Month: Mar 2009

Categories
Ealing and Northfield

Easter refuse and recycling collections

Another public service message:

Ealing Council is reminding residents that refuse and recycling collections will take place a day later than usual following the Easter holidays.

Changes to collections are as follows:

Usual collection day Revised collection day

Friday 10 April (Good Friday) Saturday 11 April
Monday 13 April (Easter Monday) Tuesday 14 April
Tuesday 14 April Wednesday 15 April
Wednesday 15 April Thursday 16 April
Thursday 16 April Friday 17 April
Friday 17 April Saturday 18 April
Saturday 18 April Saturday 18 April (as usual)

Collections will return to normal on Monday 20 April.

Categories
Policing

10,000 Specials

10000-specialsI have been a bit busy over the weekend so apologies for not being very active on the blog. I was pleased to see on Friday the Mayor sticking to his knitting and talking about recruiting more special constables. See press release here and Evening Standard story here.

More policing, more volunteering, more keeping the police force in touch with the people it polices. We have seen too many incidents recently of the Met’s canteen culture getting out of hand and spilling over into rascist and other unpleasant incidents. A few Specials around the place to say “you can’t be serious” will be very welcome.

Current Met police numbers, see here for January 2009 figures, include 35,000 PCs, 14,000 office workers and 4,000 PCSOs. Currently there are some 2,600 Specials so it will be a hard task to get the number up to 10,000. If the Met succeed in recruiting these kind of numbers they are bound to have an impact firstly on increasing the number of police on the streets which is a big win in itself but the more important effect may well be the impact it has on normalising the police and making them more accountable to the public.

I don’t know if this initiative comes from the Mayor or the new Commissioner but it is a very welcome follow up to Stephenson’s announcement of a couple of weeks ago that coppers should be out on their own more. Both initiatives pull in the same direction: more boots on the ground and more accountability.

For all of the showbiz around the Mayor he only really has two jobs to do:

  • – make public transport better and cheaper and wean it off its huge public subsidy
  • – fight crime and turn the Met into London’s own police force.

Incidentally, both of these tasks require him to tame unions that put their own members’ rewards way above public service.

Categories
National politics

You have run out of our money

My public speaking is much better than it was when I became a councillor but it still has a long, long way to go before I get anywhere near Daniel Hannan, Euro MP and Telegraph columnist. Today he totally roasted Gordon Brown for three and a half minutes during his visit to the European Parliament. I don’t know what protocol or procedure they were following but I guess that the Prime Minister is bitterly regretting allowing himself to be ambushed like this. I don’t suppose it will get on the BBC though – we’ll see.

Categories
National politics

The big game

http://www.conservatives.com/%7E/media/Flash/Flash%20Applications/videoPlayer_small.ashx

Last Thursday I went to the Royal United Services Institute at 61 Whitehall to hear David Cameron do his debt crisis thing. I had been hoping, idly it seems, for some red meat. The essence of what Cameron said, see speech here, was that some hard choices will have to be made but fiscal responsibility needs a social conscience, or it is nothing.

Cameron is trying to blunt any possible Labour attacks that the Conservatives will “revert to type” once in government and that they will slash and burn their way through the public services.

Cameron is wise indeed to be wary. Whoever is returned after the next election will have to make some truly eye-watering changes to public spending. We are talking in the order of £100 billion here. Read “Bankrupt Britain” if you think I am exaggerating. Cameron knows this and so does Gordon Brown.

Gordon Brown invented Comprehensive Spending Reviews when he was chancellor in order to take a long term view and make spending decisions every two to three years. In the Observer today Andrew Rawnsley reports that:

A comprehensive spending review was due this summer. Gordon Brown has quietly told Alistair Darling to scrap it.

So the father of the Comprehensive Spending Review is quietly putting it to death so that he doesn’t have to face facts.

Maybe our politics over the next 18 months will be a poker game where Brown bluffs that we can carry on as we were once the storm has abated and whilst Cameron bluffs that merely controlling the expansion of the state will be enough to bring Government debt under control. I hope not. After the next election one of these men will have to come clean and admit that the public sector is going to have to be significantly curtailed. I hope that Cameron does it sooner rather than later.

Categories
National politics

McNulty doesn’t know right from wrong

Today the Mail on Sunday has a huge piece on MP’s expenses and on Tony McNulty in particular. McNulty always comes across quite well in the media which is why he is often wheeled out. His media-friendliness doesn’t mean that he can tell right from wrong though. He has been found out claiming housing allowances for the house where his parents live. He says he stopped making these claims in January before he was found out. He is quoted as saying:

I have always felt some discomfort in claiming the money, to be frank. I decided that it’s simply time that I stopped – partly because mortgage interest rates have gone down and partly because I can do without it.

So let’s get this right: McNulty can’t be bothered to claim anymore because the amount he can claim is so trifling with falling interest rates and he is so comfortable the sums seem insignificant. Apparently he has not stopped claiming because it is just plain wrong. What a complete arse.

Categories
Ealing and Northfield

Alley Gating

This is a bit of a public service announcement. If you are interested in the Council’s alley gating scheme you need to get an application in before the end of this month.

To make an application, residents need to get consent from every neighbour who either jointly owns, or has a right to access the alleyway. Following approval the gates will be installed and residents who are meant to have access to the alleyway will be given keys to gain entry. The closing date for 2009/10 applications is 31st March. There are usually more applications than there are funds available so the Council will prioritise the schemes that serve the most people.

Last year the Council spent £445,000 on alley-gating to protect more than 400 homes.

The Council’s dedicated alley gating officer can be contacted on 020 8825 7757 or click here for more information.

Categories
Ealing and Northfield

Lies, Damned lies and …

It seems that two local websites have been gleefully jumping on some old statistics about street cleaning in Ealing. They look bad because they are two years old and reflect Ealing how it was – which is why the Tories were elected in May 2006.

This posting is stupidly long but stick with it if you are interested in the way that truth gets mangled by laziness. David Highton at West Ealing Neighbours published a piece on Monday titled “EALING ONE OF WORST BOROUGHS FOR STREET LITTERING”. His opening line is:

According to a new report from the Council for the Protection of Rural England the borough of Ealing is one of the worst in the country for people dropping litter in the streets.

Although he goes on to repeat a few lines from the report his intent is clear. He wants to communicate the message that Ealing is bad at keeping its streets clean.

On Sunday March 15th the Acton W3 site had a piece titled “Low Down and Dirty” and sub-titled “Local authorities come bottom of the heap with dealing with street litter”. Their opening line is:

Both Ealing and Hounslow boroughs are considered to be amongst the dirtiest in Britain according to a report published by Campaign to Protect Rural England. Hounslow is ranked fourth filthiest whilst Ealing fare slightly better ranking seventh out of the worst offenders.

They do though have the good grace to include a comment from Ealing council:

Ealing Council Cabinet Member for Environment and Street Services, Councillor Sue Emment, said: “Unfortunately the Campaign to Protect Rural England has published a report using figures which are now two years out of date. Since then we have made massive improvements and last year’s league table showed our streets were the cleanest of any west London borough.

In fact at the last independent inspection, in January 2009, auditors found 94 per cent of streets were free from litter, which is the cleanest they’ve ever been.

Of course very few people read that far past the headline and initial paragraph so this is small consolation.

I guess WEN just lifted their story from Acton W3 without doing any of their own research. It fitted in with their rather down on Ealing point of view. Similarly with Acton W3 – local media very rarely think there is much mileage in good news from the council – could that be why Ealing keeps Around Ealing?

Continue reading “Lies, Damned lies and …”
Categories
Northfield Ward Forum

Next Northfield Ward Forum to clash with G20

For anyone who isn’t busy with the G20 summit please come along to the next Northfield ward forum. If we can’t put the world right we can at least make some progress on our own doorstep.

Thursday, 2nd April 2009 at 7:30-9.30 pm at Northfields Community Centre, Main Hall, 71a Northcroft Road, Ealing W13 9SS

Provisional dates for future meetings:

  • Wednesday 24 June 2009
  • Thursday 22 October 2009

All minutes, agendas, etc here.

Categories
Policing

You’ll Never Walk Alone – you will now

Picture from linked BBC storyGreat news. It seems that new Met Commissioner Sir Paul Stephenson has come round to the idea that the police should patrol on their own more often. Quite right too. I welcomed Sir Paul’s appointment at the end of January this year and at the time I called for more single-handed patrolling, see previous posting.

This morning on the Today programme the Police Federation spokesman Peter Smyth was typically wary. He should not be. The public have to walk alone so the idea that trained coppers wearing stab-proof vest, carrying pepper spray and telescopic batons with a radio to call for back-up can’t walk alone is simply unsupportable.

I raised this issue with Boris Johnson when I met him at the House of Commons at the start of his mayoral campaign.

As I said three years ago:

It seems to me that two policemen patrolling together will spend most of their time chatting and miss a lot. Anyone who has travelled on their own will tell you that you meet loads more people on your own than you do as a couple. Two policemen, one each side of a busy road, will provide two sets of eyes and many more positive interactions with the public than two on the same side of the road. It is not hard. Next time you see a couple of coppers walking down the road why don’t you suggest they each walk down one side?

See BBC coverage here (from where I borrowed the picture used above) and the Daily Telegraph here.

Categories
National politics

What killed capitalism?

If you have an hour or two and want to read something fresh and demanding on the credit crunch I suggest that you read Andrew Lilico’s CPS paper published yesterday. Titled “What killed capitalism?” it gives a stoutly right wing perspective on the credit crunch and how we should approach it. It is well worth a read and echoes my own thoughts that we should have let failed banks fail rather than propping them up with £200 billion of our own money.