Bumped!

Sufficed to say I have had better days.

Much preperation for a presentation on the importance of internet-campaigning to a number of constituency Labour party chair's this afternoon in Crawley.

If only I got there.

I set off at 12.45pm; stocked up with petrol on the Maidstone Road and proceeded up towards the roundabout.

It was busy; the Rochester Girls Grammar School had an event... traffic was heavy.

After getting past the first roundabout I was caught on the slip road above Junction 3 (M2) before it happened - my first ever car accident. You hear of these things, but never think, it could happen to you...

Luckily it was at low speeds, and involved a third party having tried to cut in front of three moving vehicles as the roads merge into one, causing us to all suddenly break. The culprit of course never stopped but left in his/her wake a trail of bumped cars - my Peugeot coming off by far the worst of it.

The police were on scene remarkably quickly and handled it very professionally, which is nothing less than can be expected from our thin blue line. Details exchanged, a curteosy handshake with the other gentleman involved in front, and company parted. It could have been so much worse... and I was grateful that actually, whilst my car has suffered damage, it is a financial cost rather than a human tragedy.

The moral of the story is be very careful; there are some lunatic drivers out there.

Bin a bad day!

It seems like that baffling behaviour is not just the preserve of some of our current and former local Conservative Councillors.

Oliver Letwin MP - of blue-sky thinking fame - was spotted dropping his constituent communications into St James Park bin. Not only is this ethically questionable given its constituency work but there were apparently sensitive documents included.

Apparently he wasnt the only one!

Luckily for Letwin it did not include the Coalition Agreement document... he may have won a few pundits for that on the right

It was all so much easier back in Roman times a Letbin...

Knoxy-Foxy has gone

Anyone watching Question Time last night could not be left with any other impression than the public had turned on the Fox.

He has spent days trying to hide the truth from the public; ignoring the innuendo about whether he was gay or not (and I dont think he was by the way) the key fact remains he allowed a man, a friend even, way too much personal access to his position, which is highly sensitive and susceptible given its prominence.

Whilst our boys fight in Afghanistan and across the world it seems our Defence Secretary and his buddy were happy to wine and dine in some of the most exclusive hotels.

It stank of Tory sleaze.

And it isnt over; what this saga does highlight is that senior Conservative Cabinet members sit on the boards of shadowy organisations whose interests are those of their financial backers and not the public. Many of those 'Atlantic Bridge' hedge fund owners profited from the economic downturn and engaged in highly selective practices; so much for morality Cameron.

Adam Werrity was paid via a not-for-profit limited company which presumably kept him off the upper-rate tax band of 50 or 40%. This is all speculation but there are benefits of working for small limited companies...

Atlantic Bridge if it is believed goes all the way to Number 10 and includes a huge number of prominent cabinet members to boot. Have they all been dining off the largese of wealthy corporate donations... I suspect we will find out soon enough.

The replacement for Fox is none other than Philip Hammond MP who has done quite well of late on the media circuit; seen as a safe pair of hands and gray as grey, he could be a Chancellor figure in a few years, if he keeps his powder-keg dry that is.

The promotion of Justine Greening MP to the Transport post is a good one and shows Cameron is ready to kick the right-wing of his party into touch by promoting a moderate. There will be no referendum on Europe, no loony libertarianism and no bonkers Brussel bashing in his government. Good on ya Cameron; stick it to the bonkers brigade.

I have spent that last hour trying to source the position of Justine Greening MP on the Boris Island Airport and there is good news and bad. The good news is she has not expressed any opinion to support it and she opposed the third-runway at Heathrow and increasing development in Gatwick. The bad news is also that she opposed the third-runway at Heathrow and Gatwick expansion and is a London MP; whose caucus in the Conservative Party tends to favour Estuary expansion.

Local MPs need to get in a question to her as soon as possible to get assurances that under her watch we will see no proposal for an airport in North Kent.

Labour's plan for jobs

This is a really worrying time for families and businesses; struggling with higher food prices and gas bills and worried about their jobs and their children’s futures.

The Tory-led Government are cutting too far and too fast and risk choking off economic recovery. Unemployment is rising again and is currently at the highest level in 17 years. One in five young people are out of work and now more women are unemployed than at any time since 1988.

We need to act now to show the Tory-led Government that there is another way.

Labour has set out a clear five-point plan for jobs, to help struggling families and support small businesses. Our jobs plan includes:

1. A £2 billion tax on bank bonuses to fund 100,000 jobs for young people and build 25,000 affordable homes

2. Bringing forward long-term investment projects, like new school buildings

3. Temporarily reversing the VAT rise – a £450 boost for families with children

4. A one year cut in VAT to 5% on home improvements and repairs to help small businesses

5. A tax break for every small firm which takes on extra workers

It's a Balls-Up!

The staggering and public humiliation piled on the Medway Conservatives this week over the bus station 'balls-up' shows the wheels are coming off this clapped-out administration

Everything that could go wrong with the white elephant of a bus station has gone wrong. It has been a horrible week for bus users, and one which serves to highlight the feeble and incapable Tory cabinet, but also the emasculated and weak Tory backbenchers who have so little backbone they feel obliged to support a cabinet of total second-hopers.

This has been a monumental screw up at all levels.

Not only is the bus station 5 months late but at a cost of £7.3m is £2.3m overbudget. A sum that represents £30 for every man, woman and child in the Medway Towns, and staggering when added to the net sum of waste over the regeneration on the Brook, Woodlands, Walderslade, the Ridgemeadow closure, Civic Centre and countless other failures.

We have an endemic problem of poor political leadership at the very heart of our Council. A cancer of Tory failure which corrodes and eats away at public good-will.

Remember this has been ongoing for months. The Tories knew the bus station was overbudget and badly managed but deliberately obfuscated on public questions in the Full Council chamber from the Labour opposition, led by Councillor Vince Maple. They shamelessly colluded to cover up the truth from the public prior to the local election.

Omens were poor last week when the Council press office, or the politburo or pravda (depending on which paper) as its known in local media circles, started sending out press about the new facility that was due to open. The Council, according to sources, sent out shocking photo's of the previous Pentagon Centre whilst exaggerating the 'butterflies' and greenery of the new facility. Alas, the Council forgot to read the statement and included a reference to not even knowing the companies who were to use the facility in the first place. The irony wasnt lost given this was the exact issue debated in the Emergency Council meeting in September

So it opened and on site were Tory cabinet members in pinstripe. Unfortunately all was not well...

Key parts of the facility were either missing or seemingly forgotten. We have no seats for elderly residents, no toilets for families with kids, no shelter for the majority who now have to fight the elements every winter, waiting for a bus service which has been rated amongst the worst in the country by resident polling. Most importantly we have no zebra crossings, which were presumably a key part of the contract (!?).

The bus station was incomplete - which is now exactly why despite being opened we still have workman finishing the job; whilst the public stand by and watch.

The politics of this situation have been bungled - The Council were seemingly unaware of the status of the bus station before it opened; or if they were not have kept surprisingly silent... I say unaware, because if you knew parts were incomplete or not working you would not send in your political cabinet to umm, take the credit. The Tory cabinet surely been advised by somone with a brain-cell, that perhaps attending an incomplete bus station was a bad idea. You would think...

It reached eye-wateringly painful levels when Cllr Wicks, the man whose utter incapability are legend across the towns, decided to visit the Bus Station. A decision which must stand at the pinnacle of political incapability. A truly stupid move...

Yes, the very same Councillor Les Wicks, who has bungled programme after project; whose stock is so low amongst the public it makes Liam Fox look like a paragon of capability, should have been kept well away... instead he swaggers down to tell concerned travellers that the facility is 'unsafe' to use after being cornered by a fella who thinks the whole thing is a 'balls-up'.

Cllr Rodney was there of course citing a few, eer, 'teething problems' which even in the Chamber's lexicon of low impact, of which he excels, is laughable.

It was a travesty of shocking management and bungled leadership - his bungled leadership.

The other protagonist, always the politician, saw the danger and kept well away. Silent hath the Jarrett been; no wonder, grubby fingerprints of poor financial scrutiny are all over it. His inability to work with the opposition in a constructive manner and heed warnings says it all.

This bus facility was 5 months late and £2.3m over budget. Plans were bungled from day one and rushed and rammed through Planning without listening to the public. Delays have seen months of congestion and pain added to the commuter and whose cost of £7.3m could have been better spent on a better bus facility with full public consultation. The result; a facility opened with no seats, toilets, working signs or crossings...

Update

It appears that the Tories had also planned for the Pentagon bus station to become a Council Staff car park... outrageous really, but are you that surprised?

The bus station isnt finished; neither politically or indeed in reality

Medway isn't working under Tories

Only the most blind of Conservatives can now ignore the glaringly obvious - that Gideon and the Etonian cabinet of multi-millionares are totally mismanaging the economic recovery.

The last time unemployment stood at this level was under the Major Conservative government. A government that failed Britain with sky high crime, dithering factional govenrment, dodgy scandals and a total lack of leadership. History repeats itself.

Labour went into the General Election in 2010 on an economic argument which has since come to fruition. Labour wanted a slower pace of deficit reduction over a longer cycle because we were clear the recovery had not been secured.

The Tories meanwhile lied to the public over their plans. They were elected and cut the public sector and rose taxes they promised they would not - VAT.

The Etonian arrogance of the Tories who last year claimed last year we were 'out of the danger zone' and that there need not be a rise in unemployment. So today, unemployment increased by 114,000 to 2.57 million in the quarter to August, the worst total since the autumn of 1994, giving a jobless rate of 8.1%, the highest since 1996.

Medway's claimant count rose 142 to 7,120, while in the rest of Kent, an extra 445 people joined the dole queue.

Youth unemployment reached a record high of 991,000, while the numbers claiming Jobseeker's Allowance increased for the seventh month in a row, to 1.6 million, date from the Office of National Statistics has shown.

The male youth unemployment rate (23.6 per cent) is also the highest since 1992. There are now 257,000 young people who have been unemployed for over a year, the highest figure since Dec-Feb 1994. Overall, 867,000 people have been unemployed over a year and 423,000 for more than two years.

Other figures showed a 178,000 slump in employment in the quarter to August - the biggest fall in more than two years - and the largest-ever cut in the number of part-time workers, down by 175,000.The number of people classed as economically inactive increased by 26,000 to 9.35 million, a rate of 23.3%. Taking the inactivity rate and the new jobless figures together, half of 16 to 24-year-olds are now not employed, it was revealed.

Not one Medway Conservative Councillor or MP has apologised for calling it wrong...

With the Tories Britain isn't working. We need a plan B.

Waste not, want not

It seems that in the ether of the 11+ fiasco a worse scandal of gross incompetence is brewing.

The Tories have made attempts since 2003 of claiming that they are the best stewards of local services.

In 2007, the Tories were actively considering the introduction of fortnightly bin collections which has been rolled-out across the country in Conservative-controlled boroughs.

From schools, old people care to bin collection it all seems to be falling apart.

This time is is the move towards the removal of plastic sacks which was lauded by the Tory Council in 2009.

In the 'Waste' press statement in 2009 the Tories stated

"The new waste contract also proposes to give residents the option of choosing a wheelie bin so that the Council can offer householders a flexible service which caters to their needs. If residents choose to continue using black sacks they can".

The move towards full scale roll-out of wheelie bins was then subsequently cut in the April 2011 budget, whilst the 'blow-away' straw sacks have turned out to be a failure so requiring additional expenditure to retain clear sacks.

A 'wheelie' good idea? Not under the Tories!