Phil Taylor

Ealing Council will be running a Parks as Community Assets Specialist Scrutiny Panel this year. For more information follow this link.

The first meeting will be held tonight in at 7pm Committee Room 3 at the Town Hall. Anyone is allowed to attend these scrutiny meetings and the public are given regular opportunities to speak. They usually attract lots of interested parties who want to make sure that the scrutiny panels hear their views.

This panel is chaired by my predecessor Nigel Sumner who is not only an expert on parks, but more importantly, an enthusiast.

Please go and take part.

Local activist Ann Pavett asked me about the details of our “Services Day” last night at our ward forum (of which more later).

This is a chance to meet senior councillors and find out more about the way the council operates. The event kicks off at Central Library on Saturday at 10am. Follow this link for more information. There is also a press release here. I repeat the programme below:

10am: Services Day opens
Visit our information stalls, hosted by services including Youth & Connexions, Scrutiny, waste and recycling and many more.

10.30am: Q&A session - How does the Council manage its parking services?
Have you ever wondered why parking zones are created, what happens to parking fines and how Controlled Parking Zones (CPZs) are implemented?

Noon: Break - All stalls will remain open.

1.15pm: Message from the Leader of the Council Councillor Jason Stacey

1.30pm: Q&A session - How does the Council spend your money?
An opportunity to find out more about how the council is funded, how the budget is set and spending prioritised.

3pm: Services Day concludes

I am responsible for parking but my colleague David Millican who covers transport in his portfolio and leads on CPZ implementation will be standing in for me as I have a previous engagement - sorry. As well as hearing from council leader Jason Stacey, who is always an engaging speaker, you can have the chance to quiz our finance lead David Scott - a very sharp cookie.

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This attack video comes from the Conservatives. They pretty much call Brown a liar. I can’t say I disagree with them. I guess Labour thinks that no-one is capable of reading the budget Red Book. They are right that most people won’t read it. They seem to forget that nowadays there are enough people blogging and linking to that kind of document that they can’t really get away with this kind of lie campaign any more. Good job. For instance, see Fraser Nelson here.

These figures show the hollowness of Brown’s trademark Orwellian use of the word “investment”. The real meaning of investment conveys the putting aside of money for the future. It is used to denote the act of saving or the act of making capital (long term) purchases. Brown has used it as an attractive shorthand for revenue spending with no concern for outcomes. Spending for its own sake. Yet we see in his own government’s Red Book that actual investment in cash terms is due to fall from £63 billion in the current financial year to £46 billion in 2013/4. The man has so distorted the language and the numbers that he seems to have lost touch with reality completely.

The world has moved on and left Brown and his type behind.

Certain leftie blogs are getting exercised over the Mayor’s taxi expenses. See Tory Troll and the BBC.

If Boris acted like the 150 odd ministers and civil servants who are entitled to Government Car Service cars his travel costs would be about £90K per annum before anything else happened. See more here.

I know some people really take the Michael with expenses but perhaps the Mayor is entitled to keep a taxi waiting now and then. We know he cycles a lot - we see the pictures all the time.

Just about every London Borough has a ceremonial mayor who works hard, but not perhaps quite as hard as Boris, and gets the limo treatment at a similar cost to all those Government cars.

Perhaps before:

The Labour Party at City Hall has demanded an “explanation for the discrepancies” in the mayor’s accounts.

They might ask why we have to spend £14 million running 150 VIPs around in limos, most of whom we might think were less VIP than the London Mayor. The truth is that Boris, and Ken before him, have shown that you can have a big job without the limo.

As part of a £6 million recession busting package every household in Ealing will be getting £50 cashback later this year. See the story in tonight’s Evening Standard here. It is nice to see ex-Ealing Times reporter Benedict Moore-Bridger keeping in touch with his old stomping ground.

Jason Stacey, council leader, says:

We know how hard the recession has hit local people which is why I am proposing the country’s biggest ever council cash back scheme to help them during the credit crunch.

Ealing Council has built up strong reserves to see us through these difficult economic times. But, it is also important to remember that this money belongs to local people so it is only right that we give back some money during the recession.

The cash back scheme will be accompanied by a campaign to encourage residents to shop locally so that this £6million plus cash injection should also benefit our retailers.

I have just been checking out Ealing Southall MP, Virendra Sharma’s expenses. You can see them here.

He is relatively OK in as much as he has not claimed any Additional Costs Allowance, the so-called second homes allowance. He does though have some questions to answer I think. He has made claims under the Incidental Expenses Provision, ie office costs, and the Communications Allowance, otherwise known as the incumbents protection scheme.

He was elected on 19th July 2007. Before the end of the year he had worked out that he was “entitled” to claim £250 a month for petty cash without supplying any receipts. Yippee! He claimed £1,500 for his first six months on 11th December and after that he claimed for £500 on 23rd February and £250 in 31st March. I guess this time next year we will find he kept claiming £250 per month until he got caught.

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When the revolting RMT union last had a long strike in September 2007 I pointed out that all those hours of extended journeys was the equivalent amount of wasted life as would occur if Bob Crowe went outside with a machine gun and shot down 60 people. You may think that this is a bit strong but most of us think that an extra hour in the car, waiting at a bus stop, dodging in and out of traffic on a bike is a waste of life compared to say hanging out in the park with the baby, taking a long bath, having a pint with a mate - I could go on.

I have pulled out five year’s worth of figures from TfL’s annual reports, see below (click to enlarge):

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The NHS Confederation’s Nigel Edwards is not very happy with me. He says:

Didn’t like your blog coverage much! We are not a trade union and this is not special pleading: there is no more money to be had, the banks have it all, benefits will get the rest, tax receipts are falling. All healthcare systems across Europe are going to experience this whether they are funded by tax or insurance. The target of this document is:

1) our own members – they need to think about how to respond to this
2) politicians who need to think about some difficult choices.

If these are their target audiences it is hard to know how the report got to be the featured on the BBC News at Ten. Reading their report it is a sensible attempt to discuss the issues raised by the coming Brown bust squeeze. Unfortunately for the NHS Confederation their report got hijacked by the BBC wanting to do a lurid NHS cuts story. Maybe Nigel might have noticed the BBC’s agenda when they were doing his make up at the bleak “wasteland” location they chose to do his piece to camera. Ooops.

Last night BBC News at Ten presenter Huw Edwards solemnly intoned at the top of the show:

Tonight at ten: the record funding crisis set to hit the NHS within a couple of years. NHS managers tell the BBC that the funding shortfall will mean fundamental changes for the service in England.

Then we had Nigel Edwards from the NHS Confederation going all Old Testament on us:

Having had seven years of plenty it now looks like seven years of famine from 2011 onwards.

Note how staged this image is - this is not news. Note the NHS Confederation was not named in this package save for this graphic caption.

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Another way of looking at elections is to look at how many votes it takes to win a seat. One of the purported benefits of proportional representation is that it is meant to ensure that “every vote counts”. The disbenefits of PR are many, but let’s have that debate another day. Let’s look at the proposition that every vote counts. The figures below show how many votes it took to win a seat for an MEP. They exlcude the three NI seats.

Being on the up the Tories did not have to work as hard as the other three main parties (I guess you have to say that UKIP qualify as a main party for the European elections at least). The other three parties all needed about 190,000 votes to get an MEP whereas the Tories only needed 170,000. The two left wing, national, minor parties needed about half a million votes to get an MEP. On the other hand nationalist minor parties in small countries got their MEPs on the cheap - the SNP only needed 160,000 votes and the Plaid MEP was a steal at 127,000 votes.

You have got to feel sorry for the English Democrats. They polled twice as many votes as Plaid and almost as many votes as the SNP and got nothing. Now there is 280,000 votes that don’t count. The EDs got more than twice as many votes as they did in 2004 and can console themselves with having the executive mayor of Doncaster.