Archive for May, 2010

Out campaigning with the best constituency MP in the country, Karen Buck, on Saturday morning. If we look a bit glum, it’s because it was pouring with rain. By the time of the photo, Karen had gone to the other Labour stall in Church Street ward.

It was quite gratifying to see that the Tories campaign HQ has been abandoned, and is now up for rent. The local party estimate that Lord Ashcroft spent around £500,000 in Westminster North during  their five-year campaign,  but only managed to achieve a 0.6% swing.

I wonder if he thinks it was money well-spent?

This is a longer blog post than usual. Please stick with it – I think you’ll find it interesting.

The eagle-eyed among you may have spotted the following story on The Mail’s website during the election campaign: Gordon Brown tripped up by ‘celeb’ would-be MP (here is a screengrab in case the page is taken down).

Now lets’ get one thing straight from the start. The Mail are quite right: I am a rubbish ‘Celebrity’.  Trying to be famous is a full-time job, and it has just never seemed worth it to me. I’m not interested in night clubs, I don’t drink, and while I have nothing against soaps, I’ve no particular desire to spend my evenings with the cast of Eastenders, so it seems to me that ‘Celebrity’ has little to offer. I’m not famous, but I’m in a famous band. I think it’s the best of both worlds, because I can go about my days largely unmolested, but I still get to headline Glastonbury.

That said, what about the rest of the article?

Apparently Gordon Brown had planned a ’series of high-profile photoshoots’ with me. When I saw this, I called Dan, my campaign organiser. He said no one had contacted him, but if true, a request would have had to come through the London Region office. Dan gave them a call, but it was the first they had heard of it. Region called Number 10, but they were baffled as well.

So had The Mail just made this up? Thinking on it over breakfast, it had to be rubbish. What are ‘high-profile photoshoots?’ High-profile for who? Gordon Brown is genuinely famous. What good would it do him to be photographed with me? So the implication was that this was for my benefit. But if any election candidate wants a picture with their Party leader, it can easily be arranged. If I’d wanted a picture of the pair of us grinning together, I would already have had one.

And how could these photoshoots be high-profile? What newspaper would print a photo of me standing next to Gordon Brown? Let alone a whole series of them. What would be the story?

The rest of the article didn’t seem to hang together either. Apparently, ‘Labour chiefs’ were ‘galled’ by the fact that I called for a return of  the 20p starter rate of income tax. Well it’s true that I have talked about it, but the article says this was particularly galling because Gordon Brown had recently admitted that abolishing the 20p rate was a mistake. So Gordon and I agree on the issue. So why would this be particularly galling for the Labour chiefs?

The article says that it is ‘Leftwingers’ who have complained that abolition of the starter rate disproportionately hit the poor, but then it quotes former Tory Chairman Eric Pickles as saying exactly the same thing. Is The Mail saying that Pickles is a leftwinger?

Then there are the quotes from me. A nice woman from The Mail did write some time ago and ask if I wanted to do an interview, but I never replied. To read the article, you’d think I had spoken to the journalist. Apparently, I ‘warm to my theme’ and say

“I’ve had a successful musical career as the drummer in Blur. Thanks to that, I am in a position where I can make myself heard in ways that others might not be able to do. My top priority: to lead a campaign to reinstate the lower 10p tax rate.“

And in response to criticism (presumably from Number 10), I’m supposed to have said

“I am a new kind of politician.”

But I didn’t. So where have all these quotes come from?

Well let me explain a bit about how I ran my campaign.

There are around 70,000 electors in the constituency I was fighting – the Cities of London and Westminster. We didn’t have the resources to knock on every door or print 70,000 copies of every leaflet, so we tended to targeted certain areas where we thought the Labour vote would be the strongest. Election law allows candidates to post one letter to everyone in their constituency free of charge, provided the candidates supply the letters.  So I used this service to try and plug the gaps, and make sure that everyone in the constituency got at least one leaflet from me.

The Post Office have quite complicated regulations for how the letters have to be sorted and bagged when given to them for delivery, so the Labour Party have a central computer system that takes care of this. It is web-based, and you basically pick a leaflet template, slot in your own words and pictures, and the program creates the leaflet, forwards you a proof for checking, and then sends it on to the printers, where it is automatically printed, sorted and bagged in the correct way.

Here is the proof of one of the leaflets I sent out using this system (pdf). Notice anything? All the quotes have been lifted from here.

The headline of the leaflet is

“I am a new kind of politician.”

Fourth on my list of ‘Top Priorities’ is

“To lead a campaign to reinstate the lower 10p tax rate.”

Under ‘Making Myself Heard’ I say

“I’ve had a successful musical career as the drummer in Blur. Thanks to that I am in a position where I can make myself heard in ways that others might not be able to. I think I have a duty to use my fortunate position responsibly.“

Maybe the journalist lives in the constituency? Certainly he has taken some quotes from an election leaflet of mine, and strung them together to make it look like I’d had a falling-out with the Party. It’s my first experience of the press simply making a story up, and I have to admit that until then I was a bit cynical when people suggested that they actually did things like that.

Naïve? Probably.

The really ridiculous thing about this whole affair is this. As part of the leaflet service, you can have the Labour Party check over your material for you, and suggest out any corrections or improvements. I had taken them up on the offer with this very leaflet, and had indeed made some sensible changes as a result. So I already knew the Party were fine with my 20p campaign.

And just for the record, I’m not married – I divorced many years ago, and I’ve no idea if I ever described myself as a “little g*t”.

But if I did, I stand by that description.

The scandal of the MMR vaccine / autism scare is a story of greed, ignorance, gullibility, and the willingness of certain newspapers to print anything to shift copies.

The shoddy doctor at the centre of the scam Andrew Wakefield seems finally to be getting his just deserts.

Here is the story in full, beautifully illustrated by my Open Rights Group comrade Ben Goldacre.

Apparently, we’ve now had 18,000 new membership applications since the election, and Head Office are falling over themselves trying to find out who the new members are.

No doubt some are disaffected Liberal Democrats who can’t stomach a coalition with the Tories. But given the up-coming leadership election, it wouldn’t surprise me if many were simply ordinary supporters who don’t want to miss one of the few chances we get to change how things are run.

Anyone who signs up by 8th September 2010 will have a say, so if the future of Labour interests you, click the banner below and join us!

I’ve been getting itchy feet since the election. I really enjoyed the campaigning, and I have noticed a big hole in the weekend where the sessions used to be.

I know I’m not alone, because when I turned up to help out in a council by-election in Holborn and St Pancras, there were small groups from Labour Parties all over North London, all suffering similar withdrawal symptoms.

I was very impressed by Sabrina Francis – one of the Labour candidates. She will make a great councillor, and we turned up some case work for her to get her teeth into if elected.

It’s spring, the suns’s out, and the Labour Party are knocking on doors.

What’s not to like?

I have to confess to a grudging admiration for the way David Cameron has put his coalition together. He has been far more generous to the Liberal Democrats than he need have been, and as a result seems to have woven the parties pretty tightly together, at least for now.

Of course the media is desperate to see signs of early splits and divisions, and has latched on to Vince Cable’s grim demeanour since being appointed to the cabinet as evidence of a wobble.

But in reality it’s not easy to find any pictures of  Vince smiling at all, ever.

Like Gordon Brown, he doesn’t seem to have a face that’s well suited to happiness, but unlike Gordon, no one seems to have told him to have a go anyway.

Thank god Nick Clegg went with the Conservatives. If we’d cobbled together some kind of Frankenstein alliance for the sake of clinging on to power, the country would never have forgiven us. That said, there has never been a better illustration of the political maxim “vote Liberal, get Tory’.

In the cold light of day though, the election results are pretty humiliating for all three parties. Humiliating for the Liberals, who despite the seeming adoration of the public and the media, couldn’t halt their slide even further into third place. Humiliating for the Conservatives, who have had to abandon a string of flagship policies and only get to govern by permission. And humiliating for Labour, who have lost a record number of seats, and got tossed out of Number 10 with a boot up our backsides.

Shortly after the results were announced, Ed Balls said ‘the public have spoken, we’re just not quite sure what they said’.  Personally, I think it couldn’t be clearer.

Enormous thanks to the 8,188 people who voted for me yesterday! Despite all the pundits gloomy predictions, we weren’t knocked into third place in Cities of London and Westminster. In fact we bucked the National trend, with only a small swing to the Conservatives.

Also many thanks to all the volunteers who gave so freely of their time to help. The lasting legacy of this campaign for me will be the friendships I have made over the last couple of years, both inside and outside the Party.

Finally, it has been a privilege to meet so many residents in the constituency, and to try to help where I can. Please do continue to get in touch if you have issues which you think I should be getting involved with.

You can contact me at david@davidrowntree.org

Last week Barb Jungr and others held a fundraiser at the Royal Vauxhall Tavern to raise money for an upcoming legal battle between the Crown Estate residents in Millbank and the Crown Estate, which is considering selling the underlying leaseholds to another developer. It is an oddly shaped affair when residents need to sue their landlord in order to keep them as their landlord. This is a huge housing issue for Westminster, here is why: the Crown Estate is a fantastic landlord. It has deep pockets and a deeply held culture that its properties should be well maintained, attractive, and they support a progressive structure of social housing that gives priority to Westminster’s teachers, nurses and firefighters, people who otherwise would not be able to able to afford to live near to their jobs.

 

When you sign a lease, even a shorthold, with the Crown Estate there is assurance that your rents will be adjusted fairly and slowly, that your home will be well cared for, and that in all but the most exceptional circumstances your home will remain yours. You can build a life in Westminster secure in the continuity of schools, doctors, friends: your community. That security evaporates if the underlying leaseholds are sold. Even if the leaseholds are sold to another large social landlord with an agreement that there will be no change to the tenancies in place the security for shorthold tenants is gone, and the pressure to make those properties more profitable in the future will eventually overwhelm even the best intended buyer. Westminster needs to keep all of its affordable housing, and the Crown Estate is by far its best custodian.

 
A little background about the Crown Estate. It is not as many people think, the personal property of the Queen. George III converted the bulk of the royal landholdings into a public trust in exchange for an ongoing salary now known as the civil list. The Crown Estate is operated as a business for the benefit of all Britons and all of the operating profits go directly to the Treasury. For example a few weeks ago the Estate sold a large chunk of Westminster’s Harley Street for £34 million pounds, property owned by the Crown Estate since before Henry VIII. But that was a transaction of mostly commercial premises. Paul Clark, Director of Investment and Asset Managementof the Crown Estate, and the instigator of the proposed sale of the Crown Estate residential holdings, has some history when it comes to selling off housing.  As Chief surveyor for the Church Commissioners Mr. Clark facilitated a £70 million sale of church owned housing in Stoke Newington, Pimlico, and Maida Vale to a consortium composed, in part, of Genesis Homes a social housing provider and the Grainger Trust, a publicly traded property developer.  And as could easily be predicted, when property is moved to a commercial developer, people living on shorthold tenancies felt their rents rise sharply, and when leases expire, and rents revert to market rates, affordable homes are lost forever to the community.  

 
The Crown Estate has owned some of its property in Westminster since 1066, it is the heart of the Crown Estate and it owes some special responsibilities to its Westminster residents. I want to thank to everyone who helped out at the Royal Vauxhall Tavern event, and to Frank Dobson MP for Kings Cross and Holborn for their hard work on this issue. Check out www.ourhomesarenotforsale.co.uk/ and please take the time to write a letter or two objecting to the sale.

 

Last weekend I had the privilege of joining Gordon Brown and Ed Miliband at the launch of the Labour Party Green Manifesto. Big promises about combating climate change, energy security, and green job growth can be a little abstract. I wanted to take a little time to let you know some of what Labour’s green programme can mean for you, at home, in Westminster.

 

First, a warmer and more efficient home. Labour’s policy is to, “insulate every loft and cavity wall where practical by 2015.” If you own your property you will be offered subsidies. Rented properties will be required to be properly insulated and social housing will need to meet a new Warm Home Standard. Energy efficiency measures for social tenants will be 100% subsidised, including smart meters, which can help any family use less energy. As anyone who has switched energy providers in the last few years will know, the energy companies do not make it simple to chose between the dozens of tariff options. Labour policy would require energy companies to simplify their tariffs to make it easier for people to chose the cheapest option for their home.

 
Second, if you need to keep a car in London, Labour will provide subsidies of up to £5,000 to switch to an electric vehicle and support a nationwide network of charging stations, 100,000 by the end of the next Parliament. The ideal place to deploy an electric fleet is in a city centre like London where noise and pollution are concentrated. The Cities of London and Westminster is unique in that it is almost entirely within the London Congestion Charge which creates an unintended disincentive for switching to an electric vehicle.  The owner of a vehicle in Tower Hamlets, or Westminster residents just outside the Congestion Charge Zone near Regents Park, if they buy an annual pass, will save £1696 a year by switching to an electric vehicle and avoiding the Congestion Charge. Just these savings alone make it much easier to justify the economics of buying an electric vehicle. I feel that Westminster and City of London residents need additional incentives to move toward switching to electric vehicles.

 

Last, Labour will protect energy subsidies for the elderly and require energy companies to provide discounted tariffs to vulnerable customers. The last few years have taught us that fuel prices are volatile and for people on a fixed or low income fuel poverty is a real threat. I believe no one in Westminster should go cold because they cannot afford a fuel bill.    

 

I know it sounds simplistic to say, but we have all become used to just plugging things into a socket and turning them on. The facts are climate change and energy security require that over the next few decades Britain and the rest of Europe need to rebuild the entire energy infrastructure behind those sockets and do it with out ever turning them off. We are the fortunate ones in Britain, compared to our European neighbours we are extraordinarily blessed with renewable energy sources, especially wind and tidal. David Cameron has called wind turbines ‘bird blenders’, so it is no surprise that Tory councils across the country have been far less willing to approve new wind farms than Labour equivalents. We need Labour’s proven leadership on energy policy.