BURY councillors have explained in detail about the unsustainable cost of maintaining Affetside School because of its low numbers, but campaigners will not accept its closure.

Several Ramsbottom residents, including councillors, have gloated over their successful campaign to halt the proposed use of a site at Ramsbottom for refuse disposal, and patted each other on the back for effectively transferring this problem onto someone else's doorstep.

Meanwhile, Elms shopping precinct in Whitefield has resembled a scene from the London blitz for a couple of years, with most of the shops demolished, and bricks and rubble piled up.

Radcliffe's former town hall and other buildings have been converted to accommodate asylum-seekers, drug addicts and other social misfits. And recently councillors rubber-stamped the decision to close residential care homes for the elderly in Prestwich, Radcliffe and Bury.

It is beginning to look as though there is a north-south divide in the Bury Metropolitan Borough area.

As far as I am aware, residents of Prestwich, Whitefield and Radcliffe pay the same level of council tax as residents of the northern part of the borough. But as Tottington, Greenmount and Holcombe are wealthier areas, perhaps they think they are entitled to special treatment.

TRAVELLER