Cllr Phil Taylor: The left don't want you to hear Sir Michael Wilshaw

Phil Taylor is a Conservative Councillor for Northfield Ward in Ealing. Follow Phil on Twitter here.

Overnight the media reported remarks made by Sir Michael Wilshaw, head of Ofsted, as he launched Ofsted’s Getting to Good initiative.

Wilshaw is making some hugely important changes to Ofsted and to England’s schools in turn. In “Getting to Good” Ofsted spells out what it takes for a school to move from the old satisfactory judgement to good. This is all part of Wilshaw’s intolerance of poor teaching and poor schools that let down too many of our children. In future, schools will not be allowed to coast along as "satisfactory". They will be branded as being in need of improvement and given four years to get to good.

Wilshaw took the opportunity to criticise mixed ability teaching, early examinations and the fact that 20% of capable kids leaving primary school aren’t getting As, A*s and Bs at GCSE level. In passing he also questioned whether the Coalition’s Pupil Premium policy was achieving its aims based on survey data collected by Ofsted.

Phil Taylor: Boris is prioritising crime, efficiency and quality of life in London

Phil Taylor, a Conservative Councillor for Northfield Ward in Ealing, puts Boris' first 100 days in context and notes the taking up of a similar priority formula to Ealing Council's.  Phil blogs here.

Boris Johnson was elected as London Mayor on May 1st and got to work on May 2nd.  No doubt, it being silly season, Boris's first 100 days will be a big story on August 10th.  Boris will have completed his first hundred days by the end of Saturday night and the Sundays will be be full of 100 days stories.  Ridiculous.  Just the other day I had a lady from that noted political journal Time Out wanting to know my opinions on the subject of Boris Johnson's first 100 days.

They will talk about how he has taken two holidays already.  Sound man.  They will mention the old mayor hanging around a lot.  They will replay the James McGrath scandal where a backroom boy managed to get stitched up by a seasoned left/race activist.  They will also mention the Ray Lewis saga where the whole Tory party showed some naivety in its urge to include.  It took nine weeks for Ray Lewis to be found out. It took eight years to out an even bigger whopper teller under Livingstone so hopefully we have some progress.

It took ten weeks to turn the London logo at the top of the Mayor’s website from red to blue.  So much for the trivia.  What about the substance?

Phil Taylor: Tony might just make it

Phil Taylor is one of the three councillors for Ealing's Northfield ward, part of the Ealing Southall constituency that is being contested on 19th July along with Sedgefield.

The local party was a bit shell shocked by the speed at which the by-election news came following on from the sad news of Piara Khabra's death. There are a large number of very active and ambitious members here, some of whom were a bit disappointed when new boy Tony Lit was selected for the seat on Thursday. The speed at which central office has moved has been impressive and Grant Shapps has motivated everyone with his enthusiasm. David Cameron hit the ground running too, tramping around Southall with the new candidate on Thursday, see Webcameron. 

After last year's Ealing landslide which saw a total turnaround in the Borough the locals feel that Southall is ready for a change.  Already there are 14 Conservative councillors in Ealing Southall against Labour's 18. In May 2006 Labour lost 9 seats in Ealing Southall to the Conservatives.  The LibDems are nowhere with one councillor for the whole constituency. Given the LibDem performance in the last year the direction for them can only be downward.

How local elections were won: Phil Taylor

Phil Taylor is a Conservative Councillor for Northfield Ward, Ealing

Ealing is called the bellwether borough as its local election results have prefigured the national polls for 10 of  11 general elections since the borough was formed.  On 4th May the Borough's Tories achieved a swing of over 10% from Labour to Conservative.  The Labour Group went down from 48 to 29, the Lib-Dems lost a seat to reduce their tiny group to 3 and 20 new Tory councillors marched into the council chamber.  Our young, energetic leader, Jason Stacey rubbed his eyes and found himself leader of the council. 

As a new candidate my focus was restricted to my ward, Northfield, around Northfield Tube station in the south of the Borough.  We had three great candidates: David Millican, Mark Reen and myself.  Last time the Labour majority was only 4.4%.  We needed to pick up 100 extra votes each to get in. 

Our campaign started in the autumn with survey canvassing.  We were pretty sure that people were really not in favour of the West London Tram and fed up with the value for money offered by the old  Labour administration.  We talked to 2,500 residents across three wards.  78% did not want the Tram. 77% thought that the council was bad value for money. We even managed to get the survey results published in one of the local papers.  The then Labour leader, Leo Thomson, commented, perhaps foolishly, on the results greatly enhancing their credibility.  We did five leaflets, the last one of which pulled together lots of headlines from the local press that laid out how poor Ealing's old Labour council's record had been over the previous 12 years. 

The local environment was a big issue for our electors and the Vote Blue, Go Green message worked for us.  Graffiti has exploded in this part of Ealing.  Residents of these relatively prosperous streets all notice that their roads, pavements, street lights and parks do not get prioritised.  Our promise to double the level of road surfacing was very welcome on the doorstep. Education was not a huge issue.  Nobody was concerned about social services even though this is a third of council spending.

It was a feature of talking to many old folk that they were disillusioned with politics. There was a small minority who regretted there was no choice locally, meaning no UKIP or BNP I guess.  You got some sour-faced antis who would not give you the time of day but canvassing was great fun with the vast majority of people happy to talk and pleased to be visited by a candidate.  The vast majority were also unimpressed by the current council or even downright angry.  Whilst many non-Tories would not vote for us, many would rather stay at home than vote for the old administration.  The LibDems were not trying in Northfield and Labour seemed to be either complacent or resigned. In the end our average majority was 980 on a very good turnout of 42.8%. 

 

The new Tory council in Ealing is focussing on three main priorities:

• improving environmental services
• tackling anti-social behaviour
• achieving value for money and low council tax increases. 

We know what our voters want and we are delivering it.  Simple.

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The previous articles in this series looked at Hammersmith & Fulham and Bassetlaw