Stop the presses

Swansea Council spinners have come in for a well deserved kicking from businesses and residents for their statement that street begging has been significantly reduced in the city centre. Even one of their usually more reliable mouthpieces has dismissed official claims that a year-long campaign to drive beggars off the streets and clean up shopping areas has been a success.

It is further evidence of a local authority that is now totally dislocated from reality on the ground and which then adds insult to injury by pushing its bi-monthly issue of bullshit through letterboxes to claim that the administration is “delivering on its city centre promises”.

For many local council taxpayers, the complicit blurring between political and corporate propaganda at public expense is becoming unacceptable - especially when a full page feature on social services performance in the Swansea Leader does not even allude to children’s services which are under special measures following ministerial intervention.

Whatever the original idea behind the council's own so-called newspaper, it is high time that the plug was pulled on this expensive vanity. As it happens, the annual amounts spent on advertising developing a special relationship with the local paper and radio station are clearly buying friends getting better results.