Paul Johnston

One of the most outrageous comments made in GB's conference sermon was his attempt to harness the Gospel in support of his attack on the Tory policy to encourage marriage and stable family life. A 'son of the Manse' ought to know better and I can only think that he must have mislaid his famous 'moral compass' for a while.

If he's looking for a scriptural text I earnestly recommend him to meditate upon Matthew 23; vv25 & 26, which begins, 'Woe to you, scribes and pharisees, hypocrites!' (RSV)

And yet the opinion polls continue to suggest that the British people would vote for another 5 years of this kind of thing........Can that really be true?

Springboard is a local organisation of which Kingston used to be justly very proud. As part of local health and social provision it has become a kind of social enterprise in which people with disabilities, mainly of a mental nature, can learn skills and produce goods and services which are marketable.

Like a lot of small initiatives it helps its users so much to grow in self confidence that their lives are transformed and they come to depend on having this facility available for life. They have been repeatedly assured that they can do so. Now it seems that, because our own Primary Care Trust has accumulated a £22m deficit in its few years of life (its annual budget is £211,000,000!) and other funders of the service are also cash strapped, the PCT and CMHT are trying to close it down, along with some other mental health provisions locally.

All this was attempted without public consultation other than via a meeting of the Health Overview Panel on Wednesday evening. As it happens I was there as alternate for one of our absent councillors. I am pleased to say that, with the help of Mary Clark and Geoff Austin (Cons) and the much appreciated common sense approach of Mary Reid (Lib Dem) we managed to get the HOP to require the PCT to take this issue to public consultation. The CMHT and the local MP are reportedly trying to find a new organisation to sponsor Springboard and keep it running. Let us hope they use the breathing space to good effect.

All of which leads me to question the utility of the bureaucratic PCT structure introduced by the Labour government to replace the NHS Internal Market created by the Tories in the 1990s. And we all know who loves bureaucratic structures, don't we?

The man who has helped more than any other apart from Blair himself to weaken the 300 year-old United Kingdom through the botched policy of devolution is now very keen on 'Britishness'. He wants to distract attention from the fact that, as a Scottish MP, thanks to devolution, his writ scarcely runs in his own constituency but it does run here in England. The same goes for his Chancellor, Mr. Darling and any number of other ministers. We have a huge democratic deficit in this part of Britain, created by him and his friends and he hopes we won't notice.

He also promises that foreign criminals will be deported, yet his own government's policies have made that ever more difficult to achieve. His government has not lost control of our borders, it has deliberately thrown it away. And yet it appears from the opinion polls that sensible British people are prepared to vote him in for another term of years. Can this really be the case???

This man's first act as Chancellor ten years ago was to strip £5billion out of the pension funds which would have provided security in old age for millions. He has continued this raid every year since so that the funds are about £100billion cumulatively worse off now than they would have been and many final salary schemes have closed. Local authority schemes have also been put under pressure which has inevitably been passed on the the Council Tax payer as contributions have had to be uprated to make up for the shortfall.

If the opinion polls are to be believed the voters of this country are going to let him get away with it for the third time running.....

Does it really cost £10,000 to lock one park gate at night? At our last neighbourhood committee meeting we were told that it would and that, therefore, the residents of Victoria Avenue Surbiton would have to put up with the ongoing damage caused by persons accessing KFC and passing their houses and damaging their cars en route.

The ward councillors - all Lib Dem - seemed convinced that what the residents who live there saw as the solution to their problem was no solution at all and were determined that no opposition councillor or local resident was going to make them change their minds - even so far as sanctioning an experimental period to see whether the residents had got it right or not.

This is just one example of the elected representatives of people treating their electors with benign contempt, as though the simple darlings don't really know what they're talking about but the Lib Dems and Council officers know what they ought to want better than they do themselves. This is what lies behind a lot of the scepticism about the political process that is seriously weakening trust in the whole democratic process and engendering an atmosphere of helplessness and hopelessness. 

I am really glad that the stance taken by Southborough Residents against the plan by Sunrise Senior Living to build a 70 bed 3 storey care home on the site of 4 houses and gardens has been vindicated by the Planning Inspectorate. Congratulations to all involved - the thing would have been a massively intrusive buidling, completely dwarfing its near neighbours. Personally I believe it would have been a disaster from the ecological viewpoint; the four houses have substantial and well established gardens with good stands of perfectly healthy trees, many of which would have been felled.

Thanks are due to the Residents committee, to Kingston Planning officers and to the Development Control Committee for backing the ward councillors' and Neighbourhood Committee's view.

There's a link to the decision itself on http://www.surbhillcllr.wordpress.com.