Month: Oct 2006

Apologies for all of the pictures of politicos over the last few days. At least this one is female and a Tory. Angie Bray is the GLA member for the West Central GLA constituency which includes Hammersmith & Fulham, Kensington & Chelsea and Westminster. She was selected as the prospective parliamentary candidate for the new Ealing Central and Acton parliamentary constituency on Thursday evening.

This seat replaces the old Ealing, Acton and Shepherds Bush seat which is currently held by Labour MP, Andrew Slaughter who is an ex-leader of Hammersmith and Fulham council.

With the boundary changes this seat becomes a very winnable seat for the Tories.

This is another story that is critical of one of our local newspapers, the Ealing Times again. Today on their website and also in the paper with a picture of three of the villains of the piece they cover Labour’s Olympic petition campaign. Times journalist Benedict Moore Bridger has failed to tell us the whole story. He quotes Dan Whittle and refers to him as the petition organiser. He does not mention that Whittle is full time assistant to Anne Snelgove, Labour MP for South Swindon. He was Labour PPC for Wells at the last election. In a previous article he was referred to as political education officer for Central Ealing and Acton Labour Party.

Today’s article features a picture taken on 14th September (more old news from the Times) of a Labour minister, Labour MP and Labour activist. The article quotes Ealing Labour leader Sonika Nirwal. The previous article quoted Sian Vasey, director of Ealing Centre for Independent Living. What the article does not say was that she stood as a Labour candidate at the local elections in May.

Make no mistake. Anything you hear about an Olympics petition will be coming straight out of the Labour party and anyone signing this is either naive or a fully paid-up Labour member.

Ealing’s Conservative council is taking the Olympics seriously. Labour is lining up another empty campaign to try to distract us from delivering real benefits to the people of Ealing. Remember that whilst they huff and puff about another second order issue their councillors are managing a 50% attendance rate at the Health, Housing and Adult Social Services Panel against the Tories 100%.

The Ealing Times is today covering the issue of how much council tax we collect. They manage to turn a good news story into a bad news one.

The year before last the council had a glitch and managed to leave £7.1 million uncollected at the end of the year. This does not mean that this was all lost. Much of this was collected subsequently. Since then, according to a rather out of date GMB press release dated 27th September, Ealing has improved its performance such that it is the second most improved borough in London. At the end of this year the shortfall was was much reduced to £5.2 million and since the year end a further £1.5 million has been collected.

It is irritating that some people get away without paying. If they do a moonlight flit it can cost more to collect the money than you could recover. The £5.2 million sounds like a lot but the council had collected 95.6% of its projected £122 million council tax income by the end of the year.

It is worth comparing this tax with the Mayor’s CC which is essentially another tax. Last year the Mayor collected £254 million in revenue but spent £148 million in costs. This left a surplus of only £106 million (without considering the capital costs of the project). By comparison it costs the council only about £3 million to collect both council tax and business rates.

The Times’ Benedict Moore Bridger is indulging in voodoo economic when he adds previous year’s outstandings to calculate amounts of council tax that could be returned to residents. Most of this is collected after the year end.

As part of our VFM agenda the new administration is keeping a close eye on this area and expects Ealing’s improved performance in this area to keep on improving.

Pastor David Wise of Greenford Baptist Church should perhaps stand as a councillor as he obviously fancies himself as a bit of a politician. Last night he presented a 700 name petition to the council in favour of the second phase of the Northala Fields project.

As I went into the council chamber the good pastor was directing his minibus full of congregation up to the gallery and urging them to line the rail of the gallery. The minibus full showed their appreciation of the pastor after his sermon and supported Councillor Mahfouz and the Labour group in their defence of the big vision thing over Councillor Stacey’s down to earth approach.

The pastor has put his speech, including recordings from the council chamber, up on his church’s website so you can decide for yourself by following the link.

Jason Stacey, the leader of Ealing council, responded to the petition and started off by asking the pastor to read out the actual petition (also on the church’s website). This went a long way to bursting the pastor’s balloon:

• The council is going to complete the park, not downgrade it.
• The council is going to spend the park’s surplus on the park, not reallocate it.
• The funding for Phase 2 does not exist in anyone’s budget, certainly not the previous Labour administration’s.
• There will be no loss of amenities unless you count visitor’s centres as essentials rather than nice-to-haves.

The council’s discussion of this subject went all the way to the guillotine and indeed beyond it. I had the chance to make my maiden speech and made the last speech on the subject. I had prepared something but decided to wing it.

The thrust of my contribution was to point out that although Phase 1 has been a great success and is a credit to all involved it is entirely different from Phase 2. Phase 1 was a straight business proposition. You can dump waste on our site, we will charge you and build a park. This was a great trick but one that can’t be repeated once the site is landscaped.

Phase 2 is totally different. To achieve this someone needs to go cap in hand to various “funders”. These people all have small allocations and strict criteria. Rustling up the odd £5 million will be very hard and in any case most funders would expect matching funding from the council, money that is simply not available if we are to complete higher priority projects such as Northolt Swimarama. Trying to compete for these funds in the run up to the London Olympics is probably futile in any case.

The thrust of the pastor/Labour’s argument was that Phase 1 was a success, trust the team to deliver Phase 2 or we will we will lose amenities. The reality is that the two phases are completely different. The menu of amenities does look like a list of bells and whistles if you compare it with something tangible like a swimming pool. Our council can only have so many priorities so visitor’s centres do not make the list.

Northala Fields is a great project. Now is the time to complete it. I am sure that the pastor’s flock seen above will enjoy it. They will also enjoy living in clean, safe, VFM Ealing too.

For you politics junkies there is a full council meeting tonight at 7pm. Often these can be a little dull but tonight’s promises to be a humdinger, see the agenda.

The opposition is tabling a motion on Northala Park. It is being tabled by Cllr Mahfouz who likes to think of himself as the Labour hard man. There will also be a petition from Pastor David Wise, who would maybe do well to avoid such a politcal subject. Jason Stacey, the new Conservative council leader, has spotted that phase 2 of this project “has no clothes” and will stand his ground in the face of this attack. Labour want to play double or quits with public money and we want to concentrate on the priorities we were elected to deliver.

Whilst Mahfouz is huffing and puffing about the loss of a few bells and whistles at Northala Park the Labour councillors can’t be bothered to address the important stuff at the Health, Housing and Adult Social Service Panel (see previous posting). It is a bit rubbish Labour preening on this relatively trivial issue while they cannot be bothered to do the hard work of working their way through fat papers on subjects such as health, housing and social services.

Anyway it should be entertaining so come on down to the Town Hall for 7pm. Get there in plenty of time and grab a seat in the gallery. It is your council.