London votes tomorrow

02 May 2012 by Dave.

Tomorrow/Today we elect a Mayor and Council in London.

Labour’s candidate is Ken Livingstone, he is fighting to replace the right-wing tory, Boris Johnson.

I was planning to summarise my feelings but if you check out my internet spore, I think you know how I feel. Nicky Gavron, a GLA Assembly Member summarizes brilliantly, why Ken is right for London, and Johnson is wrong in her blog article, Ken v Boris.

Johnson has been a disgrace as London Mayor, I don’t even thinks he wants to be Mayor, and Ken has always been a great public servant and Londoner. Once again, read Gavron’s article.

The key powers of the Mayor are Transport, Police and Planning. Ken’ll reduce the fares, bring stability to the Police and use the planning powers in the interests of Londoners to build affordable housing.

Johnson will increase fares at above inflation, sack policemen and Comissioners and built 56 houses in the last six months.

There’s only one sensible choice. Vote Labour for London.

Posted in elections, London, mayors, voting, uk, Labour | No Comments »

Something’s got to change! (In London)

24 Apr 2012 by Dave.

Should have been out on the #labourdoorstep tonight with people, but had family things to do. So I watched last night’s London Mayor debate on bbc iplayer.

I can’t believe that Boris stated the Thatcher Government had to abolish the GLC and that Ken’s original Fares Fair was in some period of pre-history. If he want the pensioner vote he’d better get his London history right, but then he’s not a Londoner. The comment/fact that Boris isn’t a man for detail shone through on the transport/police debates. He hasn’t a clue. He’s increased fares and cut the police. He claims that the money isn’t there to meet Ken’s Fare deal; only TfL who work for him say this, every independent expert says that its do-able. I hope so, every time I pass an oyster card reader, I am reminded of what Johnson’s making me pay.

Housing is a late to the table issue. Historically the Mayor’s powers are limited but the next Mayor will take ownership of London’s landbank. This is the opportunity to build more houses. In the canvassing I have done in Deptford, I have almost cried when meeting families trapped in in small council houses, their children sharing bedrooms because there is no family social housing, no affordable private sector rented accommodation. All the candidates said they’d build affordable, and sustainable (in Jenny Jones case), social housing; but until we stop foreign money using the London property market as a safe haven there will remain two pillars of unaffordable prices in both the rental and purchase markets, insufficient housing, and too much money driving up prices. They all need a demand management policy.Air Quality wasn’t mentioned on the debate programme. If you want to see what’s happening, check out http://www.londonair.org.uk/LondonAir/; why’s it important, because the Mayor takes over responsibility for the fines negotiated by Westminster with the EU, people are dying and he can make a difference. The congestion zone, and public transport fares all make a difference. It’s a bit shit that it wasn’t mentioned on the programme.

Londoners have the second worst air quality in Europe, and the highest public transport fares in the world.

In the words of the song, “Something’s got to change!”

You get three ballot papers, vote Ken for Mayor, vote Labour for your local GLA Councillor, and vote Labour for London.

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You know Brian Paddick is quite interesting, some good policies, he obviously knows his stuff on Police and Housing, but at the end of the day he’s a Liberal. Won’t take sides in the real debate between Labour and Tory in London, so just irrelevant!Jenny Jones, the Green candidate wasn’t given a fair chance on the programme. Some of my Labour party comrades’ll be suspicious that http://www.votematch.org.uk/ recommends I vote for her, but that’s what’s marvelous about democracy, I get to choose. (I was curious as to why they said I should, and it came down to their weighting, or my weighting of what I consider to be peripheral issues, but the site is a great toy and helps focus the mind on policy.)No-one mentioned Johnson’s Council Tax saving over the last four years, just to remind you, here’s Boris Johns-hen.

Posted in elections, London, mayors, uk, Labour, politics | No Comments »

The London Mayors and their tax affairs

18 Mar 2012 by Dave.

There has been some complete shite written about Ken Livingstone’s tax affairs; he has replied in this article at the Huffington Post.

Here’s the law. The HMRC insist that people once known as sole traders incorporate themselves and run fully regulated companies so that the might of the Companies Act applies to their record keeping.  As a reward, or inducement, unlike those of us who pay PAYE, they are allowed to evaluate and pay their tax bill a year in arrears. The HMRC also take a view as to whether these “Companies” are in fact “disguised employment”.  If you fail their 13 tests, and are deemed to be in “disguised employment”, then all the company revenue  is considered “income” and taxed under income tax rules as earned income.

Ken passes these tests because

• he employs staff
• he receives money from multiple customers
• and err, I have no access to his (or Boris’s) tax records, and so have no idea how many other tests he passes and fails

So, the HMRC consider him to be a genuine service company and he’ll pay tax on

• the company profit, Corporation Tax
• any dividend income, income tax as unearned income
• any salary or non salary benefit, income tax as earned income
• any employer’s national insurance (NI) liability on himself and his staff
• any employee NI contributions on his own salary

Frankly,  I find it difficult to believe that the Daily Telegraph don’t pay Boris Johnson using similar vehicles. I can’t believe that they’ll put their hands up for the employer’s NI on £250K if they could legally avoid it. Also the disguised employment rules make paying a class 1 NI stamp on two wages a bit tricky!

It should also be noted that the Civil Service rules, which I assume do not apply to the Mayor of London,  demand that public servants are beholden to one wage, that paid by the taxpayer; this is in order to eliminate any suspicion of conflict of interest. I think we know who breaks the Civil Service rule; even if it is merely chickenfeed.

It’s not chickenfeed, it’s a shit load of money; it’s also more than he earns as Mayor.

Posted in London, mayors, Labour, politics | No Comments »

Knacker of the Yard finally goes after Press wrong doers

18 Sep 2011 by Dave.

The Guardian led yesterday, with a story about itself, How the Metropolitan Police are planning to use the Official Secrets Act to force the Guardian journalists that broke the story about the hacking of ‘Milly Dowler’ phone to reveal their sources.  Geoffry Roberston, one of Britain’s leading Human Rights Lawyers writes in the Guardian, why an injunction under even this bad law, it has no public interest defence,  should fail, and will be overturned on appeal, if not before, at the European Court. He concludes with the statement that the results of this prosecution,

an ironic tribute to the stupidity of Scotland Yard – a police service that fails to investigate criminal hackers but puts in jail the journalists who exposed them.

He acknowledges that the Attorney General may be unable to act, and the Met. may be able to ignore the advice of the Director of Public Prosecutions, but I think we should know what the Mayor of London and Deputy Mayor with responsibility for Policing have to say. After all, its Londoner’s taxes that will be paying for this.

Posted in fit and proper, hackgate, press freedom, mayors, uk, politics | No Comments »

Goodbye and good riddance to the News of the Screws

09 Jul 2011 by Dave.

Goodbye, News of the Screws. It came as a bit of a shock to hear that Murdoch has closed the News of the World, but typical of our times that I first heard of it on Twitter. The twitterati and today’s print press are all predicting the launch of the Sun on Sunday, and now that News International doesn’t own the “Screws”, it hopes it’s free to be able to buy the outstanding public shareholding of BSkyB.

Plus ca change, plus la meme chose!

It seems that firing 200 people is a small price to pay to get hold of BSkyB.

The Government, at the time of writing, are stating that they are constrained by law from taking into account if News Corporation are ‘fit and proper’ to own the UK’s largest private broadcaster. But just because the News of the World has gone, doesn’t mean that the investigation into these crimes should or will stop. News International management and management systems permitted these acts to occur and couldn’t allegedly discover them when originally asked by the police and courts. Is this a fit and proper organisation to own BSkyB? The least the Government should do on the BSkyB takeover is delay the decision and ask Ofcom to investigate if News International is a fit and proper organisation to own BSkyB.

Furthermore, the wrong doers need to be brought to court, and if guilty punished. Part of the wrong doing is, like after the Watergate burglary, the cover up. There are allegations that police officers were paid corruptly by News International, and questions as to the direction of the Met’s early investigations.

The tsunami of public outrage is caused by the allegation that agents of News International illegally hacked a murder victim’s phone, deleted messages and hacked the phones of war heroes, their families and the families of victims of the 7/7 Al-Queda attacks in London. If they’d stuck to royalty, politicians and celebrities, then Boris Johnson’s comments that this was a storm in a teacup stirred up by the left wing media &  the Labour Party, an issue he dismissed as “Codswallop”  might have held, but this is not the case. In fact, News International’s paying off of the first twelve celebrities, authorised by their European chairman, James Murdoch, might have been, and now seems  more clearly to be a cynical attempt to close off  judicial enquiry.

So we need to ask, “What did James Murdoch know about the hacking of Milly Dowler’s, the 7/7 victim’s and the War Heroes’ and their families phones?”, when he paid off Sienna Miller and some of the other famous victims.  Was it a genuine attempt to apologise to the wronged or a cover-up?

The investigating police force in this sordid affair is London’s Metropolitan Police, which has not exactly uncovered themselves in glory. The Metropolitan Police is led by an appointed Commissioner and supervised by the Metropolitan Police Authority, whose members are appointed by Boris Johnson, the tory Mayor of London. Ken Livingstone, Labour’s candidate for Mayor next year, has 10 questions to ask Johnson about if he has acted on his view that what has become this great scandal is still “#Codswallop”. The de-facto chief executive, the Deputy Mayor for Policing, Kit Malthouse, is appointed by Johnson; he was elected to the London Assembly as a Conservative. The Tory leadership of the MPA will argue that they have no right to interfere in operational issues, but Johnson appointed both the Deputy Mayor and the Commissioner. He needs to answer Ken’s questions.

The worrying thing about Livingstone’s fears is that the Met are the only police force in the UK with such a political/democratic oversight. Given the example of the last two years, and what we are about to find out, we, as citizens, need to ask if we want any more ‘democratic’ control of the Police. The Coalition Agreement’s  Crime & Policing section proposes more of this sort of thing, with police oversight undertaken by ‘directly elected’ individuals. This must at the least be re-considered.

The actions of News International have placed the questions of personal privacy,  journalistic standards, corruption and police supervision at the centre of today’s politics.

It’s not over yet, and shouldn’t be.

Posted in notw, codswallop, hackgate, bskyb, murdoch, mayors, press freedom, fit and proper, politics | 1 Comment »

On Mayors

19 Jun 2011 by Dave.

Andrew Adonis reviewed Vernon Bogdanor’s latest book, “The Coalition and the Consitution” in the New Statesman last month.  Adonis believes that Bogdanor argues that the fact of Coalition is a more significant change than the proposed reforms, which he summarises as Alternative Vote, so-called Fixed Term Parliaments and House of Lords reform. I’ve not read the book, so am not sure if focussing on Clegg’s quote, “the biggest shake-up of our democracy since 1832″ is from Bogdanor, or Adonis, but neither think the plans meet this hype.

They suggest  that A.V. & Fixed term parliaments are not major game changes, and Bogdanor also looks at the reform of the House of Commons, the reduction in MPs and the equalisation of constituency sizes.  He argues that these latter reforms, while hyped as anti-Labour will particularly disadvantage the Liberal Democrats. The Government plans for House of Lords reform have now been published, so their impact can be estimated, and we now know that the next elections will be held under First Past the Post electoral system.

Adonis departs from a review of Bogdanor’s ideas by looking at the extension of the idea of executive mayors. He argues that this, “has great democratic potential”. I don’t really see it myself.

Posted in mayors, book review, uk, politics | No Comments »