Author: Phil

Unemployment in the London Borough of Ealing, as measured by the claimant count, peaked under Labour in September 2009. Since then unemployment overall in Ealing has almost halved and youth unemployment is down 2/3rds. If you want to see where the data comes from all you have to do is go to the ONS’s nomis database.

In May 2010 the claimant count (those people on JSA) was 8,810. In March, the last month for which data is available, the claimant count was 5,215. That is a fall of 41% with the Tory-led Coalition as some people like to call it. The claimant count peaked at 9,580 in September 2009 under Labour. It has fallen by 45%, almost half, since.

The picture with youth unemployment is even better. In May 2010 the youth claimant count was 1,780. In March the youth claimant count was 800. That is a massive fall of over half, 55%, with the Tory-led Coalition. The youth claimant count peaked at 2,450 in September 2009 under Labour, a fall of 67%.

The graphs make clear that although it hasn’t been easy we are moving in the right direction now. Let’s go for jobs, stability, a proven team and the Conservative Long Term Economic Plan.

Yesterday the Gazette reported that the number of people on JSA had gone down by 25% in Ealing in the last year. I figured it was worth looking back a little further. All you have to do is go to the ONS’s nomis database.

In May 2010 the claimant count (those people on JSA) was 8,810. In February, the last month for which data is available, the claimant count was 5,350. That is a fall of 39% with the Tory-led Coalition as our friends like to call it.

The picture with youth unemployment is even better. In May 2010 the youth claimant count was 1,780. In February, the last month for which the data is available, the youth claimant count was 850. That is a massive fall of over half, 52%, with the Tory-led Coalition.

Both graphs make it clear that the Tory-led Coalition’s jobs miracle has happened for young and old, for Londoners and across Great Britain.

A quick check on donations registered at the Electoral Commission to the Central Ealing and Acton CLP shows that Rupa Huq’s campaign received a donation of £3,000 from Weaver Rose Accountants Ltd, Weaver Rose House, Southall UB1 3DN on 24th October 2014.

Who or what is Weaver Rose? It is essentially a one man band accountancy shop run by none other than Southall Broadway Labour councillor Sarfraz Khan.

On his website Sarfraz Khan offers himself as a tax consultant. Obviously it is much more tax efficient to give Rupa Huq cash though his company than to fund her out of his taxed income. But being tax efficient is fine if the cash is going to the Labour party isn’t it?

Sarfraz Khan was elected as a councillor in 2014 but a history as a political wannabe.

Ealing is a big place but is already too dominated by Southall and its bizarre politics. We know Rupa Huq is in Julian Bell’s pocket who in turn is beholden to Southall MP Virendra Sharma, his employer in his second job. Now it traspires that Rupa Huq depends on money from Southall too.

Today the Labour candidate for Ealing Central and Acton, Rupa Huq, has produced a typically sided piece for the ealingtoday.gov.uk website which I guess will be reprinted verbatim by the online version of the Gazette at least.

Her party’s misrepresentation of the changes to the local health system, known as Shaping a Healthier Future, are debunked by the NHS itself here.

Labour refuses to acknowledge that the closures we have had locally under the Shaping a Healthier Future programme are not as extensive as they make out and would have happened anyway under a Labour government, being as they are merely the delayed local roll out of Labour’s own £20 billion Nicholson Challenge programme kicked off by Andy Burnham in 2009.

On the whole Rupa Huq seems like a nice lady so it was very disappointing to see her use the death of a child to weaponise the NHS as an issue yet again. She might have troubled to look up the name of baby Muhammad Hashir Naveed who died when his parents erroneously took him to a closed A&E facility at Chase Farm Hospital in Enfield. It really wasn’t very classy.

As a Conservative and a huge fan of the NHS I was also disappointed that an academic can tell such a one-sided story of the foundation of the NHS.

Huq said:

Labour founded the NHS in 1948 to Tory opposition then and only Labour can rebuild and protect the health service now by taking the strain off our hospitals by funding an integrated care system, where residents can see their GPs before they find themselves in hospital and by reversing the break up and sell off the NHS.

So voters need to remember all this as they cast their vote on 7th May and support Labour as the only party who created the NHS and who will stand up for it because if the Tories sneak back into power with their plans for more cuts and closures it’s no exaggeration to say that there is a serious risk that there won’t be an NHS in this country anymore in the sense envisaged by its founding father Nye Bevan and that would be no less than situation critical.

The NHS was the product of a long running debate through much of the first 40 years of the 20th century. During the war the consensus emerged that there should be a comprehensive health service free at the point of use. This consensus was crystallised in the 1944 NHS white paper produced under Conservative Minister of Health Henry Willink. The Conservatives went into the 1945 election offering this in their manifesto:

The health services of the country will be made available to all citizens. Everyone will contribute to the cost, and no one will be denied the attention, the treatment or the appliances he requires because he cannot afford them.

We propose to create a comprehensive health service covering the whole range of medical treatment from the general practitioner to the specialist, and from the hospital to convalescence and rehabilitation; and to introduce legislation for this purpose in the new Parliament.

Yes, the Conservatives did vote against Bevan’s bill because it ignored the white paper which envisaged local authorities being in control and opted instead for the massively centralised NHS controlled by central government that we have being trying to get away from ever since. I am sure that Rupa Huq has enough book learning to know she is making cheap points on the foundation of the NHS and its more recent finances.

The NHS has been safe in Coalition hands for the last five years and will thrive under a Conservative government for the next five.

The scurrilous Guido Fawkes blog has been traducing Labour’s candidate for Ealing Central & Acton today. They say:

Rupa Huq, Labour’s candidate in Ealing, was also a fierce Blair critic, arguing the “legitimacy” of the Iraq War has been “demolished”.

The blog misrepresented what Huq said in an old blog post of her own.

Of course Rupa Huq has never said anything incendiary about Tony Blair and or Iraq. She rarely says anything at all, let alone anything controversial.

Rupa Huq is on the list of 106 target constituencies to which Tony Blair has given £1,000 per seat. So far two candidates have refused Blair’s cash.

https://twitter.com/LesleyEastend/status/574501626863599616

https://twitter.com/Politico_Daily/status/574908867538255872

We can assume that Huq will keep the money and keep quiet – that is what she does.

Today the Council has announced that its parking permits and vouchers are to be dematerialised from 6th April.

This will save the council money but it is not of obvious benefit to residents. In the matter of the widely abused service vouchers it will be a positive disbenefit. Residents will no longer be able to spot that business permit and service voucher users are clogging up their roads for commuting purposes. This problem is particularly acute in Zone W around the Council’s own Perceval House offices and in Zone JJ where social housing provider A2Dominion seems to enjoy protected status.

If you look at the council’s own figures the use of service vouchers has jumped by one third in only two years in spite of a 20% price increase. Every other category of permit or voucher is declining or stagnant. You can only conclude that these vouchers, which are widely abused by Council and A2Dominion staff, are priced wrong. Or something more distasteful is happening.

There is no way the economy has grown by one third to drive this increase. It isn’t down to one third more people having tradespeople visit their homes in CPZs. It is a function of Council and A2Dominion staff circumventing the intention of CPZ which is to keep commuters out of residential areas. The word has got out amongst these workers that they can game the system. The Council must know from its own data that this is going on.

The move to dematerialise CPZ permits in April will make it hard for residents to spot that business permits and service vouchers are being used or abused. These permits should remain paper based until the Council can convince people it has got a grip on this issue.