Over on the Brent Greens Blog, Shahrar Ali has posted a write up the results for the candidates at the Local Elections. The Greens stood the maximum number of candiates in each of the 20 wards in Brent and many of the candidates clocked up, several hundred votes, even reaching 840 votes in Kilburn.
The Local Election results 08/05/2010 from Brent Council.
”The local elections are in the shadow of the general election,” said Andrew Stunell, chair of the Liberal Democrats’ local election campaign team, reports the Beeb. Locally, the Labour team are focused the parliamentary campaign. What little local material they have published and distributed has been discredited and retracted. The Lib Dems are emphasizing the local campaign, highlighting the work of Lib Dem councillors in the wards.
Mapesbury - Brent Lib Dems
The local election promises to be more exciting than the race for Brent Central. Will Labour regain the Council from the Lib Dem / Conservative coalition? Will the Lib Dems gain more councillors, sufficient to gain a majority (32 seats) and control the whole council? Perhaps the Greens, fielding candidates in every ward in Brent, will gain a seat on the council.
These graphics show the political makeup of Brent Council after the 2006 Local elections and subsequent local by-elections.
Source – Brent Council website.
The deadline for nominations closed at midday on 8 April 2010 and details of the candidates for the local elections are available in this PDF, published on 9 April. A PDF? Have Brent Council learned nothing about publishing information online? I’ll rework the list and make it nice and human-readable without having to download a PDF!
After reading (and posting) Shahrar’s email I got thinking about what other information about parking and PCNs issued I could request from Brent Council under FoI.
How many of us have been issued a ticket because of a simple honest mistake, like, say, scratching off the wrong day on a parking voucher in error, or perhaps forgetting to note your registration on a temporary residents permit? Well that’s me on both counts.
How many of us have been issued a parking ticket due to an error on the part of the parking warden, like, say for example, parking a commercial vehicle in a resdential street contrary to local restrictions when no contravention could have occured as you were not driving a commercial vehicle and there were no such local parking restrictions? A bit of specific example I realise… Yes, me again.
When I make an honest mistake Brent Council will not hear your pleading and will not yeild their power to strike out the ticket, leaving you to either pay the PCN or meet Brent in court. Yet when a Brent Council Parking Warden makes a similar simple honest error, power is yielded and PCNs are cancelled.
I wonder if I Brent have data on the number of tickets that that they cancel each year due to warden error… What is of greater interest is whether Brent collect data on number of appealed tickets due to an error on the part of the driver. And can I get it?
Shahrar Ali, a Green Party candidate at both this years local and last years national elections, sent me an email yesterday on a topic important to car-owners – Penalty Charge Notices, or, rather, f’ing-tickets, as I’m sure most of us refer to them. Shahrar told me about meeting Brent residents while campaigning during the local elections and a common gripe that came up – being issued with a ticket on a public holiday.
He writes:
“Trouble is, “Restrictions apply on Bank Holidays” signage is to be found only on some of the posts as one enters the zone. But most people, reasonably in my view, take their cue from the signage in the bays – which without any explicit indication to the contrary they will assume does not apply on public holidays.
Brent can’t have it both ways. Had the assumption not been justified there would hardly be a need for the additional signage. The trouble is these signs are not fit for purpose, ie. noticeable.
What’s at issue? Nobody likes to get a fine at the best of times, but the suspicion is that signage has been erected to maximise the chances of catching people out and making a quick buck. That’s dishonest and only fuels resentment towards local government – increasing cynicsm and eroding trust in public or democratic institutions, moreover.”
(more…)
FUD? Check wikipedia…
Received the first campaign materials from Team Yellow Gold and Team Red since the elections for local government in May. Sorry for the blue tint on the scans, I think my scanner is broken.
The BELD are thanking people for voting for them in Mapesbury and give people the contact numbers of their new local councillors. I won’t reprint them here though – surely you can get them from Brent Council (after 6 or 7 clicks) or from the BELD website (well actually you can’t find any info about your local councillors or FOCUS TEAM on the BELD website).
The QP Labour people have been distributing their July newsletter which highlighted the power sharing between the Lib Dems and the Conservatives in the new Council Executive. Vote Lib Dems and Get Tories says the headline with the story claiming that the first thing the LDs did when getting voted in was to join forces with the Tories. That’s not wholey true… the first thing the LDs did was to attempt to forge a power sharing agreement with the three parties, leading to coalition. This being rejected by the second largest vote winners (Team Red), the result is a coalition between the Lib Dems and the Conservatives.
If it wasn’t so heavily couched in political sniping I might have draw greater attention to the news on the rear of the QP Labour flyer that the LD/Tory exec plan to cut the publicity budget of the council. Oh, well, go on then… ‘The Knives Are Out!’ leads the back page. QP Labour are concerned the budget cuts will affect campaigns around areas such as knife carrying. Cut the funding as far as I am concerned….stop publications such as the Brent Magazine with the budget cuts but still continue to fund issue specific campaigns. That’s my 2p worth any way…
I wanted to post this when I got home from the count early this morning but the brent.gov webserver had broken and was not serving the Election Pages. 404errr. That and they were still counting when I got home. And recounting no doubt. You can get the full results for all the candidates in each ward direct from brent.gov.uk as they are uploaded.
Electoral law prevents a council from promoting candidates standing in local elections. Has the spirit of the ‘purdah’ period been broken by Brent Council? The Brent Lib Dems seem to think so. Now, I’ve not yet seen the article in question, my copy of the Brent Magazine has been sitting unread since it arrived and usually only gets a slight glance before being recycled. I’ll get a scan and post it. But until then you’ll just have to talk Lib Dem Council Leader Paul Lorbers’ word for it – the Labour council have spent public money on a publication that features a candidate standing in the local election. So the BELD are asking for the Labour party to reimburse the costs of the publication.
Noticed more people in yellow safety jackets walking around the streets recently? On Friday last week I saw a member of the Brent Council Street Care team out ward walking in Mapesbury. He was monitoring the recycling collection from both the kerb side boxes and the green wheelie bins – check we residents were using the service and using it correctly? checking up on the contractors? don’t know – either way his purpose was to be highly visible in the ward. Suit, yellow jacket, Brent Council Street Care printed on the back in big letters? A visibility exercise in the ward prior to the ward hustings tomorrow and the Mapesbury Residents Associations (MAPRA) Annual General Meeting?That’s probably just the skeptic in me… …but then this afternoon….
