Ashcroft and left wing hypocrisy

There is a huge degree of hypocrisy from Labour and the left leaning media in their attacks on Lord Ashcroft and his support for marginal seats and I've had enough of it.

Michael Ashcroft is is a major donor to the party and has focussed his support on the marginal constituencies that we need to win in order to form a government. He is a sucessful business man, clearly understands strategy and it looks like his support is making a difference. It is that sucess which is driving the attacks on him.

The two main lines of attack are that he is "buying the election" and that he doesn't pay UK tax. Let's look at the hypocrisy of both of those.

Michael Ashcroft is a Conservative and wants a Conservative government, he doesn't dictate policy or try to lead the party around by the nose. The headline of the Independent's latest attack on him today talks about "Ashcroft's election war-chest" and of "Ashcroft money" upon reading it turns out that the vast bulk of the "Ashcroft money" is actually raised by the local grassroots within the constituencies themselves. Far from relying sole on Michael, local parties are doing it for themselves.

It is also worth comparing the decentralisation of Conservative funding with the Labour party who receive about 60% of their fundings from the unions and 75% of the value of their Q4 2009 registered individual donations came from just three people.

Incumbant Labour MPs might not like the fact that Conservative's are well funded by the should remember that they are spending public money on their communication allowance (which I have always opposed) and the Conservative opponents are not.

The other main attack is about Michael's tax status. I don't know if he is a full UK tax payer but I do know that the Conservatives will bring forward legislation to ensure that all political donors are. If Labour feel that it is so important an issue why have they not brought in similar legislation? Might it be because it would cut off funding from Lord Paul, one of their own super rich major donors?

Michael Ashcroft's donations are also made from his own money, as far as I'm aware he has never syphoned off public money to fund a political party unlike the union movement who take part in the government supported money-go-round.

It's funny how the left are so worried about high spending in elections over here when I know of many who were more than happy to lend a hand in Barack Obama's ultra high spending presidential election campaign.

Hurdles to older Londoners accessing home care services

Today the London Assembly's Health & Public Services Committee (which I chair) has published a report which documents the experiences and concerns of older people accessing home care in London and reveals many are struggling to navigate their way through the current system.

We found out that many older people in the London feel that the process for assessments can be complicated, opaque and long-winded, leading to many people facing long delays.

The report "Home Truths" says more than 1700 older people in London waited more than three months for an assessment and more than 1500 faced delays of at least six weeks following a successful assessment to receive all their services.

The report says many have problems accessing the home care they need because local authorities are dealing with a growing older population and other major pressures on their budgets. In addition, older Londoners are more likely to need home care than older people elsewhere because they are more likely to live alone, in poverty, in poor health and without local family support.

Three quarters of local authorities in the capital currently can only fund services for older people with the most severe needs, which means that an estimated 165,000 older Londoners with care needs have to make do without any local authority help at all, or pay for their own care.

The Committee felt that older people often lack clear information and advice, with many not knowing where to get the help they need to access the right care.

The report makes a number of recommendations to improve older people’s experience of the homecare system in the short-term:

• The Department of Health London Region should develop guidance on fast and effective assessment processes for people who want personal budgets.

• The Mayor should promote preventative services that can plug the gap for people with lower care needs.

• The Mayor should assess the feasibility of setting up a pan-London frontline information line for older Londoners.

Samantha Mauger Chief Executive at Age Concern London welcomed the Committee’s report: “Older Londoners are particularly likely to need home care but they currently face real challenges in obtaining the help they need. We support the London Assembly’s recommendations for greater promotion of preventative services and a new London-wide frontline information line to make it easier for people to link with local advice services and so navigate the complex system.”

Cravendale need to see clearly

I've spent the morning working through the business plan for th London Waste and Recycling Board (LWaRB), personal habits play an important part of waste reduction and recycling but product packaging also plays an important part.

Which brings me onto the Cravendale situation. Most milk bottles are made of a plastic called High-density polyethylene (HDPE) which can be recycled back into food grade plastic, indeed I visited a recycling facility in Dagenham which conducts that very process. This process relies on the HDPE being clear, which most milk bottles are. However Cravendale buck the trend and add white dye to their HDPE bottles meaning they cannot be recycled with the 95% of other milk bottles in the country. Cheers fellas!

Their excuse is that the white plastic protects the milk from the sun, I suspect it has much more to do with product differentiation and stand out on the shelf. When confronted with the fact that their product positioning screws up the ability to recycle with other HDPE products their reaction is to suggest a separate recycling channel for their product.

“In an ideal world we would have a dedicated reprocessing stream for white bottles, if they become a sufficient proportion of the waste stream.”

said their packaging manager Richard Taplin.

There is more willingness to reduce waste and recycle than ever before but manufactures and retailers have got to pull their weight. If clear bottles are good enough for 95% of milk sold in the UK I find it hard to believe that Cravendale can't change their bottles and help reduce the amount of waste going to landfill or being burnt.

Another Falklands war?

The Sun is running a story about a Royal Navy fleet being dispatched to the Falklands to defend any Argentinian aggression. Firstly one warship and it's fuel tanker is not a fleet! Secondly I cannot envisage an Argentinian attack like 1982 happening now.

I'm sure the Argentinian government still feel that the Falklands should be theirs, I'm sure they will feel that any oil revenue from Falkland waters should be theirs too and I'm sure that they recognise the level of over-stretch in the forces would make a defence of the Falklands very difficult. But even taken together it would not be enough.

The nature of Argentina's government today is very different to the Junta from the early 80s and world public opinion would look even less favourably now than it did then.

Be under no illusion though, I would not be writing about this at all had the government not starved the forces of resources while increasing their commitments. We are less able to deal with an attack now than in 1982 (although we would still win is such a conflict arose) and this sabre rattling is almost certainly linked to our current position.

Labour to attack minorities?

According to Guido the four attack lines that Labour are planning to use in the election campaign are: Ensuring the economic recovery, Protecting frontline public services, Protecting future jobs and Standing up for the many.

All sound dynamic and powerful but all so uncontroversial as to be meaningless. All apart from the last one "Standing up for the many", which I have a problem with.

When Gordon Brown and the Labour party are "standing up for the many", who will they be standing up against? I presume they will be standing up against the few, being the only ones left once "the many" are taken out of the equation. Black and Asian people are part of the few, lesbians and gays are part of the few, disabled people are part of the few, in fact another way of describing "the few" is "minorities".

Can it really be the case that one of the Labour party's campaign themes is a commitment to attacking minorities? Dog whistle politics at its worst!

Is David Wright MP ending his own career live on twitter?

I know everyone and their dog has commented on this, so I will too.

Labour whip, David Wright made the following claim:

“I put up on twitter a message linked to Barack Obama’s comment in the Presidential race last year about conservative policy, which is you can put lipstick on a pig but it’s still a pig. It looks like somebody, a third party has gone into my account and made it more offensive".

How does that statement sit with the following from the Twitter FAQ page?:

Can I edit a tweet once I post it? Nope. Once it's out there, you can't edit it. You can delete an update by clicking the trash icon on the right end of the update, but you can't make changes.

It looks like someone isn't telling the truth, could it be Twitter or is it David Wright MP?

Hat tip to Paul Waugh for the David Wright quote. UPDATE: Oooops, looks like I'm five hours behing Guido who made the same point on his blog.

FBU's Mr Toad attack says more about them than it does about Brian Coleman

My office in City Hall is next to Brian Coleman's, he is currently making space on his office wall for the Mr Toad posters that the Fire Brigade Union (FBU) produced last week for the opening of the new Harold Hill fire station. If any of you have the Coleman mustard one he'd like a copy of that too please.

The FBU's attacks on Brian have been aggressive and highly personal and these posters follow that pattern. The FBU are angry because London Fire & Emergency Planning Authority (LFEPA) and senior managers of the Fire Brigade are changing the shift patterns in the light of changing risks and likely funding reductions.

The FBU want everything to stay the same, this includes the retention of beds in fire stations. Arguments like this completely undermine the position of the FBU, which other night shift job would it be seen as appropriate for people to get to work and then go to sleep?

I have met a lot of fire fighters and as I said in my post of last week, they do a fantastic and often dangerous job. The brigade is doing great work helping to change the lives of some of London's most disadvantaged kids but this great work is being overshadowed and undermined by the foolish actions of the FBU.

Confirmation hearing

This afternoon I had my confirmation hearing for my nomination as Chairman of the London Waste and Recycling Board.

The committee voted unanimously to approve my nomination, which was nice. My friend and colleague Roger Evans (who sat on the committee) has written about the meeting on his blog and you can watch the webcast here.

Labour pricing companies out of the advertising market

A little over a week ago I tweeted the fact that all the bus stops on my walk home had government adverts on them. I worked in advertising for many years and I thought that the proportion of public sector advertising has risen mainly because the private sector had cut back.

It seems I was wrong.

Private sector ad spending has fallen because of the recession but the government's advertising spending has shot up over the same period. It is also clear that the Labour party's totemic policies are the ones getting the bulk of the spending.

The plan is a simple one, ensure a government policy or service is synonymous with the Labour party (they wrap themselves up in the NHS and Surestart) then spend public money promoting those things and reap the electoral rewards.

This is another example of Labour using public money for party political promotion (like the union modernisation fund), it has another damaging effect. The prices paid for advertising follows a very simple supply and demand pricing model, media owners don't like empty ad slots or poster sites. If the market dries up the prices fall until a buyer is willing to pay, the massive increase in public ad spending is artificially inflating advert prices and in doing so making it harder for companies to advertise their products and stimulate business.

Just to make this clear, Labour are using our tax money to promote themselves and are screwing over businesses in the process. They have to be got rid of!

Lubbock Road fire

I'd like to take this opportunity to congratulate Bromley's fire fighters for their work yesterday at Hatton Court in Lubbock Road yesterday.

I was in the middle of the Mayor's budget debate here at City Hall when the update came through on my blackberry, by the time the meeting was over the fire was extinguished and the follow up work was well under way. This is in large part down to the excellent local relationships that exists between the Fire Brigade, police, council and other local groups.

It is also worth thanking the fire crews from Bexley, Lewisham and Greenwich who supported the Bromley team and Rev. Michael Adams from the local church who made facilities available for people whose homes have been damaged.

David Cameron and Labour's attack poster

It's very kind of Labour to help distribute one of our core messages. Just so everyone remembers:

DAVID CAMERON "We are commited to the NHS".

Labour used to be quite good at this kind of attack stuff, now they are just ..........

Could Brown have handled this any worse?

Brown has developed a reputation as a bottler and a ditherer, unable to make tough decisions or choose a biscuit. One would have thought that withdrawing the whip of MPs charged with theft would be such an obvious and easy decision that even Brown could have done it promptly.

WRONG!

We then see the Labour Party's own lawyers advising the three charged MPs, a clearly an undesirable situation, clearly a need to put distance between the party and the accused, clearly an opportunity to show decisiveness.

Wrong again.

Brown cannot be blamed for the individual conduct of his party members but he can be judged by his reaction to that conduct and in my estimations he has failed.

Criminal MPs and pensions

I sit on the MPA's Professional Standards Cases Sub-Committee, it sounds like a bit of a back-water but believe me it isn't. It is the body which decides (amongst other things) whether to revoke part of the pension of police officers who have been found guilty of criminal offences.

When police officers break the law they not only lose their jobs and receive a punishment from the courts but also run the risk of losing a significant part of the pensions too. While none of the parliamentarians have been tried yet, let alone found guilty, it might be worth considering a similar practice for the law makers as we have for the law enforcers.

I don't believe Gordon Brown

My local MPs have a track record of putting Gordon Brown on the spot. Bob Neill brought the house down when he offered to show off Bromley's excellent recycling facilities.

Today David Evenett asked a question to which Brown gave an answer that I cannot believe is true. David asked why the PM didn't declare the unnamed fund refured to in Peter Watt's book, Brown replied "I know nothing of what he is talking about". Sorry I just can't believe that is true.

I could believe him saying something like "I know nothing about any such fund" or "the was no such fund" or "I have declared all donations and campaign funds properly" but he didn't. He claimed not only to know nothing about the fund itself but also not even to have heard about the allegations, widely reported in the media over the last few days and the notice of complaint about it to the Parliamentary Standards Commissioner.

Sorry Gordon, I just don't buy that.

Speaker dropping traditions

Nadine Dorries isn't a big fan of the current Commons Speaker, understandably so in my opinion. In this blog post she outlines a Commons tradition that she has chosen not to maintain and that the Speaker isn't too happy about it.

John Bercow has decided to drop a host of traditions that he clearly doesn't like in the name of modernisation, does he have the right to demand others maintain the traditions that he does like?

Single patrolling

There has been some disquiet about the Met Commissioner's call for London's police to have single patrolling as their default procedure. There is even a facebook group about it.

I think that single patrolling is a good idea for a host of reasons, it doubles the police's footprint on the ground, it encourages officers to engage with the local community rather than chat to their partner and it makes it less intimidating for people to engage with them.

Naturally there may be times and places when patrolling in pairs is needed for safety reasons and officers should use their judgement but this should be the exception rather than the rule.

Changing habits is not easy but when the boss of a uniformed organisation gives a direct order it is reasonable to expect that order to be carried out.