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We need policies for all communities
• IN the mayoral elections on May 1 whoever is honoured with the trust of Londoners must be able to judge and plan policies for all Londoners, policies which bring prosperity and improvement for the living conditions for all the diverse communities.
Some say that Ken Livingstone has been at the helm of London’s government for too long and he has now run out of initiatives.
In fact they say that it is healthy to change from time to time.
But the track record of Ken’s leadership is really impressive. For example: £600 million extra per year has been invested in a better bus service with greater frequency and more routes.
There are now an extra two million passengers a day. The congestion charge continues to reduce traffic levels in central London by over 70,000 fewer cars every day and the western extension was successfully introduced in February 2007. Three times as many affordable homes have been delivered per year compared with when the Greater London Authority was set up in 2000.
Ken is at the forefront of the efforts to persuade local authorities to build new affordable homes with new well planned initiatives, which will deliver for years to come.
Police numbers have risen from 25,000 in 2000 to 31,000 in 2007, plus 3,700 police community support officers also on the beat. There has been an 83 per cent increase in cycling, via major expansion of bus/cycle lanes, and a major increase in funding for new cycle routes, safe cycle parking and London. Bus and tram fares for all under-18s in full-time education have been abolished; and bus and tram travel for Londoners on income support has been cut in half.
Ken Livingstone has been at the forefront of making the bus fleet and underground accessible for disabled and deaf Londoners.
He is ensuring that the London 2012 Olympic and Paralympic Games will benefit thousands more people in east London and beyond.
We need a mayor who is able to plan for short, medium and long-term prosperity for the citizens he serves, a mayor who knows how to bring together diverse communities for the common good and resist efforts to break the community cohesion for which many, many progressive activists have for many years fought to make a reality.
DAVID HARALAMBIDIS
NW5
Political capital!
• SINCE taking over responsibility for a borough-wide portfolio, which means I serve all Camden residents, I have quite deliberately stopped submitting party-political letters to the newspapers.
However, mayor Ken Livingstone’s ridiculous attempt to make political capital from our fears about post offices has infuriated me into breaking my silence.
Apparently he has called for a judicial review – not of the closure plans, which would pull the rug out from under the feet of his Labour Party pals in Parliament – but of the consultation itself “because it’s too short”.
Up and down the country there have been anti-closure demonstrations and the postbag must be running in the millions.
Surely even Gordon Brown and Post Office Ltd cannot be about to claim the public doesn’t care.
Whether the consultation period was a week or a year, the result will be the same. Communities don’t want the closures. Livingstone knows this. If he wanted to help he would be challenging the outcome, not the process.
With signs that his empire might be about to crumble around his feet, no wonder Livingstone is getting desperate. But what sort of idiots does he take Londoners for in trying to convince us his irrelevant publicity-stunt might make a difference?
CLLR MIKE GREENE
Conservative, Hampstead Town ward
Anti-racist campaign
• WELL done to the team at Searchlight who organised the excellent day of anti-racist campaigning in Camden on Saturday with musician Billy Bragg.
Volunteers came from all over the borough, and many from even further afield, and thousands of newspapers were delivered, highlighting the threat of the BNP being elected to the London Assembly on May 1.
One of the things that makes London a great city is its diversity, the result of migrants coming here over the years from elsewhere in the UK and around the world.
The BNP is a racist organisation that claims that non-whites can never be British, even if they were born here, and would ban mixed race relationships.
Many of its members are Holocaust deniers with violent criminal pasts.
There is no prospect of a fascist being elected to the London Assembly from our local district of Barnet and Camden, where the battle is a two-horse race. However, there is also a London-wide top-up list in operation so it is vital that local people who oppose the BNP turn out in large enough numbers to stop the racists reaching the 5 per cent of the vote they need to be elected.
Whichever mainstream party you support, or even if you don’t support one, please get out and vote on May 1 if you don’t want the shame and division of having racist bigots in London’s government.
PHIL JONES
NW1 |
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