Month: Oct 2006

Categories
Ealing envirocrime

Another fly-posting menace

Rowans.jpgRowan’s, a bar in Chiswick High Road, has been fly-posting quite spectacularly in the neighbourhood. Today I took down 18 posters as follows:

  • 1 gates of Elthorne Park
  • 5 junction of Little Ealing Lane and South Ealing Road
  • 2 zebra crossing south end of Northfield Avenue
  • 4 junction of Lower Boston and Boston Roads
  • 6 junction of Boston Manor and Swyncombe Avenue

Although they are in the borough of Hounslow I don’t see how hard it would be to get the Hounslow licensing panel to review their licence. I have written them a letter and will take it round there this afternoon. Whilst I am at it I will dump their signs on their premises too.

Categories
Ealing and Northfield

Too many yellow boards in the neighbourhood

September 24th attackTwo very violent assaults in the neighbourhood have taken place in the last few weeks – both perpetrated by gangs of hoodie wearing black teenagers. As a result the police have been appealing for help from the public using their yellow boards.

A vicious stabbing happened in Mattock Lane on Sunday 17th September. Only a week later a savage beating was meted out to an off-duty policeman on Sunday 24th September near the junction of South Ealing Road and Little Ealing Ealing Lane, see photo right.

It seems only sensible to avoid groups of hooded youths at night right now until these evil people are caught.

The photo right and articles linked to above are both from Ealing Times.

Categories
High tax, low pay

Gordon’s chains for the poor

IFS.gifThe Joseph Rowntree Foundation have been doing more good work to show how this government ill serves the poor. This time through a report from the IFS funded by them published today.

It makes sobering reading:

  • since Labour came to power someone on benefit trying to improve themselves by working harder gets to keep 2.5p less of each extra £1 they earn
  • over 2 million workers would lose more than half of any increase in earnings to taxes and reduced benefits
  • of these some 160,000 would lose more than 90p of each extra £1 they earned.

If Brown would untax the poor he could really make a difference in people’s lives. In doing so he would probably have to untax all of us. He would rather keep the squeeze on and try to help the most vulnerable with credits only these then trap the poor in dependency. Oh, that’s OK then!

Categories
Ealing and Northfield

Ealing TV

Ealing TVThanks to Ealing Times we now have Ealing TV.

Click left to see their report on the clearance of 33 Creighton Road by the council last week.

The Times’ Benedict Moore-Bridger is to be congratulated on what he has achieved with a simple camera and some pretty basic recording equipment.

The local press will never be the same again.

Categories
Ex-Mayor Livingstone

Questions for the London Mayor

Mayors Question Time.jpgIn the spirit of public participation AM Roger Evans is asking on his blog for the public to forward him ideas for questions to ask the London Mayor.

My suggestions to Roger are:

Building on the answers from the Mayor about TfL’s £78 million comms spending and its breakdown I would like to have a complete breakdown of all comms spending across the GLA and all the GLA family including LSCP, the Olympic bodies and so-called “programme budgets” within the LDA and the GLA itself for 2005/6 and budgets for 2006/7. This should include anything that has a London or London Mayor logo on it. The LDA for instance pay their £500K contribution to the Londoner from programme budgets not overheads. I suspect there are other bodies buried in the programme budgets.

Another question I might ask the LDA is to categorise their programme budgets as follows for last year and the budgets for the current year:

  • hardcore economic development spending
  • bread and circuses (eg Tate extension, Londoner, etc).
Categories
Ex-Mayor Livingstone

Mayor posturing over grants

ken_big.jpgThe Association of London Government distributes about £30 million in grants on behalf of London local authorities. For our borough this means broadly that we distribute about £1 million in grants and give another £1 million to the ALG to distribute on our behalf.

Since May this year when the London local elections changed the majority on the ALG, the ALG has been discussing the distribution of these grants. Most boroughs do not like having these decisions being taken out of their hands and would like to see this cash repatriated to the boroughs. The overhead of grants administration at the ALG is way too high as well.

The people that receive these grants are obviously up in arms and Mayor Livingstone sees this as an opportunity to get his hands on the cash. He loves using our taxes to buy our votes and here is another £30 million worth. According to a press release his PR army issued on Friday he has written to Ruth Kelly, Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government, to ask for the transfer of voluntary grants funding to the Mayor’s Office “in order to protect London-wide grants now under threat from cuts”. In other words give me the cash and I will spend it on buying votes like I did when I ran the GLC.

The Mayor’s dim press people make the mistake of putting a link to the list of grant recipients in their press release. The list goes a long way to destroying the case for this kind of central distribution. For one thing many of the recipients have the names of boroughs in their name – why can’t they be funded locally? For another too many are arts groups that need to sell tickets to real punters.