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New Parliamentary Constituencies for Newham

When the Coalition came into office last year they agreed as part of their programme of government to reduce the number of MPs in the House of Commons from 650 to 600, which will save the taxpayer about £12 million a year and result in seats that are much closer together in terms of size.

The Boundary Commission, which decides on how parliamentary constituencies are made up, has produced its initial proposals for England. These include an overall reduction in MPs for London, but the changes for Newham and the surrounding boroughs involve a slight increase in representation.

The commission found that Newham was too large for two constituencies, as both the existing constituencies (East Ham and West Ham) have electorates in excess of 86,000, which is over the maximum permitted under the new arrangements. Therefore they have proposed a West Ham and Royal Docks constituency containing nine wards, including three (Beckton, Boleyn, and Royal Docks) from the existing East Ham constituency; a revised East Ham constituency that contains six Newham wards and two wards (Clementswood and Loxford) from Redbridge, which are currently in the Ilford South constituency; and a new Stratford constituency with five wards from the north west of Newham, together with the four southernmost Waltham Forest wards.

The full list of wards for the new proposed constituencies are:

West Ham & Royal Docks constituency:

Beckton
Boleyn
Canning Town North
Canning Town South
Custom House
Plaistow North
Plaistow South
Royal Docks
West Ham

Stratford constituency:

Forest Gate North
Forest Gate South
Green Street East
Green Street West
Stratford and New Town
Cann Hall (WF)
Cathall (WF)
Grove Green (WF)
Leyton (WF)

East Ham constituency:

East Ham Central
East Ham North
East Ham South
Little Ilford
Manor Park
Wall End
Clementswood (R)
Loxford (R)

The full Boundary Commission proposals for London are here: http://t.co/aoYHPPF

Unsurprisingly, an analysis by the Guardian shows that all three seats will be safe Labour. Based on voting in the 2010 election Labour’s majorities will be 20,382 in West Ham & Royal Docks, 20,032 in East Ham and 16,926 in Stratford. The only minor surprise is that the Lib Dems will be the main challengers in Stratford (by a small margin, it has to be said).

The Boundary Commission will be holding hearings on its proposals for this part of London at East Ham Town Hall on Thursday 27 – Friday 28 October 2011. More information is available at www.consultation.boundarycommissionforengland.independent.gov.uk

You can also write with comments to Boundary Commission for England, 35 Great Smith Street, London SW1P 3BQ, or by email to london@bcommengland.x.gsi.gov.uk. The closing date for comments is 5 December 2011.

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Categories Newham

Declaring War on Council Crackdowns

24 Aug

Sir Robin Wales cracks down on bad stuff (in his dreams)

Last week Newham Council announced a new ‘crackdown’ on slum landlords; today it announced a ‘war’ on guns and knives.

It seems barely a week goes by without some dramatic new initiative designed to tackle the latest menace, usually in the form of a ‘crackdown’ on whatever it is. This generates a few headlines in the local press before disappearing off the radar, to be replaced by the latest bee in the mayor’s bonnet.

I did a Google search on Newham and Crackdown, and it returned more than 85,000 results!

So, here are a few of the things Newham Council has ‘cracked down on’ in the past few years – and I didn’t get past page 3 of the Google results to compile it:

Crime and anti-social behaviour in Plaistow
Squatting
Tenancy Fraud
Illegal Cars
Drugs
Garden Waste
Blue Badge Fraud
Truancy
Timeshare sales
Boy racers
Dangerous dogs
Landlords flouting safety regulations
Street gambling
Illegal property conversions
Unlicensed street trading
Illegal skips
Anti-social behaviour in Stratford
Crime and Anti Social Behaviour in Romford Road
Sale of crossbows

The thing is that with the exception of crossbows – an issue that lives solely in Sir Robin’s imagination – these are all important things that need to be dealt with. But by labelling every initiative a ‘crackdown’ you remove all meaning from the word. And you end up taking the same approach to everything – as the saying goes, if the only tool you have is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail.

Tags: crackdown, newham, robinwales

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Categories Newham

Hacking the Opposition

11 Jul

Last week the “London Borough of Newhamgrad” blog site was hacked into and 3 months’ worth of recent posts were deleted. A headline was posted declaring “You’ve been hacked”.

For anyone not familiar with the Newhamgrad site, it describes itself as “an insight into the most dictatorial local authority known to Britain.” It is run by an anonymous group (I’m not one of them and have no idea who they are) who have enough connections inside Newham Dockside to come up with the occasional juicy tale, though mostly it’s bitchy political gossip.

Websites get hacked all the time, but this was no drive-by attack by a bored teenager – this was a deliberate and targeted act.

The intolerance of the Wales regime and its supporters for any kind of dissent or challenge is legendary in the borough – former councillor Alan Craig once described it as “Mugabe without the bullets“. The usual response to any criticism of Newham Labour is to label the opponent a Tory or a Trot (oddly, some people have difficulty distinguishing between the two) and expect that it is enough to damn them, but this surely represents a new low. Whoever did this went beyond politically illiterate abuse and committed an offence under the Computer Misuse Act 1990. Such offences are punishable by up to 12 months in jail.

Why would anyone want to risk that kind of penalty, just to remove some political tittle-tattle from the web?

The posts that were removed might have been a bit embarrassing for those concerned, but nothing fatal to anyone’s political career. And certainly nothing worth going to prison to suppress. They covered:

Cllr Armarjit Singh’s voting for the West Ham stadium loan without declaring that he had received hospitality from the club
Cllr Ayesha Chowdhury’s living in social housing despite owning (or having a significant interest in) a property portfolio that the site claims is valued at £2.4 million
The recent Sunday Times allegations about payments by West Ham to an executive at the Olympic Park Legacy Company
Lyn Brown MP’s hiring of an unpaid intern when she had previously campaigned for a ‘living wage for all’
The Newham Campaign Forum – a fund into which all Labour councillors are said to pay a percentage of their allowances
Cllr Unmesh Desai’s desire to succeed Sir Robin as Mayor * Plans to establish a ‘free’ school in Newham
Cllr Richard Crawford’s portfolio of responsibilities
Newham’s failure to investigate a Freedom of Information request that it said it would investigate
Cllr Paul Schafer being referred to the council’s Monitoring Officer
A Charity Commission decision not to investigate a local charity over its relationship with Newham Labour Party

On Thursday a notice appeared on the Newhamgrad site stating “This site has been the target of hacking attacks for weeks as well as been subjected to an attempt by spammers to ‘scrape’ IP addresses from our website and set up spiders to trawl it. Newhamgrad will be down until it carries out further investigations. We will be back.”

I hope they will, if only to prove that the regime’s critics will not be silenced so easily. And I hope that next time someone takes exception to something that appears on the site they deal with it via the comments section. Of course, if they think Newhamgrad goes too far they always have recourse to the law – but taking the law into your own hands is never the answer.

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Categories Newham

More Fun and Games in the Mayor’s Palace of Varieties

4 Jul

The Sunday Times carried a detailed story yesterday alleging that West Ham United made payments totalling £20,000 into the bank account of Dionne Knight, a director of the Olympic Park Legacy Company. This arrangement was put in place by Ian Tompkins, who is the director of West Ham who masterminded its Olympic stadium bid and Ms. Knight’s lover. In a previous life Mr. Tompkins was director of Communications at Newham Council, where he worked closely with the Mayor, Sir Robin Wales.

West Ham claims that the payments were for ‘consultancy work’ helping to prepare procurement documents for contracts to convert the stadium after the Olympics and that, as far as they were aware, the OLPC had given permission for Knight to do the work. They also claim the payments were on behalf of the Legacy Stadium Partnership, the joint venture entity with Newham Council that will own the 250-year lease on the stadium; as the partnership didn’t have a bank account set up they paid Knight directly.

According to records at Companies House, Legacy Stadium Partnership LLP was first set up on 12 April 2011, but the Sunday Times says that the first payments were made to Ms Knight in the month before the OLPC made its decision in February. Quite how West Ham could have made payments on behalf of an entity that did not even exist is not explained.

Since the story emerged both Knight and Tompkins have been suspended from their jobs, pending internal investigations. Knight has admitted she hadn’t told OLPC about her work for West Ham.

The Sunday Times, perhaps predictably, has billed this as a “corruption scandal” and local anti-Labour blog London Borough of Newhamgrad uses the same word in its summary. That’s going too far, at least on the evidence to date.

But there are a number of fairly obvious questions that arise from all this about what Ms Knight knew about the status of the bids to take over the stadium and what she might have discussed at home with Mr Tompkins, and what he may then have communicated on to his employers at Upton Park to help them construct a winning tender. The OLPC says ‘chinese walls’ were in place and Ms Knight had no access to key information, or influence on the outcome. But as she was working for West Ham without their knowledge it is unclear how much of a grip OLPC had on the situation. One might also ask why West Ham, on behalf of the joint venture, felt it necessary to hire a consultant to work on stadium conversion procurements before it knew the outcome of the OLPC process and why it thought there would be no conflict of interest in hiring an OLPC executive to do it while the bidding process was ongoing.

Of course Newham residents will have an interest in finding out the answers to these questions, as we are the ones on the hook for the £40 million loan being made to the Legacy Stadium Partnership (to the principle benefit of West Ham United FC), should the whole thing go horribly wrong. And if the 20 grand paid to Ms Knight was on behalf of LSP, as WHU say, half of it is our money – for which the Mayor is accountable.

Tags: newham, olympics, robinwales

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Categories Newham

Is Sir Robin channelling St George, or or turning into a Tory?

19 May

This is something I posted a few days ago on the e-Democracy web site:

The BBC is reporting that Newham libraries are to remove all foreign language publications, quoting the Mayor as saying the move will “encourage people to speak & learn English.”

The decision has, predictably, comes in for some criticism from members of communities that will be affected by the move. But the Mayor rejects this, saying, “English language is something that we’re pushing very strongly.

“Two things about the English language: You need it to get a job; secondly it brings a community together.

“Public money should be spent encouraging people to speak and learn English. Whenever I raise that with my residents they all agree with that.”

Leaving aside for a moment Sir Robin’s self-aggrandising description of Newham people as “my residents,” this is an interesting position, and much more in tune with current Conservative thinking, which rejects multiculturalism as a failure, than the view taken by the left since at least the 1960s.

In a speech earlier this year in Munich David Cameron said, “We have allowed the weakening of our collective identity. Under the doctrine of state multiculturalism, we have encouraged different cultures to live separate lives, apart from each other and the mainstream.” He added that we need to make sure that “immigrants speak the language of their new home.”

I wonder if this apparent conversion to Tory thinking is a just an excuse for a bit of mean-spirited penny-pinching, trimming into the prevailing political wind, or whether the Mayor genuinely believes it. If so, will he follow up by axing the translation services that put the borough’s myriad communications into a variety of community languages, on the basis that if people want to transact with government they should do it in English? It would be controversial, but would have the merit of consistency.

There is some small irony in a Scottish mayor presiding over a London borough with an ethnically diverse population positioning himself as a champion of Englishness. It would be fascinating to know what other councillors think of all this, and whether they were consulted before Sir Robin decided on this latest campaign.

Tags: newham, robinwales

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Categories Newham, Politics

How Newham Council Spends Our Money

8 Mar

In line with government requirements on transparency, Newham Council has released details of all payments over £500 in made in January 2011.

You can download the data from here: http://bit.ly/gEXKd1

I have had a quick look and here are some headlines (bear in mind, this was just for the month of January):

There were 9,677 payments, totalling £33,931,106

Details of 766 payments, worth £1,644,445, were redacted due to ‘personal data’ or ‘commercial confidentiality. There is no way to find out what these payments were for or who they were made to.

The top 10 recipients of Newham’s cash were:

NEWHAM HOMES LTD – £2,039,397 (15 payments)
RINGWAY JACOBS LTD – £1,774,918 (58 payments)
LOCAL SPACE LTD – £1,549,617
(1 payment)
F M CONWAY LTD – £1,178,547 (48 payments)
BADENOCH & CLARK T/A PPS – £1,088,057 (1,643 payments)
NEWHAM TRANSFORMATION PARTNERSHIP LTD – £999,268 (14 payments)
MOUCHEL LTD – £648,759 (3 payments)
WILLMOTT DIXON CONSTRUCTION LTD – £608,475 (2 payments)
NEWHAM LEARNING PARTNERSHIP (PROJECT CO) LIMITED – £530,893 (8 payments)
LONDON COUNCILS – £507,579 (4 payments)

Kingsgate Interim Advisory, “a turnaround business, focused on the implementation of solutions for challenged or failing organisations” received 3 payments, totalling £51,015.

Buried near the bottom is a single payment of £500 to the Fabian Society. The payment is from the Chief Executive’s department, for ‘conference expenses’. Given that the Fabian Society is a party political organisation (it is affiliated to the Labour party, though you don’t have to be a member to join), I’m not sure why public money is being spent sending someone to one of its conferences. No doubt there’s a proper explanation, but I’d be curious to hear it.

(for the avoidance of doubt, I have no axe to grind with the Fabians – I used to be a member and left when I resigned from the Labour party)

Tags: newham

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Categories Newham

The World Turned Upside Down

4 Mar

Imagine a council, running one of the 32 London Boroughs. And imagine that this council had just voted overwhelmingly to unilaterally change the contracts of its employees, to make their conditions of service worse, in order to save a few million quid.

You’d be appalled.

Imagine that this same council has just voted unanimously to implement a budget that will cut £100 million of spending over the next 3 years and cost 1,600 jobs among their staff.

You’d think that was a Tory council, wouldn’t you? Or may be a Con-Lib coalition? Bloody typical!

Now imagine that this same council has agreed to take out a £40 million loan and given it to a successful local business to move to swanky new premises, that this business is owned by multi-millionaires and employs some of the highest paid people in the country.

You’d think it was madness. Tory madness.

Imagine the men that own this business made their millions from pornography and sex shops.

You’d be outraged.

And imagine if you then found out that if their business failed, the people of the borough would be liable, through their council taxes, to repay that £40 million and all of the interest on it. And that the people of this particular borough are among the poorest and most deprived in the country.

You’d organise a march, demand action be taken to stop this nonsense. You’d write to the papers, organise a petition.

Unless you were a member of the Labour Party. Because this is exactly what’s happening in Newham and the silence is deafening.

Our Labour mayor and the 60 Labour councillors (we have no opposition at all here) have done exactly this. The local business is West Ham United football club, who happen to play in the world’s richest league and are owned by Davids Gold and Sullivan, millionaires many times over. And the swanky new premises is the Olympic Stadium.

So while council staff have had their conditions of service downgraded and 1,600 of them will lose their jobs, while services that people depend on are being cut, a Labour council is advancing £40 million to a couple of porn barons to help them fund a football club, leaving some of London’s poorest people to pick up the tab if it all goes horribly wrong.

Truly, the world has turned upside down.

Tags: newham, olympics, robinwales