Sally Allen: Fighting for the right to disagree

You couldn’t make it up. As we approach the end of 2024, the political landscape is a mix of déjà vu, unpredictability, and more chaos than your aunt’s annual Christmas dinner. 

The Labour Party has somehow managed to stage an improbable comeback (albeit seriously unpopular even after just a couple of months), the Conservatives have dusted themselves down from the drubbing they received and elected a new leader, and Donald Trump is back in the White House. 

If this sounds like the plot of an absurd political thriller that somehow got turned into a comedy of errors, let’s hope not. 

I do think and hope that there is light at the end of the tunnel but feel we will probably have to wait a few years to actually see it. 

So far, I like the cut of Badenoch’s jib and question if Starmer will survive his term in office. It is all to play for and if Trump can make a comeback, who else? I think the political stage has a long way to go before it stabilises.

After years in the political wilderness, Labour is back, and it's impossible not to question the abilities of the front bench. 

Nobody has even had a proper job before and certainly nobody has run a business or has any commercial experience. 

So, the jury is out on how on earth they can run a country. How people without commercial experience are even allowed to run for Parliament is a mystery to me. 

They have a very steep learning curve to climb, and I only hope that a few of them get a grip quickly, particularly on border control, which is now completely out of control. 

Even Trump has now said that he will send migrants to Rwanda, so maybe it wasn’t such a bad idea after all? 

Labour were constantly having a vicious go at the Tories when they were in opposition, but now that they are in charge, it seems they have no ideas whatsoever. Empty rhetoric is all we hear. Running the country is a business and Labour has never left us in profit, unlike Ken Clarke and Nigel Lawson.

They’ve replaced the brooding, hard-left leader Corbyn with someone younger, slightly more energetic, and with less likelihood of accidentally getting lost in a protest march, but still very much on the hard-left side of politics. 

The new leader even wears expensive suits and spectacles – not very labour but then again, he didn’t pay for them. 

I rather miss the old donkey jackets of yore. At least they were authentic. One thing you can say about Boris is that he clearly didn’t take any designer suits from any of the Tory party donors! Sadly, a dangerous communist ideology seems to be replacing common sense.

The issue that is currently concerning me the most, is the increasing loss of free speech. It is fundamental to the ethos and heartbeat of our country and the reason why millions of people have died trying to protect this essential human right. 

Our country fought to rid the world of Nazi philosophy and a Kafkaesque nightmare. And yet, it appears that the police have prioritised chasing down offenders of dodgy posts on X rather than policing our streets, borders and generally grabbing hold of the real criminals. Maybe it is because people like journalist Allison Pearson are easy targets. 

Two police officers turning up on her doorstep, ironically on Remembrance Sunday morning, whilst she was still in her jimjams is somewhat over the top, particularly as they were not even able to tell her who had complained or what the content of the complaint even was. 

We will see if they now charge her with “malicious communications”, the latest heinous crime we might commit!  Yvette Cooper is supposedly even going to strengthen the laws concerning verbal hate crimes, which currently hardly seems possible. There seems to be a complete lack of proportion and common sense. 

I take you back to that old school rhyme ‘sticks and stones may break my bones, but words can never hurt me’. 

Well of course words can hurt and hurt deeply, but a little moderation and common sense surely needs to be added into the mix before we are all afraid to say anything at all and end up a country of mutes. 

It is not healthy for us all to have the same opinion. Diverse opinions should be loudly heard and then debated to try to find the best solutions to all our problems. It is how progress is made. If we all stay mute and woke, and just give up and stay home, the sinister edge of society will quickly take over. We have to fight for what we believe in and maintain the right to disagree.

With Trump back in the White House, who is clearly not afraid to voice an opinion and is determined to rid America of woke, I sincerely hope that one of his first decisions will be to stop the handover of the Chagos Islands to Mauritius i.e. China! 

The people of Chagos don’t want it, plus it’s strategically nonsensical from any viewpoint, unless you are Chinese. Personally, I think all this anti-colonial crap is ridiculous. You shouldn’t cancel the past, you should learn from it; and it wasn’t all bad either.

On a very positive note, the wonderful historic Singleton Gardens are to be saved from development. Why it took so long however is questionable. When an application for commercial development of the Victorian gardens was first received, it was quite rightly turned down by our Planning Department. 

This decision was then appealed by the developer who put in a new application to build seven apartments, two attached dwellings and extensions/refurbishments to an existing dwelling. Planning was then turned down for a second time even after planning officers and directors of planning had recommended approval.

The developer then appealed to the Planning Inspectorate in Bristol. The Community and councillors won on Heritage grounds. 

It is the setting and unique character of Singleton Gardens which is so special and why a kitchen garden would continue the nineteenth century usage to provide food for future generations. 

Thank heavens, good sense prevailed and now this historic site is safe from predatory developers. Very sadly, all this faffing around means that costs were awarded against the Council, which obviously the taxpayers will have to foot. The protracted time spent on arriving at the decision obviously has a heavy cost attached to it too.

When you go on holiday do you seek out new blocks of flats to look and marvel at? I don’t think so, we all like to look at the heritage of where we are visiting particularly wonderful old buildings. We hardly have any left in Torquay, so please let’s treasure the ones we have left.