WBTimes report that “Floella Benjamin ditched the teddy bear props” when she joined Lib Dem candidate for Brent Central, Sarah Teather this week. Floella joined Sarah on Harlesden High Street to collect signatures in Harlesden, to sign up residents to a petition urging the government to reform air passenger duty.
Sarah Teather and Floella Benjamin
Air Passenger Duty (APD) is an excise duty which is charged on the carriage of passengers flying from a United Kingdom airport. The levy takes distance into account, making long distance flying significantly more expensive. The charges rose on November 1, 2009 and will rise again on November 1, 2010.
The APD hits Brent residents with family overseas, especially those with family outside of the Eurozone. Sarah Teather is campaigning for a reform of the APD and will no doubt continue this work to reform the structure in an incoming Lib Dem government.
Sarah Teather and Floella Benjamin
According to the WBTimes, “Mrs Benjamin also revealed she considered running as the Lib Dem candidate for Mayor in 2007 – but decided not to after her mother warned her about the pitfalls of a career in politics.”
The North West Two Residents Association held its AGM on the 22nd April at the Windmill Pub on Cricklewood Broadway.
The NW2 Committee
NW2 began in September 2007 as a group local residents who wanted to improve the sense of community in the Cricklewood area. As Carol Granger, Committee Chair, writes “The Association was founded first to try to improve the sense of community in the area and provide opportunities for people in the neighbourhood to get together, and to get to know each other and maybe help each other out; but also to improve the appearance of the area (litter, graffiti, etc); to try to improve relationships with Brent and the officers who look after services for the area; try to make sure Cricklewood didn’t stay the Cinderella of Brent / Barnet / Camden. I think we only have to look around to see evidence that it is all working.”
NW2 thanked local Lib Dem Councillors Hayley Matthews, Chris Leaman and Sami Hashmi for their support and commitment to the group. The councillors have attended neighbourhood walkabouts and acted on local issues raised by residents and helped secure WardWorking funded for NW2 projects.
The full reports from the AGM are online.
From WB Times today. Sarah Teather smeared by member of Dawn Butlers team in fictitious expenses complaint.
AN INVESTIGATION into the expenses of one of the borough’s MPs has been abandoned after it was found that a letter of complaint was fictitious.
The Parliamentary Commissioner for Standards said an objection claiming that Brent East MP Lib Dem Sarah Teather sublet her constituency office in Willesden to her party while the taxpayer picked up the bill was not genuine.
A follow up letter from the complainant included a returning address that was almost identical to that of an employee of Labour MP for Brent South, Dawn Butler, who is also Minister for Young Citizens and Youth Engagement.
The commissioner also said he discontinued the inquiry because he had no grounds for believing that claims Ms Teather made from parliamentary funds for her office provided support to the cost of the Lib Dem party.
A letter to Ms Teather from the commissioner said: “I have been in contact with the person who purportedly made the complaint. I have satisfied myself as to his identity. He has stated that he did not make a complaint against you.”
As the complaint was made, Ms Teather, who was famed for not claiming a penny during the expenses scandal, strenuously denied the allegations.
Brent Liberal Democrats said the party contributed over and above its usage of the office, as approved by the Commons, calculated by a surveyor and agreed with a solicitor.
Chris Leaman, Brent councillor and the Lib Dem London campaign manager, said: “Its seems a strange coincidence that the first letter was written by someone who now says they have never made a complaint about Sarah Teather and did not write the original letter. Many people will be wondering why the second letter is written from an address that does not exist, while a similar address with an identical post code has one person registered at it and that person works for Dawn Butler.
“Dawn Butler must take immediate action and reveal the full facts if any person employed by her has been involved in this smear campaign against Sarah.
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…
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.
A recent Focus On…Queen’s Park from the Liberal Democrats with the candidates for Councillors showing their opposition to the Queen’s Park tower development.
Also highlighted are the traffic problems that are percieved will blight an already congested Salusbury Road. Well, the development is supposed to address this issue by changing the flow of traffic in the area – but with no tower to route traffic around…..?
The proposal for the tower block in Queen’s Park is a lead topic for each of the parties contesting the electoral ward of Queen’s Park. For Labour it is getting like the Monty Python topic not to be mentioned in front of our hosts for the World Cup. The Lib Dems have made great gains from this thread – well, a sitting (yet not restanding) Councillor defected to Team Yellow with the tower plan as a key issue. The defection as on the front page of this weeks Willesden and Brent Times and the ‘bun fight’ at the Queen’s Park Corral was analysed over a double page spread.
The Green’s in Queen’s Park have made opposing the development symbolic of their opposition to decision making without consultation – a characteristic of Brent Council in their view.
While I have not seen any campaign literature from the Conservatives in Queen’s Park (please forward some if you have it!) the Party is opposing developments in the Dudden Hill area – maybe they have the same tac in QP?
More to come:
Thank you for reading.
Brent Labour Councillor Jonathan Davies has joined the Liberal Democrats reports the BELD website.
“I have realised that the beliefs I stand for such as the safeguarding of our civil liberties, international justice and a free and fair society are best represented within the Liberal Democrats.”
Also connected to Jonathan’s feelings over the proposed development of a tower block in Queen’s Park ? : “The issue of Queen’s Park Tower is a classic example of Brent Labour in action. Consultation with local communities is kept to a bare minimum with decisions being made by a small cabal of Labour politicians and unelected Brent Council officers.”
This local red top was delivered in late February. It leads with the news of the Liberal Democrats delivering a “hammer blow” to Labour” in Dunfermline by-election.
The national political story was the continued opposition to the ID card legislation by Sarah Teather and the Liberal Democrats. The newsletter also covered the story of the comments made by Labour Cllr Jonathan Davies on the ‘consultation’ over the Queen’s Park Tower plans.
The two other key stories are the rehousing of Willesden Market following a successful campaign by the W&BT that Sarah Teather has supported and another highlughting Sarah’s long standing commitment to local healthcare provission with a story about her support for the closure threatened Wembley Minor Accident Treatment Service.