Despite the appalling weather and conflicts with normal electioneering we had a good turnout and were able to talk to voters or deliver leaflets through doors in West Green, Ifield, Bewbush, Ifield West and Gossops Green.  We will be doing more there and also in Pound Hill South, Tilgate and the four wards in Reigate & Banstead where the BNP are standing.

The message was generally well-accepted and the response was positive.  One notable exception was an idiot in Ifield shouting something about how we need to reclaim our country and not be giving it away.  The integrity and consistency of his opinions was compromised slightly by him wearing a Chelsea shirt with ‘Vialli’ on the back.

Quite how successful Chelsea would be without their Russian owner, Israeli manager, his Portugese predecessor, and the African, Italian, German and Italian players I am not sure, but that’s another discussion all together.

Over the next few weeks  the Wealden UAF will be out and about again and if anyone is interested in coming along they should get in touch – details on the WUAF website.

We had been there before, but this was the first time since their recent refurbishment.

The place seems to go out of its way to distance itself from the image of the traditional British Indian restaurant, with not a scrap of flock wallpaper in evidence, but instead it presents itself as a place for ‘contemporary Indian cuisine’.

The refurbishment has seen the place expand into the shop next door. There is now a bar and lounge area at the front, a large dining area behind that and a seperate room for private parties at the back. There is a large window into the impressively clean and well-equipped kitchens so that you can, if you want to, watch your food being prepared and cooked.

The emphasis on presentation extends to the food as well. Our starters were arranged on deep, square plates in the French style with drizzles of sauce and lots of white space around the different elements. Jayne and I both had some lamb kebab sort of thing which was described as being marinated for a day to melt in the mouth and really did just that.

For main courses you can order all sorts of tikka masalas, kormas, jalfrezis, etc. and then rice and vegetable dishes to go with them. With the new decr comes a new menu and Jayne was a bit disappointed to find that her favourite (balti) is no longer on it, but she enjoyed the bhoona she had instead.

I decided to go for ‘dak bungalow’ pigeon with three-bean kedgeree and roasted vegetables, mainly because so few places serve pigeon that you never know when you will get the chance to have it again. When it arrived it looked tiny on the huge square plate and I was a bit worried that it would be gone in three bites, but it was deceptively filling and the flavour made me eat more slowly to enjoy it more.

On previous visits the desserts had been the mass-produced ones where a supplier provides a choice of pre-frozen dishes along with a laminated menu. They all tasted OK apparently, but you knew that exactly the same thing was being served in any number of Indian restaurants along with Chinese and Italian places too. It reminded me of a holiday on the Algarve I took years ago where every restaurant had identical dessert menus.

That has all gone now and desserts are much more individual. Chas had a chocolate mousse with a small pile of strawberries (I think) at the bottom. Jayne and Chrystal had the selection of ice creams and sorbet and got a little confused by them. Each one was a scoop of a sorbet and two scoops of ice cream in a glass cone. The cone was balanced on a glass full of crushed ice with cranberry juice and Chrystal wasn’t sure if she should/could eat or drink it. Very different to the last time when they had ice cream served in a plastic penguin toy, although the kids were younger then and probably enjoyed that.

The one thing that has not changed is the staff. The same people are still there and they are very friendly and helpful, even if one poor lad did keep asking us if we wanted a menu even though we had already ordered.

The venue is the Holy Trinity School 6th form centre, Buckswood Drive, Gossops Green.

There is a slight whiff of futility about these meetings because the committee has very few powers to make decisions: it can only make recommendations or comments for the whole council to take into consideration when making the actual decisions. Added to that, the county council is Tory-dominated but the West Crawley Committee is 100% Labour – I think it is the only one in the county with more than one Labour member, as nearly all the Labour county councillors represent divisions in the West of Crawley.

Having said that, the committees were set up to solicit opinions and there is a chance that recommendations from it will be taken into account, especially if they are backed up by public opinion. Some of the agenda could be heavy going, but there are some important issues which are of particular interest to residents of this area.

The way I look at it, the county council have made an effort to set these meetings up in Crawley instead of being out of sight in Chichester, so the least we can do is try and turn up. If I did not have a previously-arranged piss-up to host I would be there myself.

Topics like the fire station, hot school meals, grant applications and the transport/highways works programmes should provide enough interest for the public, and I hope that the local papers will send someone along too. If nothing else, it is always good to see Ralph Wright from the highways department in action – he really should have been a politician instead of an officer.

The last one of these meetings I went to had very few members of the public in attendance, unless you count about 20 borough councillors. Lets see if we can get a few more this time around.

Items on the agenda include:

Update

Developments since the last meeting, including the Northern area bookbus, the fire station, and hot school meals. Only 10 minutes is allocated to this, so expect a basic update and not a major discussion.

Public Questions

Any questions – although there is a request that anyone with complex questions should submit them before the meeting to allow them to give a more substantive answer.

Highways and transport works programme

This is all about a report on the programme of works for the next two years. The committee is to respond to the report. (The actual schedule is in an appendix to the report)

Community grants

Another report, this time about applications received for community grants.
Applications have been received from:

• Chestnut Tree House
• Crawley CVS
• Crawley Audio News
• 2nd Ifield St Margaret’s Scouts
• Broadfield Youth & Community Centre
• CTL Anglican Church
• The Happy Hut Care Group

The committee will be considering each of these applications, and I think this is the bit where they actually can make a decision. The committee has a budget of £20,000 which can be allocated. Applications total £18,160 plus “a contribution” for the scouts, so they should all be OK, but I don’t know if they intend to hold onto anything for contingencies.

Minerals & waste development framework

Yet another report, this time about public consultation on the draft minerals and waste core strategy and strategic waste site allocations.

General information on county local committees can be found here, including full agendas, answers to frequently asked questions, and contact details for anyone who wants to know even more.

Our girl has a friend whose sister goes to Manor Green College as a year 9 pupil. Manor Green is a brilliant school. Our boy goes there and has benefitted greatly from it. The school is for children with learning disabilities and is the result of a merger of Deerswood school (for mild learning disabilities) and Catheringtons school (for severe learning disabilities).

One of the great things about the school is that there is transport provided by coaches and minibuses for all the pupils. The justification for this is that, as a specialist school, it is likely to draw its pupils from all over town regardless of distance and that many of the students will be less able to make their own way to school on normal buses.

Anyway, during the summer holidays only a week or two before the start of term this girl’s parents had a letter stating that transport was no longer being provided for year 9 pupils. I guess that the idea is to phase it out gradually by removing it from year 9 and 10 next year and so on until there is no transport for those in the senior part of the school.

In some cases the children may live fairly close or be trusted to make their own way to school, but many of them will not. The obvious solution will be for the parents to have to make special journeys or detours on the way to work to drop their children at the school by car.

In this particular case, the parents do not have a car. Although the child can get free bus travel to school, her father would have to pay something like £7.50 a day to take her to school and collect her if he took her on the bus. That is nearly £40 a week, and they cannot afford it. So the only alternative is for the father to walk her to school from Broadfield to Ifield. This means setting out a lot earlier in the day than previously. Apparently on the first day the child ended up with such blisters she could hardly get to the front in assembly to collect a prize for something or other.

I think this is nothing short of a scandal. If the measure of a society is how well it treats its most vulnerable members then we are not doing very well at all are we?

Quite apart from all that there is a very practical consideration in this matter of school transport for Manor Green College.

When the county council originally submitted plans for merging the two schools and relocating them together at the current site there were plenty of concerns from local residents. I remember these concerns well as I was on the planning committee. I may have even been chairing it at the time, I can’t remember exactly when it was. One of the main concerns for those living in Lady Margaret Road, and for the committee, was about the volume of traffic which the new school might generate.

We were told that traffic would not be the problem it is at other schools because transport is provided so there would not be hundreds of cars, but only a few buses. But now the buses are starting to be phased out. This year there will be the cars of most of the year nine pupils’ parents. Next year it could be years nine and ten, and when there is no transport for any of the seniors, will the removal of transport for the lower years start?

So much for the assurances we were given at the planning stage.

We are always hearing so much about Labour’s stealth tax rises – an accusation I would dispute anyway – but this is the Tories’ alternative approach: stealth service cuts with their human cost to parents at the school and residents of the surrounding roads. Perhaps if the county council had better manged the costs on the Fastway project they would not have to be stooping to such levels to save a few quid.

The Labour group on the county council have been alerted to this and will pursue the matter at Chichester. I hope the residents of Lady Margaret Road and the parents at Manor Green can be pursuaded to kick up a bit of a fuss about this thin end of the wedge which has been stealthily introduced during the summer.

One little bit of disclosure: Jayne is a parent governor at Manor Green. She was not made aware of this through being a governor.

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.

There are those who say that the best approach is to deny them the oxygen of publicity (a good time to quote the late Linda Smith who said she didn’t believe in giving them the oxygen of publicity, or even the oxygen of oxygen) and those who feel that the issues should be tackled head-on.

I think the second argument goes that the BNP may be gaining support through other parties neglecting the average working class voters while they chase the floating middle class vote, but they are gaining it by disguising what they really are so there is something to be gained in publicising their links with racism, football violence, crime, holocaust denial and terrorism.

I look at it this way: if I did absolutely nothing and then they won a seat somewhere I would be kicking myself afterwards.

Anyway, a few others feel the same and thats how I found myself teaming up with a Conservative councillor this afternoon, delivering a bunch of UAF leaflets in Ifield. A very strange experience, and a little bit worrying. I know he is a decent man who is genuinely against racism, but I also know he is very smart and knows what works to his party’s advantage. I’m pretty sure his attendance today was motivated by his decency rather than his electoral intelligence, but there is still a small doubt.

Actually, make that a very small doubt. If the Tories really thought they would gain from having anti-Fascist literature delivered, there would have been more than one of them out there.

The largest presence was from Sussex Police, who had a couple of vans full of riot police in the area just in case. The BNP had said they were going to be campaigning in Ifield and the UAF had also said they would be leafletting, but as far as I know everything went smoothly.

Apparently there have been reports of postal votes being sent out with no ballot paper in, two ballot papers in, or a ballot paper for the wrong ward.

By coincidence the wards affected are the three which are considered by all parties to be the most marginal – Southgate, Ifield and Broadfield South.  It is possible that they may have to be re-printed in a different colour and re-issued, with any originals received just discounted.  Will recipients of the new one just throw it away because they think they have already voted? What about someone who uses their original postal vote, and then goes on holiday before the new one arrives?

If any of these seats are won and lost by a handful of votes (Southgate's majority last time was 3 votes) it could be that just a few confused voters could have decided it.  If any ward is as close as Southgate this time I would not be surprised to hear calls for a re-run.

I really like voting by post myself. It is convenient and if anything happened near polling day I would not be prevented from voting[*]. Although its a lot easier to get a postal vote now, it is still not as widespread as it could be and cock-ups like this do nothing to increase confidence in the system.

As a party activist I will admit that the increase of postal voting does make a lot of the old campaigning techniques redundant: why announce something brilliant a few days before the election if half the floating voters have already voted for example?  I guess it can help a bit too if you are organised enough to know how many of your supporters have postal votes you can make assumptions about the rest of the postal voters and estimate how hard you need to work on election day itself – but most people tend to work as hard as they can anyway, so its a very theoretical advantage.

[*] This happened to me in 1992.  At that time you had to give notice a long time before an election that you required a postal vote and had to provide proof that you needed it – as opposed to now where you just have to want it.  I had to go to Sweden on business a week before the election, and stay there for two weeks. I asked about getting a postal vote and it turned out that the deadline had passed – but I had been on another business trip to America at the time.  I was a bit peeved, but all the duty frees made it a bit easier to take.

It turns out that some CCAR people and other concerned citizens have met to discuss some co-ordinated action against the BNP in town, and they intend to meet again soon – on April 18th.

I am sure they would be only too happy for anyone who is at all interested to turn up – I will confirm the time and venue. It would be great to see some people who are not part of the usual political machinery turn up and get involved.

Talking of which, someone has organised to get a couple of thousand UAF/anti-fascist leaflets, but I don’t think they have decided exactly what to do with them yet (that is one of the objectives for the meeting, I believe). If anyone volunteered to take some to distribute in one of the areas where the BNP is standing I imagine they would be welcome to take some.

If all else fails, we will hand them out in the shopping parades in Furnace Green, Ifield, Southgate and West Green, like we did in the Town Centre before the general election – which was very well-received.

A few members from other towns which do not have elections came along as well, and its always good to see new faces. Thats a hint by the way – we will probably be doing this sort of thing most Saturdays from now on: if anyone fancies coming along to join in just let me know.

I know of people in Ifield and Tilgate who have received these, but I am sure the BNP are delivering them elsewhere.

Much of what they say is the usual sort of thing and misguided as they might be, it is their right to put forward their views on education, health and crime. What is not right is the very strong implication that problems in all these areas are caused by immigration, muslims and non-Britons in general. The literature is quite insidiously clever in a way. It lists plenty of areas where everyone has concern, and you can’t argue that there are not problems. However, it it assigns the wrong causes to all these problems and proposes solutions which would not work.

It is all hate, trying to disguise itself as concern. One of the leaflets reproduces the cartoon from the Danish newspaper of the prophet with a bomb in his turban. Surely nobody can see that as anything other than a provocative act? (I wonder if they got permission from the cartoonist? Maybe we can get them on copyright offences if nothing else)

The good news is that our Crawley clergy are getting involved in all this. Even as an atheist myself I have a lot of time for most of the vicars I have met, and none more so than Father Leonard Doolan. He works in one of the affected areas, Ifield, and reports that the Bishop of Chichester has personally written to local muslims and other faith groups assuring them of his support and that of his churches.

The BNP are claiming to protect “our” Christian way of life, but all the Christian churches are united in telling them where to get off. If you are a Christian are you going to believe your own church or a group which your church totally abhor?

Its a shame that the Crawley UAF are not around to give a response to all this, and to organise opposition, but a timely reminder of why any of us are involved in politics – if we all did nothing this is the sort of rubbish which would fill the vacuum.

Apart from anything else, the BNP leaflets have a headline “more administrators – less beds”. How could anyone consider voting for a party with such poor grammar?

Update: 28th April

You will notice the absence of comments on this post, and the absence of a form to post any.

There are several reasons for this.

Firstly, an isolated initial comment soon developed into a private argument between two individuals. I have no problem if Rupert and Richard want to spend their time insulting each other, but they can do it by e-mail, where I am not paying for the diskspace.

Secondly, the debate (if it can be called that) was becoming very specific about an incident which is probably still under investigation, and was entirely an exchange of hearsay, speculation and invention between people who were either not there or at least claiming to have not been there. I have removed the comments more out of consideration for the welfare of the paper’s staff than anything else. Some other posts have comments on with which I strongly disagree, and which are still there, but this one was getting out of hand. Apart from anything else, the volume of comments was such that it stopped me spotting normal spam-attack comments which had slipped through the net!

So… commenting on this post has been disabled and existing comments, including my own, deleted to discourage further name-calling and clogging up of what is, after all, my own private site. Everyone is, of course, welcome to set up their own site or move the discussion to a site with lower standards.