Talking of choosing, you only get to choose if you are registered to vote. The deadline is Wednesday 18th April, more here. Similarly for postal votes or changes to postal votes. Do it now!
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I have only just seen this letter in the Gazette from Labour’s Dr Onkar Sahota, their candidate for the Ealing & Hillingdon GLA seat. It didn’t make it into the Ealing & Acton version that comes through my door which maybe reflects the Gazette’s calculations about the attractiveness of this candidate outside Southall.
If Sahota was some journeyman, hack councillor he might be forgiven for completely twisting the facts around the currently proposed re-structuring of health services in our area. But he isn’t. He is a doctor. It is his colleagues who are proposing this re-structuring. It is “clinically led”. I don’t think he is helping his patients in the long term by slagging off his clinical colleagues on the other side of the purchaser-provider divide.
Sahota really starts lying when he talks about “Tory cuts”. The NHS is one area where the Coalition are committed to not cutting. Increasing NHS spending in real terms is spelt in the Coalition Agreement:
The parties agree that funding for the NHS should increase in real terms in each year of the Parliament, while recognising the impact this decision would have on other departments.
The £20 billion of cuts that Sahota is alluding to and the equally mendacious Southall MP, Virendra Sharma, has specifically referred to are no such thing. They are savings. The distinction is important. The £20 billion is to be re-invested in NHS services. This whole exercise is the so-called Nicholson Challenge. It pre-dates the Coalition. It is an attempt to make the NHS more efficient so that it can do more for the same amount of money in real terms. Note – not more for less. Just to stand still the NHS has to run much faster.
I am open minded about what local clinicians propose for local services. They have to make it work. I would like to see Ealing Hospital being efficiently used to provide services for local people. I am glad to see clinicians at the forefront of designing future health services here in Ealing.
Sahota is lying when he talks about cuts. He knows the difference. If he wants to call this exercise cuts he needs to call them Labour cuts because they were set in train under Labour. People expect more of doctors.
Let’s make sure that Livingstone stays in our past!
We all know that the council is having to manage its spending very carefully and make some big changes. Indeed last September council leader Julian Bell told us:
We are facing an unprecedented level of cuts in our budgets over the next four years given the coalition government’s ideological choice to slash public spending by unnecessary amounts and at a reckless speed.
For years many people have felt that the one obvious saving that most local councils could make is in the cost of their senior management teams. Unfortunately not the Ealing Labour group. Like babes in the wood they have failed to get management costs under control. They do not have the experience or confidence to demand that the senior management team at the council start saving at the top. Instead they have gone for frontline services, such as halving park rangers and the latest wheeze of introducing a £40 garden tax.
If you listened to Labour’s propaganda you might think that Ealing’s spending is being cut by 30% (it isn’t). Indeed, in their libraries consultation document Ealing council said:
Due to cuts to our government funding, Ealing Council needs to save £65million over the next three years. This is approximately 30% of the money that the council has available to spend on its services.
I complained at the time that these figures were mendacious but let’s take them at face value. You might expect the senior management team to be cut by 30%? No. 20%? No. 10% even? No. In the last year the council’s senior management team costs have been lightly pared back to the tune of 7.7%.
Last October the former council leader asked a series of 3 questions (40-42, here) asking how many and how much the senior management team at Ealing council cost. This year I have repeated the questions (15,17 and 18, here) to see how much Labour has saved on the senior management team in the course of a year. The answers are tabulated below.
This time last year the council employed 98 senior officers who essentially cost £100,000 each. Now this number is down to 90. I have to say: Big deal!
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What was it all for?
This morning my twin brother and I went to meet my father at the Royal Artillery Memorial in Hyde Park Corner. My Dad served with 129th Field Regiment RA, a Scottish regiment, attached to the 17th Indian Division. The Black Cats, as they were known, had the distinction of being continually in combat during the three-year long Burma Campaign. They also had a reputation for arrogance.
My father’s division was one of thirteen drawn from the far flung corners of the British Empire that fought as part of the 14th Army, also known as the Forgotten Army. This was essentially the third army of the British Empire which learnt over three long, bloody years how to fight and beat the first army of Imperial Japan.
As we were seated my father’s Black Cat insignia was recognised by another Burma veteran from 5th King’s African Rifles attached to 11th (East Africa) Division. They talked briefly about their divisions fighting together around Bishenpur. At the end of their brief conversation our neighbour sighed and said words to the effect of: “What was it all for?”
I can quite understand anyone in their late eighties or early nineties asking that question. The modern world is so different from the one that these men were bought up in. It is understandable that they find the modern world somewhat alien. But from my generation’s perspective their contribution looks enormous. I can’t imagine a world where these men had not gone before us. They faced down totalitarianism and made the world an immeasurably a better place.
As we left I said thank you to our 11th Div neighbour. I meant thank for everything you did twenty years before I was born. Thank you for saving the world. I wasn’t brave enough to say anything like that so it was just “thank you”.
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On holiday
See you next week.
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Labour’s legacy
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On LBC tonight
I am doing the politics slot on Petrie Hosken’s show on LBC 97.3 FM again tonight from 8pm to 9pm. This will be the fourth time I think. Not sure what we will talk about given that we are on the verge of the silly season. Scools out last week. Parliament out this. The awful Ekram Haque “happy slapping” case will figure I guess. A 67 year old grandfather killed by three poisonous creeps who showed no remorse. Happy slapping is an awful term. Negligent homicide might be more useful.
http://c.brightcove.com/services/viewer/federated_f9/10177795001?isVid=1
In his speech on the corporate plan the Conservative group leader, Jason Stacey, pulled up the new administration on their performance on street cleaning.
The council’s benchmark for street cleaning is that at least 90% of roads inspected in a ward should be rated A – this is means that effectively you cannot really see any rubbish or detritus. In the four months before the local election the previous administration managed to get every ward in the borough over this hurdle. It was important to us. It was what we set out to do. Cllr Stacey shared figures with the council showing that 12 wards (Cleveland, Ealing Broadway, Ealing Common, Elthorne, Greenford Broadway, Greenford Green, Hobbayne, Lady Margaret, North Greenford, Northfield, Northolt Mandeville and Perivale) failed to meet the standard in June.
The new man responsible, Cllr Mahfouz, pronounced himself “livid”. Quite right. The Tories did manage to clean up the borough but I can’t tell you how much effort it took. Anyone who thinks that you just draw up a contract and sit back seriously underestimates the task. You have to keep endlessly hassling to get what you want and it is only by prioritising the hassling, which to their great credit Cllrs Stacey and Emment did, that you get the result. Maybe it shouldn’t be this way, but it simply is. Cllr Mahfouz needs to keep up the pressure. Tedious but necessary.
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Gone rowing
I’m away for the weekend rowing.
Basically it is a boys’ weekend with a 54 mile row to Henley from Hammersmith thrown in to keep it interesting.
Back Tuesday. No doubt tired and sunburnt.
Phil Taylor 