Cornlands Community Garden – Bug identification tomorrow (Saturday)

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The organisers of the Community Garden on Cornlands Road write;
“We have suffered some setbacks due to the crazy weather, vandalism issues and also changes to the Dig In team but the playground is slowly being transformed and we have been enjoying our weekly gardening clubs, we have some dedicated enthusiastic locals who are making the garden blossom. The broad beans are nearly ready and the peas are flowering, we have built a compost bin and we have lots of ideas for the future. We want more people to come along to garden and learn about food growing, or if you just fancy a cup of tea and a chat please join us.
We will be at the garden on either a Tuesday 5pm – 7pm or Thursday 3pm – 5pm each week.

We will be on site tomorrow 10:30am – 12 noon celebrating insects as part of National Insect Week so come along to find out which bugs are friends or foes in a fruit and veg garden and make some insect friendly crafts. All events and activities are FREE and OPEN TO ALL.

We are holding a Summer Fair on Saturday 18th August 1pm – 3pm so please spread the word or contact me if you wish to get involved.

If you use Facebook search for YWT Dig In and you can keep up to date with Cornlands and also the other two gardens we have created so far; Brailsford Crescent in Clifton and also Hull Road Park. We shall soon be starting work on the fourth community garden which will be in The Groves.

Ward committee voting – How Labour fiddled the outcome

Reductions in Ward Committee funding - click to enlarge


The York Council have been forced to publish the results of the residents ballot on how Ward Committee funding should be spent this year.

The most striking feature of the process is the massive reduction in the value of funds allocated for local improvements. The ward by ward figures are reproduced left.

The reason, for the reluctance of the Council to provide information on voting patterns, is immediately apparent with a huge drop in the numbers participating in the ballot.

In part this will be the result of the way in which the ballot paper was distributed (tucked inside a free commercial magazine) and partly because many, previously popular, schemes had been deliberately omitted from the options made available for residents to consider.

For example, in the Westfield Ward, residents had no opportunity to indicate their support for the continuation of the local security patrols.

The Council was probably right, though, to start a new category for voluntary and other organisations – which had no local base in the Ward – but which were trying to access ward committee finding to pay for city wide schemes. These applications had grown in number to the point where it had become possible that no money would have been left for local neighbourhood improvements – the original intention of setting up the Ward Committee system.

Even with the new financial limitations, it is clear that many ward Councillors have ignored public opinion and decided to allocate funding to their pet schemes.

Westfield voting results. click to enlarge

For the first time ever, Westfield Ward Councillors have approved an allocation for a project which the majority of voters opposed (buying new pantomime costumes). Perhaps not surprisingly, this was actually the least popular proposal ever to appear on a Ward Committee ballot paper! A grant of £300 to the Acomb Bowling Club is also being made although the scheme never made it onto the ballot paper sent to residents.

Years of hard community based work have been put in jeopardy by a Council that prefers to try to manipulate public opinion through a combination of impenetrable silences, spin and misinformation. It will breed a cynicism in the Community about the Council and its motives, which may take a generation to reverse.

A copy of the voting results for all wards can be found at this web site http://tinyurl.com/York-FOI-11th-June-2012

Or Email us at libdem.york@btinternet.com and we will send you a spreadsheet with the voting information on it.

Safety (speed) camera locations in York area Wednesday 27 June to Tuesday 3 July 2012

North Yorkshire Police mobile safety camera locations

North Yorkshire Police will be carrying out mobile safety camera enforcement on the following routes between Wednesday 27 June and Tuesday 3 July 2012.

•A64 between Whitwell Hill and Barton Hill
•A64 between Barton-le-Willows and Jinnah
•A64 west-bound Bowbridge Farm Tadcaster
•A64 east-bound Bowbridge Farm Tadcaster
•York Road, Haxby, York
•A1237 Monks Cross, York
(more…)

UK economy Myth 5: There’s an easy, immediate solution to all this

There is something rather ‘Alice in Wonderland’ about the current UK economic debate. The Coalition argues that it is taking historically tough action to bring down the deficit and curb the national debt. The evidence just does not support this assertion. Labour meanwhile asserts that it is the Coalition’s fiscal toughness which has driven the UK back into recession, even though the differences between the Coalition’s approach and Labour’s are minimal.

In short, it suits both sides in this argument to pretend that the dividing lines between their two economic approaches are wider than they are: it maintains the pretence that the electorate faces a great ideological choice between the Coalition and Labour. This illusion is promoted by a media which is also much happier to portray imagined conflict than it is to present the messy reality.

The closer reality is that neither the Coalition nor Labour is at all sure how to respond to the current economic slowdown. The growth of the Blair/Brown years was driven by a massive expansion of personal and government debt, as Tim Morgan has noted here in his pamphlet The Quest for Change and Renewal:

Between 2000 and 2009, the big drivers of the economy were private borrowing and public spending. Reflecting this, the CREF (construction, real estate and finance) sectors expanded rapidly on the back of private borrowing while big increases in real public spending drove up output from HEPA (health, education and public administration) … the rapid growth between 2000 and 2009 in both CREF (+42%) and HEPA (+28%) masked a languishing in the rest of the economy (–5%), with real output from manufacturing plunging by 26%.

These differential rates of growth left a huge proportion of the economy incapable of growth. In 2009, the public spending driven HEPA sector accounted for 19% of all economic output, whilst borrowing-dependent CREF activities represented a further 40%. Add in a retail sector beleaguered by the squeeze on real disposable incomes and almost 70% of the economy is incapable of growth. Thus seen, Britain’s growth prospects are grim, because a huge proportion of the economy is skewed towards, and dependent upon, the dead-and-buried drivers of private borrowing and public spending. And growth is critical to the Coalition’s fiscal plan, because that plan cannot work unless revenues increase in response to a brisk expansion in output.

The usual attempts at an economic fix have failed, as consumers, companies and government de-leverage after a decade or more of maxing out their debt. The Government (both Coalition and then Labour) has tried to boost private spending by keeping interest rates at close to zero, while the Government (both Coalition and then Labour) has injected huge sums of public money into the economy — some £825bn through a combination of deficit spending and quantitative easing. So far none of this has worked, though it may of course have prevented the situation from becoming even worse.

Conclusion

The first step toward a diagnosis is to acknowledge the extent of the problem. Yet that isn’t currently happening in our debates on the economy. Political debate instead turns on the minute differences which separate the Coalition’s and Labour’s remarkably similar economic approach.

It suits the political parties, and it suits the media. But as a result myths are taking hold — that the Coalition is embarking on ‘slash and burn’ austerity, or that the national debt is being wiped clear — which distort the reality of the situation. And this only makes it harder to begin grappling with our problems.

http://stephentall.org/

UK Economy Myth 4: Obama’s approach is the reverse of the Coalition’s

Trying directly to compare and contrast two different economies such as the UK’s and US’s is tricky. Nonetheless, many, especially on the left, have pointed to Obama’s policies — and the relative success of the US economic recovery — as evidence that the Coalition’s supposedly more extreme austerity policies are therefore flawed.

Yet it’s hard to square this direct comparison with reality. In fact, Obama cut federal spending by 0.9 per cent in real terms from 2010/11 to 2011/12, identical to the UK’s average real term cuts across this parliament. And, as this graph shows, the US deficit reduction plan is forecast to be ‘faster and almost as far’ as the UK’s:


(Graph from The Spectator; no live web-link.)

Fiscally, then, there is more similarity between the US approach and the UK’s. If you want to look for an Obama comparison that holds, you’d be better placed looking at the similarities between his taxation policies and those of the Lib Dems.

UK Economy Myth 3: Ed Balls’ ‘too far, too fast’ claim has been justified

The present dire state of the UK economy has led many to argue that Ed Balls’ repeated warnings, originally delivered in his Bloomberg speech in August 2010, that the Coalition Government is cutting ‘too far, too fast, have been justified. As we’ve seen, however, the reality is somewhat different: public spending in real terms does not even start to reduce until next year (2012-13), and even then it shrinks by just 1% of GDP.

It is true, though, that Labour’s publicly declared plans for the deficit at the 2010 general election were more modest in scope than those adopted by the Coalition. It is quite another question whether they would have stuck to them: after all, it was Labour’s Alistair Darling who warned of ‘cuts deeper than Thatcher’, and Liam Byrne who admitted there was no money left. But let us assume Labour would have done what they said they would: what then would have been the result for the British economy?


(Graph from Centre for Policy Studies; data from Ernst&Young ITEM club.)

This is a counter-factual question which has been assessed by the Ernst&Young ITEM team using a model identical to the Treasury’s to work out the macroeconomic impact of sticking to Labour’s fiscal plans between 2010 and 2012.

The results? Well, under the most likely scenario of Labour’s looser fiscal policy (identified in the graph below as Labour 2), economic growth would have been fractionally lower (2.0%) than under the Coalition (2.1%) in 2010, identical in 2011 (0.7%) and slightly higher in 2012 (0.7% cf 0.4%):

Overall, the marginally higher growth of Labour’s looser fiscal policy would have resulted in 70,000 fewer unemployed. However, that reduction would have been obtained with an increase in debt across the three years of £26 billion — the equivalent of £370,000 per job — to be repaid by the nation later.

In any case, Labour’s ‘too far, too fast’ mantra is built on sand. The reality is the Coalition has so slowed down its original deficit reduction programme that it is now less stringent than Alistair Darling’s. Yes, that’s right — the Coalition’s fiscal plans under David Cameron are looser than Labour’s fiscal plans were under Gordon Brown:

5 Myths about the UK economy – Myth 2 The Coalition is bringing UK debt down

Not surprisingly, given 1) the economy isn’t currently growing and any recovery is forecast to be weak, and 2) the Government is continuing to maintain historically near-record levels of public spending, the national debt is forecast to continue rising throughout the lifetime of this Parliament. Yet politicians, including Nick Clegg as well as the media, persist in confusing the different concepts of deficit (at its simplest, the excess gap between what we earn and what we spend as a nation in a year) and debt (the accumulation over years of all our borrowing).

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So, for the record, here are the public debt figures for the UK. The UK’s debt is increasing throughout this Parliament on the following three measures:

• Nominal figures: from £903bn (2010-11) to £1,251bn (2014-15);
• As %-age of GDP: from 61% (2010-11) to 69% (2014-15);
• At 2010-11 values: from £903bn (2010-11) to £1,125bn (2014-15).

5 Myths about the UK economy – Myth 1

With acknowledgement to Stephen Tall who is Co-Editor of Liberal Democrat Voice we reproduce his analysis of the UK economy over the next 5 days.

The economy is the big issue: it was at the last general election, it has dominated and will dominate this parliament, and it will be the big issue at the 2015 general election. Yet trying to get behind the political rhetoric to discover the economic reality is surprisingly tricky. The purpose of this post is to look at what I see as the top five myths currently being perpetuated about the economy, and to explain why I think our current debate is misleading the public and diverting us from finding proper answers.

Myth 1: UK public spending is reducing

So keen has been the Coalition and Labour (for their own different reasons) to talk up the extent of the Government’s spending cuts that the reality has been forgotten. Public spending is going up year-on-year under the Coalition, rising from £690bn in 2010-11 to £744bn (+8%) by 2014-15. If we allow for inflation, there will be a modest reduction: from £690bn to £668bn (-3%) by 2014-15.
That figure of £668bn public spending in the final year of this parliament will be higher than in every single year of the last Labour Government’s 13 years in office, bar its final one. Indeed, Coalition spending in 2014-15 would be higher even than that final Labour year (2009-10) if it were not for the increased cost in servicing the national debt.


(Graph from Burning our Money blog; data from Tullett Prebon economic and fiscal database.)

Vulnerable people in York

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The Council is to consider next week a report on the number of cases of abuse of vulnerable people in the City.

The highest number of alerts and referrals continue to be received regarding people over 85. Of the 690 alerts 242 (35%) concerned people over 85.

The number of alerts and referrals continues to grow within the City, but with lower referrals than the England average. Family members are making increasing numbers of safeguarding referrals.

The Council continues to receive relatively low numbers of alerts from the wider community including education, training, workplace, friends and neighbours. No referrals have been received again this year in respect of people with substance misuse related needs, and this is now subject to joint consideration with the Council’s Drug and Alcohol commissioners.

A full copy of the report can be found here: http://tinyurl.com/Health-York-26th-June

Residents cuts hate list

Residents in the Westfield and Dringhouses wards have given their views on recent cuts in public service standards.

They gave their views in response to a “Focus” survey.

The top 10 least popular cuts (least popular first) are:

1. Stopping, or charging for, green waste wheelie bins emptying – 97% opposed

2. Reduction in highways maintenance budget 94%

3. Reductions in drainage gulley cleansing frequencies 93%

4. Reduction in snow and ice clearing budget 84%

5. Recent increase in Council Tax level 82%

6. Reduction in Ward Committee budget 81%

6. Closure of Beckfield Lane recycling centre 81%

8. Stopping Community Ranger security patrols 78%

9. Increased car parking charges 71%

10. Closure of Council’s Acomb Office – 54%