I don’t think that Ealing North MP, Stephen Pound, was wishing a new 11th plague on Ealing (see previous ten plagues on Egypt here) when he wrote to the Ealing & Acton Gazette last week to promote the idea of raising a Blue Plaque to pop goddess Dusty Springfield. All very commendable but the Gazette’s hapless sub-editor has managed to dream up a snappy title for the letter, and in the process mispell it.
I have just been catching up with some casework (that is what councillors call respondoing to your letters). I have had to write to a lady who is unhappy to have got a parking ticket when transporting her mother and her Blue Badge. She got a ticket for parking in a loading bay and feels that the council has made a mistake.
The Blue Badge is not a parking “get out of jail free card”. There are many places where you can’t park even with a Blue Badge. If you are transporting a friend or relative it is as well to know the rules. They are not in the Highway Code and most “civillians” won’t know them. But, everyone who gets a Blue Badge is issued with a booklet called “The Blue Badge Scheme: rights and responsibilities in England”. Click on the title to follow link.
If your grandma wants a ride make sure you read the book or it might be expensive.
September will see the opening of two refurbished libraries. I was able to have a sneak peek this morning.
On Monday 14th at 9am Northolt Library will re-open for business.
With the help of the Lottery we have completely refurbished Northolt Library and it looks really stunning. We have our council officers to thank for putting in a winning bid for this round of funding.
The outside is now very eye-catching as you will have noticed driving up Church Road but the inside is wonderful. Very light and airy with lots of space.
The building is transformed.
On Tuesday 22nd at 9am West Ealing Library will re-open.
This is a more modest scheme which updates a relatively modern library that was looking a little tired. My photo below does not do the interior justice – it is not really that gloomy, it is my camera, or more likely my technique, that is at fault.
In both cases we have pushed the libraries out towards the street, making them more obvious and accessible. This worked very successfully in Northfield Library where usage of library increased massively after its refurbishment. The Northfield statistics spoke for themselves, see here. I am sure these two latest projects will be equally successful.
If you click on the Customer Services Category link on the right hand menu you will see that I regularly check the performance of our Customer Services organisation.
I popped into the Customer Services centre this morning after an early morning meeting. I was checked in at 9:15am and was seen at 9:23am. There were four people waiting in the whole centre, two of whom were waiting on the issue of parking permits. There was one cash window open serving one person so there was no queue there. Everything was calm and businesslike.
Chatting briefly to the agent I saw they recommended avoiding the start and end of weeks if you want a quick visit. Also avoid the the end of the month.
This morning I was woken with a start at about 6.30am by a terrific crashing sound. My first thought was that someone’s house had fallen down. My second thought was an early morning delivery to a nearby house where they are building an extension. My third thought was fly tippers.
I was out of the house in my pyjamas some 10 seconds later but the truck had already disappeared from view leaving a complete load which partially blocked the road. I needed to rent a new truck so I got a tipper truck from Rentco. Then I e-mailed our envirocrime officer at 7:28am, he called me at 8am and was onsite at 8.30am with the area manager, David Stokes. We found a credit card bill from an address in Wandsworth amongst the rubbish so hopefully we will be able to pursue the flytippers. Photographs were taken and another truck arrived at 9.30 ish to remove the rubbish. By 9:50am it was gone except for the fridge that needs to be collected by a different vehicle.
Well done all. Hope we can nail someone for this.
Our envirocrime team are actively after these people. They currently have another fly tipper’s vehicle impounded for instance. If you hear an early morning crash stick your head out of the window and get their registration!
Today one of our residents emailed to point out this story to her local councillors. She feels that this government scheme is a good one and was asking if Ealing was involved. She is right that this is a good scheme, as far as it goes, but I am afraid she is a victim of the government’s summer communications strategy. This announcement is straight off Labour’s communications grid. Lazy old Yahoo just regurgitated the press release without analysis.
You can see the original DCLG press release here. This shows how all of the money is already allocated in equal, tiny lumps of £52,632. All of the money is going to Labour or Labour marginal boroughs with the only cash in London going to Hackney. Most of the money is going to the north.
Ealing is doing town centre regeneration itself on a large scale. In Hanwell where we are buying up the lease and doing up 120 Uxbridge Road (my picture above grabbed off Google Street View) to stabilise and enhance Hanwell town centre. This disused bakery is a key site that is dragging the whole town centre down. See press release here. The report is here.
The government’s announcement is a joke. £3 million for the whole country is being used for gerrymandering. £3 million into the re-elect Gordon Brown fund.
Check out the Council’s budget book here. On page 149 you will see that last year Ealing spent £1.8 on town centre regeneration schemes and is planning to spend £15.8 this year. The Hanwell project alone is about £1 million.
Don’t believe the (government) hype.
My posting this week on our local MP’s “honouring” of wartime Axis leader Chandra Bose has set off a small debate. Tory blogger Iain Dale took up the story this morning, here.
I chose my words carefully and called Bose an Axis leader not being entirely sure of this particular bit of wartime history. He was indisputably an Axis leader and was treated as such by wartime Germany and Japan. If that was the only charge you could lay at Bose’s door it would be enough to condemn the hapless Sharma who is either ignorant or he arrogantly believes that no-one will find him out.
Iain Dale chose to use the phrase fascist leader and has been criticised for it, not least on the Pickled Politics blog here. Sunny Hundal asserts: “Bose was never a fascist, though he did want to work with the Japanese and/or Germans to get rid of the British.” This is a very bizarre statement, at least to a Western viewpoint. Was there ever a war where it was easier to choose which side you were on? Anyway Hundal seems to assert that because Bose was not a race supremacist he is OK. Hundal is just wrong.
I have read quite a lot of material on Bose this week. It is clear that Bose had bought into fascism before the war and saw it as a tool to govern post-independence India. It looks very much like Bose saw himself as a strong leader in the mould of Mussolini.
Various commenters have been trying to muddy the waters by invoking some unfortunate language used by Churchill and referring to the wartime alliance with Stalin. These are red herrings. Bose was an axis leader, he was a fascist and Sharma was a fool to “honour” him. Worse than that Sharma wants to have it both ways. Last Thursday he was “honouring” a fascist. The Wednesday before that he was “paying tribute” to WW2 veterans, see here. He has made a fool of the veterans who attended the evening along with Kevan Jones MP, the government Minister for Veterans.
I have chosen my side. I side with my Burma Star wearing father and his 2.5 million comrades in the Indian Army. It seems Sharma sides with Bose and his 40,000 INA men.
On Thursday Ealing Southall MP, Virendra Sharma, gave a speech at the Nehru Centre in London essentially recommending the thoughts of Chandra Bose. Indeed Sharma’s press release is headlined “VIRENDRA SHARMA MP HONOURS THE LEGACY OF NETAJI SUBHAS CHANDRA BOSE” and includes a picture of Bose in a fascist uniform, see right.
Just in case you are unclear about who Sharma is “honouring” here is another picture of Bose:
According to Wikipedia:
His stance did not change with the outbreak of the Second World War, which he saw as an opportunity to take advantage of British weakness. At the outset of the war, he went away from India and travelled to the Soviet Union, Germany and Japan, seeking an alliance with the aim of attacking the British in India. With Japanese assistance, he re-organised and later led the Indian National Army, formed from Indian prisoners-of-war and plantation workers from British Malaya, Singapore, and other parts of Southeast Asia, against British forces. With Japanese monetary, political, diplomatic and military assistance, he formed the Azad Hind Government in exile and regrouped and led the Indian National Army in battle against the allies at Imphal and in Burma.
My father fought at the battle of Imphal, in fact he soldiered through the whole Burma campaign, so you can imagine that I am not impressed with Sharma. One of the forgotten footnotes of this brutal campaign was the Indian National Army. 40,000 men joined the INA which fought with the Japanese against the allies in the Second World War. At the same time, as a part of the British Empire’s war effort, the Indian Army became the largest all-volunteer force in history, rising to over 2.5 million men in size.
Sharma gave his speech at the Nehru Centre. This is effectively part of the Indian state. Our MP has attended conferences in India, paid for by the Indian government for parliamentarians of Indian origin, see here. Maybe Sharma needs to work out whether he is an Indian MP or a British MP? It is one thing for an Indian MP to view Bose as an Indian patriot. It is quite another for a British MP to speak in praise of an Axis leader, even if he was essentially a failure at a military level. Yet again Sharma gets it wrong – only this time not slight cock up wrong, not silly old fool wrong, but resigning wrong.
Apparently our MP is on his travels again. I saw the Daily Mail on the plane home from my holidays yesterday. According to them:
A crack team of MPs have spent the past week on a junket – sorry, fact-finding trip – in Mauritius.
‘We were there to build a closer relationship between the UK and the island,’ said a spokesman for Labour MP Virendra Sharma, who was on the expenses-paid trip.
Nothing to do with the fact that the Indian Ocean is paradise on Earth at this time of year.
Funnily enough Ealing Southall MP, Virendra Sharma, fails to mention this on his own website. Could it be he is a tad embarassed by the trip? I had thought that earlier revelations had shamed him into staying home.
The Joint Committee of London Primary Care Trusts (JCPCT) has just voted unanimously to close Ealing Hospital’s Stroke Unit. As a result Ealing stroke patients will be forced out of the Borough to units such as Hillingdon and Charing Cross. Both units have a worse rating than Ealing. Visit the website to check it.
The Ealing PCT representative who voted to close the Stroke Unit at Ealing Hospital was none other than former Labour Mayor Phil Portwood. Equally lamentable was the failure of Ealing Southall Labour MP, Virendra Sharma, to make a submission to the joint committee. Labour have really let Ealing down.
Meanwhile Tory councillors are hopping mad. They have been fighting to save the unit:
Phil Taylor 