Month: Oct 2006

Categories
Communications disease

MPs planning to give themselves £10K a head to stay in power

It will be interesting to see how far this proposal gets. The Daily Mail story reckons that Jack Straw will tomorrow be proposing that all MPs get a £10K per annum “communications” allowance. This will give an unfair advantage to incumbents and looks like another step on the road to state funding for political parties.

For you and me this means another £6.46 million being taken off us to be spent by our betters. Yes, it’s only 10p per head per year but it all adds up. Another way of thinking about it is to imagine 6,460 people doing a full week at the minimum wage to pay for all of this.

Categories
Ealing and Northfield

Pink garden waste sacks free from today

VBGG

From today Ealing residents don’t have to pay for the pink garden waste sacks. See council website.

This year the new Conservative administration in Ealing has made £2.8 million available to improve environmental services in Ealing. The Conservatives said at the local elections that you could go green by voting blue and the free pink sacks are one small part of delivering on that pledge.

Just becasue they are free though don’t be greedy! They are biodegradable so there is no point in having 200 rotting away in your shed.

Categories
Ealing and Northfield

Ealing MPs well behaved on expenses

Last Thursday the House of Commons published a breakdown of MPs’ expenses. On the whole this shows that Ealing’s three Labour MPs are fairly well behaved in the area of claiming expenses.

They all claim pretty much up to the maximum of £104K for their office expenses. I personally think that this kind of spending by MPs should make sure that our Government is better scrutinised so I don’t have much argument with it. This allows you to employ 2 or 3 good people to do research and manage your postbag.

Stephen Pound, Ealing North, only claimed £277 for living away from home last year. Andrew Slaughter, Ealing, Acton & Shepherd’s Bush, only claimed the London supplement of £2,360 and Piara Khabra, Ealing Southall, did not claim anything. Hurrah! Top marks for Ealing MPs in this area although it would be surprising if there were big bills in this area.

On the other hand Joan Ryan, Under-Secretary of State for nationality, citizenship and immigration, is also MP for Enfield North. Maybe she feels that divorce affect immigration process. It’s also important to note a tube home to Enfield North is beneath her dignity. Somehow she manages to claim near the maximum housing allowance at £19,333. So I guess we should be grateful to our own MPs.

Local MPs are also pretty modest with their travel expenses:

  • Stephen Pound, Ealing North, £4,431
  • Andrew Slaughter, Ealing, Acton & Shepherd’s Bush, £2,391
  • Piara Khabra, Ealing Southall, £3,007

All three Ealing MPs spent a bit writing us letters:

  • Stephen Pound, Ealing North, £4,181
  • Andrew Slaughter, Ealing, Acton & Shepherd’s Bush, £6,358
  • Piara Khabra, Ealing Southall, £1,735

Piara KhabraPiara Khabra’s level of spending in this area might be so low as to suggest a lack of activity! Indeed our octogenarian MP for Ealing Southall has not done anything at Parliament since last July. See TheyWorkForYou.com. I nicked the retro 50s style black and white photo, left, from the Labour website.

Finally, Piara Khabra scored another zero on the IT front. I guess at 81 all that IT stuff is a bit much. We will be celebrating Piara Khabra’s 82nd birthday on 20th November.

Categories
High tax, low pay

Mail on Sunday gives insight into Labour rising star’s mind

David Milliband is one of New Labour’s rising stars. The insight you get from the leaked memo published by the Mail on Sunday today shows how ruthless these people are.

I believe the time has come to consider a more sophisticated approach – a mechanism that allows fuel duty to offset significant drops in oil prices would maintain pressure on the cost of motoring without individual announcements on fuel duty needing to be made.

To put this in plain English: “Hey Gordon, I have a wizard wheeze for a new stealth tax. Instead of making public announcements about fuel duty let’s simply increase it quietly when the price of oil goes down. That way no-one will notice. We can take more and more from people without them noticing. When the oil price goes up petrol prices will go up and we can blame it on the oil price. When oil prices come down we will increase the tax take and no-one will notice. I am a genius potential future chancellor, made in your own mould, please give me a job.”

The full article outlines how the Government might take £1,000 per household off us in the name of greening our country without saying how anything might be given back. It is breathtaking. Think of our RAF lady from Thursday. More tax for rubbish. Less cash for her.

Categories
Ex-Mayor Livingstone High tax, low pay

Boris Johnson reveals reality of low pay, high tax Britain

Writing in today’s Telegraph, Boris Johnson describes the plight of an RAF logistics worker who is paid £11,500 a year, or £958 a month – around the minimum wage level. She has to pay £116 in tax and £61 in National Insurance which is just another tax. Earning so little she is being taxed at a rate of 18% even before she pays Council Tax at a rate of £118 a month.

All of those middle class types who are guilty about their own good fortune and hence supportive of high taxes forget about the low paid and pensioners who have to eke out every penny and would rather not pay for a load of those same middle class types to have unproductive jobs on quangos and the suchlike.

In the same paper, on the same day the London Development Agency, a part of the Mayor’s wasteful empire, is looking to spend £35K per annum on an Equality & Diversity Manager.

We are looking for an enthusiastic and knowledgeable equality specialist to work within the LDA Equality and Diversity team on a six month contract.

You will play a pivotal role in driving forward the Gender Equality agenda whilst developing new areas of LDA work such as a focus on migrant workers and forging links with the Commission for Equality and Human Rights. As well as contributing to GLA group programmes and the development of internal projects, policies and strategies you will also provide agency wide leadership on Equality and Community Cohesion Impact Assessment.

You will be a committed and flexible self-starter with a proven track record of putting strategic and policy decisions into practice. You will also require exceptional political sensitivity, influencing ability and a thorough understanding of legislation and issues affecting London’s diverse and multi-racial communities.

So instead of spending public money bringing economic developnment to London the twits at LDA are spending our RAF lady’s hard earned cash on rubbish. It takes the tax from about 16 low-paid people to pay for one Equality & Diversity Manager. Doh!

In reality it is much worse than that as it is not costless to collect tax and the E&D Manager is not costless to employ. Let’s double the number of low-paid people required to support this drone if we want a realistic idea – 32.

Categories
Public sector waste

LibDem Richmond to punish car drivers

The lead story on the Radio 4 Today programme at 8am this morning was the London Borough of Richmond’s plan to relate residents’ parking permit charges to the size of vehicles. The LibDem council will also pull in an extra £1 million a year in charges but apparently this is only incidental!

  • If you drive a small car charges will be unchanged
  • When you hit the 1.6L mark charges will go up
  • By the time you get to the luxury sports/4WD bracket charges will be 3 times
  • A second car will attract a 50% surcharge on top of the fee.

See BBC story.

Apparently electric cars will be exempted from any charge at all. This is just scientific mumbo-jumbo as it uses way more carbon to burn fuel, turn it into electricity, lose a chunk in transmission losses, lose another chunk in charging a battery, lose another chunk in converting electricity to motion than it does to burn petrol in an incredibly efficient internal combustion engine. For the same reason that trams are an environmental swindle, so are electric cars.

There are various ways to save space while parking such as using the 4 post car lift. This allows its user to park one car on top of the other and it is widely used by auto shops that have cars coming in on a daily basis.Another ideal method to save the parking space is to give away unwanted junk and scrap cars in sale to scrapmycarmontreal.com.

Richmond already has the highest council tax in London. Don’t expect the extra £1 million to be used to take the pain away though.

Follow the link to see their consultation document.

Categories
Ex-Mayor Livingstone

Mayor publishes Muslims in London report

The Mayor has been looking at Muslims in London and publishes this report today, just as Muslims are celebrating Eid ul-Fitr.

It makes interesting reading. As ever the Mayor draws the wrong conclusions though.

The report identifies a weakness in the level of educational achievement by this group and points out that attainment in English is a major handicap. This handicap is exacerbated by an unwillingness of some to speak English in the home.

I have noticed the same mistake being made by the newly-arrived Polish community in Ealing. If you don’t speak English at home your children will always be disadvantaged at school, this will feed through to low educational achievement and, in the end, relative poverty.

The Mayor’s prescriptions include:

  • The DfES and local education authorities should work towards eliminating direct and indirect discriminatory practices by educational institutions.
  • There needs to be Londonwide accesible and affordable interpretation services for people with a first language other than English.
  • Local Education Authorities must work with communities to increase the proportion of Muslim teachers and Muslim school govenors in areas with significant Muslim communities.

My prescriptions would be:

  • Hire more great teachers like Gerry Curran.
  • Shut bad schools quickly and make sure investment goes into good schools. Muslims, like the rest of us, are quick to spot and use good schools.
  • Provide free or subsidised English teaching to all new immigrants that need it.
  • Extend the We are Londoners campaign to be a “Londoners speak English” and “Speak English at home” campaign.

One London

The Mayor spends £100 million a year on advertising. It is a shame he can’t spend it doing something useful like making sure that London kids get the best start in life. One way to achieve that is for them to speak English as early as possible.

Categories
Ealing and Northfield

Boston Manor CPZ consultation

The results of this consultation have been published on the council’s website. They make interesting reading and the council’s officer should be congratulated on the thorough job that they have done.

Over 1600 questionnaires were sent out and almost half of them came back in usable form showing how contentious this issue is. Responding to previous complaints that a blanket approach had been taken the results of this consultation were broken down street-by-street, even by sections of streets in places. This break down shows, perhaps unsurprisingly, that the main problem is Boston Manor tube station.

Boston Manor CPZ

Your three Northfield councillors spent much of last winter campaigning around Northfield and we talked to many of these residents more than once. For everyone who was enthusiastic for a CPZ there was someone else equally enthusiastic for the status quo, even very near to the station. Overall almost 3/4 of those responding were against a CPZ so it would be quite easy to justify doing nothing.

In the Conservative manifesto for the local elections we said:

Every year Ealing Council introduces more and more Controlled Parking Zones (CPZ) across the borough. Conservatives in Ealing do support CPZs but only where a clear majority of residents in an area support it. A Conservative run Ealing Council will tighten up the process for introducing new CPZs and we will freeze the cost of CPZ permits for the lifetime of the next council.

The Northfield councillors are minded to support a very small CPZ immediately adjacent to the tube station. The proposal will be discussed at the next Ealing and Hanwell Area Committees.

Categories
Ex-Mayor Livingstone

Caribbean Showcase – Emperor Livingstone’s bread and circuses

Caribbean Showcase.gifToday Roger Evans AM, the Conservatives’ transport spokesman on the GLA highlights spending on the Caribbean Showcase on his blog.

At the last but one Mayor’s questions on 13th September Damian Hockney asked about the funding of the Showcase, the Mayor’s Notting Hill Carnivall spoiler. It cost £308K. The Fibbing Mayor does not simply say “I paid for practically all of it with your precept money that I am supposed to spend on policemen really”. No he tries to obfuscate:

  • the GLA only spent £68K
  • the LDA, which is part of the GLA, only spent £120K
  • my little sub-quango Creative London, which is part of the LDA, only spent £95K
  • I made TfL and the London Fire Brigade spend a couple of grand each for stalls.

On 11th October, at LDA questions Damian Hockney kept up his attack by asking what criteria the LDA used to decide to support spending £215K on this farce. They still have to reply to the question. More on this later.

So all-in-all the Mayor wasted £287K of our precept cash trying to force the Notting Hill Carnival to do what he says. No doubt he tells them in private meetings that if they bend to his will they can have this cash for the Carnival. Once he has made them move to the park he will take the money away no doubt.

Categories
Ealing and Northfield

Movie star appeal

Bang Bang.bmp
Ealing Times reports today that Labour councillor Bassam Mahfouz was voted the most popular participant in the political speed-dating event held as part of Local Democracy Week last Tuesday. Cllr Mahfouz came out ahead at Greenford High School when 30 students quizzed 14 councillors from all parties about issues such as local democracy, being a politician and pressing political issues.

We should perhaps not be surprised by Cllr Mahfouz’s star quality. A local movie maker used Cllr Mahfouz, pictured left above, to play the part of Carlos in his boy’s fanatasy short film called Bang! Bang!. It really is rather good. Follow the link.