Conservatives who broke the Council Tax Freeze promise 1

Which Conservatives broke their parties 2010 election promise to freeze Council Tax for 2 years. 

Even though the Conservatives didn't win, their promise morphed into the Coalition Agreement.

Liberal Democrat run Councils followed the agreement. The Conservatives in Cambridgeshire have broken this promise. The Police Authority has 17 members. 9 of these are Councillors nominated and a majority of these are needed to pass the Council Tax.

As no elected members said they voted differently they must have all voted for this rise. Ms Shona Johnstone has put her name forward as Conservative candidate for Police Commissioner up for election in November 2012. Ruth Rogers for Labour. Neither has stood up for the Council Taxpayer against the ever increasing Council Tax bill.

Reason to vote Conservative - No.3

The one thing I like to look at is how the respective campaigns can say different things in different areas. i used to experience this with the Liberal Democrats who could campaign in one town for one policy and then campaign in another town for an opposite policy in a town next door in the same authority.

Looking at how the Conservatives are fighting in St Ives I can see a difference. Despite the fact the HDC Conservatives have broken the national promise for a Freeze in Council Tax for 2 years, Cllr Ablewhite, HDC Council Leader, is out campaigning for a 4 year freeze on St Ives Council Tax.

There we have it. The Conservatives are quite happy to break a promise to freeze council tax for 2 years and then make another promise to freeze council tax for 4 years. This seems very wrong.

Reason to vote Conservative - No.2

The Conservatives upped their portion of the Council Tax by 3.5%.  Originally the rise was 2.5%. The Government was looking to give freeze money for 1 year of £191,000. By upping the Council Tax by 3.5% the Conservatives broke the national promise of a Council Tax FREEZE for 2 years. The local Conservatives argue that without this increase they cannot get back this money later on due to the need to get an increase approved by a referendum.

Yet this is the same argument for not freezing One Leisure charges. By holding down the charges, the Council will not be able to get this money back in the future. Because the argument will be the Council cannot raise charges because it would lose custom.

In a recent Insight column in the Hunts Post, Cllr Ablewhite says the following: "We have frozen charges
in our One Leisure Centres that are enjoyed by millions of users every year that is accessible to all."

Millions of users is Council speak for the number of times the facility is used by someone. When I think of a user I feel this is one person. This would mean that millions of people from outside HDC use these Leisure Centres. Obviously they don't. A user therefore must be everytime they use a Leisure Centre they are classed as a user. Someone goes for a swim once a year they are classed as one user. Someone who goes to the gym 4 times a week over 50 week equals 200 users.

This is a blatant misuse of statistics. And the Hunts Post should have pulled him up for that.

How much could come from a price rise at One Leisure. A simple 10 pence rise for each use of a Leisure Centre would bring in £200,000. To quote Cllr Ablewhite..."All this and more for a few coppers a
week more."

All Cllr Ablewhite needed to do was up One Leisure charges by 10 pence and he would have brought in enough money to freeze the Council Tax this year. All for a few copper more. He would rather keep Leisure than save £400,000 a year by putting out to a trust. 

Reason to vote Conservative - No1

Each year Council must meet certain deadlines. The Accounts must be audited and approved by 30th September each year. The accounts for 2010/11 should have been approved by 30/9/2011. They weren't.
Another date was set and this was 2nd November 2011. This date passed and the accounts weren't passed. another date was set for 7th December 2011. The accounts weren't passed then.

With dates coming and going the council decided on a different rouse. That was to say the accounts would be ready "early in the new year". Well "early in the new year" has come and gone. The new "promise" is these accounts will be approved in May 2012. That is over 7 months on from the legal deadline.

One reason given for the delay in the approval these accounts was the redundancy of the capital accountant who went sick. Except having made this account redundant the Council has taken on a "Financial Accounts Specialist".

No heads have rolled. The date to approve the accounts continually moves. Not only did the Conservatives mess up the redundancy because they had got rid of the one person they needed but they have now employed another person. Trying to save money has cost the Council money. 

5 Reasons to vote Conservative (or not) on 3rd May 2012

Here are 5 reasons:

1. Low Council Tax - There is a myth that Conservatives keep Council Tax low. This is myth. Conservative run Fenland DC has the highest Council Tax in Cambridgeshire almost twice that of HDC. Depending on which set of stats HDC is either 180th oout of 201 District Councils or 94th of of 201 District Councils.

2. Law and Order - Conservative run Councils are tough on Law and Order. Yet Conservative run HDC keeps breaking the law. One major example of law breaking are the accounts. These are still not signed off by the auditors over 6 months after they were legally required to do so. There was also an issue over Housing and Council Tax benefit claims.

3. Conservatives promised a two year council tax freeze - Yes the Conservatives promised a 2 year Council Tax  freeze and provided the money to this to be implemented. Whilst Conservative run HDC took the cash for year one when it came to year 2 the HDC Conservatives dropped this promise and increased their portion of the Council Tax by 3.5%.

4. HDC Conservatives spend our money wisely - Except Cllr Ablewhite et al lost HDC, in a decision to oppose the Co-op in St Ives petrol station, £5000. This is because the Planning Inspector thought the decision was so wrong he took the extraordinary step of awarding costs against the council.

5. HDC Conservatives provide cost effective services - Unlike most Councils, HDC has gone down the road of retaining most of its services in-house. For example One Leisure could be turned into a trust. When this was mooted the saving was £400k a year. This has now been dropped because of the £200,000 cost of setting up a trust - though no paperwork on the £200,000 cost has surfaced. The Conservatives put money aside to "invest to save". Leisure looks a prime example to save the Council Taxpayer money £400,000 a year by spending money already put aside to set a trust up. Yet the Conservatives would rather keep running One Leisure and costing the Council Taxpayer £400k a year than reducing this cost.

I cannot find any reason to vote Conservative this year.

Demise of the Neighbourhood Forums

HDC is set to pull the plug on Neighbourhood Forums. As it turns out this will be generally a good thing. The problem with the Neighbourhood Forums was simple. They had no power and therefore people didn't attend. In the end these Forums were a show case for the District Council to bring forward bits and pieces on what they wanted to promote. That is what I felt attending the St Neots Forum.

All the Councils could have come forward with ideas. Some examples were: The Jubilee; The Cinema Project; Riverside Car Parking charges; Cuts to services; New Homes Bonus; The Portas Money bid; The Open Air Swimming Pool. None of these examples ever came forward for discussion.

This was the main downfall of the Neighbourhood Forums. They were crammed, short on time and didn't look at the real issues concerning the locals.

Should we shed a tear for their demise? Well no! I feel we should be angry at their demise. These had the potential of being good for the community to be informed of issues which effect the community. The feedback should have been looked at by all Councils yet it simply wasn't. No committee or panel had the notes of the meeting presented to them. In the end there was no way for feedback from any conclusions to be fed into each Councils committee system.

What is replacing the Neighbourhood Forums are two systems. The Local Joint Committees - which will be pretty useless they get large budgets to spend and Shape My Place forums which look interesting.

Should John Major be praised?

In a letter to the press Sir Peter Brown praises John Major and feels the passing of time will look kindly on the former Prime Minister. Indeed the economy did bounce back after the UK left the ERM in 1992 after John Major, as Chancellor, took us into the ERM in 1990.

The problem with praising John Major for his "achievements", is the everything else is dusted under the carpet. For me John Major was the worst Conservative Prime Minister and Leader of the Conservative Party ever.

John Major's 1992 election win should be seen as a pyrrhic victory. In 1992 the Conservative Government was coming to the end. Having ousted Thatcher, the Conservatives looked for a new leader. John Major was 2 votes short of an outright victory. Heseltine and Hurd withdrew from the contest and John Major was announced as the new leader and therefore Prime Minister. In that internal election the seeds to Major's problems were sown. This was because any loss of MP's at the next election would be those supporting John major rather than those who opposed him.

When the 1992 General Election was announced, the Conservatives had a formidable election machine to get there message out and did so getting 14.1 million votes. Even though John major scored more votes than any other leader before or after this didn't translate into seats. John Major lost 40 seats and had 336 seats. This was 10 more seats than the 326 seats needed for a majority. This gave John Major little room for manoeuvre when it came to votes and appointments.

The first order of business for the reassembled Parliament was the election of Speaker. Major wanted Peter Brooke and the House of Commons wanted Betty Boothroyd. The House of Commons won out and Major was defeated. Yet this was a silly mistake and showed the ineffective nature of John Major.

The premiership of John Major has been very well documented. Whilst the political machinations surrounded John Major, the party machine was dying. Loss of Councillors, Councils and volunteers made the party machine not work. John Major could pull the levers but the machine just didn't work. The finances held up through large donations. The 1997 election showed no matter how much money is thrown at an election unless you have boots on the ground the money is wasted. During this time Labour went after seats during the Boundary Commission review. And Labour got the review in their favour.

At the 1997 John Major got 9.6 million votes. That is a loss of 4.5 million votes since 1992. That was a loss of 32% in the Conservative vote.

If John Major had lost in 1992, the Labour Government would have had a rough time. The Conservative Party election machine would have been intact. By John Major winning he effectively destroyed the machine that got him elected.

The same has gone on in the Labour Party under Blair and Brown. They have lost 5 million votes from the 13.5 million in 1997 to the loss in 2010 of 8.5 million.

John Major did in 5 short years what it took Labour 13 years to achieve. The Liberal Democrats are seeing the same now they are in a coalition.

In the end I still don't respect John Major and still think his premiership was a shoddy affair. The Conservatives should have lost the 1992 general election. In winning John Major wasted 5 years for the Conservatives and set about laying the foundations for New Labour.