Month: Mar 2010

Categories
National politics

Empty budget

http://news.bbc.co.uk/player/emp/external/player.swf

I saw the budget live yesterday and have been following the coverage but I have had trouble raising myself to comment on it all. There was lots of Brownite twiddling with inconsequential details. For instance, it is lovely that Darling has made £100 million available to fix the roads. Apparently £4 million of this is going to London (why so little?). Our council alone has allocated £689,700 from contingency so you can see that £4 million across 33 boroughs and the City of London is a joke. The whole £100 million is 0.06% of the deficit so, so what? Our government will spend £167 billion more than it raises in taxes this year. We are truly, horribly screwed.

The Telegraph reckons that Darling has raised taxes by £19 billion. At the same time Darling talks about £11 billion of savings to be made in the next financial year to start in April. Only an analysis by the TaxPayers’ Alliance shows that more than half of this is “unspecified”.

We have just had yet another tax and spend budget from a government that refuses to acknowledge that it has blown the public finances. Although the deficit for this year year will apparently only be £167 billion rather than £178 billion we are in big trouble and Darling and Brown refuse to be honest about it. Darling admits that the next government will have to be harsher than Thatcher. Do you trust Brown/Darling to deliver the medicine? Still less Clegg/Cable?

Categories
Ealing and Northfield

Sharma tweets again

Over the last couple of days there have been a couple of pieces in the newspapers about the influence of modern communications technology on the forthcoming elections. See here and here.

One thing we can be sure of is that a number of candidates are going to make fools of themselves with blogs and Twitter. No doubt some will say that I have made some mistakes with this blog. No doubt. But, unless you want to simply regurgitate the party line you will sometimes make mistakes.

Congratulations to local MP Virendra Sharma for trying to reach people with Twitter. You can see his efforts here.

The other sure thing about this election is that anyone telling porkies is going to get quickly demolished by bloggers and the other fact checkers out there. As a local councillor (who is unembarrassed to pick up his allowance in spite of his lack of attendance) Sharma should know that road re-surfacing is not a good line of attack. You can see the comparative records of Labour and Tory administrations illustrated in the chart below.

The list of roads to be resurfaced next year that we signed off at our last Cabinet meeting, see here, included twenty roads in Southall.

These will cost something like £1 million. Ooops. The horrid Tories are spending as much in Southall alone as Labour spent across the whole borough in a year. Sorry Cllr Sharma but you are a wally.

Categories
Communications disease National politics

Reforming Parliament, start with the cash stupid

Today the News of the World has a shock, horror piece about a £17K lift attendant at Parliament. They say:

Incredibly, our pampered politicians are looking for a hired flunky to actually push the buttons for them in the House of Commons elevator.

And the fact they’ll pay £17,277 a year, plus perks, out of taxpayers’ money to do it last night sparked an almighty row.

You can see the job ad here.

Apparently there are four “lift attendants”. I think the News of the Screws may have hit the wrong target though – apparently these guys have a role escorting visitors around for security reasons. It would be strange to have Parliament unattended given the security you might want to see there. But, the problem with Parliament is that it is unscrutinised. Seeing itself as sovereign it thinks it can do what it likes and does not need to weigh priorities and cut its cloth like the rest of us.

A much more dodgy job as is this one one for a House of Lords press person – £30K for a 20 hour week with 35 days paid holiday. Where do you get that kind of gig in the private sector? The only way the House of Lords is ever going to look good is if the lords stop stealing from us (Uddin & co you know who you are). No number of overpaid fluffy comms people are going to trump that kind of behaviour. This is a total waste of money.

The total bill for Parliament last year was £516 million or, to put it another way the cost of running five district general hospitals the size of Ealing. See House of Commons figures here and house of Lords figures here. MPs direct pay and allowances are £242K per head and they cost £633K per head all in.

The Tories are talking about shaving this bill 10%, see here. I reckon you could take 40% out, see here. The figure of 40% is a bit arbitary but if you run an organisation with no real cost control pressures for many decades halving its spending should be a doddle. I figured 40% gave me some room for error! If you are reading David I would do the job for free. Give me two years max.

Categories
National politics

Would you use your child like this?

This photo appeared on Facebook in the last few days. The poster the child is carrying is a lie. Has the Labour government closed down any of its own childrens’ centres? I don’t think so. It seems rather unnecessary to use a child to point out that a future Conservative government is going to be looking very hard at all areas of government expenditure.

We know who posted this photo. It was Gail Gallie. Her biog is posted on her own PR company’s website:

Gallie was the account director on BMP DDB’s 1997 New Labour election campaign, which helped bring Tony Blair to power, and later as a head of marketing at the BBC she led the launch campaigns for Cbeebies and BBC Three and strategic overhauls of the core BBC brand as well as Radio 1 and BBC News.

I wrote to Gallie to challenge her about who the kid was and she admitted that it was her own son. This seems very unwise to me and I will remove the photo as soon as she removes the one she posted on Facebook. In her mail Gallie said:

He’s my son, it is my photo, and I did it to support the campaign to keep Sure Start Centres open and available to people like me who use them.

This Facebook page is supposed to look all homespun but is in reality just an extension of Labour’s press release from yesterday that repeats their lie that the Tories will take £200 million out of Sure Start and close one fifth of the childrens’ centres. Even Channel 4’s Cathy Newman is not convinced and demolishes Labour’s lies quite satisfactorily here. The Tories will look at the effectiveness of Sure Start and refocus resources on the most needy. The evidence so far is that the money on Sure Start has not made a measurable difference to attainment, see here.

You can’t help thinking that the Tories are right to ask if the SureStart money couldn’t be better spent if high powered PR types like Gallie are hogging the places. If Gallie and her mates use up all the Sure Start places it will not be a surprise if the service does not reach the “hard to reach”. Doh!

Categories
Ealing and Northfield

Council tax frozen again

This year the Gazette put our announcement on their front page (click to enlarge), which is very nice. Last year it was relegated to an inside page. The move was a lot rarer last year than this so was certainly more newsworthy then. We should be grateful I guess that we got the front page this year.

The council tax record for the new Conservative administration is now clear: two rises of 1.9%, below inflation, two years of freeze to match Boris’ GLA precept. A cumulative rise of 3.8% over four years.

Continue reading “Council tax frozen again”
Categories
Ealing and Northfield

Residents tell the Council it has delivered

I have spent some time today looking at the results of the Council’s residents’ survey. You can see the whole thing here.

Very early in our administration we set three priorities:

  • cleaner streets
  • safer communities
  • value for money.

As a result my eyes were drawn to this table right at the end of the document. It shows the top four concerns expressed by residents by year.

It shows that the Council has succeeded in making a difference in all three areas as measured by residents’ perceptions.

  • concern about litter/dirt on streets has step-by-step gone down from 30% to 20%
  • concern about crime has gone down from above 40% to below 30%
  • concern about the level of the council tax has slumped dramatically from 40% to 16%.
Categories
National politics

When you are in a hole

The British left wrote a collective letter to the Guardian today to tell the government to keep digging. We have the biggest deficit in the whole OECD and these morons say we should keep making it worse. The chart above is taken from the excellent Burning our Money blog who took it in turn from the OECD.

Continue reading “When you are in a hole”
Categories
National politics

Don’t stop Believing

I enjoyed Boris Johnson’s column in the Telegraph today. It refers to two recent books: David Willetts’, “The Pinch” and Matt Ridley’s “The Rational Optimist”. Willetts’ book is a somewhat pessimistic presentation of the baby boomer generation and their consumption. Ridley’s title speaks for itself – Boris himself comes down on the side of sunny optimism. Tim Montgomerie at the ConservativeHome blog talks of Boris’ “captivating belief in human progress”.

As a late boomer myself who started work on a non-contributory pension in 1984 and saw his contemporaries having trouble finding work in the harsh recession of the early eighties I simply don’t buy into Willetts’ thesis.

On the other hand you can usefully compare the “musn’t grumble” generation we are losing now, who had childhoods stinted by the Great Depression and then had to fight a war and deal with over ten years of rationing, with the early boomers and say the later never had it so good but there is no good reason to suppose that today’s youngsters will have straightened, diminished lives.

On Saturday I was at an 18th birthday party (it’s a long story) and I was very amused when they all rushed to the dance floor to dance and sing along to Foreigner’s “Don’t stop Believing”. This record was made in 1981 and keeps finding new audiences through its use in movies. It has recently been covered in the Glee TV show. As a result this week the Glee version is still at 20 in the charts and the original itself is at 27. The song has a classic piano introduction, the obligatory rock guitar solo and one of the best hook lines in pop music. Watching 50 kids go mad to it reassured me that today’s kids will make it.

Categories
Ealing and Northfield

SEC admit that their chairman was biased

Last Monday after SEC’s town hall meeting I commented that the chairman, the BBC’s Stephen Sackur, had failed to be objective. I said:

He referred to the Conservative team as “you lot”. He called the Glenkerrin Arcadia scheme an “insane idea” (compare this with the language of the planning inspector: “The evidence to the Inquiry demonstrated that the appeal proposal would deliver a number of substantial benefits, which would fulfil some important objectives of development plan policy.”) When one guy at the back talked in favour of tall buildings Sackur ridiculed him. He talked about property developers making “frankly millions for themselves”. He asked: “Why is Ealing’s shopping rubbish?” He asked: “Why is the cinema project completely buggered?”. Whatever Sackur is, objective he is not.

The whole session failed to provide much illumination. Sackur didn’t even try to run a useful meeting.

My fears have been inadvertantly confirmed today on the Ealing Today forum. SEC activist Arthur Breens says:

Over 400 people turned up to the Town Hall just over a week ago to hear prospective parliamentry candidates and councillors explain their ideas for the development of Ealing Town Centre.

Steven Sackur trounced Cllr. David Millican (Cabinet member in charge of regeneration and transport). He visibly struggled to explain, promote or defend his brief. You began to feel sorry for him but then you wondered why was he on the stage at all?

Funny behaviour for a chairman. No wonder Cllr Millican was on the defensive. Breens has let the cat out of the bag. Ooops.

At least I think Breens is associated with SEC. SEC refuse to publish any accounts, minutes of meetings or lists of officers so it is hard to know who they are or what they are trying to achieve. They are not transparent and they are certainly not accountable to anyone.