Ed Vaizey

In the last few weeks, I have supported a campaign to save a much-loved tea room in Wantage, called Madison’s.  the campaign has been led by the owners and customers, as well as an excellent local councillor called Bill Melotti.  Basically, Madison’s had been forced to move out of their premises.  They found an alternative site, but according to the Liberal Democrat run Council, it was the wrong “use class” ie retail, not restaurant.  So the Lib Dems turned down Madison’s planning application.  To cut a long story short, Madison’s appealed and won - but the delay has forced them to shut for amonth and lay off ten people.

I find this kind of thing exasperating, especially as I have to listen to Lib Dems in Parliament being pious about their support for rural Post Offices, which they rightly see as vital to local communities. Yet, here they had the perfect opportunity to save a much loved local business and they funked it - until local opinion forced them to change their minds.

With this particular council, I come across these bizarre decisions all the time - whether turning down applications from a local farmer to build much-needed business units, or forcing a local cricket club to remove signs that have been in place for twenty years.  They show no sensitivity to local needs, and might as well not be elected, as they seem only able to follow the letter of the law and the recommendations of their officers. 

I was lucky enough to see the Prom performed by the Simon Bolivar Orchestra, just over a week ago, and conducted by the prodigy Gustavo Dudamel, a mere 26.  That makes him the daddy of the orchestra though, who are all Venezulans aged between 18 and 25.  Some critics have described it as the best Prom ever, with the orchestra donning venezualan jackets, playing in the crowd and basically displaying an exuberance rarely seen at a classical concert.

The performance has reverberated even more widely because of how it came about - the orchestra is merely the pinnacle of an amazing 30 year long project in Venezula called El Sistema.  A quarter of a million young Venezualans play in youth orchestras, and many of them come from very deprived backgrounds.  With the recent focus on gang violence in Britain, many are now asking whether it could be done here - including my friend Charles Barwell HERE and Julian Lloyd-Webber.  Apparently it is going to be tried out in Scotland, in Stirling.

Of course, we already have a good netwrok of orchestras in this country, and we don’t (yet) have the scale of social deprivation we see in Venezula.  Given the huge opportunities that exist here, it is debatable whether a systematic national programme could have the same effect as it has in a developing country.  But the idea certainly needs exploring.