Randomly Selected Article or Link

So, we're going to get to hear later today what Dave means by "localism":

BBC NEWS | Politics | Tories offer votes on council tax:

Councils should hold referendums if they want to bring in "high" council tax increases, Tory leader David Cameron is due to say. If people voted against a rise, they would get a rebate the following year, he will add in a speech in east London. This would replace the current system of central government "capping" bills in England and Wales...Mr Cameron is expected to say he wants to improve "democratic accountability".

Under the plan, there would be a "trigger threshold", above which councils would have to hold a referendum. In England this would be set by Parliament, with the Welsh National Assembly deciding the level for Wales. Bills sent out to households would ask whether they supported any "excessive" increase, with a referendum form attached. In his speech in east London, Mr Cameron will say: "All politicians in opposition talk about giving more power to local councils. But all governments seem to end up centralising power.

Right - so how are we going to reverse that, I wonder? Oh yes, we'll decide at Westminster what's excessive and force local government to hold a referendum. Like that's decentralizing? Not only that, but a post hoc referendum which will, it appears, do nothing to tell a local authority what it ought and ought not to be spending money on, and after the budget is set.

It seems to me that this is a man making a bid for power on behalf of his party. Power which, in this country, will allow him more or less to do as he pleases with local government. And yet not only is he not making any visible attempt actually to do something about what he describes as and the Taxpayers' Alliance found in summer polling to be the most hated tax, but he's taking the current system and adding another layer of Westminster control over it.

Dave, it's this simple - you cannot make local government more accountable without making it raise more of its own money. The very fact that your Westminster cronies set the levels of central funding that goes to councils means that council up and down the country have to make up for shortfalls with disproportionate council tax changes. If you want to set them, and local people, free, you need to trust them to raise their money and trust local people to boot them out of power at local elections on the whole of their record.

This has got to be one of the most inept, unimaginative, populist policy pronouncements yet from Dave, displaying a fundamental misunderstanding of something he has repeatedly said is at the centre of Tory policy - localism. I do hope the speech is better than the press release.

The most common incidents I have to deal with as a warden in a hall of residence are fire alarms. We wardens go to bed at night - we all have day jobs - so we have a pager each that goes off to wake us in the event of a fire alarm.

Previously we had no discretion but to phone the fire brigade before we went to investigate the incident and organize the evacuees before the brigade arrived. Nowadays at the fire service's request we go and investigate first, so it's very much in our own interests to discourage frivolous fire alarms.

And one of the stories I tell was of one case where the brigade was so pissed off at having been called out to some drunken teenager breaking a fire alarm glass and running off that they not only called the police, but kept everyone outside, at 2 am on a freezing December Sunday right in front of an emptying student club night venue, for an hour while they wandered around checking every bedroom in the block for hazards and non-evacuees.

It seems this kind of just desserts is no longer to be tolerated by the fire service:

Firemen sacked after student call:

Three firemen have been sacked after students were kept out in the cold for almost three hours following an alarm.

The incident occurred in Glasgow in November when firemen from Cowcaddens' station responded to a late night call at student flats in Calgary Street.

The students said that although there was no fire, they were kept outside their accommodation from just after midnight until 0300 GMT.

Oh well!

When I started this blogging lark, I chose Blogger mainly as a way of getting a blog up quickly with as little effort and learning as possible in order to support Chris Huhne for Lib Dem party leader. I'd always intended when possible to move my blog to my own URL here at www.jockcoats.org.uk and my own server and software I could play with.

Since I went and bought another server, and set up a personal site using www.jockcoats.org.uk when I was running for election as university governor (which I've won, by the way thank you for asking, but more on that later no doubt) and since my Blogspot address got hijcaked rather embarrassingly by someone redirecting to a pretty explicit gay porn website at the weekend, I've decided to carry out that move now.

So I grabbed back my Blogspot address and redirect it to here, but if you are reading this and link to my blog at http://jockcoats.blogspot.com/ in your blogrolls and so on, maybe you could change that over to http://www.jockcoats.org.uk/ as soon as you can be bothered. I'm still getting used to the software, so things will probably change quite a lot over the next few days. For information, I'm using Drupal, and its blogapi module to allow me to continue posting through ecto.

Technorati Tags: blogging

The Tories seem up in arms about the prospect of new valuations for council tax...

Tories warn over home inspections:

MPs are discussing new powers for inspectors in Northern Ireland, as part of the revaluation of its rates system.

It could pave the way for English tax payers to be forced to admit inspectors who want to check features which could increase house values, the Tories say.

Of course, if they simply changed over to taxing land values nobody would ever have to even open the garden gate.