Categories
Customer Services

All quiet at Perceval House

If you click on the Customer Services Category link on the right hand menu you will see that I regularly check the performance of our Customer Services organisation.

I popped into the Customer Services centre this morning after an early morning meeting. I was checked in at 9:15am and was seen at 9:23am. There were four people waiting in the whole centre, two of whom were waiting on the issue of parking permits. There was one cash window open serving one person so there was no queue there. Everything was calm and businesslike.

Chatting briefly to the agent I saw they recommended avoiding the start and end of weeks if you want a quick visit. Also avoid the the end of the month.

Categories
Ealing envirocrime

The short life of a fly tip

fly-tip

This morning I was woken with a start at about 6.30am by a terrific crashing sound. My first thought was that someone’s house had fallen down. My second thought was an early morning delivery to a nearby house where they are building an extension. My third thought was fly tippers.

I was out of the house in my pyjamas some 10 seconds later but the truck had already disappeared from view leaving a complete load which partially blocked the road. I needed to rent a new truck so I got a tipper truck from Rentco. Then I e-mailed our envirocrime officer at 7:28am, he called me at 8am and was onsite at 8.30am with the area manager, David Stokes. We found a credit card bill from an address in Wandsworth amongst the rubbish so hopefully we will be able to pursue the flytippers. Photographs were taken and another truck arrived at 9.30 ish to remove the rubbish. By 9:50am it was gone except for the fridge that needs to be collected by a different vehicle.

fly-tip-clear-up

Well done all. Hope we can nail someone for this.

Our envirocrime team are actively after these people. They currently have another fly tipper’s vehicle impounded for instance. If you hear an early morning crash stick your head out of the window and get their registration!

Categories
Ealing and Northfield National politics

Don’t believe the hype

Today one of our residents emailed to point out this story to her local councillors. She feels that this government scheme is a good one and was asking if Ealing was involved. She is right that this is a good scheme, as far as it goes, but I am afraid she is a victim of the government’s summer communications strategy. This announcement is straight off Labour’s communications grid. Lazy old Yahoo just regurgitated the press release without analysis.

You can see the original DCLG press release here. This shows how all of the money is already allocated in equal, tiny lumps of £52,632. All of the money is going to Labour or Labour marginal boroughs with the only cash in London going to Hackney. Most of the money is going to the north.

120-uxbridge-road-hanwell

Ealing is doing town centre regeneration itself on a large scale. In Hanwell where we are buying up the lease and doing up 120 Uxbridge Road (my picture above grabbed off Google Street View) to stabilise and enhance Hanwell town centre. This disused bakery is a key site that is dragging the whole town centre down. See press release here. The report is here.

The government’s announcement is a joke. £3 million for the whole country is being used for gerrymandering. £3 million into the re-elect Gordon Brown fund.

Check out the Council’s budget book here. On page 149 you will see that last year Ealing spent £1.8 on town centre regeneration schemes and is planning to spend £15.8 this year. The Hanwell project alone is about £1 million.

Don’t believe the (government) hype.

Categories
Ealing and Northfield

Netaji Sharma

My posting this week on our local MP’s “honouring” of wartime Axis leader Chandra Bose has set off a small debate. Tory blogger Iain Dale took up the story this morning, here.

I chose my words carefully and called Bose an Axis leader not being entirely sure of this particular bit of wartime history. He was indisputably an Axis leader and was treated as such by wartime Germany and Japan. If that was the only charge you could lay at Bose’s door it would be enough to condemn the hapless Sharma who is either ignorant or he arrogantly believes that no-one will find him out.

Iain Dale chose to use the phrase fascist leader and has been criticised for it, not least on the Pickled Politics blog here. Sunny Hundal asserts: “Bose was never a fascist, though he did want to work with the Japanese and/or Germans to get rid of the British.” This is a very bizarre statement, at least to a Western viewpoint. Was there ever a war where it was easier to choose which side you were on? Anyway Hundal seems to assert that because Bose was not a race supremacist he is OK. Hundal is just wrong.

I have read quite a lot of material on Bose this week. It is clear that Bose had bought into fascism before the war and saw it as a tool to govern post-independence India. It looks very much like Bose saw himself as a strong leader in the mould of Mussolini.

Various commenters have been trying to muddy the waters by invoking some unfortunate language used by Churchill and referring to the wartime alliance with Stalin. These are red herrings. Bose was an axis leader, he was a fascist and Sharma was a fool to “honour” him. Worse than that Sharma wants to have it both ways. Last Thursday he was “honouring” a fascist. The Wednesday before that he was “paying tribute” to WW2 veterans, see here. He has made a fool of the veterans who attended the evening along with Kevan Jones MP, the government Minister for Veterans.

I have chosen my side. I side with my Burma Star wearing father and his 2.5 million comrades in the Indian Army. It seems Sharma sides with Bose and his 40,000 INA men.

Categories
Ealing and Northfield

Local MP speaks in praise of Axis leader

chandra-boseOn Thursday Ealing Southall MP, Virendra Sharma, gave a speech at the Nehru Centre in London essentially recommending the thoughts of Chandra Bose. Indeed Sharma’s press release is headlined “VIRENDRA SHARMA MP HONOURS THE LEGACY OF NETAJI SUBHAS CHANDRA BOSE” and includes a picture of Bose in a fascist uniform, see right.

Just in case you are unclear about who Sharma is “honouring” here is another picture of Bose:

bose-and-nazis

According to Wikipedia:

His stance did not change with the outbreak of the Second World War, which he saw as an opportunity to take advantage of British weakness. At the outset of the war, he went away from India and travelled to the Soviet Union, Germany and Japan, seeking an alliance with the aim of attacking the British in India. With Japanese assistance, he re-organised and later led the Indian National Army, formed from Indian prisoners-of-war and plantation workers from British Malaya, Singapore, and other parts of Southeast Asia, against British forces. With Japanese monetary, political, diplomatic and military assistance, he formed the Azad Hind Government in exile and regrouped and led the Indian National Army in battle against the allies at Imphal and in Burma.

My father fought at the battle of Imphal, in fact he soldiered through the whole Burma campaign, so you can imagine that I am not impressed with Sharma. One of the forgotten footnotes of this brutal campaign was the Indian National Army. 40,000 men joined the INA which fought with the Japanese against the allies in the Second World War. At the same time, as a part of the British Empire’s war effort, the Indian Army became the largest all-volunteer force in history, rising to over 2.5 million men in size.

Sharma gave his speech at the Nehru Centre. This is effectively part of the Indian state. Our MP has attended conferences in India, paid for by the Indian government for parliamentarians of Indian origin, see here. Maybe Sharma needs to work out whether he is an Indian MP or a British MP? It is one thing for an Indian MP to view Bose as an Indian patriot. It is quite another for a British MP to speak in praise of an Axis leader, even if he was essentially a failure at a military level. Yet again Sharma gets it wrong – only this time not slight cock up wrong, not silly old fool wrong, but resigning wrong.

Categories
National politics

Free life

The comments by David Norgrove, the UK’s pensions regulator, reported today by the BBC, are I suspect just the start of a massive debate. The credit crunch and Gordon Brown’s destructive stewardship of our economy are going to blight our national life and stunt our ambitions for at least a decade. Our pensions system, and more widely the attitude of our older people and society’s attitude to them in turn, will be a key factor in our wealth and happiness during this period.

life-expectancy

Norgrove today points out that people like me are getting 6 hours of free additional life every day. The graph above, reproduced from National Statistics here, is stunning. It is a straight line. Nobody quite knows why the graph keeps going up, or when it will stop. Indeed, some scientists say that the first woman who will live for 1,000 years may already have been born.

The great question for our society, and the key to how wealthy we will be for decades to come, is how do we use these extra hours? Do we sit around collecting silver and assets? Do we buy 2017 gold eagle coins and dig a hole in the backyard to bury them for a rainy day? Do we sit around expecting our children and grandchildren to sub us or do we earn our keep? It is right that people should be given some years of retirement at the end of their lives. Even if you feel that this time is paid for by your own savings the economic fact is that you are supported in retirement by the industry of the young.

Our plans for changing people’s expectations of retirement are incredibly unambitious. Right now, pensionable age is 60 for women, 65 for men. That will rise to 66 in 2024, to 67 in 2034 and to 68 in 2044. For myself, at 47, I will be entitled to a state pension at 66. Norgrove suggests 70. My own father retired at 70 almost 20 years ago (during which time life expectancy from men increased 6 years). I fully expect, health allowing, to work until 75.

We need to move much faster to 70 being a normal retirement age with the possibility for people to work beyond that even and enhance their pension if they need to. We also will have to look at pushing the qualifying age for other benefits associated with old age out to 70 too. Our taxes will be much lower, our national debt will be much lower, our young people will be unburdened with supporting a rising elderly population, our older people will be enjoying additional years of happy, productive life. Our working lives need to lengthen, not our retirements. If you are looking for at home care for a loved one visit https://www.partnersforhome.ca/future-home-care-services-manitoba/.

Categories
Ealing and Northfield

Sharma back in junket land

Virendra SharmaApparently our MP is on his travels again. I saw the Daily Mail on the plane home from my holidays yesterday. According to them:

A crack team of MPs have spent the past week on a junket – sorry, fact-finding trip – in Mauritius.

‘We were there to build a closer relationship between the UK and the island,’ said a spokesman for Labour MP Virendra Sharma, who was on the expenses-paid trip.

Nothing to do with the fact that the Indian Ocean is paradise on Earth at this time of year.

Funnily enough Ealing Southall MP, Virendra Sharma, fails to mention this on his own website. Could it be he is a tad embarassed by the trip? I had thought that earlier revelations had shamed him into staying home.

Categories
National politics

Harman’s judgement

Harriet Harman is easy to ridicule as Harriet Harperson. She makes it easy.

I don’t watch GMTV but apparently that was the forum that Harriet Harman, Deputy Prime Minister [sorry Labour party leader] and the person with her finger on the red button this week and last, used this morning (according to the Times) to say:

Somebody did say… that if it had been Lehman sisters rather than Lehman Brothers then there may not have been as much…

Essentially she was trying to blame the credit crunch on men. Only on Sunday the Sunday Times quoted her as saying:

Men cannot be left to run things on their own. I think it’s a thoroughly bad thing to have a men-only leadership. In a country where women regard themselves as equal, they are not prepared to see men just running the show themselves. I think a balanced team of men and women makes better decisions.

This woman aspires to running our country. What a complete arse? Apparently she will be standing in for Gordon Brown for another week. Deliver us from evil.

Categories
Communications disease Health, housing and adult social services

NHS ad spending was £56 million last year, twice previous year

On Tuesday a ministerial statement was put out by Minister of State, Department of Health, Phil Hope, correcting five years worth of written answers on the subject of NHS advertising, see here. Apparently £56.43 million was spent by the NHS on advertising last year, about double the total of each of the preceding four years. The largest amount was £23.38 million spent on tobacco related campaigns.

The figures exclude production costs, COI fees (see previous post) and VAT. They exclude all the comms staff and glossy annual reports. They exclude management meetings where the aesthetics of these ads are discussed. We can safely assume that NHS communications spending is some hundreds of millions of Pounds.

Hat tip: Dizzy Thinks

Categories
Ealing and Northfield Health, housing and adult social services

Labour won’t fight for Ealing Hospital’s stroke unit

The Joint Committee of London Primary Care Trusts (JCPCT) has just voted unanimously to close Ealing Hospital’s Stroke Unit. As a result Ealing stroke patients will be forced out of the Borough to units such as Hillingdon and Charing Cross. Both units have a worse rating than Ealing. Visit the website to check it.

The Ealing PCT representative who voted to close the Stroke Unit at Ealing Hospital was none other than former Labour Mayor Phil Portwood. Equally lamentable was the failure of Ealing Southall Labour MP, Virendra Sharma, to make a submission to the joint committee. Labour have really let Ealing down.

Meanwhile Tory councillors are hopping mad. They have been fighting to save the unit:

  • representations were made by the Leader of the Council, Cllr Jason Stacey and the Cabinet Member for Health, Cllr Mark Reen to Healthcare for London (HfL)
  • Cllr Gregory Stafford, the Conservative Chairman of Ealing’s Health Scrutiny Panel, held a six-hour meeting on the issue and submitted a major report to HfL demanding that the unit be saved
  • Cllr Gurcharan Singh, the Conservative Parliamentary Candidate for Southall, collected a petition of over eighteen hundred people calling for the Stroke Unit to be kept at Ealing Hospital.
Continue reading “Labour won’t fight for Ealing Hospital’s stroke unit”