Notices have gone up announcing the closure of Clemson Street Car Park in advance of work starting on the long awaited new Morrison’s store for Willenhall and already the Liberal Democrat Focus Team are receiving phone calls from shoppers, shopkeepers and traders about the lack of information about alternative parking. 

Anne Willoughby, who heads up the Willenhall South Team, has asked Walsall Council to ensure information about where alternative car parking is sited along with signs directing motorists to them.

Commenting on the lack of information Liberal Democrat councillor Ian Shires said “Why is it that the council never seems to get its act together on major projects such as this? The new store will not open till later this year so there will be considerable disruption whilst work goes on. All that is required is a little commonsense, is that too much to ask for?

“Lessons need to be learned, any disruption created by regeneration work in Willenhall needs to be kept to a minimum. The council should be working closely with shopkeepers, traders and shoppers to ensure that there needs are catered for so  trade does not suffer”  concluded Ian.    

Just a quick reminder, as there are 5 Friday’s this month there will be no Advice Surgery tonight.

The next surgery will be on Friday 5th June at the Lighthouse Children’s Centre, Davis Road, New Invention between 7pm and 8pm.

We can always be reached by phone, post or email. Details as shown

 This is a message for anyone who has a postal vote for the European Election and who hasn’t yet posted it off. Did you know that your vote won’t count if you don’t sign the slip attached to the envelope? Or that it won’t count if you don’t write in your date of birth as well?

In fact, your signature must match the one you used when you applied for a postal vote some time ago.

Now the problem is that some people have more than one signature.  Maybe you normally write an unintelligible squiggle, but use a much more recognisable signature for important documents. You really do need to remember which signature you used on the application.

This year postal votes across the country have been carried out slightly differently, in order to reduce fraud.

When you fill in the postal ballot form, you then place it inside an envelope and seal it down. On the outside of the envelope is an identification section which has your name and address printed on it, and spaces for you to write in your date of birth and your signature. You then place this envelope inside a larger one that has an address on it, and then post it.

So if you do have a postal vote, make sure it counts!

Earlier today I received a letter from Danny Alexander, Chief of staff to Nick Clegg, which I thought you might like to see: 

Dear Ian

Nick Clegg has had a great few weeks taking a strong stand on cleaning up Parliament and leading the call for a complete overhaul of our political system. Last week at Prime Minister’s Question Time he challenged Gordon Brown to reform our electoral systems. Now even Brown’s own ministers are echoing Nick’s call. I hope that you have been able to see the lead article in today’s Guardian which sets out a 100-day plan to reform government.

Tonight we will be screening a brand new Party Election Broadcast recorded this week in which Nick deals with these issues - you can watch it online now. He will be making the case to:

• Give people the right to sack MPs
• Stop all big party political donations
• Elect the House of Lords
• Make the voting system fair - so that governments can’t just get all that power and all that money with only a minority of you voting for them
• Put an end to self serving politics and put you back in charge

But Nick can’t do it all on his own. He needs our help.

We need to demonstrate that at long last there is a groundswell for real reform of our broken system. If you want to see British politics changed in this way then you can visit our new campaign site www.TakeBackPower.org and sign Nick’s petition.

But don’t stop there. I’m sure we all know friends and family who have been appalled by the recent expenses scandal. Why not show them we are different? Email the www.TakeBackPower.org web address on to five other people and help Nick change politics for good.

Best wishes,

Danny Alexander MP
Chief of Staff to Nick Clegg

Postal voters in Walsall have being given incorrect information about the last date they can post their votes back for the European Parliamentary Elections due to take place next Thursday 4th June reports Liberal Democrat councillor Ian Shires.

In the instructions which accompany the Ballot Paper the council are telling people that if they post their ballot papers back after Monday 28th April then they may not arrive in time to be counted.

Clearly it’s a typographical error. When the text was “cut and pasted” from last years letter the date should have been changed to read Monday 1st June, it wasn’t, result chaos!

“The mistake came to light when phone calls started to come in from confused voters” said Ian, “we contacted the council who said that they were aware of it because they also had received phone calls from confused voters (surprise! surprise!).

“To compound things the only action taken was to post the correct information on the council’s website. I wonder how many people spotted that. It’s difficult enough getting people to vote with all that’s going on at Westminster around MP’s expenses. This is just adding to the problem” concluded Ian.

If you live in Walsall and have a postal vote you can still post it back. The last date that you can do this to be sure of it getting there in time is MONDAY 1st JUNE. 

Age Concern and Help the Aged are holding a week of action on 8th-12th June 2009, to promote the need for quality care for older people and they want you to be part of it!

The aim of the week is to get everyone talking about the issue of care and support.  

While we and thousands of older people know the current care system is failing leaving many with poor quality care‚ politicians stay silent.  Politicians are still refusing to accept they need to take responsibility and commit to improving the care system.

Over a million people aged 65 and over receive care and support. While many receive care and support that is of high quality‚ many do not. If you feel strongly about this issue or if you‚ or a relative‚ have an experience of care then you should think about taking part in our week of action.

Read more about the Week of Action on Care on the Age Concern Web Site

If you or anyone you know is having problems with the care or support that you are receiving, your Ward Councillors may be able to help. Contact us on 01922 404970 or email me on shiresi@walsall.gov.uk

Nick Clegg

Warm words and rhetoric are easy. We must seize the mood and enact a radical programme of reform within 100 days.

Finally the dam has broken, and everyone is talking about changing Britain’s political system. For decades reformers have been thwarted by Westminster inertia. But the MPs’ expenses scandal has overturned old certainties and made change possible.

This moment must be seized by all who want a different kind of politics. Warm words, rhetoric and consideration are not enough; indeed, they are a guarantee that little will happen. So let us bar the gates of Westminster and stop MPs leaving for their summer holidays until this crisis has been sorted out, and every nook and cranny of our political system has been reformed.

Today I’m setting out a plan of action to get all the changes we need delivered in just 100 days - making it possible for MPs to be sacked by constituents, abolishing the House of Lords, getting corrupt money out of politics and changing the electoral system to give everyone a voice. People will say it isn’t possible - parliament can’t act that quickly. I say the innate conservatism that marks out our political establishment is part of the problem. Let’s stop all this self-congratulatory hype about the mother of parliaments and get on with improving it.

Momentum will ebb away unless we act quickly. Delay would be a victory for those who want to confine change to the bare minimum - the two establishment parties who will talk up reform long enough for the storm to pass, then kick it into the long grass for good.

David Cameron’s proposals set out in the Guardian on Tuesday were a masterful example of well-judged rhetoric free of substance and conviction. Open-source software, new select committee chairs and legislative text messages will not rescue British democracy. They are designed, I fear, to provide verbal cover for maintaining the status quo.

Real political change is about taking power from those who have hoarded it for themselves, and distributing it to others. So change will only be possible if the vested interests that have benefited from the way things are accept that they can no longer preside over an institutional stitch-up. For generations the Labour and Conservative parties have ­colluded to keep out competition. They are like a corporate duopoly, ­setting the rules of the game to maintain dominance. And just like in economics, it’s ordinary people who suffer: taken for granted, and deprived of the ability to make different choices to those imposed upon them.

That is why what Cameron did not say is more revealing than what he did. No mention of the murky business of party funding. No mention of the scandal of an unelected second chamber. The rejection of any change to an electoral system that hands power to governments on a fraction of the vote. Without these changes, British politics will continue to be a game of pass the parcel between two old parties, while the rest of the country switches off,

So instead of long-term consideration of the possibility of tinkering, let us have 100 days of real action: swift, decisive and confident. It really is possible. The details of a reformed system of party funding have already been thrashed out between the parties, months ago. Sir Hayden Phillips secured outline agreement to ban donations of more than £50,000, limit spending to £100m over a parliament and shake up union contributions. The reason it wasn’t adopted was because the Conservatives walked out, keen to protect donations from tax exiles such as Lord Ashcroft. But there is no reason not to return to what was all but agreed, and enforce it. The political parties and elections bill, now before parliament, could be amended and adopted within weeks.

Similarly, on House of Lords reform, the principles of a fully elected chamber have already been exhaustively debated and adopted by MPs. As in any bicameral system, peers should be elected on a different constituency basis and electoral cycle to MPs. Details could be decided on and introduced in the constitutional renewal bill being promoted in the House of Lords by Paul Tyler.

And then there’s electoral reform. The ideal solution would be an Irish-style single transferable vote system in which voters elect the person, not the party. But even alternative vote plus - as first advocated by Roy Jenkins in 1998 and now backed by Alan Johnson - would ensure most MPs have a personal constituency link with their voters, as already occurs in Germany and Scotland. Labour made a promise more than a decade ago to hold a referendum on the Jenkins proposals. If the government won’t call a general election, let us have this referendum in early September, as the culmination of 100 days of reform.

Together, over the next 100 days, we could achieve nothing less than the total reinvention of British politics. These months could become a great moment in British political history, rather than a shabby footnote to a shameful month of scandal. Let us seize, not squander, the opportunity for change.

This article first appeared in the Guardian, May 28, 2009.

Wed, 27 May 2009

The expenses scandal that has rocked the country in the past few weeks is just the tip of an iceberg of problems with Britain’s political system.

The exploitation of the House of Commons expenses rules has exposed a culture of arrogance and secrecy right at the heart of our democracy, protected for decades by the vested interests of those in charge. Finally, the truth is out and real change is becoming possible.

This is a once-in-a-generation chance to overhaul our political system, and we must seize it. We need a revolution - the power to sack MPs, a fair voting system, an end to the House of Lords, more power for Parliament to control the government and the eradication of dirty money from politics.

Money has far too big an influence on our politics. Labour is funded by trade unions, the Conservatives by multimillionaires, many of whom don’t even pay their full British taxes. And all the parties have run into difficulties with donors who look dodgy. So we must stop big donations once and for all with a cap of £25,000 on any individual donations and a cap on total spending too. Politics should be a competition of ideas, not advertising budgets.

Once elected, government should be subject to proper control by the people’s representatives in Parliament. Our Parliament has been weak for too long - there isn’t time for MPs to scrutinise legislation and spending is controlled entirely by government with MPs unable to alter a single pound in a single budget. This has got to change. And a new, reforming Speaker should urgently reduce the power of government in Parliament.

But the reform of Parliament will never be complete while appointed party apparatchiks sit as legislators in the House of Lords. Whatever the merits of individual lords and baronesses, they should not be deciding the law of the land. This anachronism cannot be swept under the carpet any longer.

Finally, we must restore democracy by giving power back to people. Liberal Democrats have been calling for over a year for constituents to have the right to sack their MP if they are suspended for wrongdoing - this must be made law immediately so people can have their say on corrupt MPs as soon as possible.

The ultimate power people hold, however, is in their vote, and our system denies millions their voice. The Labour government that holds the reins of power was elected in 2005 with the support of just 22 per cent of eligible voters. Such a system, where so much power depends on the support of so few people, will always breed secrecy and arrogance. It must be changed and a voting system introduced that puts power into everyone’s hands.

We have a choice in this crisis. We can patch up the obviously rotten parts of our democracy like expenses and pretend that’s enough. Or we can choose to build a new democracy from scratch, with new rules for everything and new hope for the future. I know which side the Liberal Democrats are on.

This was the week that…

·         The Speaker of the House of Commons bowed to pressure and stood down [more]

·         The government finally backed down and granted Gurkhas and their families the right to settle in the UK [more]

·         Two Labour Lords became the first peers to be suspended from the House of Lords since 1642 [more]

·         The government’s car scrappage scheme got off to a chaotic start [more]

·         A Tory MP blamed the outcry over MPs expenses on public ‘jealousy’ [more]

·         The UK’s reputation suffered on credit markets as the outlook for government debt was downgraded [more]

·         Labour sunk to an all-time-low in opinion polls [more]

·         A group of Lib Dem MPs were named ‘heroes of the week’ [more]

Over the last week we learnt that…

·         Car production fell 55% in April [more]

·         Household spending has fallen at the fastest rate since 1980 this year [more]

·         Mortgage lending fell again in April, this time by 9% [more]

·         The government has paid out £15bn too much in tax credits since 2003 [more]

·         Spending on NHS management consultants has trebled in the last two years [more]

·         The UK economy has slid further into deflation [more]

·         Prison violence is increasing [more]

·         Government buildings, including the Department for Energy and Climate Change are not meeting green standards [more]

·         Jo Swinson, Lib Dem MP, has made the most parliamentary contributions of any Scottish MP [more]

Over the last week the Liberal Democrats…

·         Challenged the government to make the difficult decisions needed to cut the budget deficit [more]

·         Called for a complete transformation in the way politics is conducted [more]

·         Revealed that 24,000 people die prematurely every year in Britain due to air pollution [more]

·         Showed how the government managed to block the creation of 10,000 new jobs [more]

·         Held the government to account for failing to tackle Britain’s alcohol problems [more]

·         Uncovered a huge rise in sexually transmitted diseases among under 16s [more]

·         Warned that the UK is facing a junior doctors crisis [more]

·         Federal Executive published its response to the revelations of misuse of MPs expenses [more]

·         Lord Rennard announced he would be stepping down in September for health and family reasons after six years as Chief Executive of the party [more]

Tempers are running high, public anger is palpable. So of course Cameron rides to the rescue pledging to restore real power to the people. Real power that is except of a written constitution, an elected house of lords and fair votes.

This ain’t the right time to be responding to public emotions with shallow people power sound bites.  Especially as until now the Tories have been against these people power ideas!