Scrutiny Committee

Last night I attended the Education scrutiny committee meeting. First off we heard from five schools who have recently been through an ofsted inspection. All the schools has passed and one, the Compton School had passed all sections with grade ones. Whilst it is important to see the schools and also very interesting, I am not sure that scrutiny is the best place for doing this.

Scrutiny is supposed to provide feedback on the processes and policies of the Council. The minutes will note that we saw the schools but what will actually be fed back into the system to help us get even better? In reality probably not much.

We were also tasked with commenting on the budget. The problem is that the information we were given lacked any context. We knew what was being cut or rationalised but not what effect that might have. For example if a post is deleted that might have a big effect if there were only three staff in a department. It would have a lesser effect if the department concerned had fifty staff. Without the context any meaningful comment was difficult and relied on members having prior knowledge either from their own professional background or from their experience. Many of the members of the committee are new Cllrs and lack experience to do this.

The meeting was not helped by loud live music from an event being hosted by the Mayor in the room next door!

Book reviews and comments

I've been reading a couple of interesting books recently. The first is Ian Kershaw's two volume biography of Hitler. Kershaw manages to achieve a coherent narrative which although very comprehensive does not lose the reader in the detail. I've just finished the first volume which deals with the period up to 1936. Perhaps the scariest part for me is the way Hitler and the Nazi party destroyed the Weimar republic from within. Although there were external factors such as the depression, Hitler could have been stopped by the other parties. In the end they handed him power in the hope that they could control him. Once he had that power they had signed their own death warrants. In some cases literally.

The other thing that strikes you is just how nondescript Hitler was. True he had a gift for oratory but beyond that very little else. How he came to run a modern european country is astonishing. The casual racism and anti-semitism that was prevelant in society is also clear from the book. Being anti-semetic was almost mainstream in early 20th Century Germany and Austria. Hopefully we have come along way since then, although it is surprising how often you hear remarks like; "I'm not racist but . .." or hear people expressing support for openly racist parties.

The other book I am reading is 'Britian after Blair'. This is a compilation of essays edited by Julian Astle, David Laws, Paul Marshall and Alasdair Murray. The essays seek explore the liberal alternatives to Blairism. The book also contains an audit of the Blair era . Whilst there are many things to applaud, there are also many things where blairism has either struggled or failed. The essays, mostly by Lib Dem MP's seek to map out alternatives to the new Labour agenda. I haven't finished reading them yet but it is clear that there is a coherent liberal agenda which should have a wider audience than it is currently getting.

Talking of liberalism. Recent comments on my blog, mostly anonymous have led me to consider how comments should be dealt with. My current thinking is not to censor them or require the writer to give their identity. after all if you can't deal with criticism why be involved in politics. Also i'm sure people reading them can draw their own conclusions from anonymous comments.

so the comments stay. To the person/s who don't like my grammer etc - You really don't have to read this if you don't want to. I really won't mind if you don't.

East Barnet by-election

Firstly congratulations to Joanna Tambourides who won the East Barnet by-election for the Conservatives. I won't pretend we weren't dissapointed with the result. Sean worked very hard and we did increase our vote by 5%, the only major party to increase our vote share.

Given the very short time we had it was difficult for a proper campaign to take place and the postal voters hardly saw anything of the campaign before they voted. I notice that my fellow Cllr, Robert Rams has aready accused us of a negative campaign. Well Robert, I believe we set out to raise the issues that the people of East Barnet cared about. We didn't set out to deliberately deceive the electorate as the tories did when they quoted one of their own members letters in the local paper as if it were the papers opinion. People in glass houses should not throw stones.

The comments made about Sean Hooker are grossly unfair. Sean fought East Barnet because he lives there and cares about his local area. He is hardly a career politician as he works full time for an insurance company. Sean wasn't at the count because he had to got to work. Had the count been held as scheduled then he would have been there.