I ACTUALLY took my mother into Weymouth shopping on Friday and I can tell you the streets are not pristine and adorned with hanging baskets.

The side streets have the cheap blue bags which DWP quango think are adequate, strewn around with food debris, littering the pavements.

The King’s Statue has a giant steel fence reminiscent of a Granby factory surrounding it, and when the grass is strimmed it is just blown back on to the central reservation and left to rot?

From the shabby seafront with its sand modeller’s unattractive dome blotting a once pristine seafront to the underpass which nobody bothers with.

To the empty harbour which we as ratepayers forked out £4.5 million on a hole only to find the next week the one and only ferry company up and left.

As with the very council, who are supposed to go down with the ship, they are going to the upwardly mobile Dorchester.

They just as well be on the dark side of the moon.

Where are all the savings we were promised when the council amalgamated the services and is it reassuring for a council to be in another town running the day-to-day services of Weymouth, miles away?

From the lacklustre carnival which should have gone the way of the dodo to the second rate services foisted upon the residents of what could be a resort which could attract the swarms of tourist which came of olde.

We need a new vibrant council in our town leading from the front not nine miles away?

MARK GRIFFITHS

Stoke Road, Weymouth