Month: Apr 2010

Hectoring Clegg wrong on immigration

Post author By Phil
Post date 30th Apr 2010
4 Comments on Hectoring Clegg wrong on immigration

I was pretty certain last night when Nick Clegg was challenging David Cameron to confirm or deny his “80% of immigrants come from the EU” claim that Clegg was talking nonsense. Apparently it is more like 40%. Clegg was using some Economist numbers that talk about foreign born workers.

So get this, Clegg was beating up Cameron with the stat that the vast majority of foreign born workers are from the EU whilst the majority of immigrants are from outside the EU. In other words too many non-EU immigrants aren’t working. Clegg was unwittingly underlining what many people fear; we are encouraging too many people to come here and enjoy our benefits system, often at the cost of the poorest people in our society.

Figures here.

National politics

Vice chancellors?

I am sorry but the least credible thing proposed during this evening’s leaders’ debate was Nick Clegg’s emergency deficit summit.

He proposed gathering all of the parties’ chancellors and vice chancellors along with the Bank of England and the Financial Services Authority (FSA). I am sorry but this is 9/10ths nonsense.

First off the only vice chancellors in British public life are the chief executives of our universities who usually take the title of vice chancellor. I can only imagine that Clegg was referring to the Chief Secretary to the Treasury and his or her shadows. The Chief Secretary’s role in our government is number 2 to the Chancellor and involves negotiating with government departments about budget allocations, public sector pay, welfare reform, and procurement policy.

Clegg has clearly not thought through how to tackle the deficit and this statement shows that he is making it up as he goes along. The main role of the Bank of England nowadays is monetary policy and the control of inflation, not fiscal (tax and spend) policy. The FSA is almost totally irrelevant to sorting out the deficit. The FSA are a finance industry regulator – why not bring the water regulator into the conversation? What a jerk?

The idea that you will come to a swift conclusion about what to cut or what taxes to raise by bickering with your political opponents is just risible. The players in this conversation are the next government’s Treasury ministers with the spending ministers around the Cabinet table supported by their senior civil servants who will already have presented their ministers with a list of possible savings as soon as they arrived at their new desks. Clegg doesn’t know what he is talking about.

Ealing and Northfield

LibDems leaflets

The LibDems are well known for being the most appalling liars in election leaflets.

I have not seen any LibDem leaflets in Northfield so I can’t comment on them here but I have been helping in Elthorne where I found this Elthorne Focus No. 10 April 2010.

As is fairly typical in LibDem leaflets they have a little box top right showing that they are in second place.

This picture is a lie pure and simple.

If you take it at face value it seems the picture conveys that the LibDems are closely behind Labour and that the Tories are trailing in their wake. Only the numbers tell different story.

The numbers are right and do reflect the Ealing Southall by-election in 2007. But human brains don’t read numbers and prioritise their understanding above the instant impression given by the picture.

A truthful picture is shown below created by me by putting the actual results into Excel and creating a chart. It shows that the Tories had a bad result but they were not that far behind the LibDems and that both parties have a big job to overhaul Labour.

But, note that this leaflet is more a local election leaflet than it is a parliamentary one. A more honest leaflet would refer to the last local election results where two Tory councillors and one Labour one were elected and the LibDems came third. Not a distant third in what was a three-way marginal ward in 2006 – you could even argue that if the Greens put up three candidates it would have been a four-way marginal ward potentially. An honest picture created from the 2006 results is shown below.

I don’t think it really helps politicians if they call each other liars but the LibDems claim to be something new and their leader is positioning himself as honest but his party really is not. If you don’t think these images demonstrate a clear case of lying what would you call it?

After four years of good Tory government in Ealing I would expect to see Elthorne become even more entrenched as a Tory ward on May 6th.

This issue has been highlighted a number of times by other people, indeed only today in Wales here.

National politics

Plastic people

I hope that Nick Clegg’s set dressers cleared up after themselves when they filmed last night’s party political broadcast on behalf of the LibDems – to make their point the LibDems made the Houses of Parliament and a couple of other attractive cityscapes look a mess. The rubbish, like just about everything else about the LibDems, is fake.

The main theme of yesterday’s broadcast was broken promises. Clegg says: “the trail of [other parties’] broken promises can come to an end”. As an eternal opposition party LibDem manifestos typically aren’t much read, but the 2005 manifesto made this promise about the European constitution/Lisbon treaty:

We are therefore clear in our support for the constitution, which we believe is in Britain’s interest – but ratification must be subject to a referendum of the British people.

The referendum promise was one of the few things in their 2005 manifesto that the LibDems could have fought for. They didn’t.

Clegg talks about fair politics and says: “no more dodgy donations to political parties”. The LibDems have refused to return the £2.4 million proceeds of crime given to them by Michael Brown. Whatever you think of union donations to Labour and Michael Ashcroft’s donations to the Tories it is hard to argue that the money was stolen. The LibDems continue to benefit from the dodgiest donation in British politics.

You only have to look at the LibDem leaflets on your doormat to know that the LibDems are the least honest party in British politics.

Ealing and Northfield

Labour can’t deliver

No really. Over the last week or so the Ealing Southall Labour team have been delivering a leaflet to the constituency. Only they are doing a poor job. Last week I was in Lawrence Road, Ealing Park Gardens and Birkbeck Road delivering a leaflet to that part of the Northfield ward. Labour really don’t get it. We got elected in 2006 partly because Ealing was such a mess and needed cleaning up and they are making a mess trying to get re-elected. Doh! Talk about missing the point.

I was laughing to myself in Lawrence Road when I saw that the Labour deliverers had failed to push the leaflets through the letter boxes. I was really quite angry on behalf of our residents when I saw their leaflets thrown around in Birkbeck Road and Ealing Park Gardens.

Communications disease

Milliband’s £80K logo

The Mail on Sunday are reporting today that the FCO have just spent £80K updating their logo. It is the kind of story that reassures you that government spending can be controlled without culling teachers and nurses. Sure we will all feel sorry for the logo designers having to go hungry but not that sorry.

National politics

One minute

Post author By Phil
Post date 24th Apr 2010
No Comments on One minute

I am afraid you will not find me doing much blogging over the next 10 days. Any spare minute I have will be spent knocking on doors in Northfield. I won’t embarass the lady by naming her but I met an ex-Labour candidate from Ealing who resigned in 2006 yesterday. She said she couldn’t vote for us because she was a Labour party member but she said “You are doing a good job”.

Ealing elections 2010

Three jobs Nigel

I don’t think that “Three jobs Nigel” is a phrase that will catch on not having any rhyme or alliteration. It is still worth asking though what is LibDem candidate for Ealing Southall, Nigel Bakhai, playing at?

It is not unusual for councillors who are standing as parliamentary candidates to stand for both their own wards where they currently sit and Parliament. For instance in Ealing Jon Ball (Central Ealing and Acton, LibDem), Bassam Mahfouz (Central Ealing and Acton, Labour) and Gurcharan Singh (Ealing Southall, Conservative) are all doubling up. The Tory candidate for Ealing North, Ian Gibb, is not standing again as a councillor – it’s double or quits for him.

It also seems understandable if you don’t have a seat and want to be a councillor and at the same time represent your party for a hopeless constituency – for instance the Greens’ Christopher Warleigh-Lack is standing in Elthorne as a councillor and standing for Ealing North. Similarly Sarah Edwards for the Greens is standing in Walpole ward and Ealing Central and Acton.

But, Nigel Bakhai is standing three times over. He is the LibDem candidate for Ealing Southall and was bigging up the LibDems’ poll results only yesterday in the Gazette. He is not making quite so much fuss about the fact that he is standing as a councillor in Elthorne ward where he lives but also in the Hillingdon ward of Botwell. How much work can he be doing in Hillingdon? None I suspect. He is either taking the Mickey out of people in Botwell or Ealing, or both.

Ealing and Northfield

Recycling rate doubled under the Tories

Post author By Phil
Post date 21st Apr 2010
2 Comments on Recycling rate doubled under the Tories

You may remember this slogan from the Tories at the last local elections in 2006. In Ealing we can truly say that we have delivered on that promise – or at least our brilliant residents have.

At last night’s council meeting Cllr Clifford Pile asked the Cabinet Member for Environment and Street Services, Susan Emment, for the latest recycling figures for the borough. The answer is 38% for last year. This is fully double the recycling rate that the Tories inherited four years ago.

In our 2006 manifesto we had a long section on recycling:

RECYCLING

Conservatives in Ealing are committed to raising the amount of our waste that we recycle. We believe that the key to achieving this is ensuring that any recycling scheme is accessible to everyone, easy to use and free at the point of use for all residents.

It is the simplicity and ease of the Green Box recycling scheme that has made it such a successful scheme. Conservatives support the retention of the Green Box scheme and we would expand it by including the recycling of cardboard.

Ealing Council is also in the process of partially introducing the Kitchen Waste recycling scheme. We support in principle the new Kitchen Waste recycling scheme and we shall be closely watching to see how successful it is. If is does prove effective, we shall continue the roll out of this scheme across the whole borough.

Residents have also told us how useful they find the recycling stations across the borough, but often these are badly designed and sometimes difficult to access. We will therefore implement a programme to improve the design of all our recycling stations; making them cleaner, easier to access and free from unnecessary clutter.

Conservatives believe, however, that the existing ‘pink bag’ scheme for the recycling of garden waste does not meet the key requirement of a recycling scheme being accessible to everyone and free at the point of use. We believe that the burden involved in ordering the bags as well as the 50p charge per bag actually serves as a disincentive for residents to recycle their garden waste.

We will therefore abolish the ‘pink bag’ scheme and replace it with a more user friendly scheme that is free to residents at the point of use.

We have more than delivered on this adding plastics and drinks cartons to the list of items you can recycle and pushing recycling facilties out to blocks of flats. It was hard to put numerical targets on recycling when we were in opposition. In our new manifesto we promise to achieve 40% recycling by next year and then on to 50%.

Ealing and Northfield

Taxing jobs II

A couple of weeks ago the Telegraph published a letter from me on the jobs tax – yet more increases in Employer’s NI proposed by the Labour government and opposed by the Conservatives.

Yesterday at full council Cllr Joanna Dabrowska asked the council leader Jason Stacey what the cost of Gordon Brown’s jobs tax would be to Ealing Council. The answer was £1.14 million per annum. When asked to put this in some context Cllr Stacey pointed out that this sum would add 1% to council bills. Alternatively, the council could cut the 50 new street cleaners we have added to the workforce since we came into power, or cut the 50 new PCSOs we recruited or get rid of 32 social workers. Another approach would be to cut every day centre in the borough plus a couple of libraries.

The opposition leader Julian Bell blithely asserted that he could cap the council tax for another year and protect services and swallow the loss of £1.14 million. Thank heavens he is not running the council.