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Woad on the road and bicycle hire

Today is the day, the Barclays Cycle Hire scheme is live and the cycle superhighways are there to ride along.

There are now 5,000 bikes across London ready for you to hop on and hop off, whisk you from one place to another, encourage exercise and lighted the load on the bus and tube network.

All good.

London Mayoral hopeful says "I have no opinions about crime and policing in London"

If you read that headline in the lead up to the elections in 2012 you would be right to be incredulous.

It would be inconceivable for a serious candidate to not have a position on one of the top issues affecting Londoners. The Mayor wasn't confident that the former Commissioner of the Met was giving crime fighting enough of a priority which is why we now have a Commissioner that takes crime fighting very seriously. Make no mistake, Sir Paul Stephenson runs the Met but does so in a way which addresses the priorities of Londoners rather than the Home Office.

Yet in most of the country there is no mechanism to ensure the police force stay focused on the needs of local people.

There really are only two questions that need to be asked with regard to policing in the UK, firstly; Would you be happy with a police force accountable to no one? I assume that the vast majority of people would say "no". This leads on to the second question; "To whom should the police be accountable? I strongly believe that the police should be accountable to the people that they serve rather than a (physically and metaphorically) distant government department.

When you hear that the police don't want "political control" think about what that means. No one is advocating politicians making the operational decisions but if politicians shouldn't have overall responsibility for the police then who should?

The new proposals outlined by Teresa May today represent a huge step towards the police being accountable to the local people in the area they serve.

Angry of Bexley and Bromley

I watched the BBC's coverage of Livingstone's media stunt at the MPA this morning. I wasn't surprised that the covered it but I was surprised by how unbalanced the reporting was.

I was moved to send the following missive to an important person who works at the Beeb:

Dear........

I am very unhappy with the BBC London element of today’s lunchtime news, in
particular the reporting of Ken Livingstone’s appearance at the MPA this morning.

I struggle to see how the presentation of a blatantly political and numerically insignificant petition (400 names form a city of 7 million people!) warrants a slot on the news. Having decided to cover the story I would have expected the piece to include at least some attempt at balance and context, both were missing. The report highlighted Ken Livingstone’s position but failed to show responses from the MPA’s Chief Exec Catherine Crawford, Steve O’Connell AM or myself, all of whom addressed points that he raised.

The former Mayor is showboating as part of his attempt to get the Labour nomination, he is doing this by campaigning against a policy created under his mayoralty, enacted by Len Duval AM whilst Chairman of the MPA and continued by Boris. None of this came across from your report.

If you intend to use this package again I feel it inexcusable not to include a balancing opinion at the very least.

Ooooooooh I feel better now.

Ken Livingstone - The Arch Hypocrite

For anyone who was starting to buy into the "cuddly Ken" image he is trying to promote should watch tomorrow's MPA meeting.

Livingstone is using the slot normally reserved for people (or their families) who have been the victims of miscarriages of justice or have been hurt by police mistakes (the De Menezes family and Blair Peach's family have both come in recent years) to present a petition about police numbers.

Not only is this crass and blatantly political but also deeply hypocritical, the policy that Livingstone is campaigning against is one initiated under his mayoralty while there was a Labour Chair of the MPA.

Project Herald is about getting police officers out from behind desks and onto the front line, while some police officer posts will be civilianised it will release about 550 officers to go out on the beat rather than sitting behind desks in custody suites.

Livingstone was once a slick political opperator but this move is stupid, obviously linked to his bid to become Labour's mayoral candidate and deeply hypocritical. He has screwed up big time.

I intend to tear into Livingstone at tomorrow's meeting, but I might be at the back of a long queue.

A brace of Johnsons in Orpington

This morning I joined Boris and Jo Johnson MP, Cllr Stephen Carr (Leader of Bromley Council)and the Mayor and Mayoress of Bromley at the official opening of Orpington High Street.

Bromley Council and TFL have jointly spent £2.2 million renovating the area to support and encourage local business. The turn out and responce from local residents and traders indicated that they feel it has been money well spent.

After speeches and a quick coffee provided by the Oprington Business Forum, we joined the Johnson boys during a walk along the street chatting to businesses. Here you can see a picture of Boris and Jo doing the "left arm in" verse of the Okey cokey.

How hot is the Earth supposed to be?

I have been toying with the idea of writing this post for some time. I am well aware that discussions about climate change can generate a lot of heat and not much light (pun intended), but this is a question that has been bugging me for quite a while. So I am willing to withstand the brickbats in order to harvest the wisdom of the crowd.

I have witnessed conversations which involve one person saying that global warming isn’t happening at all, on saying it is happening and it is all down to human action and another saying it is happening and it is all down to increased sun activity. I stood by and just listened.

Let’s start at what I believe I know. When I learned about the dinosaurs I was told that they were the dominant life form on Earth for over 150 million years, which is a period that makes the humans’ time on Earth negligibly short. They were reptiles and therefore cold blooded and depended on significantly higher air temperatures than we have now in order to survive.

As our distance from the Sun hasn’t significantly changed, so it is reasonable to assume that there is an expected average temperature that a planet should expect when it is 150 million KM from the Sun. Venus is a bit closer and a bit hotter and Mars a bit further and a bit colder.

This leads me to the big question, how hot is the Earth supposed to be? On average?

For 150 million years until about 65 million years ago it was much hotter than it is now, over the fairly recent past it has been much cooler than it is now, but which is closer to the average mean temperature for the whole history of the planet. If the mean is a higher temperature than we are currently experiencing, could recent global warming be at least partially explained by reversion to the mean?

Thoughts please!

Impressed with FM Conway

Those of us who live or have grown up in SE London will probably be familiar with the dark green trucks of FM Conway, they have been doing road resurfacing in London and NW Kent decades.

FM Conway's Head Office is based just outside the eastern edge of my constituency and they are opening two new sites in north Bexley, they employ a large number of people from both Bexley and Bromley so I think of them as a local company.

So why am I talking about them? Yesterday I went to visit them wearing both my constituency and LWaRB hats and I was impressed on both counts.

As I said the company already employs a number of local people and the numbers will increase as their two new sites come on stream, but the thing which impressed me the most is their work on recycling the road materials that they collect.

FM Conway are working towards 0% of road materials going to landfill. This involves breaking down the road surface, sorting the component elements, cleaning the aggregate (using water recycled from their gully cleaning activities), reprocessing the aggregate and bitumen mix and putting it all back again as a lovely, new, smooth road surface.

By using the recycled material the company are avoiding both landfill and aggregate taxes, both of which are increasing dramatically. This process is both good for the planet, good for FM Conway, and good for the council tax payers as it reduces the cost of road-works.

It is great to see a local company getting on the front foot like this.

How to say sorry

I have always been frustrated by what passes for a political apology. Lines like "I regret that my comments may have caused offence" etc. fall short of what I would describe as an apology.

It's tough when you are apologising for something that wasn't your direct fault but as politicians we are very good at fronting a policy proposed by a civil servant or a report drafted by a scrutiny team. Taking it on the chin when something goes wrong is the other side of that coin.

I was hoping that the habit of half apologies would leave with the Labour government and I'm pleased to see that the early signs look promising. For anyone who isn't sure what a proper apology looks like, here is a one:

A Desmond not good enough any more?

I cockney rhyming slang the word for a second class honours degree (lower division) is a Desmond. The Lower second is known as a 2.2 or two two and Desmond is short for Desmond Tutu (the famous anti apartheid campaigner and former Arch Bishop of Cape Town).

I digress.

I hear on the news this morning that employers are regularly disregarding a 2.2 degree when considering applicants for graduate jobs. I find this deeply concerning because there was a time when getting a degree of any classification was regarded as an achievement and a 2.2 costs the student and the state just as much as a 2.1 or a first.

If we are saying that for, perhaps half of all graduates, the time money and effort just wasn't worth it we should be more honest and say that the last government's arbitrary target of 50% of young people going to university was not just unwise but deeply unfair.

What we need is a credible and respected vocational education stream, not seen as worse than or subordinate to the academic stream but different and equally important. We have too few engineers, teachers, craftspeople because we force too many young people down an inappropriate academic stream.

It would be sad enough if it were just that but the real shame is that we are saddling thousands of young people with huge personal debts at the very start of their lives for the privilege of getting a degree that employers don't take seriously.

And before you ask I'm proud to have a vocational degree (and a Desmond at that!).

Nanny state

I don't usually link to Boris' telegraph articles, as much as I enjoy them I feel that doing so would look more than a little sycophantic. This week I make an exception.

How have we got to the stage where parents are now assumed not to have their child's best interests at heart? When we hear stories of young children being tortured to death by their parents right under the noses of social services can we really justify adding to their workload by reporting parents for letting their children walk or cycle to school?

I don't know much about Mr & Mrs Schonrock's children but I look at my own children (exactly the same age) and ask if they could walk to a school one mile away unaided. I'm not sure mine are quite ready yet, we live on a busy road and our eldest can sometimes be a bit excitable, but I don't believe that they are too far off. At some point they will have to be let lose into the world and it should be the parents who make the choice as to when and how that happens.

As a country we need to radically rethink our relationship with children, in some areas we make them adults too early and then in other areas prevent them for gaining Independence and responsibility.

You've had your fun now it's time to move on

No one got back to me about why the residents of the ironically named Democracy Village only started their protest when the weather was good. I can only assume that while peace, and the environment were genuine concerns there was also a large degree of wanting to have some fun. I can relate to that, I like a few nights under canvas in the Summer months myself.

One of the cornerstones of a functioning democracy is respect for the rule of law, so I hope that having lost the case that the GLA brought against them in a court of law they will take it on the chin (collectively speaking) and find a more appropriate campsite.

Actually, while I hope this is the case I don't expect for one moment the protesters will respect the rule of law, as there are already reports indicating that they will not.

I believe in the right to free speech and the right to protest but there are plenty of other ways for people to make themselves heard and put a point across. So my message to the people on Parliament Square is this:

Why not start a blog, or write a letter to the papers or, or, or...... Hey!!!!! This is a crazy idea but why not stand for election, you know use the democratic process. There is a big clue in the name of your camp; DEMOCRACY Village. So what I've done there?

Actually the main point that I'm making is that you've had your fun, there are still plenty of avenues for your legitimate concerns to be aired but the rest of us would really like our square back now.

Thanks in advance.