Why am I not surprised that the list published by the Tories today of ‘Ten reasons to vote Conservative’ did not include any reference to the environment or climate change?
So much for David Cameron’s claim that he has ‘sought to push the environment up to the top of the political agenda.’
It follows the recent revelation that reducing Britain’s carbon footprint was at the bottom of Tory parliamentary candidates’ priorities.
Mr Cameron has done his photoshoot with huskies, now it seems to be back to politics as usual.
Tags:Conservative green policies·David Cameron·Sandy Walkington
St Albans Labour Party has been trumpeting their narrow 32 vote margin in holding their London Colney parish council seat as the greatest news since the second coming. Of course their candidate Maria Aguado is to be congratulated on her victory. But the real news was the trouncing of the BNP and the barnstorming performance by LibDem first-time candidate Vibs Nazeri.
It was the last opportunity for real voting anywhere in the St Albans constituency before the imminent General Election. Leaving aside the BNP, both Labour and particularly the Conservatives saw their vote share fall compared with the huge surge in support for the Liberal Democrats.
As recently as 2008, district councillor Dave Winstone, the Conservative candidate on Thursday, polled 48 percent of the vote to win London Colney village in the last district election. On Thursday he came in third place, with his 181 votes representing a dramatically reduced 27 percent vote share. It’s yet more evidence of the damage done to the St Albans Conservative Party by months of local in-fighting.”
Vibs polled 29 percent of the vote, a massive increase from the six percent polled by the LibDem candidate in London Colney in 2008. The Labour victory was achieved on a markedly lower vote share than they achieved when they lost the village in 2008.
The momentum going forward into the General Election is clearly with the Liberal Democrats.
PS And the best news has to be the humiliation of the BNP with a fourth place 61 vote finish. (Incidentally they contested three other by-elections on the same day in other parts of the country and came fourth in all of them.) I hope the Review newspaper will forgive me for reproducing a quote they got on polling day from voter Jane as she went into the polling station:
“I have voted Lib Dem.
“I always vote, but I think it is particularly important because of the BNP.
“I don’t want a bunch of fascists on my doorstep.”
Amen to that.
Tags:BNP·Dave Winstone·London Colney·London Colney by-election·Maria Aguado·Sandy Walkington·St Albans·Vibs Nazeri
I want to say thank you to Tesco. The news that they are dropping their plans to build a superstore on the London Road site and instead move their St Peters Street store to larger premises in the former Woolworths is a shot in the arm for St Albans.
We can now get an appropriately mixed development at London Road – who knows, a primary school, perhaps a small shopping centre, housing of course, all done in a way that respects the scale of the city centre. I hope there will be an intelligent planning brief for the site but equally no delay.
Meanwhile only yesterday I was talking to market stallholders whose site is outside the former Woolworths. They were so sad at the decline of St Peters Street at the Hatfield Road end. They knew there was a possibility of a reinvigorated city centre Tesco and they were looking forward to it as a magnet and anchor.
Well Tesco looks to have delivered – full marks to them.
Tags:London Road·Sandy Walkington·St Albans·St Albans Market·Tesco
Today’s “The World This Weekend” included a long item on the MP expense scandal and looked in particular at voter reaction in Stevenage (Barbara Follett) and St Albans. Both Anne Main and I were interviewed for the programme while we were at St Albans City Station on Friday evening. There were vox pops with local voters.
I was kindly introduced as “The main challenger in this constituency Sandy Walkington” – and the BBC is of course always right.
Tags:Anne Main·BBC·MP Expenses·Sandy Walkington·St Albans·The World This Weekend
It’s just a thought.
The arrival and departure boards at St Albans City gleamed with on-time trains tonight. How different from recent months. And what a coincidence that the FCC top management were doing their Meet the Managers (or “Face the Music”) session, not to mention more radio and television crews as well as local media than you could shake a stick at.
It’s nice to know an on-time service can be delivered. More please.
Tags:FCC·First Capital Connect·Sandy Walkington·St Albans
I can well remember my first time in Bedmond. It was circa 1985. With a friend, I had done a great circular cycle ride from St Albans reaching Sarratt. Coming back, we came up Toms Lane, and I well remember the weary push. All I wanted was the ridge and the then easy ride back to St Albans.
Imagine my astonishment when I came to the top and found the tin church. These are common in the Highlands, but I never thought I would see one in Hertfordshire.
Officially it’s the Church of the Ascension, and the tower looks like a Jules Verne rocket ready to blast you to the moon and beyond.
It’s the original flat pack church – normally designed for shipping out to the colonies. Apparently you could even buy them in Harrods and I guess you still can. It cost £80 – a bargain. Refixing the steeple cost considerably more a few years ago. And now they have a need to fix the roof.
So let me commend the parish coffee morning on the first Wednesday of each month. You contribute to the roof, you get the chance to see inside the warm pitch pine interior, and you meet a lovely group of people including Bedmond’s energetic and much liked councillor Joy Mann.
Tags:Bedmond·Bedmond church·Joy Mann·Sandy Walkington·St Albans·Toms Lane
I had not consciously logged First Group’s strapline until I was sitting this afternoon in a Palace of Westminster committee room seeing a set of slides produced by Mary Grant, chair of First Capital Connect and managing director of all First Group’s rail operations.
FCC certainly has “transformed” travel but not perhaps in the way that the marketing copywriters had intended.
Ms Grant was there with Neal Lawson, the new MD of FCC, to meet Norman Baker MP, the LibDem shadow transport secretary, and fellow LibDem MPs Tom Brake and Paul Burstow, both of whom represent constituencies “served” by FCC. Also present was Bill Bradshaw, former Director of Strategy for British Rail and now LibDem transport spokesman in the House of Lords. Norman had kindly asked me to join them, together with Nigel Quinton, my counterpart in Hitchin & Harpenden.
At least there were no New Labour crocodile tears. But no tears at all really. Some routine expressions of regret – “how we inconvenienced passengers was unacceptable” – but I had no sense that they truly understood just how horrible the last few months have been for local commuters. As a met police detective said to me last night, “Ive never had such an awful time.” We heard a lot of excuses and “force majeure” was dusted down rather a lot.
[Read more →]
Tags:377 trains·delay repay·FCC·First Capital Connect·Lord Bradshaw·Mary Grant·Neal Lawson·Nigel Quinton·Norman Baker MP·Paul Burstow MP·Sandy Walkington·St Albans·Tom Brake MP
A belated note about last Saturday’s St Albans Interfaith Group’s reception at the Civic Centre.
St Albans is special in so many ways, and the longstanding interfaith group (which predates 9/11) is evidence of that. The initiative came from the Rev Tony Hurle of St Paul’s Church, who wanted to create a regular dialogue between the local religious communities.
On Saturday we had speeches from Kevin Walton, the Canon Chancellor at the Abbey, who made the point that our city’s origin stemmed from Alban, then a non-Christian, reaching out to protect a persecuted Christian; a luminous talk from Dr Khalid of the Islamic Centre, St Pauls’ close neighbour in Hatfield Road; speeches from the United Synagogue in Oswald road and the Masorti congregation; the Bahai; and the Society of Friends, who are currently hosting the Masorti congregation at the Friends Meeting House in Upper Lattimore Road. Also spotted were friends from Marlborough Road Methodist Church, as well as other Anglican churches in town.
My apologies if I have omitted anyone. They are all Abrahamic faiths, and there is far more that unites than divides us. I found this event an uplifting and moving experience.
Tags:Marlborough Road Methodist Church·Sandy Walkington·St Albans·St Albans Abbey·St Albans Bahai·St Albans Islamic Centre·St Albans Masorti Synagogue·St Albans Quakers·St Albans United Synagogue·St Pauls church St Albans
First Capital Connect is making a dog’s breakfast of its compensation offer for the months of hopeless service. Why am I not surprised? I am joining Liberal Democrat transport spokesman Norman Baker MP in a meeting tomorrow with Neal Lawson, the new occupant of the FCC managing director’s office, and I will be saying that they have to do better in terms of recognising what their passengers have had to endure.
The latest proposals are unnecessarily complex and frankly niggardly. People who had a break in season tickets – for example when the previous one expired around Christmas and there was no point renewing before going back to work – look to be losing out.
As for people who have already claimed under the Delay Repay Scheme, the way this has been handled beggars belief. I am told by local commuters that rather than one single set of tickets for a combined claim, passengers are receiving a separate envelope and letter with rail travel voucher for each journey leg where delays were more than 30 minutes. One local commuter told me she came home to 13 separate letters, each with 36p postage. One of her fellow passengers had his letter box inundated with 24 identical envelopes, again each carrying 36p postage. This will have been repeated for thousands of commuters. A huge amount of money swallowed up in postage and unnecessary bureaucracy.
Presumably if you are a season ticket holder, you have to put these vouchers behind the proverbial clock on the mantelpiece and wait till your season ticket runs out, then use the vouchers (which won’t cover any underground element) and then renew the season ticket.
I have previously noted the basic unfairness of the one-size-fits-all national Delay Repay scheme with its cut-off point of 30 minutes, so St Albans commuters have to be delayed by more than 100 perent of their journey time to qualify. It would have been far better if FCC had devised a simple and appropriately generous season ticket extension scheme from the beginning. My son lives in Berlin. They had a major problem lasting weeks with the surface railway S-Bahn – operated by a private company. Annual season ticket holders got a month’s free travel, monthly season holders got an extra week. Simple and uncomplicated.
Tags:delay repay·FCC·First Capital Connect·Norman Baker MP·Sandy Walkington·St Albans
I was profoundly depressed to see that the Government’s own figures show that almost a third of boys from disadvantaged backgrounds cannot write their own name after a year at primary school. The increasing lack of social mobility in the UK is very concerning. These figures show that the gap between poorer children and the better-off is clear when they are only five years old.
It makes me more than ever convinced that our policy of paying a pupil premium (incidentally a LibDem idea now copied by the Conservatives) to schools targeted specifically at children from the least privileged backgrounds must be right. A far better and fairer use of money in the crucial early years than Labour’s absurd Child Trust Fund.
PS Incidentally I am currently reading Chris Mullin’s “The View from the Foothills”. As well as giving fascinating insight into the period when Mr Blair took us to war, his descriptions of his Sunderland constituency and the lack of any ambition from many parents for their children illustrates the challenge we face if we are to start closing a gap which has widened under both Conservatives and Labour ever since Mrs Thatcher.
Tags:pupil premium·Sandy Walkington
