Tony Arbour gets more than 9% swing.

It was a great pleasure to see that Tony Arbour was returned to the GLA on Thursday with a swing of more than 9% to Conservative. London South West had been the Lib Dems’ great hope of a first past the post gain and they threw everything they knew into getting it. This included lying doggo in Kingston while hitting Richmond like a plague of locusts.

One of my council colleagues put it like this, and I can’t better his account:

Quote from the final Lib Dem election leaflet -

“Just a few votes will separate Stephen Knight from the unpopular Tory candidate”

That’s 26,928 - but then again Lib-Dems are always hopeless at arithmetic. Like £11m is only a small amount for Kingston taxpayers to fork out for their new theatre.

And as for unpopular? Well obviously not with 76,913 local electors!

Well done Tony (and Boris), and everyone who worked so hard to secure this victory, and rub the smug grins off so many Lib-Dem faces. Doesn’t it make all those deliveries and canvassing in the rain so worthwhile!

Indeed it does!

 

‘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!

 

In desperation

Received a piece of Lib Dem ‘Literature’ through the door this morning. It’s really amazing in some ways that they are still rehearsing the worn-out formulas that were so novel (were they?) 30 years ago. You know “It’s a two horse race” with that little old graph showing the Lib Dems close to winning and Labour with no chance. In short, ‘don’t vote for us because we’re any good, but do it to get someone else out’. Tactical voting. Sheer negativity and cynicism. Livingstone is ’squandering and crony-ridden’ while Johnson is ‘a buffoon’. Negativism again. Paddick ‘has been a senior policeman for over 30 years……’ Most have risen very rapidly through the ranks. He certainly rose rapidly through the ranks of the Lib Dems, whom he joined all of 2 years ago! Everyone is a fool or a crook except the Lib Dems.

Some people, including (I reckon) some of their own members, have swallowed this stuff for over 20 years now. Let us hope that the polls are right and that the voters of London are about to tell them to grow up and get serious because the old, tired formulas just won’t wash any more.

 

Paddick’s transport policy ‘evolves’

Full council last night, where the feature event was a debate on the ‘£10 to enter Greater London’ policy advocated by the Lib Dem Mayoral candidate (see ‘Weak thinking, Brian’ below).

Needless to say the Lib Dems ‘amended’ the Conservative motion, which was critical of the policy, by changing one thing - ALL the words. The only debating chamber in which I have ever been where the substitution of an entirely different motion from one which has been proposed and seconded is called an ‘amendment’ is the Council Chamber of this Royal Borough. However, the Mayor seemed to think it was alright, so who am I to criticise?

It appears that the Lib Dem policy has undergone two clarifications and evolutions since the Conservative motion was submitted (about 2 weeks ago so the agenda could be published!). The latest version, pulled off the website yesterday, gives two possible options for dealing with the nonsense I pointed out some days ago. These are:-

Option 1: create an exempt zone outside Greater London, the residents of which would be inside the Congestion Charge zone and thus exempt from paying the charge on entry into Greater London. Precisely what would be included in this zone is nowhere indicated - as yet. Would Esher be in or out? or Leatherhead, which lies outwith the M25 circle. We don’t know. But our Lib Dems seem on the face of it, not to believe this would be adopted. I say this because their ‘amendment’ seemed geared to

Option 2: exclude some of the Outer London Boroughs from the Congestion Zone. Our Lib Dems took it for granted in their ‘amendment’ that this would mean that Kingston would not be affected. Presumably the charging zone would start at Ham Parade if this were the case and Richmond were not so privileged. Would this mean I would have to stump up £10 a time to go to 6 p.m. Mass at St. Thomas Aquinas on Sundays - as the proposal is for the charge to apply 24/7? But the point is that this is only listed in the manifesto as an option which might be applied, and there is no guarantee that it would be or that Kingston would be protected as one of the selected Boroughs.

So the evolved policy is a better presented dogs dinner than it originally was - but it’s still a dog’s dinner nevertheless.

 

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.

 

Weak thinking, Brian!

This section from the Lib Dem Mayoral candidate’s transport manifesto should sink his chances with most Kingstonians without trace. The first idea isn’t a bad one but the consequential second policy is just plain barmy:-

• Scrap the Western Extension Zone

• Introduce in its place a 24/7 £10 greater London congestion zone for non-Londoners. Commercial vehicles and London registered vehicles will be exempt. Aimed at encouraging visitors and commuters to use public transport.

It was noticeable that, when Howard Jones drew attention to this proposal in the Budget debate last Wednesday there was embarrassed silence from the Lib Dem members. And no wonder! People coming in to Kingston to shop from Esher, Claygate, Long Ditton or the far end of Lovelace Road or Ditton Road in my ward or Balaclava Road or Portsmouth Road in St. Marks ward would be faced with a £10 charge every time they come to shop in Surbiton or Kingston - the biggest retail centre in London outside the West End - and they’d have to pay an extra tenner on top of the seat price and the parking charge to visit the beloved Rose theatre. That should strangle Kingston’s economy sure enough.

Only someone profoundly ignorant of the nature of the boundary areas of Greater London (where one building in Greater London is often next door - literally - to one in Surrey) could possibly have come up with such a harebrained scheme - and he wants to be Mayor!

 

Come on Mary! Fair does!

Having read Mary Reid’s criticism of the Conservative opposition’s attitude to the 2008-09 Budget, I wrote a considered reply as a comment on her blog. This was last Thursday. I note she hasn’t published it, yet she has published a comment on part of the Leader of the Opposition’s speech from someone called ‘Joe’, who charmingly describes my Leader as a ‘dumbass’.

Some of us are interested in genuine debate, not crude abuse.

 

Edwardus Exclusus

 Apologies for the conceit, but, reading this morning’s newspaper article about the Deputy Speaker’s disciplining of our dear MP for his disrespect for the Chair, I was reminded of Erasmus’s satire on Pope Julius II (under the title ‘Julius Exclusus’) in which he envisaged the indignant Pope being shut out of Heaven by St. Peter and ‘cast into outer darkness’.

Ed was red carded for his petulant criticism of the Speaker for failing to call the Lib Dem motion for a referendum on EU membership in place of the referendum most people in the UK want, on the ratification of the Lisbon Treaty, which, as Ed knows fine well, is a very different issue.

This is a Lib Dem fudge and nothing more. They pledged support for a referendum on the Constitution at the General Election of 2005. So did Labour and the Conservatives. Just about every MP was elected on that understanding. That includes Lib Dems, some of whom in the West Country profess themselves to be Eurosceptics!

Given that the whole world knows (even if some in the Government and the Lib Dems won’t admit it) that the Lisbon Treaty is the Constitution in all but name (’That which we call a rose, by any other name……’) those MPs should be insisting that the pledge they were elected upon should be honoured. Of course they’re scared of a NO vote, none more so than the Eurofanatic Lib Dems. Hence the not so subtle attempt to try to change the question. Even the present Speaker could see through that one and he was right to do so. Having been seen through, our Ed thhrew a tantrum and has been sent to stand in the corner - and quite right too!