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.

 

New ‘Back Boris’ page

  For the latest info. from the Boris Johnson Mayoral campaign, click on ‘Back Boris’ above and follow the links on the page.

 

Why the silence?

Have just had a few days in Florida. This was the view from the restaurant window in our resort hotel in St. Pete Beach where we had our breakfast watching the pelicans having theirs.

The place had its own private beach just to the right of the picture - ideal for whiling away a sunny afternoon and taking the odd dip in the Gulf of Mexico. Delightful - and what a shock when getting back to Brown’s Britain this morning to read about the ‘Budget’ - and the fact that England had contrived to lose to the weakest Scottish side in years after beating the French at home!

 

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

 

Boris launches Transport manifesto

 Conservative Mayoral Candidate Boris Johnson has launched his Transport manifesto today.

This link takes you direct to the Adobe .pdf version of it; http://www.backboris.com/assets/completed_transport_manifesto.pdf 

Prominent features include scrapping Livingstone’s plan to charge a £25 congestion charge on people carriers and reconsulting on the western extension of the  Congestion Charge zone.

 

We want a referendum!

I borrowed the picture from the Daily Telegraph website. To read the full story follow this link http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2008/03/03/neu203.xml

As about 90% of a fairly respectable turn out in ten locally organised referendums have voted ‘No’ to the Lisbon Treaty isn’t it time our MPs allowed us all to have the say they promised us in 2005, when they were elected?

 

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.

 

KSCA AGM

Attended a crowded meeting of Kingston & Surbiton Conservatives this morning at the Christ Church Hall in Berrylands ward.

It’s amazing to think that it’s nearly a year since Helen Whately was selected as our candidate for Parliament. She is proving a very energetic campaigner - as last week’s efforts over Post Office closures eloquently testify. She will make an excellent constituency MP.  She builds a team around her that works and stays on to see a job through. Apparently, by contrast, the Lib Dem MP, on last week’s protests, had the same group of people who were ferried around in a people carrier and a car from site to site with a placard that had the name of the particular PO outside which they posed for photos pasted on, then pasted over for the next site. While Helen’s team stayed on to collect signatures, the Lib Dems scuttled off to the next photo shoot.

This afternoon, after the AGM, she and a team were off delivering leaflets in Tolworth and Hook Rise.

 

 

 

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!