Councillor's expenses

One thing of especial interest did come up at full Council on 21st May. With all the furore about MP's expenses, one of my colleagues posed a question to the Leader about Councillor's expenses. Specifically, Cllr. Carole Morris asked if Councillor's expense claims could be published monthly on Basildon Council's website. Since I am the Councillor with the responsibility for IT, this has been delegated to me and I propose to get it done as soon as possible. I don't think that we have got a problem with expenses at Basildon, but this is public money and the public deserve transparency on how it is spent.

I cannot imagine that there will be much argument over that.

Basildon District Council's new Cabinet

These is the new Cabinet for Basildon District Council:


Councillor Gordon is leader of the Labour Group and Councillor Williams in the nominee from the Liberal Democrats as we run a mixed Cabinet. There is some discussion about the other parties giving up their Cabinet positions in return for Chairmanship of the various scrutiny functions, but this has to be considered in light of yet more government legislation on the operation of local government. We want to see how this affects the Council decision-making processes before we make any changes.

Brown - no election cos' I'd lose

Prime Minister's Questions were extraordinary today. David Cameron asked for an election and Brown said no because it would cause 'chaos'. When pressed he clarified that to mean that a Conservative victory would cause chaos. So there you have it. We won't have the election that the country is demanding because Gordon Brown would lose. Politically, this is a bit of a clanger as Gordon Brown will now be accused of 'bottling', again. It also runs counter to press editorials and campaigns for an immediate election in the aftermath of the expenses scandal and the papers won't like that at all. There were numerous better ways to handle David Cameron's question, but Brown unerringly found the worst response. He will rue that in the days to come.

Even Nick Robinson twigged what a mess Brown had made of things.

Conservative Election Broadcast, on expenses instead

In case you missed it, this is why the Conservatives are doing better in political terms than Labour over the expenses scandal.



It's called leadership Gordon.

Mail on Sunday has Labour on 20%

The expenses scandal has hit support for the major parties, but it is now clear which has been hit the hardest. The Mail on Sunday will have a poll today, I am writing this very early on Sunday morning, that puts Labour support on 20%, with the Conservatives on 42%. It is clear that the contrast between David Cameron's decisive leadership and Gordon Brown's vanishing act has not been lost on the electorate.

Brown has form on this. Again and again when Tony Blair was Prime Minister, Brown would go and hide away when the political going got tough. That might have been all right when Blair was there to handle the difficult stuff, but he is gone now, Brown saw to that. Now that Brown has the top job he has to lead because that is actually the what the top job is. Instead he has hidden himself away and so Labour are plumbing new historic lows in terms of support. At 20% pledging to vote Labour, the lowest since modern polling began in 1943, we are in uncharted political territory. Certainly if that was carried over into a general election Labour would probably cease to exist in its current form. At the very least the June 4th elections look like being a total disaster for Labour.

Meanwhile, the search for Gordon Brown continues.

There is nothing British about the BNP

Formed from foreign ideology, rejecting historic British values of the basic equality of all people, engagement with the world, and political change through evolution, not revolution, the BNP is about as anti-British as you can get.

If they were British then why do they keep banging on about the Holocaust? The reason is simple, if your ideology is based on far-right philosophers from the continent then you have to attack the greatest single argument against them. So the BNP feed the Holocaust denial industry, because intellectually they have to. If your beliefs lead to extermination camps then they must be wrong. So, try and pretend the extermination camps never happened and that the Allies were just as bad. Imagine that, a political party with 'British' in its title that believes in moral equivalence among the participants of World War 2.

But this is why the BNP are fundamentally anti-British:



More here.

Cameron shows leadership on expenses

David Cameron looks like a Prime Minister, while the Prime Minister dithers. That is the contrast in the two party leaders' responses to the expenses revelations in the press. From David Cameron: unjustifiable expense claims to be repaid, all expenses to be published immediately and a rapid review of past expenses. Agree or forget being a Tory MP. From Brown, wait for a committee to report in a couple of months, due process must be followed, blah, dither, blah. Cameron gets it in a way that Brown just doesn't. In the same way as he has misread the public mood on every other major issue facing the country, Brown seems to think that the old trick of punting the matter into the long grass will do the trick. Not this time. People are simply furious at such blatant robbery of the public purse from some of our elected representatives. Brown and Labour will become yet more unpopular, if such a thing is possible.

As for Hazel Blears, Andrew MacKay, Elliot Morley and their ilk, they are finished in British politics, and probably for anything else as well. Both politics and business are built on trust. No one is going to vote for or employ anyone they cannot even trust to fill out an expense form honestly.

Brown says sorry

With truly inexplicable timing, Gordon Brown has finally said sorry for the MPs expenses fiasco. He apologised on behalf of 'all MPs' and 'all Parties', dropping his remarks into a speech to the Royal College of Nursing. Apparently, this was not pre-planned, with the PM deciding on the insert on the way to the event. Now, an apology is long overdue from Gordon Brown. While this mess afflicts all parties, most MPs are Labour and we have had a Labour government for the last 12 years, so the culpability lies mainly with them. More importantly, some contrition earlier, much earlier, might have given Gordon Brown or Parliament or both some chance of getting in front of this issue. Instead we have had stalling, denial and a refusal to take accountability which has only finally ended with the leaking of expense claims to the press. Now we have had an apology on the day that the Tories were getting a going over, which makes little sense in hard political terms. It is also far too late to draw a line under the issue, which will bubble on until every last grisly detail is in the public domain.

So, where now? Well, I agree with Sir Christopher Kelly, whose Committee on Standards in Public Life is carrying out a review of MPs' allowances, that the new openness means that most of the abuses that we have seen will probably never happen again anyway. All that is now required is for a code to be formalised that allows MPs office expenses and a second home in the vicinity of the Palace of Westminster if they need it. Hardly rocket science. Oh, and it would also be nice if HMRC went after those MPs who evaded capital gains tax as part of their taxpayer-funded property development activities. If I have to pay a hefty tax bill then so should they.

MPs Expenses

'I followed the rules', appears to be the stock excuse. It is very sad that this appears to have replaced 'I did the right thing' as the standard for our elected representatives. Of course not every MP has been taking the mickey out of the taxpayers by getting us to pay for their lifestyles and property deals, but enough have to tarnish the whole institution of parliament. At the moment it is the Labour party getting it in the neck via the press leaking of their historic expenses claims, but one suspects that the odd Conservative is going to pop up as having crossed the line of probity as well. Even so, such things tend to damage the governing party more. After all they are in charge, both of the county and in parliament where, by definition, they have a majority. Certainly the polls make grim reading for Labour on the back of this with a poll in the Mail on Sunday gving CON 45%(nc), LAB 23%(-3), LDEM 17%(nc). The UK Polling Report suggests that this equals Labour's lowest poll rating ever.

Nominated for Deputy Leader of Basildon District Council

I have been nominated as Deputy Leader of Basildon District Council by my colleagues in the ruling Conservative Group. Subject to the vote at the Council AGM on the 21st, that will be my new role in the service of the people of Basildon District. It is a huge and humbling honour to have such trust in me shown by my colleagues and friends and I am so grateful to them, and to the many others that have supported my in my political career for this opportunity. I can only say that I will do my best for all of the people of the District.

Nominated as new leader is Cllr. Tony Ball, the current deputy who will be following in a family tradition as his father was a the leader of the Council in times past. The outgoing leader is Cllr. Malcolm Buckley, an immensely capable and successful politician, who is stepping down as his own decision.