Sandy 4 St Albans

Sandy Walkington campaigns with the Liberal Democrats across St Albans

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“Look! St Albans” is worth a look-in

February 26th, 2012 · Sandy's blog

Tomorrow – Monday 27th February – sees the first public open meeting for the Look! St Albans initiative.  It will begin at 7 pm at the Dagnall Street Baptist Church and I intend to be there and will be able to report back further.

Look! St Albans is the initiative of a wide number of local organisations – see below.  They have asked the Prince’s Foundation to help in articulating specific design rules for new buildings and spaces in the St Albans city centre.

The Foundation is inviting the public to share their ideas and images, on the basis that we know what is special about St Albans.

As the Civic Society says on its website, it’s all about “what is typical, unique, weird and wonderful about the city. Look at the buildings, the public squares and spaces that can be seen in the city. Look for features and design details you feel reflect best the identity of St Albans. Also, examples of what you don’t want to see repeated.”

The objective is to use the output of this process to provide detailed local design guidance for the St Albans City Centre area, which should be adopted by the Council.

I think it’s a very interesting project.  The challenge is not to end up with Disneyfication.  We want good modern architecture made out of honest materials which respect the historic city.  I am particularly keen on the quality of floorscape which so often lets us down.  I hope too that we can think about the contribution made to the St Albans townscape by all the footpaths which criss-cross the city centre making it permeable and often affording deliciously framed views.  The Maltings does this particularly well with the brick steps up from London Road and under the library into the central “street”.  Then they let themselves horribly down with the dire dark brown Victoria Street frontage.

So it’s all about promoting the good and preventing the bad and the ugly.

Organisations working with the Prince’s Foundation on the Look! St Albans project:

St Albans Civic Society, Hertfordshire Association of Architects, Herts Advertiser, St Albans City and District Council, St Albans and Hertfordshire Architectural and Archaeological Society, St Albans Abbey, the Chamber of Commerce, and seven local residents’ associations – Fishpool Street, Society of St Michaels and Kingsbury, Cunningham, Marshalswick, Garden Fields, Verulam Road and Aboyne.

Hats off to all of them

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How synthetic is the row about the Work Programme?

February 24th, 2012 · Sandy's blog

It seems  insulting to ethnicities with a history of slavery and to those who are genuinely enslaved currently when people receiving jobseekers allowance and then required to do work experience with expenses in a high street store are desribed as “slaves” – however mundane the experience might be.

Unless we are very lucky, we almost all start in mind-blowingly boring “McJobs”, even when they are paid.  I can recall dividing the day into ever more elaborate fractions in my head in one particular factory where there was simply nothing to do but listen to the compulsory Radio 2 over the loudspeakers and act busy as the shop stewards had taught us.  Stacking shelves would have been bliss by comparison.

I thought the panel on last night’s BBC QuestionTime were excellent on this issue.  In the end potential employers want to see stuff on a cv, a demonstration that the person concerned can get up in the morning.

The January 2012 official labour market statistics show 425 18-24 year olds cleaiming jobseekers’ allowance in St Albans District.  While much better than other places, it is still far too high.

I hope that the £1 billion Youth Contract promoted by Nick Clegg with its up to £2,200 subsidy per young person taken on will kickstart more youth employment opportunities.  Clearly paid work is better than unpaid employment.  In the meantime I am glad that different organisations are offering work experience and I hope that the current issues can and will be ironed out to restore confidence to the employers concerned.

For example I wrote above that expenses will be paid (which is my best understanding of the scheme) – but I have seen some suggestions that some Work Programme suppliers do not do this which is clearly wrong.

Any feedback on actual experience welcome.

PS Once upon a time families had to pay master tradesmen to take on their sons as apprentices – but I don’t want to give Chris Grayling ideas…

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“Quantitative Easing” explained – simples

February 23rd, 2012 · Sandy's blog

Every so often we hear that the Bank of England has indulged in another bout of “quantitative easing” which is explained as a clever way to increase liquidity in the economy and thus encourage economic growth.  QE is one of those terms that make one’s eyes glaze over, except for a nagging feeling that the Bank is printing money.

Last week I attended a fascinating briefing on the economy for local businesspeople by one of the Bank of England’s regional agents.  A member of the audience asked him to explain quantitative easing in words of one syllable.  What follows is my best recollection of his answer, so it’s not meant to be a direct quote and any errors are wholly my own!

Various institutions, not just banks, hold government bonds, otherwise known as gilts, which are sold to finance the national debt.  In quantitative easing, what the Bank of England is doing is buying those gilts for cash from those institutions that wish to sell -  in the most recent exercise, the Bank bought some £50 billion worth.

The institutions can decide how to use this cash which they have suddenly been paid – they might just put it on deposit but that is not at all profitable at current rates or they can invest it more productively – it’s up to them.

The government bonds haven’t gone away, they are now owned by the Bank, which receives interest from the Government like any other holder of government debt.  As the economy picks up and public finances get back into order with the government no longer having to add to debt and even starting to pay it down, the Bank can then sell the government debt which it has bought back into the market, thus balancing out the whole process.

So it is not a one-way process of “printing money”.

I hope I have understood the exercise correctly – the explanation seemed very lucid when I heard it!  Happy to have corrections, or any further illumination – my days of studying macro-economics are in the very distant past.

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Peter Oborne, Abu Qatada and the legacy of Winston Churchill

February 9th, 2012 · Sandy's blog

The views of the Telegraph’s chief political commentator Peter Oborne are always interesting.  His defence in that paper of the European Convention on Human Rights, prompted by the uproar over Abu Qatada,  is robust and cogent – see http://tgr.ph/yEqlU9

Here are some choice extracts:

There is nothing on this earth more British than the instinct to stand up for the underdog or the pariah, however unpopular or unattractive he or she might be. And there is no institution – not even the MCC or the Lawn Tennis Association – more British than the European Court of Human Rights.

It was inspired by Sir Winston Churchill, eager in the aftermath of the Second World War and the Holocaust to export the British system of fairness and decency. Churchill ensured that its founding document was drafted by a British politician, David Maxwell Fyfe, later to become a Conservative Lord Chancellor. Every single one of the great ideas that were to be embodied in the European Convention – freedom from torture, restraint on the power of the state, freedom under law – was an ancient British principle transferred on to the European stage.

It should be a matter of enormous national pride that an institution so profoundly British in its inspiration has refused to send an Arab fundamentalist (however despicable his crimes are alleged to be) to Jordan, where he might be tortured, or at best face the prospect of being sent to jail on the back of evidence acquired from a torture victim.

Oborne goes on to quote Churchill’s great “Iron Curtain” speech in Fulton, Missouri, where he defended the Western tradition of the rule of law, and comments that today “Churchill might be denounced as some eccentric, mad-eyed human rights fanatic.”

Maybe the government can get adequate guarantees from Jordan that the evidence of torture victims will not be used against Abu Qatada if he is deported back there.  I understand there are all sorts of problems with putting him on trial in the United Kingdom because it might expose some of the mechanisms used to track potential terrorists, and we have to find a way through that if possible.

But our concern that certain intelligence-gathering methods should not be publicised in open court cannot justify ill-informed pot-shots at one of the key foundations of our liberty.  I agree with Peter Oborne.

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What the Dickens?

February 7th, 2012 · Sandy's blog

It’s Dickens’s bicentennial. While Bill Sykes lurked in Hatfield, following the brutal murder of Nancy, Bleak House is firmly in St Albans, standing behind its pineapple-topped gateposts at the corner of Normandy Road and Catherine Street.  (How many Albanians still pronounce Catherine with a long ‘i’ I wonder.)

bleak_houseBH is now a chi-chi interior designer’s office.  Its name seemed more appropriate to its previous incarnation as an outpost of social services.

I presume Dickens Close was carved out of Bleak House’s former grounds and was named for the author.

PS I have done my Dickens for the year by completing Our Mutual Friend in a 100 year old volume from a centenary edition of his collected works bought new by my grandfather. Like almost all Dickens it is very good in parts (for example the glorious Mr Pecksniff) and is surely the first novel about recycling – but there are some real longueurs.

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High noon for Park Street – official

February 3rd, 2012 · Sandy's blog

The Secretary of State has considered carefully all the representations before him.  On the basis of the submissions received, he is of the view that there are no substantive issues which require the Inquiry to be re-opened and he has therefore decided that he is in a position to re-determine the appeal on the basis of all the evidence and representations now before him… The Secretary of State will issue his decision in this case on or before 5 April 2012.

This is the bald wording of the official letter just received by me as one of the witnesses at the most recent Public Inquiry into the Helioslough proposal to build a lorry terminal at Park Street.

So yet again we are in an end-game and one that looks pretty final.

It all now depends on one man, Eric Pickles, and the advice he receives from his departmental lawyers.  Will he uphold his previous decision to overturn the Inspector’s recommendation that the terminal should be allowed? – which was then challenged in court by Helioslough on a legal technicality.

Or will he cave in?

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From The Book of Hawking to the book of Hawking

January 31st, 2012 · Sandy's blog

Last week I attended the presidential lecture by Donald Munro at the Arc and Arc (the St Albans and Hertfordshire Architectural and Archaeological Society).  All newly elected presidents give a lecture.  Donald chose as his topic the history of printing and publishing in St Albans up to the end of the nineteenth century.

Not many people know that St Albans had the third printing press in England after Caxton’s Westminster press and a press at Oxford.  The St Albans press was set up in 1479 and housed in the school, then part of the Abbey.  One of the earliest printers was in fact described as “the St Albans schoolmaster”.

It was the first printing press in England to do three-colour printing – black, red and blue.  It was also the first to have a printer’s mark – now a legal necessity for any book or publication.

The most significant early book produced at St Albans was the famous “Book of Hawking” – written in English with beautiful woodblock illustrations. Published some time around 1486, its full title was “The Boke of St Albans: Containing Treatises on Hawking, Hunting and Coat-Armour.”

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‘The Crypto Linguist – pre doughnut days’

January 21st, 2012 · Sandy's blog

Father profileGoing through my father’s papers, we discovered a poem – ‘The Crypto Linguist – pre doughnut days’ – written only last November about and for him by James Crowden.  It so perfectly encapsulates all that my father was.   James very kindly read it at yesterday’s funeral service.

(The “doughnut” of the title is the new GCHQ building at Cheltenham to which they moved after my father retired.)

He offers me red wine and an olive on a stick.
His narrow terraced house
Beneath the old viaduct and opposite the chapel
Nicely tucked away where no one will ever find him.
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Nick Clegg’s dogged insistence on better resources for mental health treatment

January 19th, 2012 · Sandy's blog

In 2008 Nick Clegg came to the Sopwell House Hotel in St Albans to make one of his first speeches as newly elected Liberal Democrat leader. The occasion was the annual Guardian Public Services Summit.

He chose to concentrate on the inadequacies of service provision for the mentally ill.  It was not an obvious crowd-puller for a new leader and therefore provided an interesting perspective on Nick as a rather unusual politician.  I had to meet him at the station and drive him to the venue – no ministerial cars then.

The audience were struck by his passion on this issue and that he should have chosen such a relatively unsexy subject.  Their reception was warm, but doubtless they thought that this was yet another set of noble aspiration from a third party leader who would never have the opportunity to deliver on them.

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Speed can be over-rated – is HS2 the domestic equivalent of Trident?

January 10th, 2012 · Sandy's blog

The planned HS2 route does not go through St Albans constituency, although two other main line railways do – the West Coast mainline and the Midland mainline.  So I am not being nimby in the expressing doubts about the merits of the HS2 proposal.

I don’t think that ultra high speed rail makes much sense in a crowded island.  We are not France with its huge empty swathes of agricultural land.

And with increasingly good broadband access on the move, one of the main arguments for HS2 that it helps business people also feels suspect.  Many business people appreciate train journey time as a chance to catch up on e-mail and reading, using increasingly sophisticated mobile handheld devices.

This is not to say that we do not need more rail capacity.  The Chilterns may not excape unscathed.

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