Councillors Whitworth, Wilson, Gray, Chowdhury, Paul, Fiaz, Furness & Collier – the Mayoral Protection Squad on weekend manoeuvres
Next time angry residents approach Sir Robin armed with a megaphone and loud opinions about social housing, a crack team of councillors will be ready!
The Conservatives held a fund-raising auction on Monday night. One of the items up for sale was match day hospitality in the Directors’ Box at West Ham.
It won’t have fetched much. We know from councillor Lester Hudson’s register of gifts and hospitality that it’s only worth £25.
Marco Arment, writing on his blog
Vaccines are truly one of humanity’s greatest and most important accomplishments.
It’s tragic, dangerous, and incredibly destructive that society is needlessly regressing on this front. I’m sadly confident that anti-intellectualism and shunning of widely proven scientific data, selfishly and shamelessly encouraged by entertainers and politicians to advance their careers, will prove to be the most damaging and deadly regression of developed society in my lifetime.
Anti-vaxxers are deluded and the idiocy they peddle is incredibly dangerous. Diseases that were all but eradicated are making a comeback because of them. They put not just their own children but everybody at risk.
In Newham only 82.2% of children have received their first dose of MMR immunisation by the age of two. By the age of five, 71.9% of children have received their second dose of MMR immunisation. This is lower than the national average.
The reasons why immunisation rates here are so low are complex and more likely to be connected both to poverty and a highly transient population than to high profile celebrity anti-vaxxers. But they don’t help.
Sir Robin is desperate to raise his profile beyond the borough boundaries, but this is probably not what he had in mind.
(hat tip to Kevin Blowe)
The Evening Standard’s otherwise excellent account of the Standards Committee verdict on the mayor includes this slightly odd line:
Sir Robin, who has been leader or Mayor of Newham since 1995, is entitled to an allowance of £81,027 a year, although he donates some of it to charity.
I asked the journalist, Jonathan Prynn, if Newham council’s PR people had asked him to add this and he denied it, saying “the charitable donations have been widely reported.”
I’d say ‘widely’ was pushing it a bit and it’s only ever been reported because the mayor’s people offered it as some kind of justification for his inflation-busting pay rises. It is utterly irrelevant in the context of this story. I wonder what brought it to Mr Prynn’s mind?
Many Newham people who earn far less than Sir Robin give money to charity and it represents a far bigger chunk of their income. They don’t expect to see it reported in the papers and would be deeply embarrassed if it was.
Perhaps the mayor should think back to the lessons he learned back in his Sunday School days:
Be careful that you don’t do your charitable giving before men, to be seen by them, or else you have no reward from your Father who is in heaven. Therefore when you do merciful deeds, don’t sound a trumpet before yourself, as the hypocrites do … that they may get glory from men. (Matthew 6:1-2)
Sir Robin being restrained by councillor Obaid Khan
I was going to blog about the Standards Committee’s verdict on Sir Robin’s conduct at the Newham Show back in July, but I can’t improve on this excellent account in the Evening Standard, other than to point out that Sir Robin was not restrained by a member of the council’s staff but by a Labour councillor, Obaid Khan.
Nor could I give more insight into what happened than Kevin Blowe, who made the formal complaint.
Not titling his post Sir Robin Wales, My Part in His Downfall was definitely a missed opportunity.
In a piece in today’s Guardian on the failure of the 2012 Olympics to deliver a legacy of greater participation in sport David Conn observes
The real Olympic legacy winners, of course, are West Ham United, owned by David Sullivan and David Gold, who made their first fortunes in pornography. Next year the Premier League club will take charge of the Olympic stadium, built with £429m of public money, and for which the public is paying a further £160m to convert for West Ham. The club will pay rent, and stands to make a fortune from the 54,000-seat capacity – far more than than its current Upton Park home – and enhanced corporate feasting. Karren Brady, who has worked loyally for Sullivan all her career, negotiated this stadium deal of the century with London’s mayor, Boris Johnson, and has since been made a Conservative peer – Baroness Brady of Knightsbridge.
And a quarter of that £160m conversion cost is being met by the council taxpayers of Newham – local people who are struggling with falling wages and rising prices. Meanwhile, David Cameron promises to drive even more of them into poverty by cutting the benefits cap if his party wins in May.
But of course there’s no cap on handouts to the wealthy. Multimillionaire pornographers and their Tory chief executive can have their business subsidised by the taxpayer: it’s enough to turn your stomach.
Finally the council have worked it out: no RPZ for us!
A good result for Forest Gate North.
Will the council stand up for local people or just let Galliard get away with it? I think we all know the answer to that question.
To rub salt into the wound, the developer is proposing that just 51 of the 838 homes to be built on the Boleyn Ground site will be ‘affordable’ housing. That’s made up of 5 studios, 8 one bedroom flats, 25 two bed units and 13 three bed homes. These will be offered on a shared ownership basis: there will be no affordable homes for rent.
As bad as that seems, things are even worse in Stratford.
CBRE are proposing to redevelop Morgan House – an office block – and part of the shopping centre to provide more than 500 new homes. These will overlook the Olympic Park and provide easy access to both east London’s best connected transport hub and Europe’s largest shopping mall.
Given the high prices such a prime location will attract, it comes as no surprise that, according to the developer:
There are a number of unique and exceptional site-specific circumstances which result cumulatively in the proposal site being entirely unsuitable for on-site affordable housing provision.
The reasoning is that Newham’s priority is family homes, and a town centre location surrounded by busy roads would not be the right place to house families.
So what about the option of providing affordable homes on another site? That’s not going to happen either.
an initial review of site availability in the area has not identified an appropriate donor site for affordable housing provision. Further, the applicant does not have any suitable sites that could be identified for affordable housing provision.
The only option the developer will consider is bunging the council some cash:
Subject to viability, given the very special circumstances involved with the existing site and emerging proposals, it is considered that a commuted payment towards affordable housing provision would be the most appropriate mechanism for the provision of affordable housing.
Of course once the council has the cash – assuming the viability assessment even requires it to be paid – there’s no obligation to actually spend it on providing affordable housing. It can just vanish into the general pot and pay for whatever the mayor wants.
forestgatedotnet 