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Today I have created a bit of a storm with a comment I made on Twitter about David Attenborough. It was an off the cuff, ironic comment and I didn’t set out to make anyone miserable. If David Attenborough is unhappy I am sorry. I don’t suppose he expects to comment on such contentious topics as population control and not get a strong response.

The background to this is that David Attenborough has for many years been a patron of the Optimum Population Trust which now calls itself Population Matters. My tweet reflected my frustration with Attenborough repeatedly using his “national treasure” status to promote a set of views that see people as being a problem. His prescriptions seem always to apply to other people.

My view of the world is that we have to work out how to make sure that the 9 billion people who will populate the world by 2050 all have a good life. They all have hopes and dreams and don’t need to be told what to do by Attenborough and his organisation.

I won’t be discussing this incident any more.

All political parties in Ealing have been working together to fight the closures of four local A&Es. It is hard to work like this sometimes when your fellow campaigners are prepared to tell lies about you.

Today a Labour leaflet dropped on to my mat. There is a piece on the hospitals campaign but towards the end it goes horribly off message. Labour says:

Labour supports the campaign to oppose Tory Hospital closures and will continue to fight for local people.

They clearly fear the Conservatives locally as they don’t bother mentioning the LibDems and think it is somehow insulting to refer to my party as Tory rather Conservative. They really believe in the power of words these people.

The last bit is fine – it doesn’t differentiate Labour as all of the local parties are on the same page on this issue. The first bit is the lie. The reconfiguration is arguably a Conservative/Liberal Democrat one in that the doctors and the health service bureaucracy proposing the Shaping a Healthier Future proposals are publishing them and consulting on them whilst Coalition government is in power. But, the whole exercise was kicked off under the Labour government and is often referred to as the Nicholson Challenge. The idea of the Nicholson Challenge is that in order to be able to provide new services in an era of constrained overall health service expenditure, existing services need to take £20 billion of savings out of their existing cost base. Hence the slightly confusing situation where the government says it is protecting health spending (and it is) but services are changing anyway. I would argue that Labour’s Nicholson Challenge policy was sensible, and indeed the Coalition has accepted it, but that the response to Nicholson chosen in North West London unfairly impacts our borough and a more equitable solution needs to be found.

Ironically Labour have used this picture in their leaflet. It dates back to the 2012 London Mayoral campaign and was taken on a day when both Ken Livingstone and Labour health spokesman Andy Burnham visited Ealing hospital. Of course it was Andy Burnham as Health Secretary who instigated the Nicholson Challenge which might usefully be called the Burnham Challenge. So Labour are calling their own policy “Tory hospital closures”. How easily they lie.

The MP for the Southall half of the Ealing Southall constituency has been peddling this lie since the general election. Sharma knows it was a Labour policy but still he carries on.

Amidst all the headlines today about benefits changes coming into force there will be another change here in Ealing today that will hit all of us in the pocket.

For the third year running Labour will increase parking charges in the borough. For four years the previous Conservative administration froze these charges. The Labour administration has set out to double its income from these charges as a part of its efforts to add £10 million a year to the fees and charges it collects from the public.

From today parking permits in the 2/3 hours zones will be £50. For four years they were £25. They have doubled (100% increase) in three years.

From today parking permits in the all day zones will be £80. For four years they were £45. Again they have almost doubled (78% increase) in three years.

Hourly visitors’ vouchers in the 2/3 hour zones have gone up 50%. They were 40p for four years. Now they are 60p.

It is a lot worse in the all day zones. They used to get 3 hours for 40p. Now it is 60p an hour. A 350% increase. The all day visitor’s vouchers were £1 for four years. They have gone up 350% to £4.50.

These charges far exceed the cost of administering and policing the controlled parking zones. By the time the council has finished it will have at least doubled its income from these charges. In just the first year of Labour’s rises income from parking charges rose 43%.

I wasn’t very impressed with the Radio 4 Today programme wheeling out Jonathan Portes, Director, National Institute of Economic and Social Research, this morning essentially to spike David Cameron’s guns before his speech today on making it plain to immigrants that they can’t expect to get something for nothing if they come here.

Essentially Portes said that the average immigrant was less likely to be on out of work benefits than the average person who was here already. That may be true but Portes was being disingenuous. My city, London, is full of capable, talented immigrants and they are very welcome. One of them is my American wife. If they help us to fix our economy that is fine by me. But, we cannot afford any more people in this country who think that work isn’t for them. Ian Duncan Smith has been leading efforts to ensure that work pays and that people will always be better off working than being on benefits. We can’t afford to import more people who are essentially content to be dependent even if on average immigrants are less dependent than the settled community.

The big picture is that our state will spend about £720 billion next year, but income will only be £612 billion leaving a deficit of £108 billion. The biggest slice of spending is social spending at £220 billion. Cameron is focusing on the right priority and Portes is missing the point.

For the last three months I have been keeping track of the parking tickets given out by the Borough, see April, May and June. Since I last wrote on the subject of parking tickets the council has released their July data. You can see the data published by the council here.

For comparison the council gave out 197,302 tickets in the 2011/12 financial year (see Annual Report here). I have multiplied the monthly totals by 12 to give the equivalent yearly rate and divided that by last year’s total number of tickets issued to give an idea of the proportion that one road feature or offence represents compared to the whole borough.

In July there were 8 sites that generated more than 200 tickets in the month, some 17.7% of all tickets issued in the Borough.

Again all top 8 sites are CCTV enforced and 4 out of 8 sites are bus lane sites. Altogether these 4 high volume bus lane sites generate over half of all bus lane tickets in the borough.

The Otter Road box junction is getting out of hand with 800 tickets in July. This number has been going up every month for four months and now almost 5% of all tickets in the Borough are given out at this one site. Some comms work needs to be done to knock back this number.

April: 652
May: 704
June: 750
July: 800

If all these tickets were paid at the 50% (which is on average what happens in practice) this one box junction is worth £624K to the council. I will be asking officers what is going on here. Maybe the leader of the council in whose ward it is will want to do some asking too?