Cllr Rebecca Geach

12 years this night our precious son was taken from us in the early hours of the 8th. Zane Died, Authorities Lied. 12 yrs on and no lessons learnt, no prevention of future deaths & flood alerts in play. We call for #ZanesLaw to ensure what happened to Zane, never happens again #TruthAboutZane

FBU EC member for South East, Joe Weir moved a motion, on Zane's Law at TUC congress on Monday. The motion was unanimously backed. TUC affiliated unions have now joined us in the fight to get Zane's Law into legislation, for better landfill regulations to protect our communities. #TUC25

Wonderful to be able to contribute. Happy #IWD2025 !

@ThreshedThought It’s too late

I wonder now if the UK government will increase defence spending. If not now, when?

🚨End of an Era 🚨 “I’m …. here today to directly and unambiguously express that stark strategic realities prevent the United States from being the primary guarantor of security in Europe,” US Secretary of Defence, 12th Feb 2025

@SW_Help Thank you. I will submit a complaint. I always carry my pass and happy for the staff to check it on asking but not being able to get in and out of stations and almost missing trains is unacceptable especially for the vulnerable.

@RebeccaGeach My apologies. Sometimes stations require discounted tickets to be checked by gate staff during a short auditing period, but this should be temporary. I will pass this extra info on but would encourage you to also submit a complaint via our website help.southwesternrailway.com/hc/en-gb/reque…. ^CW

@nationalrailenq I have a disabled pass. After almost 20 years of having one my disabled tickets are no longer opening many station barriers and I am always having to seek assistance to get someone to physically open the gate for me. Why is this happening? Disabled people already face enough barriers when using trains. We already have to factor in extra time. Now there is an extra physical barrier which has caused me to almost miss a medical appointment because the gates were closed at the station I arrived at and no one was around to manually to open the gate for me! I had to go looking for a human. Can you imagine a person in a wheelchair having to start looking for rail staff because their ticket no longer lets them through the barriers. People who are the least able to rush for their trains are being delayed at the entrance whilst waiting for someone to open the gates for them. What’s going on???

@SW_Help Thank you. The disabled pass is a card which allows you to buy disabled train tickets and travel with them. So it is not the pass as I never put that through the gates. Someone at these stations has made the decision to stop disabled rail tickets from opening the barriers there.

@RebeccaGeach Hey Rebecca - I'm very sorry to hear this. The best way for us to look into this would be to phone our customer support service on 0345 6000 650. This should help us determine if there's a problem with your pass, or if it's station-specific. ^CW

@nationalrailenq @SW_Help Thank you. Looking forward to hearing from @SW_Help I know my residents who hold disabled passes will also be having the same problems as me at local station Staines and others on the line.

@RebeccaGeach Thank you for confirming. It looks like both of those stations are South Western Railway managed stations so I am looping them in here so they can look into this further for you @SW_Help

@nationalrailenq I can’t go through Staines station barriers anymore at all with my disabled rail tickets. At Raynes Park the barriers were up and unmanned yesterday afternoon and my disabled ticket also wouldn’t open those.

@RebeccaGeach Hi Rebecca, I'm sorry to hear that. Which station was this at please?

@MarkGriffin59 @Conservatives @UKLabour @JimfromOldham Given Tories control 15/17 county councils there is no political gain for Labour here just a step towards devolution, a policy started under the last Government. The last Government also postponed local elections when 2 tier authorities amalgamated e.g Somerset.

@MarkGriffin59 @Conservatives @UKLabour @JimfromOldham Labour have nothing to gain from this. In Surrey we have made notable progress in the boroughs. Conservatives lost control of 10 it 11 of them. But they still control the county council. If elections were held next year there was a big chance they would have lost Surrey also.

Could someone from the @Conservatives party, please explain their position on the possible cancellation of the County Council elections next year? Do you agree with @UKLabour proposals as @JimfromOldham suggests?

I worked next to John Prescott’s office in the House of Lords for a few months. He was terribly loud especially when he was watching the footie in the office and he was quite liberal with his language. Definitely a presence. I also remember he was quick-witted, warm and human. My enduring memory is his poor assistant having to fax all his letters and emails to his home when he wasn’t in the office as even by 2017 he didn’t know how to use email! A very authentic individual who will be much missed 🌹

Today I went to Stanwell to honour the fallen. At this somber time each year I think about one of the most beautiful books I have read in my life - A Testament of Youth. Surely one of the most raw moving accounts of the damage war inflicted on a generation. An experience which we always pray our children will never live. #RemembanceDay #RemembranceDay2024

Grieving parents from Surrey have handed in a letter to 10 Downing Street calling for an inquiry into their son’s death. An inquest found Zane Gbangbola died from carbon monoxide poisoning, but this is disputed by Zane’s parents Nicole and Kye. ⁦@TruthAboutZane⁩

A must read! Let’s get #justice for Zane & clean land for homes.

Great discussion at this round table on how to address the SEND crisis…funding…more EPs…senco workload…curriculum reform…inclusive practice….

@LincolnJopp You have a veteran amongst the Conservative councillors who when I spoke to him was interested in new jobs. Maybe worth approaching them.

w4mpjobs.org/JobDetails.asp… We’re hiring. Any UK military #veteran applying is guaranteed an interview but all are most welcome to apply. Come and join a great team and help me do something really valuable for the country. 🙏🏻 🇬🇧 💂

@catarnold_ @LabourParty @LabourWomen4NEC @EmilyP_Smith @CharloCornell @shivanova Congratulations on your win! Your statement on #SEN access and #neurodiversity really resonated with me as a mum of a SEN child. I wish more people talked about it in politics. Of course you had my vote.

Labour Members, voting ends at noon on Tues 17th for @LabourParty #NEC #elections. Please use your top 5 CLP reps' votes for me and @LabourWomen4NEC slate. Non-factional members who want to see inclusion, democracy and integrity weaved through every facet of our Labour Party.

@afneil I’m a Labour Party member who is always glued to Spectator TV every week so that shows what an excellent job you must have done to bring “lefties” like me in. Sometimes I even discreetly buy the magazine!

My Farewell to The Spectator 2/2 My greatest regret is that I have not been able to find you a new home guaranteed to nurture the unique chemistry of The Spectator, which makes it so special and successful. I’m sorry about that but the matter was taken out of my hands. We managed to stop the takeover by know-nothing Americans bankrolled by Arab potentates with their own agenda. But, after that, we did not have the power to choose our new owner or even influence who it was to be.  No doubt the new proprietor will bring assets to the table, perhaps even bigger budgets. However you can have all the resources in the world but if you don’t understand what really makes The Spectator tick then they will be as naught. Your new bosses need to look and learn from you.  Above all, core to The Spectator’s very raison d’être, is the independence of The Editor. I regarded it as my prime responsibility for 20 years to ensure that, protecting The Editor not just from outside pressures, commercial or political, but even from proprietors. And to provide a dispassionate guiding hand when it was required.  That is what I did. I cannot tell if the new owners will have the same reverence for editorial independence since they have not shared their thinking. Redbird didn’t care about who they sold us to and had no interest in demanding editorial safeguards. They just wanted to get shot of us for the highest price.  I wish you all the best for the future. I will miss you. You are such a talented bunch and good company too! Don’t hesitate to reach out if you ever think I can help you in your careers.    Most of all I will miss walking through the door at 22 and seeing the smiling, welcoming faces of Lynne and Fiona at reception. Their unstinting, good-natured, solicitous presence was, for me, emblematic of the friendly, inclusive culture we created at Old Queen Street - a family as well as a team. I wish you all the luck in the world in preserving and enhancing it. Your once and former Chairman, Andrew   10.ix.2024

My Farewell to The Spectator 1/2 It is with great sadness that I write to tell you I am resigning as Chairman of The Spectator, with immediate effect. I made it clear many months ago that I would step down when a new owner took over. That time has now come.  It has been my immense privilege these past twenty years to have served as your Chairman. During that time we have transformed the oldest magazine in the world, established in the age of the quill pen, into one of the most successful publications of the digital age, growing revenues rapidly across all digital platforms while still maintaining a very healthy print circulation.  In recent years The Spectator has never been more profitable, its reach never wider, at home and abroad (helped by our splendid Australian and American editions), and its journalism (under the peerless Fraser Nelson) never better nor more influential than it has been in its almost 200-year history. It is a testament to the efforts of everybody in every department, past and present. You should be proud of what you have achieved. I am certainly proud of you.  A pertinent indicator of these achievements is that a magazine which was given a notional value of £20m two decades ago has been sold for around £100m today (I don’t know the exact price since, in a fit of pique after we stopped Redbird’s Arab-financed takeover, some of us were excluded from the sales process now coming to an end). But at a time when most “legacy” publications are struggling to retain anything like their pre-digital worth, this is an unprecedented increase in value.  It is sad, even unfair, that nobody responsible for this success — that is, everybody at 22 Old Queen Street — will share in the upside. That is a result of the strange and surprising circumstances, definitely not of our making, we found ourselves in June 2023. Suddenly and without warning we were placed in receivership because our then proprietors had used us as collateral for massive debts unrelated to us (without ever telling us). They then failed to pay these debts. That explains the purgatory we’ve gone through these past 16 months and the peculiar nature of the sales process, in which those who’ve created the added value do not get to share in it.  It is a tribute to your professionalism and dedication that, throughout these troubled times, you never missed a beat. You continued to publish in print and online as normal. No reader could ever have guessed the internal turmoil we were going through — at one stage there were more external advisers crawling over us than we had employees — because you never deviated from our high standards.  My proudest recollection will always be the fact that, at a time when legacy print publications were relentlessly cost-cutting and regularly making huge numbers of good people redundant, I did not preside over a single compulsory redundancy in 20 years. Far from shedding folk we were always expanding and hiring. And we did so in a way that turned what once seemed like a largely Eton-Oxbridge fiefdom into probably the most meritocratic publication in the country.