Categories
Ealing and Northfield

Tories fighting for Crossrail

david-millican-at-tory-conference

At tonight’s Council meeting (see agenda here) Tory transport spokesman David Millican has tabled the following motion for debate.

This Council affirms its support for Crossrail and notes the myriad of benefits it will bring both to Ealing and to London as a whole. Council welcomes the continued support of the Mayor of London and urges politicians of all parties to maintain Crossrail as a priority during these difficult economic times.

This is part of a wide ranging campaign by Ealing Tories to support the Crossrail project and to make sure that this borough really benefits from the project.

At the start of October Ealing Central & Acton PPC Angie Bray and council leader Jason Stacey met with London Mayor Boris Johnson at Ealing Broadway station to press the case for improvements at the station as a part of the Crossrail project, see Gazette article here.

At the Tory conference the next week David Millican was able to use TfL’s fringe event to ask Peter Hendy, Commissioner for Transport for London, what he was doing about interchange issues around Crossrail. At the end of the meeting both David and I were able to buttonhole the chairman of the Crossrail company, Terry Morgan, and make clear the public’s demand for “kiss and drop” at our Crossrail stations. The next day David Millican was able to press for Crossrail during the transport session with Teresa Villiers (see photo above) and again raised the interchange issue with her at a fringe meeting later in the week.

Categories
National politics

Taking back the flag from the BNP

The Nothing British campaign are today launching a campaign to get veterans to speak out against the BNP’s use of military images to effectively steal veterans’ service for their own cause. I couldn’t agree more.

See BBC report here.

Categories
Ealing envirocrime

Fly tippers’ truck crushed

fly-tip

Back in August this fly tip was left round the corner from where I live. At the time the matter was dealt with very efficiently by the council, see previous posting. I went through the stuff and found a credit card bill with an address and our local envirocrime officer took a statement from me.

david-and-ricky

I was very pleased to see this photo yesterday. It shows Northfield envirocrime officer Ricky Wright and David Stokes, one of the area managers and Ricky’s boss, sitting on the remains of the truck that left the fly tip. The two men concerned have also been arrested, interviewed and charged. I look forward to reporting on their sentences soon.

Categories
Mayor Johnson

Met needs to junk the limos pronto

government-car

The Mayor was slightly on the back foot yesterday at Mayor’s question time in the face of a question from LibDem AM Dee Doocey regarding senior Metropolitan Police officers’ chauffer driven cars. Follow this link and move the clock to 37:00. Doocey put a figure of £2 million on the total cost and the Evening Standard reported yesterday that this spending involved some 41 officer entitled to cars.

Doocey rightly pointed out that the Mayor had himself recommended to David Cameron that he reduce the number of ministerial and other government cars, see previous posting here.

It does I have to say seem pretty bizarre that the Mayor and his predecessor can do without a car but 41 policemen can’t. Boris indicated that “I can’t snap my finger and make these cars disappear in one fell swoop”. No doubt the Mayor will get rid of these cars during the course of this term. After that any contractual hold outs will need to be names and shamed.

The Government Car Service’s cars cost nearer to £100,000 each so I suspect that Doocey’s number is an underestimate.

Categories
Ealing and Northfield

Skatepark still being attacked

elthorne-park

I am disappointed that the skate park “bitter enders” are still trying to undermine the council’s proposals to put a skate park in Elthorne Park. Jill Evans, of Coldershaw Road, wrote in last week’s Gazette to say:

Mr Taylor’s letter, typically selective on facts, alleges his consultation produced a favourable response for a skatepark to be placed in Elthorne Park. It did not. As usual this council’s consultation results were predetermined by the careful selection of questions asked and not asked.

Ms Evans does not like democracy it seems. The results are clear and were published by the council here. She and others believe that they can win their argument by rubbishing our consultation exercise. It merely demonstrates that they have lost the argument. It is clear that Ms Evans thinks that the residents of Townholme Crescent should have a veto about what goes on in the park. I am sorry but this is unrealistic. The majority of Ms Evans’s neighbours want the park to go ahead. It is a shame she can’t accept their opinion.

Ms Evans laughably tries to create dividing lines between people who live side by side. According to her she is a “have not” but if you go to the end of her road where it turns into Midhurst Road and enters the Northfield ward I represent suddenly people become “haves” and live in the “privileged Ealing area”. The map below shows that Northfield ward actually abuts Elthorne park, see full version here.

elthorne-park-map

It is worth noting that we have made a decision to go ahead. But, the next step for the project to go through planning. It is up to the planners and Ealing’s parks people to come up with a workable, credible solution that addresses the concerns that have been raised in the consultation process. The public will have a proper opportunity to contribute and I am sure that we will end up with a successful project which most people are happy with, most of the time.

Categories
Mayor Johnson

GLA freeze

council-tax-freezeIn Boris Johnson’s speech today the announcement of the second successive year of freezing of the GLA precept was almost a throw away line.

With even deepest red Labour boroughs proposing to finally rein in their increases (some years too late) I guess this is not huge news.

The reason that there are only 8 Labour councils left in London out of 32 is because they have been so slow to learn that they are simply unaffordable. Hopefully there will be even fewer next May.

Boris’ announcement is yet another step in the right direction from Conservative London government though. Well done.

Categories
National politics

Hague’s law

hague-at-conference-2009

At the Tory conference today William Hague was fuming about a claim made by the Prime Minister. Early in his speech at last week’s Labour conference Gordon Brown reeled off a list of Labour’s achievements:

You know because if anyone says fight[ing] doesn’t get you anywhere, that politics can’t make a difference, that all parties are the same then look what we have achieved together since 1997: the winter fuel allowance, the shortest waiting times in history, crime down by a third, the creation of Sure Start, the cancer guarantee, record results in schools, more students than ever, the Disability Discrimination Act, Devolution, Civil Partnerships, peace in Northern Ireland, the Social Chapter, half a million children out of poverty, maternity pay, paternity leave, child benefit at record levels, the Minimum Wage, the ban on cluster bombs, the cancelling of debt, the trebling of aid, the first ever Climate Change Act.

You can see the BBC video of Brown’s speech here (if you want). You can hear him claim the Disability Discrimination Act for Labour 1:38 in.

The reason Hague is peeved is that it was he himself who designed and passed this legislation in the mid-nineties as Minister of State at the DSS with responsibility for Social Security and Disabled People. The Disability Discrimination Act emerged in 1995, see here, and was amended in 2005, see here.

Does Brown think that Labour’s social achievements are so thin he has to nick some Tory ones or does he think that only Labour can make any social progress so the DDA must be a Labour achievement?

It would be easy to go through Brown’s list and deconstruct it – it does not stand much scrutiny. By way of example let’s look at Brown’s claim for peace in Northern Ireland, a process started by Margaret Thatcher, in spite of the Grand Hotel bombing, and carried forward by John Major. Tony Blair played a valued part in closing the deal on 10th April 1998 when the Belfast Agreement was signed. But to sustain his claim Brown has to explain how Blair got an agreement from a standing start in 11 months from an election. He didn’t and Gordon Brown is simply not telling the truth. Again.

Categories
Mayor Johnson National politics

Boris on form

boris-at-conference-2009

This week I am at the Tory conference in Manchester. There seems to be a bounce in people’s steps here although no-one thinks that there isn’t a lot of hard work to do to win a general election whenever it comes. The first session today started off with Eric Pickles and ended up with Boris Johnson. The book end comedy acts sandwiched a detailed laying out of the basis of the manifesto from Oliver Letwin and a briefing from Francis Maude on preparations for government. Maude made much of the point that it is not arrogant to prepare for office but the opposite. Nothing could be more arrogant than failing to prepare for office. Tony Blair himself lamented that his government wasted many opportunities being unprepared for government in 1997.

It is wrong of me to write Boris off as a comedy act although he did manage to be very funny. He also managed to remind me why I am a Conservative. See his speech in full here. Well worth a viewing. Above all Boris is a deadly serious politician who is prepared to raise hard issues such as this much needed defence of the City:

But never forget all you bankerbashers that the leper colony of the City of London produces 9 per cent of UK GDP, 13 per cent of value-added and taxes that pay for roads and schools and hospitals …

He also used the speech to plead again for protection for Crossrail’s funding. The quote below starts at 10:45 into the segment. When you hear Boris say Crossrail you can hear a little cheer – that was me!

Get rid of the nonsense, but don’t chop the investments essential to the UK economy
Cut the baby-sitting monitors, but don’t cut Crossrail
Cut the baby-sitting monitor human resources department,
but don’t cut the tube upgrades
Cut the baby-sitting monitor equal opportunities action day
but don’t cut the great projects and investments that will deliver jobs and growth now and make London more attractive for generations to come.

Categories
Mayor Johnson

Yanks go home

Some Yanks that is. Not my Wife!

Today the Evening Standard carries a story that an environmental advocacy group called ClientEarth has challenged the Mayor in respect of his attempts to remove the Western Extension of the London Congestion Charge. You can see their letter here.

Anyone with a memory will know that our previous mayor pushed the Western Extension through in a thoroughly anti-democratic way in the face of a very negative consultation, see here. ClientEarth on the other hand is essentially an American lawyer called James Thornton with no memory, certainly with no sense of irony. I guess he wasn’t in London when Ken Livingstone was railroading the Western Extension through.

mcintosh-familyClientEarth is funded by a couple of American silver spoon chomping, trust funders called Winsome and Michael McIntosh. You can read about the exploits of them and the rest of their extended trust fund family at their hilarious family foundation website:

The Hartford Family Foundation is dedicated to preserving the memory of the late George Huntington Hartford, and the company he founded in 1859, The Great Atlantic & Pacific Tea Company.

Any objective analysis of the Western Extension will show that it is exceedingly marginal (and not even necessarily positive) from an environmental point of view. To have American lawyers and trust fund drones trying to overturn the expressed will of Londoners stinks to high heaven I have to say.

The London Mayor made the following pledge in his published transport manifesto on which he was elected:

I will do what Ken Livingstone did not, and listen to Londoners on the Western extension. The Western extension was introduced despite the overwhelming opposition of local residents and I think that was wrong. I will consult the residents in the zone and on the border on whether we should keep the Western extension, and whatever the result I will abide by it.

I don’t think these people are challenging the Mayor’s consultation which showed that 69% of people were in favour of ending the Western Extension, see here.

It does seem to be anti-democratic to be trying to get the Mayor on a technicality. Maybe their time would be better spent challenging the previous mayor’s consultations? Of course ClientEarth don’t publish financial information or records of meeting. They are an unaccountable bunch of busybodies who should be sent packing by the Mayor.

Categories
Ealing and Northfield

Sharma out

Virendra SharmaAccording to the Ealing Southall Labour party website the lamentable Cllr Sharma won’t be standing again as a councillor. They don’t actually say that but his name does not appear in the list of candidates for Southall they are putting forward for next year.

Last year Cllr Sharma had the worst attendance record of any of Ealing’s 69 councillors, attending only one third of the meetings he was supposed to, see records here. That did not of course stop Cllr Sharma claiming his full allowance of £9,480 on top of his MP’s salary.

I don’t suppose that we shall see much more of Cllr Sharma. The last time he appeared at a council meeting he was roundly humiliated and made a total fool of himself supporting the cause of Ghurkha settlement in our council chamber and then voting against it in Parliament.

Hopefully he will be neither MP nor councillor next May.