If so, are you willing to let us have a copy for future UAF leaflets or the website? No payment (we are saving funds for campaigning) but full attribution if requested.

I can thoroughly recommend a look at this page on the Adur DC website for an interesting insight into Tory party recruitment and selection processes. Those of us in the Labour party will be familiar with how we invite nominations for council candidates and then scrutinise or vet those nominations, with forms to fill out, references from branches and interviews to sit. how much simpler the whole thing is for the Tories. Cllr Eade says she got her job this way…

One day, after a service at the Southwick Methodist Church, I was approached by a Conservative Member who asked me to become a Councillor. The pre-requisites were a female Christian.

Note that she was not approached to be a candidate, but to be a councillor. They take their results for granted down there. But what is this about the pre-requisites? This was before Call-me-Dave came along with his new multi-culturalism but do you get the impression that anything has changed at this level? The Tories might get a few token ethnic minorities into high-profile places to make themselves look good, and field one of their few ethnic minority members strategically in wards with high minority ethnic populations – like they did in Langley Green this year – but out in the sticks I can imagine this being typical.

This page appears to have been written in 2004 at the earliest, since it mentions the 2004 elections. It ends like this:

I believe the Eastbrook Ward is a great place to live and will do all I can to keep it that way.

I’m not sure that moving to the other end of the county 2 years later was what she had in mind, but maybe her departure will make Eastbrook a better place. I don’t know, I haven’t met the woman.

Still on this religion thing. Mrs Eade makes a great deal of her religion, mentioning it at every opportunity. Now although I am an atheist myself I am not a fundamentalist atheist who forces that (non-)belief on other people. I get on extremely well with several vicars on the understanding that we don’t try to convert each other.

I was told today that Cllr Eade is bringing a motion to Adur council on Monday which says:

That the Council agree to prayers being said in the Council Chamber for a
period of up to fifteen minutes before each meeting of the Full Council
and that the Council invite a minister of the Christian religion from one
of the main denominations (Church of England, Roman Catholic, Baptist,
Free Church, Methodist or United Reformed Church) to attend at the Council
to lead prayers for the Council meeting and the Councillors attending.

That the Council is in agreement with another room being made available
for Councillors of other religions to meet for prayers prior to each
Council meeting.

She obviously has strong feelings about this sort of thing. How long before a similar motion comes to Crawley council? With any luck Adur DC will reject this – but since they appear to recruit by trawling through church congregations you can’t count on it.

I think this sort of thing counts as forcing your religion on other people.

But as we were only doing the one piece of literature we decided to just say what we thought and it turned out to be the most controversial leaflet in the town, leading to a bit of a row in the pages of the local papers and the Labour leader calling the Tory leader a wimp. Which was fun.

The topic which caused the controversy was our suggestion that a Tory council would lead to cuts in services, with at least one of the town’s major public assets sold off or transferred to a trust, the major public assets being the stadium, the Hawth theatre, Tilgate Park, the rare breeds farm and the golf course.

At the time this was called scaremongering. As it happens we were, and still are worried that this could be a possibility having looked at the booklet which came with the annual council tax bill showing large reductions in the overall budget, mostly coming from the Leisure part of the budget.

An argument I didn’t make at the time, because it never even occurred to me, was one which was pointed out in a letter to the Observer after the elections pointing out that all the things we said were only things which the Tories threatened were likely if the council houses were not sold off – since the housing stock transfer fell through then these things were likely to happen… unless all those claims in the councils bullying letters to tenants were just scaremongering.

In other words our election material was only scaremongering if the council’s housing campaign was. Well since we have now found out that the claims in those council letters, brochures and DVDs were exaggerated maybe it will turn out that everything is safe after all. I wouldn’t bet on it, but its a bit too early to be in a position to say “told you so” just yet.

Ironically the “told you so” moment comes with the second main topic of our election leaflet, which was really just a bit of rhetorical mischief, but turns out to have some substance.

What we said was that Furnace Green had an unfortunate track record with its councillors. First of all they had one who spent the last 6 months of her term working on an oil rig in Africa or something like that. Her replacement was someone who, as far as we can make out, never lived in the town but continued to live in Brighton, and lost most of his interest in Crawley once he failed to get selected as parliamentary candidate here – then lost all interest when he got selected in Brighton.

In the first instance it was just one of those things. It can happen that you get a transfer or an opportunity which means moving away. Unfortunate but unavoidable. Following that up with another absentee councillor is just careless. Our slightly provocative stance was that neither Thakordas Patel nor I were likely to be be going anywhere and would therefore be available to concentrate on representing Furnace Green – but really this was based on the track record in Furnace Green and not this year’s candidate.

As far as we could make out the candidate was a local person, pillar of the community, regular fixture at the local church and everything so we didn’t push that too hard. it seemd unlikely that lightning could strike the same place three times in a row.

But what we didn’t know at the time, and you can be sure we would have mentioned it if we had, is that the Tory candidate, Carol Eade, was already a district councillor in Adur and vice chair on a couple of committees down there. This is a fact which I only found out very recently.

So it turns out that Furnace Green elected another councillor who has responsibilities elsewhere, and not only that but potential conflicts of interest. She did not resign her seat in Adur and continues to serve on both councils, drawing two sets of allowances, but is surely unable to carry out both jobs properly.

But surely we have plenty of examples of councillors who sit on both the borough council and the county council, so why is this any different? Actually I am not in favour of that either, but its quite common practice and quite different. For a start those councillors normally represent the same area but at different levels. The county council meetings are during the day and the borough meetings are in the evenings so it is possible to go to all relevant meetings and when you are in your ward you are there representing all the people who voted for you at different elections.

That is not the case with Cllr Eade. Adur council meets in the evenings so there can be clashes with the Crawley meetings, and whichever place you are in you can only be representing one of your sets of voters.

I can remember when I was a councillor in Crawley. There were weeks when I had meetings four nights of the week. So much of my time was occupied with matters relating to Crawley or specifically to Broadfield that I know I could not have managed the time to also serve on another council 40km away with meetings at the same time.

From looking at the two councils’ web sites, it appears that Cllr Eade serves on the bare minimum of committees so the chances of a clash in meetings she serves on is a lot less likely, but this is far from ideal. Firstly it means she is not doing a full job on either council, and increasing the workload for all her colleagues slightly, but serving on committees is only part of the job. Quite often you will want to attend committees you don’t serve on so you can keep abreast of everything. If there is a Crawley council committee meeting on a topic which affects your ward on the same evening of the Adur full council meeting you can’t do both can you? And remember that official council meetings are only a part of the workload – there are group meetings in both places, training sessions, workshops and then there are residents and tenants meetings and other things which don’t appear on the official diary.

(Talking of which – I would have done some research to see if Cllr Eade has any obvious diary clashes but I fell at the first hurdle when I failed to find the list of council committee meetings on the Crawley web site. Another example of how crap it is. Adur have a lovely full-year calendar on theirs, linked to from all sorts of places and not so much easy to find as hard to miss.)

On top of all those obligations, councils place their members on outside bodies to represent the council’s interests, and those bodies all have meetings to attend. As it happens Eade is on very few of them either – another example of her being given deliberately light workloads at both councils. I can only imagine that the Tory groups on both councils are complicit in fixing it this way to facilitate being on both authorities. Either that or Cllr Eade is not very competent so they try to minimise the chances of her being able to cock anything up. Perhaps they could tell us which it is?

So it looks like Furnace Green did manage to elect another councillor who is unable to dedicate their whole time and attention to Crawley, when they had a choice of two Labour candidates who would have been here full time. Told you so!

It may be that Cllr Eade is actually serving Crawley fully – in which case she is short-changing Adur. I wonder if the constituents of Eastbrook ward know that their councillor moved to Crawley last June, and now serves on Crawley council?

There is another aspect to this: is there a conflict of interests in being on two district councils within the same county? On the register of members’ interests in Crawley Cllr Eade has listed her membership of Adur council under section 2.2 (member or hold a position of general control or management of a public authority or body exercising functions of a public nature) so at least that interest is registered. However there is no such corresponding entry in the Adur register of interests.

That is interesting, but more to the point is probably illegal. I have been out of the loop for a while, but my understanding is that any changes in circumstance have to be recorded on the register within 28 days. It is more than 28 days since the elections in Crawley, but the last change to the register in Adur was a change of address notification in June 2006. As far as I can see that puts Cllr Eade in a position of failing to comply with the code of conduct for council members.

Of course, as I live in Crawley I am not too bothered about what goes on in Adur, but I shall be mentioning this to my party colleagues down there, and they may want to make something of it.

There other small inconsistencies in the two registers of members’ interests but I think they are trivial. For example, the Adur register lists membership of something called the Conservative Councillors Association as a “body whose principal purposes include the influence of public opinion or policy” but the Crawley register contains no reference to that body. In the equivalent section it just lists membership of the Conservative Party – although I thought the normal practice would be to list membership of the “Horsham and Crawley Conservative Association”. But that is the sort of thing which is a bit of a grey area – you never know whether you need to declare it or not. The safest course is to list anything which might matter just in case.

I suspect that missing off the Conservative Councillors Association is an honest mistake of omission, but I can’t say the same of this May’s election material. If you are asking people to vote for you to be a councillor and you have several years experience of being a councillor, that is the sort of thing you would put in an election address on the basis that even more people will consider you the right choice if they know you have relevant experience. As far as I can remember, there was no mention of being or having been an Adur councillor.

The only reason I can think of for that is that the Tories did not want us to know, so the information was withheld. If we had known we would have pointed out the conflicts of interest and potential conflicts of time, and the Tories knew we would have done that so they counted on us not being aware of the identities of every councillor in small authorities down on the coast. And it worked.

So we not only have a part-time councillor, but one who is probably in breach of some or other code of conduct in Adur and who stood under false pretenses. Nice.

There are other factors though. Even standing in a ward with no hope of winning, I still feel happier in myself if its a place where I would l would like to live or represent, and Furnace Green is one of the half-dozen parts of town where I would like to live and Maidenbower isn’t. In fact, and I know this sounds bizarre, there are a couple of parts of Furnace Green which really remind me of life in the North Shore suburbs of Sydney. Anyway, it makes going through the motions a lot easier if you can identify with the place and its residents.

Still. Nobody really enjoys losing, even if there was never any prospect of winning, so I think I will give it a rest next year, even if Jayne doesn’t stand anywhere but I am definitely not having both of us fight elections at the same time: its just too much to do.

One of the reasons why I am presently happier to be a civilian than a councillor is that I am enjoying the freedom to say what I think without having to look over my shoulder for the Standards Board. Its not that I disagree with having some standards, but its much more fun to not have to show respect to people you don’t actually have any respect for. Its bad enough with some of the councilor, but I imagine the rules can stretch to cover the BNP which would cramp my style a bit! Maybe in the future it will settle down and the whole standards thing will be more concerned with what really counts like undeclared interests instead of acceptable political verbals.

Having said that, its a freedom I don’t use or abuse enough so I think it might be time to do some catching up and have a swipe at a few easy targets in the near future

Not that the new intake of Tories are universally bad: just most of them. Jayne’s opponent in Tilgate, for example, seems to be OK. By a strange coincidence they both worked at the same school at the same time about 5 years ago but didn’t realise it until they were chatting at the polling station. Jayne seems convinced that he will do a good job for Tilgate – even if she would have done a better one.

My only concern about him is that he seems too nice to be a Tory. That could be down to my lack of imagination – I just can’t imagine how a genuinely pleasant, churchgoing, committed Christian who has worked in the public sector can be an ideological Conservative. I can, however, imagine the culture shock he might get at his first Conservative Group meeting when he gets to see what is behind the curtain. If I had to bet on the person most likely to follow Marcella Head across to the Lib Dems I would put my money on him.

Tilgate was close last time when it was a two-horse race. As soon as we saw that the Greens, Lib Dems and BNP were joining in this time we felt it was more likely to go. In that case its easier to take if its someone who appears to be decent and straightforward rather than some of the other Tory candidates like Jarnail Singh or Alex Maple.

I still think I had an easier time of it than Jayne though. That John Cleese quote seems particularly apt again: “Its not the despair. I can take the despair. Its the hope I can’t stand”

It feels like I have spent more time in Tilgate in the last week than I have at home in Broadfield, except for last night when I spent about 8 hours preparing paperwork for tomorrow, finally giving in and going to bed at 3am. I even forgot to watch the TV programme about the Large Hadron Collider – everyone was talking about it at work today.

The other night we came across the forces of evil. Bumping into the Tory candidate (yet again) was bad enough, but then we came across a group of 3 BNP members delivering leaflets. I recognised them from the count last year.

The most disconcerting experience was when I knocked on some chap’s door and introduced myself and he said “Oh I know who you are”. I thought he just meant that he knew I was with the party because of the rosette but he said he knew me because he had seen me around.

Not sure what will happen in my own seat. We stopped off to visit Thakordas on the way home from Tilgate the other day and he seems quite confident about it. He is certainly very organised over there. I feel a bit guilty about neglecting Furnace Green a bit in favour of Tilgate, but I already had my plans there before the extra Furnace Green seat fell vacant.

If we do manage to grab one of the seats in Furnace Green I hope it is TP who gets it – it would be very unfair otherwise, especially after his experience last year, and what happened to his daughter in Three Bridges in 2004.

Right now I think I shall go and read yesterday’s morning paper so I can then read today’s morning paper. It will all be doom and gloom but at 70p a throw I ought to actually read the thing and not just do the Kakuro puzzle on the back.

I dare say we could get more than a quorum just from the ‘usual suspects’ (10 or 12 from the Crawley Labour party, half a dozen from Respect, another bunch from the Crawley Campaign Against Racism, and Bob Lanzer from the Conservatives) but I would love to see a load of new faces with new ideas for whom it is not just one more meeting. If you have contacts among the church groups, sixth form, trade unions or wherever – pass the word around.

Anyway, about the elections: the message is still to go out and vote. From knocking on doors on behlf of Labour I have talked to a lot of non-voters. Some have lost faith in the whole political process (“well they are all the same aren’t they?” ) some never had any in the first place, and most are just not engaged at all. But nearly all these steadfast non-voters are not comfortable with the idea of the BNP standing, so all I can say to them is that if you can’t find it in yourself to vote for anyone, at least vote against the BNP.

it will not reduce the number of their votes, but it will reduce their percentage of the vote and make it more closely represent the true level of support they have – which is very small. Look at it this way, if they have 200 supporters in an area of 4000 that is 5%. Not a lot, but their supporters will turn out whatever happens. If the overall turnout is 20% – not unusual here – that means there will be 800 votes and the BNP’s 200 votes then becomes 25% and they will then claim that a quarter of the electorate support them.

That is what happened in Denne ward in Horsham back in December. The BNP scraped together 171 votes from the 4222 electorate (4% of the electorate). A turnout of 32% gave them 12.7% of the votes cast and you can see on their mesageboards that they are claiming 12% support in Horsham now. If Horsham had got the sort of turnout we sometimes get in Crawley they would be claiming over 20% support for their 171 votes.

Where I am standing in Furnace Green it should be easier to persuade the disinterested to vote. They can go out and cast one vote for Labour and another vote for the Tories to cancel it out, but still register two votes against the BNP. But even in the other wards, even if you don’t agree entirely with any party you will find, along with at least 95% of the population, that you will find more in common with any of them than with the BNP so pick the one you disagree with the least and vote for them.

Even most people involved in politics at any level will admit, even if only in private, that most of the time you are voting for, supporting, or promoting, not what you really want but what you don’t want the least. While the BNP are involved in our elections here I’m willing to put aside my normal dislike of single-issue politics and urge everyone to vote on this issue even if they have no interest in any others.

The one which amazed me was Tottenham Hotspurs’ reaction to being given a bye to the last 16 of the UEFA cup. The story is that they were to play Feyenoord, but Feyenoord got into some trouble over crowd violence, so UEFA booted them out of the cup and Spurs get to progress to the next round.

So how do Spurs react? They talk about making a claim for compensation for missing out on gate receipts and TV money for the game they will not have to play. That takes some front doesn’t it?

The amusing example is from the letters page of the Crawley News. I think this could be more chutzpah than bare-faced cheek, but the letter reads as follows:

Further to the article in the News on January 10 about shops closing in Crawley’s parades, we would like to inform readers that frizzy’s Indian takeaway in Furnace Green is still very much open for business.

It is written by Mohammed Shuaib, owner, Frizzy’s, Furnace Green Parade… fair play to the bloke. he is a businessman and knows the value of publicity. There are dozens of shops still open in the parades, and any one of them could have written a similar letter – but he is the one who thought to do it. You can’t blame him for writing it, and the decision to print such a blatant plug was made by the Crawley News.

But thats not what amused me. What amused me was that the News opted to illustrate this letter with a photograph of Frizzy’s. There is not a single person around, and the shop has all its metal shutters down and locked. I think they are having a bit of a laugh, and I’m glad they decided to share it with us.

It is worth mentioning something first about how the figures were derived. Something like child poverty is difficult, possibly impossible, to measure. (See The Tyranny of Numbers by David Boyle for a good book on the difficulties of measuring sociological elements) What the JRF have done is made an assumption that child poverty has a positive correlation to the level of children living in families which are in receipt of workless benefits, which seems to be quite logical and sensible.

This means that if a ward is said to have 35% of children in such familes while the national average is 21% it does not necessarily mean that 35% of children are in poverty. It could be a bit higher or a bit lower but the important point is that whatever it is it is almost certainly significantly higher than the national average.

It is quite a useful tactic – to estimate something which can’t be measured by finding something which can be measured and which has a strong chance of being related. It does not even matter whether its a direct relationship or whether both are the effect of a common cause: as long as you can be fairly sure of that relationship you can start to gather valid data.

Sorry. I made a quick detour via nerdsville there. Back to the numbers.

Although Crawley fares quite well compared to Oxford it is still not happy reading. Overall the town has levels of child poverty of 18.3% – below the national average of 21%. But of the 15 wards in Crawley 3 are higher than average with the worst being a full 10 percentage points higher than the national average – and that is the ward where I live, Broadfield South.

The full results are:

31.4% Broadfield South
28.2% Broadfield North
24.9% Bewbush
20.2% Ifield
19.9% Langley Green
18.8% West Green
18.5% Northgate
17.2% Tilgate
16.8% Southgate
14.2% Three Bridges
14.1% Gossops Green
11.5% Furnace Green
9.0% Pound Hill South
8.0% Pound Hill North
5.3% Maidenbower

As I said, this is particularly depressing for us in Broadfield but it is not telling us anything which we didn’t already know. Plenty of surveys and reports have shown the various indices of deprivation in Broadfield to be high. Indeed the results of similar previous surveys are the reason why Crawley has a Surestart centre and why it is located in Broadfield.

Surestart is unlikely to directly reduce child poverty levels in anything other than the long term, but it does offer brilliant support and assistance for those families and (lets not forget) all the other families in the area.

Before we all get carried away with the usual knee-jerk reactions about Broadfield being some sort of sink estate lets get a bit of perspective though. The total figure of 29.7% for the whole of Broadfield means that just over 70% of children are not in families which are dependent on benefits, so don’t write them off!

Conversly, much as I welcome the presence of Surestart and other initiatives here in Broadfield and appreciate that it does make sense to concentrate such efforts where there is most need we should not forget those children suffering from poverty in Maidenbower and Pound Hill.

It is well documented that those wards are amongst the richest in the country, as measured by average income of the residents, but the important thing to remember about averages is that they are, well, averages. It is bad enough to be in a family classified as poverty-stricken but how much worse to know that any potential help is less likely to reach you because you are in a ‘rich’ area?

As there are, according to the JRF data, 1550 children in poverty in Broadfield and Bewbush it does make some sense to concentrate efforts here, but spare a thought for the 325 children in poverty in Maidenbower and Pound Hill. Having wealthy neighbours doesn’t help them at all. There is no trickle-down at work there.

Interesting fact: because of the larger number of children in Maidenbower, there are actually more children in poverty there than in Furnace Green despite the percentage figure only being 5.3% compared to Furnace Green’s 11.5%.

By all means lets continue with efforts in the most seriously affected areas, but do not ignore the rest. Remember that of all the under-15s affected by child poverty in town 73% live outside Broadfield and Bewbush and nearly 10% of them live in Pound Hill and Maidenbower!

As a whole we should really be scandalised that nearly 1 in 5 children in the town are dependent on benefits and not satisfied just because that is better than the national average. The acceptable level should be zero.

I think the crawley Mela is a bit unusual. Traditionally a Mela is an Asian festival, and tends to feature mostly culture from the Indian sub-continent. Our one tends to spread its net a bit wider. The organisers made a point of saying that the Mela this year would include acts and stalls from everywhere.

This was bit confusing, as I can remember an African band last year, as well as an African drum workshop and a calypso singer, and the ubiquitous Irish dancing.

Croydon have a different approach: they have a more traditional Mela on the Sunday and a World Party on the Saturday. That seems to work, but I like the idea of mixing it all up like we do.

Locally the event gets a lot of support from all sorts of organisations. Obviously the borough council plays a large part, BBC Southern Counties always have a large presence and both the local newspapers are there in force. Various other organisations and charities have stalls there, either as a fund-raising activity or to publicise their services.

Jayne and I went along after our interviews, and I have to admit that I thought it was all a little flat compared to previous years. There did not seem to be as many punters there, and there seemed to be less choice in the merchandise in the stalls. I didn’t see the African stalls selling clothes and musical instruments for example, although the range of foods available was as wide as ever – with the notable absence of the Malaysian satay stall from two years ago which I really missed last year.

We were not there all day but even so, in previous years you could not turn a corner without bumping into one of the borough councillors, who used to turn out in force to support the event. This time the only ones I saw were the Mayor and her husband who were there in an official capacity, and the new leader of the council. Its not a major consideration for the general public but I think it shows a level of support for the organisers when most of the councillors turn out.

I am coming to the conclusion that the Hawth is not the best venue for this type of event, either in terms of size or layout. Because it is a fairly small site everything is crammed together closely, with no open spaces to talk of. If you want to lay out a blanket away from the crowds and just chill there is not really anywhere to go, and having the car park within the grounds means that you always have to keep one eye out for cars.

I can see the benefits for the organisers – having the theatre there means that there is no need to bring in portable toilets (and it means that the toilet quality is a lot better than at most festivals). The same applies to the theatre bar – no need for a beer tent. It didn’t apply this year, but the theatre also provides some shelter if the heavens open. But having said that, I think the current venue is a bit claustrophobic for a festival. There is certainly no room to grow.

I just can’t help thinking that it would all be a lot better in Tilgate Park, Southgate Playing fields, Goffs Park or Broadfield Park, although I’m sure we would all miss the parking chaos at the Hawth.