly what concerns me. What does concern me that there should be more, better accessible education available. I cannot change the system but can work within it and I AM listening. It's unfortunate that the limitations of a forum like this can cut sympathy, empathy, emotion out of the tone of posts and if I come across as belligerent rather than determined to help effect some positive change in education then I'm sorry for that. In my life I'm a parent first and a publican second. My work is all about people and, because of this I have become very active in community matters in Camberwell and SE5. I set up SE5 Forum for Camberwell in 2003 with a grant I raised from UnLtd specifically to begin to address the patent inequities there are in this part of London when it comes to regeneration. In a separate place because of the tenure of the lease I own on a pub I have become a vociferous political campaigner standing up for the rights of publicans against the country's bullying pub companies who have destroyed Britain's heritage of pubs as centres of community. In that position I am one of the founder members of the Fair Pint Campaign www.fairpint.org.uk. In that arena I have been, along with many publican colleagues, accused of being a radical extremist, a commie, a lefty and a lot more nonsense when, in fact, what we are demanding is a fair opportunity to compete and to trade on a level playing field against big companies in a highly competitive marketplace. Far from having contempt for teachers, I have enormous respect for them. Many of my close friends are in state school secondary education, even more are in primary. My partner of sixteen years is a teacher, I am a governor at my children's school, a local, successful state primary. My parents were both teachers, my father a head teacher and county education advisor, my mother worked at national level on educational policy for further education and my own political leanings have been well left of centre all of my life, which remains the case. Without exception, ALL these people I know in teaching severely criticise the education system in Britain not for its aspirations but for its actuality. I'm in my early fifties, when I was at school in Newcastle in the 60's the background discussion about the failings and unfairness of secondary education was much as it is now. I have seen wave after wave of parents through the last thirty years go through the stress, angst, hand wringing and basic fears about the future for their children as their eleventh birthday approached. I have seen parents and their kids, working class to wealthy middle class go through the mill in exactly the same way as have this year's wave of unfortunates. The difference for me this year is that it's MY kid who's getting a totally crap deal, and the children of a LOT of other people I know too whose class backgrounds span the gamut, and my personal circumstances mean I have some time to apply to trying to change something that's patently badly wrong. Getting 'behind' an existing failing school is not my cup of tea - it simply would not come to anything. Getting behind a new proposition that starts from scratch with the ambition to provide a really high quality educational experience for children of all backgrounds CAN work. Anyone who had been a fly on the wall of one of the steering group's meetings would be amazed at the commitment and determination to get this done, and the discussions, please believe me, are ALL about doing this working class children. That's good enough for me and it would be good enough for my eldest child, who's likely to miss out on such an opportunity of a high quality education that the Michaela Community School can provide to local kids. It won't change the whole world but it will increase the chances of the lottery for people who otherwise have little chance of winning the opportunities they deserve... Got to go prepare for this evening's meeting...

It's a bit disappointing there are no responses - people are busy I guess. @sillywoman particularly; I'm interested to know more about the situation you mention.

@reggie: please explain more about money being stolen by a nursery - and how that is relevant here? @Fuschia: thank you but I don't agree. Seems to me the problem in England is that education has been driven by political dogma for at least the last seventy years and policy has see sawed wildly from parliament to parliament and from Left to Right for ever. Education should be about providing children with the best possible chance to learn to become rounded, competent adults who can fit into society comfortably. Children need stability, teachers need stability, people need stability in order to be effective and education quite clearly is not that way nor has it been in my lifetime. The perennial point locally that reflects this is that there is not enough decent schools let alone enough places for children from Camberwell or East Dulwich to go to. This is ridiculous and must change. As for the political dogma about Free Schools, I'd appreciate it if you could specify just how a Free School will take resources away from others. What exactly is the mechanism, and where is this process described, that will make it so? OH yes. The bit about defending our community schools instead of my putting myself forward as 'the darling of this ideological campaign'. Rubbish. There does not seem to be much to defend except that, evidently. 'our community schools' aren't good enough; besides, that's what you read into it and you are way off the mark, I'm just a parent who's really pissed off. I'm just prepared to stand up and do something about an inequitous situation and I cannot do that by keeping schtum... it needs to be broadcast or it will not happen. And no one else is going to broadcast it for me. Will they? I'm particularly driven by two things: 1) The realisation this year (because the train wreck of secondary education happened to my family and my friends' families together for the first time this year) that very little changes perennially because communities of parents are divided and counquered by a rubbish system that, in the end, lets everyone down and leaves everyone scrabbling around trying to find scraps of solace in a bad system that is letting us all down. 2) Knowing a boy in my son's class who was not offered a place at all. Nothing. The letter said 'Dear blah blah blah... your son has been offered a place at ___________________ school. No explanation nor apology, nothing. It might have been a typo for all his mother could work out. Nothing, just a blank space? What's that all about? That happened to 43 other children as well. In my view the people in charge of such incompetence should be sacked for stuff like that. Their complacent view is: 'unfortunately this is the way it is but they will all get a place in the end' so it doesn't matter. It's NOT GOOD ENOUGH. By the way; IF my son had got into his first, second, or even sixth choice school and IF his friend had been offered a place at one of his choices, I would not be here - I would not have spent time trying to work it out because I would have had the (wrong) impression that everything was working out hunky dory with the system. @sillywoman: who are you referring to and where exactly in the south of the Borough do you mean?

Thank you for finding this elsewhere and posting it citizenED

Hotting up on the new school front. Some militants attached to some unions and SWP have got hold of it and are mustering ranks to do a big protest outside the Sun and Doves on Thursday evening to try to stop the 'Tory self publicists' from getting toward setting up a school. If highly educated and politicised clowns like these put as much effort into ensuring decent standards spread through existing school provision there wouldn't be any demand for far better access to decent education at secondary level. Since becoming involved with this I've had conversations with mums and dads from their forties to seventies who recount experiences just like all the people who've been let down by the system this year. If one school that's set up by people from the local community can happen and actually get it right how can that be anything other than a good thing?