James Cleverly

The man who killed Jimmy Mizen has been sentenced to life in prison, to
serve a minimum of 14 years, after being found guilty of murder.


Jimmy had gone out to buy his first lottery ticket the
day after his 16th birthday died after an unprovoked attack by 19 year old Jake Fahri.

The Mizen family have been strong and forgiving under circumstances where anger and blame would have been more than understandable. My thoughts are with them.

According to this article on the BBC website, Alistair Darling in going to tell bankers that "they need to restore public confidence to avoid a backlash".

Colin Bloom has got off to a cracking start in his campaign to become the next MP for Erith & Thamesmead. It seems that Labour is doing everything they can to help him.

Firstly the current semi-detached Labour MP, John Austin, has become completely detached from the seat and the selection for his replacement has descended into a complete farce. I'm sure that local Labour members will be torn between nepotism and cronyism, still it's nice to have a choice.

Last night I was at the Local Government Chronical Awards dinner. The LDA was short listed for an award for our Compete For website. Dara O'Brian was the compare.

I've been to plenty of such dinners and the compare makes or breaks the evening. Dara was fantastic. Many comedians do five minutes of their standard set and then just read out the awards. Dara opened the event with a very funny bespoke set about bin collection, working in thankless public sector jobs and withholding his council tax unless his local authority won an award.

The humour continued through the presentation of the awards themselves.

I'd like to congratulate Bexley council who were short listed for two awards but like us didn't get a cigar.

I hear that Boris will get a wax model of himself at Madam Tausauds before Gordon Brown!

That will mean another smashed phone in the padded bunker in Number 10.

Not so long ago Harriet Harman suggested that the "Court of Public Opinion" had precedence over the courts of law. The rhetoic used by Labour in regard to Sir Fred's pension was very macho and populist.

The fact that Sir fred had the protection of contract law was waved aside. Ignore the law and do what's right was the implicit message. For "do what's right" read do what's popular.

Sir Fred's home and car have now been vandalised. Someone has clearly ignored the law and done what they feel was right and justified, just like Harriet Harman advocated.

I have little doubt that she will want to disassociate herself from these actions and condemn those who did them. But, for future reference it might be useful for her to list which laws we are safe to ignore or the dates of the next formal sitting of the Court of Public Opinion.

Huge congrats to the England women's cricket team for their World Cup win, why don't we just get the women's team to play all our matches and give the guys a breather?

We might win something.

I was at Colfe's School (my old school) this morning being grilled by twenty or so year 8 English students and then the 6th form politics class. They don't hold back!

First question from the 13-14 year olds was "What can be done about under-age sex?" They went on to ask about community responses to youth violence, public perceptions of you people, issues of personal safety and then on to the media's role in youth crime.

The 6th formers asked about political process, the role of the GLA, the use of "hard power" and "soft power" in politics and also the role of, and our relationship with, the media.

I said that the media did have a role to play and could be culpable at some level but it was ever thus. There has been glorification of sex and violence in popular media (see the penny dreadfuls, left) from the earliest days of the printing press and I'm not convinced that there is much mileage in trying to change that.

What do you think?

I have been fighting alongside Conservative councillors, MPs and local residents against the cuts to NHS services in South East London for almost two years. The "Picture of Health" proposals and consultation have both been very unpopular.

There has been considerable disquiet about the cuts, particularly in Bexley and Chislehurst because of the drastic cuts in Queen Mary's Hospital in Sidcup. Boris and I joined local protesters on the SOS QMH marches last year.

I had always felt that money was the big driver for the cuts but the Picture of Health committee insisted that clinical needs were the driving force and that over 100 local clinicians supported the plans. Who could argue with over 100 local medical experts? No one, surely!

Well the Bexley Times has done the kind of local campaigning journalism that is rare these days and found out that there was in fact no list of 100 clinicians! The cornerstone of these proposals turns out to be a sham.

Huge well done to the Bexley Times and I the Picture of Health committee had better get ready for huge row.

Iain Dale interviewed Ken Livingstone for Total Politics, you can read it here.

It is a fascinating article, if you thought that Gordon found it hard to admit to past mistakes you'll realise he has nothing on Red Ken. More than that, not only does Livingstone not take any responsibility for his defeat, he blames Gordon. There is no love lost between the two of them and I'm sure the smiles in their joint campaign photos were actually grimaces.

Livingstone was very careful not to slate Gordon after the election, he wanted to stay in the Labour good books to get the Mayoral nomination for 2012. Judging by the broadside that he fires at Gordon in the interview he no longer feels that loyalty to Brown is a prerequisite for the Labour nomination. Basically Livingstone is saying that Brown is an irrelevance.

I don't believe for a minute that Labour will have Livingstone as their candidate for 2012, the more interesting question is whether Livingstone will run as an independent again. He gives himself a bit of wriggle room in the interview. I suspect he might.

John Prescott is leading the way amongst Labour supporters online! I never thought that I'd say that with a straight face. The Tory logo generator was a fairly good idea, but it hasn't quite hit home, I've used it to generate some very professional looking logos (see above ;-) ) that I might use on this and other sites in the near future.

Here is the BFBS TV (British Forces Broadcasting Service) report on the opening of the Army Showroom that I attended in Dalston last week.

This weekend I was down in Hythe with the TA doing my annual military aptitude tests.

As those of you following me on twitter will already know I attended the opening of the Army's new show-room in Dalston, with the the Commander and Deputy Commander of London District. It's a very exciting project aimed at increasing the understanding of the Army.

I then bumped into the Deputy Commander again on Saturday morning down at the rifle range in Kent. I'm sure you're curious so I can reveal that I passed all my tests with flying colours.

New figures published today by the Greater London Alcohol and Drug Alliance (GLADA) show fewer young Londoners are using drugs, particularly cocaine. The report also reveals that while both drug use and alcohol consumption by young people is lower in London than the rest of the UK, the number of 11 – 18 years admitted to hospital for alcohol related illnesses has increased.

Clearly the fall in drug use is good news but young Londoners still drink far too much for their own good. I'm off to chair the Health and Public Services Committee this morning to look further into this very issue.

Key facts from the report show:

- The proportion of young Londoners between 16 and 24 who reported using any drug in the last year decreased significantly between 2005/06 and 2007/08 - from 20.3 to 17.8 per cent.

- Proportion of young Londoners who reported using cocaine powder is down from 7.1 per cent in 2005/06 to 4.7 in 2007/08

- In London, alcohol-related hospital admissions for 11-18 year olds have increased from 1,171 in 2002/03 to 1,769 in 2006/07. This is a 51 per cent increase over this five-year period. Across England as a whole there was a 39 per cent increase over this same period.

- The estimated numbers of problem drug users (those who use cocaine / drug use has taken over their lives) in this age group dropped by approximately 2,300, from 14,068 in 2004/05 to 11,750 in 2005/06.

Action for Children is the new(ish) name for the National Children's Home charity and it celebrates its 140th birthday this year. I popped along to a reception at the House of Commons this evening to hear about their work and bounce some of my ideas off of people who have much more experience that me.

I'm really glad I went, firstly it showed me that I'm not barking up the wrong tree and also that there are some plenty of practical ways we can support each other's work. So "thank you" to Tim Loughton MP for the invite.

The transport committee this morning was a bit of a cracker. TFL got a bit of a roasting over the quality of their Dial-a-Ride service.

To be fair it wasn't so much the service that was being criticised but the booking system. We heard a series of stories of people being taken to places but not brought back, two mini-buses being sent to transport a husband and wife and sharp increases in costs.

Not a good story at all. The guys from TFL took it on the chin and promised to take the feedback on board and I believe they will, but it will take a lot of hard work to win back user confidence if today was anything to go by.

I was out with Colin Bloom, the very hard working candidate for Erith and Thamesmead, this afternoon.

Colin has a great story on his blog about the BNP not understanding British history very well, they've used an image of a Polish Spitfire (flown in defence of Britain against the Nazis) in anti-Polish immigration poster.

Clueless!

Karl Bishop who stabbed Harry Potter actor Rob Knox to death was sentenced to life today and told he would be behind bars for at least 20
years.

I'm off to York Hall in Bethnal Green for People's Question Time this evening.

If you're going, I'll see you there.

Great news, Bexley's own Parish Wood Park has won the SE London vote of Help a London Park.  Well done and a big than you to everyone who voted.

I was going to use a stronger word but I restrained myself. This weekend Harriet Harman said of Fred Goodwin's pension: "it might be enforceable in a court of law, this contract, but it is not enforceable in the court of public opinion and that is where the government steps in."

All stirring stuff, but I don't want the country turned into a place where the rule of law is ignored because of public opinion. Goodwin's pension makes me angry, particularly because so many others have had their own pensions damaged by the failures at RBS. But that does not mean we should ignore the law or advocate breaking the law.

Ms Harman is trying desperately to divert attention away from the fact that the Government had the chance to curtail Goodwin's pension and failed to do so. They simply screwed up.

Fighting words are pretty useless now.

I see a bit of a patern emerging.

On Saturday I was at the Churchill Theatre in Bromley on a Question Time style panel called "The Youth Factor", the audience was made up of children from around the borough and they wanted answers! This was part of a Youth Conference organised by the Bromley Community Engagement Forum which also had workshops on road safety, gun and knife crime, alcohol and drug awareness and terrorism.

It was very interesting to hear the issues that most concerned these young people. The Zipp card, behaviour and safety on buses, knife crime, media bias and disproportionality in stop and search all came up. They didn't pull their punches.

Tomorrow night I'm speaking at the Political Society of Beths Grammar School in Bexley followed by a question session. It's billed as: "A chance for you to put your questions to your assembly member!" I don't imagine I'll get an easy ride there either.

Bring it on!