Phil Taylor

Petition to kill Strasbourg

Post author By Phil
Post date 31st May 2006
1 Comment on Petition to kill Strasbourg

I don’t want to spread myself too thinly with this site but a Dutch friend of mine gave my e-mail address to a site called www.oneseat.eu. Set up by Cecilia Malmström, member of the European Parliament for the Swedish Liberal Party, the site is trying to get a million signatures on their petition to get rid of the European Parliament’s second site in Strasbourg.

They have almost 375,000 signatures already.

It costs European taxpayers approximately 200 million euros a year to move the Parliament between Brussels in Belgium and Strasbourg just over the border in France. Love Europe or hate it the only people who benefit from this arrangement are the restaurant owners of Strasbourg. I am sure that it would be money well spent just to give them all a few hundred thousand euro to compensate them for their loss and shut the whole Strasbourg circus down.

Get signing!

Tram

Budapest tram lessons for West London

Post author By Phil
Post date 30th May 2006
1 Comment on Budapest tram lessons for West London

Having a break in Budapest this weekend I was interested to see their trams in operation. Their system looks quite elderly and our guide talked in terms of the system having been going throughout the length of the last century. He was clearly attached to this method of transport.

The Hungarian capital is fairly low-rise with many wide boulevards. All of the tram tracks I saw ran on special purpose lanes. Sometimes they were separate from the roads. Sometimes the lanes went down the middle of a road with one or two lanes of traffic running either side. I was interested that their trams were about 26 or 27 paces long, much smaller than those proposed for the West London Tram which will be 40 metres. I can’t see how bigger trams in smaller streets make sense in Ealing.

See BBC story.

Communications disease Ex-Mayor Livingstone

The Londoner keeps up its expensive misinformation

Post author By Phil
Post date 26th May 2006
No Comments on The Londoner keeps up its expensive misinformation

The London Mayor’s £3 million “free” newspaper dropped on my mat this week.

The front page story was free bus travel for London’s under-18s. Typically the article did not tell us how much this initiative is costing. We might like the benefits, but we should be told the cost at the same time though. A real newspaper would cover both sides of the story.

Although the Mayor admits to this piece instant recycling costing £3 million a year, he is not telling the whole truth. He makes the various parts of his empire pay for advertising so really he steals from their budgets and spends it on puffing himself up. The Londoner usually has 20 pages. This month fully 4 pages of ads are paid for by other parts of the GLA. There is less than half a page of real adverts. Your tube and bus fares are more expensive because of The Londoner and there are less police and firemen protecting us because of The Londoner.

Localism

Remote councils

Writing about the centralisation of local government in Britain today on the ConservativeHome website (follow link), Nick Cuff, a Wandsworth councillor, has some good points to make including an interesting table that shows just how out of step we are compared to the rest of Europe in terms of how big our councils are and therefore remote from their electors.

I am not sure that I would make councils any smaller but you could argue that they are big enough to look after themselves!

I repeat his figures – he does not say where they came from.

Country	Average population per council	Number of electors per councillor
France	1,580	116
Germany	4,925	250
Italy	7,130	397
Norway	9,000	515
Spain	4,930	597
Sweden	30,040	667
Belgium	16,960	783
Denmark	18,760	1,084
Portugal	32,300	1,125
UK	118,400	2,605

Policing

Police account for themselves

Post author By Phil
Post date 25th May 2006
No Comments on Police account for themselves

I attended the Ealing Community & Police Consultative Group last night. I had not attended before but was keen to hear the Borough Commander, Collette Paul, speak. In her Borough-wide policing report she gave a preview of crime statistics for the Borough for the year just ended.

It was a mixed picture with overall crime increasing fractionally by 1.5%. Some notable successes balanced by new problems.

Down:

Thefts of motor vehicles – down 33.7%
Residential burglary – down 31.7%
Wounding – down 10.6%

Up:

Thefts from motor vehicles – up 19.7%
Pick pocketing – up 68.6%
Snatch thefts – up 130%
Robbery of the person – up 35.5%

It seems that proactive police work and the SmartWater scheme have had an effect on residential burglary. The fall in wounding was put down to partnership working with the licensed trade.

On the negative side it seems that thefts of high value electronic equipment, such as satnavs and portable PCs, as well as cash, have driven the rise of thefts from motor vehicles. Commander Paul recounted one case where the same “customer” had come back three times having left stuff out in his car. A slow learner I think! The Group Chairman, Charles Gallichan, pointed out that some thieves are looking for the ring made by the sucker that holds satnavs in place on windscreens and then breaking in to look under the passenger seat for the kit. Commander Paul said that some thieves have scanners to help them locate hibernating PCs in boots of cars. Turn them off completely. We should be hearing about developments in this area soon. The three categories of robbery (pick pocketing, snatch thefts and robbery of the person) are being driven by three factors: gangs of youths targeting buses, a Hammersmith gang of bike robbers and the sextrade.

Commander Paul presented a slide showing the correlation between crime and crack houses. Five have been closed down recently. There are many more to root out and this will be a big Police priority over the next few months. Commander Paul’s objective is to get rid of them all and then stamp hard on any new ones so that the message goes out that they will not be tolerated in Ealing.

Overall Commander Paul gave the impression of having a grip. She handled the Q & A session well including the grumbling from the floor. A recurrent grumble was poor customer service at Ealing Police Station, something of which I have had experience of myself. She is actively looking at a long term solution to this problem.

Susan Parsonage, Head of the Council’s envirocrime unit, then talked about how the Council is working in concert with the Police and others to tackle environmental crime. It sounds like they have made a good start but that there is a long way to go. She acknowledged the council’s poor performance in enforcing Penalty Charge Notices (see previous posting) but felt that the Council’s performance should be measured in terms of improving peoples’ environments. Success in stopping the street selling of cars in Greenford needs to be repeated in many other places.

Localism

More power for councils

Today the Local Government Association published its document Closer to People and Places. The LGA, a mouthpiece for local authorities, is adding its voice to the Lyons Inquiry (see previous posting), the Conservatives and LibDems who are all calling for more power for local authorities and for the abolition of Brown’s sandpit in which councils have to go cap in hand for silly little grants from the Treasury rather than being able to raise taxes locally and spend them how they see fit locally.

Key points are:

Slashing 1,000 targets to save taxpayers £2.5billion
Giving councils extra powers including over transport, infrastructure, planning, economic development and skills
A return of the local Business Rates with an inflation safeguard so they have freedom in raising revenue and setting their budgets
The power for local people to hold NHS chief executives, police chiefs and council leaders to account if they consistently perform poorly
Dedicated budgets for ward councillors to spend on local projects
Greater ‘postcode choice’
Opposition to any proposals by central government to cut the number of councils or councillors

Philip Johnston in the Telegraph today adds his opinion to the debate.

The current regime is costing us all big time. I will be asking our officers to work out how much the current regime costs in Ealing.

Uncategorized

Little Red Book published today

Post author By Phil
Post date 19th May 2006
No Comments on Little Red Book published today

Today The Little Red Book of New Labour Sleaze is published by Politico’s Media. This is a round-up of nine years of New Labour sleaze cataloguing over 100 examples. Listed on Amazon and appearing at a Waterstone’s check out near you the book is a product of the work of 70 odd bloggers led by Iain Dale and Guido Fawkes. I volunteered to help do a couple of pieces that appear in the book.

The project came together at the end of April, just as Blair was enjoying his own black Wednesday on 26th April. Iain Dale, a well-known Conservative writer and political blogger asked for help in putting the book together from the blogging community. I heard about his efforts through Conservative Home and joined in. Three weeks later a copy of the book lands on my doormat! Let’s see if it has any resonance.

Tram

Unanimous on Tram

Last night a set piece drama unfolded in the council chamber as the whole council voted unanimously to stop the Tram. There was a “recorded” vote where each councillor has to call out their vote in turn. All the Tories answered “For” to their name. When the first Labour councillor answered For too there was a murmur in the chamber. Soon it was clear that it was going to be a unanimous vote as the Labour group voted with the Conservatives then the LibDems. There was a huge round of applause as the result was announced.

In the preceding debate the arguments against the Tram were rolled out and Labour councillors acknowledged that the people had spoken on the Tram and that the public had decided against the Tram.

As a new councillor it was a great treat to take part in the proceedings and to see the council at work. I don’t suppose I shall another unanimous vote for a while.

See Ealing press release.

Ealing and Northfield Ex-Mayor Livingstone Tram

Mayor brands old Ealing Labour administration as incompetent

Post author By Phil
Post date 18th May 2006
No Comments on Mayor brands old Ealing Labour administration as incompetent

Ealing Times today covers the Mayor’s weekly press conference that took place on Tuesday. Mr Livingstone said: “The Labour-run council in Ealing were frankly not good enough in their performance, and the people were deeply unhappy with the incompetence.”

The Mayor would rather blame the Labour administration for Labour’s loss of Ealing than blame the Tram although he did conceded that if public opinion continues to move against the West London Tram the project will have to be reviewed.

Tram

Tram in the Independent

The Independent on Sunday (IoS) covers the West London Tram and the changes in control across the three boroughs that will have to deal with the impact of the Tram. The IoS points out that Transport for London will need to get at least half the cash from central government and that last year the previous Transport Secretary refused three tram schemes.

I think the most likely outcome of the whole Tram saga is that eventually a Transport Secretary will refuse to put up any cash. I hate the idea that we will spend £10s of millions on a public enquiry before we get to that stage.