I am Paul R Penman and I am standing for the City Centre ward as an Independent.
I have been a Community Councillor on the Old Town Community Council since 2018 and have served as its Secretary. I am currently its Treasurer. In the 2017 local election, I stood unsuccessfully for the Scottish Tory Party in Leith.
I am 57 and have lived and worked in the Edinburgh city centre for 42 years. I started as ‘the Junior’ in Aitken and Niven, Ltd in 1980. It was ‘Are You being Served’ with an Edinburgh accent. After five years in this role, I moved into the hotel industry, working in the Caledonian, the Sheraton, the Balmoral and the Roxburgh in various management roles.
I studied Politics and Modern History at Edinburgh University, but not very well. After this, I worked at High Riggs Job Centre (awful), Fettes College and between 2011 and 2011 I served three tours, back to back, in Afghanistan with 148 Squadron RLC (V) better known to the world as the NAAFI. I was posted to Kabul, Kandahar, Lashkar Gar and Camp Bastion. There were some very grim times there with rocket attacks, suicide bombers and of course casualties.
I also met some of the best people I have ever in my life and made great friends. On my return, I work as the Steward of Craigmillar Castle, then as Steward at the Scott Monument, during a very difficult time there. This also allowed me to see first-hand the toxic incompetence that passes for management in the Edinburgh Council. I was the first and last Doorman at The George Intercontinental before Covid redundancy and after that a Warden at the Scottish Veterans’ residence I currently work as a Building Manager for a private residential block in the Edinburgh city centre.
I am standing again because in my view the current shower of insufferably smug snowflakes in the City Chambers has allowed the Edinburgh Old Town to become an open-air public toilet smothered in graffiti, their woke attitude towards begging is clearly solving nothing. I propose a total begging exclusion zone around the city centre and that all homeless provisions should be moved to new purpose-built homeless accommodation, offering one-stop-shop services, as part of the new Leith waterfront development. Perhaps Prefabs are the answer to the problem of homelessness?
Off licenses must be banned from selling alcohol to vagrants, by doing so they are helping people to destroy themselves in the streets, Methadone should not be dispensed in the city centre.
When elected I will demand that the police crackdown hard on these gangs and get them off our streets. Tartan-Tat shops have been allowed to go on desecrating the city center long enough. I propose an immediate end to all outside merchandise and loudspeakers outside these shops and that no further leases should be sold to merchants of tat.
Graffiti is destroying the quality of people’s lives, and I speak as a resident of the Royal Mile myself, I will propose that criminals serving community payback orders (those that were not absolved by or soft-touch justice system) should be put to work, exclusively, to scrub graffiti off the walls. Pavement cyclists must have their fine increased from £50 to £250 and e-scooter pavement dafties must be jailed.
I will not list all of the outgoing council’s many failings as they are very well known.
I note that there are five other Independent candidates for my Ward and I would point out that not only am I the most eminently well-qualified candidate, but I was also the first candidate in Edinburgh to submit my nomination papers and I think this demonstrates commitment.
This is a once in a generation (5 years) opportunity to elect a candidate who knows what it is to work for a living and who remembers a world before pro non fascism and sanctimonious wokery.
It is time to fight back.
Founding Editor of The Edinburgh Reporter.
Edinburgh-born multimedia journalist and iPhoneographer.
