Wednesday 13 April 2016

london manifestos of goldsmith and khan

People look at this blog by accident because of the London election. Here are notes to self & others: https://www.londonelects.org.uk/im-voter/who-you-can-vote

*Did not submit a mini-manifesto.


It says you can make a 1st & 2nd choice for mayor, even if you live in a marginal constituency. You can also look-through manifestos for good ideas or the usual, which is to say "more housing" and "be nasty to people who aren't in the room or voting", so it would be good to see the small print. The two likely candidates in reverse order are..

https://backzac2016.com/

http://www.sadiq.london/a_manifesto_for_all_londoners

I have not done my homework about how each candidate hopes to get more homes.

  • They all tend to spout the stuff about needing more external investment and visitors in order to raise the value of the pound, make manufacturing jobs harder to get and housing more expensive. To me, that is an opposite thing to the commitment to make more housing available.
  • The usual idea about "brown field" housing is good, but doesn't mention the fact that landlords don't let it to willing employers who want to make things, which is another very high priority, nor mention office space that could be re-zoned as office/residential if the mayor has legal power to do that.

I have not done my homework about how each candidtae hopes tobe nasty to people who aren't listening.

I hope they don't and that I am being rude un-necessarilly.
The Livingstone regime was nasty to clothes manufacturers and under-employed people by diverting money for job training towards a thing called Ethical Fashion Forum that promoted goods at zero tariff from a badly-run countries - Bangladesh in particular - that have no welfare state but plenty of money to set-up special trading zones with even less employee rights than existed at Rana Plaza, or export subsidy out of taxes on Bangladeshis. Their goods are already cheap and their countries already over-populated because of bad government. A few paragraphs of tariff law could change Bangladeshi's life massively by insisting that their government builds-up a national insurance system in order to get access to european markets, rather than the current 0% tariff and subsidy from Dfid. Similar to the recent Daily Express story about Dfid giving subsidies to Chinese steel works - which I have asked Channel 4's fact checking service to check.
http://election-richmond-park.blogspot.co.uk/2015/03/httpsfullfactorg-full-fact-is-uks.html
lists three fact checking organisations

I hope they don't and that I am being rude un-necessarilly.

The Lingstone regime was also nasty to people who used its many services delivered through organisations that claimed grants. The organisations were not required to publish their bid, nor request that users of the service sign to say that they have seen the detail and know how the organisation is funded. Those who ask a disaibility and job training service, or a youth employment service, to talk in an adult way are brushed-off; those who need a service delivered in a more competant way are also brushed-off.

The Livingstone and Johnson regimes were nasty in falling for PR projects like the Olympics or London Fashion Week with their implausible claims to help londoners - hower carefully dressed up by long reports commissioned from Oxford Economics.

The Goldsmith manifesto headlines suggest more parks but also more parks police. In Richmond, a group called Friends of Barnes Common and an associated company have been given £48,000 of taxpayers' money in a single year to do the kind of thing that cartoon characters do: be nasty to people who are not listening. They have built steel arches to prevent travellors parking their caravans in secluded car parks, and cut-down undergrowth nearby to maintain lines of site to make life harder for cruisers who want a bit of privacy. They have sent reps to police liaison comittees to badger them to send police around each night with search lights, just in case someone should want to go and cruise in the park. They say they have visited a similar scheme in Tower Hamlets where special laminated signs are left when alcoholics, cruisers, or rough-sleepers use the park telling them to clear-up after themselves and not come back. In summery, these are bad people doing bad things with money that should be spend on social care.

The Social Care problem.
I guess both candidates see it as health or social care, rather than olympics or social care or parks or social care or streetlights or social care.

Anyway, I have not done my homework but people search for things things so I have posted the links