John Hemming's Web Log

It looks like we will be able to reinstate the Senior Citizens concessionary fares scheme for over 60s before the government scheme comes into action. There is a formal consultation period of 56 days which delays any change. However, following discussions earlier today it looks like people over 60 in Birmingham will have free travel on bus and train in the near future (before the government's proposal of 1st April 2006). We think there is a good chance the change will occur across the old West Midlands County. However, what is clear is that we will be reinstating free travel for women and introducing it for men aged 60+. This is a good pro-public transport move which also support our senior citizens.

The linked article also has .wav files of the talk Howard Flight gave on 23rd March 2005. It was the original "timesonline" quote. I have arranged for the .wav files to be transcribed and the transcription follows. The big question for the Tories is whether it appears on reading the full text that Howard Flight is actually implying the Conservatives will cut more spending than the £35 Billion in the James Report. (Which includes Labour's £21bn cuts (Gershon savings) in any event.) At the end he says: "I've probably banged on too long." I would agree with that particular line. The real issue, however, is should Michael Howard have sacked him for what he said? I am not convinced that that is the case. To me this shows how Michael Howard should not be trusted with any power. What you can conclude from Howard Flight's talk is that a) The tories have policies that are designed to attract support. b) The tories have dumped suggestions that people would ...

I find this story particularly sad. It is really the tip of an iceberg of problems with disrespectful behaviour across the country. For all that ASBOs and such mechanisms offer some slight hope to people terrorised by yobs they are not the real answer. For the real answer we need to look at why patterns of behaviour are developing such that there are continual aggressive incidents across the country. Yesterday I drove across central London in a taxi and saw an aggressive row which was on the verge of serious violence (people pushing each other). There are a number of difficulties. Most lie around the desire of some people to act in such a way as actually is designed to irritate others. Part of this lies in how schools operate. The government's obsession with the rights of the parents of yobs means that teachers have to run around justifying reasonable actions they have taken to deal with indiscipline. Those children learn that blagging gets results and that if they behave irr...

The linked press release comes from Labour's main website. It is entitled: "Tories' £35bn cut to public spending just the tip of the iceberg" What confuses me is that the Conservative proposals called the James Report include the £21bn in the Gershon Report. The "Howard Flight Redacted" version only finds an additional £13-14bn on top of what Labour already propose. The Lib Dem Treasury team have read the report and find that £8bn of that is bogus. It still remains, however, that Labour are concentrating on the £35bn figure when they really should recognise that this implicitly criticises their own £21bn proposals. The real debate should be do we want to have teachers in classrooms or would classroom supervisors do. Labour appear to be committed to this change as a gradual process. This is evidenced throughout government policy and particularly in DfES documents. Now that would be a useful debate to have. Labour intend gradually phasing out teachers in c...

Although the Evening Mail and Radio WM are interested in this story, the editor of www.icbirmingham.co.uk declined to publish the article about Weddings in The Council House. The City Council has decided to allow people to have civil ceremonies in The Council House. They have been allowed at Highbury for some time. However, the Charities Commission are bouncing up and down about what happens at Highbury (because it is a charitable trust). Also it is something that people might like to have as an option. The idea is that The Council House belongs to the citizens of Birmingham. It is, therefore, appropriate that Citizens of Birmingham should be able to make use of the banqueting suite for their events. (Within the constraints of booking and also the payment of the appropriate fee.) The last wedding I went to was that of (Labour) Councillor Mike Olley at Birmingham's CoE Cathedral (St Philips). This was attended by one Labour MP, about four Labour Councillors and three Lib Dem ...

I heard about the second strike near Sumatra whilst at a fundraising event in Birmingham organised by Islamic Relief entitled "An Evening of Inspiration". The event was interesting as a musical crossover between traditional south Asian pentatonic scales and the normal western duodecaphonic scales. The end result for one number by 786 was a form of mixture between traditional nasheed and the musical style of Westlife. In the mean time the news agenda is moving on The Independent reports on the further growth in tactical voting with an interesting quote from the Electoral Commission: "A spokeswoman for the Electoral Commission, which monitors general elections, said vote swapping was within electoral rules, but no one could break the privacy of the polling booth." Is this the same Electoral Commission as the one that supported all postal ballots where the polling booth is abolished. The issue of Education and specifically the government's failure on discipline...

You wonder if this is the one which is "the boomerang strikes back". The tories have brought in an Australian political advisor to run their campaign. He may have said "sack the MP as an MP". Clearly this decision was taken in haste and may be repented at leisure. I still haven't seen the full quotations that he was sacked for. However, most of them have only been what one would expect tories to say. At an absolute minimum an argument that they would exclude from proposals politically unacceptable ideas is only reasonable. The question, of course, is whether or not they would later implement them. If he was saying that the tories said one thing in private and another in public then that is a valid area of criticism. The effect of sacking him as an MP is that it winds up the other Tory MPs. It is also likely to keep the issue on the political agenda. Michael Howard has then got the difficulty that reversing position will also cause problems. In a sense th...

The relationship between the Gershon report of the government and the Conservatives' James report is coming to light now. The big problem for the tories is that their James report actually includes the Gershon savings. For example if you look at page 56 of the report on James you will find that of their identified potential savings in education of £5,687,000,000 this includes the Gershon figure of £4,133,000,000. In other words the total figure of £34,864,000,000 includes the Gershon figures of £21,480,000,000. All big figures. The real question is what is means when implemented. This information is much harder to find. I have a copy of the DfES Efficiency Technical Note described by them as: 1. This Efficiency Technical Note explains how the Department for Education and Skills will monitor and measure the efficiency gains that are achieved across the services funded by the Department between 2005-06 and 2007-08. The Department plans to achieve over £4.3 billion in annual eff...

This issue is relevant in Sparkbrook and Small Heath and Perry Barr. In both of these seats the Respect group are standing. Extracting from his article: " the votes cast for the Greens, Respect and others will have no impact, with a possible exception in Bethnal Green and Bow," and "It is possible that in some constituencies the Green/Respect vote could ensure the return of a warmonger, as we have seen in the odd by-election." In this he is referring in part to Hodge Hill where having the Respect votes were sufficient to stop Labour winning. The challenge for Talib Hussain and Jon Hunt is that of persuading anti-Labour voters to unite behind them as the best placed candidates to beat (probably) Roger Godsiff and (probably) Khalid Mahmood.

"Yet, three years after the first reintroduction of the "modern" matron, the number of deaths from the superbug MRSA has doubled. The figures, up from 487 in 1999 to 955 in 2003, have caused alarm among health professionals and patient groups." The problem is that even if you have a budget that does not mean that you can actually control what is done. There is a philosophical flaw in the concept that everything can be managed effectively through a contract. It is a bit like keyhole surgery. In theory things can be done, but not a lot although if only little bits need to be done then everything works. One of the problems with MRSA is noone really has any idea of how much underreporting there is. However, unless you actually give the ability to manage to people which means the ability to sack a contractor or member of staff then it is difficult to manage all aspect of a system. If a "matron" says - you haven't cleaned there and the response is "i...

It has been raised with me that people who pay every 6 months are not expecting to pay the first installment in April, but instead in May. The good news is that the City Treasurers Department will agree the later payment date for those who wish it. (only for 6 monthly council tax payers).

The sagas across the world about how to achieve "open government" continue. It is important for people to remember the scuffle involving 200 people in Somerville Road that happened last June. If we don't have systems of elections that the losing parties accept as being operated properly then this sort of thing will grow (as it has been doing). Incidentally in the last week there has been news of postal vote fraud in Reading. What the government should agree to is that postal votes are counted separately to non-postal votes. A simply statutory instrument would do this and it would not impact in any serious way on the mechanics of the election. Why don't the government want this?

All we know is that a number of PJP Activists have been arrested. What we cannot understand is that if they had all the warrants on Tuesday when all the people were in court they had to wait until 7.30am this morning. They could have gone to the court and arrested all of them in one go. It appears to be that the police have gone around to witnesses for the Election Court. The witnesses have been asked by the police whether they have signed statements. A few have then been frightened by this so that they have denied signing the original statements and signed further statements to this effect. When you compare the statements they normally end up having the same signature. The end result is that the police are claiming that the original statements may be perjury which is absurd generically on the basis that the witnesses could have been called into court had the respondents been bothered. I am told that one witnesses grandson signed on behalf of her. All this really shows is how ea...

One of the debates in Birmingham at the moment relates to the provision of the list of postal voters. Last year (and in other authorities this year) the elections office provided an electronic list of postal voters before the elections. We have requested that again this year, but the returning officer is saying that the law prevents her from providing the list. I was told I could visit the elections office to see the records. I visited the elections office on Tuesday, but they did not have the records of the postal voters available. Today I was told I could visit the elections office, but I would not get a list. I could sit by the side of someone who would operate the records computer and was not allowed to touch the computer. My objective is to identify which votes are being sent to local addresses other than that of the voter (most of which end up being stolen in some way). The Deputy Returning Officer said to me that he didn't think that would help with my task. I pointe...

I attended a meeting of the East Yardley Neighbourhood Forum to discuss devolution last night. An interesting point was that some youths decided to try to block the door at the end of the meeting. It was relatively easy to break the blockage, but it is this sort of anti-social behaviour that really irritates people. For all the time the government have spent on new laws the procedures do not really exist for the sort of totting up type of situation in which people commit a lot of relatively minor nuisance type offences with no fear of any sanction. I cited at the meeting the problem with the driver of a stolen car who would not be prosecuted according to the CPS. The people at the meeting seemed to be quite happy with the way in which devolution was working. Our proposals to make funding available to smaller groups on an easy basis also went down well.

This is, of course, a live issue. I am currently trying to get the City Council to give me a list of postal votes across the city. This will enable some work to be done to minimise fraud. They are currently ignoring me.

Vote 2005 is an interesting exercise. It involves an online debating forum with a large number of parliamentary seats identified. It is a better forum than the traditional usenet uk.politics.electoral which has been the online location generally where political activists debate from many places. Usenet, however, has a number of problems which means that it can take a lot of time to review matters. George Galloway's - Respect the Unity Coalition not to be confused with respectcoalition.co.uk - the "lunacy coalition" have been floating around for some time now. This is an attempt by the Socialist Workers Party to build an organisation that people will actually vote for. Previously they had Socialist Alliance which had some marginal success locally where they had hard working candidates. Their plan was to turn the Stop the War campaign into a political party. In doing so they have lost a lot of the support and activists the SWP had without gaining that much. Through the...

This afternoon I spoke to a meeting in Stechford. Part of my speech related to the damage the Labour Government are doing to the laws and rules created in British Traditions stretching back centuries. Two key elements are the Magna Carta and Habeas Corpus. Articles 38 and 39 of the Magna Carta said: 38 In future no official shall place a man on trial upon his own unsupported statement, without producing credible witnesses to the truth of it. 39 No free man shall be seized or imprisoned, or stripped of his rights or possessions, or outlawed or exiled, or deprived of his standing in any other way, nor will we proceed with force against him, or send others to do so, except by the lawful judgment of his equals or by the law of the land. The Magna Carta was the result of an agreement wrung from King John on June 19 1215. It may have only protected the more powerful feudal lords, but it was a step in controlling overweaning state power. Had the barons not seized London in May 1215 he would...

This is one of the tags used in and around Yardley. This particular tag appears twice around the Swan Island. Although we are managing to keep some areas clear of graffiti there are other locations where this becomes harder. Some may say I am a bit sad for going around photographing graffiti. The fact is, however, that graffiti makes an area a mess. The message of keeping things clean (where possible) links through from minor "liveability" issues such as graffiti and rubbish to major issues (see elsewhere in this blog). One thing that has to happen is enforcement action (which I believe would be best through the civil law) to dissuate the graffitis from creating their mess. Labour seem to have taken a different tack and try to make the graffiti artists do better graffiti. I don't think that is a sensible solution.

Talking to local people Part of Saturday was spent doing the usual tours of Shopping Centres. On this occasion Simon Hughes MP came out with the Yardley team. The response on the streets was quite positive. This was probably helped by the improved weather. The previous week was rather cold. What is nice about this process is that we can get a bit more subtlety into the political debate. It is clear that local residents are unhappy with the proposals for boundary changes that Labour are supporting.