Archive | October, 2012

More Rotten Boroughs

17 Oct

The mayor makes yet another appearance in Private Eye’s Rotten Boroughs column this week.

The article essentially repeats the story told on Mike Law’s blog about Sir Robin’s pay rises and contributions to charity.

I’ve lost count of the number of times over the past few years that Newham has featured in the Eye. Surely it’s time for someone – the leader of the Labour Party, perhaps – to take Sir Robin to one side and tell him to sort it out.

Or maybe our 60 Labour councillors might start doing their jobs and hold the mayor to account. Isn’t bringing the council into disrepute against the code of conduct?

Tags: , , ,

Revised proposals for new parliamentary constituencies

16 Oct

Following a public consultation the Boundary Commission for England has submitted revised proposals for new parliamentary constituencies which, if approved, will come into force for the 2015 general election. A key part of the brief was to reduce the total number of constituencies from 650 to 600 and to equalise (as far as possible) the number of electors in each one.

Under these proposals Newham would be split into 3 constituencies, 2 of which would also include wards from neighbouring boroughs.

The new constituences would be:

I’d spend a bit of time explaining what this means in practice if it wasn’t a complete waste of time. Following the Tories’ decision to torpedo reform of the House of Lords these proposals stand almost no chance of being passed. Labour opposes them fundamentally and the Lib Dems are sufficently pissed off about the death of Lords reform (coming after their monumental shafting in the AV referendum) that they will vote them down too.

The Tories may hope that a deal on state funding of political parties (‘cash for seats’) will bring their colaition partners into line, but Clegg must know that would be political suicide. What’s the point of cash for seats if you have no, er, seats?

 

 

 

Tags: