Phil Taylor

At tonight’s cabinet meeting the Labour council agreed their £1 million garden tax and the Tory group issued the following press release:

Labour Announces £1 Million Garden Tax

Ealing’s Labour Council will impose a £1million garden tax by charging residents £40 a year for a fortnightly garden waste collection.

Cllr David Millican, Conservative Group Leader, said:

“It is outrageous that Labour will charge £40 a year to collect our garden waste and then only fortnightly. This is a Labour choice and not a Conservative choice.

Our borough is the Queen of the Suburbs and we want to encourage more people to improve their gardens and do their bit for the environment. This £40 tax will stop a lot of people recycling their garden waste.”

Labour’s has chosen to implement this tax as they say it will remove the cost of the garden waste collection from the Council Tax payer who does not benefit from the use of the service (i.e. those without a garden). However, this is nonsense. Is Labour really saying that that people without children should not be paying for schools?”

There has been a lot of discussion of this move on the www.actonw3.com forum and the www.ealingtoday.co.uk forum. On the later you can see contributions from Labour’s environment chief, Bassam Mahfouz, and the old leader of the council, Jason Stacey, who put in the current system which works and most people really like.

Reports of the death of deference have been greatly exaggerated apparently. Yesterday MPs got to see the proposed Boundary Commission changes at noon. The Electoral Commission only let the public see them at midnight.

The Boundary Commission’s embargo was destroyed by the Guido Fawkes blog publishing the whole thing at 3:04pm yesterday afternoon. Quite right. The Boundary Commission was very silly. Their job is not to bend at the knee to MPs. The people pay. The people should see first. Note to Boundary Commission: This is the 21st Century.

The result for Ealing looks very interesting, if you are a political nerd like me. The maps of the five proposed constituencies that touch Ealing are listed below:

• Ealing
• Greenford and Northolt
• Hammersmith and Acton
• Southall and Heston
• Wembley and Perivale

If these changes stick Ealing residents will not feel much has changed I suspect even if 9 wards have a new MP.

The Ealing constituency is a gift to Angie Bray. Overnight she has a safer looking seat. To give you a feel the constituency would have 19 Tory councillors, 6 Labour and 2 LibDem if the current voting patterns were repeated in 2014.

The new Greenford and Northolt seat would be easily in Stephen Pound’s grasp if he wants it. He will be coming up to his 67th birthday in 2015. This will be another safe seat probably with 19 Labour councillors, 4 Tory and one independent if the current voting patterns were repeated in 2014.

The relatively youthful Andy Slaughter, he will be 54 in May 2015, looks like a shoo-in for the Hammersmith and Acton seat proposed. Again, on paper, this looks like a pretty safe Labour seat with 18 Labour councillors, 9 Conservative councillors and 3 LibDem councillors if the current voting patterns were repeated in 2014. It would be foolish though to underestimate the power and enthusiasm of the Hammersmith and Fulham Tories who will dominate the Blue team in this new seat. Slaughter may well be in for a rough ride.

Virendra Sharma would probably get the fabulously safe seat of Southall and Heston. At the next election Alan Keen, MP for Feltham and Heston, and half of the Vile Keens duo, will be 78. Sharma will be a relatively sprightly 68. To give you a feel for how safe this seat would be 27 out of 27 councillors would be Labour ones if the current voting patterns were repeated in 2014.

Perivale residents will perhaps feel more estranged from Ealing in their new home of Wembley and Perivale which is a new version of Barry Gadiner’s Brent North constituency. This looks like a potentially safe Labour seat where 16 out of 24 councillors would be Labour ones if the current voting patterns were repeated in 2014, leaving 4 Tory and 4 LibDem. It is worth noting that before 1997 Brent North was a Conservative seat held by Rhodes Boyson so there may be room for upsets but the demographics have been consistently moving against the Tories for years now in this area. Gardiner will only be 58 in 2015 so might have another term or two in him.

I can’t see any of the local MPs being particularly upset about these proposals however much Stephen Pound may huff and puff about how complex it is. He would much rather the whole thing didn’t happen and the Tories had to overcome a 10% hurdle to get into power. It will though introduce a lot of upset for the local parties which will have to reorganise themselves. Ealing will encompass one complete constituency and four partial ones. It will make political organisation much harder and I am sure that people in parts of the borough will feel really neglected. For instance Ealing Tories are very unlikely to devote much effort to the Southall wards. The Ealing CLP will feel like a very small band of brothers. I don’t see an ambitious young man like Labour’s Bassam Mahfouz standing in Ealing in 2015. Perivale will look north, not south across the A40. For those who feel disenfranchised by first past the post in Ealing that feeling will only deepen. Ealing Borough will remain no place to be a LibDem. I suspect that the changes will be a good thing in the long run. They should give political hacks like me the opportunity to explain the changes to people and to engage with new groups. We’ll see.

The Guido Fawkes blog has picked up the story of Ealing Southall MP, Virendra Sharma’s £5,000 Indian government sponsorship deal. Guido has found a video of the party in question and even a copy of the cheque for £5,000 from India Tourism, see here.