Mary Reid

Small businesses are very vulnerable these days, so Kingston Council has just announced that it is taking some steps to support them through the credit crunch.

Many small businesses do not claim for a business rate reduction for which they are eligible, so the Council will be writing to 750 local firms reminding them about it and encouraging them to apply for the discount. This could save them over £1000. 

Now I didn't know about business rate reduction, but it seems it is legislation that was supported by the Lib Dems in 2005. Any business with premises with a rateable value of under £21,500 can claim a discount. For some reasons, the Conservatives voted against this proposal which is clearly designed to help small local businesses.

The Council also wants to help reduce cash flow problems and is undertaking, wherever possible, to pay bills to local firms within 10 days. The current legal limit is 30 days.

Every little helps...

Here is Michael Billington's review in the Guardian of 'Love's Labour's Lost' at the Rose which I really enjoyed last week.  The final sentence is more than worrying.

This is the second production of Shakespeare's wondrous comedy in a month. But whereas at Stratford Greg Doran's RSC version seeks to distract us from the knotty complexities of the language, Peter Hall's production confronts and delights in the play's sophisticated verbal games. Hall's show may not offer much for the eye, but it is an absolute feast for the ear.

One example will suffice. It is made crystal clear that the King of Navarre and his mates are driven by a hunger for "fame" in their pledge to abjure female society. But the arrival of Rachel Pickup's delightful Princess of France makes nonsense of the royal vow. Hall highlights a fascinating, often ignored speech in which the Princess dwells on the dubiety of seeking glory through deer-hunting. The speech both establishes the Princess's humanity and forms a crucial part of the play's ongoing dialectic about the vanity of fame.

Though Christopher Woods's spartan set resembles a denuded swimming-pool, the play sits well on the Rose stage. Finbar Lynch is a shade too dour to be a natural Berowne but Peter Bowles's Don Armado is pure delight: a haughty Spanish braggart literally laid low by love for Ella Smith's Jaquenetta. William Chubb brings out the preening of the pedantic Holofernes, and Michael Mears as the Princess's chamberlain caresses each phrase with diplomatic skill. This is a Shakespeare production of the highest calibre; the only sadness is that, unless the Rose can find new funding, it may be the theatre's last.

There was an old joke about the poor lad named William Posters...

Actually, Kingston doesn't have too many problems with fly posters, in either the human or paper form. But where they do appear, these A2 or A3 sheets are closely related to graffiti, that is, unwanted graphics that deface public buildings.

The Council does have the power to prosecute the worst offenders, and it has decided to take stronger action against commercial posters. This week they have already removed 15 posters from our Neighbourhood, mainly ones tied to lampposts and telegraph posts. If companies continue to do it then they will be sent a letter explaining that they can be taken to court.

I have been chatting with the council officers about this approach, mainly because I didn't want the action to be extended to those neighbourly notices asking us to look out for a missing cat, or telling us about a local charity coffee morning. I'm pleased to say that common sense will be applied, and such domestic notices will only be removed if they are clearly past their dates.

Answer these questions, without using a calculator.

1. What is the angle between the hands of Big Ben at 9.15?

2. Nick and Gordon each receive presents shaped like cuboids (or "boxes"). Each is tied with three loops of string - one in each of the three possible directions. Nick's package has loops of lengths 40cm, 60cm, 60cm, while Gordon's package has loops of lengths 40cm, 60cm, 80cm. Decide whose package has the larger volume, and find the volumes of the two packages.

They were posed by the think-tank Reform as part of challenge to delegates at the party conferences back in September.

And the interesting news is that the Lib Dems came out best, with an average score of 83%, with the Conservatives on 71% and Labour on a measly 65%.

I wonder if they included Vince Cable, the darling of The Guardian today, in the sample?

Reform wanted to draw attention to the problems that occur when the teaching of mathematical skills in schools is reduced to numeracy alone. They quote Dr Tony Gardiner, founder of the UK maths challenge, who set the questions:

"What is needed is better teaching of elementary mathematics, rather than intensive, highly focused efforts directed towards a narrow interpretation of ‘numeracy'. English school mathematics now systematically trains its best pupils to assume that all problems are mindlessly trivial."

You can download the full set of questions and answers here, but I'll reproduce the answers, with Tony Gardiner's comments, to the two questions above.

_______________________________________________________________________________

1. This is an excellent example of a simple, everyday problem, which requires one to coordinate two thoughts at the same time.  One's first thought may be to picture the minute hand pointing at the "3" and the hour hand pointing at the "9" and so to answer "180°". 

However, one should immediately realise that between 9 and 9.15 the hour hand has moved one quarter of the way from "9" to "10".  Since each "hour" corresponds to one twelfth of a full turn (namely 30°), in one quarter of an hour, the hour hand moves 7½°, so the angle between the two hands may be given either as 172½° or as 187½°.

Working recently with a very select group of 200 Year 10 pupils - from the top 1-5% of the ability range - almost three quarters failed to see beyond the knee-jerk response "180°", which indicates that English school mathematics now systematically trains its best pupils to assume that all problems are mindlessly trivial. 

2. This is a classic instance in which naïve "intuition" is totally misleading: Nick's package is in fact the larger!  In mathematics, one always has to calculate - not guess.

Let Nick's package be xcm by ycm by zcm. 

The first loop has length 2x + 2y = 40, second 2y+ 2z = 60, third 2z + 2x = 60.

Adding gives  4x + 4y + 4z = 160; so x= (x + y + z) - (y + z) = 40 - 30 = 10.

Similarly  y = (x + y + z) - (z + x) = 40 - 30 = 10; z = (x + y+ z) - (x + y) = 20.

So Nick's cuboid has volume 10´10´20 = 2000 cm³.

If we do the same with Gordon's pcm by qcm by rcm, we get  

2p + 2q = 40, 2q + 2r = 60, 2r + 2p = 80, so  p + q + r = 45; so p = (p+ q + r) - (q + r) = 45 - 30 = 15; q= (p + q + r) - (r + p) = 45 - 40 = 5; r = (p + q + r) - (p +q) = 25.

So Gordon's cuboid has volume 15´5´25 = 1875 cm³

A complete beach has been stolen from the north coast of Jamaica, it seems. Not the one in the picture, but another just a few miles along the coast.

Hundreds of tonnes of white sand vanished from a planned resort on the island's north coast in July but three months later there is no sign of suspects nor sand.

An estimated 500 truck-loads of sand were removed from the Coral Spring beach in Trelawny and were believed to have been sold to rival resorts, a hefty logistical feat which has stumped police.

"It's a very complex investigation because it involves so many aspects," Mark Shields, the deputy commissioner for crime at the Jamaica Constabulary Force, told the BBC.

"You've got the receivers of the stolen sand, or what we believe to be the sand. The trucks themselves, the organisers and, of course, there is some suspicion that some police were in collusion with the movers of the sand."

There are certainly some inventive, and foolhardy, thieves in Jamaica. The power went down one evening while we were staying at the Silversands resort in the picture earlier this year. Next morning we were told that someone had stolen the main power cable to the complex.

Incidently I met Mark Shields during that visit.  He is one of several ex-Met police officers who are now working for the Jamaican Police. I don't suppose he has come across the theft of a beach before.

I've just got back in from seeing the first performance of Love's Labour's Lost at the Rose. Do go and see it!

This play has a reputation for being difficult to stage, which is why most people, including me, aren't familiar with it. It is full of witty dialogue - the kind of competitive word duals that Shakespeare revelled in. In fact, it was one of his earliest plays, and you can see how much he was enjoying the cleverness of his art and a rather knowing style of comedy. Compared with the dramatic later plays it is high on words but low on action.

If anyone could make a production of this play work on stage it would be Sir Peter Hall. And it does, with great clarity - even where the text is sometimes tricky to disentangle, the meaning is exposed through all the non-verbal acting clues.

At one level it is a romantic comedy - with an early appearance of those confident and independent women that Shakespeare loved to portray. At another level it is a right of passage tale, although at least two of the 'scholars' would have been more convincing if they had been 10 years younger.

And through it all shines the author's delight in the richness of the English language.

I popped into the large M&S foodstore at Tolworth yesterday. The remodelling is now complete, although the official opening isn't until Wednesday. It looks good.

The shop has always sold a limited selection of basic clothing, but I was intrigued to find that the new clothes section only sells the upmarket Autograph range. This seems a surprising move given the cutbacks we are all having to make - but maybe M&S knows what it is doing and is simply reflecting its own market analysis.

Overheard in the vegetable section: "I don't like change". I felt like rushing up and saying "But life is all about change - that's what makes it so beautiful and exciting".  I didn't, because she was probably just looking for the bread.

Hint - we all buy bread, that's why supermarkets always locate it as far away as possible from the entrance.

What an extraordinary week it has been. The world wide financial crisis has dominated the news so some other fairly important developments have been overshadowed.

First, the Lords gave its overwhelming verdict on 42 days detention without trial.

No, never, not in my lifetime. I did enjoy Shami Chakrabati's delighted analysis of this - "politics actually works"

Jacqui Smith has defiantly said that 42 days could be introduced again in the future, but this is just rhetoric, since the proposal could not stand a chance in the current Parliament. No other country in the world finds it necessary to remove civil rights from technically innocent people by holding them without charge for six weeks.

Interestingly, in the Guardian today the former head of MI5, Stella Rimmington, said she 'abhorred' the plans for 42 day detention for terrorism suspects.  Her successor, Eliza Manningham-Buller, has said the same. I somehow think they know what they are talking about.

As it is, we are left with 28 days detention, which is still far too long.

Next, as I mentioned on Wednesday, the SATs test for 14 year olds have been scrapped, after an unholy muddle this year with the marking. They should have gone years ago; the tests for 7 year olds had already been toned down to teacher-based assessments, although the formal tests at 11 still remain.

Of course, each child's progress need to be constantly monitored and assessed diagnostically from time to time. That is good teaching.

But that was never the purpose of the SATs, which were set up originally to provide anonymised information about how a school performed. This was so one school could be compared with another in the league tables. That in itself was based on a totally wrong headed understanding of children's attainment. It assumed that the quality of teaching was the only factor that affected a child's performance, whereas it is well known that other factors such as basic aptitude, emotional stability, learning difficulties and economic disadvantage all affect the outcome.

Whilst it is right to encourage children to raise their expectations, the view that all can obtain, say 5 GCSEs at Grade C, is pernicious and discriminatory. It undervalues many people who live useful and productive lives but who never achieve academic success.

Then amongst all this there was the third debate between the Presidential candidates. Am I the only one who thinks McCain looks like a hamster? 

From this side of the Atlantic it is unthinkable that he and his gun-toting sidekick could end up in the White House. But then we Brits do tend to underestimate the power of conservative, not to say red-neck, middle America. With almost all my experience of the States being limited to the liberal East coast, I just cannot get into the mind-set of a nation that equates liberty with the right to carry a deadly weapon, and can refer to itself as the 'land of the free' without irony whilst endorsing Guantanamo Bay and torture.

It was also a week in which I attended the funeral of an old friend, heard that my son's offer on a house had been accepted, said farewell to our researcher, shared my other son's good fortune, remembered my Dad, found my mother in cheerful spirits, did some casework, had several meetings about Neighbourhood issues, worked on a new book, finished a website and started planning another - life goes on....

This message is purely for members of the Liberal Democrats - please ignore if that doesn't apply to you.

My ballot paper for the election for the President of the party has just arrived, and I think I've made it pretty clear that I am supporting Ros Scott.

I've written about her energetic campaign before, and I've also indicated (hopefully not too subtly) that I am not impressed by Lembit Öpik.

I'm worried that party members who have only seen Lembit doing his amusing stints on 'Have I got News for you' may not realise just how out of touch he is with the rest of the party. We need someone who can speak for the grassroots membership, ansd Ros, with her background in local government can do just that.

Do have a look at her impressive website.

Steve Bell's brilliant cartoon in the Guardian yesterday captured the end of Thatcherism.

Copyright © Steve Bell 2008 

At last people are recognising the consequences of an ideology based on individualism and competition. Thatcherism provided a justification for greed, replaced honest investment in business with gambling on stock prices, ousted ethical trading and glorified risk taking. It led directly to today's economic crisis.

And the solution? - nationalisation of the banks. Ah, the irony of it all.

In parallel, a social philosophy based on the needs of individuals was written off and replaced with a doctrine of competition which inevitably generated losers. It created an educational system that destroyed collegiality and pitted school against school, that greatly increased the stress levels of a whole generation of young people, that focussed on a limited range of skills and denigrated the arts.

The SATs are, thank goodness, finally fading away, with the ending today of testing at Key Stage 3. Government still needs to cut right back on testing at 11, so that it becomes once again a diagnostic tool rather than a verdict on a young life.

The Thatcher Government has much to answer for. But so does the Labour Government of the last 12 years, which swallowed its doctrines and is only now being forced to recognise the cruel error at its heart.

Howard Taylor's blog caught my eye today. He writes about that dilemma at the heart of ethical trading - we want to buy goods that support developing countries, and yet transporting them to the UK uses many food miles

Howard is better placed than most to talk about this - he works in Ethiopia where the economy partly depends on the coffee and roses that find their way onto affluent dining tables in the UK.

I didn't just find this blog through random surfing. Howard works for the Department for International Development (DfID), and is one of a small group of their staff who have taken up blogging recently. It's all good stuff, embedded in the reality of their firsthand experiences, and it's great that DfID is supporting and encouraging it.

The other two who have launched their blogs already are Emily Poskett in Tanzania, and Vicky in Afghanistan. More are on their way.

I have been very marginally connected with this project through Gallomanor. It got started while I was away on holiday, so I have just been lurking and watching the inspirational Griff Wigley at work.

I contributed to Gallomanor's Civic Surf project, and I'm hoping to be more closely involved in future blogging projects with them as well.

Dozens of young people started arriving early this morning to be the first to try out the new skateboard park. They had to wait until the temporary fencing was removed and the Jubilee Way Playscape was finally opened.

But this is much, much more than a skate park, exciting as that is. The Playscape is a completely new concept in play spaces - it provides adventurous and challenging activities in a natural-looking, hilly landscape.

What is more, the designers from Groundwork worked on the design with young people from Devon Way Youth Club and Lovelace School.

It's difficult to remember that this was the site of a couple of derelict tennis courts only a few months ago.

It's also hard to believe that this is the middle of October!

If you've got children between the ages of 8 and 13 you must bring them along to try it out. The older ones will probably find it for themselves anyway.

I was relieved to learn this morning that Kingston Council has no investments in Icelandic banks.

(That must be my shortest posting ever....)

Yesterday I had a meeting with road engineers from Transport for London and Kingston Council, about improvements to the Hook Road/Elm Road junction.

We have been trying to get TfL to do something about this dangerous spot for years, but I'm afraid it has taken a fatal accident to get any action.

TfL have now carried out a feasibility study and have come up with some very promising designs. Next they have to get funding for a full design, and then they have to bid for funds to implement it. At some stage there will, of course, be consultation with the Neighbourhood and with people who live nearby about the preferred layout.

It's all going to take some time, but at least it looks as though we are making progress.

The headline on a press release this week from Kingston Council read 'Health promotion in fish and chip shops'

Now I'm happy to admit dropping into the chip shop at the end of my road for the occasional haddock and chips - but I always feel guilty. It doesn't seem to sit well with Flora-that-I-can-easily-believe-is-not-butter and my weekly organic vegetable box.

And indeed, it seems I may be right to worry about the healthiness of my supper.

It seems that Environmental Health Officers in six southwest London boroughs, including Kingston, bought 24 fish and chip takeaways and then subjected them to analysis. They found a huge variation in the level of fats and salt in the samples, and are now working with the worst culprits to make the food healthier. 

That's very timely because in the last big recession, the Depression of the 1930s, fish and chip shops became the barometer of the times. 

My grandfather was a miner in the Aberdare Valley at that time. His job went, so he decided to run a fish and chip shop. For a while it became a cheap source of meals for the local people, but eventually even fish and chips, or just a bag of chips on its own, became a luxury.

It was said that only one man in 20 had a job in Aberdare. My father, who was a Grammar School scholarship boy, had to leave home at 16 (imagine it!) and travelled up to Hackney on his own where he got a job in a broom factory, fitting brush heads.

His parents decided that there was no future in fish and chips, or any other trade for that matter, so they moved up to Slough where my grandfather was able to get a job as a roadsweeper and they could be nearer their son. They faced prejudice - "These thieving Welshmen are taking all our jobs" - as well as poverty.

For a while, as the credit crunch bites, fish and chip shops may well become more significant in everyone's lives - it's when they start shutting down that you will know that our recession is turning into a second Depression.

These three young men have received grants from Young Kingston to enable them to attend the Special Olympics National Games in Leicester next year. They will be representing South East region in Ten Pin Bowling.

Alec, Michael and Alan all train with Special Olympics Surrey (which includes Kingston). This was set up last year by one of our local heroes, Sue Frett, who has championed sports for people with special needs for many years. She is hoping that some of her athletes will be selected for the Special Olympics in 2011.

The local employees at the Royal Bank of Scotland have made a generous donation to Young Kingston so this was an opportunity to thank them and let them see what their money was being used for.

In case you don't know, there are three Olympics movements - the elite Olympics, the Paralympics for people with physical disabilities, and the Special Olympics for people with learning difficulties.

Thank you for asking me.

I expect the property developer has offered you something between £50,000 and £100,000 more than the market value for your home.

Or he might have made an offer for part of your garden.

What the developer tells you

He is planning to build a handful of beautiful new homes on your site. He will also need to purchase a neighbour's house and possibly some back gardens alongside.

He has been in discussion with the Council, and getting planning permission should just be a formality.

What the developer does NOT tell you

The amount he is offering you, attractive as it seems, is far less than the value of your plot with planning permission. 

Getting planning permission will not be straightforward, because many of your neighbours will put in objections.

He is entitled to ask for advice from the Council's planners, but that does not mean that they support the project.

If the first application is refused then the developer may appeal, or may chose to put in an amended application. The final decision will probably not be known for a couple of years.

If he does get planning permission, he will then have three years in which to start the project.

If he does get planning permission then you will not see a penny until he is ready to start building, which could be five years after the original offer.

If he does not get planning permission then you will not see a penny. Full stop.

In the meantime you will be tied to an agreement to offer the developer first refusal, so will not be able to sell your house privately.

You will lose any friends you have amongst your neighbours.

There is a good chance that the developer will pull out at any time. Developers try lots of different sites, but only expect to be successful with a small proportion of them.

If the housing market suffers a downturn then the developer will probably pull out anyway.

Just ask yourself...

Why doesn't the developer buy your house outright at the beginning of the process?

Who is bearing the risk?