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by Paul Scully | May 17, 2008 | News |
Earlier this year we saw the LibDems fight a by-election in Cheam with a negative campaign and no positive policies despite having controlled the Borough for 22 years. Something similar is happening in Crewe & Nantwich where the Conservatives are hoping for their first by-election victory in a Labour-held seat since Mitcham & Morden in 1982. The News of the World is publishing a poll tomorrow which shows the Tories in a 8% lead.
Government Ministers have all been up to Crewe with one notable exception, Gordon Brown. The Labour candidate has repeatedly refused to say whether she sees the PM as an asset or liability to her campaign. Labour activists are hiding their leaflets from reporters. The newsletters concentrate on asking whether Edward Timpson is posh or not, belying Gordon Brown’s repeated claims that he is just getting on with the job in leading a successful Government. It’s all getting a little embarrassing now.
Edward Timpson does live in an expensive house. His father built up the successful Timpson chain of shoe repairers. Crewe is in Cheshire, home to the WAG. Timpson’s place is not Beckingham Palace. He was brought up along with 80 foster children that his parents looked after at various points in their lives. Timpson was brought up around the area.
Tamsin Dunwoody has dropped the second half of her double barreled name ‘Dunwoody-Kneafsey’ in order to maximise name recognition in trying to win her late mother’s seat. Her grandmother had a seat in the House of Lords and her grandfather was a Party grandee. So much for abolishing hereditary succession. She also lives in a rather large house, except hers is 125 miles away in South Wales. The desperate regression to class warfare was capped when that great prole Quentin Davies rolled into town. I can’t imagine having a Quentin and a Tamsin on my doorstep explaining how simply awful it would be to have toffs in charge. It would be funny if Gordon wasn’t still clinging on by his fingertips at all of our expense.
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by Paul Scully | May 15, 2008 | News |
There were several interesting questions asked at the Full Council meeting on Monday:-
Philippa Stroud asked about housing after the resignation of the Chief Executive and Chairman of Sutton Housing Partnership. This was after the failure of the organisation to get the two star rating which would have secured funding to bring our houses up to scratch. We have the second worst housing in the capital and need some £120m to bring it up to a basic standard of decency. Philippa highlighted a case where a single mother was living with her four children in one room.
Philippa also asked why more than 90 girls could not find secondary school places in Sutton. We know how many children enter primary school each year so we should be able to predict secondary school demand with a reasonable level of accuracy. The LibDem lead councillor shrugged this off with the comment that “sometimes the figures don’t add up.” Although thirty places have been made available in Carshalton Girls, sixty children will be left high and dry for sometime to come. Cllr Tim Crowley asked what advice should be given to parents such as one sat in the audience whose daughter had no place for next September. The resident was left disappointed when no answer was forthcoming.
Carshalton resident Paul Kelly, asked what the council was doing to support small businesses and shops in the outlying parts of the Borough like Worcester Park and whether cutting parking charges and increasing spaces would help. He had noticed an increase of boarded up shops and noted that 450 small business had closed in the Borough over the last year. Lynn Gleeson, lead councillor for Economic Development explained that because more women were obliged to work to pay their mortgages, they did not shop in the same way. Whereas it is true to say that shopping patterns are not what they were, Cllr Gleeson failed to explain what the Council was doing to reinvigorate our High Streets in the face of such changes. You may not be surprised to hear that she did not believe that parking charges were too high.
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by Paul Scully | May 13, 2008 | News |
Another full Council meeting last night. The questions threw up some interesting exchanges but I’ll concentrate on the main business for this post.
We discussed two corporate documents, the Sutton Strategy and the Sutton Plan. The former is agreed by the Council and partner organisations such as the NHS Primary Care Trust and the Police. The latter is supposed to translate the LibDem manifesto into actions.
This is all well and good in theory and much of this was required to tick another box for national government in order to get funding but they both highlighted one fact. The documents explained what the Borough was like now and targets listing what they would like to do but there was precious little about how to do any of it. The section detailing implementation ran to a single page with even an Ethnic & Diversity Statement running to five. It clearly demonstrated the fact that the Liberal Democrats have become an unneccesary adjunct to the council; the Borough’s appendix if you will, with officers pushing on with running the show despite the LibDems rather than because of them.
The officers should be there running the day to day administration but the lead councillors are there to give political leadership, setting out their vision and keeping officers on the path to delivering this vision. The case in Sutton is that the majority party have run out of steam, hanging onto the coat-tails of the officers and the council’s partners.
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by Paul Scully | May 10, 2008 | News |
Boris has certainly hit the ground running in his first week as Mayor. He has made some bold appointments with Ray Lewis becoming Deputy Mayor for Young People. Ray is the inspirational head of Eastside Young Leaders’ Academy with a fantastic track record of providing real change for young people in Hackney.
Patience Wheatcroft, former Business Editor of the Times will lead a 60-day audit of City Hall. She will be helped by Stephen Greenhalgh amongst others. As leader of Hammersmith and Fulham Council, Stephen has already been incisive in his approach to local government finances, cutting council tax in his borough by 3% each year for the past two years.
Boris has met with Michael Bloomberg, Mayor of New York to draw comparisons and with Council leaders from across the city further demonstrating his desire to work closely with those people that know their part of London best. If you are going to build transatlantic relations, Bloomberg is the better bet than Hugo Chavez.
His first action was to ban alcohol from the underground and buses. In his campaign, Boris concentrated heavily on making public transport safer. This is an important first step and it is good to see such quick action despite Bob Crow’s typically blinkered approach. I’m sure that if Boris had not done this and assaults on staff went up, the call for strikes would have been deafening.
Finally according to Iain Dale comes my personal favourite. Boris showed the basic common sense that has been sorely lacking for eight years. I’ll leave it to Iain to tell the story:-
“When Boris sat down at his desk on Monday morning he was presented with a huge press cuttings file, which included loads of articles from the Morning Star. ‘Why on earth are you including these?’ he asked one of his staff. ‘Well,’ said the staff member, ‘Mayor Livingstone was keen to support the Morning Star’. ‘In what way?’ asked Boris.It transpired that the GLA Building had a subscription of forty – yes, forty – copies of the Morning Star delivered every day. Boris’s first action as Mayor was to cancel all forty subscriptions to the lefty rag, thereby halving its circulation with one stroke of the mayoral pen. That’s what I call the mark of a real Conservative – annoy the leftists and save the taxpayer £10,000 a year at the same time.”
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by Paul Scully | May 7, 2008 | Carshalton Central, News |
The Post Office have revealed their decision on the future of branches in London. All five that were earmarked for closure in the Borough are to be axed, leaving hundreds of people inconvenienced and having to suffer longer journeys and longer queues.
One is here in Carshalton, opposite the BP garage on Carshalton Road. BP are putting an M&S Simply Food branch on their site. Without postal services, I fear that the shop will find it hard to compete with the might of M&S and BP. Another nail in the coffin of diversity.
Ken Andrew, Conservative Parliamentary Candidate for Carshalton & Wallington did a terrific job in raising awareness of the threat and collected a petition with well over 3000 signatures on it. Despite best efforts, the decision had pretty well been made with only 7 branches reprieved in London out of 171.
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by Paul Scully | May 7, 2008 | News |
Under rules agreed by the Labour Government earlier this year, Ken Livingstone stands to get a £69,000 payoff after losing the election, at least £30,000 of which will be tax-free. You may think that this is a small price to pay to be free of the man.
Departing Assembly Members will receive around £25,000. There is a weak case to be made for this when someone has lost an election. However, there is no case when someone steps down at the election as a planned retirement such as LibDem members Graham Tope and Sally Hamwee, both members of the House of Lords. They did not stand for election yet qualify for a payout. I didn’t stand for election either, where do I queue up for my handout? If I find out, I’ll let you know.
Earlier this year we saw the LibDems fight a by-election in Cheam with a negative campaign and no positive policies despite having controlled the Borough for 22 years. Something similar is happening in Crewe & Nantwich where the Conservatives are hoping for their first by-election victory in a Labour-held seat since Mitcham & Morden in 1982. The News of the World is publishing a poll tomorrow which shows the Tories in a 8% lead.
