Polly Toynbee

Polly Toynbee was on Start the Week on Radio 4 this morning. Andrew Marr was asking his guests to make predictions about the year ahead.

Ms Toynbee made the prediction that we would become wealthier, healthier and safer next year, as we have done in each of the past ten years.

She also predicted that we would also not feel any of these things and as a result moan more than we had in the previous year.

Surely that's the point. It's not whether we are, according to statistics, wealthier, healthier or safe, the salient point is whether we feel that way or not.

National GDP may have risen and the economy may continue to grow, that doesn't mean that I am feeling any wealthier at the end of this year than I did at the end of last. I also know that my taxes have increased, as has my mortgage, as has the cost of running my car.

I also know that the turnover of my business has decreased, that I am facing greater costs as an employer due to increased legislation, taxation and regulation.

We may be living longer yet that doesn't mean I am feeling any healthier or that my family is any better off health wise. I know that my family might be healthy, but also that access to NHS services has not improved and that my mother is still facing a month long wait for an appointment at her local pain relief clinic.

Crime statistics may show that the level of crime is decreasing nationally, however my experience this year has been to have my car broken in to twice, two more times than in any of the previous five years. I hear daily from people that they feel there is no point reporting minor crime because the police are unable to respond quickly and seem unable to offer any prospect that the culprits will be caught.

Isn't it about time that commentators like Ms Toynbee stopped talking about the national statistics and started viewing the everyday experiences of real people? Then she might understand why people are likely to complain more in the coming year.

500 Binge drinkers admitted to hospital every day

This story about the number of drink related admissions to hospital made the front page headline in the Daily Telegraph today.  

The figures revealed by the Telegraph's investigation are shocking but not surprising.

Their assertion is that the ease of availability and low cost of alcohol have been the main causes of increases in drink related illness.  I'm not sure personally whether an increase in the opening hours of licensed premises has had a dramatic effect on the amount alcohol being consumed.  I am sure, however, that its availability and cost are a major factor in the growing problem alcohol plays in our society.  

I wrote the following article for one of our leaflets back in October:

"Conservative Parliamentary Candidate for Mid Dorset and North Poole, Nick King, is putting forward a clear agenda to deal with alcohol fuelled anti social behaviour in the area. 

Nick, a member of Dorset Police Authority says: “Much of the problem comes from the inappropriate sale and use of alcohol.  Alcohol costs too little and is therefore too freely available, too much ends up in the hands of young people.  I’m proposing measures that will tackle the cause of the problem rather than spending money on dealing with the symptoms.”

Nick’s proposals include the following: 

1. Extend the prohibition of alcohol consumption to all unlicensed public spaces.
2. Give police the power to confiscate alcohol.
3. Place a levy on town centre bars and clubs to pay for additional policing.
4. Impose minimum pricing on alcohol sold through shops and supermarkets.

Nick explains: “We have to get away from a culture that says drinking in public is acceptable.  We need also to give the police and local authorities powers to control where alcohol is consumed, to make areas alcohol free and allow the use of others at certain times.”

For me the most important part is the last one.  Drink is readily available and often sold at a ridiculously low cost.  Locally we are lucky that our local authority licensing teams work well with Dorset Police to maintain a standard minimum price per alcohol unit sold through bars and clubs.  This stops many of the irresponsible practices that encouraged dangerous drinking, such as the 'one charge for all you can drink' evenings.  

This kind of intervention should be rolled out nationally and, more importantly, should be extended to all off sales of alcohol too.  There should be no need to increase the taxes charged on alcohol, it should be enough to ensure that the cost per unit is maintained at a reasonable level which prohibits the purchase of enormous quantities.

Success for Parkwood Road

News reached us at the end of November that Dorset County Council has agreed to our local campaigners' requests to take positive action along Parkwood Road on behalf of its residents. The road, located near to Rowlands Hill and the Quarterjack Surgery, has been suffering parking problems and vehicle-caused obstructions for some years now. This has resulted in a situation where waste collection lorries, and even emergency vehicles, have been unable to drive along the road because of some residents' rather problematic parking.


However, back in 2005, the chairman of Wimborne Minster Town Council's Planning and Environment Committee, Cllr Michael Hodkinson, raised the issue with Dorset County Council and called for double-yellow lines to be installed along the majority of the road to alleviate these problems. He began to compile evidence and photographs, and then in early 2007 Cllr Richard Booth joined Michael's campaign and began to canvass residents along Parkwood Road to ascertain their levels of support for such a scheme. Nearly everyone backed Michael and Richard's campaign.


This was passed onto Dorset County Council and now action will be taken. The installation of double-yellow lines has been sanctioned and copies of these plans can be found in the Wimborne Minster Town Hall.


I am pleased that this situation will soon be resolved, but in the future I will be ensuring that such processes are handled with more attention and efficiency by Dorset County Council – clearly too much time passed between the issue being identified and positive action being implemented by the County Council.

It really is time for change...

Further to my last post, it would seem prudent to emphasise the fact that this Government is smelling of cheap incompetence. As this HMRC scandal deepens – with another six packages unaccounted for and evidence of recorded phone calls being sent on CD to bemused householders across the country – we look back at a Brown premiership that has encompassed an evasive Home Secretary who attempted to cover up the true details of the country's asylum seeker situation. We have also seen the Northern Rock fiasco, a by-product of the credit crunch and of Gordon Brown's haphazard control of the Treasury for over 10 years, and not to mention the latest loans scandal which threatens to undermine further the credibility of senior Labour Party officials.


And, if that wasn't enough, further evidence of Gordon Brown's incompetence can be linked to the aforementioned HMRC scandal. Why did he cut the budget from that agency, thereby minimising the opportunity for proper checks to be carried out to trace data and to ensure that only appropriately-trained staff had access to such data?


Gordon Brown has been prided as a man of strength and of conviction, yet his premiership is derailing fast and it actually seems that he has been a very convincing actor for the past 10 years and a very unconvincing prime minister for the last 5 months.


And in the same way that he has allowed Alistair Darling to remain as Chancellor of the Exchequer, he also found the time to promote Dawn Primarolo from her previous job of Paymaster-General (a post she held from 1999 until June 2007, which exercises direct control over HMRC and made her the de facto minister in charge of that agency) to Minister of State for Public Health. So we have a prime minister who is incompetent, a Chancellor who cannot run his own Treasury, and a minister in charge of our public NHS who has a previous record of laying the (dis)organisational foundations for this HMRC crisis.


Wonderful.


Isn't it time that the citizens of the UK had the chance to vote on this crippled Government? When can we vote for change and for optimism? For real fiscal prudence and free market economics? For sharing the proceeds of growth and cutting stealth taxes? And, above all else, when will Gordon Brown give us the chance to vote for a new Conservative Government that will deliver the fair and just society that Britain desperately needs?

A Matter of Competence

No doubt by now commentators elsewhere are highlighting the horror of the loss of 25 million personal records by the Revenue and Customs.  

Errors occur in every business.  Post goes astray.  These kind of things are often unavoidable.

What is avoidable is allowing a 'junior official' the access to so many personal records, the ability to download them and the authority to send them willy nilly to another agency without there being any system to authorise, track or confirm receipt of the information.

It is a matter of competence.  Yes, Revenue and Customs are a semi detached agency of the government, but the responsibility for their operation still lies, ultimately, with the Treasury.  That means the Chancellor of the Exchequer.

If he has an honour at all he should resign.   

Gardeners' Question Time and Council Funding

Not normally found together in the same sentence, I fully admit.

I quite enjoy listening to Gardeners' Question Time on Radio 4.  Invariably their are questions asked that apply equally to my own gardening experience.

I was listening last week and heard a question from a member of the audience in Durham about what to do with the plastic plant pots she obtained from the garden centre when buying new plants.  She complained that her local authority, Durham City Council, did not offer a plastic recycling service and wanted some ideas from the panel as to other uses to which the pots could be put.

The panel comprised members who mostly lived in the South and expressed surprise that Durham didn't offer a plastic recylcing services as all their local councils did.

It dawned on me that this is a symptom of the imbalance in funding for local government which we suffer from so severely here in Dorset.

Presumably, Durham City Council don't have the same cost pressures that our local councils do and therfore have not been 'encouraged' to bring in a wider recycling scheme to cut their land fill waste.  The logical conclusion must therefore be that not only is the Government's financial settlement for local authorities unfair, it's also not very green. 

Fixing our broken society

I have been appalled by the recent headlines which show that gun crime and gangland violence is on the rise. Now some of the victims are not even members of gangs, but innocent bystanders. Nonetheless, gang member or not, these are all children and we must take immediate and committed steps to eradicate this culture of violence from within our society.

When the Conservatives speak of the UK's broken society and how social responsibility is the answer, I tend to agree. But, we must also commit detail and policy examples to these soundbites. For example, there can be no doubt that our society is starting to come apart when violent crime has more than doubled since 1997, which includes gun crime also doubling in the same time. Almost 450,000 more crimes were committed in 2005-06 than in 1998-99 - but just one in four crimes were cleared up by police.

Signs that our society is failing are manifesting themselves in other ways as well. Family breakdown is all too common, social mobility is falling, education is not tailored enough to certain children's needs. For example, why not reform the system to create three tiers of colleges - science-based, arts-based and vocationally-based. That way our children can enjoy self-selection instead of being selected by local education authorities which may neglect individual needs.

To address the problem of crime and antisocial behaviour, we need a two-pronged strategy: judicial punishment and rehabilitation programmes. The former means more police on the streets, more funding for PCSOs, and a system where paperwork and bureaucracy is cut back so the police can actually get on with protecting our communities. After all, statistics show that a police officer only spends an average of 40% of their time on the beat nowadays due to unreasonable amounts of paperwork and hoops to jump through.

Rehabilitation, meanwhile, is more complicated, yet much more rewarding in the long term. We need to really integrate community leaders with those that cause the most trouble, whilst realising that many young drug addicts have a medical condition which must be treated with compassion and with commitment on both sides. Jail is not the only answer, it works hand-in-hand with other forms of treatment.

But how do we reverse the mindsets of thousands and thousands of children who have grown up in a climate of fear and uncertainty? We need to reach out to inner cities and to areas where family breakdown is rife, by launching comprehensive and individually-tailored educational programmes. We need to offer incentives for those who may not be academic, but those who would nonetheless flourish in more vocational professions. All of these activities need to be led by strong leadership figures - perhaps even directly-elected mayors - and more social workers and community leaders, funded by increasing deregulation and sharing the proceeds of growth.

This issue spans decades, not elections. We now need the chance to enact our array of compassionate and comprehensive policies. This is the most important issue facing politicians today - without a society for the future, nothing else can come to true fruition.

Civic honour for former Bournemouth councillor

Last week I was one of the few Conservative Councillors who voted in favour of ex councillor Adrian Fudge being made an Alderman of the town. For me the situation is very simple. While I may have disagreed fundamentally with Adrian over his policies and more particularly over those issues effecting the ward for which we were both councillors, Littledown and Iford, I could not fault his commitment to the role of councillor either in terms of time or energy. I believe it’s necessary to divide the personal from the political and that is why I voted the way I did and will do so again if the matter comes before the Council.

While I was disappointed that a majority of my colleagues did not see the situation in the same way, I was more disappointed by the fact that opposition members chose to boycott the subsequent Council meeting after the vote had been taken. We are all elected to represent the residents of our wards. They expect us to carry out the role to which they elected us and for which we are paid. What more fundamental duty is there than to attend a meeting of the full Council? The vote was, after all, democratic. I may not have liked the result any more than my Lib Dem and Independent colleagues, however by choosing to leave the chamber they left their electorates disenfranchised and failed fundamentally in their duty to the people who elected them.

There are far more important issues facing the town than whether an ex councillor is made an Alderman. We politicians are left in a poor light by the affair and I would urge my colleagues of all parties to draw a line under it and move on to concentrate on the important issues they were elected to address.

Congestion

It took me over an hour to get from Bournemouth to Wimborne last night. If this goes on much longer the whole area is going to become a car park in the Summer.

We need to get the Highways Agency and the Unitary, District and County Councils to resurrect the road improvement schemes for the area, we need to think outside the box on public transport and we need an MP who'll pull all of this together.

Don't we?

UKIP and the BNP

The BNP web site has this comment at the begining of an article about the number of UKIP candidates standing in this year's local elections:

"British National Party activists and members in all parts of Britain are generally on good terms with local members and activists of the UKIP – having so much politically in common."

That says it all really. It certainly confirms the suspiscion I've long held that UKIP are just the more acceptable alternative for those who would otherwise be more at home in the BNP.

Blogging Breakdown

I thought an apology was in order. I suddenly realised that it has been over a month since I posted anything on this blog.

Time certainly flies doesn't it.

Collapsing buildings, moving house and a poorly dog are my excuses. Hopefully the next few weeks will see me making up for lost time.

Where our money's gone

The Shadow Chancellor, George Osborne has a commentary in today's Sunday Times.

This part of the article stood out for me:

for every extra £100 that Brown has spent since 1997, only £30 has been used to improve frontline public services. Thanks to the way he has run the Treasury, the rest has gone on cost-inflation, bureaucracy and waste.

That says it all about this Government really doesn't it? It also tells you exactly why I am running for Parliament.

The DVLA - nothing better to do?

My Dad went to get an MOT for his car today.

He went to a small local garage in a village near where they live. It's run by a father and son and provides an excellent service. The chaps are friendly, do the job while Dad waits and, best of all from Dad's point of view, have a good old chin wag with him while he is there.

It's the kind of personal service that doesn't make anyone astonishingly rich, but does ensure customer loyalty and therefore a regular income in the face of larger and often cheaper competitors.

Except today, when Dad went there he was told very apologetically by the father of the pair, that he couldn't really stop to talk until the MOT inspection was completed. The reason for this was that, at the commencement of the inspection, the garage log in to the VOSA computer. They then have a certain time to complete the inspection. If they take longer than this allotted time, the VOSA ring them up and start quizzing them about why the inspection has take too long and what is wrong the with the car.

What happens if there is an issue which needs discussion? What happens if the person doing the inspection is called away?

The whole thing seems mad to me. What possible benefit is there for the VOSA to insist that an MOT inspection take a certain amount of time? More importantly, who is paying for the person to sit on the end of the phone calling these various garages to enquire why the inspection is taking so long?

Talk about the Nanny state sticking its nose in to everyone's business, this really is an example of bureaucracy gone mad.

Update: Thanks to the person who posted the comment to put me right about the difference between the VOSA and the DVLA and to suggest the garage talk to them. Quite right, I'll get Dad to mention it, however it still seems draconian to me; an intrusion and a waste of resources.

New recycling facility in Upton

Lytchett Minster & Upton Councillor Paul Johns has worked with the Town and District Councils to obtain a plastic bottle recycling bank in the Upton Community Centre car park. This is a convenient site for many Upton residents and we hope many of you will find it useful.

The recycling bank was moved, as a temporary measure, from the Upton Oil Company site to the Community Centre and unfortunately it has taken longer to get a replacement unit for the Oil Company site. Therefore if the plastics bank at the Upton Oil Company is full please use the one at the Community Centre.

Bearwood Community Centre - An apology and a correction

Back in January I posted this message which involved a reference to the local church being involved in the refurbishment of the Bearwood Community Centre.

I'm very sorry to say that this was wrong. I misunderstood the information I was given about the refurbishment of the centre. For that error I'm very sorry and I'm pleased to correct it publicly here.

Milhams Recycling Site

I attended the Environment Scrutiny and Review Panel at Bournemouth Council tonight.

One point that was raised was the exclusion of anyone who isn't a Bournemouth Council Tax payer and lives more than 3 kilometers from Milhams Recycling and Waste Centre.

Undoubtedly this policy has helped Bournemouth's recycling and waste targets, but it has inconvenienced people in the general locality greatly.

Milhams is on the edge of Bournemouth, essentially where Bournemouth, Poole and East Dorset Councils' boundaries meet.

I'll be campaigning for this radius to be widened after the local elections in Bournemouth in May. The site is the closest waste facility for people in Merley, Bearwood, Canford Bottom and Colehill, yet many of these places are more than 3 kilometers from the site. If we are really committed to improving recycling and waste management we should find a formula by which people in the wider area can use the facility.

Wimborne Conservatives

Wimborne Conservatives have a new web site. You can take a look here.

Excellent effort from their team.

Conservatives confirm opposition to ID cards

The Shadow Home Secretary, David Davis MP, has today written to the Cabinet Secretary, Sir Gus O'Donnell giving formal notice that an incoming Conservative Government would scrap the Government's ID card project.

David has also asked what provision, if any, has been made in the relevant contractual arrangements to protect the Government - and public funds - against the costs that would be incurred as a result of early cancellation of the scheme.

A similar letter has also been sent to the likely major contractors warning them of our intentions.

This is the text of the letter to Sir Gus...

"I am writing to you in relation to the Government's planned roll outof its national identity card scheme, commencing this year. You will be aware that there is a long standing convention that one Parliament may not bind a subsequent Parliament.

As you will also be aware, the Conservative Party has stated publicly that it is our intention to cancel the ID cards project immediately on our being elected to government. You are now formally on notice of our position and fully appraised of the contingent risks and associated liabilities arising from the national identity card scheme.

In light of these risks, I urge you to consider very carefully the government's position, in advance of the roll-out of the scheme later this year. As a matter of financial prudence, it is incumbent upon you to ensure thatpublic money is not wasted, and contractual obligations are not incurred, investing in a scheme with such a high risk of not being implemented. In particular, I would be interested to know what provision, if any has, been made in the relevant contractual arrangements to protect the Government - and public funds - against the costs that would be incurred as a result of earlycancellation of the scheme.

The Conservatives will be a launching campaign against Labour's ID Cards proposals tomorrow."

Hat Tip: Iain Dale

I'm voting, are you?

Estonia's General Election is on March 4th. This advert is appearing to encourage people to vote. The people are the well known Estonians in different fields (yes, they do exist).

The message on the shirts means 'I will vote, and you?'.




Perhaps we should organise similar adverts for the next local or general elections. Who would you choose? For me: Johnny Wilkinson, Dame Judy Dench, Cliff Richard, Richard Branson and Lord Coe.

Useless fact and Eurovision Link: Ines (laulja - which means singer) sang the 2000 Estonian Eurovision entry 'Once in a Lifetime', it came fourth.

Family Farms

Iain Dale has a great post about how the changes to UK Farming have effected he and his family here. I highly recommend it to you.

My family are remarkably similar, my mother's family were in farming in North Herfordshire on the Essex border and we subsequently moved to North Devon. The changes Iain talks about and, particularly in the Torridge area, Foot and Mouth, have changed farming and the countryside for ever, and not for the better.