The BNP’s lies in Norwich North
Much to my joy I received my first Norwich North by-election leaflets from the BNP yesterday. The first one was pretty much as I expected:
I think its the same layout as the one they used for the Euro elections a couple of months ago: it’s got the Battle of Britain spitfire picture which caused some hilarity last time round when it was revealed to be a Polish (in BNP speak: dirty-foreigner-Eastern-Europeans-coming-over-here-and-taking-all-our-jobs) squadron plane, and it’s got four numpties, I mean ordinary British working people, trying to make excuses for their decision to embrace fascism.
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Boris ambushed over crisis centres
The Boris Keep Your Promise (over rape crisis centres) campaign yesterday ambushed London Mayor Boris Johnson.
Watch Boris squirm as he tries to explain why he hasn’t kept to manifesto commitments, given the money needed is less than his “chicken feed” second salary.
There’s also a report on the Sauce blog (via The F Word)
Gang culture, territory & fear
Nothing brings Britain’s social problems into focus like seeing them on your doorstep. What might seem abstract when described in Home Office documents or reported from unfamiliar places becomes a lot more intimate when it’s set somewhere you know: full of landmarks you’ve visited, people you might’ve met, folks who speak with the same accent or walk the same streets as you.
So when I read Mark Townsend’s report on the rise of gun & gang culture around the Burngreave & Pitsmoor areas of Sheffield, I was always going to react to it differently than if it’d been set in somewhere like Manchester, Liverpool or the North East. I can’t claim to know these neighbourhoods intimately, but my emotional attachment to the city means I probably can’t react as impartially or dispassionately as I would if it were set somewhere else.
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Protestors to mock Boris’s “chickenfeed”
Unison members at the Greater London Authority (GLA) will be inviting the public to chuck feed at a chicken man representing Boris Johnson during a protest over job cuts. Tuesday’s picnic protest will kick off a series of events leading up to a rally in October.
Regional Officer, Shirley Mills, said: “Boris ‘two jobs’ Johnson described his £250,000 second job as “chicken feed”, while slashing jobs of low-paid workers. Leo Boland, the GLA Chief Executive, is also earning over £205,000, £10,000 more than the Prime Minister. It is disgusting that these two wallow in their huge wages while low paid staff face the axe.”
Protest: 12.20pm on Tuesday (21 July) at Potters Field, City Hall, The Queens Walk, SE1 2AA.
Is Brian Coleman AM finished?
Adam at Tory Troll may have dropped a bombshell. He alleges today that: “The London Fire Authority have awarded a £12 million contract to a company that lavished hospitality on it’s Chairman Brian Coleman.”
Through a FOI request he finds that: “The actions of Brian Coleman during a recent Fire Authority meeting were unlawful according to legal papers provided to this blog.” – Coleman is also leader of Barnet Council.
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Why I won’t vote Conservative in Norwich North
….not that I’d ever contemplate voting Tory anyway.
The lead up to election day
As most people are probably aware by now, I live and work in Norwich. More specifically, I live and work in the constituency of Norwich North, which, thanks to the disgraceful and hypocritical behaviour of Gordon Brown’s so-called Star Chamber, is about to have a by-election following the resignation of one of the best constituency MPs in the country, Dr Ian Gibson.
The election is due to take place in a couple of weeks time, on July 23rd, and naturally, as a local resident and a political activist, I’ve been taking a very keen interest in things.
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Tory sticks up two fingers at Boris, amidst cronyism
Tory Assembly Member Brian Coleman refuses to publish his expenses while at the GLA. But will Boris Johnson have the guts to fire him?
Yesterday the full expenses for 24 London Assembly Members were revealed. But one remained – Coleman. He not only refused to publish them but the declared that because Boris asked him to publish them, he wouldn’t! He also said he would not help the “mad, bad and the sad, the bloggers on the internet” by publishing his expenses.
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Will they really hand back power to the people?
Last week I attended a Fabian round-table debate with Liam Byrne MP leading a discussion on the Equality Bill. Bryne talked of how we wanted to build a more civic identity and give power back to the people and let them make the decisions. He saw that as a solidarity building exercise. He quoted a book that made my ears perked up – Rules For Radicals, by Saul Alinsky.
As a disciple of the book I had to get my two-pence in. So at the end I made two points.
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While Labour fiddles…
More on sheltered housing warden cuts in Barnet – an example of the sort of Tory public service cuts we’ll see more and more:
We go now to a tall, brutalist council building in Barnet’s Totteridge and Whetstone, where yours truly is holed up at a cabinet meeting in a large committee room, watching Cllr Mike Freer, the spiritual void who runs Barnet council, brush aside the concerns of elderly sheltered housing residents who are about lose their cherished onsite warden service in Freer’s latest cost-cutting wheeze.
As reported here recently, Barnet council and its financial team – that group of fiscal legends best known for investing (riskily) £27m in Icelandic banks, where the whole pile tanked – claim they need to find £12m in savings to balance books compromised by inadequate central government settlements (ie, it’s Labour’s fault – a point that Labour rubbishes, for what it’s worth), inflation, and a desire to keep council tax increases below three percent as local and national elections loom.
The council believes it can save £950,000 (re-forecast to £400,000 in a rapidly revised proposal for this evening’s meeting) by removing onsite residential wardens (whose tasks include dealing with health and security emergencies, organising GP visits, organising social activities, and checking on residents at least once a day) from sheltered housing scheme. They’d be replaced with a ‘floating’ support service where support workers based at hubs would visit elderly people who met eligibility criteria. continue reading… »
The curious voting patterns across London
This is an analysis piece by blogger Political Animal
If the patterns emerging on the map below (apologies for the atrocious reproduction quality) look slightly familiar, it’s probably because, like me, you spent some time last year poring over maps like this or thiswhich showed clearly the inner/outer London divide in voting in the Mayoral elections.
Perhaps we shouldn’t be too surprised that last week’s European elections produced similar results – voting patterns aren’t likely to change that much in 13 months – but they are evidence of the re-emerging political disconnect between the ‘two Londons’. The dominance of New Labour did much to smooth over that disconnect. It may be the case that its death throes are widening the gap further than ever before.
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The other kind of Tory housing…
A bit more about the realities of evil Tories on the ground, as we prepare to be governed by them:
Parked high outside Hendon Town Hall is one of those wretchedly dated revolving billboards that councils use to spam the masses with unsubstantiated PR bilge: at various turns of the loop, this one proclaims that the Tory Barnet council is ‘working for a healthy community,’ and ’supporting the vulnerable to live independent and active lives,’ and screeds of other modernisation tripe.
All is not lost, though. There is this evening a nice, large protest group under the billboard – a protest group that is made up of exactly the vulnerable Barnet residents that the council purports to so fervidly support.
These protestors are very pissed off. They are Barnet sheltered housing residents, and they’re picketing this evening’s Barnet council annual meeting to protest at a council proposal to remove permanent on-site wardens (people who help in emergencies, organise GP visits and appointments, and check in with each resident at least once a day) from their sheltered housing blocks and replace the wardens with a ‘floating’ support service, whatever the hell that is. They’re mostly very elderly (in their 80s and even 90s) and at that unlovely point in life where people become too frail to stand. They’re huddled in wheelchairs, or clutching walking-frames, or leaning on carers and chairs.
They’re not too sure what a ‘floating’ support service is, either. The cynics among them have a few ideas – they imagine a system where residents telepathically trip some alarm when dropping dead from heart attack, thus alerting a random officer somewhere in the borough to stop by later on with a shovel.
I understand – kind of – the term ‘floating service’ to mean a support officer of some stripe will stop a various housing blocks across the borough, to meet briefly with anyone who needs – well, supporting.
Bill Campbell, Barnet council’s unnaturally oily senior press creature, refused point-blank to say what a floating service was when I told him that I didn’t quite grasp the idea – Campbell said he couldn’t say what a floating service was until the cabinet voted for or against the concept at its 8 June meeting. I said that someone must know what a floating service was, if only to be in a position to put the concept of it before the cabinet. Campbell said again that he couldn’t say what the concept would be. I thought probably somebody could. This went on for longer than was strictly fascinating. Suffice to say a floating service is not one the council wants to brag about. Let’s return on 8 June. continue reading… »
We should boycott the Queen’s party
There’s a load of good initiatives starting life on the LibCon website at the moment, not least Paul Evans’ call for a link between reselection/deselections and the strengthening of local parties, and the Labour activists letter to the NEC. It’s clear the website is becoming quite a political force.
Not one to look a gift horse in the mouth, therefore, I’m using LibCon to start a call for a boycott of the Queen’s garden party, if the BNP are invited.
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A Campaign to Clean Up Westminster
While there has been a lot of anger and condemnation expressed about MPs expenses, and quite rightly too, there is less agreement about how we take this forward. The outrage over expenses is, to my mind, a proxy for wider annoyance and disenchantment with Westminster.
So the question is: can we capture use the anger and energy out there and channel it towards a wider agenda? There’s a lot of people already thinking about this and I went to one meeting yesterday where some people are planning to do exactly that.
But two questions are key. First, what should be the agenda and list of demands? How would you like to see Westminster changed? Secondly, what would be the vehicle to push through broader change?
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The Trouble With Boris
In 1990, Boris Johnson received an infamous phone call from his friend from Eton and Oxford, Darius Guppy. Dispatches has acquired a recording of the conversation, which until now has never been broadcast. It is a recording that suggests Boris was not only willing to break the rules – but even to break the law.
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Barnet: a case in outsourcing disaster
With more than two million people unemployed, house repossessions on the rise and falling incomes – health, education, housing support, welfare and job support become ever more important. Local authorities are already reporting a rise in demand for debt counseling, housing advice, employment guidance, community finance and business support. The DWP has had to take on extra staff to cope with growing demand.
So this is hardly the time to play private sector lottery with funds meant for the public sector. And yet, public sector leaders continue to promote the lie that private provision of public services is cheaper, more efficient, and inevitable. Pity too, that the public isn’t buying it.
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Report: Govt has lost control of database state
A quarter of all databases are fundamentally flawed and must be scapped, says a landmark study out today.
The first ever comprehensive map of Britain’s database state today reveals how the database obsession of government has left officials struggling to control billions of records of our most personal details and almost every contact we have with the agencies set up to serve and protect us.
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LC briefing: Lie detectors – where your money is going
For this LC briefing, using Freedom of Information requests, I can tell you exactly how much taxpayers’ money has been spent on the trial to date and exactly where this technology is being used to vet benefits claimants.
If James Purnell’s department did decide to roll out this system nationally, one company could, within the next five years, build an effective monopoly over the processing of welfare benefit claims worth tens of millions, if not hundreds of millions, of pounds a year.
So here’s the breakdown, and a little surprise I uncovered last week…
Moving on from the miners’ strike
It’s about midday on a glum, sunless Saturday. On Cheapside, there’s the usual obstacle course of street traders, buskers and charity fundraisers: a BNP stand stocked with parka-clad pampleteers and studied scowls, a bunch of trade unionists pushing anti-fascist leaflets into the palms of passers-by, and a group of pan pipe players whistling – of all things – the tune to My Heart Will Go On.
Turn left onto Mayday Green, and among the pound shops, charity shops and pasty-picking pigeons, there’s a boarded-up store front carrying a proud advertisement from the council: Barnsley is Changing.
In a sense, they’re absolutely right.
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Liberal Conspiracy briefing: Exposing the DWP’s lie detector testing
Hello LC readers I have a treat for you. Today we start publishing the first of our briefings – a document I’ve been working on for the past month or so. It’s not coming out all at once because there are some legal and other issues still to be resolved. But in coming days and weeks, more will be revealed.
Our focus is on the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) and in particular its recent decision to use lie detection technology to catch out benefit claimants.
We think that this is not only unethical, but the technology itself is so prone to error as to be useless for the purpose for which is it supposedly intended. So why is the DWP spending over a million pounds promoting it across local authorities? Has it done research into its drawbacks and limitations? If yes, then why is it still using it?
Council staff vote to strike against Tories
I report here and here, and here, on the bitter fight that Hammersmith and Fulham residents and staff are having with the Hammersmith and Fulham Tory council over staff and service cuts.
Things seem finally to have reached boiling point: at a union AGM last week, Hammersmith and Fulham Unison members voted unanimously to ballot for strike action to support contact centre workers who are threatened with compulsory redundancy. I have a report on the contact centre story here.
A few thoughts:
Much has been made by Tory commentators of Hammersmith and Fulham’s genius for reducing council tax – but that’s only one half of the picture.
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