This is a tricky issue for those of us who genuinely want to find out what people’s wishes are, their opinions, and (around election times in particular) their voting intentions if they are prepared to disclose this. Incidentally, that last is actually quite useful as far as the one questioned is concerned, but that is a lengthy discussion, so is for another time, I think.

Being pestered on one’s own doorstep, or in the street, is something about which many of us feel uncomfortable. So much “cold calling” and similar still goes on in this way, especially as other forms of cold calling have (rightly) been outlawed, such as by telephone, fax or email. Obviously, this was done for very good reasons: it wasn’t a spurious reaction, but in the interests of consumer protection.

Not that the legislation stops them: they merely ring, fax or email from abroad instead. Obviously, any outfit going to such lengths to flout our British laws has to be dodgy, by definition — and that leads me onto my subject for today.

Yes, it’s the ongoing saga of energy providers to pay people to come around with clipboards and identity badges to try to persuade you to change your energy provider. The fact that they feel the need to “cold call” in this way — despite the clear message from legislation in this area that the practice is considered unacceptable — once again shows that they are not to be trusted — ever!

It is nowadays well known that the cold-calling “representatives” at your door are very highly trained to elicit a sale, particularly to the most vulnerable and susceptible members of society, and even in extremely difficult circumstances — they have the “patter” and the techniques to break down resistance. Personally, I put them in the same category as all others with a similar self-serving agenda. To me, they are amongst the lowest of the low. I can and do handle them, usually quite emphatically after reminding them that no reputable business would conduct itself in such a manner (which it plainly wouldn’t).

I permanently “blacklist” any organisation that ever tries this on: they will never get my business. This is the only way to discourage these people — make sure they lose out through their dubious practices.

Remember that, no matter how attractive the sales pitch might be, that is all it is. The rep’ will do very well out of a sale (i.e. by signing-up to them) as will the company behind the initiative. These people aren’t trudging around our streets as volunteers — they are well-paid employees (or equivalent) of very profitable companies.

My advice: don’t deal with them — ever!

Councillor Ward is one of the 3 Councillors for Rochester South & Horsted Ward on Medway Council – you can view his website here.

A small group of friends go out for a meal at the local Macdonalds (or similar). On checking the money they have hey find there isn’t enough for them all to have (say) a burger, fries and a cup of tea or coffee. So, they pick on the least liked member of the group and say “Sorry, you’re having just the burger — no fries, no drink — so that the rest of us can have ours.”

That’s what the Government wheeze called “floor damping” means to Medway Council and Medway residents: several million pounds taken away after an already poor financial settlement, for no proper reason.

In the case of our group of friends, the correct approach is of course obvious: all to have their burgers and fries, and make a brew-up when they get home. It’s what I’d have done!

Instead, central Government chooses to take millions away from Medway every year, starting two years ago. Worse than ever, today’s published setllement shows that the level of floor damping for the next financial year (2008-2009) has been increased by an additional three-quarters of a million pounds! It will be no less than £5,369,000 top-sliced off our funding, with no possible justification whatsoever.

We already know how tight things are here, what with the restrictions we have had to place on opening hours at the Stirling Centre, closure of creches and additions to parking charges, including extending their hours. Today’s settlement is the clearest, most blatant case of fiddling wuch funding that this country has probably ever seen in its entire parliamentary history.

We all accept that there are reasons for small tweaks to iron out funding discrepancies, as and when these are identified. When the Government’s own data shows that this can been carried to such an extreme that, if Medway were funded on the same basis as (say) Leicester City Council this would result in no less than an additional £365 million coming to us each and every year — well, it’s something that quite frankly should be made illegal.

Bottom line: why should our more than a quarter of a million people — including 29 of the most disadvantaged and deprived neighbourhoods in the nation — have to suffer and go without, just because our national Governmnt (already in huge disgrace over their own Party funding) feel that they can play fast and loose with taxpayers’ money to suit themselves?

It’s about time the law on all this were changed, so that governments were legally compelled to serve the nation, rather than their own personal and party ends. I’d vote for that!

Councillor Ward is one of the 3 Councillors for Rochester South & Horsted Ward on Medway Council – you can view his website here.

It’s official — from Medway’s Labour Group. There is no deprivation in Medway, and that of course includes Twydall. Well, that’s news to me!

It was at last Thursday’s meeting of the full Medway Council that this year’s budget situation was raised, and official figures quoted showing how Medway received so much less per head of population than other areas of the country (which is how Government funding of Local Authorities is decided — the infamous “Barnett Formula”) that we are tens of millions of pounds underfunded every year.

Figures quoted from official Government sources showed that, if Medway were dealt with on the same basis as these other (generally northern Labour) councils, it would make a difference of up to £60 million more coming here every year.

As I said at the Council meeting: I hadn’t realised just how vast the gap was, and it was no wonder that we were now struggling so hard against these more-or-less impossible odds.

However, the Labour finance spokesman, Twydall’s Cllr Glyn Griffiths, claimed that the difference was down to Medway not having any deprived areas: there is a part of this funding formula that gives extra funding to such areas, and we aren’t getting any of that because we don’t need it, as we are a prosperous area.

Really? I say to him: tell that to residents in your own ward of Twydall, Councillor Griffiths! They aren’t in need of any extra support, then? Not according to you!

It is little wonder that, with attitudes like this, most Medway residents no longer really want any Labour representation on the Council. Interestingly, there are signs of this dissatisfaction with Labour brewing in the few remaining wards where still they have councillors, including Twydall.

Now that the three Rainham wards nearby now have only Conservative Councillors, how long can it be before Twydall goes the same way as Rainham, Strood and other parts of Medway that have voted Labour councillors out of office? Okay, Strood tends to keep one token Labour member somewhere in the urban part, but I expect even that to end at the next local elections.

If the Labour Group continue to so misrepresent and sell short the people in their own and other wards, this “Incredible Shrinking Party” (to borrow a movie title!) will simply wipe itself out, as it has been doing for the last ten years.

The Labour presence on Medway Council has gone down at every election since the Unitary’s creation (and even between elections) from 39 members in 1997 to 25 in 2000, 17 in 2003, 16 when Cllr Chishti crossed the floor to our side, and earlier this year the number reduced still further to just 13 members.

Unless local Labour members buck up their ideas in very short order, and for starters at least join us in fighting the dishonest funding regime that deprives Medway of huge amounts of funding, they will be perceived even more than they already are as out of touch and merely tame “pawns” of their national Party.

That is no use whatsoever to the communities of Medway — and if they don’t change their ways even more of them will be thrown out of office in three years or so from now, perhaps even all of them. They’ll then have only themselves to blame.

Councillor Ward is one of the 3 Councillors for Rochester South & Horsted Ward on Medway Council – you can view his website here.

So sang Sir Harry Secombe in “If I Ruled The World”.

Well, although I have no wish to rule the world, or even to become an MP (I leave that to those better equipped for the task, such as our own Rehman Chishti!), I am not immune to having pipe dreams about what I would do if I were ever placed in such a position. Probably most of us have had similar thoughts from time to time.

Anyway, I wouldn’t plan to run before I could walk, so I have limited my ideas for change and improvement to this nation of ours alone.

The first and most basic change I would make would be to introduce a formal Constitution — something I know many want, but political parties claim is “unnecessary”. I happen to disagree with that stance.

My proposed Constitution would be in two parts: the first would be a set of principles that would cast in stone, so to speak, never to be compromised. The only way any of them would ever be permitted to be changed would be via a national referendum.

One of those principles would be respect for all democratically-elected institutions, and no-one to overrule any of them from above or beyond.

Thus local communities would be allowed to determine their own futures without the threat of bullies like John Prescott or Gordon Brown imposing their own agendas — no-one in most of the affected communities voted for them, and certainly not on any kind of basis that permits interfering in local matters!

There would be NO housing quotas, imposed pack-em-in densities or other externally-dictated policies, under any circumstances! We here, who know what is best for our a area, will make all the decisions ourselves, without overruling from outsiders of any kind. There are plenty of legitimate recourses in case of perceived maladministration or similar, so we never need central government, regional assemblies (which would be permanently banned, by the way) or overseas agencies to try to tell us our business. This would be made unchangeable law!

Europe would be pushed back into what it does well: essentially just a trading bloc, rather than the attempted superstate that is still being pushed upon us in one guise or another. Oh, and where’s our promised referendum on the latest version of this, by the way?

The second part of my Constitution would be the changeable sections, including methods of taxation. One change is this arena that I’d like to try is for virtually all taxes to come to local communities in the first imstance, and for those communities — via their own local elected representatives — to effectively sub-contract a noational governmental organisation to deal with those very few things that really should be done that way.

Much of what national government currently does shouldn’t be dictated by them at all, but be left to the affected communities to deal with in their own way. After all, no outsider can have more than an inkling of what is really needed and how best to implement it.

A big clue to this is in how Medway manages its regeneration, as part of the Thames Gateway. We do this ourselves, rather than via any of the indirect methods utilised by other parts of the Gateway Region, all of which have had similar levels of investment but are way behind Medway in
so many ways.

Thus we clearly demonstrate the superiority of local management of projects and initiatives (and there are many more I could list, from Liveability to our Olympic Village plans, from our excellent libraries to our Contact Points and Centre, and so on) and other areas show their approaches to be next to useless by comparison.

Of course we shall still need “watchdogs” such as auditors and inspectors, but more sensibly applied, such as ten years ago when the costs to our council were just 30,000 Pounds or so per year. Now it’s over a third of a million pounds a year, all coming out of the same pot that provides local services. The next time any local service is being considered for review, it’ll be worth remembering this one of many externally-imposed reasons why the review has become necessary.

My Constitution would seek to provide a genuine incentive to reduce all bureaucracy by personally penalising anyone introducing new forms without a rock-solid case for doing so, and would reward those who find ways to get rid of such waste.

Okay: there are the bones of my ideas. Who here is with me?

Councillor Ward is one of the 3 Councillors for Rochester South & Horsted Ward on Medway Council – you can view his website here.

How many times have we all been taken in by the most reasonable of voices, the most charming of people, and the most disarming of spiels?

Yes, I perceive hands going up all over the place as people read this!

We’ve all had it done to us, and usually many times. It is really disheartening to know that so much of what is soft-sold to us, whether a product, service, religious cult or political ideology, is in fact nothing like that in reality.

What do you do? The natural tendency is to become cynical and distrust anyone with a persuasive argument to put. This, though, is throwing out the baby with the bathwater, as they say.

No! We all need to be much sharper in our dealings with the all-pervasive sales patter, wherever it originates — not automatically rejecting everything (which would be pointless) but being far more selective without giving up completely. There is good stuff out there, even including political stuff, as this old cynic found out first-hand after disillusionment with my previous preferred political party.

Don’t get me wrong: the Liberal Democrats in my previous home area were generally very good, and I had high regard for them. I hope they are still maintaining those worthy standards, though I do realise that the party has deteriorated as a whole, which is a great shame.

Meanwhile, I have had to steer a very careful course through the mire of political misinformation that tends to come from some directions, however well dressed-up it appears to be. There is a lot of that about, by the way, and I suspect it pervades all parties in particular locaties from time to time.

Here in Medway, it is the Labour party who are by far the worst offenders, and it is disappointing that not only are they expert in making themselves look credible and believable, but also there are still so many people in this general area who are easily taken in that it simply encourages them to do more of the same.

Anyone making even a modest effort would soon see through almost everything the Labour Party in Medway ever puts about — but so few ever do! In my ward we have a disproportionate number of seasoned professionals, and they are certainly no-one’s fools! They even start off treating me with suspicion (despite my considerable track record) though once they know me well enough, an unshakeable bond is then established.

If only the majority of Medway residents were at least in the same ball-park category of perceptiveness as my wonderful (but challenging!) electors are in places in my ward that I could list here(!) then the Labour people would have virtually no support. It has been declining over the years as the last several local election results have clearly demonstrated, but the lesson still hasn’t been fully learned.

It needs to be learned!

As for the LibDems: well, they are a mixed bunch, and do at least have the potential to become a useful and valuable force within Medway. They too have the unfortunate habit of misleading people with gloss and easy claims, but I see signs of hope on the distant horizon. Medway does need a credible opposition: it would be healthier than a one-party elected Council.

At the moment there is none, so I for one wish to encourage one to come into being. Just don’t let it be a continuation of the plausible sales pitch of a dishonest outfit, dependent upon a gullible public.

I think we all deserve better than that!

Councillor Ward is one of the 3 Councillors for Rochester South & Horsted Ward on Medway Council – you can view his website here.

There is an old saying that “All power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts completely.” It’s almost right.

Just like the usually misquoted saying that “money is the root of all evil” should in fact be “The love of money is the root of many kinds of evil” (check it, if you want), so the first should be that “All power /can/ corrupt…” etc. There is no universal law of the universe that guarantees it must happen if every case.

The truth of this is something I have discovered from being on the inside track within the (local) political establishment myself for a few years now. Believe me: I have been watching very carefully!

Yes, there is some obvious self-serving going on (thankfully not within my political group!) as for example the instance Alan has recently highlighted on this website, and a fair amount of what goes on within the council meetings and the scrutiny committees turnms out to have been politically motivated — usually to cling onto support (i.e. votes).

Here we see the paradox of electoral politics: the idea is to truly represent the public and do their bidding (as far as one is able) or be voted out next time. But pursuing the votes as the be-all and end-all — or at least the bottom line — of one’s agenda is not the same thing at all. We in this country have become ever more acutely aware of political ‘spin’, and the more elaborate (and expensive) campaigns at election times. It all tends to give an impression of pursuing power for power’s sake, and trying to make it look as though it’s really all being done “for the people”.

Fortunately, there is a lot of overlap between the two; but it still isn’t the right way to approach the subject, even if the results are perhaps as good a fit as can realistically be achieved in a human society.

So, are there any alternatives? Well, to give them their due, the LibDems have at least looked into alternative voting arrangements that they claim will be “more representative”, though it has been obvious for a long time that this is because they stand to benefit from the changes they propose. Actually, they aren’t more representative at all; and the LibDems have done their usual trick of latching onto one idea and won’t budge from that. They are fixated on one system and one only — one that effectively re-uses some votes (in a sense double-counts them, though this doesn’t show in the published figures).

In reality, this merely shifts the votes in odd directions, and fails to tackle the underlying causes of the issues I mentioned above. Quite the reverse: it has been shown that all the alternative methodologies that have been bandied around have fundamental weaknesses that make them less democratic and less likely to represent the voters.

This applies to transferable-vote systems, party lists and the rest. Such matters as enormous wards where the elected members cannot know their ‘patch’ and are unknown in most of it, and seeking favouritism to be high on a party list, are but two of the severe demerits to these schemes.

Another wheeze is voting “by thirds”, whereby all wards have three (or six, or nine, or…) members, and a third of these are elected in turn, per year, in a rolling programme.

Why? What is the point of this? It threatens to break up ward teams (who have to work on the basis that they could lose a member each year), drags everyone who bothers to vote out to the polls three times as often, and of course costs almost as much per year in election expenses as it currently costs every three or four years. All Polling Stations will still need to be opened and staffed every year, the Count will cost almost as much, and so will the other legally-required expenditure. It all comes out of your tax money, and mine.

The lesson from all this is not to fall into the trap of jumping at such fads as the Next Best Thing, however plausible the idea sounds when argued for by someone with a vested interest. This doesn’t mean that there can never be a better way; and I started a discussion on this subject on one of the uk political newsgroups a year or so ago.

No usable conclusion was reached, but at least we had looked at the subject in the twenty-first century, with postal votes and other new ingredients possibly affecting our deliberations nowadays. This would not have been the case when it was previously looked into, so it was worth giving it another airing.

My own conclusion is that tinkering at the edges is not the way. It gives the appearance of change, but achieves nothing of any real value. It is a bit disappointing to me as the prime mover of that discussion I mentioned just now (and which can be found in Google News’ archives, if you’re interested) but I have learned to live with what is, rather than what I might wish.

The only even near-certainty of getting the right person as a representative is to watch very carefully what is actually going on with them. The media cannot be entirely trusted, though they generally do a good job. You have to be really quite sharp! In my own ward this was not a problem, as we have a number of professionals of high standing living here. They are no pushovers, even with my reputation going before me, but they are very ‘with it’ and nobody’s fools.

If the rest of Medway had what we have in my ward, there is little doubt that the elected Medway Council would be an even better and more representative body — though, to be fair, it is (since last May) now very good indeed on my side of the Council Chamber, and a little better than pre-May on the opposite side.

What changed in May, though? More of Medway’s residents by far cast their votes this time, and they sent a message to those of us who were elected (and to those who weren’t, for that matter!) — they want and expect a better quality of representation. They’ve seen how things once were, changes since May 2000 have shown a flavour of change for the better, and they want more of that.

And, frankly, who can blame them?

Councillor Ward is one of the 3 Councillors for Rochester South & Horsted Ward on Medway Council – you can view his website here.