Month: May 2008

Categories
Ealing and Northfield

Party killer

jon-ball.jpgLibDem councillor John Ball reckons he is joining the Circle Line cocktail party tonight to mark the end of drinking on the Tube. He is reported in the Ealing Times as saying:

There is a genuine problem with alcohol on public transport, but the ban is not going to provide any sort of solution, it is just a headline-grabbing move.

The rail unions are up in arms as they fear it will cause more conflict between tube staff – who will have to enforce these measures – and drinkers. It is just an illiberal move.

Talk about being on the wrong side of the argument. The Tube is a public transport system. No-one has to use it. It is entirely reasonable to expect a certain standard of behaviour when using it and not drinking seems pretty reasonable. Smoking was banned on Tube trains about 20 years before the national smoking ban and was entirely uncontroversial. A few idiots made a show of smoking afterwards but were pretty soon shamed into compliance. The unions may not like policing the Tube but if you don’t publicly state what is expected of people how do you expect them to start to comply?

I predict that the ban will be 100% successful and 99% popular.

Categories
Customer Services

Customer services too slow

I decided to give Ealing’s Customer Services a harder test by turning up mid-afternoon on the last Friday of the month. Sure enough the place was a lot busier than my previous visit. For instance, there were 26 people waiting for parking permits and 26 people waiting for housing benefits.

I talked to a few people. The people waiting for housing benefits enquiries were typically stoical. One lady had been waiting over an hour to get visitors vouchers. There was a queue of 7 at the cash office window but there were 3 staff on so it didn’t look like it would be a long wait.

One older lady who wanted a Leisure card was a little confused by the different numbers streams for the different queues. She wasn’t much reassured by my explanantion but her number came up soon after we chatted and I was able to get her to the right place.

I took the opportunity to check the loos. The gents looked as clean and fresh as any office loos which is to say not brilliant but pretty acceptable.

It took me 51 minutes from 3:11pm to 4:02pm to be seen. It seemed that only three Parking Services reps were on which probably accounted for the delay.

Categories
Policing

Knives and the teenage death toll

The Mayor and the Metropolitan Police are today highlighting the work they have done to tackle knife crime. 193 weapons have been seized and 210 people arrested. You have to hope that they convert some of these arrests into jail sentences if the message is going to get through.

Altogether 4,277 stop and searches have been made so far as a part of what they call Operation Blunt 2.

Continue reading “Knives and the teenage death toll”
Categories
Mayor Johnson

Boris gets serious about rubbish

This time last year the old mayor was grassing up London local authorities to the European Commission. This year the new mayor is announcing that he will work with them to increase recycling rates. Hooray.

The old mayor was interested in garnering power to himself and had ambitions to create a hugely expensive “Waste for London” organisation.

The new mayor seems to be more interested in working with the boroughs and achieving results. Good for him.

Livingstone was so out of order on this one it was painful. Even government minister Ben Bradshaw said in a letter:

Our analysis indicated that a Single Waste Disposal Authority could increase the overall cost of dealing with London’s waste. There would be significant set-up costs and disruption because of transferring staff, assets and contracts from the boroughs to the new body. Even after the initial set up costs, our analysis indicated that it could cost up to £5 million a year more to manage London’s waste through a Single Waste Disposal Authority because of the introduction of an extra tier of management.

Categories
National politics

Nasty McShane

I read the piece by Denis McShane, Labour MP for Rotherham, in this morning’s Telegraph and my first thought was heaven rejoices, etc. He says:

Any prime minister in office today would feel the voters’ anger as they see their cherished plans to spend their own money as they see fit destroyed by rising prices combined with the insatiable greed of the state in all its manifestations to take the people’s money for its own, often incompetent and counter-productive ends.

Hallelujah!

Only further down he resorts to the SVP-style dog whistling (more rabble-rousing, bullhorn, full-on class ridden nastiness) that is a bizarre side effect of New Labour’s death throes:

This can be targeted at the indigenous working class, furious at the incessant year-on-year council-tax increases above the rate of inflation.

Categories
Mayor Johnson

Completely Caracas – the numbers that is

completely-caracas.JPGToday the Mayor announced that the silly Venezuelan deal put together by his predecessor will not be renewed and that the half price concession for those on income support will be curtailed six months after that, see press release here.

Last September I reported that the ad bill for this ludicrous scheme would be £975K, see here.

The lefty bloggers are all over it and as usual they don’t get the difference between promises and PR and actual delivery. Tory Troll says:

Around a quarter of a million Londoners on low-incomes were expected to benefit from the cheap oil in return for technical advice and assistance given to Venezuela.

The trouble with all of this is that this deal was never going to help 250,000. Transport for London’s original business case assumed that only 160,000 would take up the offer. In his quotes today the ex-Mayor used the number 80,000 and the BBC used the number 56,000 elsewhere. Now you might say that those 56,000 will lose out. But notice that they will start to lose out by the end of the current tax year about the time that Mayor Boris is going to announce his precept for next year. I suspect he will be able to tell them that they will be enjoying a much lower precept than they would have done under the previous mayor.

If the Mayor focuses on streamling the GLA bodies and doing less better those 56,000 and all other Londoners will be better off under Johnson than they were under Livingstone.

Categories
Uncategorized

Basel spoilt by the SVP

These posters are all over Basel. They refer to a referendum on June 1st and are the work of the Schweizerische Volkspartei (SVP) or Swiss People’s Party. They are the people responsible for the notorious black sheep poster campaign last Autumn, see here. In case the imagery is unclear the coloured hands are reaching for Swiss passports. Dog whistling is clearly not the preserve of our own prime minister.

The June 1st referendum seeks to reinstate a process that allowed local people to decide on the naturalization of a foreign citizen through a municipal vote.

This process was banned in 2003 by the Swiss Federal Court, which alleged that many citizenship applicants, particularly those of Balkan origin, were rejected unfairly by some communities. The SVP is in favour. More information here.

Although the SVP are the largest party in the Swiss National Council with 62 out of 200 seats they are out of step thankfully with the majority of Swiss opinion on this one which is 56% against the referendum compared to 33% for and 11% not sure.

Last year the black sheep campaign was widely covered by the UK press but the election result was not. The SVP increased their share of National Council seats from 55 to 62. Not a good advert for Swizerland.

Categories
Uncategorized

Off to Basel for the weekend

basel.JPG

Categories
Policing

Wasteful prof on the wrong side of the sus debate

Eleven MillionSir Al Aynsley-Green, who has previous for being wasteful with money, has put himself on the wrong side of the debate about stopping and searching young people by saying:

There is a balance here. On the one hand for young people to feel safer by having the presence of the police – but on the other hand making sure the new powers don’t create further antagonism by increased stopping and searching.

These are very contentious and I certainly support the case for much more research on the effects of these policies on them.

You can’t argue with his point about striking a balance but to use the word contentious in the context of the police addressing our horrific teen murder rate in London is just to make a prat of yourself. Sir Al needs to get to a few London secondary schools and ask a few of the kids what their biggest worry is – other kids carrying knives silly.

Categories
Mayor Johnson

Duvall wants to waste public money going to law

Labour blogger Dave Hill is working himself up into a righteous frenzy over Mayor Johnson’s latest appointment. He has posted no fewer than six times this afternoon on the appointment.

Who cares what Ken Livingstone thinks about it?

More worryingly Labour group leader Len Duvall is talking about legal action. He says:

The chair of the London Assembly is already considering taking legal counsel as to the propriety of Mr Parker’s appointment and it is rumoured that a number of other people were approached for this position before him but turned it down.

Notably it won’t be the Labour group hiring the legal counsel. They want to use public money to make a party political point so it will be the Assembly chairman, Jennette Arnold, doing the dirty work.

Labour will find out tonight in the Crewe and Nantwich by-election what the country thinks about them. Taking the newly elected Conservative Mayor to law at public expense over someone who is offering to work unpaid will not endear London Labour to Londoners. Duvall should think again.