According to this calculation UK government debt goes through the £1 trillion mark today. This figure excludes PFI, unfunded state pension schemes and a list of other liabilities such of those of the state banks, Network Rail and nuclear decommissioning.
Last year the UK government spent £155 billion more than it collected, the deficit. This year the figure will be about £150 billion. That is something like £5,000 per tax payer per year.
It might be a little late in January to be doing reviews of the last year but the East Acton councillors did make me ask myself how many people had been visiting my blog lately. The answer is 30,909 different people (Absolute Unique Visitors) in 2010. That is about 85 different people every day. With these stats if someone is a repeat visitor they only show up once. I can claim a readership of 31,000. They may look only once but they are unique.
I know that the Labour councillors are big fans of the blog. There are few cabinet or council meetings that pass without a mention of the blog; good job too as I am now a back-bencher and I don’t get that many opportunities to speak nowadays. Council officers also keep an eye on the blog and frequently mention pieces to me. I also know that TfL Commissioner Peter Hendy is a reader. Boris knows me as “Phil the blogger”. The last time I met him he called me “Paul the blogger” but I figure that is near enough. I am terrible with names. I really shouldn’t be a politician.
There are a dozen peaks in the graph, click on picture to enlarge, when stories get picked up by big blogs such as ConservativeHome or Iain Dale and I have listed my five biggest stories of the year below:
January 11th Andrew Marr paper review a farce
1,529 unique page views
March 18th Would you use your child like this?
855 unique page views
May 10th One in sixteen votes lost
1,198 unique page views
Nov 25th BBC gives wrecker Soloman a platform
991 unique page views
December 14th Jody McIntyre is not telling the whole story
2,292 unique page views
East Acton’s Labour councillors have been scratching their heads wondering why 100 people have looked at their facebook “fan page” in the last week. The reason is because I linked to it when I did my review of Labour’s use of social media, see here.
6th January
During the election most of the Labour ward teams had joint ward facebook accounts. It was not a particularly successful approach as you can see by visiting the East Acton one which is the only one still in operation. There are only 4 posts since May so pretty dormant. On 19th November an Ealing Labour Twitter account was started up so it looks like they think that this is the way to go.
Oh! That explains it. Keep up boys and girls.
Guido Fawkes points out this morning that LibDem and Tory votes in the Oldham and Saddleworth by-election exceeded Labour’s vote. If Labour’s narrative is going to be that the country is turning away from the “Conservative-led” coalition in disgust then it is hard to see how this first by-election where the “ConDem” coalition has beaten Labour by 923 votes plays to that narrative.
The result was:
Labour 14,718 (42%)
LibDem 11,160 (32%)
Conservative 4,481 (13%)
UKIP 2,029 (5.8%)
BNP 1,560 (4.5%)
Angela Harbutt on the Liberal Vision blog suggests that an AV style system would have seen the LibDems win. I am quite happy to stick with FPTP me.
I am a member of the Tory party, not the coalition party, but still I am content that Labour can’t beat the coalition at a by-election in a safe seat. I have always said that the coalition will go to term. At the end of that term Labour will not come back. In the meantime Labour will win most by-elections, except in the safest of Tory or LibDem seats. Labour will stay ahead in the polls and it will sometimes be a hairy ride for Tories, but in 2015 Labour will get smacked as people have to decide whether they want to be led by grown-ups or rather expensive sentamentalists.
You probably saw the ASLEF threaten the royal wedding story, see Evening Standard here.
Boris is livid. Quite right. These guys are a great advert for banning strikes in public transport. Don’t forget Ken Livingstone’s campaign to be selected as Labour’s candidate for London Mayor was supported by a donation of £5,000 from ASLEF, see here.
With lots of news lately about rampant petrol price rises, councils pushing up prices of services, train and Tube fares going up, etc it is reassuring that even the Communist Party of Great Britain supporting Morning Star is not immune to the realities of hard times and market forces. According to South Acton councillor Mik Sabiers his copy of the Morning Star bought on Saturday morning has gone up from 60p to £1, a rise of 67%. Sabiers produces one of the funniest Twitter feeds.
Today I complete my round up of what Ealing’s councillors get up to on social media with the Tory councillors.
There are no Tory twitterers. I am not sure why the Tories are so Twitter averse. Maybe you are entitled to be tech laggards if your party name implies leaving things well alone! I guess that Twitter became popular whilst the Ealing Tory group were in power and it was not obvious to any of the then Tory councillors that it made sense to make a fool of yourself with Twitter. As I have found myself it is not hard to have your words taken out of context with blogs. The scope with Twitter, which is more spontaneous and offers less context, to cock up is probably greater than it is with blogs.
As well as myself there is one other Tory councillor blogger, Benjamin Dennehy, one of our new councillors.
Benjamin has gone to the trouble of getting his own domain name and setting up a very slick website. It does sometimes have a hint of the Alan B’stards about it. His blog has some interesting posts but has not been updated since 9th December. Keep up Benjamin!
Cllrs Millican, Stafford and I have done pieces for the ConservativeHome blog.
The Tory councillors are relatively confident compared to the other groups about posting on the EalingToday forum. Between them Cllrs Dabrowska, Dennehy, Costello, Millican, Popham, Stacey and I have posted hundreds of times, most often trying to respond to those “Look what the council has done now?” type postings. It’s old tech but hey!
Continuing my round up of what Ealing’s local politicians are doing with blogs and other social media here is what the LibDems are doing. Two out of the five LibDems on the council are active online.
New councillor Nigel Bakhai has his own domain name and website, an artefact of his standing as the LibDem Parliamentary candidate for the Ealing Southall constituency. Bakhai has a blog component of his website, it comprises an excruciating list of appointments. “It is a blog Jim, but not as we know it.”
Bakhai is a relatively new twitterer with 110 tweets to his name to-date. His tweets are not much more exciting than his blog.
As candidate for Ealing Central and Acton Cllr Jon Ball had a blog up until May last year which is still up but has not been updated since. Ball has managed 26 posts in five years which does not say much for his work rate.
Ball is also a twitterer with over 2,600 tweets under his belt so maybe he compensates with his Twitter account. It is all a bit inane though.
Both Bakhai and Ball have commented a few times on the EalingToday forum. It is creditable that 2 out of 5 LibDem councillors are out there but they are both dull, dull, dull.
In some spare time over the holidays I have been looking at what local politicians are doing with blogs and other social media. What stands out is that the Labour group in Ealing are enamoured of Twitter. This post covers what the Labour group on the council is up to online. Going through the councillors in alphabetical order …
New Perivale councillor Sitarah Anjum has a facebook page which has a number of videos of her singing sweetly in Hindi. She also has a more “corporate” Cllr Sitara Anjum facebook page.
Council leader Julian Bell is an established twitterer. He regurgitates (retweets in the jargon) council press releases and Daily Mirror editorials leavened with a few cultural and sporting references to demonstrate his roundedness no doubt.
Bell uses a screenshot from an interview with BBC London as his facebook and Twitter profile photos. I guess he is proud of his local TV appearance. I might have tried to find a photo with only one chin if it was me.
New councillor Daniel Crawford is also a new twitterer starting up over the Christmas holidays and then going quiet again after 11 posts. In his few posts he has majored on sports commentary. Maybe if and when he gains his confidence he will start to comment on Acton Central ward and Ealing council issues. Last year Crawford wrote a short account of the Ealing local election for the LabourList blog here.
Self-styled Armenian Labour Councillor Ara Askanderian, another new councillor, seems to have a lot going on online but closer examination reveals little.
He has his own domain name and a one page website with contact details.
Iskandarian also has a thinly populated blog, 11 posts in all 2010, see here. He does do very wordy posts, mainly on Armenian issues.
He also had a go at Twitter and closed his account.
Bassam Mafouz still has his website up from when he was standing as Labour candidate in Central Ealing and Acton. It has only been updated since May 4th to give links to his new Twitter account started up on 21st December and his now defunct facebook page. With hilariously bad taste Mahfouz uses his Twitter biog to echo the movie Gladiator with this line:
Father to an adorable son, husband to a beautiful wife.
The Gladiator quote is:
Father to a murdered son, husband to a murdered wife.
Mahfouz hasn’t really worked out what to use Twitter for yet, his posts seem to be a bit all over the place, but I suspect that he will learn to use it effectively to burnish his own image as big beast of Ealing Labour. Mahfouz is I think the only Labour councillor brave enough to comment on the EalingToday forum.
Cllr Mik Sabiers had a Twitter account before he became a councillor and tweets many times a day. It is usually a quixotic mixture of personal minutiae and comments on the latest bands Cllr Sabiers has been to see in his itinerant role as Morning Star’s music critic (I kid you not).
New Northolt Mandeville councillor Chirs Summers used to have both Twitter and facebook accounts before the election in April until Summers made the national press revealing that he was both working at the BBC dealing with complaints about political bias whilst also standing as a Labour councillor. More here.
Another new councillor, Hitesh Tailor is also an established twitterer. As the cabinet member for housing he is relatively senior and pretty confident in his approach although he does not add much value, merely repeating the party line of deficit denial whilst blaming all Labour’s local decisions on the coalition.
During the election most of the Labour ward teams had joint ward facebook accounts. It was not a particularly successful approach as you can see by visiting the East Acton one which is the only one still in operation. There are only 4 posts since May so pretty dormant. On 19th November an Ealing Labour Twitter account was started up so it looks like they think that this is the way to go.
Summing up 8 out of the 40 strong Labour group have been trying out communicating with the public with social media (if you exclude what are presumably private facebook pages). 6 out of the 8 are new councillors. It is notable that 15 out of 15 Labour Southall councillors are totally offline, dark, logged out, out of sight.
Judging by the way that only four of the Labour crowd are seriously online and the fact that some have clearly invested in some kind of online presence and pulled back I suspect that the Labour councillors are quite heavily whipped online. A couple of safe pairs of hands such as Bell and Mahfouz are allowed to Twitter away but for the rest they cannot be trusted unless they have had something going on before they were elected.
Much of the commentary around last year’s student riots focussed on the unfairness of the boomers, who went to university pretty much for free and have done well out of the UK’s property market over the last 40 years or so, visiting £9,000 tuition fees on the next generation. As a late boomer myself I can’t help feeling a little guilty over this.
This morning the Radio 4 Today programme followed up on the Grant Shapps interview in the Observer on Sunday. There he talked about the craziness of first time buyers, without the benefit of help from their parents, having to wait until they were 36 to buy their first properties. I started paying my first mortgage when I was 23. Maybe that was too early. Shapps talked about the desirability of the housing market lagging wages and making housing more affordable over time.
Shapps is on dangerous ground talking about pushing the cost of housing down and in the past I have had people get angry with me when I have suggested that it would be desirable if this happened over time. As a nation we have an unhealthy relationship with property ascribing to it supernatural powers. Most commentary on the housing market blames supply but the demand picture is just as important. Not many people have lost money being long in property over the last few decades and as a result many of us have rather large homes. We believe that we simply cannot lose if we pile further and further into property even branching out into buy-to-let when we can’t envisage an even larger home.
As you walk around London suburbs where maybe 80% of properties have been extended by say 30% with rear and loft extensions you can’t help but wonder how we have increased the size of the property stock by a quarter say and still the price has greatly risen above inflation. Surely we are doing something weird? We are. Many of us are effectively hoarding. I know there are other factors at play such as immigration and foreign property buyers in London but these factors can only have a big impact in a market which is already overbought.
There are two things which the new coalition government has done which will have a big impact on property prices over time. Firstly, it plans to take about £2 billion out of housing benefits. The social housing advocacy industry worries that this will lead to large movements of benefit recipients out of more expensive property. I am not sure how many taxpayers are that worried about this. The most likely outcome is that rents will fall. This will blow back on property prices.
The second big change is those tuition fees. Because Brits think that property is magic the price of property is strictly tied to their ability to borrow. The liquidity problems in banking have already flowed through to stable property prices. Interest rates will march up to 5% or so over the next couple of years and will bear down further on any hint of exuberance in the property market. Over the medium term tuition fees will feed through too. If future generations of young people have their property borrowing limited by education loans on a large scale this will feed through to lower property prices. Instead of maxing out their borrowing on property alone young people will need to share their credit limit between education and property loans. What this means is that when the boomers come to cash in their property chips they will get less than they would have if tuition fees had not been pushed up.
The next generation will borrow and repay pretty much the same. Tuition fees will be offset by lower property prices. The UK property market will get more normal. The boomers will pay. Rejoice!
Phil Taylor 