The Shaun Bailey campaign in Hammersmith continues to do good work in hammering the awful “Andy” Slaughter. Hear him here on LBC Radio today totally failing to justify the £6 billion loss made by Gordon “Get the big decisions right” Brown.
Earlier this week the same team put out this poster:
The excellent Iain Martin at The Wall Street Journal points out that it was all a bit slow today. So much so that Sky was reduced to covering the Plaid Cymru press conference. I heard this being covered on BBC radio too and was profoundly depressed by it. It seems that the main plank of Plaid’s campaign is that the Welsh should clamp their jaws on the teat of state spending and grimly hang on. See their press release here.
Plaid’s Leader Ieuan Wyn Jones AM told the news conference at Plaid HQ in Cardiff:
With the prospect of a hung parliament becoming increasingly more likely, Plaid can and would secure the best deal for Wales and our communities. In a situation where no party has overall control we will be in a very strong position to fight for a fairer funding deal for Wales to protect jobs, schools and hospitals. Who else is going to stand up for Wales and for our communities? Think about it. The greater the vote for Plaid – the better the deal for Wales. This is an opportunity to make a real difference.
What a depressing prescription? No ambition beyond keep on taking from the English. Some kind of nationalist.
Apparently the local Labour candidates feel the need to go around in pairs when they knock on doors. I guess if you were representing one of the most unpopular governments in history you would be wary of knocking on doors on your own. Hilariously Walpole candidate Rupa Huq today published two photos of her colleagues knocking on doors on her blog here. It seems they have not got the hang of this canvassing thing yet. In Northfield we have been knocking on doors for four years now. We cover a lot more ground on our own!
Brown has just got back from the palace. Thank heavens Gordon Brown’s prime ministership is over.
Good bye.
The letter below (from me) was published in the Telegraph today, follow link.
Tax on employment
SIR – I was pleased to see Britain’s business leaders come out in favour of the Conservatives’ plan to mitigate Labour’s disastrous National Insurance increases (Letters, April 1).
Business leaders might do their staff, and the country, a further service if they spelt out the difference between what they pay for labour and what each individual actually receives in pay and benefits.
Some years ago the P60 form made clear both the employee’s and the employer’s NI contributions; it even had a box showing the total NI outlay for each employee. Over time this box was hatched out and then vanished altogether. Reference to the employer’s NI was removed as the state sought to obfuscate the onerous levy it extracts from even the lowliest worker’s pay.
Might employers provide their staff with a simple statement showing total staff cost and the proportion passed to the state and the proportion passed to the employee? Most people would be shocked at how big the state’s slice of the pie is.
Phil Taylor
London W13
I almost started a furious e-mail to Ealing Today to rebut this story until the penny dropped and I realised what it was. Good one.
Root and Branch Change Planned
Group of councils to switch to artificial trees on local streets
A consortium of London Councils including Hounslow, Ealing, Hammersmith and Fulham and Wandsworth are planning to cut costs by switching to the use of artificial trees.
The plan envisages that as trees on local streets die they will be replaced with sophisticated carbon fibre replicas which would be virtually indistinguishable from the real thing.
The consortium believe that this will provide massive budget savings on maintenance and reduce the need to replace paving stones cracked by root growths. Problems caused by falling leaves in the autumn such as blocked drains and people slipping on wet leaves will be a thing of the past.
They expect residents to be pleased as the new trees will reduce the risk of subsidence for houses with trees in the road outside – and sticky deposits from lime trees have been a problem for people parked underneath them.
The new trees will come in a range of traditional British species and will allow the re-introduction of the elm onto London’s streets. They will be preprogammed to ‘shed’ their leaves in Autumn and ‘blossom’ in the spring. It is estimated that it will take around fifteen years for the existing tree stock to be replaced. The consortium has given reassurances that no healthy tree will be cut down unless it is financially advantageous for them to do so.
Spokesperson for the consortium, Avril Amadan said, “Many of our residents are already recognising the environmental benefits of switching from a real tree to an artifical Christmas tree and we are simply following the logic of this idea. Trees are costly to the taxpayer and bad for the planet and we are providing a 21st century alternative ”
The move is likely to be resisted by environmental groups concerned about the loss of the capacity of trees to absorb carbon dioxide. Green lobbying organisation ‘Friends Of Our Locality’ have produced a study that shows that the switch to artificial trees will actually reduce carbon emissions – the need to pollard growing trees and sweep leaves creates more CO2 than the plants absorb they claim.
The hi-tech trees will also be able to contain extra equipment such as traffic monitoring cameras and display panels for the Councils to republish information from their magazines and newspapers.
As the trees will be hollow, the larger varieties may provide a workspace for local monitoring officers. Ealing Council is proposing setting up a unit called Ealing Local Volunteer Executives. These E.L.V.Es would reside in the trees to report breaches of parking and refuse disposal regulations by local residents.
April 1st 2010
The Conservatives have put out this hilarious spoof website as an April Fool’s joke. One of the key waste points they raise is the size of centralised government comms spending going through the Central Office of Information which I have been consistently highlighting for a few years now, see here. The total bill was £540 million last year. It is good to see that the Tories have worked out that all of this spending is obscene, not just the £232 million of ad spending, which is where they were at in January. The graph below tells the whole sick making story.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/player/emp/external/player.swf
I saw the budget live yesterday and have been following the coverage but I have had trouble raising myself to comment on it all. There was lots of Brownite twiddling with inconsequential details. For instance, it is lovely that Darling has made £100 million available to fix the roads. Apparently £4 million of this is going to London (why so little?). Our council alone has allocated £689,700 from contingency so you can see that £4 million across 33 boroughs and the City of London is a joke. The whole £100 million is 0.06% of the deficit so, so what? Our government will spend £167 billion more than it raises in taxes this year. We are truly, horribly screwed.
The Telegraph reckons that Darling has raised taxes by £19 billion. At the same time Darling talks about £11 billion of savings to be made in the next financial year to start in April. Only an analysis by the TaxPayers’ Alliance shows that more than half of this is “unspecified”.
We have just had yet another tax and spend budget from a government that refuses to acknowledge that it has blown the public finances. Although the deficit for this year year will apparently only be £167 billion rather than £178 billion we are in big trouble and Darling and Brown refuse to be honest about it. Darling admits that the next government will have to be harsher than Thatcher. Do you trust Brown/Darling to deliver the medicine? Still less Clegg/Cable?
Over the last couple of days there have been a couple of pieces in the newspapers about the influence of modern communications technology on the forthcoming elections. See here and here.
One thing we can be sure of is that a number of candidates are going to make fools of themselves with blogs and Twitter. No doubt some will say that I have made some mistakes with this blog. No doubt. But, unless you want to simply regurgitate the party line you will sometimes make mistakes.
Congratulations to local MP Virendra Sharma for trying to reach people with Twitter. You can see his efforts here.
The other sure thing about this election is that anyone telling porkies is going to get quickly demolished by bloggers and the other fact checkers out there. As a local councillor (who is unembarrassed to pick up his allowance in spite of his lack of attendance) Sharma should know that road re-surfacing is not a good line of attack. You can see the comparative records of Labour and Tory administrations illustrated in the chart below.
The list of roads to be resurfaced next year that we signed off at our last Cabinet meeting, see here, included twenty roads in Southall.
These will cost something like £1 million. Ooops. The horrid Tories are spending as much in Southall alone as Labour spent across the whole borough in a year. Sorry Cllr Sharma but you are a wally.
Today the News of the World has a shock, horror piece about a £17K lift attendant at Parliament. They say:
Incredibly, our pampered politicians are looking for a hired flunky to actually push the buttons for them in the House of Commons elevator.
And the fact they’ll pay £17,277 a year, plus perks, out of taxpayers’ money to do it last night sparked an almighty row.
You can see the job ad here.
Apparently there are four “lift attendants”. I think the News of the Screws may have hit the wrong target though – apparently these guys have a role escorting visitors around for security reasons. It would be strange to have Parliament unattended given the security you might want to see there. But, the problem with Parliament is that it is unscrutinised. Seeing itself as sovereign it thinks it can do what it likes and does not need to weigh priorities and cut its cloth like the rest of us.
A much more dodgy job as is this one one for a House of Lords press person – £30K for a 20 hour week with 35 days paid holiday. Where do you get that kind of gig in the private sector? The only way the House of Lords is ever going to look good is if the lords stop stealing from us (Uddin & co you know who you are). No number of overpaid fluffy comms people are going to trump that kind of behaviour. This is a total waste of money.
The total bill for Parliament last year was £516 million or, to put it another way the cost of running five district general hospitals the size of Ealing. See House of Commons figures here and house of Lords figures here. MPs direct pay and allowances are £242K per head and they cost £633K per head all in.
The Tories are talking about shaving this bill 10%, see here. I reckon you could take 40% out, see here. The figure of 40% is a bit arbitary but if you run an organisation with no real cost control pressures for many decades halving its spending should be a doddle. I figured 40% gave me some room for error! If you are reading David I would do the job for free. Give me two years max.
Phil Taylor 