Categories
Ex-Mayor Livingstone Mayor Johnson

Ken was cheap, Boris is cheap

Certain leftie blogs are getting exercised over the Mayor’s taxi expenses. See Tory Troll and the BBC.

If Boris acted like the 150 odd ministers and civil servants who are entitled to Government Car Service cars his travel costs would be about £90K per annum before anything else happened. See more here.

I know some people really take the Michael with expenses but perhaps the Mayor is entitled to keep a taxi waiting now and then. We know he cycles a lot – we see the pictures all the time.

Just about every London Borough has a ceremonial mayor who works hard, but not perhaps quite as hard as Boris, and gets the limo treatment at a similar cost to all those Government cars.

Perhaps before:

The Labour Party at City Hall has demanded an “explanation for the discrepancies” in the mayor’s accounts.

They might ask why we have to spend £14 million running 150 VIPs around in limos, most of whom we might think were less VIP than the London Mayor. The truth is that Boris, and Ken before him, have shown that you can have a big job without the limo.

Categories
Ealing and Northfield

£50 cashback

As part of a £6 million recession busting package every household in Ealing will be getting £50 cashback later this year. See the story in tonight’s Evening Standard here. It is nice to see ex-Ealing Times reporter Benedict Moore-Bridger keeping in touch with his old stomping ground.

Jason Stacey, council leader, says:

We know how hard the recession has hit local people which is why I am proposing the country’s biggest ever council cash back scheme to help them during the credit crunch.

Ealing Council has built up strong reserves to see us through these difficult economic times. But, it is also important to remember that this money belongs to local people so it is only right that we give back some money during the recession.

The cash back scheme will be accompanied by a campaign to encourage residents to shop locally so that this £6million plus cash injection should also benefit our retailers.

Categories
Northfield Ward Forum

Petty cash

Virendra SharmaI have just been checking out Ealing Southall MP, Virendra Sharma’s expenses. You can see them here.

He is relatively OK in as much as he has not claimed any Additional Costs Allowance, the so-called second homes allowance. He does though have some questions to answer I think. He has made claims under the Incidental Expenses Provision, ie office costs, and the Communications Allowance, otherwise known as the incumbents protection scheme.

He was elected on 19th July 2007. Before the end of the year he had worked out that he was “entitled” to claim £250 a month for petty cash without supplying any receipts. Yippee! He claimed £1,500 for his first six months on 11th December and after that he claimed for £500 on 23rd February and £250 in 31st March. I guess this time next year we will find he kept claiming £250 per month until he got caught. Some one should of read more on the review of Quickbooks Self-Employed, never hurts to learn more .

Continue reading “Petty cash”
Categories
Mayor Johnson

RMT murder another 60

tube-1400-11-6-2009When the revolting RMT union last had a long strike in September 2007 I pointed out that all those hours of extended journeys was the equivalent amount of wasted life as would occur if Bob Crowe went outside with a machine gun and shot down 60 people. You may think that this is a bit strong but most of us think that an extra hour in the car, waiting at a bus stop, dodging in and out of traffic on a bike is a waste of life compared to say hanging out in the park with the baby, taking a long bath, having a pint with a mate – I could go on.

I have pulled out five year’s worth of figures from TfL’s annual reports, see below (click to enlarge):

tube-figures

Continue reading “RMT murder another 60”
Categories
Health, housing and adult social services National politics

If you lie down with dogs, you will get up with fleas

The NHS Confederation’s Nigel Edwards is not very happy with me. He says:

Didn’t like your blog coverage much! We are not a trade union and this is not special pleading: there is no more money to be had, the banks have it all, benefits will get the rest, tax receipts are falling. All healthcare systems across Europe are going to experience this whether they are funded by tax or insurance. The target of this document is:

1) our own members – they need to think about how to respond to this
2) politicians who need to think about some difficult choices.

If these are their target audiences it is hard to know how the report got to be the featured on the BBC News at Ten. Reading their report it is a sensible attempt to discuss the issues raised by the coming Brown bust squeeze. Unfortunately for the NHS Confederation their report got hijacked by the BBC wanting to do a lurid NHS cuts story. Maybe Nigel might have noticed the BBC’s agenda when they were doing his make up at the bleak “wasteland” location they chose to do his piece to camera. Ooops.

Categories
Health, housing and adult social services National politics

NHS producer interests pull off media coup

Last night BBC News at Ten presenter Huw Edwards solemnly intoned at the top of the show:

Tonight at ten: the record funding crisis set to hit the NHS within a couple of years. NHS managers tell the BBC that the funding shortfall will mean fundamental changes for the service in England.

Then we had Nigel Edwards from the NHS Confederation going all Old Testament on us:

Having had seven years of plenty it now looks like seven years of famine from 2011 onwards.

nigel-edwards

Note how staged this image is – this is not news. Note the NHS Confederation was not named in this package save for this graphic caption.

Continue reading “NHS producer interests pull off media coup”
Categories
National politics

English Democrats doubled their vote

Another way of looking at elections is to look at how many votes it takes to win a seat. One of the purported benefits of proportional representation is that it is meant to ensure that “every vote counts”. The disbenefits of PR are many, but let’s have that debate another day. Let’s look at the proposition that every vote counts. The figures below show how many votes it took to win a seat for an MEP. They exlcude the three NI seats.

european-elections-2009-votes-per-seat

Being on the up the Tories did not have to work as hard as the other three main parties (I guess you have to say that UKIP qualify as a main party for the European elections at least). The other three parties all needed about 190,000 votes to get an MEP whereas the Tories only needed 170,000. The two left wing, national, minor parties needed about half a million votes to get an MEP. On the other hand nationalist minor parties in small countries got their MEPs on the cheap – the SNP only needed 160,000 votes and the Plaid MEP was a steal at 127,000 votes.

You have got to feel sorry for the English Democrats. They polled twice as many votes as Plaid and almost as many votes as the SNP and got nothing. Now there is 280,000 votes that don’t count. The EDs got more than twice as many votes as they did in 2004 and can console themselves with having the executive mayor of Doncaster.

Categories
Ealing and Northfield

Taken for granted

Local blogger Appealing of Ealing comments on my posting on Ealing Labour’s performance in the European elections thus:

“Labour’s vote share went from 32.0% in 2004 to 25.7% in 2009, a drop of 6.3%”

Which is almost exactly the percentage won by Jan Jananayagam, the pro-Tamil candidate. Isn’t it really the case that she has split the Labour vote at a time when when feelings are running high in the Tamil community. What do you think the outcome would have been had Jananayagam not been on the ballot paper?

I don’t know if Appealling of Ealing is a Labour activist but I suspect that many South Asian people across the borough of Ealing are fairly fed up with having their votes taken for granted by Labour types. Why do they imagine that the many hard working, entrepreneurial, professional, middle class South Asians are going to slavishly vote Labour for all time? It is easy for Labour to write off the five ex-Labour councillors in Southall wards who defected to the Tories in July 2007 as traitors. But I think they may have sensed that not only is UK politics on the turn but that Southall’s South Asian community is not going to simply carry on being Labour’s cannon fodder for ever and a day.

Categories
Ealing and Northfield

Ealing Labour collapses

The council has just published the European election results for the Borough, see here. They show a solid performance for Ealing’s Conservatives. More people voted for the Tories in 2009 than in 2004. The Tory vote share went from 22.8% to 25.6%, a rise of 2.8%. Across London, see posting below, the Tories lost 5% of their voters. In Ealing we held on to our voters and actually added a few (18 to be precise). This sounds unexciting but look at what happened to Labour.

Labour’s vote share went from 32.0% in 2004 to 25.7% in 2009, a drop of 6.3%. This means that Labour lost 7,354 votes or 28.3% of their total vote in 2004. Across London Labour lost 20% of their voters but they performed even worse in Ealing.

Labour still “beat” the Tories by 107 votes. A somewhat pyrrhic victory I think. In 2004 they beat the Tories by 7,479 votes. Once you take out the UKIP/Euro factor Ealing still looks like a safe Tory borough in spite of the negative effect of the Westminster expenses scandal. As soon as Gordon Brown sorts his head out and resigns we will have three Tory MPs in Ealing.

Categories
National politics

Labour lose London MEP and 20% of their voters

I haven’t had much time to analyse the European election results in London. They look like an unspectacular inching forward for the Tories in the face of the MP’s expenses scandal rather than a revolution. That said Labour lost an MEP. Previously London had nine MEPs – now it only has eight. The Tories retained their three MEPs. The LibDems, Greens and UKIP kept their one MEP each. Labour lost one and went down to two.

You can see the full results here. Coverage from the BBC here and Dave Hill here.

Lots of people will comment on the percentage vote shares. I always think it is worth looking at the numbers of votes. The Tories lost 25,634 (5.1%) votes – an effect of MPs expenses? Labour lost 93,994 votes or fully 20% of their 2004 vote. Disaster. The LibDems lost 48,634 (16.8%) votes. Disaster. Funnily enough UKIP did equally badly as Labour and the LibDems – they lost 44,193 (19.0%) votes. The biggest winners were the Green who gained 31,603 (19.9%) votes. The BNP also did well adding 10,268 (13.5%).

One side story from the London European elections is the performance of independent candidate Jan Jananayagam who managed to pull in 50,004 votes. A quick look at her website indicates that she got the Tamil vote.