‘Stock Transfer’ rides again

Remember this? From the large scale stock transfer attempt of 2004. The Labour, Lib Dem and Conservative leaders all of the same mind. And they were right too, but the ballot failed to support them.

Four years and about £20m of negative housing subsidy later, the Lib Dem administration is having to look again at the long term future of our Housing stock. Because about 30p in every pound our tenants pay in rent is creamed off to subsidize social housing elsewhere (another Gordon Brown classic stealth tax - hitting the poorest!) Kingston just can’t afford to keep its housing stock in decent repair.

I chaired the Housing Consultative Committee on Tuesday. Once again the same questions from residents about unrepaired gates and fences, windows and frames etc.

The administration has launched, in some haste, a questionnaire to test the water to see whether there might be support for some change in ownership and management. Sensible move - except they didn’t use the resident participation mechanisms open to them beforehand. This at a time when HCC has just spent umpteen hours over the last 10 months drawing up a new RP compact - with administration encouragement. Result - bad start for process and ‘mea culpa’ from Executive member with ‘absolution’ pronounced by Chair of HCC on condition of genuine contrition and a firm purpose of amendment. This was done more in hope than expectation but we must always hope!

Meanwhile the Government might get its sticky fingers out of our tenants’ pockets - and pigs might fly!

 

No sympathy at all - but….

I have no sympathy at all for the Conservative Councillor in Slough who has been found guilty of electoral malpractice. I have none either for his agent. Regardless of party affiliation, anyone who does this kind of thing deserves all the opprobrium and penalties that are coming to them.

But, and at the risk of being boringly repetitive, the encouragement of unfettered postal voting, coupled with the monthly (rather than annual) updating of the electoral register, is making electoral fraud easier than at any time since the introduction of the Ballot Act in 1872.

In Kingston we have a very professional team in charge of electoral registration. I am sure the same is true of most local authorities. But there are far too few people to be able to check meaningfully the vastly increased claims for postal votes that now flood in (over 15000 in this Borough in 2006) - or even to check that the persons named on the applications actually exist. The Government must either tackle this meaningfully as a matter of urgency or be regarded as too complacent about the situation to be bothered.

 

A bit of Scotch mist

This link takes you to a leaflet put out in the East Renfrewshire constituency of Europe Minister Jim Murphy. It bears the imprint of the Constituency Labour Party. East Renfrewshire was one of the ten UK constituencies where a referendum on the Lisbon Treaty was organised by iwantareferendum.com - NOT, I might add, by the Conservative or any other party.

http://www.iwantareferendum.com/east_ren_letter.pdf

When Mr. Murphy was asked about the gross misrepresentations in this leaflet he said that it was nothing to do with him, ‘you’ll have to ask the Labour Party!’

To visit the website and sign the on line petition for a referendum on the Lisbon Treaty follow this link

http://www.iwantareferendum.com

 

Ken and the Council Tax

  It is worth remembering that, thanks to the constitutional mess made by Tony Blair of London’s local government, a large chunk of what we pay in Tax to our Boroughs is ‘precepted’ (i.e.syphoned off) to pay for the antics of Ken and his cohort in City Hall. A Kingston band D taxpayer will contribute £309.82 to Ken’s coffers next year. As a band F payer I shall be stumping up £447.52 and quite few of my constituents in Surbiton Hill will pay an eyewatering £619.64!

What’s he doing with it? Ken has turned what was supposed by Blair to be a modest co-ordinating outfit into a mighty empire. City Hall, built to house the whole thing, quickly became overcrowded as Ken hired more and more staff to push his power grabbing agenda. Part of this is the creation of his own foreign policy, typified by the above picture of Ken with Hugo Chavez of Venezuela and backed up by the creation of what amounts to embassies abroad, all at our expense. This was something Blair and Co. never envisaged and which the craven media have kept rather quiet about, with the honourable exception of Channel 4’s ‘Dispatches’ a few weeks ago.

Another feature of Ken’s management of OUR money has been his distribution, through persons like Lee Jasper, of largesse to organisations which then disappear or at the very least leave no proper audit trail on how the money has been spent to achieve the socially laudable aims for which it was supposedly granted. It’s all documented in the ‘Dispatches’ programme and elsewhere.

For pity’s sake, London, WAKE UP!