Blog Of The Year

As we approach the half way point of the year, Not The Barnet Times has decided to break with convention and make an award for the best blog of 2009 - so far!

Competition has been fierce, but in the unanimous view of the judge, the most outstanding article was written by none other that Barnet’s own Rog T whose post on 13th June 2009 succinctly demonstrated the similarity between Prime Minister Gordon Brown and Council Leader Mike Freer.

Not The Barnet Times is pleased to publish an extract of the award winning blog below. The full post can be viewed here:

10 Reasons why Gordon Brown Mike Freer should resign today

1. He wasn't the Leader at the last election

2. He plotted behind the scenes to depose the man who the country Barnet elected

3. He has used his leadership to promote a raft of people who clearly aren't up to the job

4. When the country went into recession Barnet Council lost £27.4 Million in Iceland he took no responsibility whatsoever despite being Prime Minister Council Leader and Cabinet Member for resource management, with a £3,000 responsibility allowance

5. He is happy to tolerate a Cabinet full of people who have gorged themselves on expenses allowances

6. He has promoted people such as Peter Mandleson Brian Coleman despite a long history of scandals

7. He never apologises for his mistakes

8. He is the architect of shameful policies which have destroyed peoples pensions will destroy the Sheltered Housing system and threaten the wellbeing of the Great Britain’s Barnet's elderly

9. He has become a laughing stock, which is bad for Britain Barnet

10. He has completely lost touch with the voters.

Congratulations Rog. Your prize is the reinstatement of the warden service which you can collect just as soon democracy and accountability are restored to Great Britain Barnet Council.

The Generation Game

Not The Barnet Times does not concern itself with the private lives of private citizens. But when public figures use taxpayers’ money to wine and dine their girlfriends, then it becomes a matter of public interest.

Regular readers will know that former Deputy Mayor of London Ian Clement, 44, was forced to resign after it was revealed that he had improperly used his GLA corporate credit card to entertain his mistress Claire Dowson, 23, agent for Chipping Barnet Conservatives.

It was an open secret that Clement and Ms Dowson were an item. He accompanied her to the recent Mayor installation ceremony for his fellow trougher Brian Coleman, and Ms Dowson also took him as her guest to the wedding of backstabbing rising Tory star Sachin Rajput.

Clement was a very high profile member of staff earning a massive £127,784 a year. Don’t Call Me Dave does not understand why the GLA Chief Executive Leo Boland (pictured left) did not take Mr Clement to one side and tell him how sad and pathetic it was for an older man in a position of power to be carrying on a relationship with a woman young enough to be his daughter.

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Emer Coleman, pictured right, was Director of Strategy for Barnet Council (Chief Spin Doctor to you and me) responsible for “overseeing the implementation of the council's communication and consultation strategies to ensure meaningful two-way communication between residents and the council” but who is now working on secondment to the GLA. However, according to an answer given at last week’s Hendon Residents Forum, she is still in possession of a Barnet corporate credit card.

Chairman of the Forum, Cllr Brian ‘Mandela’ Gordon was completely unaware that Ms Coleman was not currently working for the council, which does somewhat call into question her communication skills.

Whilst we are sure that Ms Coleman would not use her card improperly, that she still appears to have one is symptomatic of the slack financial controls in Barnet that led to £27.4 million of taxpayers’ money being deposited in Icelandic banks contrary to the council’s own guidelines.

Unavailable for Comment

The Barnet Press has published an article this week highlighting the heavily redacted expenses claims for Barnet’s three MPs.

The paper interviewed Chipping Barnet MP Theresa Villiers and Hendon MP Andrew Dismore. However, Finchley MP Rudi Vis was “unavailable for comment” which simply proves his total lack of respect to the electorate who voted for him and helped pay for his retirement house by the coast.

In the same week, the Barnet Times featured an article about Brian Coleman’s obscene £400 taxi fare at taxpayers’ expense. When the paper contacted Coleman for a comment, he hung up the phone.

Coleman’s contempt for the taxpayer is becoming tiresome. If you go into public life, you are answerable to the public for your actions, whether you like it or not.

As Mayor of Barnet, Coleman no doubt hopes the newspapers will publish favourable articles about him every week with accompanying photos of him wearing the ceremonial bling. But if he is not prepared to answer legitimate questions about his abuse of the expenses system, then he forfeits the right to such publicity.

Not The Barnet Times suggests that our two local papers starve Coleman of the oxygen of publicity he so desperately craves unless and until he is prepared to justify his conduct to the public at a time when other serial troughers have been forced to reimburse taxpayers for their similar greed.

Tories abandon the vulnerable

Whilst David Cameron tries to convince the public that the Conservatives have changed and are ready for Government, Mike Freer proves that, in Barnet at least, the Tories remain the nasty party.

On 6th July 2009, the Cabinet will be revising the corporate plan for 2008/09 - 2012/13. Paragraph 9.2 states:

The previous ‘supporting the vulnerable’ priority theme has been changed to ‘promoting independence’.

So there we have it. The official line from Barnet is “We’re not looking after you any more. You are on your own”.

Just as Labour MPs bottled it when they had a chance to get rid of their useless and incompetent leader (who was similarly not elected Leader by the public) so Barnet’s Conservative councillors appear to be ready to head lemming-like into the political abyss because they won’t stand up to Freer and put an end to this nonsense.

Is Brian Coleman Britain’s most shameless councillor?

Despite two months of daily revelations exposing the greed of our elected representatives, it is still possible to uncover new tales of unbridled snout-in-the-troughism. And there are no prizes for guessing that it involves that man Coleman again.

The Guardian’s Dave Hill has discovered that on 10th November 2008, Brian Coleman claimed almost £400 for a single taxi ride!

Coleman was attending the Lord Mayor’s banquet at the Guildhall but because the pompous oaf is so utterly contemptuous of the taxpayer - and deluded as to his self importance - he kept the taxi waiting five hours while he stuffed his face sitting alongside the genuine VIPs.

Hubristic is insufficient a word to describe Brian Coleman. Last year he claimed almost £103,000 in allowances from the taxpayer yet, by his own admission, if he wasn’t a politician, he would be stacking the shelves at Tesco’s.

The Ian Clement scandal proves that Boris Johnson is an appalling judge of character. If he is to have any hope of redeeming himself in the eyes of the electorate, he must sack Coleman immediately as Chairman of the London Fire & Emergency Planning Authority for this flagrant abuse of taxpayers' money.

The electorate will have an opportunity to do the same next year.

Villiers not repaying Stamp Duty

Conservative Party Leader David Cameron today announced that 41 Tory MPs will make further repayments of allowances worth £125,000. This is in addition to the £130,000 already repaid by other ‘Honourable’ Members.

Although Chipping Barnet MP Theresa Villiers has agreed to give up the Additional Costs Allowance (ACA) in the future, she is not repaying the £16,000 stamp duty and other legal charges associated with the purchase of her second home last year.

When her expense claim was revealed by the Daily Telegraph, Mrs Villiers said: “In 2008, I purchased a second home. I then commenced claims for this second home under the ACA. All the claims relate to that second home and are legitimate and within the rules.”

Nobody disputes that the claim was permitted under the rules. But these were rules which benefited MPs only and were not available to any of her constituents.

We mere mortals are required by law to hand over ever larger sums of our hard earned cash in tax. Nobody likes paying tax but we accept it is a necessary part of living in a democracy. However, we expect our taxes to be used to benefit the whole country and not simply feather the nests of a few MPs.

Not The Barnet Times has a simple message for Mrs Villiers: Pay the money back!*


* The same message applies to Labour MPs Rudi Vis and Andrew Dismore who have both also made unacceptable claims under the ACA.

Sex, Lies and Credit Card Receipts

Barnet’s premier blogger, Rog T, recently complained that the Tories didn’t do sex scandals any more. Well former Deputy Mayor Ian Clement has proved our Rog wrong. Not only has Clement betrayed his long term partner and child, but he’s also been fiddling his expenses, just like the big boys in Westminster.

The Guardian’s Dave Hill has been running the story on Clement’s expenses in some detail.

Proving that you don’t need to be clever to get on in politics, it appears that Clement decided to take his lover Claire Dowson out for romantic trysts in Barnet and then charged the cost to taxpayers claiming he was actually having lunch with Mike Freer and Michael Rye, leaders of Barnet and Enfield Councils respectively. If he had just one brain cell, Clement would have known that council leaders keep diaries, and both Freer and Rye were able to prove they were not Clement’s dining partner on the dates in question.

Clement cannot claim he made an innocent mistake. He had written the names of Mike Freer and Michael Rye on the receipts he submitted to the GLA. The London Evening Standard has also reported on this story and noted that Clement's alleged business lunch on 5th November was actually a dinner date at a restaurant close to his lover’s home. The receipt is timed at 23:22. How romantic!


The news of Claire Dowson’s involvement in this scandal will come as a shock to members of Chipping Barnet Conservative Association where Ms Dowson is the agent. When contacted by the Evening Standard, she refused to deny her relationship with Clement or that she had been treated to meals at GLA expense, saying: “I don't want to say either way.”

These meals were paid for using a corporate credit card. Did Claire not notice the distinctive card or was she too busy gazing into Clement’s eyes? Did she not know that Clement had a long term partner and child? Everybody else did.

Claire Dowson was only appointed to her current position last year. She has been extremely foolish having an affair with a man old enough to be her father and her unsavoury behaviour has brought the Association into disrepute. If the Conservatives wish to regain some semblance of credibility in Barnet, they must sack her immediately.

If Ms Dowson really loves Ian Clement, she should learn how to bake a cake with a file in it.

UPDATE 24.06.09: A reader has contacted Don’t Call Me Dave to say that Claire Dowson is no longer the mistress, but the fiancé. Unfortunately, I have not been able to verify this as Ms Dowson has taken an unscheduled leave of absence from her office, but if true it will only serve to intensify questions as to how much she knew about Ian Clement’s abuse of his GLA corporate credit card.

At least Ms Dowson can claim something in common with Boris Johnson. Both have shown appalling judgement in their choice of associates.

Hang Your Heads In Shame!

By electing John Bercow as the new Speaker, MPs have stuck two fingers up at the electorate.

Upon his election, Bercow said: “I continue to believe that the vast majority of members of this House are upright, decent, honourable people who have come into politics, not to feather their nests, but because they have heeded the call of public service.”

No doubt Mr Bercow also believes in the tooth fairy and Father Christmas.

His election is a shameful act by a shameful group of self serving parasites.

Department for Paper Clips

Following the Aerodrome Road Bridge debacle where a £12 million project has run £11 million over budget, Barnet Council has now established a department for paper clips and shuffling papers around Major Projects Directorate.

This department is to be run by Deputy Chief Executive and Executive Director of Environment & Regeneration Brian Reynolds. Regular readers will know that Mr Reynolds is one of the council officers who was sent on a junket to the South of France at our expense.

The public will be surprised to know that this new directorate was not established by a council committee or even by a member of the Cabinet. Rather, it was set up on the authority of an unelected council officer Mr Clive Medlam who, in the opinion of Don’t Call Me Dave, should be prosecuted for his role in the Underhill indemnities.

Two issues arise from this:

First, why are officers able to take decisions of this nature without reference to the elected councillors?

Second, when will the council recognise that public bodies are institutionally incapable of managing major projects? The Millennium Dome, the Olympics, ID cards, NHS Database are just a few of the well known public sector projects which have run massively over budget.

A Major Projects Directorate will do nothing to improve project management in the Borough. It will serve only to increase bureaucracy and create a few more non-jobs. Sir Humphrey would be proud!

Bridge over troubled Hendon

Sources close to the Cabinet have told Not The Barnet Times that Cllr Andrew Harper has changed his mind and will now throw his hat into the ring for the leadership contest due to take place this autumn when Mike Freer is told by Conservative Central Office to quit steps down.

Last Thursday, Cllr Harper appeared before the Business Management Overview and Scrutiny Sub-Committee to defend the Aerodrome Road bridge debacle where the project is £11 million over budget.

Harper’s line was that the council was naïve about the costs and that it was not poor project management but rather poor estimating. He claimed that taxpayers have got a good deal. Goodness knows what a bad deal would be in the world of Andrew Harper.

With logic like this, and a refusal to apologise to taxpayers for yet another cock-up, Mr Harper is probably the ideal candidate to replace Teflon Freer.