Forum Topic

Is the Ealing Labour Group a Fake?

In his support of the "Fair Treatment Now" initiative Labour party leader and MP for Doncaster North Ed Miliband said: "When people with mental illness get fair access to the decent treatment they deserve, they stand a better chance of recovering, and getting back their lives. For far too long mental health has been seen as a Cinderella service when in fact it is critical to helping people achieve good quality, well balanced lives."How and why can Ealing Labour Group justify closing the LINKS mental health service and the ALbert Dane Day Centre for the disbled if they are part of the Labour Party. I think there is something smelly going on here and perhaps the Labour Party leadership should look at this.

Maggie Tomlinson ● 5669d4 Comments

Just read Animal Farm and you will see where we are.

Peter Chadburn ● 5669d

Maggie,You make a very good point, I wonder who the body snatching aliens are who have taken over Ealing’s Labour group?The saving Labour will take on the Albert Dane day centre (for disabled users), which sees the service eliminated, is £156K.  The saving for the LINKS day centre (for mental health users), which again is eliminated, is £279K.  By comparison Labour have gone easy on communications spending cutting the £1,474K budget by a mere £250K or 17%.  On union facility time, ie time during working hours for union officials to do their business, the cut in the £250K budget is only £50K or 20%.  The number of service heads employed by the council was 77.  They cost £6.7 million.  Only 7 out of 77, or 9%, have so far lost their jobs.  These modest savings in the backroom compare unfavourably with the 40-50% cuts in frontline areas such envirocrime officers, park rangers, and cleansing monitoring officers and the total elimination of these two day centres.  As Peter points out elsewhere on the forum, the point of these closures is not to save on the revenue side but to grab the buildings for the property strategy.  The point of the property strategy is to roll up a range of community assets ranging from day centres and community centres through to small car parks and sell them in order to fund the building of three shiny new council offices.  I could quite see how you could save on the revenue side and make these facilities more responsive to their customers by coming up with a long term plan to give the buildings to voluntary sector organisations who could then come up with innovative offerings that allowed users to use their personalisation money to buy those new services.  This way there would be more facilities in the borough and less drain on the council’s revenue budget.  It does assume though that you don’t want to grab the buildings.  It should be noted that officers presented the property strategy, then called the hub strategy, to the Conservative administration in 2006.  We told them to where to put it.  Labour seem to be happy to follow the officer’s advice – maybe we have identified the body snatchers?

Phil Taylor ● 5669d

I think the view that Council Officers are running Ealing Council is one that I and many others can subscribe to.

Eric Alan Leach ● 5669d

Labour’s counter argument or so called justification, and perhaps that of the ignorant minded don’t work for the community attitude couldn’t care a less mindset of the regeneration team heads, is that as regards the three service centres the overall running costs will eventually be less than today. So apparently they claim there is a saving. However somewhere I have seen that the intention is to keep Perceval House. So what is this all about?We have a weak Labour leadership. What is the evidence? Well they don’t communicate at Cabinet level with the citizens of Ealing. They want to reduce the number of Scrutiny meetings so they can be held even less to account. They do not respond on blog sites. The Tories have a better tradition in doing this over the years even though they rightly get fried from time to time. The non cabinet Labour members at Ward meetings say making alternative arrangements are being made without being able to articulate in detail what these are. They don’t use the AR propaganda rag to inform us. They don’t use the Ealing Gazette.The new Labour website blog Ealing Rose has a somewhat urbane and life is rather difficult and so we are trying to our best flavour, but even here the many issues of the day are not being addressed and in particular it is not being used as a discussion arena by Labour supporters.I have known many people who have been stoutly left of centre all their lives, but as they got older have switched guiltily to the right. Labour in Ealing by virtue of their cowardly inertia, refusal to engage and their attack on the vulnerable which for the Southall Councillor mob is just extraordinary, are doing an excellent job in encouraging just such a swing.

George Knox ● 5669d