Phil Taylor

The LibDems are well known for being the most appalling liars in election leaflets.

I have not seen any LibDem leaflets in Northfield so I can’t comment on them here but I have been helping in Elthorne where I found this Elthorne Focus No. 10 April 2010.

As is fairly typical in LibDem leaflets they have a little box top right showing that they are in second place.

This picture is a lie pure and simple.

If you take it at face value it seems the picture conveys that the LibDems are closely behind Labour and that the Tories are trailing in their wake. Only the numbers tell different story.

The numbers are right and do reflect the Ealing Southall by-election in 2007. But human brains don’t read numbers and prioritise their understanding above the instant impression given by the picture.

A truthful picture is shown below created by me by putting the actual results into Excel and creating a chart. It shows that the Tories had a bad result but they were not that far behind the LibDems and that both parties have a big job to overhaul Labour.

But, note that this leaflet is more a local election leaflet than it is a parliamentary one. A more honest leaflet would refer to the last local election results where two Tory councillors and one Labour one were elected and the LibDems came third. Not a distant third in what was a three-way marginal ward in 2006 – you could even argue that if the Greens put up three candidates it would have been a four-way marginal ward potentially. An honest picture created from the 2006 results is shown below.

I don’t think it really helps politicians if they call each other liars but the LibDems claim to be something new and their leader is positioning himself as honest but his party really is not. If you don’t think these images demonstrate a clear case of lying what would you call it?

After four years of good Tory government in Ealing I would expect to see Elthorne become even more entrenched as a Tory ward on May 6th.

This issue has been highlighted a number of times by other people, indeed only today in Wales here.

No really. Over the last week or so the Ealing Southall Labour team have been delivering a leaflet to the constituency. Only they are doing a poor job. Last week I was in Lawrence Road, Ealing Park Gardens and Birkbeck Road delivering a leaflet to that part of the Northfield ward. Labour really don’t get it. We got elected in 2006 partly because Ealing was such a mess and needed cleaning up and they are making a mess trying to get re-elected. Doh! Talk about missing the point.

I was laughing to myself in Lawrence Road when I saw that the Labour deliverers had failed to push the leaflets through the letter boxes. I was really quite angry on behalf of our residents when I saw their leaflets thrown around in Birkbeck Road and Ealing Park Gardens.

You may remember this slogan from the Tories at the last local elections in 2006. In Ealing we can truly say that we have delivered on that promise – or at least our brilliant residents have.

At last night’s council meeting Cllr Clifford Pile asked the Cabinet Member for Environment and Street Services, Susan Emment, for the latest recycling figures for the borough. The answer is 38% for last year. This is fully double the recycling rate that the Tories inherited four years ago.

In our 2006 manifesto we had a long section on recycling:

RECYCLING

Conservatives in Ealing are committed to raising the amount of our waste that we recycle. We believe that the key to achieving this is ensuring that any recycling scheme is accessible to everyone, easy to use and free at the point of use for all residents.

It is the simplicity and ease of the Green Box recycling scheme that has made it such a successful scheme. Conservatives support the retention of the Green Box scheme and we would expand it by including the recycling of cardboard.

Ealing Council is also in the process of partially introducing the Kitchen Waste recycling scheme. We support in principle the new Kitchen Waste recycling scheme and we shall be closely watching to see how successful it is. If is does prove effective, we shall continue the roll out of this scheme across the whole borough.

Residents have also told us how useful they find the recycling stations across the borough, but often these are badly designed and sometimes difficult to access. We will therefore implement a programme to improve the design of all our recycling stations; making them cleaner, easier to access and free from unnecessary clutter.

Conservatives believe, however, that the existing ‘pink bag’ scheme for the recycling of garden waste does not meet the key requirement of a recycling scheme being accessible to everyone and free at the point of use. We believe that the burden involved in ordering the bags as well as the 50p charge per bag actually serves as a disincentive for residents to recycle their garden waste.

We will therefore abolish the ‘pink bag’ scheme and replace it with a more user friendly scheme that is free to residents at the point of use.

We have more than delivered on this adding plastics and drinks cartons to the list of items you can recycle and pushing recycling facilties out to blocks of flats. It was hard to put numerical targets on recycling when we were in opposition. In our new manifesto we promise to achieve 40% recycling by next year and then on to 50%.

A couple of weeks ago the Telegraph published a letter from me on the jobs tax – yet more increases in Employer’s NI proposed by the Labour government and opposed by the Conservatives.

Yesterday at full council Cllr Joanna Dabrowska asked the council leader Jason Stacey what the cost of Gordon Brown’s jobs tax would be to Ealing Council. The answer was £1.14 million per annum. When asked to put this in some context Cllr Stacey pointed out that this sum would add 1% to council bills. Alternatively, the council could cut the 50 new street cleaners we have added to the workforce since we came into power, or cut the 50 new PCSOs we recruited or get rid of 32 social workers. Another approach would be to cut every day centre in the borough plus a couple of libraries.

The opposition leader Julian Bell blithely asserted that he could cap the council tax for another year and protect services and swallow the loss of £1.14 million. Thank heavens he is not running the council.