Tag Archives: boris johnson

Stop these nasty attacks on people living here now

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Manchester tram attack

Racist abuse on a Manchester tram this week Pic credit:www.dazeddigital.com

CROSS POSTED ON BYLINE.COM

During both the first and second world wars my family came under  suspicion and attack from people because our family name Hencke is German. At one stage we even considered changing it or  Anglicising it  to something like Henkey.

The reason was that we were  at war with Germany and although our family left Germany via Holland in 1862 and we were virulently  anti Nazi ( my mother is Jewish after all) the hatred of the foreigner was very high at this time.

Since the Brexit campaign there has been an upsurge in nasty, vicious attacks on EU people staying and working here and racist attacks against ethnic minorities which we have not seen  for some time.

Frankly I blame  Nigel Farage, UKIP and both Boris Johnson and Michael Gove for giving respectability and legitimacy to people who have held these views privately to think they can now openly harass foreign workers in this country.

By promising to quit the European Union and ” take control ” people have been given the impression that we can stop immigration altogether and that perhaps their wish that people could be sent home will be granted.

They have been told that all their problems getting jobs, housing, places for their kids in school, hospital operations  and even traffic jams and waiting in queues are all the fault of immigrants. If they left everything would be wonderful.

This monstrous lie was perpetuated in split screen TV campaign broadcasts by the Brexit campaign. Any sane person would know that this is far more complicated.than that.

But what has been alarming is the reaction. People attacked on a Manchester tram, women abused in the street, someone quizzing people on their nationality  in a supermarket queue and telling  the till staff to serve British born people first. Others have been nastier including abusing Polish  kids at school, putting nasty messages through Polish people’s letterboxes and daubing German made cars (presumably bought by British people) with swastikas. And there was the nasty graffiti  on the Polish centre in Hammersmith, west London.

It is soon going to become very obvious that people are NOT going to get what they want from Boris Johnson. Immigration will not stop, they are not going to be miraculously rehoused and immigrant’s children are not going to be removed from school. All because  this depends on policies that have nothing to do with immigration – such as house building or providing enough places in schools.

So what should  be done. There should be a crackdown on people who do this to show it is unacceptable.

But there also should be action to explain to people that if they want to live in  dynamic, prosperous, modern society  it is going to be a multi racial and diverse and people of different beliefs, race and sexuality all have something to contribute. We are no longer a pale male and stale society and can’t turn the clock back  centuries. That is why I think London rejected the Brexit case.

The problem is that we are left with a nasty backlash from people who see they have been left behind and want to take it out on anybody who is different to them. That must be tackled or we slip into a nasty, divisive country that no one will want to stay in.

 

 

 

Did Boris steal Ken’s best ideas for London?

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Ken Livingstone Pic Credit; the Guardian

The site Londonlovesbusiness is rather an extraordinary place to find an interview with Ken Livingstone which is actually sympathetic to the former Labour mayor and critical of Boris Johnson.

But two articles  by Robyn Vinter in the past week give Red Ken a lot more credit than Blue Boris. You can find them here  and here . The second include a statement from Boris’s spokesman  listing all the things Boris says he has done for the capital.

Basically the articles say it was Red Ken who originally put forward the idea for Crossrail, London Overground. the Olympic Games and  what became to be known as Boris Bikes.

And there is also an extraordinary claim by Ken that you won’t find much evidence in City Hall archives that he was responsible for any of them.

The reason is he says is: “One of the things Boris’s team did once they won in 2008 was go through all the dates and records and websites at City Hall and remove my name from all of them and it took some time doing that.”

We have all heard that history is always written by the victors but to  change the actual archives used for people to research history is a step too far.

Given we have a key election for Mayor this year I put up links to these articles so people can judge for themselves before casting their vote.

 

 

 

Boris Johnson’s unlucky dirty tricks on the No 13 bus

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The Number 13 bus - not to be used by Boris for a dirty tricks! Pictire Credit: Commons

The Number 13 bus – not to be used by Boris for a dirty tricks! Picture Credit: Commons

Is there no desperate act a politician will stoop if his mate could lose his seat on may 7? Well Boris Johnson is prepared to do it to save Mike Freer, his Tory colleague standing for Finchley and Golders Green even it means telling porkies in the seat that once returned Margaret Thatcher and has a large Jewish vote.

Threatened according to another Tory peer and now eminence gris of the pollsters, Lord Ashcroft, with losing his seat to Labour’s Sarah Sackman on May 7, Boris thought he could perform a minor miracle and save a much loved bus route,the number 13 from Golders Green to Aldwych and swing the vote.

Unfortunately for him his success turned out to be a lie – because he has no power to do so particularly under the purdah rules in a General Election which forbids politicians ( and Boris is of course a Parliamentary candidate elsewhere) from taking controversial decisions for electoral gains.

This didn’t stop Mike Freer – see below – posing with Boris on his website announcing he had saved the Number 13.

As he says on his website:

” London Mayor, Boris Johnson, has today announced that the Number 13 Bus from Golders Green to Aldwych has been retained. The Mayor’s announcement follows a long-running campaign by Mike Freer to save the much loved service. Mike raised the issue of the 13 bus during the Mayor’s visit to Golders Green last week.

Mike comments ““I’ve already had a meeting with TfL and told them they were wrong and when Boris came to Golders Green recently I told him he needed to go back to the drawing board.

The proposals have been dropped and the number 13 is going nowhere. I’m very happy about it. It’s always useful when you can get things done.

“Being an MP you don’t always get your own way but sometimes you can get a result like this. Under Boris’s mayoralty, the number 13 is going nowhere.”

Err Unfortunately not true Mr Freer. That is not the story Transport for London are telling the people as this letter shows:

Dear Stakeholder

We recently consulted on proposals for changes to bus routes along Finchley Road and Abbey Road, which included the replacement of route 13 with alterations to routes 82 and 139. We received over 3000 responses to the consultation which is now closed. However, concerns have been expressed that the consultation has been partially undertaken during the pre-election period which runs until 7th May.

It is therefore our intention not to progress the scheme at this time.  The comments received from this consultation will however be used to inform future bus network planning in the Finchley Road and Abbey Road areas, and any resulting proposals would be subject to further public consultation.

 Yours sincerely

Peter Bradley

Head of Consultation

Transport for London

All that has happened is that Transport for London has already postponed the consultation until after the election – when it will come back again. No doubt Mr Freer hopes he will have been safely re-elected by then and of course will have no interest in any cuts that follow for his constituents.

Revealed: The Old Etonian Baronet who snapped up London’s fire engines for £2

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Sir Aubrey Brocklebank- a hooray henry owning all London’s fire engines for £2? Pic courtesy Daily Telegraph

This is Sir Aubrey Thomas Brocklebank,  6th Baronet Brocklebank, of Greenlands and Irton Hall, Cumberland.

He is now the proud owner – not just of a  battered 2cv  racing car as pictured  here – but of the entire fleet of fire engines owned by the London fire brigade. When you next have a fire in Greater London this is the man who will responsible that the crew arrive in a properly maintained and equipped fire engine.

In the mad world of  privatisation  Sir Aubrey was able to snap the fleet and  get his hands on an income stream worth nearly £200m over the next ten years – for JUST £2.

You the  council taxpayers will be paying this man £1.5m a month to look after London’s fleet. He got this  at a knock down price because  the Greater London Authority foolishly under Ken Livingstone and even more foolishly under Boris Johnson and former London fire chairman, Brian Coleman, sold off  London’s fire engines and a 20 year lease on its own maintenance headquarters in Ruislip to a private firm.

The firm was sold on to AssetCo ( which I have written about extensively) whose  own chief executive, John Shannon, had to be dismissed, when he left it teetering on bankruptcy. The actual engines are at present owned by bankers, Lloyds TSB, one of the chief creditors of AssetCo London which had over £30m in debts and haven’t a penny to  replace the ailing fleet of engines from 2014. This has been admitted by Sue Budden, director of finance,of the London Fire and Emergency Planning Authority, . She told councillors at a meeting last week: “When they look ahead and look at the big vehicle replacement that is due to start in 2014, I think they can see they are not set up to cover that.” The full story by me is on the Exaro  news website at http://www.exaronews.com.

Step in Sir Aubrey who bought ailing  AssetCo for  £2 – without the fire authority or its staff- even knowing until the deal was signed. Such is the new world of privatised services – elected people aren’t even important enough  to know who owns them.

Now Sir Aubrey appears to be the scion of a very famous and powerful shipping family who owned two stately homes. One, Nunsmere Hall in Cheshire was built for his namesake, the third baronet, who went on to join the board of Cunard, and drew up plans for the original Queen Mary in the 1920s. The family have a steam locomotive on the narrow gauge Ravenglass and Eskdale railway named after them and in 1927 there was a swish saloon known as the Brocklebank.

The present Sir Aubrey  even graces the picture collection held by the National Portrait Gallery – with portraits of him and his first wife, Dr  Anna-Marie Dunnet, purchased by the gallery in 2004. He was also like the all the family, educated at Eton but too old at 60, to be a contemporary of London mayor Boris Johnson.

But a closer investigation reveals that  Sir Aubrey is not all he seems. Gone it appears are the two stately homes – both are now hotels. And Sir Aubrey  now remarried  with wife, Lady Hazel, is actually on the electoral register at a£162,500  three bedroomed semi in Stanwick, Wellingborough in Northants – in the constituency of Tory Mp, Peter Bone.

He doesn’t even own his house outright – he has a mortgage with the very democratic Nationwide building society.

It is at this address in July  that he set up a small private company A & AB Investments Ltd, which paid the princely sum of £2 for London’s fire engines. It is this company that is now the ultimate owner of London’s fire services. He has since set up another company Premier Fireserve, based at  the leased maintenance plant owned by the fire brigade.

Nor does he have any of the illustrious careers of his ancestors. Instead he is non executive chair of a series of venture capitalist funds, under the name Puma – who simply offer very good tax avoidance schemes – by investing in anything from hotels, property, antiquarian books – and then liquidating their investments after five years to secure maximum tax relief and returns for their investors. Hardly reassuring for such a permanent feature as providing a fire service which cannot be traded for tax  avoidance.

His only other passion is racing 2cv cars – with a  team known as Twin Snails. Indeed the elderly boy racer competed at Snetterton in Norfolk over the August bank holiday weekend in the British championships. His team have had mixed fortunes -doing better at Snetterton but coming a cropper at Brands Hatch -see http://www.flickr.com/photos/maisiehexagon/492921242/

Now you may think I am making  all this up. I tried to contact Sir Aubrey five times  to find out his side of the story. But he is shy and reclusive when it comes to the press – and he never returned my calls. I wonder why as I never bite.

But I think any reasonable person would think he is not the  first person you would want to run a public service and he hardly even has a particularly good business record. It is time he is held to account and I have great hopes that  Ex MP Andrew Dismore, the Labour assembly member for Camden and Barnet, will pursue him on our behalf by every means possible to find out the truth behind this, on the surface, very dodgy development.

Coleman Update: Final Humiliation – Now facing the sack by true blue Barnet

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A report tweeted by the editor of the Barnet Times series is forecasting final doom for Brian Coleman tonight Thursday)- when his own Tory group removes him from his Cabinet  environment portfolio. (see http://bit.ly/Jhqe8h)

This means is less than seven days his income from the taxpayer will be slashed from over £120,000 – to just £12-14,000 a year. For the very first time his income level may justify his subsidised fixed rent two bedroom flat he rents from Finchley Methodist church charity.

He still keeps the chairmanship of an important Barnet Council committee on the budget and spending – but he will no longer get his £38,000 Cabinet salary.

Boris Johnson seems to have taken the sensible decision to keep him away from the London fire authority after his big defeat at the hands of the electorate which saw Andrew Dismore defeat him by 21,000 votes.

How  the mighty are fallen – Thank God for democracy and transparency.

Bye,Bye Brian..beaten by braveheart Barnet bloggers

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Brian Coleman: Thrown out by voters in Barnet

The emphatic defeat of Brian Coleman in the London Assembly elections – a larger than life bully in true blue Barnet – was one of the defining features of the London Assembly elections.

 He was knocked out of the seat by Labour comeback kid, Andrew Dismore,  an “awkward squad” former MP for Hendon, whose campaigning skills and determination when he was a MP was  well-known in Parliament. So he shouldn’t have been surprised that Dismore would pursue every voter.

Victor Andrew Dismore: Former awkward squad MP

But there is no question in my mind  why 2012 was so different to 2008 for Brian Coleman –  apart from the political climate that favoured Labour last night but also saw Dismore perform far better than Livingstone.

Coleman had a unique skill to anger  nearly every group in the borough  – whether the small shopkeeper, the motorist,home owners (over parking),the local firefighter, the trade unions, struggling single parents, religious groups, journalists, – and when there was a chance to throw him out they could hardly wait to do so.

But he had relied on a cash strapped local press to bully his way often unreported and rarely held to account by his local Tory group, who seemed to live in ” shock and awe” of whatever he said next.

But the difference between 2012 and 2008 is that he couldn’t get away with it so easily – because of the rise of the blogosphere. Five local bloggers including a larger-than-life figure blogging as Mrs Angry;a guy with a head for figures – Mr Mustard; John Baldy and the Barnet Eye  and Barnet Bugle took him on – and wouldn’t let him get away with it. I should also add – Mr Mustard has reminded me -Mr Reasonable and Vicki Morris.

 He also faced a pretty lively campaign from the Fire Brigades Union – both in Barnet and across London – because of his passion for privatisation which got him far too closely connected to AssetCo, the near bust and badly run owner of London’s fire engines.

 In my view – though this  can’t be scientifically proven – the coverage of the blogosphere changed hearts , minds and eventually votes  in Barnet. They were read by large numbers of people (the one I did as an armchair audit on his expenses,home, and allowances, attracted well over 3000 hits)

Coleman himself was a large dinosaur when it came to the net – he needed young Tories and officials to tell him how to operate a computer – so he didn’t realise what was coming.

Coleman is one of the first councillors  to be thrown out following bad coverage on the net. The very ” armchair auditors” that David Cameron and Eric Pickles are keen to promote – came out and devoured their protegé on the London Assembly. Grant Shapps, the computer savvy local government minister, should be proud to see people held to account in this new way.

If the Tories believe in real democracy the one decision Boris Johnson should take is not to use his power to re-instate Coleman as an appointed councillor in any way to the London Assembly. The people of Barnet and Camden have spoken.

Maude’s Tory Madrassa: The House of the Rising Spads

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Come into the garden,Maude. leafy outlook at Denny Garden - a tenant's perk

This is the second part of the Armchair Audit of Francis Maude -looking at his role as a landlord.

Not only can Mr Maude look forward to a platinum pension  from investment bankers, Morgan Stanley, (see previous blog) but he is  also making money as a  landlord in Kennington, south London by letting out rooms available only to young  ambitious Tories.

Just off the Kennington Road where he once lived lies Denny Crescent, a beautiful and leafy enclave in a somewhat grotty  area.

Here Mr Maude purchased  a home for £240,000 cash in 1999. The  three bedroomed property, one of a terrace, has more than doubled in value since then – a next door home was recently sold  for £485,000 – and boasts two special  features.

One is  a restricted covenant signed between Mr Maude and as the title-deed shows ” His Royal Highness Charles Philip Arthur George Prince of Wales, Duke of Cornwall, Rothesay,Earl of Chester, Carrick,Baron of Renfrew, Lord of the Isles and Great Steward of Scotland.”  Originally it was owned by the  Duchy of Cornwall which has imposed restrictions.

Mr Maude’s  terraced home  is Grade II listed. Lambeth Council’s description describes the  terrace as built in  “1913 by J D Coleridge for Duchy of Cornwall Estate. Crescent of 2-storey red brick cottages in Dutch style. Dark tiled roofs with dividing chimney walls and moulded wood eaves cornice. Returned crowstepped gables, with Roman cement coping, at ends and flanking centre. First floor brick band. Sash windows with glazing bars in moulded wood architraves. Half glazed doors in plain wood frames have low oblong fanlight. Handsome rainwater heads with Prince of Wales’ feathers and motto. ”

The second is membership for £125 a year and use of a private garden for his tenants, Denny Garden Ltd, opposite his home. You can find out all about this at http://dennygarden.wordpress.com.

EXPENSES SCANDAL

This property featured in the Daily Telegraph’s expenses scandal. It was the family’s London home – the electoral register shows Francis, Christina, and two of his daughters  Julia and Cecily, lived there until 2006.

Then Mr Maude  and his family swapped homes to a flat in nearby Imperial Court taking out a £345,000 mortgage and began claiming  substantial Parliamentary expenses on the flat. They charged the taxpayer £387.50 for moving the furniture from Denny Crescent there.

What the title deeds reveal is that Mr Maude also took out another mortgage with the HSBC Private Bank  on Denny Crescent raising another tranche of cash.

Mr Maude’s “tax efficiency” as they call it  is clever – at the time he claimed  interest on one mortgage from the taxpayer and offset new rental income from Tory activists in his old home  by loading all the mortgage  interest costs and repairs against the rental charge. That way he pays little tax.  And he has released hundreds of thousands of pounds of capital to spend himself. No wonder he is a highly paid former investment banker.

The property unlike next door – where the tenant pays Prince Charles’s Duchy of Cornwall  £500 a month for the unfurnished house – is not registered as a  fair rent.

MAUDE’S TORY MADRASSA

Westminster gossip  among Tory Spads ( the name for political advisers to ministers) has it that the only way you can get a convenient place to lay your head at the Maude address is to be vetted by his daughters. No chance if you are not a rising Tory activist, preferably a special adviser or wannabe MP. It also ensures no indiscretions to outsiders at the dinner table. Some wag described it as “Maude’s madrassa”.

True or not Mr Maude has had both  infamous and rising stars as his tenants.

Maude's most infamous tenant: James McGrath Pic courtesy: Daily Telegraph

 Chief among them is Australian James McGrath, a  40 something strategic adviser to Boris Johnson.

 He was exposed by journalist and campaigner Marc Wadsworth for suggesting that black immigrants who were unhappy with living in a London run by Boris Johnson should go home (See Guardian comment  is free  http://bit.ly/sWjUCq). Despite being close to Lynton Crosby( now masterminding Boris’s campaign again) he was forced to quit and he ended up going home to Australia where he is campaigns director for the Liberal Party. He has threatened to return.  In an interview with Shane Greer in Total Politics,(see http://bit.ly/sN4Sgd ) he said: ” I might come back here, we’ll see what happens.

Shane: Who knows, maybe the Boris re-election?

James: “Maybe actually, that would be nice actually especially if Ken runs again. No worries.”

Shane: “Good to stick it to him?”

James: “Totally.”

Less controversial is Martha Varney, Maude’s tenant until 2010, but a rising star,in her late 20s / eraly 30s and now special adviser to  eccentric bin dumper Oliver Letwin, who works with Francis Maude, in the Cabinet Office.  She is paid between £40,000-£54,000 a year.

Even less well-known is Alistair Richardson, in his late 20s, another Tory wannabe who has written blogs for Platform10, urging in 2o08 that MPs  (now on £65,000) should be paid at least £100,000 a year.

There are also  people not on the public electoral register. So which rising Tory star will kip at Maude’s listed home next?

Eric Pickles and Boris Johnson: Dirty Large Tricksters

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New Tory image: The Exhaust Pipe. Pic courtesy auto.howstuffworks.com

Remember  David Cameron’s greening of the Conservative Party with that lovely logo of a tree. It is beginning to look as though it has got leaf rot or some other nasty disease. Perhaps the symbol should be replaced with an exhaust pipe.

Pickles: A cunning little plan.Pic courtesy cyclingsilk.com

The rot set in when Eric Pickles decided on a crafty  trick  in the Localism Bill to ” devolve” the payment of European Union fines from Whitehall to town hall. The two likely areas where councils will start having to pay hundreds of millions of pounds are waste disposal and air pollution. Both are affected by EU directives and Britain has little time left to comply with them.

This has caused considerable anger among  Labour councils and even at the Conservative dominated Local Government Association. Authorities now not only face swingeing cuts but also fines unless they spend money to meet tough EU standards aimed at reducing pollution and waste. And if they have to pay the fines they will have to introduce even more cuts or get into expensive law suits with ministers over what proportion of the fine they should pay.

As Baroness Margaret Eaton, Conservative leader of the LGA said:  “ Changing the goalposts now to make councils liable for fines is unfair to them and unfair to the local residents who may have to foot the bill. The Government must amend this unfair, unworkable, dangerous and unconstitutional legislation.” See full press release at http://bit.ly/g2W7EP

But there has been another extraordinary response from Boris Johnson which seems to suggest the solution is NOT to implement the new  EU anti-pollution measures so we don’t have to pay the fines anyway. Flushed out by Murad Qureshi, Labour’s environment spokesman at City Hall, he disclosed that David Cameron and Eric Pickles want the EU to defer new tough air pollution measures for four years until 2015 so major conurbations including traffic ridden London don’t have to do anything yet.

Murad Queriashi is not impressed: “: “London’s air is literally killing thousands of people prematurely every year but it just doesn’t seem like Boris Johnson appreciates this. Improving air quality standards is one area where the mayor of London can, with a bit of will, make a real difference to people’s lives and especially to the lives of children. The statistics obviously haven’t had much effect on Boris – hopefully the threat of a big fine will.”

All this calls into question whether the Tories are really committed to the environment.

 Basically Pickles has devised a very cunning plan. Make councils pay EU fines which will make the EU unpopular. See if you can delay anti-pollution measures which are affecting health – try walking across the Euston Road in London or near Birmingham’s inner ring road  – so we don’t have to bother anyway. If that fails, it doesn’t matter, because it will be the councils who pick up the tab.

Robert Neill, the local government minister, gave it away earlier this year by blaming Labour for signing up to the Lisbon Treaty for councils having to pay fines. But as far as I know there was no provision in the treaty saying councils must pay.

Perhaps Pickles, Neill and Johnson aren’t really bothered by pollution – so an exhaust pipe rather than a tree would suit them.

The Boris appeal: Please give generously….

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Boris launches appeal Pic: courtesy anorak.co.uk

 

Boris Johnson recently told the London Assembly that he simply could not afford to give a 4 per cent pay rise to the lowest paid staff at City Hall because “everyone is feeling the pinch.” He may yet be forced to make an appeal on his own behalf. This is how it might look.

These are hard times. Everyone is feeling the pinch. But it is much worse for those at the top who now face crippling taxes  while having horrendous responsibilities for clearing up the mess left by those nasty Socialists..

What you don’t seem to realise is how badly off I am. Don’t you realise thanks to Dave’s dodgy decision to keep the 50 per cent tax rate which is driving my mates away from the City, I am having to pay MORE in extra tax  on my £400,000 a year than some of you will ever earn in a lifetime.

As mayor I need proper time for r and r and this doesn’t come cheap. While only on New Year’s Eve I needed to shell out over 35,000 rupees a night- £501 in British sterling if you must know – for a camping holiday in the middle of  the Indian scrub.

And while lying in my tent I was about to be upstaged by a load of Russian oligarchs with oodles of cash arriving from Amritsar in a private jet! Fat chance of me travelling from London in the same style, even if I could hitch a lift from Lord Ashcroft. And that was without the cost of flying out by bog standard passenger jet and the prices for big fat Havana cigars and loads of Scottish malt whiskey which any Mayor has to consume to keep up public appearances.

Indeed I was forced to jump back into my personal hot tub to avoid indignity of being outspent by those Russians. Thankfully there was decent Chinese air com and an Italian espresso to calm my shattered nerves.

As you can see from the web brochure, http://www.the-serai.com/the_serai.html, it was a modest place, at least for a mayor.

Fortunately back in Blighty my good friend Fraser Nelson allowed me to recoup a little cash by writing  about my holiday trip for my old  magazine, The Sextator, sorry Spectator. You can read all about it at http://bit.ly/gbhGlx and my views about the Piccadilly line are thrown in for free.

 But this extra cash is not going to be enough. I will need more money to keep the r and r I must have while I battle on. You can help me by contacting me by e-mail at mayor@london.gov.uk . Do give generously. As I told the London assembly everyone is feeling the pinch.

Netroots: Blogger’s victory safeguards public scrutiny

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brian coleman -thwarted by a blogger.Pic courtesy: Evening Standard

Those who went to the TUC’s Netroots conference  last weekend should take heart from the success of one of their active bloggers only days after the event.

Adam Bienkov, aka Tory Troll, spotted that Brian Coleman, chair of the London fire authority, had tabled a paper changing arcane standing orders to abolish the right of any of the elected representatives to ask him a question on fire policy. This was to happen at the same meeting that is expected today to tear up a carefully negotiated settlement with London firefighters over their working hours.

 Brian Coleman, no stranger to this blog, was going against Conservative policy to promote transparency and accountability in public life. He would have probably got away with it without the tenacity of Adam. He published the facts,linked the report on his website and it got taken up – by print media in the London Evening Standard and the Guardian Diary. Soon it was on local radio airwaves and this morning was on regional BBC Breakfast TV.

The result: a complete climb down when Boris Johnson, to his credit, effectively repudiated Coleman, and publicly endorsed the party’s policy of openness in City Hall.

This is worth highlighting because  it  can be replicated with the new Netroots network. Other bloggers can keep an eye on their local council by looking up the agenda of council meetings on the council website  before they take place. And if they see anything nasty, highlight it and get in touch with the local media. Turning sunlight on dodgy council decisions can be really effective. Well done, Adam.