I usually make a habit of only blogging about tax, but when an elected authority (or in this case two) does something really stupid I have to make an exception.
I like the location of our offices - they are the right side of Manchester for where I live, and I have a 6-lane motorway to drive the busy bit, and we are right next door to my beloved Lancashire County Cricket Club. However, next Thursday I may well wish that our offices were anywhere else in the world other than where they are, thanks to an incredibly short-sighted and frankly inexplicable decision by Manchester and Trafford Councils.
There was great controversy last season when Manchester United were refused a victory parade for winning the Champions League, following the carnage wreaked by Rangers fans in the city a couple of weeks earlier before, during and after the UEFA Cup Final. Whilst I hold no candle for Manchester United, that decision was wrong in my view; after all United fans were hardly likely to trash their own city (cue jokes about London, Belfast & Dublin) in the way that Rangers fans had. But I think the legacy of that misguided decision is now coming back to haunt us.
I can remember the 1999 parade, and the utter chaos that ensued in trying to escape from Salford, where I then worked. However, the arrangements for this appear to be designed to cause even greater chaos, and to have been made without any thought for businesses in the area at a time of considerable economic hardship. Let me explain.
The parade (should United win) is scheduled to take place in late afternoon on the Thursday after the final on Wednesday evening. There will be no parade if they lose. So for a start it is impossible to make any concrete plans to deal with the disruption, because we don't know whether there will be any. Not a good start, but it gets much worse.
The timing is frankly incredible. Our offices are more or less opposite Trafford Town Hall, a centrepiece of the celebrations. Not only does this mean that our offices will be effectively inaccessible at evening rush hour (due to road closures and sheer mass of people), meaning that our staff will be unable to get home by car, but it has also been arranged to coincide with a 20:20 cricket match at the other Old Trafford, so that thousands more people will be trying to get to pretty much exactly the same place for the 5.30 start of that match. On pure public safety grounds this is madness, and should never have been contemplated by the Councils, or indeed the police.
Most of our staff live north of Manchester, and will be faced with trying to get from Stretford through central Manchester and out to the north in the face of hundreds fo thousands of people doing the opposite. By car this appears likely to be utterly impossible, and the option of using the Metro is more than complicated by the fact that the line between St Peter's Square and Victoria is closed for maintenance work. So how do the leaders of the two councils concerned suggest our staff get home that evening please? Personally I 'merely' have the problem of getting from a speed networking event in Salford that I am organising (finishing about 5pm) via the office to a 7.30 meeting in Poynton, which looks likely to be equally impossible. Why should people going about their lawful business have their lives utterly disrupted in this way?
By all means have a parade, but why not at the weekend, when it will not disrupt business (I haven't even talked about the temptation for employees to sneak an afternoon off work to attend the parade) and would not clash with a popular cricket match? The fact that Manchester City Council was so embarrassed by its mistaken decision last year is no basis on which to make another wrong decision this year. In common with, I suspect, all non-MUFC supporting business people in the area, I will be ditching English patriotism and hoping that they lose next Wednesday. I think we are entitled to expect more thought and consideration from our elected local leaders, to whom I will be copying this post for their comments.
Mark Simpson
21 May 2009
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