Brown bottles it!

Andrew Sheridan drove the England front row forward to victory today.
Gordon Brown led the Labour retreat from calling an election today.



What an incredible day it has been! Unfancied England beat Australia 12 -10. The front row of their pack was immense, driving Australia back time after time. France beat New Zealand, favourites to win the 2007 World Cup, by two points. And Gordon Brown rules out an election!

For a guy who was 10 points up in some polls one week ago to call off the election after polls in the marginals suggest a 6 point swing to Conservatives is some humiliation! It shows Brown in his real colour. He has been trying to become leader of the labour party for years, prepared to stab Tony Blair in the back whenever he could. Now we see that the colour of his liver really is yellow. Is he fit to run the country? When will he bottle it next? Can he cope with a real crisis? He can talk tough, but his real colour is yellow.

And Ming's party is now down to 11% in the polls. Looks like Chris Huhne is heading for a drubbing in Eastleigh. Will he try to find a safe seat somewhere else? Is there a safe Lib. Dem seat anywhere in the country?

Disabled Rights campaigner selected for Eastleigh

Eastleigh Conservative Association has voted unanimously to elect Maria Hutchings as their candidate to fight the next general election.

Mrs Hutchings, 46, and mother of four, said "it is a huge honour and privilege that I should be selected to represent Eastleigh. We will start right now to build upon the hard work of local Conservatives to ensure a victory in the next general election. The Blair/Brown project has brought this country to its knees with stifling stealth taxes and now Brown is poised to submit even more power to the E.U. The people of Eastleigh and Great Britain deserve better and this lady is ready to deliver."

Maria Hutchings first came to our attention in February 2005 when she lambasted Tony Blair on national television for the closure of special schools and the lack of provision for disabled children.

Maria is a communications consultant and married to Stuart, 49, who is a marketing manager to a group of electronics companies.

We are absolutely thrilled to have Maria as our candidate. She is a passionate politician, full of conviction and a bundle of energy.

Eastleigh's Conservative Parliamentary Candidate

Eastleigh's Conservative Parliamentary Candidate will be announced this Saturday 29th September. Be one of the first to know his or her name. Find out here on the blog on Saturday evening.

Referendum on the EU Constitutional Treaty

Last week residents of East Stoke, a Dorset village voted in a referendum about whether the nation should be surveyed on the new legislation for the European treaty

The vote was called when a local resident, John Barnes, used an obscure provision of the 1972 Local Government Act which states that if 10 members of a parish call for a vote on any subject then the council is obliged to carry out the request.

Mr Barnes said he hoped the result would lead to further polls being held across the country to put pressure on Prime Minister Gordon Brown to call a referendum on whether to accept the treaty.

Imre Niedermayer, Hungarian-born landlord of the village pub, The Stokeford Inn, said he was happy to take the time to cast his vote as he believed the poll represented "democracy in action".

"What this is about is democracy. I was brought up under communism and unless we have a vote about this treaty and unless we are all allowed to make our contribution to politics then it is not healthy and we will end up with a police state."

If you would like to vote on this issue please select yes or no on the right. You may also post your comments below.

Britain's broken society

What are the causes of Britain's broken society? Are they

• High crime rates
• Drug abuse
• Alcoholism
• Gambling addiction
• Divorce
• Cohabitation
• One parent families
• Debt
• Television
• A lack of religious beliefs and teaching
• Poor education
• The yob culture
• Overcrowding
• Multiculturalism

What do you think? Please let me know.

A couple of statistics I came across recently are

"Half of unmarried couples separate by their child's fifth birthday. One in 12
married couples separate by their child's fifth birthday." David Cameron

Britian's broken society costs the country £102 b a year:
Family breakdown £24 b
Educational underachievement £18 b
Crime £60 b

Personal debt is now at a total of £1.38 trillion in the UK. The average debt of each family is £54, 452. 7 - 9 million people say that they have a serious problem with debt.

At least the Conservative party is trying to address these issues. Gordon Brown, like is predecessor Tony Blair, seems happy to send us further into debt.

Air pollution: the consequence of more building in Eastleigh

One effect of all the rain we have experienced recently is the tremendous growth of plants, particularly weeds. Kate and I spent a peaceful couple of hours yesterday weeding part of our allotment. We had planned to continue this morning (Saturday) but it is raining again. While we were quietly working away I was listening to all the noise around- the roar of two motorways, each about a kilometer away, the traffic on Passfield Avenue and Derby Road and the occasional take off of a plane from Southampton airport, a kilometer in the other direction.

Most of the town of Eastleigh is hemmed in between the M3 to the west, the M27 to the south and the airport to the East. The motorways are heavily congested and occasionally gridlocked. Traffic flow around the town is poor; it can sometimes take an hour to travel a couple of kilometers. Air pollution is bad. Monitoring sites in various places around the town frequently exceed UK National Air quality standards and mean annual levels are above safety limits.

Eastleigh Borough Council will soon be examining plans to build 452 houses on South Street Allotment site and an unknown number of houses on the Woodside Road Allotment site. For each new dwelling there will be an estimated additional 6 traffic movements. What will happen to the Nitrogen Dioxide levels? They will rise further. Do the people of Eastleigh want to live in an increasingly unhealthy environment?

In the 1970's I conducted a piece of research on the park lakes of Liverpool for my M. Phil. degree. The 7 Liverpool parks were constructed because "the researches of sanitary science show incontrovertibly that the general health decreases and the rate of mortality increases in proportion to the density of population in a given area......it was suggested to construct a series of parks in such a relation to each other as will secure a central line of open space, to act as a kind of lung which will in a few years be the heart of Liverpool." (Anon 1868 - quoted in my thesis).

It appears to me that those 19th century Liverpool planners were more enlightened than 21st century Lib. Dem Councillors who are intent in pushing through plans to destroy places which have been public open spaces for over 80 years. By building more houses and roads they will further damage the health of Eastleigh people.

Mean annual Nitrogen Dioxide levels at a few sites around Eastleigh



Notes
Figures are in microgrammes per cubic metre, μgm-3
The National Air quality standard for Nitrogen dioxide is a maximum annual mean of 40 μgm-3 with 200 μgm-3 as a maximum which must not be exceeded more than 18 times in a year.
References
1. http://www.airquality.co.uk/archive/site_search.php
2. http://www.airquality.co.uk/archive/laqm/tools.php?tool=background04
3. http://www.airquality.co.uk/archive/laqm/tools/95_2004.csv
4. http://www.airquality.co.uk/archive/data_and_statistics.php?

Flooding and the Eastleigh Allotments High Court Decision.

In a week where much of England has experienced exceptional rainfall and floods the people of Eastleigh have mercifully escaped. However the High Court decision this week to allow building on Eastleigh's allotments will only bring that risk of flooding closer. Just today I heard a professor from Liverpool's John Moores University stating on the radio that building houses, roads and paving gardens all increases the risk of flash floods. He urged people to keep woodlands and green spaces within towns as these absorbed up to 50% of the water falling on them.

If, as the Lib Dem run council in Eastleigh desire, these two prime sites are sold off for hundreds more houses the risk of flooding to low lying parts of Eastleigh will incrase dramatically.

We have been warned by this week's weather!

It is a sad week for Eastleigh people. A couple of years ago 14 000 people signed a petition to keep Eastleigh's South Street and Woodside allotments. Hundreds of people are on waiting lists for allotments near their homes. We are being encouraged to go green, grow our own, reduce the food miles, eat more fruit and vegetables, get fit by undertaking more exercise, plant more trees - all things which are promoted by having an allotment. Yet because of overpopulation in the South of England and poor planning of housing needs we are forced to relinquish one of our most precious assets.