Category: Ealing and Northfield

In some spare time over the holidays I have been looking at what local politicians are doing with blogs and other social media. What stands out is that the Labour group in Ealing are enamoured of Twitter. This post covers what the Labour group on the council is up to online. Going through the councillors in alphabetical order …

New Perivale councillor Sitarah Anjum has a facebook page which has a number of videos of her singing sweetly in Hindi. She also has a more “corporate” Cllr Sitara Anjum facebook page.

Council leader Julian Bell is an established twitterer. He regurgitates (retweets in the jargon) council press releases and Daily Mirror editorials leavened with a few cultural and sporting references to demonstrate his roundedness no doubt.

Bell uses a screenshot from an interview with BBC London as his facebook and Twitter profile photos. I guess he is proud of his local TV appearance. I might have tried to find a photo with only one chin if it was me.

New councillor Daniel Crawford is also a new twitterer starting up over the Christmas holidays and then going quiet again after 11 posts. In his few posts he has majored on sports commentary. Maybe if and when he gains his confidence he will start to comment on Acton Central ward and Ealing council issues. Last year Crawford wrote a short account of the Ealing local election for the LabourList blog here.

Self-styled Armenian Labour Councillor Ara Askanderian, another new councillor, seems to have a lot going on online but closer examination reveals little.

He has his own domain name and a one page website with contact details.

Iskandarian also has a thinly populated blog, 11 posts in all 2010, see here. He does do very wordy posts, mainly on Armenian issues.

He also had a go at Twitter and closed his account.

Bassam Mafouz still has his website up from when he was standing as Labour candidate in Central Ealing and Acton. It has only been updated since May 4th to give links to his new Twitter account started up on 21st December and his now defunct facebook page. With hilariously bad taste Mahfouz uses his Twitter biog to echo the movie Gladiator with this line:

Father to an adorable son, husband to a beautiful wife.

The Gladiator quote is:

Father to a murdered son, husband to a murdered wife.

Mahfouz hasn’t really worked out what to use Twitter for yet, his posts seem to be a bit all over the place, but I suspect that he will learn to use it effectively to burnish his own image as big beast of Ealing Labour. Mahfouz is I think the only Labour councillor brave enough to comment on the EalingToday forum.

Cllr Mik Sabiers had a Twitter account before he became a councillor and tweets many times a day. It is usually a quixotic mixture of personal minutiae and comments on the latest bands Cllr Sabiers has been to see in his itinerant role as Morning Star’s music critic (I kid you not).

New Northolt Mandeville councillor Chirs Summers used to have both Twitter and facebook accounts before the election in April until Summers made the national press revealing that he was both working at the BBC dealing with complaints about political bias whilst also standing as a Labour councillor. More here.

Another new councillor, Hitesh Tailor is also an established twitterer. As the cabinet member for housing he is relatively senior and pretty confident in his approach although he does not add much value, merely repeating the party line of deficit denial whilst blaming all Labour’s local decisions on the coalition.

During the election most of the Labour ward teams had joint ward facebook accounts. It was not a particularly successful approach as you can see by visiting the East Acton one which is the only one still in operation. There are only 4 posts since May so pretty dormant. On 19th November an Ealing Labour Twitter account was started up so it looks like they think that this is the way to go.

Summing up 8 out of the 40 strong Labour group have been trying out communicating with the public with social media (if you exclude what are presumably private facebook pages). 6 out of the 8 are new councillors. It is notable that 15 out of 15 Labour Southall councillors are totally offline, dark, logged out, out of sight.

Judging by the way that only four of the Labour crowd are seriously online and the fact that some have clearly invested in some kind of online presence and pulled back I suspect that the Labour councillors are quite heavily whipped online. A couple of safe pairs of hands such as Bell and Mahfouz are allowed to Twitter away but for the rest they cannot be trusted unless they have had something going on before they were elected.

I don’t know who wrote Ealing Southall MP, Virendra Sharma’s New Year message in the Gazette. It may well have been Labour council leader Julian Bell who works two days a week for Sharma. It is nonsense from start to finish.

In his first paragraph it seems Sharma has left behind his silly name calling and no longer uses the term ConDem coalition. He is not sufficiently up to speed with Labour Newspeak to have adopted Conservative-led coalition yet. No doubt he will pick that one up in a few months.

In his second paragraph he gets in a quick crack against the LibDems on tuition fees without bothering to explain the moral difference between Labour introducing and trebling tuition fees and the coalition trebling tuition fees.

Papa V gets slightly nauseous in his 3rd.

In Parliament we have seen the sickening sight of Tory and Lib Dem MPs cheering and waving their order papers when the chancellor announced £81bn cuts in public services and the loss of 500,000 public sector jobs and a further 500,000 private sector job losses.

I expect that Sharma’s weak stomach heaves at the sight of Tories even when they are not waving their order papers. Sharma of course exaggerates, a large part of the £81 billion is tax rises and is only different from the £60 billion tightening that Labour was envisaging by degree. Again Papa V please explain the moral difference between £60 billion and £80 billion. The UK’s interest rates, bond yields, etc since the election and the lack of Greek or Irish style crisis for the UK demonstrate that the Coalition has got the degree right too. Getting this judgement call right was the most important task faced by our new government. They got the biggest decision right. History will judge them well.

In his 5th Papa V is miserable about the consequences of clearing up after his government’s mess. In particular he talks about VAT. His government put up VAT by 2.5% last January. Is it morally worse to put up VAT by 2.5% this January? He calls the new VAT rate unprecedented but is clearly ignorant of the fact that rates of 20% or more are the norm across Europe.

Papa V signs off with a swipe at bankers and a complaint that “we are rapidly becoming a more unequal and divided society”. Maybe Sharma thinks that this kind of polemic goes down well in Southall. I suspect that Southall people are a bit smarter than that. The bank bail out will probably end up with the UK government making a small profit. Labour’s record on inequality was atrocious. It is all very well wanting loveliness but Labour simply failed to deliver it.

Our main problem is that Labour allowed government expenditure to run way out of control. We have been spending £4 for every £3 of tax revenue. The deficit was £155 billion last year and will be about £150 billion this year. That is the equivalent of putting £5,000 on the credit cards of every UK taxpayer last year and this year. We can’t afford Labour.

Bassam Mahfouz, wannabe Arab MP and local Labour transport and environment supremo, very kindly tooted the trumpet of last Conservative administration with this press release on Monday.

The amount of rubbish being thrown out by residents has dropped by 8% making Ealing one of the top ten performers in the country for reducing waste.

Very wisely Mahfouz praises the work done by Ealing residents to achieve this result. He fails though to make clear that Ealing residents achieved this feat before Cllr Mahfouz started his new role. The 8% figure compares the financial years 2008/9 and 2009/10.

One of the things I wish we had not covered at last Tuesday’s full council meeting was the Armenian genocide. I am quite happy to call it that. If it look like a duck and quacks like a duck. This is though a controversial subject and both the UK government and the UN have declined to call the extensive massacres (probably 1.5 million people) of Armenians in Turkey during the First World War genocide arguing that the term was not invented until after the Second World War. The Armenian community in the UK is keen to get the massacre described as genocide and the Turkish community are equally keen not to. Councils have serious domestic responsibilities and it is just frivolous and self-indulgent in my view to devote time to difficult, historical arguments from all over the world.

The council motion (follow this link and go to page 5) was proposed by Northolt councillor Ara Iskanderian and seconded by his fellow Northolt councillor Bassam Mahfouz. Mahfouz has previous for this kind of thing and made a fool of himself during the general election in talking about his election creating the ‘the first Arab MP’. Iskanderian presents himself as an Armenian before anything else. For instance:

Armenian Labour Councillor Ara Askanderian

Ara Iskanderian is an Armenian journalist working in London

I am Armenian

The Writings, Ramblings and Musings of Ara the Armenian

Iskanderian and Mahfouz need to remind themselves that they are Ealing councillors representing one of the most deprived areas in the borough. Iskanderian has not said a word in council meetings in the 7 months since he was elected before he came up with this unnecessary, sectarian motion. Iskanderian is a Fabian socialist with a Masters from the notoriously left wing SOAS. Online he writes thousands of words on Armenian issues but has failed to make any public utterances on his ward or on Ealing for that matter. The motion might help him further his career as professional Armenian. It does not help anyone in Northolt.

The council sullenly complied with the Local Democracy, Economic Development and Construction Act 2009 on Wednesday. This act requires councils to have an online petitions system in place by December 15th. The council has done this as required but refuses to advertise it, I guess on the grounds that some pesky residents might actually use it. If you want to submit a petition to Ealing council use this link.

To get the politics out of the way this is a Labour bill which includes a raft of other local government measures that I understand the Tories might well repeal in the name of localism. The Tories aren’t against petitions, they are against telling councils what to do. That does not stop councils choosing to make petitions easy and transparent. I think that whatever the law says our council should make petitions from members of the public a central part of what we debate in Ealing.

One of the Conservative councillors, Benjamin Dennehey, has been quick to put up a petition related to the rangers cut that the current Labour administration is proposing. I suspect that this will be a popular subject but it might be easier for people to sign up if it was not a councillor putting up the petition in the first place. After all councillors can table motions at council. The council’s petitions scheme allows the public to effectively table a motion. If a petition attracts 1,500 signatures (750 for issues affecting one or two wards alone) they get a short debate right at the start of the council meeting where the petitioner gets to present their petition at the start and sum up briefly at the end.

Although the online system only went up this week the scheme has been in force since June and has been used. In response to the new act the council adopted a petitions scheme at the full council meeting on 15th June, you can see the details here.
Indeed, at the last full council meeting on Tuesday we debated three petitions from members of the public:

Mr J Sear submitted the following petition about Hanwell Community Centre:

We the undersigned want to keep the building as a community centre so that the provision of sports, social and other facilities can continue, at affordable rates, for the benefit of all that live and work in the London Borough of Ealing. Furthermore, the undersigned do not agree with and will resist any residential development either in the existing building or built on it. The Centre is the focal hub of the Cuckoo Estate Conservation Area and must retain its unique position in the community.

The petition submitted had over 900 signatures.

Ms V Garrard submitted the following petition about the Albert Dane Centre and Links Project

We the undersigned are totally opposed to the closure of the Albert Dane Centre and the Links Project, oppose attempts to move our public services into the private sector and call on Ealing councillors to protect these front line services.

The petition submitted had over 1,600 signatures.

Ms K Brar submitted the following petition about the cinema site in central Ealing

Londoners and Ealing residents petition Empire Cinemas to commit to when they will begin to start work on the cinema. The delays and lack of focus has deeply affected local businesses and disengaged the local community. This petition seeks to re-focus attention on building the cinema without delay so that much needed tourism, trade and energy can be brought back to Ealing.

The petition submitted had over 2,100 signatures.

All three of these were good topics and worthy of a blog posting in their own right. Some councillors might resent the loss of airtime to the public but, I have to say I would much rather debate issues raised by the public than restrict ourselves to what the councillors dream up.

You may remember this appalling scene from South Road in Northfield ward in the summer. This photo was taken by a council officer on 15th June after I had reported this scene to Customer Services on 9th June. It took a lot of kicking and screaming from local councillors to get this site sorted out as the six day delay just to get on site might indicate.

The cowboy builder concerned, Michael Wells of South Ealing Road, has been ordered to pay £1,651 after putting up unlicensed scaffolding and leaving rubbish and debris by the side of the road. He was found guilty at Ealing Magistrates Court on Thursday, 25 November. See the council’s press release here.

Labour’s Bassam Mahfouz is quick to get in on the act and sound off in the press release:

When I heard about this case, I was appalled that any builder could have such a blatant disregard for their own safety and the safety of the public. In addition, he has used the public street to store his building materials and rubbish, which shows a lack of respect to other residents. After being fined, I’m sure he will think twice before committing similar offences again.

Great. Cllr Mahfouz will have heard about this case when the lady from the comms department rang him to check that the quote she had made up for him was to his taste. What he does not say though is that it was the council’s envirocrime team, who are very energetic and proactive and masters at getting people prosecuted for messing up our neighbourhood, who were the main movers behind this prosecution. Mahfouz also fails to mention that his administration are cutting the envirocrime team of 26 to 15, a cut of 42%.