In my experience Wingers are overwhelmingly friendly and welcoming – and they are often also very generous people, especially in their dealings with other Wingers. I won’t cause embarrassment by naming him but one Winger I know is generous to a fault, often seeming to allow himself to be taken advantage of in all sorts of ways. He will doubtless stand a much better chance than me of going to heaven, even though he is a known persecutor of cats.

Lots of Wingers have been exceptionally helpful and supportive to me during the past year – organising the Blackpool Light Parade, facing the challenges of 2008 from some Wingers who have been anything but friendly and supportive, and in planning for a new future for the UK GoldWing Community.

However there is another side to the UK Goldwing Community.  A friend of mine who abandoned GWOCGB some years ago to form a independent GoldWing Club which still thrives said “There are some nasty people in GWOCGB, you’d be better having nothing to do with them.”

But I had met overwhelmingly nice people in GWOCGB and especially Lancs & Lakes.  It took me five years or more to discover that my friend was right; there are also some really nasty people in GWOCGB and, if you cross them, they get really nasty and personal.  Tragically even in my beloved local club, Lancs & Lakes, where I made (and still have) many valued friends, a couple of people I have known for several years have turned out to be quite nasty too.

However even from my beleaguered viewpoint, only a tiny minority of that Club are truly nasty people, but they are a minority which holds sway in GWOCGB and they defend their position completely unscrupulously.  The dishonesty continues.  GWOCGB is clearly failing as a Club; its membership continues to fall by 10-15% per year, its financial reserves are dwindling and its leaders show no sign at all of either ideas to improve things or willingness to accept innovation. They have even taken initiatives which have aggravated the membership loss during 2008. What sort of National Committee destroys two active Regions of GWOCGB in the same year?

Lancs & Lakes may be in for another dose of “Support” GWOCGB-style at its AGM in January but the die is already cast. GWOCGB’s noisy (and blinkered) loyalists turning up in Lancashire mob-handed again cannot, whatever else it might hope to achieve, salvage Lancs & Lakes as the cohesive and friendly Region it was.  The doers and grafters in Lancs & Lakes are voting with their feet; a new and independent GoldWing Club will form in the North West to replace Lancs & Lakes as the mainstream GoldWing Club in the North West.  As with GoldWings North Wales, the only open question is whether there will be enough people left behind to allow Lancs & Lakes to continue to function at all as a Region.

I have made it clear that I will not publish personal criticism or abuse of any kind, although I will (and have done) publish critical comment, including criticism of my ideas and the issues I have raised.  This is going to be an active and respectable Newsletter for the UK GoldWing Community rather than a purely personal Blog.  Please help to make it so by contributing your comments and ideas freely.

As long as it’s a reasoned comment and about ideas or issues, and as long as it is not personally abusive or offensive, I will always publish it.  And a contributor’s identity is protected unless he or she wants to reveal it, so no one need fear being shouted down, and especially shouted at, on this Blog.

To illustrate what I have had to exclude so far, here are some comments from one Contributor:

“Clearly there are [some people] who do not appreciate the difference between a blog and a guestbook.”

Nothing much wrong with that even though it is a jibe rather than a constructive comment, except for the sniping reference to a particular group of Wingers, which as it happens I knew was spurious, so I edited that bit out – but then I happily published the rest of it.

The same Contributor then submitted two further Comments which were purely personal jibes which had no relevance to the Articles on which they were supposed to be comments – and no rationale or value either, so they got rejected completely.  (They were lost when they were deleted, otherwise I would have quoted them here, so you could judge for yourself.)  I emailed him to tell him what I had done and why.  I encouraged him to address himself to issues.

His next Comment was as follows:

“can’t stand the heat Huh?”

In response to a very positive comment, “Wonderful stuff Stuart”, about an Article about riding skills by another Winger, Mr Nasty then commented:

“wonderful stuff stuart…..ooooaaarrrggggg  there goes christmas lunch”

And a further comment on the same Article:

“Box of kleenex for [name given]. Its only north west pussies that have a problem with riding wings off road. Merry Christmas”

And then:

“Any chance of a North west “Pussy school of riding” course.  Maybe one where you teach how to wobble round the nurburgring?”

And then, seemingly for no particular reason:

“up ya kilt ya bass”

And finally:

“Heh heh your spell checker can kiss my ass Merry Christmas”

None of these Comments were published as Comments on this Blog.  Mr Nasty sought to obscure his identity by using a different pseudonym and email address than the one he uses everywhere else in his capacity as a Winger, but he has nevertheless been promptly and positively identified.

If it was someone else, these comments could perhaps be dismissed as merely an out-of-character set of drunken railings but in this individual’s case this behaviour does unfortunately reflect his (truly unpleasant) character.  He knows that he has been identified (he was told this before the end of the day on which this stream of comments were made) and he has made no attempt to apologise or retract.  He is a national Officer of GWOCGB and one of its Forum Moderators.

I will of course be seen by some visitors to this Blog as taking another opportunity to “have a pop at GWOCGB” by writing this Article.  Well if that is what I am doing then it is at least, as far as the GoldWing Community as a whole is concerned, for a constructive purpose.  At the time of year when GWOCGB members are deciding whether to renew their Membership and in the wake of yet more false information being fed to them by their National Committee, I think they are entitled to make an informed choice.

And this year, as never before in UK, there is going to be a choice.  Just as GoldWings North Wales has formed,  GoldWings North West is about to form.  There will be help available for Wingers elsewhere in the UK too, from a new national GoldWing organisation, the Federation, to reform your own local GoldWing club and make it independent of GWOCGB too if you wish.

The Federation of United Kingdom GoldWing Clubs will have a website up and running soon which will provide off-the shelf assistance in forming a local or special interest GoldWing Club.  There will be an off-the-shelf set of Club Constitution and Rules (for you to adapt or alter as you wish to suit your Club) and an off-the-shelf way of setting up a website for your Club too if you want one.

You will be able to affiliate your Club to the Federation and have your website linked to the Federation’s, but the choice will be yours.   GWOCGB Regions may affiliate to the Federation too if they wish.  The Federation will provide an alternative to a national club which is ruled by a central committee and which takes all the money – but it is not anti-GWOCGB or indeed anti anything else either. Anyone who wishes to stay in GWOCGB as well as joining the Federation will be more than welcome to do so.  GWOCGB Regions can affiliate with the Federation too if they wish and indeed this will be the most cost effective way for them to acquire full and adequate PLI cover for all their activities and events.

There will be no compulsory subscriptions to this national body at all.  The optional subscription, in return for which there will be PLI cover for all your activities and other benefits, will only be £5 per person per year.  The Federation will be a low-cost volunteer organisation which will generate as much as possible of its own income.

You will decide what you want to do in your local Club, not some central committee; you will set a subscription if you want to have one – and you will keep all the money too if you want to.  For example the subs for GoldWings North West will probably be set at only £12 per rider per year (wives and partners free) of which £5 will go to the Federation to pay for PLI cover and to help to support shared services like web hosting.  How does that compare with £42 to rejoin GWOCGB, none of which comes back to your Region?

And if it’s important for you to have a GWEF card, consider joining the Irish GoldWing Club as an Associate Member, or French, German, whichever is cheaper – which one of my friends is already doing as a way of making his personal statement to GWOCGB’s National Committee without sacrificing his GWEF Events access.  The new Federation of UK GoldWing Clubs will of course seek to join GWEF in due course and should eventually succeed, just as France and Germany made a successful transition to a Federation structure within GWEF, whether or not this encounters resistance to start with.

So there it is; if you are not happy with people like Mr Nasty dominating and screwing up your Club, this would be a good time to make your objections known.  If you want more information about just how badly GWOCGB’s National Committee have behaved, visit the Lancs & Lakes website, sign in as a GWOCGB Member and read “A Letter fom Suart Ormerod”.  Talk to your Winger friends in your local area about forming an independent Club and saving some money in the process.  At least consider delaying your GWOCGB Membership renewal, to let your National Committee know that you disapprove and want them to commit to change before they get your continuing support.

And have your say, anonymously if you wish, by using this Blog.   No one will give you a hard time, as they well might if you dare to express an independent opinion on GWOCGB’s Forum.  By all means express your opinions, favourable or otherwise, about the issues and ideas – or, even better, come up with your own ideas for the benefit of the UK GoldWing Community.  And don’t worry about your spelling or grammar – you will not be criticised for that and I will try to tidy up spelling and grammar without altering your meaning anyway.  Not that mine is particularly good, as my friend (the cat abuser) kindly pointed out to me recently – and as another contirbuter has reminded me, none of us is perfect.  The thing is to keep trying to do at least a tiny bit for the benefit of the GoldWing Community; if enough of us do just a little bit, we can really make things better.

So as 2008 closes and I turn my own attention to working for the positive future which I see for the GoldWing Community (hopefully this will be my last ever comment on GWOCGB’s problems) I wish all Wingers, in the UK and abroad, a very Happy New Year.