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Down with traffic lights
I missed this story in the Sunday Times over the weekend. It covers improvements to traffic congestion that my colleague David Millican is making and focuses on the removal of traffic lights in particular. Millican had a piece published on the ConservativeHome blog today that covered the background to this story, see here.
It takes a while for these things to get into the press sometimes. This was discussed at the last Cabinet meeting on 7th April. You can see the paper here with all the details.
As is usual with these things go straight to the table at the back. We are spending £200K on some small schemes to reduce traffic congestion. We know that the Residents’ Survey showed that congestion is a big issue for a large proportion of people in the Borough, see graphic below, this scheme is a start to tackling this important issue.
The topic is also covered on the Ealing Today forum here. Robert Worley heard the item being discussed on Radio Five on Saturday night. As ever grumpy old Eric Leach gets it wrong again saying: “The story is not on the Council’s web site”. The council’s press release, issued on April 8th, is here.
Last Tuesday Labour MP for Ealing Southall and local councillor, Virendra Sharma, made a rare appearance in the council chamber. Sharma claims to be much too busy to attend very often due to Parliamentary business. He also makes a right fool of himself when he does. Last Tuesday he was defensive to say the least as he was constantly challenged by the Tory group for his lack of attendance.
Yesterday, whilst the government lost the Ghurka vote in a large rebellion, Sharma managed to stick with the government whip and voted against the Ghurkas after having spoken and voted for them in our own council chamber. What a prat?
Ealing Council Leader, Cllr Jason Stacey, said:
Many Gurkhas attended the council meeting on the 21st April and they heard Mr Sharma speak in favour of their cause and all parties represented on Ealing Council voted to support the motion in favour of the Gurkhas campaign. How can an elected MP and Councillor speak and vote one way and then just eight days later do the complete opposite? Mr Sharma can try all he likes to wriggle out of this one but many Gurkhas in this borough will feel completely betrayed by an MP who has treated them with such contempt.
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Please go
Sorry about the lack of blogging again. We are travelling in North America – we had a wedding on Saturday and we need to show the baby off to her great grandmother in Virginia. I missed the budget although it sounds atrocious. Over here all the talk is of Obama’s first 100 days and swine flu.
It seems like Kalvis Jansons’ petition on the Number 10 website asking Gordon Brown to resign might become the big online story this week. By 16:50 today when I signed it it had already got 15,989 signatures.
http://c.brightcove.com/services/viewer/federated_f8/1570028817
I wonder how many times Gordon Brown rehearsed this video? For all of his hard work he seems incredibly ill at ease and entirely unauthentic.
It is very smelly that Brown is launching this today before the budget and proposing to steam roller his proposals through next week. Trying to change the subject by any chance? Apparently he hasn’t even talked to the opposition leaders yet. Is he going to spend all of next week shouting I tried to fix MP’s expenses but the Tories and LibDems ruined my plans?
He wants to control MP’s expenses by removing the Additional Costs Allowance and introducing a per diem. What is wrong with just claiming justified expenses against receipts like everyone in the business world? Brown is also trying to bring paid work into the picture which is a valid debate to be had but in trying to put expenses fiddling in the same category as paid work he is moral equivalencing theft and hard graft which only a socialist could do.
What Brown is not telling you is that Parliament cost a whopping £461.5 million in 2006/7, that is about £350,000 per member. See some figures here. They don’t feel obliged to publish any statements of accounts anywhere you and I can find them. Brown’s video is small beer. Let’s sharpen the axe on this budget first.
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Tax and spend
Tax and spend is going to be the biggest issue in our politics between now and the next election which will happen at the latest possible time in May 2010. The BBC is reporting today that even Darling/Brown know that they have to cut public spending.
Darling is a joke. In November’s Pre-Budget Report he sneaked in without fanfare “inclusion of a £5.0 billion allowance for Additional Value for Money Savings in 2010-11”. Even with this total finger in the air never, never saving that does not kick in until next financial year, effectively safely after the next election, public debt as measured by the Maastricht Treaty definition will hit £1 trillion by March 2011 – only two years away, see previous posting. And these figures will be revised downwards on Wednesday as they are wildly optimistic.
Apparently Darling is going to square the circle by adding another £10 billion of savings that kick in the year after that in 2011/12. No doubt there will be little detail of how these savings will be achieved. Darling’s £15 billion savings are grossly inadequate. According to the BBC “He will say the money can be found by making Whitehall more efficient”. This is just a fantasy.
More realistic estimates of the gap to be filled range from £40 billion, according to the IFS, to £100 billion, according to Malcolm Offord’s Bankrupt Britain report.
Today the Reform think tank is launching its report “Back to black” which spells out how to save £30 billion. None of their suggestions are easy. But, they are serious.
Meanwhile the erstwhile favourite think tank of New Labour, IPPR, has lost its mind in proposing a totally irresponsible wish list all funded by higher taxes in their new paper published today “Time for Another People’s Budget:
- A substantial increase in personal tax allowances
- Extra spending to achieve the Government’s child poverty reduction target
- Extra spending on low-carbon technology
- An immediate restoration of the link between pensions and earnings.
As my contribution to the debate I have been working with the ConservativeHome blog on a project called the Star Chamber which we launched yesterday. The idea is to look in detail at various savings proposals in order to gauge their public acceptability. Many of the proposals will be controversial. Some will be easy and popular. Some will be unacceptable but we won’t find out which are which without the debate.
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Masters undone
On Wednesday 22nd we will hear about how our government is going to lead us to the promised land and save us from the Credit Crunch. Fat chance. Instead this weekend the reality is more stories of how venal and corrupt our Labour masters are. We are the masters now. Yeah right.
In the Sunday Times we hear how Ed Balls is that the centre of the web.
In the News of the World we hear how the Labour General Secretary is implicated.
Clearly Rupert Murdoch and News International have turned.
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Crime down in Northfield
It is crime statistics reporting season. On Thursday the Mayor reported that crime is at a 10 year low. See his press release here. Some good progress is reported:
Overall there were 18,000 fewer offences in London between 2007/8 and 2008/9, including a cut in youth violence of almost 10 per cent and a drop in serious violent crime of 2.4 per cent. Gun crime has reduced by almost 26 per cent, knife crime has dropped by 13 per cent, murder has been cut by more than four per cent and robbery is down 12 per cent.
I criticised the previous mayor for talking up reductions in total crime whilst violent crime, which is rather more important to most people, was on the rise, see previous post. These latest figures reassure me. There are problems to be tackled in many areas still including rape and domestic crime.
Cllr Ian Gibb, who is also the PPC for Ealing North, points to good figures for Ealing, see here. Crime across Ealing is down 3.8% whereas London is only down 2.2% overall. The story in Northfield is even better – crime down 7.6%.
Northfield is one of the safest places in London to live. Our crime levels are fractions of the Ealing and Greater London levels. The only area where we are typical of Ealing and London is burglary. We had 10.2 burglaries per 1,000 of population last year compared to 12.7 for Ealing as a whole and 13 for London as a whole. In these hard times it is probably as well to think again about basic home security, even in lovely Northfield.
To better understand the figures have a look at the overall Ealing figures here. The Northfield figures are here.
If you want to keep in touch with policing issues in Ealing take a look at the Met’s Ealing website.
If you have nuisance crime issues that are locally based rather than immediate 999 issues call Sergeant Fox on the Northfield Safer Nieghbourhood number 020 8721 2950. Their webpage is here.
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Apologies
Apologies for having taken a week long vacation from my blog. I hadn’t meant to but with entertaining over Easter and getting out into the garden on the nice days I have been neglecting the blog. I have even managed to do a little exercise over the last week or so, not to mention some actual, paying business.
I have been stunned by the way the Damian McBride story has run for the last five days so I have been more of a blog consumer than producer lately. My ideas will be bucking up soon.
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He just doesn’t get it
Today Tim Montgomerie at the excellent ConservativeHome points out two stories about Boris Johnson in the Evening Standard and talks about “Good juxtaposition”. For me a more striking juxtaposition was between these two stories:
Phil Taylor 