What a Year! Fantastic! Leader of Sunderland Council Bob Symonds celebrates.

In true Sunderland Council Labour Party style Leader of the Council, Mr. Bob Symonds raises a glass of champagne to toast last year's success.
And what success was that?
-Thousands of people illegally fined in the Parking Ticket fiasco ... and the Council admitting that it covered up monies it received illegally?
- The tens of thousands of public money spent on correcting massive errors in Traffic Orders and on-street signing?
- Millions of pounds of public money been spent on creating speed humps and 20mph zones which it now transpires are not legal?
- The Vaux site, adjacent to the City Centre, which any visionary Council would have snapped up as soon as it came on the market still lies as an abandoned wasteland five years after the brewery was levelled?
- Massive swathes of the City's former council estates boarded up and in ruins in a landscape more akin to downtown Beirut after the Council housing stock was sold off, along with the freehold of the land which belonged to the people of the City, to social landlords, The Sunderland Housing Group'?
This is just the tip of the iceberg.
With hindsight Mr. Symonds it may have been more prudent to have raised a mug of tea ... to celebrate a moment of respite in a very long struggle to get this City into 'premier league' status and on a par with Newcastle and Gateshead.