Cricket, lovely cricket........

See link http://uk.news.yahoo.com/21082006/323/pakistan-cricket-legends-slam-mini-hitler-umpire.html.

I've done a fair bit of umpiring in my time both as a schoolteacher in London and Bristol and at Club First Division and Schoolboy County Cricket levels. So I've got a lot of sympathy for Messrs Hair and Doctrose and rather less for the petulant attitude of the Pakistan team and less still for what I see as the attempts to excuse their petulance by commentators who ought to know better.

I don't know whether the ball was tampered with or not. Nor do Botham, Hussain et al. It will be for an ICC investigation to determine whether it was or no. The umpires on the field and with the thing in their hands evidently thought it had been, so they changed it and the game continued for over an hour thereafter. The real issue is not, then, the decision on this. The real issue is that, after an hour or more off the field for bad light and the tea interval, the Pakistan team decided, for reasons best known to themselves, not to resume play when invited to do so - twice, as it happens.

If they felt they needed to launch a protest they had bags of time to do it during the time off the field. They aren't an Under 12 School XI. They are experienced, professional cricketers and they know (or should know) the Laws and that the Umpires have no choice but to act in accordance with them. Once a decision has been made and the game has resumed under the new circumstances created by that decision, the decision cannot be revoked. For instance, once a batsman has been given out and a new one has taken his place, the original one cannot be put in again if someone (even the umpire himself) convinces the umpire that he made a mistake in giving him out in the first place. To use Blair's expression 'you move on' and the original decision has to stand.

The Laws, accepted the world over, provide that, when resuming after an interval the same procedure applies as at the start of play - the umpires check the time and call 'play'. If there's no-one to bowl, or no batsman has appeared, the match will be deemed by the umpires to have been forfeited by the absent side. There's no provision for a side not appearing because it feels hurt by a decision made 2 hours earlier. Pakistan know that fine well - so do all those commentators on TV and in the press who are happy to make out that it's all Mr. Hair's fault, or the ICC's fault... or anybody's fault......except Pakistan's.

It's a dreadful way for any match to end, but the cause of cricket will not be well served by the kind of cringe that we've been getting from commentators.

......On the subject of building projects

See link http://uk.news.yahoo.com/01082006/325/wembley-fa-cup-final-2008.html.

This is worrying. Not very long ago they were confidently assuring us that the 2006 Cup Final would be played at Wembley. Now even 2007 seems out of the question. It's of a piece with the Scottish Parliament and numerous other projects - horrendously late and seriously over-budget. One wonders how deep is the involvement of this, the most incompetent government this coutry has ever had, bar none!

Let's hope that Seb Coe and his team can do a better job on the 2012 Olympics........

Amateur theatricals

The big political issue since the local election in May has raged around the Kingston Theatre.

The Lib Dems, having scarcely mentioned the topic in their election material only three months ago, decided that the deal whereby GMH ( owned by local resident Mr. Auchi) was to put up the remaining £3.4 million to fit out the theatre was no go. Mr. A's advisers were trying to impose over-onerous conditions. When exactly the Administration members knew this was going to be the case remains a matter of some doubt, but what emerged a very short time after the election was that they had decided that the Council would find the necessary funds itself from wherever. Our Scrutiny Panel, now Conservative dominated, called in the Executive's decision and found that it had not fulfilled its fiduciary duty to the CT payers in taking on a new commitment with budgetary implications which was risky and for which there was no electoral mandate. The decision was referred back to them, they having already decided on a reference to full Council. The full Council debate showed in a recorded vote a united front in favour of the spending proposal by all the Lib Dem councillors and against it by all the Conservative and Labour ones.

I hope that the theatre will now produce the revenues which will enable it to fund its own running costs and to meet the other financial obligations which have been taken on. I am sincere in hoping this, but I am also sincere in having some doubts about the prospect of this and fears that the theatre will find itself looking to the CT payers to bail it out of financial difficulties in the future ad infinitum. I just can't help recalling that we were told in 1998 that we could have this theatre without any financial commitment of public funds by the Council and that this proved an all-too-forlorn hope. Supporters point to a newspaper article last year which said that the theatre would bring £11million a year into the Borough. I read the article and looked in vain for convincing evidence in support of this assertion.

We shall see what we shall see.

Now the dust has settled.............

Having taken on the job of agent for all 48 of our candidates at the Kingston Borough election I inevitably found myself with a pretty full time job for a month getting their election expense returns completed, signed and returned. At the same time I have been working to update my knowledge of matters environmental to fit my new role as shadow to the Executive member for Environment and Sustainability. This means, among other things, listening to the people she doesn't listen to as well as the ones she does. We are to start a major scrutny of the waste management programme next month, so quite a bit of August will be taken up with getting that up and running.

Waste strategy

See http://uk.news.yahoo.com/13062006/140/rubbish-bag-tax-boost-recycling.html

This is an interesting idea but not a new one. I discussed it with officers when in our minority Administration in 2001.

The problem is, does one charge by bag or bin-load or by weight of rubbish? And what would be the administrative costs of such a scheme? To weigh each household's individual waste output each week or however often would require a revolution in the way of working of our waste contractor, SITA. In my street the common practice is for waste bags to be collected in a heap ready for rapid loading onto refuse vehicles with no regard being paid to the house of origin. Most blocks of flats - there are many in my ward and their number increases annually - use communal 'paladin' waste bins which sometimes accumulate rubbish block by block via a chute. Again a charge for individual householders would be very difficult to administer fairly.

If the Government is interested in pursuing this idea it will need to tackle these problems and others to make it worthwhile for refuse collection agencies to take it up.

The wettest drought ever?

See http://uk.news.yahoo.com/hot/w/water-crisis.html for background info.

As one who vividly remembers the Great Drought of 1976 I thought I detected symptoms of something similar this year.

I remember that January and February as being very dry. On January 6th Chew Valley Lake (the biggest reservoir to our then home in Keynsham) was down to levels more appropriate to August. One could even see the old bridge in the village which had flooded when the River Chew was dammed to create the lake reservoir. This followed on a hot, dry summer in 1975.

January and February were very dry here this year and hosepipe bans were introduced in April. A repeat of '76 was threatened (or promised - depending on one's point of view).

Here the similarities have ended abruptly. By this stage in 1976 we were experiencing a heatwave which lasted until the end of August. As I write this on 21st May the wind is howling outside, it is cold for the time of year and it is raining heavily for the 5th day in succession, we lost an ash tree to the storm at the side of our house on Friday and the Kingston Guardian wanted to talk to me that same day about flooding in Browns Road. Some drought!!

New ASB initiative

See http://uk.news.yahoo.com/15052006/140/dial-101-new-non-emergency-number.html

This move by some police forces to create a new emergency number with a lesser status than 999 could be a good move. Some of my constituents, confronted by anti-social behaviour, seem reluctant to contact the police about it. Sometimes it's because they just can't find the non-emergency number they need. So this should be a reassuring move.
However, it will need to be backed up by resources and action if it is to help vulnerable citizens feel there is protection they can call upon when they feel threatened. When we see things like Surbiton Police Station not being manned full time and Mew Malden Station sold to Witherspoons for a new pub and no Police desk in the new Community Centre for Hook and Chessington, there's bound to be a suspicion that this may be an 'eye-catching initiative' in the best Blairite tradition and little more. We wait in hope............

Election result

For full details of the election results see www.kingston.gov.uk. You will notice that The Conservatives made 6 net gains from the Liberal Democrats and they gained 1 seat from Labour. The Liberal Democrats now have an overall majority of 2 seats, whereas previously they had 12. The biggest swing of the night was in Chessington North and Hook, where the Conservatives achieved a 23% swing against the Liberal Democrats, reducing their majority from over 1100 to a mere 18. Across the Borough the Lib Dem administration is supported by a few thousand fewer people than voted for the Conservative opposition - what price proportional representation now?
One ward stands out like a sore thumb as uncharacteristic of the the rest of Kingston. That is Berrylands, where the Lib Dems contrived a dramatic increase in their vote to unseat our Leader, Kevin Davis. Edward Davey MP seems to have involved himself far more than usual in the campaign, though I don't remember deeing him at the count of votes. There were recounts in Berrylands, Canbury, Norbiton, Old Malden and Alexandra wards.
In my ward of Surbiton Hill the Greens beat Labour into 4th place and my majority over the nearest Lib Dem rose from 66 in 2002 to 552 this time around, rather exceeding my hopes and expectations. I am sure my Anonymous correspondent will be characteristically generous in his congratulations!

Postal voting

See link http://uk.news.yahoo.com/26042006/140/woman-arrested-election-fraud.html

We should all be seriously concerned about this.

Although the article above refers to postal vote malpractice in Birmingham, where it was famously detected 2 years ago, I feel the prevalence of postal voting nowadays is an open invitation to electoral malpractice by politicians on a scale not seen since the mid-19th century. My own Borough, Kingston upon Thames, now has 15,515 people entitled to vote by post, whereas only a few years ago the number would have been measured in hundreds.

This dramatic change is because anyone can now have a postal vote on demand, whereas previously one had to be able to give a reason why one couldn't attend the polling station in person. If the reason was illness, the application had to be countersigned by a doctor. Other reasons may have been the nature of one's employment or, in my case in 1983 and 1987, being a candidate at the General Election in a constituency far from home, or having moved to another part of the country. In the last case no postal vote was allowed for local government elections.

Nowadays innumerable ballot papers are issued to people who are dead or have left the address to which the paper is sent or just not bothered about voting or basically ignorant of the system. Such papers are an easy prey for activists locally who might collect them and mark them according to their own wishes.

Someone may have asked for a postal vote in your name to be sent to an address other than yours. You might not find out until you turn up at the polling station - and if you stay away from it, you won't find out at all. And don't say it doesn't happen here. In Birmingham it was proved to have happened in 2004 on something approaching an industrial scale - a system that would 'disgrace a banana republic', as the Judge remarked at the trial.

Can't the electoral officers in our Town Hall check to see that all the papers returned are 'in order'? In theory they do and my experience is that they are conscientious and diligent people - certainly in Kingston they are - but they are also very few and are now dealing with 10 or more times as many postal ballots as they were 10 years ago, but with the same number of staff. So do the maths yourself.

The perpetrators in one Birmingham ward were caught and punished, but they were the tip of the iceberg. There's a serious threat to the integrity of our elections going on here and Blair and Prescott are doing nothing about it. I wonder why.

Out of FOCUS II

At last the Lib Dems have put some 'literature' through my door. Previously I have had to comment only on what was delivered elsewhere.

The latest effort is called the 'Surrey Express'. They must think people are simpletons and believe that this is a bona fide newspaper commenting objectively in a 'FREE Local Election Special' (sic) - as though people would otherwise have to pay for it and would willingly do so.

Interestingly they do admit that there is a 'neck and neck race' for control of the Borough. Considering they are defending an overall majority of 12 and currently have twice as many councillors as the Tories and 10-times the number of Labour, this is quite an astonishing admission of how vulnerable their deplorable administration of the Borough has made them.

Again they try to change the subject and divert attention from their failures into a campaign for a 'fair deal for Kingston'. They completely fail to note that the funding imbalances to which they draw attention are nothing new. Outer London Boroughs have been significantly worse funded by central government since the present London Local Government set-up was established in 1963. They therefore emphatically do not explain why a party with such overwhelming power as they have had has so signally failed to get a grip on the Borough's finances.

We have also further attempts to smear the Conservative Minority administration between 1998 and 2002. They don't admit that it was a minority administration and that THEY, year on year, kept it in being. This time they produce some figures about responsibility allowances paid to our Leaders during that time. What they don't say is how much was paid in responsibility allwances to Derek Osbourne and Roger Hayes (their leaders) during the same period. Not much less actually. Nor do they point out that from 2000 onwards their members chaired the Overview Panels, one being Labour, and were paid responsibility allowances at the same rate as Cabinet members.

But most risible of all is a call from the ineffable Edward Davey MP to 're-elect a Council that's kept its promises.' What about its promise not to sink any more public money into the Theatre project - broken shamelessly last year to the tune of £3,000,000 or £250,000 a year in interest alone? All this without ever once allowing the elected representatives of the Council Tax payers a single opportunity to debate the issue in the open in full Council.

Mr. Davey should be ashamed of himself for putting his name to such hypocritical nonsense as this.

Progress Report

For our latest In Touch see www.ksca.org.uk.
We've been canvassing some of our weaker areas coupled with a one or two stronger ones. The results are most encouraging. Nick Kilby was positively ecstatic about the response in one of the former Tolworth West roads canvassed last Saturday morning. Last evening's team also had a great response in a formerly uncanvassed road where the Lib Dem rejection of massively supported petitions on local road closures was particularly resented.
Am particularly delighted that we have carried our point on Arlington Road and that it is going to get a safer pavement sooner rather than later. I'm sure the officers of RBK hadn't looked at it before Jane and I went down there and, with the help of residents, made a fuss in Committee. One up for local representation!
So far we have not seen or heard anything from the opposition apart from a rather scrappy leaflet from the Greens some weeks ago and a couple of responses to matters on this blog from an out of touch Lib Dem (I presume) called 'Anonymous'.

Running scared

Could have been called 'Out of FOCUS II'.

With 3 weeks to go to the Borough elections the Lib Dems have already got nasty and personal. They usually wait until much later. This is distributed in Berrylands ward and is a grotesque attack on our Group Leader Kevin Davis. This from the same group of people who credited Edward Davey with presenting a petition against a phone mast which I actually presented in full Council before 30 of their Councillors! There's much play on what happened when the Tories 'ran' the Council - that famous myth (see http://pauljohnston.blogspot.com/2006/03/deceitful-voice.html) .

They are obviously rattled and are running scared!

Out of FOCUS

One annoying and less than engaging characteristic of the Lib Dems is their pretence that elections are about something that they aren't about at all.
In 1994 I fought St. Mark's Ward. It had and still has a large student population. Students were annoyed at the time at the Major government's replacement of student grants with a system of repayable loans. The Lib Dems put out FOCUS leaflets encouraging the students to vote Lib Dem to 'send a message to Major' that grants should be restored and the loan scheme be scrapped. The students obliged by voting for the Lib Dems who won the ward and the Borough. Result? The loan scheme wasn't scrapped. It's still there and has been made more arduous for students by Blair's imposition of tuition fees which will soon be increased by 'top-up' fees. Of course the Council in Kingston has not and never has had any say whatever over such matters and the Liberal Democrats knew that all along.
Now they're at it again. 'Axe the Tax' they say. They're embarrassed by their failure to tackle Council spending and the resultant hike in Council Tax to the point where Kingston residents are paying the highest Council Tax in London. So their FOCUS leaflets are now encouraging voters to vote for them again to abolish the Council Tax altogether. But again this is blatant deception. They know that Kingston Council has no control whatever over the system of financing local government and that Blair is as unlikely to be influenced by the return of a Lib Dem Council in Kingston as Major was in 1994. But they also know that they have had power over the level of the Tax in Kingston since 2002 - and that's what the election is really about.
In fact they encouraged us to vote Edward Davey into Parliament to 'axe the tax' a year ago. He got in but the tax is still there.
There is a desperate need now for politicians at all levels to tell the truth as they see it if respect is to be restored for those in public life. I wish the Lib Dems would show that they understand this too.

Fruitcakes

I have actually very little time for UKIP. Since 1997 its principal objective seems to have been the prevention of Conservative victory in parliamentary and European elections. Its interventions have helped Labour and the Liberal Democrats by splitting off enough Conservative votes to enable candidates from those two parties - often, in fact usually, far more enthusiastic about the EU and all its works than the defeated Tory candidate - to be elected on a minority vote. That is how Edward Davey came to be our MP in Kingston & Surbiton by 56 votes in 1997. In 2004 they bit deeply into our vote in the European election and lost us, in London, an excellent MEP in the person of Richard Balfe. Last May they almost certainly did contribute to the loss of or failure to gain about 27 seats in Parliament. None of this has advanced by one inch the stated UKIP claim of bringing about the separation of the UK from the EU. UKIP actually helps the victory of the Euro-enthusiast left and thereby achieves precisely the opposite of its stated aim. I cannot believe that its leaders are unaware of this.

So do I agree with David Cameron's remarks about 'fruitcakes' or Michael Howard's earlier comments about 'political gadflies'?

No. Both were ill-judged and did UKIP more good than harm, partly by gratuitously boosting their importance at a time when they were hardly even registering on the national political consciousness. Anyone who has studied the political history of contemporary Britain must be aware that such name-calling can severely backfire on the people who do it. Who was the Labour minister in Attlee's post-war government who rashly referred to the Tories as 'vermin' - only to see a number of Tory MPs proudly sporting badges with 'VERMIN' written on them

Whatever one might think of the leaders, the ordinary folk who vote for their candidates do so for the most part from a sincerely held conviction that the EU lies at the heart of much that distresses them about contemporary Britain, such as our seeming impotence in the face of criminality and the erosion of our civil liberties, the collapse of discipline in schools and families and all that is involved in political correctness. These are not fruitcakes or gadflies. They are decent people who have traditionally looked to the Conservative Party as their natural home.

If we're going to win power, we want them back - and we must realise that there is no contradiction between getting them back and earning the support of the 'middle ground' in British politics. Anyone who thinks there is is just plain wrong.

Campaign launched

We had a great pre-campaign dinner in Surbiton last night, mainly for candidates and friends in the Kingston and Surbiton constituency. The largest dining room in the building in Surbiton Crescent was packed. We had warm-up speeches from Kevin Davis, our Leader, and Tony Arbour of Richmond borough and the GLA. Our main speaker, Steve Norris, was unable to make it for family reasons, but his place was filled extremely well by our newest Member of the European Parliament, Syed Kamall. His main theme on the Conservatives as a party of achievement and opportunity was a good reminder to us all of why we are in politics - to help people achieve things for themselves and their communities. Let's hope that in our own small way in Kingston we can do do this in the next four years.

Client state?

Two emails have reached me in the last two days which put the finger on one of the biggest problems currently strangling enterprise and efficient local and national government in the UK. I refer to the bloated state of the public sector.
We know that more than half the jobs 'created' under 'New' Labour since 1997 have been in the public sector and many of them administrative, not delivering services, not wealth creating and often of highly doubtful utility in growth areas such as the various inspectorates set up to monitor the achievement of Brown's 'targets' - the modern version of Stalin's five year plans and just as distorting of effort as they were. And of course we have the ones tackling various 'problems', whose whole career structure depends upon ensuring that the 'problems' should never be solved but that ever more 'problem' areas should be identified requiring ever more solvers........and so on ad infinitum.
The latest local government enormity I heard about in the emails, one of which came from the Sustainability Officer(sic) of the Council was of the existence of a Council Travel Awareness Officer, supposedly encouraging bus travel and discouraging car use.
So all you people paying the highest Council Tax in London and/or being means tested for the cost of domiciliary care can rest easy in the knowledge that your Liberal Democrat Council is making good use of your money on such schemes and personnel as this.

Private Sector Housing Forum

This is intended as an interface between the Council and private sector housing providers. It met last night.
Subjects for discussion included the new Tenancy Deposit Scheme and the Local Housing Allowance.
The TDP is supposed to come into force on 6th April, but not all the Regulations are as yet in place, so there is some confusion as to how it will operate and how landlords and tenants are all to be informed about it. Landlords' organizations such as the National Landlords' Association will do sterling work, but there are reckoned to be 750,000 landlords in Britain, the vast majority of whom belong to no organization at all.
The LHA would be funny if it were not so tragic. The ostensible intention of the Government is to make 'vulnerable' households (means in this context families in receipt of Housing Benefit) more financially responsible by paying the benefit to them instead of, as with current Housing Benefit, direct to the landlord (thus avoiding rent arrears and consequent eviction). The LHA is also differently calculated, using a formula (as I understand it) based on family size>no. of rooms required x median cost of renting said number in the local housing market. One flaw is that half the available accommodation will cost more than the median and in many cases much more. Families will be free to rent fewer rooms than the family size formula indicates they should have. This might mean they get accommodation for less than their assessed LHA. They will be free to pocket the difference.
All of this seems to me to be a recipe for

• rent arrears, to avoid which
• landlords will be less than ever inclined in high demand areas like Kingston to rent accommodation to people on benefits, while
• such people will be encouraged to go into overcrowded accommodation as well.

The government has been trialling the scheme in half a dozen 'pathfinder' (sic) areas - not Kingston. It has produced a glossy booklet finding that such prognostications as the above are not justified, though, reading between the lines, there is an element of back-pedalling. Times for introduction have been lengthened and there are signs of nibbling at the edges of the scheme. But basically the Government is desperately trying to persuade itself that the scheme is good and well thought out. It didn't succeed last night in convincing anybody else, except, perhaps, the one Labour councillor present........

Davey gets a new job........

Sir Menzies Campbell, having been elected Leader of the Liberal Democrats, has moved our local MP, Mr. Edward Davey, from his Education portfolio to the front bench spokesmanship on the Department of Trade and Industry. Just a few months ago the Liberal Democrats were wanting to abolish this Department outright.
So is Sir Menzies' move a promotion - or a demotion - for Mr. Davey?
Time will tell.

What a waste...........

This photo shows me, as Cabinet Secretary for Environment four years ago, surrounded by some of the 'fridge mountain' created by the EU's directive on CFCs and (moreso) by DEFRA's tardy and totally inadequate response to it.

In Kingston, thanks to some excellent work by the Environment Contracts manager, we were able to be just about the first local authority to make adequate arrangements to cope with the disposal problems the Directive created. Our success showed that 'where there's a will, there's a way'.

By the time I left office in 2002 we had nearly finished work on a complete waste management strategy, on which an all-party group of councillors had been working for years, with extensive meetings that seemed to make little tangible progress. After I took on the portfolio, the lead officer and I pushed things forward considerably by devoting whole afternoons to the issues involved so as to cut down the time spent in the working party. The whole thing was nearly complete by March 2002. Then we had a change to single party Lib Dem control and the strategy document seemed to disappear from view, the final version not appearing until 2004/5. One thing that emerges from this is that the volume of waste recycled in the Borough appears to be less now than 4 years ago. We had added tins, plastic bottles and textiles to the paper recycling scheme we inherited from the Lib Dems and they have since replaced textiles with glass.

Even so we are not recycling anything like enough and it's costing us about £1m in landfill tax each year. That's why we proposed at Budget Council to introduce a weekly recycling collection, the cost of which would be substantially offset by savings of landfill tax by encouraging people to recycle more and put less in the dustbin. The idea was - to coin a phrase - rubbished by the Lib Dems. I hope they might change their minds - or Kingstonians might change them for them.

The A3 Bus Gate

Visited the A3 bus gate referred to on www.pauljohnston.info with Priyen Patel our researcher. We met Paul Saunders and other residents. Paul has a very impressive archive with photos and press articles from years back detailing the dangers posed by this bus gate when it was opn in the past. Priyen and I took some of our own while we were there. We witnessed a near concertina collision as a couple of cars had to brake sharply as a bus slowed dramatically to get through the gate. The approach to the gate is obscured by a pedestrian footbridge and any driver behind a bus would believe themselves to be on a 50mph (80kph) 6 lane dual carriageway and would not expect a bus to take a sudden lurch to the left, apparently through the crash barrier that runs along the full length of the road.

We observed buses going down the slip road, completely occupying an advisory cycle lane. Any cyclist using it would have no chance against an oncoming bus. The only 'safe' place for cyclists is, thus, the footway.

One bus overshot the gate completely (it was going far to fast to make the turn) and carried on down the A3. It still managed to stop at the same stop it would have used if it had used the gate.

This is a piece of arrogance by TfL who refuse to listen to the people who know. My hope is that someone doesn't end up paying for it with a limb or even their life.