James Barber

After World War 2 the International Monetary Fund (IMF) to help countries in financial difficulties by lending money to tide them over. Laudable idea to give countries stability.

Unfortunately the conditions of such loans are often very painful. A recent study has shown 21 countries lent money by the IMF see an increase in deaths due to Tuberculosis. Kind of a measure of the health care systems in such countries.

The conditions are usually a drastic reudction in government spending on things like health care. This says to me that IMF conditions, programmes and ideology experiments on countries not taking into account the overal bigger impacts. Loosing large numbers of citizens in poor countries due to reduced health care provision is bad for economies. 

This could explain why the IMF is singulalry so unsuccesful helping poor countries succeed.

Last year for England crime dropped by 10% nationally but knife crime is still a problem. 22,151 reported knife crimes occurred with half of these in inner London, Manchester and Birmingham.

To help the East Dulwich Safer Neighbourhood Team find knives before they are used to commit a crime the East Dulwich councillors are using Cleaner, Greener, Safer funds to purchase a metal detector wand so small it can fit in a shirt pocket. T

Hopefully this little device will work as hoped and help the local East Dulwich find any knives out their. Hopefully, they wont have any to find. Even finding one knife will be a huge success.

If this devices proves useful we’ll fund others.

Oxford has announced it is plannning to introduce Brtain’s first city-wide 20mph speed limit next year on all residential streets. Oxford is small city. Fitting considering the Cowley car factory history dominating the non academic side of the economy for so many years.

Ubiquitous 20mph in residential streets is exactly what we’re working towards in Southwark. East Dulwich latest 20mph zone is being worked on now centred around Friern Road.

I recently visited Portsmouth which I udnerstood to have implimented such 20mph zoning but spotted little evidence. Shame.

The next step will be considering implementing 20mph zones even where no speed humps and bumps have been built. Even doing this has just with 20mph signs has been shown to reduce average and extreme speeds.

Watch this space…

August 1908, one hundred years ago, the Liberals’ landmark Old Age Pension Act received its Royal Assent and became law. A little bit of Liberal Democrat heritage to be particularly proud about.

I find it hard to imagine our country before the civilising affect of a state pension ensuring all older citizens are able to retire. The value of that pension over the last two decades has rapidly declined compared to average wages. That is sad.

The number of retired people has also shot up. But the principle is still present. A pension. I often wonder if I’ll make it to retirement age - burning the candle at one end with a busy job, the other end having a young fmaily and in the middle being a councillor trying to make things better.

Happy 100 years of pensions.

I recently experienced the new St.Pancras station while travelling to Paris on business. A couple of weeks later I needed to travel via the new Thamesink station at St.Pancras as I was home from a work meeting in Leeds far later than planned and hadn’t brought bicycle lights. Yesterday I read St.Pancras had been given a RIBA London Award. My experiences are that it looks good and as a shopping mall it should win an award. But as a station it’s a failure. It delays passengers from arriving at the station to departing by train. This is the whole purpose of a station. I used to be a regular passenger travelling to and from Leicester University. It was always a faded station but it had soul. It is now bang up to date and superficially attractive but the customer requirements have been subsumed.

At the other end of the Eurostar journey Gard du Nord has not descended into shopping mall vernacular. It is a real station with the buzz of that purpose. Brussells midi is a horrible edifice. The St.Pancras architects have recreated that atmosphere in central London.

Sadly such awards for trash architecture reflect a loss of purpose for architects. The human scale has been lost. People are now merely consumers to be paraded past shops to generate revenue.

So how will the new London Bridge Station fair - will it be a glorified shopping mall or a station that helps passengers quickly arrive and depart by train? The architects have abondoned the current ramps and replaced them with numerous escalators and changes of level. It wont feel a smooth transition for arriving or departing.

This year the East Dulwich councillors Richard Thomas, Jonathan Mitchel and I have allocated £42,450 out of our £120,000 Cleaner Greener Safer funding allocation towards Crime Reduction. We’ve met the East Dulwich Safer Neighbourhood Team Sgt. Duncan Jackson and agreed the initial spending. These monies are on top of the £35,000 last year and £15,000 the previous year.

175 Alertboxes - proven to reduce shop and busines crime by over half

2,000 Smartwater/Select DNA type property marking kits to make burglary pointless

New Neighbourhood Watch signs

Laser speed camera and mobile traffic calming message board 

When I was elected in May 2006 East Dulwich ward was 267th out of all 625 London wards, with 1st being best, for rates of crime per thounsand population.  We’ve helped improve this so that in East Dulwich we’re now 221st in London and improving. Roughly this means 130 fewer reported crime victims last year.

I’m just from a weeks bucket and spade holiday with my family. We thought rather than Dorset, our regular haunt for such holidays, we’d try Broadstaris on the Isle of Thanet. Great place. Lots to do with yound kids. WHAT AMAZING AMOUNTS OF GRAFFITI AND LITTER. Being a councillor in Southwark I regularly report graffiti. Southwark Council removes it within one working day with the property owners permission. In Broadstairs the graffiti just doesn’t shift. All week the same graffiti stayed - and a lot more than we’re used to these days in Southwark. They also have a litter problem. Again Southwark Council is the 3rd cleanest borough in London and it really showed in comparison with this seaside holiday towns litter problem.

So I relaxed but not as much as I wanted to.

East Dulwich station is a rather charming if very run down station. It is amazingly busy and the nearly all ramped access has proved a god send when my young children travelled by prams everywhere. Over two years ago I met the rail operating company to ask about the five remaining steps being ramped over but such a ramp would have a slope greater than 1 in 20 - which I was told generally isn’t allowed due to the Disability Discrimination Act. I also wanted fences changed to make the prolific littering easier to manage.

A fortnight ago I met Network Rail and the TOC to see if they could consider a new ramp or lift and stairs to make the station fully accessible. They explained that various retaining walls have been moving signigicantly. That the very nice large tree has had to be lopped as it was causing the retaining wall problems.

The outcome. Network Rail are going to consider some options of what may or may not be possible. Lifts are expensive to maintain. A ramp would need to be very very long indeed. 

At long last Caffe Nero, having spouted considerable vitriol about Southwark Council, East Dulwich residents, council officers, and after the latest 30 day deadline, Caffe Nero have finally removed two noisy illegal and ugly air conditioning units they’d installed within a few feet of residents bedroom windows.

I never thought I’d quote the “unacceptable face of capitalism” and think it resonated with the appalling actions of a business located in East Dulwich.

Imagine what it must have been like having these units feet away from your bed, working 24/7, and being particualrly noisy in summer when you need to have your bedroom window open to keep cool.

At last some good news for these residents who can finally get a good nights sleep.

I feel sad and angered with the anouncement today that all eights proposed Post Offices closures in Southwark will go ahead. One of the East Dulwich Post Offices will close. The one on Melbourne Grove.

The service given at this Post Office is so good that many users bypass other Post Offices. Some people just can’t queue for quarter of an hour. This decision is particualrly bad as the Camberwell Post Office will close for an extended period while it is kncoked down and rebuilt. So at the very least delaying until after that project happens would make sense.

But this isn’t about making sense. It is about closing profitable popular urban Post Offices with the presumption customers and their business can travel to other Post Offices and boost profits from urban Post Offices. These decisions are not about giving excellent, better or even the same level of service.

The whole landscape needs to be changed to maximise customer service. Ministers and Post Offices decision makers are not customers of Post Offices. They have other people to run such errands. Hence this daft decision - timed to be announced just after the 1 May elections.