Monday, 1 May 2017

Why the Green Party is backing Sophie Walker and the Women's Equality Party in Shipley on 8th June.

Two days ago, I received a letter from a local resident whom I have known for nearly twenty years. She supports the Greens here in Shipley, and votes Conservative in the general elections. She is a wonderful member of our community.

She wrote to me on this occasion, however, to complain about the decision of the Green Party in Shipley to support Sophie Walker of the Women's Equality Party against Philip Davies in the upcoming election on 8th June.

I thought it might be of interest for me to share my response, simply to lay to rest any puzzlement that other residents here in Shipley may have about our decision to back Sophie.

In the meantime, I very much hope that local Labour and Lib Dem activists will also take this opportunity to stand aside, back Sophie and campaign for a progressive MP for Shipley.

-----

My reply reads as follows.

Dear X,

Green Party support for Sophie Walker in the general election in Shipley

Thank you very much for your letter regarding your support for Philip Davies in the upcoming general election. Thank you as well for your very positive feedback about the work that we do locally as Green councillors.

I am writing, of course, to explain our decision to support Sophie Walker of the Women’s Equality Party.

As you rightly say, Philip has worked hard for Shipley since he was elected in 2005. He is very responsive to resident concerns and has supported the local councillors on a number of issues over the years. We have a good working relationship with him and I have nothing against him personally.

I also readily acknowledge the fact that, on some national issues, he has done well. I am thinking, for example, of his brave opposition to the tripling of university tuition fees in 2010 and his steadfast refusal to support the ruinously expensive and unnecessary High Speed 2 rail project.

Unfortunately, from my political perspective, Philip sits in the House of Commons as a Conservative MP. I therefore disagree profoundly with the way he votes on my behalf in that chamber on a very wide range of issues. I outline why in detail below. This is why I stood against him as the Green Party candidate in 2010 and 2015, and why Bradford District Green Party is supporting Sophie Walker’s Women’s Equality Party candidacy against Philip in this general election. In addition, I should stress, Sophie is a very impressive individual who would do a fantastic job representing the people of Shipley in Parliament and, of course, her party shares the same broadly progressive agenda that the Green Party stands for.

Our decision here in Shipley to back Sophie Walker is, fundamentally, a matter of electoral arithmetic. If the Green Party, the Labour Party and the Liberal Democrats ALL field candidates against Philip in this election, the progressive vote will split and the Conservatives will win. Even if the Labour Party ALONE runs against Philip, with the backing of the others and without Sophie in the field, Philip will win. Labour cannot provide the kind of broad cross-party progressive platform that will bring enough Shipley residents on board to win the day on the 8th of June. Quite simply, the only possible way to win Shipley back for the progressive politics that I believe in is for everyone to unite behind Sophie and her campaign. That is why I will be voting for her and why the local Green Party is not fielding a candidate on this occasion.

As I mentioned above, I have profound concerns about the way in which Philip uses his position as my MP to back policies I disagree with. In this regard, of course, and despite his track record as a serial ‘rebel’, Philip has on the whole backed Tory policies which I regard as a disaster for the country. These policies have also undermined the quality of life of many Shipley residents.

Philip and his fellow Tory MPs have voted repeatedly for cuts in government spending and investment that have undermined the quality of life for Shipley residents. He has supported budgets that have cut hundreds of millions of pounds from Bradford Council’s services since 2011. These excessive cuts in government spending, for which Philip has voted, have also undermined frontline policing in Shipley and local crime is currently increasing partly as a result.

Philip has repeatedly voted for cuts in welfare support for the poor and vulnerable, including many of the people he represents in Shipley - he has voted at least 49 times to cut welfare spending in the Commons. Here are some examples. He voted to abolish the Education Maintenance Allowance in 2011 – you will be aware that the EMA had encouraged many Shipley young people to stay in post-16 education. He supported the introduction of the bedroom tax in 2011.[1] He voted against excluding child benefit from the welfare cap in 2012.[2] He voted to cut local support for people in financial need who struggle to pay their Council tax in 2012.[3] He has repeatedly opposed increases in welfare payments that would have kept them in line with the rise in prices.[4] I disagree with him on all these decisions.

Philip has voted in defence of private health care and in favour of the marketisation, fragmentation and creeping privatisation of the NHS since 2011. He supported the coalition’s top-down NHS reforms in 2012.[5] I would strongly prefer our health care system to be properly managed by the government and fully funded.

Philip has repeatedly voted in support of measures to give schools greater autonomy from local authority control, including the establishment of Free Schools, and has even voted against requiring teachers to be either qualified or working towards a teaching qualification.[6] As a teacher and parent of school-age children myself, I am horrified at the way in which our education system is becoming even more fragmented and am concerned as well at the funding squeeze that is eroding the quality of our education provision.

Philip has repeatedly opposed the imposition of higher taxes on the wealthy. Indeed, in 2012, he supported the reduction in the top rate of income tax from 50% to 45% on incomes over £150,000.[7] He has repeatedly voted against proposals for an additional tax on bankers’ bonuses.[8] He has repeatedly voted against proposals for a ‘mansion tax’.[9] He has repeatedly voted in support of cuts in corporation tax.[10] I believe that the better off should pay their fair share in tax to provide all of us with the high quality public services that we expect for ourselves, our parents and our children, and I want to live in a more equal society – more equal in terms of outcomes as well as opportunity.

Philip has campaigned against increases in fuel duty. He therefore shares responsibility, along with his Tory colleagues, for the worsening air pollution produced by our over-reliance on car use. As a result, Shipley residents are suffering the health consequences of illegal levels of air pollution across parts of the constituency.[11]

Philip voted against the smoking ban in 2006 despite the huge health benefits that this has delivered for Shipley residents in the decade since this ban was introduced. Since then, he has repeatedly tried to block further measures intended to protect people from the harmful exposure to tobacco smoke.[12] My view is that government action in this area of policy has led to healthier lives and has been entirely reasonable and justified.

Philip has campaigned for a more flexible minimum wage, to allow employers to pay people with disabilities less – including, by definition, disabled residents of Shipley. He has done so despite of the fact that this would create a situation where some employers will pressurise potential (or existing) employees into accepting a contract that pays them below minimum wage.[13] I worry about any watering down in employment protection for our more vulnerable citizens.

Philip has, of course, always been one of the leading Tory backbenchers who eventually forced David Cameron to promise an EU referendum in January 2013 in order to hold the Conservative Party together. He subsequently campaigned hard for a LEAVE vote in 2016. In doing so, he has ignored the views of thousands of Shipley residents who support EU membership, including myself, and continues to deny the mounting evidence that Brexit will damage the UK economy and undermine our social and environmental protections. My view is that the decision to leave the EU is the worst public policy decision made by any government in my lifetime. My only consolation is that I hold an Irish passport and have recently acquired Irish citizenship for my children, thereby ensuring that all of us will continue to have access to the many advantages of EU citizenship.

Philip was one of only five MPs who voted against the Climate Change Act in 2008, and has consistently spoken out and voted against the need for ambitious government action that would enable us to make the transition to a low carbon economy.[14] He has therefore undermined the long-term environmental security of Shipley residents. He also voted in favour of the forest sell-off in 2011 that was later abandoned by the Conservatives in the face of a huge public outcry.[15] He also voted in favour of the badger cull in 2013 (although he subsequently changed his mind in 2014 for some reason).[16]

Philip has consistently supported the renewal of the UK strategic nuclear deterrent and voted repeatedly for this in the House of Commons.[17] He has done so despite the fact that most countries do not regard nuclear weapons as necessary for their security (France is the only other EU member state with a nuclear arsenal) and despite the huge cost of these weapons of mass destruction (it is anticipated that renewing Trident will cost the UK at least £100 billion over the next 30+ years).

Philip supports the restoration of the death penalty in the UK. In my view, judicial killing of this sort is barbaric, unnecessary and therefore immoral, and I find it hard to understand why any Shipley resident shares Philip’s view. Reintroducing the death penalty would also necessitate the UK withdrawing from the European Convention on Human Rights and the Council of Europe, something else that would be a huge step backwards for our country. Indeed, Philip has campaigned and voted for the repeal of the 1998 Human Rights Act and supports its replacement with a so-called ‘British bill of rights. This would undermine existing human rights protections for Shipley residents and I profoundly disagree with Philip on this issue.

Philip was one of many Conservatives (a majority of Conservative MPs, astonishingly) who tried in vain to block same sex marriage in 2013. Apparently he did so on the ludicrous basis that he was “in favour of equality”.[18] Fortunately, the UK has moved on and Shipley’s gay residents are now able to marry in spite of Philip’s views on this matter.

As you probably know, Philip has repeatedly filibustered private member bills in order to block their progress in the Commons. These include: protection against eviction for tenants requesting that their landlord carry out property repairs; reducing UK international aid; tighter regulation of payday lenders and reducing hospital parking charges.[19] Most recently, in December 2016, he tried in vain to block a bill proposing better protection for women against domestic violence.[20] I wish he would spend his valuable time presenting his own legislation rather than blocking decent bills brought to the Commons by other MPs.

Philip is, of course, notorious for his impatience with ‘political correctness’. For example, he spoke at the August 2016 International Conference on Men’s Issues, organised by the Justice for Men and Boys Party. His comments there revealed his deeply dismissive approach towards making further progress on women’s equality.[21] Another illustration of this is his criticism of the Women and Equalities Select Committee, on which he serves in the Commons.[22] Why he wastes his time in this way is simply beyond me, considering the huge range of economic and environmental challenges facing the country that he ought to be concentrating on instead.

In addition to supporting cuts in fuel duty, despite the pressing need to cut road congestion and traffic pollution, Philip has opposed nationalisation of the UK rail network. [23] He has also voted in favour of higher rail fares.[24] He voted against allowing Councils greater control over local bus services.[25] In contrast, I want an MP who will work to deliver a high quality, publicly-run rail network and decent, well-funded and managed bus networks that meet our increasing need for low carbon and affordable travel.

Finally, Philip has repeatedly opposed the kind of progressive constitutional reforms that I would like to see in this country. He has voted against electoral reform for the House of Commons; voted against an all-elected House of Lords or even the abolition of the remaining hereditary peers; voted against devolving more powers to Scotland and Wales or to local councils; and voted against lowering the voting age to 16.[26]

Bearing all of the above in mind, I hope that you will understand why I cannot support Philip in this election and why I will be campaigning instead for Sophie Walker to be my next MP.

In the meantime, if there is anything I can do to help you in my capacity as your local councillor, please do not hesitate to get in touch!

Very best wishes, as ever,

Kevin


Posted by at No comments:

Tuesday, 7 June 2016

European thoughts - why I am voting REMAIN

A sense of European perspective.


The 'debate' about Europe spiralled off into fantasy land weeks ago. The Remain camp warn of renewed warfare and economic collapse if we leave the EU; the Brexiteers warn of the end of a thousand years of history if we stay in. Each side ramps up the rhetoric, leaving most of us scratching our heads wondering who is right. The lack of proportion is breath-taking. The extreme posturing is disheartening. The result is that nearly half of voters say they do not trust what either campaign is telling them.

Thanks to The Guardian's Steve Bell for this little beauty!

The reality is that we face a far more nuanced choice than the campaigns suggest. On the one hand, if the UK votes to stay in, British citizens will continue to enjoy a significant range of benefits of membership despite the EU's considerable imperfections. On balance, therefore, I hope very much that we vote REMAIN on 23rd June. If, on the other hand, we vote LEAVE, the sky will not fall in. But we will be worse off in several respects, even if we strike a deal with Brussels allowing us to continue to access the single European market and even if much of the beneficial EU legislation that currently protects us continues to apply.


As I outline below, I am voting to remain in the EU because we retain sovereign control over most key government decisions; and, where we share sovereignty, we do so for perfectly practical reasons and generally support the decisions that result. The resulting EU legislation gives us essential environmental, consumer, social and employment protections that will be put at risk if we leave. I am voting to remain because leaving the EU will not in itself stabilise UK population levels. I am voting to remain because we can easily afford the cost of EU membership and, in fact, are economically better off overall. I am voting to remain because the EU is sufficiently democratic, albeit in need of some reform, and we can only achieve those reforms by remaining an influential EU member state.


Shared sovereignty is good for Britain.


The Leave camp bangs on about the need to 'regain control' and 'take back our sovereignty'. The Remain camp counters that our sovereignty has not been significantly compromised by EU membership. Neither of them is being entirely truthful.


On the one hand, the Leave campaign massively overstates the degree to which British politics is subject to EU law. The reality is that most of the important decisions made by British governments have little or nothing to do with the EU. Think about the 'big ticket' political arguments that have polarised the UK over the past six years. In most of these areas, the UK decides for itself what it wants to do and to suggest otherwise is nonsense. Domestic politics reigns supreme. Here are some recent examples.
  • British governments, not the EU, have been responsible for the successive 'austerity budgets' pushed through by George Osborne since 2010 and for the steady degrading of our public services.
  • The British government, not the EU, has ramped up university tuition fees, cut higher education funding and reduced investment per pupil in our schools.
  • The British government, not the EU, pushed through the radical top-down NHS reforms of 2012.
  • The British government, not the EU, cut the top rate of tax for the wealthy and boosted their tax-free inheritance rights.
  • The British government, not the EU, has been responsible for the heartless welfare cuts and benefit changes that roll on and on. Brussels did not impose the bedroom tax on our most vulnerable families or embark on the train wreck that became Osborne's derailed attempt to cut tax credits for the working poor.
  • British ministers, not the EU, have decided to waste tens of billions of pounds on HS2 and new roads rather than invest more widely in our public transport networks.
  • British governments, not the EU, have scaled back support for the British renewable energy sector and chosen to subsidise fracking and nuclear energy. It was not Jean-Claude Juncker of the European Commission who coined the phrase "green crap" or tried to privatise our forests, but our very own prime minister.
  • The British government, not the EU, handed control of our police forces to elected Police and Crime Commissioners (for whom most of us don't vote).
  • The British government, not the EU, is making multi-billion pound preparations to renew our strategic nuclear weapons system.
  • British governments, not the EU, have allowed our airports to expand and British ministers are preparing to allow a third runway at Heathrow airport despite the environmental costs.
  • British governments, not the EU, are responsible for the failure to build enough new homes over the past thirty years.
  • British ministers, not the EU, decided to flog off the Post Office to the private sector.
  • Successive British governments, not the EU, decided to participate in disastrous wars in Afghanistan, the Middle East and North Africa despite widespread public unease.
On the other hand, of course, it is disingenuous of pro-EU campaigners to suggest that our sovereignty has not been compromised by British membership of the EU. We share sovereignty in a growing range of policy areas as a result of successive treaties signed by Conservative and Labour governments. The Single European Act of 1987 - supported by Mrs Thatcher herself at that time - allowed the Council of Ministers to use Qualified Majority Voting (QMV) to push member states to accept common European rules governing their trade. Subsequent treaties signed in Maastricht, Amsterdam, Nice and Lisbon between 1991 and 2007 extended the use of QMV so that most EU directives and regulations are now passed in this way. Moreover, the powers of the European Parliament have been similarly extended through a process known as 'Co-Decision', giving MEPs a more co-equal say (with the Council) on most EU legislation. The upshot of this is that the ability of UK governments to 'veto' draft EU legislation (in those policy areas where the EU has the right to legislate) has been greatly curtailed over the past thirty years.


My considered view is that, on the whole, it makes sense for us to share sovereignty in these particular areas of policy. It makes sense for governments to share decision-making in relation to our shared trading relations. It makes sense for European governments to jointly decide how to protect worker rights in that shared market - and to provide good employers with a level playing field on which they can look after their staff. It makes sense for us to share decision-making on legislation to deal with cross-border environmental challenges like climate change or water quality or air pollution. It makes sense for the EU to regulate our agricultural sector given our shared reliance on food imports and exports. In short, in areas where common action is the best way to safeguard and improve the quality of our lives, it makes sense for decision-making to be made in a way that facilitates progress and minimises the problem of individual governments blocking necessary change for selfish reasons.


In any case, most EU legislation is positively supported by the UK, both in the European Parliament and the Council of Ministers. This is partly because the European Commission and the European Parliament usually bend over backwards to accommodate the concerns and interests of the member states in order to find a workable consensus. As a result, British ministers vote in favour of at least 90% of the legislation that crosses the desks of the Council of Ministers. That sounds like a reasonable deal to me - I can only dream of a scenario in which I supported nine out of ten decisions made by the British government!


We can stay in the EU and manage our population challenges


UKIP has dined out on the issue of immigration since the mid-2000s and used it as a means of galvanising their attacks on the EU. Their campaigns are xenophobic in the extreme and it is no coincidence that support for UKIP has grown since 2004 as support for the BNP has declined.


I fully accept that managing migration and the overall level of the UK population is an issue that requires close attention in order to ensure that everyone living in the UK has access to affordable housing, decent healthcare and school places. It is true that EU laws governing freedom of movement make it impossible for individual EU member states like the UK to re-establish tight controls on migration from other EU countries (and nonsense for Cameron to claim otherwise). It is also true that annual net migration to the UK has risen sharply following the EU's enlargements in 2004 and 2007 and has recently topped 330,000.


But the Brexit campaign has blown the issue of migration out of all proportion in their narrow-minded quest for victory in this referendum. My reading of the situation is that migrants are NOT the main cause of our housing crisis; and the problems in our health and education systems are the result of chronic under-funding and poor decision-making by generations of British ministers. This is as true today as it was a century ago, when thirty million fewer people lived in Britain and most of them lived in poverty with terrible housing, health care and education. Plus ca change, plus c'est la meme chose...


The Brexit campaign's claim that population growth in the UK will be solved if we leave the EU is nonsensical for a range of reasons. The UK population is increasing naturally as births outnumber deaths; most migrants come to Britain from outside the EU; tens of thousands arrive as refugees or are seeking asylum; many are students who will continue to be wanted by our universities; many have vital professional qualifications, experience or skills that our employers will continue to demand. Sustainable population 'management' in the UK will require an intelligent, multi-strategy and long-term approach, and 'pulling up the drawbridge' is not the answer to our woes.

I suggest that it is worth pressing a few facts into service before blaming 'Brussels' for population pressures that have, in fact, been a feature of British life for the past half century.
  • Half of the ten million increase in the UK population during my fifty year lifetime has been the result of people being born here in Britain. Trends suggest that our home-born population growth will continue whether or not we leave the EU.
  • Most migrants to the UK in the past twenty years have come from outside the EU, drawn in for family reasons or to study here or to fill labour shortages in key sectors like healthcare. Leaving the EU will not deal that side of the population equation at all.
  • Around 25,000 people seek asylum in the UK each year, a number which rises and falls regardless of our membership of the EU.
  • One in seven new British businesses are set up by migrants. Migration boosts our economy overall, so limiting EU migration will have an adverse impact on our GDP.
  • Approximately two million Brits live and work or study or are retired in other EU states. What will happen to them and us if Brexit makes it more difficult for them to remain abroad? Our EU borders are open in both directions.
  • Migrants are more likely to be in work and paying tax than British citizens. Most are young, healthy and childless and therefore far less reliant on our public education and health care services than that bubbling cesspit of xenophobic outrage known as the Daily Express would have us believe.
  • It is true that migration exerts some downward pressure on the wages of the lowest paid, but the best answer to that problem is for our government to establish a decent National Living Wage and enforce it properly so that all employers respect the law and treat their staff fairly.
  • It is also true that migration creates additional housing pressures, but our national housing crisis is primarily the result of decades of under-investment in new housing, of the mass privatisation of our social housing stock since 1979 and of land-banking by developers who are still not being pushed to develop brownfield sites or higher-density urban housing in sufficient quantity. Limiting EU migration will make little difference to that problem either.
Finally, it is highly likely that the UK will have to accept free movement of workers even if we vote to leave the EU! So this ugly, dangerous debate about migration is an academic one. If we vote to leave, the British government will seek to retain the preferential access to the single European market that we currently enjoy, and free movement will be the price we pay to secure this. The Norwegians and Swiss have had to accept this and I cannot imagine that our future will be any different. Of course our economy is far larger than those of Norway and Switzerland, and of course we are a major importer of EU products; but EU leaders are well aware of the extent to which British companies rely on their European export markets and will insist that we continue to accept free movement as the quid pro quo for access to that single market. Why anyone should think otherwise is beyond me, given Cameron's complete failure to secure concessions on the principle of free movement during the nine months of EU talks that followed the 2015 general election.


We can afford the cost of EU membership


The third red herring waved by Brexiteers is their fatuous claim that mountains of British cash is trousered each year by our friends in Brussels. The Brexit battlebus is festooned with the false allegation that British taxpayers hand over £350 million to Brussels each week, or about £19 billion per year. This is money which the creative accountants at Brexit suggest would otherwise be invested in the NHS by generous Tory ministers.


This is nonsense, and here's why.


  • The Brexit campaign glosses over the billions that the UK gets back in return as an EU member state. In 2014, our rebate was worth £4.4 billion. We also received £1.1 billion in regional funding and £2.3 billion in farming support. Add in our other financial returns from the EU and it turns out that our net annual contribution to the EU is just under £10 Billion (about half the level claimed by the Brexit campaign).
  • Our net contribution falls further if we factor in other benefits of EU membership. The Office for National Statistics estimates that, if we take into account the spending by EU visitors to the UK linked to our EU membership and the European research funding that goes to our universities, our net contribution falls to £7.1 billion. The Treasury Select Committee estimates that the weekly cost of our EU membership is, in fact, £110 million, less than a third of the amount claimed by the Brexit campaign.
  • In addition, some of the money that the UK transfers to the EU is recycled into infrastructural investment in the emerging economies of central and eastern Europe. As those economies develop, new British export markets are opening up: British goods exports to these new markets have doubled over the past decade and the value of services exports has trebled (overall, this trade was worth £16 billion by 2014).
  • Our net contribution to the EU budget is perfectly reasonable and affordable. We are one of the wealthiest countries in the world, let alone the EU. The amount we contribute to the EU is around one-eightieth of British government spending and about 0.5% of our total national wealth. We spend eight times more on education and fourteen times more on pensions and are about to spend £100 billion on a fresh generation of nuclear weapons that we don't even need. The fact that the UK spends more on health care alone than the EU's TOTAL budget tells us all we need to know about the relatively low 'cost' of staying in.
  • It is, to say the least, doubtful that a Tory government would spend this money on the NHS if we left the EU. Tory ministers have, in fact, spent their past six years in government slashing investment in public services, including education and health, and cutting one million public sector jobs. Their track record suggests they are far more likely to dish out fresh tax cuts to wealthier, Tory-voting Britons than pay for the additional doctors and nurses that our healthcare system desperately needs.


The EU is not the undemocratic federal superstate claimed by its critics


As I mentioned earlier, the roles and powers of the EU are tightly restricted by the treaties that we have signed since we joined in 1973. Most big decisions are still made at Westminster, and it is twenty-five years since the Maastricht Treaty embedded the principle of subsidiarity in the EU (the idea that the EU should not make decisions that are best left to the governments of the member states).


Yes, the European Commission is not directly elected. But the role of the Commissioners is to propose draft legislation that is subsequently only passed into law by the Council of Ministers (representing Europe's elected governments) and the European Parliament (stuffed with MEPs directly elected by the peoples of Europe). The Commission is therefore less like a European government and more like a European civil service, and generally bends over backwards to consult with governments and key interest groups as it makes decisions.


Of course, I would like to see further democratic reform of the EU. I would like to give the European Parliament the power to remove individual European Commissioners who are not up to the job and to have more freedom to propose draft legislation. I would like to see far greater transparency in the deliberations of the Council of Ministers. I would like to see far greater numbers of European citizens taking the trouble to vote for their MEPs rather than not bothering to exercise this vital democratic right. Above all, I would also like those citizens to vote for the green, progressive politicians that we desperately need in those corridors of power - my beef is not with the EU's particular institutional architecture, but with the 'business-as-usual', unsustainable politics of the people who populate it.


It is a rich irony that British politicians lecture our European friends on the lack of democracy in the EU. Our British head of state holds this job because her dad was king. He got it because his brother abdicated. The royal family is a relic of medieval politics that should have been swept away decades ago. But at least our monarch plays a ceremonial political role, unlike the 800+ members of our House of Lords. All of them are unelected and unaccountable and lack legitimacy; some are bishops and some are hereditary peers; and all have a say over the laws passed by our Parliament on our behalf despite the fact that we (the people) did not choose them in the first place. As for the Commons, our Tory government reigns supreme thanks to a general election in 2015 that gave the Conservative party barely 37% popular support on a turnout of under 70%. Their mandate to govern rests on the positive support of barely a quarter of the electorate.


So, why stay in?


The bottom line is that our membership of the EU makes it far easier to trade with our European partners in the single European market and ensures that this trade is properly regulated with common standards. The EU has passed over two hundred environmental laws that protect us from various forms of pollution and have begun to help us make the transition to a post-carbon economy. European social and employment legislation provides us with a range of important worker rights - vital for ensuring fairness as the single European market has developed. Closer cooperation on cross-border policing makes all of us safer. The freedom that we enjoy to travel, work and retire anywhere in Europe is a freedom that we can celebrate and should not fear. The cost of EU membership is one we can easily afford. It's time for Britain to accept that we no longer live in the 1950s, that we are part of an interdependent world, and that the benefits of working together far outweigh the compromises we sometimes have to make in the shared enterprise that is the EU.


So, vote to REMAIN on 23 June!

















Posted by at No comments:

Saturday, 31 October 2015

Hospital Parking Fees - end them NOW.

I was not surprised to see my Conservative MP for Shipley, Philip Davies, trigger another raft of press and social media controversy yesterday. This time, he is in the stocks for derailing an attempt by Labour backbencher Julie Cooper to exempt carers from car parking fees at NHS hospital. Philip spoke for over 90 minutes to help ensure that Ms Cooper's private member's bill ran out of time and stands no chance of becoming law. This is tragic, as it means that these charges will continue to have a detrimental impact on the lives of tens of thousands of patients, carers and relatives.


The focus of public outrage should, however, be the fact that Tory ministers refused to support Ms Cooper's bill in the first place. If the government had backed this cause, to stop these immoral charges, there would have been little that Philip or his colleagues Christopher Chope and David Nuttall could do to resist (not to mention Jacob Rees-Mogg, whom I spotted lounging lugubriously across the green benches at the far end of the chamber, chipping in occasionally to help extinguish precious parliamentary time).


We have a government that is busy privatising our NHS, opening up our public health care to profiteering private sector providers and, in the process, ripping apart the social fabric and public sector ethos for which the old NHS was world-renowned. Allowing hospitals to levy parking charges on ordinary people visiting their sick relatives is simply another manifestation of the privatising mania that was unleashed on the NHS by the Tories in the early 1990s and expanded in an extreme way with the calamitous passage of the Health and Social Care Act in 2012 (supported, of course, by the Liberal Democrats).


The bottom line is that charging patients to use hospital car parks should be banned. I accept that this would require extra taxpayer funding as the sums raised are quite substantial. The money raised by these charges varies, but can run into millions of pounds of additional revenue per trust. Overall, it is estimated that the total revenue raised each year is around £100 million. But this income stream is a tiny proportion of the overall NHS budget for England of £116.4 billion this year. It is also dwarfed by the £20 billion in 'savings' that Tory ministers expect the NHS to find by 2020, not to mention the huge £3 billion cost of implementing the 'top-down' re-organisation of the NHS overseen by David Cameron since 2012 (a far cry from the Tory leader's promise in 2006 that there would be "no more pointless and disruptive reorganisations").


So, it is entirely reasonable to argue that a government ban on hospital car parking charges would be swift and straightforward to implement AND that the resulting revenue shortfalls could be dealt with affordably. The money can be found - just as George Osborne is apparently going to find a few billion quid in his autumn budget statement for the working poor to offset his planned tax credit cuts. Hospital car parking charges should not be a subject for Friday afternoon debates between a handful of MPs in the Commons, but are a pressing social issue that our government needs to deal with once and for all.
Posted by at No comments:

Friday, 30 October 2015

Thoughts on that Tory Tax Credit Car Crash

It is hard to know where to begin with George Osborne's tax credit car crash as it is such a target-rich environment.


Let's start with the low-grade way in which the tax credit policy was concocted, symptomatic of the dismal quality of much government policy-making (so much for the Tories being the 'natural party of government'). One complaint aired by MPs and peers is their frustration about the lack of detailed justification for the tax credit cuts or reliable information about their impact on Britain's poorest working families. Even the Treasury Select Committee has struggled to get its hands on the data it wants. It should not be left to the IFS to demonstrate that so many people will be so badly hit, or to identify the blatant inaccuracy of Tory assurances that working families will be compensated by other policy changes such as the phased introduction of a (so-called) 'living wage' by 2020. This information should have been on the table months ago, as soon as George Osborne set off down this road in July.


It is also difficult to square the parade of Tories complaining vociferously about the impact of these particular cuts with the fact that many of them have supported shocking reductions on welfare support for so long. Where have they been for the past five years? Many voted for the successive Osborne budgets in 2010, 2011, 2012, 2013 and 2014 that worsened poverty and widened inequality across the UK; and those who won their seats for the first time in May stood as Tory candidates squarely behind a manifesto commitment to carve another £12 billion off the welfare bill. It's true that senior Tories were coy about the precise nature of the welfare cuts, but where on earth did these Tories think the axe was going to fall given that pensions are protected? It is also true, as Cameron has pointed out, that these multi-billion pound cuts have attracted majority support in the Commons on several occasions in recent weeks, yet barely any Tory MPs - including those now queuing up so eagerly and publicly to berate the Chancellor - were prepared to stand up and be counted by voting NO. Had they done so sooner, these proposals would have been slung back into the Treasury boiler room long before they ended up in 'The Other Place'.


It is saying something that, as a citizen of one of the world's oldest democracies, my main line of defence against these tax credit cuts has been the House of Lords. I am happy to toast the way these peers wedged their crowbar in the government gearbox. But they remain a group of unelected, unaccountable legislators who have been handed well-paid jobs for life in an absurdly over-populated parliamentary chamber (the second largest in the world). We need a reformed parliament in which power is shared across two chambers and is not concentrated in the hands of a few key individuals who use their single-party majority to dominate the Commons and drive through bad policy. In short, we need this kind of sustained parliamentary scrutiny of government decisions to be the norm rather than the exception and the only way to legitimately achieve that is to elect the upper house.


Excitable press reports that Cameron is threatening to create 100+ new Tory peers to regain Tory control over the Lords are probably exaggerated. Apart from anything, it is hard to imagine that the Queen would be thrilled to play a starring role in such a politicised drama. Moreover, the creation of another batch of 'Cameron Cronies' would shine an unflattering light back on a prime minister who won support from just 38% of voters in May 2015 on a miserly turnout of 66%. In other words, Cameron and Osborne and their cocksure Tory ministerial colleagues - part of a pack of 330 Tory MPs in the Commons - enjoy the backing of barely a quarter of the electorate and are therefore hardly brimming over with democratic legitimacy themselves. If this policy-making disaster has demonstrated one thing about our democracy, it is that a reformed House of Commons is as essential and long-overdue as a reformed House of Lords.











Posted by at No comments:

Saturday, 3 October 2015

Further thoughts of Sainsbury's...

I have just emailed in some additional objections, which read as follows.

"Further to my previous objection, I would like to express several additional concerns that I have about this application (partly as well to amplify some points in my first objection).
 
First, the new lay-by for deliveries only catersfor trucks coming from one direction and leaving in the opposite direction. This will create difficulties (on an already-congested stretch of highway) when the deliverytruck arrives at the site from the Bingley direction or wants to head towards Bradford after completing its delivery.

Second, these deliveries will have to be made across the footpath and therefore will block pedestrian access. Other shops in the area (for example, the Co-Op) have rear access for deliveries.

Third, the proposed delivery-only layby is unlikely to be adequately policed and will almost certainly be used as well bycustomers 'nipping in' for a pint of milk or to use the ATM. This will create problems when deliveries arrive.

Fourth, the application does not adequately resolve the conflict between (a) cars from the Bingley direction seeking to turn right into Sainsburys and (b) cars from the Bradford direction seeking to turn right into Victoria Road (the latter manouvre has become more common since the right turn at the old 'Tramshed' roundabout was outlawed by the new junction there). Linked to this are the tricky manouvres of cars leaving the Sainsbury's car park and turning right towards Bradford. And, remember, all of these vehicle movements will be taking place along a stretch of road that is regularly filled with cars queuing in the Bingley direction (the supermarket will be busiest at these peak commuter times).

Fifth, vehicles entering the car park when it is full will not have enough room to turn round easily and will sometimes seek toreverse out into busy traffic and across a busy footpath. Indeed, the entire parking area is very constrained and leaves very little room for manoeuvring - hardly ideal and potentially dangerous for anyone parking to go into the store with small children.

Sixth, vehicles travelling towards Bingley andwaiting to turn left into the Sainsbury's car park will cause blockage for those wishing to exit Grosvenor Rd.

Seventh, the entrance/exit of Sainsbury's will be directly opposite a busy bus stop which has at least eleven services per hour in daytime (not including school services) and wheretraffic already has to squeeze past parked buses. These drivers already have tonegotiate the right-turners into Grosvenor Rd and Victoria Rd who occupy the centre of the road.

Finally, I would like to add a request that, in the (hopefully unlikely) event that the planning panel has a fit of the vapours and decides to award approval, that two firm conditions are added: (1) that a clearly-marked and signed pedestrian crossing is provided across the entrance to the car park so as to facilitate pedestrian movements and try to minimise the number of cars parked across this busy pedestrian route as they seek access and egress from the site, and (2) that the boundary between the delivery bay and the pavement is bollarded sufficiently to prevent lorries using any part of the footway for their manouvres."

So, if everyone else can pile in too, that would be great!

Posted by at No comments:

Sunday, 27 September 2015

Sainsbury's are back! Time to circle the wagons once more...

Well, Sainsbury's have submitted another planning application for a new supermarket on the Bingley Road site of the current car wash, by the junction with Grosvenor Road. This application is very similar to their previous one earlier this year, and so I have just sent in my very similar objections!


If you agree, please object in writing to Martyn Burke at Bradford Council - martyn.burke@bradford.gov.uk. The number of the planning application is 15/04044/FUL and the deadline for comments is Wednesday 14 October 2015.


My specific objections are as follows...


I am objecting – as I did in response to the previous similar application from Sainsbury’s - on three grounds: (1) the likelihood that the new building will add to local noise pollution; (2) the additional traffic and parking nuisance that will be generated if this proposal goes ahead; and (3) the adverse impact that this development will have on local businesses and Saltaire’s economic viability.

I am particularly concerned about the impact of this development on the amenity of nearby residential homes on Grosvenor Rd and Grosvenor Av.

Noise Pollution

First, deliveries to the store will take place throughout the store’s operating hours. Deliveries could therefore be arriving at 7am and leaving at 11pm, and this application states that the cumulative duration of these deliveries will span over an hour a day. In fact, if Asda’s delivery arrangements in Shipley are anything to go by, early deliveries are likely to park near the store before 7am while waiting to unload, with engines running. Delays in unloading, as is inevitable from time to time, will also result in activity at the site beyond 11pm. All of these large vehicle movements will have an adverse impact on the amenity of nearby residents.

I am also concerned that the operation of this facility will result in overnight noise pollution for neighbouring residential homes. The refrigeration plant will operate for 24 hours a day, unlike the existing car wash. The applicants estimate that the noise of the external plant will be quite close to existing night time noise levels even with a “judicious selection of refrigeration plant and/or standard noise mitigation techniques”. My experience in other contexts (the impact of Asda’s external plant in Shipley town centre a few years ago, and the operation of Shipley Pool prior to its refurbishment) is that nearby residential properties are adversely affected by the noise of external plant. It is reasonable to assume that this equipment will not operate as perfectly as its design suggests it should and, let’s face it, proper maintenance is not guaranteed. Much depends as well on the direction of the wind, as this can boost local noise pollution considerably.

Unsustainable transport and pedestrian safety

I am concerned about the transport implications of this proposal and, in particular, the impact of frequent vehicle movements across a well-used pedestrian route. Parking nuisance will also be an issue.

There are several planning considerations that need to be borne in mind in in this context.

The National Planning Policy Framework (NPPF) “recognises the importance of promoting developments which encourage travel by sustainable transport”, that proposals need “to be balanced in favour of sustainable transport modes, giving people a real choice about how they travel”, and that “encouragement should be given to solutions which support reductions in greenhouse gas emissions and reduce congestion”.

Replacement Unitary Development Policy UDP7 states the aim of “promoting improved accessibility through enabling the use of public transport, cycling and walking and reducing the dependency on the private car”.

The West Yorkshire Local Transport Plan 3 (LTP3) 2011-2026 commits Bradford Council to “making it easier to access places, services and amenities by sustainable means” and to “reducing congestion and supporting greener fuel technologies”.

The applicant (as before) acknowledges that the proposed development will increase the number of cars accessing the site compared to the current operation of the car wash. According to the data provided, the extra two-way vehicle movements could be 62 per weekday peak hour and 38 per Saturday peak hour. This extra traffic add to local congestion: 40-60% of these trips on weekday peak periods will be newly generated by the store, rising to 55% to 75% at weekends. 

The extra traffic will result in a significant number of vehicle movements in and out of the site across a well-used pedestrian route linking Saltaire with the nearby residential streets. This is also a key route for parents walking their children to the local primary schools. While waiting to access the queueing traffic on the main road, these vehicles will be parked directly across the line of pavement. I already receive regular complaints from residents about cars queueing to access, and exit from, the car wash; this development will greatly exacerbate this problem. These extra traffic movements will start far earlier in the morning than is currently the case with the existing car wash, and go on far later into the evening, impeding pedestrian journeys at those times as well.

Parking is another serious concern. It is reasonable to assume that a proportion of these vehicles will not, in fact, park on site by the store as the application anticipates, but will use Grosvenor Road instead - particularly if these drivers already use Grosvenor Road for their journeys to work or to home and wish to make a short stop at the store en route. This will result in additional car engine and door banging disturbance for nearby residents from 7am to 11pm.

I accept that the highway network will be able to ‘absorb’ these additional vehicles, but Saltaire is already blighted with all-day traffic congestion and a range of related traffic nuisance issues including significant rat-running and speeding traffic plus parking problems. These proposals will make a bad situation worse, and increase high carbon travel and pollution at a time when the Council is in theory committed to decarbonising our economy. So, yet again, we are faced with proposals that degrade our ability to decarbonise our lives. For example, as far as I can see, the proposed development does not provide any sheltered cycle stands (only two unsheltered cycle stands are proposed) and does not provide any electric vehicle charging points.

I would ask colleagues to bear in mind that Policy TM2 of the Replacement UDP makes it clear that planning permission will not be granted if proposed developments “adversely affect existing and proposed transport infrastructure or services” and that “where proposals have a detrimental impact on the transport network, planning permission will not be granted”. I would argue that these additional car journeys will place additional stress on the local road network and the amenity of residents and non-car users, and I hope that colleagues will take Policy TM2 into consideration.

Unsustainable economy

My third concern is the negative impact of this new supermarket on the economic resilience of Saltaire.

The Replacement UDP states that the Council will “as far as it is possible” encourage the growth of independent specialty shops in places like Saltaire on the grounds that “a preponderance of such shops helps to keep a centre vibrant and prosperous and lend charm and individuality in a way that enhances its character and makes a shopping trip to that centre different from a trip to any other.” The Replacement UDP goes on to state that the Council will therefore “seek to support the retention and growth of independent retailers.”

In my view, the proposal undermines the aims stated above. For example, the applicants assert that the store will create 20 new jobs, but do not specify how many of these jobs will be part-time or how many other jobs will be lost in Saltaire as other shops close or reduce their staffing levels as a result of the diversion of retail footfall that this new store will trigger. This application does not offer the quantity or quality of work to local people that it claims, merely an suggestion that these jobs will be for ‘local’ people.

New supermarkets reduce footfall at local shops and this new store will divert trade from existing shops in Saltaire at a time when many are already struggling in the wake of the economic downturn. We know that hundreds of thousands of small, locally-owned businesses have been driven out of the UK retail market in recent decades. Local communities have been ‘hollowed out’ economically and homogenised in terms of the retail offer available to local residents. The insidious impact of this erosion of local identity has left us denuded of a sense of pride in our immediate economic communities and lacking control over our economic futures as a result and this proposed new supermarket can only exert additional economic pressure on Saltaire’s remaining independent traders.

Moreover, the new store’s turnover is far less likely to be ‘recycled’ in Saltaire than would be the case if this money was being spent by shoppers in locally-owned stores. Money spent in a locally-owned store is three times more likely to be spent locally by that retailer than is the case with money spent at chain stores such as Sainsbury’s.

Finally, I would also like the consultation period to be extended significantly to allow sufficient time for residents to consider this complex application.

Posted by at No comments:
Subscribe to: Posts (Atom)