Sadiq Khan: The property company candidate

I don't often read Property Week but I was most interested to see a recent analysis of gifts by the property industry to Mayoral candidates. Sadiq Khan (Labour) got £40,000 from three companies: £20,000 from DCD Properties, £9,900 from AA Homes and £10,000 from Henley Homes. Zak Goldsmith, by contrast, got just £4,000. But I guess he doesn't really need the money.

Who are these generous companies?

It's clear that they have a variety of activities including some very stylish developments. It's no surprise that they offer some very expensive flats. Henley Homes, for instance, has developed Carlton Gate where a one bedroom flat costs £450,000!

Not, shall we say, obvious business partners for a Labour politician. So they must want something from him.

So the questions are these.

• What will the property companies expect from Mayor Khan? 
• What, if anything, has he told them to expect?
• And when he makes a decision about housing how will we know how much he's been influenced by his generous friends?

Crazy cuts!

The government's proposals to cut the solar PV feed-in tariff by 87% defy all logic.

• They put over 2,000 London jobs at risk (and 27,000 nationally).
• They damage a growing industry wshen it is within about three years of needing no more subsidy.
• They make it harder for the UK to meet its climate change goals. (Not that it would anyway but why undermine such success as we have?)

 Solar and wind are low risk renewable energy technologies that are developing fast. Instead the government seems to prefer nuclear - a technology with high-costs and a near 100% record of delivering late and over budget.

The great vote theft

It's extraordinary that the week after the release of the film Suffragette should see a threat to deprive millions of citizens of their votes. In Enfield up to 9,000 people - 4% of the electorate - could lose their votes on December 1st.

It's all due to the government's approach to Individual Voter Registration. This replaces the old system of household registration and, in principle, is probably better. But the government has chosen an implementation method that doesn't make best use of IT. It's now over ten years since a leading building society told me how they use multiple online databases to check the identities of applicants for bank accounts. Yet - and perhaps predictably - the government has chosen to ignore this and make life difficult for at least some citizens.

Not content with this the government decided this year to give local authorities one year less to  finish checking the identities of everyone on the old Register who hasn't yet applied to join the new  one. According to the Electoral Reform Society:

The government recently brought forward the date for transferring to the new system to December 2015 - one year earlier than previously planned,
meaning nearly two million people could fall off the register for no good reason.
We believe that¹s unnecessary, and wrong. And we are working hard to change it.
- See more at: http://www.electoral-reform.org.uk/voter-registration#sthash.GjryK2WN.dpuf

The government recently brought forward the date for transferring to the new system to December 2015 - one year earlier than previously planned,
meaning nearly two million people could fall off the register for no good reason.
We believe that¹s unnecessary, and wrong. And we are working hard to change it.
- See more at: http://www.electoral-reform.org.uk/voter-registration#sthash.GjryK2WN.dpuf

The government recently brought forward the date for transferring to the new system to December 2015 - one year earlier than previously planned,
meaning nearly two million people could fall off the register for no good reason.
We believe that¹s unnecessary, and wrong. And we are working hard to change it.
- See more at: http://www.electoral-reform.org.uk/voter-registration#sthash.GjryK2WN.dpuf

"nearly two million people could fall off the register for no good reason. ..  that's unnecessary, and wrong."

 The ERS notes that

"areas with a high concentration of certain demographics – students, private renters and especially young adults" – are particularly in danger of having low registration numbers. .... urban and socially deprived areas where registration is low are likely to have fewer MPs per person than affluent areas where registration is high."

So the current process will have two significant results:

• The people, such as the young and ethnic minorities, least likely to vote for the government will be least likely to be registered and thus able to vote.
• The areas in which they are concentrated will have fewer MPs than others.

Enfield has two safe seats but the loss of one third of 9,000 voters would be enough to change the result in the third, Enfield North, where Joan Ryan won by just 1,086.

That is not a result which will much worry David Cameron but it ought to worry the rest of us!

PS: If you haven't registered yet do it now at https://www.gov.uk/register-to-vote.

- See more at: http://www.electoral-reform.org.uk/voter-registration#sthash.GjryK2WN.d

The government recently brought forward the date for transferring to the new system to December 2015 - one year earlier than previously planned,
meaning nearly two million people could fall off the register for no good reason.
We believe that¹s unnecessary, and wrong. And we are working hard to change it.
- See more at: http://www.electoral-reform.org.uk/voter-registration#sthash.GjryK2WN.dpuf

The government recently brought forward the date for transferring to the new system to December 2015 - one year earlier than previously planned,
meaning nearly two million people could fall off the register for no good reason.
We believe that¹s unnecessary, and wrong. And we are working hard to change it.
- See more at: http://www.electoral-reform.org.uk/voter-registration#sthash.GjryK2WN.dpuf

The government recently brought forward the date for transferring to the new system to December 2015 - one year earlier than previously planned,
meaning nearly two million people could fall off the register for no good reason.
We believe that¹s unnecessary, and wrong. And we are working hard to change it.
- See more at: http://www.electoral-reform.org.uk/voter-registration#sthash.GjryK2WN.dpuf

Climate schizophrenia

The USA is a mighty strange place. It produces some of the world's best scientists and most effective technology entrepreneurs. It also produces a political culture dominated by money and fiercely hostile to anything that challenges the power of the ruling elite.

Only in the USA do we see so many powerful politicians in simple denial of the facts that world temperatures are rising and will continue to rise unless we active decisively. It's not because the USA is magically exempt from the consequences of climate change. Quite the contrary:

Sea-level rise:  A recent study by Princeton scientists has confirmed predictions that sea-level will rise 1 metre by 2100 and continue to rise thereafter. The land on which 30 million Americans live will ultimately be lost to the sea. Threatened cities include Boston, New York, Miami, New Orleans Long Beach and even Sacramento.

But all that's decades, even centuries, in the future. Is the problem a kind of short-sightedness?  Well not really. Here's what's under their noses.

Drought.  California is in the fourth year of a severe drought, the worst in its history. This has produced forest fires that have killed six people and destroyed 1,000 homes (New Scientist, 26/9/15, p5). The effect of climate change is easy to understand here. Apart from just drying out the vegetation it makes precipitation fall as rain, which runs off, not snow, which would replenish the underground aquifers.

Or is the USA still so obsessed with the Middle East that nothing else registers? Again no.

War.  Syria's civil war began with protests in cities like Homs and Hama in 2011. Conditions in these cities had been exacerbated by Syrians seeking refuge from the 2007-11 drought, the most severe on record. And the severity of that drought was due to - have you guessed? - climate change. Actually Syria's rainfall has been declining for about fifty years whilst its population has risen four or five fold in that same period.

Of course, it's never just climate change. Population growth, rising consumer demand, religious extremism, government policies - or the lack of them - and just bad luck are all part of the causal chain.

It's just that so many US leaders refuse to see the obvious for fear that they'd be obliged to support policies of restraint that would threaten their comfort and the profits of their corporate sponsors.

But you knew that, didn't you?