Town Councillors bizarre ‘Ghetto’ comments heap more negative ‘press’ on Shotton.

Town councillors “desperate to raise Shotton’s profile” bizarrely compare the town to a ghetto.

Women queuing in Łódź Ghetto Poland

Shotton Town Councillor Elwyn Jones and Councillor Mike Evans both made reference to the term ghetto, a word once synonymous with the segregated ‘Jewish Quarters’ of eastern European cities particularly during Nazi occupation.

Nowadays the word is widely used to describe parts of a City where minority groups live due to social, legal, or economic pressure.

The comments appeared splashed across the front page of the ‘Flintshire Leader’ on Wednesday, in an article about the current wave of graffiti tags being sprayed and drawn on fences mainly around residential parts of Shotton including Pippins Close and Shotton Lane.

Its the second article by the Leader in as many weeks about the same issue and is effectively a rehash of a fairly well balanced story published on January 8th – however this new one is littered with fairly outrageous comment.

In the article Cllr Jones said:

“Vandals and thugs who are vandalising the area are turning Shotton into a ghetto and running it down.

He starts to then backtrack a little:

“Hopefully things won’t get that far, but it gives the impression that it is like a ghetto because of the state of the place.

The next line is clearly a dig at the Police:

“Unless you enforce against these things people will continue to vandalise.”

Cllr Jones then makes an absurd claim that the graffiti is spreading fear amongst resident who no longer want to go out at night.

He said:

“It is frightening people and they don’t want to go out,”

Fellow Councillor Mike Evans then chips in with a short sentence featuring the word ghetto:

“Unless this problem is nipped in the bud it will end up looking like a ghetto”

Of course quotes from Councillors are nothing new in local newspapers, its the lifeblood of many stories, indeed if you strip away the quotes from this story you are left with very little other than the hard fact that there is somebody with some spray paint who is illegally decorating Shotton with ‘MD7’ tags.

The person responsible will no doubt, thrive on the media coverage while plotting their next wave of attacks just to rile the locals a little more.

The Leader, which claims to be a pillar of the community, will be on hand to scoop up more enraged councillor comments to add to an already impressive archive of negative stories centring around Shotton, fuelled largely by comments from the very people we have elected to represent it.

Take a quick walk along Shotton High Street and it becomes instantly apparent that graffiti is the last of the problems here, the area is an eyesore, and whilst the town councils remit is limited, its fairly clear the people of Shotton are being let down with the state of the area, and the graffiti is perhaps convenient distraction for some of the harsher realities Shotton town council should be addressing.