… Until Sunday. Here’s something to ruminate on:
Vote for home care get well-paid Public Arts Officers!
I Write regarding the article on home care campaigners. Well over 150,000 additional hours of extra home care are desperately required in Bristol.
Bristol Evening Post 30 July 2007
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Media Guardian 30 July 2007
I think it’s a bit dismissive and pseudo-utilitarian to imply that public arts is objectively less important than home care. Living in an environment with little or declining beauty is surely bound to have some effect on the mental health of Bristol’s 400,000 inhabitants. Of course, if you want to make a point about the *quality* of public art funded by BCC, then that’s an entirely different kettle of fish!
Furthermore, even multiplying the maximum salary by a factor of two (to take account of costs of employment, such as office space, pension, etc), that would still only give an additional 43p per hour for those 150,000 extra hours, or alternatively 12,144 hours at minimum wage (assuming no additional costs for pension, office space etc – otherwise half that amount).
I write the above as no fan of the way the city has been administered throughout my memory.
It’s worth noting that had the Lib Dem administration remained, their pre-election home care plans would have allowed an additional 157,000 hours of home care – Labour scrapped this expansion, as well as needing to make more cuts of their own to balance the budget.
*Makes note to slip “dismissive and pseudo-utilitarian” into conversation at least once a day*