Month: Mar 2008

Categories
Health, housing and adult social services

Evil system

Ealing Hospital.jpg

I had to go to Ealing Hospital tonight. I used the Harmoni out-of-hours service, or at least my baby daughter did. We saw a very nice doctor and although it was a bit anonymous it was a pretty good service. Can’t say the same about the parking though.

In a bit of a new parent tizzy and with a middle-aged man’s long-sightedness and a broken light it took me rather a long time to work out how to use the Pay-and-display parking. You get a bargain four hours for only £3.50. That is the minimum charge and most people don’t stay that long – I was there for 34 minutes so paid 10p per minute.

The hospital knows that the British public will in pull together adversity, especially in the face official money-grubbing. Our natural inclination will be to give each other the unused portion of our tickets. Only they have installed new ticket machines that require you to punch in your car registration.

On returning to my car I commiserated with another user: “Evil system”. He shot back: “Isn’t it just”. As I pulled away he was attaching a note to the machine. It read “Every little helps to pay for more managers”. Quite.

I think I have an item of any other business for the Health, Housing and Adult Social Services Panel on Tuesday.

Categories
Policing

London’s teen murder epidemic in the news

Today the Sunday Times is covering London’s teen murder epidemic from the point of view of a 15-year-old schoolgirl called Tekeya from Stockwell who has seen seven of her friends and relatives murdered in the past two years.

I discussed this issue with an 18 year-old who works for me yesterday. He too has a dead contemporary. He reckons that a large number of kids at his 6th form in south west London carry knives. Apparently Labour government minister Ivan Lewis is today proposing 10 year sentences for carrying in the New of the World. The sentence for carrying a bladed weapon only went up from two years to four years on February 12th 2007 but even when it was “only” two years the criminal justice system was letting off 80% of offenders with non-custodial sentences. Posturing Labour MPs will not solve this problem. My kitchen hand will be safe when the first lad in his school gets sent down for 4 years for carrying. It will be hard on that first boy but every kid in the neighbourhood will instantly get safer.

Categories
Ex-Mayor Livingstone Policing

Mayor’s crime scam

Today Livingstone launched his crime manifesto, see PDF here. It was rather overshadowed by his gaffe-prone performance on the BBC London television news last night. Follow this link and move the slider to 5:29 to hear Livingstone complain about the media seeming to labour under the motto “if it bleeds, it leads”. Unfortunately for him, and the families of the boys murdered last night, this appearance on TV was sandwiched between the deaths of two teenagers.

In his document the Mayor acknowledges London’s teen murder problem:

The murders of young people are a critical issue we have to bear down upon by a combination of tough policing targeting the possession of knives, in particular, and policies to get young people off the streets by providing them with safe places, like youth facilities, to go outside school hours.

He uses much more space for spurious graphs showing falling crime. The Mayor relies on recorded crime to kid us that London is getting safer. Recorded crime is only a measure of how many crimes the public bother to report AND the police bother to record. I had £996.58 skimmed out of my bank account last April. The bank replaced it without complaint but they didn’t get their cash back from the Sri Lankan petrol forecourt crew that videoed my PIN. This incident didn’t appear in the Mayor’s crime statistics but it is still a crime – it is simply one that the police don’t want to record. Similarly, when it took 2 hours 10 minutes to report my girlfriend’s stolen car in October 2004 the only reason I stuck it out was because I need a crime number for insurance purposes – incidentally the police did find the car in the end. The four people who gave up whilst I was waiting may have decided that their crimes weren’t worth the wait.

Teenage killings are a specific London problem and one that the Mayor has offered no concrete response to because discussing it undermines his “I have licked crime” rhetoric.

According to Channel 4 Dispatches:

27 out of the 52 teenagers who died last year were murdered in London with Lambeth having one of the highest levels of violent crime in the capital.

According to these numbers London, with 12% of the whole UK’s population, has over half the problem. And it is getting worse. 11 kids in less than three months, or one a week in London alone. The Mayor can rail at the media but there is an underlying truth that they are revealing.

Categories
Ex-Mayor Livingstone Mayor Johnson

RMT/TSSA to knock out Tube for four days

News just out that RMT and TSSA are proposing a strike from 6.30pm on Sunday 6th April until the same on Wednesday 9th. These cynical twits know that London Underground will want to get all its trains back to depots so the network will start to collapse on Sunday lunchtime and it will not get back into its stride until lunchtime on Thursday so in effect the strike will last four days.

Bob Crow ex TfL Board MemberThey don’t mind lashing out at Livingstone who will have his preposterous Olympic torch relay upstaged on the Sunday. I expect to be at the Tibet rally in Argyle Square so I guess I will have to walk home. Thanks Crow, you ugly bugger.

It only emerged today that Livingstone took £20,000, which has never been officially registered with the Electoral Commission, off ASLEF at the last election. In return he has to just shut up I guess when the rail unions decide they want to throw their weight around.

Boris Johnson has pledged to put an end to this nonsense which has seen 16 Tube strikes under Livingstone. Boris says:

Once again under Mayor Livingstone, Londoners will have to face hours of misery on the tube – all because the Labour Mayor hasn’t got a plan to work with the unions.

Ken Livingstone has repeatedly shown himself to be unwilling to deal with the problem of strikes and the deeper issues behind them. He has been in office for eight years; in that time there have been 16 incidents of industrial action, which have led to a disruption of services.

London needs a forceful advocate on behalf of Londoners to work constructively with all the unions to solve this problem. I will be pro-active, and seek to negotiate – in good faith – a no strike deal with the unions. In return, they will have a guarantee of independent arbitration that will rule on pay and working conditions. This is a fair solution that is designed to build bridges with a fresh approach. It would guarantee union members long-term job safety, while ensuring that London is kept moving.

The current Mayor has simply stopped trying to deal with London’s problems. London needs to vote for change on May 1st to find solutions to London’s problems – and to strike out the strikes.

Categories
Policing

Two teens murdered in North London

In two separate incidents two teenagers were stabbed to death yesterday bringing this year’s teen murder toll to 11 already. BBC coverage here. They say:

Police said Amro Elbadawi was injured in Dart Street, Queen’s Park, on Thursday afternoon and was confirmed dead after being taken to hospital.

In a separate incident, a 17-year-old died after being stabbed in a street in Stamford Hill, north London, on Thursday morning.

Some people have criticised me for raising this issue. Clearly they are not teenagers from hard up families for whom this is their main concern.

1 January: Henry Bolombi, 18, stabbed
5 January: Faridon Alizada, 18, stabbed
21 January: Boduka Mudianga, 18, stabbed
26 January: Fuad Buraleh, 19, beaten
19 February: Sunday Essiet, 15, stabbed
29 February: Ofiyke Nmezu, 16, beaten
2 March: Teng Le, 17, stabbed
13 March: Michael Jones, 18, beaten
15 March: Nicholas Clarke, 19, shot
27 March: Devoe Roach, 17, stabbed
27 March: Amro Elbadawi, 14, stabbed

Categories
Mayor Johnson

Boris’ green manifesto

Boris launched his environment manifesto today. See the full document here. Standard report here.

On Tuesday the Mayor did his environment thing, see Standard again here. The Mayor likes to make out that he is Mr Green and is highlighting his alliance with the Green Party.

Boris’s document lays out what a London Mayor can achieve in practice whilst the Mayor is trying to save the world. The Mayor’s approach also betrays his Zone 1 focus.

As I have said before the Mayor has not been shy about using public funds for green electioneering, for instance £3.3 million for LEZ and emissions related congestion charging ads. The later “gas guzzler” charge and Boris Johnson’s antipathy to it figure prominently in the Mayor’s pitch even though his own documents make it clear that it will have no effect on CO2 or general pollution. The LEZ is another environmental scam, see here, but in Johnson’s document he promises to leave it alone.

We are passionately committed to improving London’s air quality. We must act to deal with the estimated 1000 deaths per year caused by air pollution. The ‘polluter pays’ principle that lies behind the Low Emission Zone is fair. We believe the LEZ is a step in the right direction.

On one level I am disappointed by that but it is probably sensible politics as it would cause a lot of uncertainty and confusion to withdraw the scheme now. It is though an object lesson in how not to do environmental projects. As is another the Mayor’s schemes to subsidise loft insulation. Boris’ document says:

The Mayor’s principal policy for improving the energy efficiency of domestic properties has been a heavily-publicised money back scheme, funded in conjunction with British Gas. With this scheme, the household receives a postal order after they have ordered insulation. The money offered depends on whether the insulation is self-installed (£50) or professionally fitted (£100).

But the most recent figures show that just 3,098 Londoners have signed up to the Mayor’s scheme to insulate their homes (the target was 30,000 homes by 1 June 2007). This is despite more than £2.2 million spent on marketing and publicity – with just £300,000 spent on actually insulating properties. We are certain that this performance can be bettered and we will promote an alternative scheme that uses Council Tax rebates to persuade owner occupiers to install insulation.

Rather like the Mayor’s Oyster card give away which cost £800K in advertising, the purpose of insulation scheme is to promote the Mayor rather than to change the world, or even a few London attics.

Categories
Ex-Mayor Livingstone

Crossrail – truly spectacular failure of negotiation

Andrew Gilligan is fast becoming my hero but he might have given me some credit for this story.

As it happens I know that he reads the blog so there is a good chance he saw it here first.

He rightly points out the Mayor’s “truly spectacular failure of negotiation” with regard to Crossrail.

I highlighted the Mayor’s failure of negotiation first when Crossrail was announced in October of last year and again when the Mayor started his Crossrail scare campaign at the end of February.

The Mayor’s deal is particularly bad in the context of the £17.8 billion annual net contribution to the Exchequer made by London (Oxford Economic Forecasting figures for City of London). In return for sending more than the cost of Crossrail to the rest of the country EVERY year, London gets a 10 year project which is majority funded by London itself and only receives a £5.1 billion government grant with unlimited liability for overruns. Livingstone is a terrible negotiator. He was so keen to add Crossrail to his train set he drove a really bad bargain.

Categories
Ealing and Northfield

Sharma’s got two weeks

Virendra SharmaYesterday the Ealing Conservative Group (of councillors) issued a press release pointing out that Ealing Southall MP, Virendra Sharma, has only got two weeks to attend a meeting before he gets chucked out of the council for not attending meetings. They say:

Cllr Virendra Sharma MP is just 14 days away from being forcibly ejected from the Council for non-attendance.

The Ealing Southall MP has attended just five minutes of one Council meeting during the eight months he has been a Member of Parliament.* Despite his failure to attend Council meetings he has continued to claim his £9,000 councillors’ allowance.

The last meeting he attended (in part) was Full Council on 9 October last year. He now has just two weeks – until 9 April – before he disqualifies himself from sitting on the Council. Ealing’s constitution says that any Member who does not attend a meeting for six months automatically ceases to be a councillor.

ENDS

*Cllr Sharma has not attended the following Council meetings that he was scheduled to attend since his election to Parliament on 19 July 2007: Southall Area Committee on 19 September 2007, 27 November 2007 and 23 January 2008; Transport and Environment Scrutiny panel on 17 October 2007, 19 December 2007, 30 January 2008 and 13 March 2008; Full Council on 11 December 2007, 19 February 2008 and 4 March 2008; Planning on 17 October 2007 and 30 January 2008.

Sharma has been claiming his £9,000 a year basic allowance for being a councillor but the only thing he has turned up for was a few minutes of a council meeting on 9th October. He was an hour late and only stayed for a few minutes.

If you look at the council’s meetings programme there is not much going on over the next couple of weeks. The only thing for the rest of this month is the Adoption panel on 31st March. It would be pretty inappropriate for him to turn up there to claim his £9,000. The next week there is the Cabinet meeting and two scrutiny panels. As well as having no reason to be there Sharma will know that he will get a lots of stick from Conservative members if he turns up there. I guess that leaves the Shadow Cabinet meeting on 7th April. If he only turns up here for a few minutes he can stay on as a councillor for another six months without lifting a finger and pick up another £4,500 of allowances. Maybe a few people will turn up at Shadow Cabinet for once to give him a bit of a welcome.

Categories
Ex-Mayor Livingstone

Hendy gets the Gilligan treatment – again

Andrew Gilligan has another piece in the Standard tonight based on a leaked e-mail from Peter Hendy, the £320K a year Transport Commissioner, ie boss, of Transport for London. This time it is Hendy effectively boasting that he can bully the police by removing funding for TOCU, the Met’s Transport Operational Command Unit, because he doesn’t like them criticising bendy buses on safety grounds. Hendy says:

… it makes me inclined to cut support for TOCU.

What a big man?

Last week Gilligan had Hendy banged to rights consorting with the Mayor’s weasly little chief of staff, Socialist Action-er Simon Fletcher, see here.

Given that both of these stories are based on leaked e-mails we might suspect that there is more like this to come. Goody, goody!

Categories
Uncategorized

Rally for Tibet April 6th

After yesterday’s news pictures of Greek security people duffing up Tibet protestors I know what I will be doing on Sunday 6th April from 2.15pm – supporting the idea of freedom for Tibet and hoping to help in a tiny way to embarrass the preposterous Olympic movement and its fatuous torch tour to totalitarian China.

Details below (click to enlarge).