I met a personal friend of mine this week who has been experiencing horrendous neighbour nuisance. He lives in a terraced house in the city next door to someone with a record of drug abuse and mental health problems who has also been dealing in drugs from his home. What is salutary about this story is that none of the agencies who should have been dealing with the situation - social services, health agencies, the police and the property owner - have been able to prevent it dragging on for years.
I'm certainly not advocating a return to the days when people were incarcerated for years because of teenage angst. However, because of the pressure to reduce the number of beds, the modern health service seems to have adopted the same sort of model as is now used for operations - the patient is whisked in, treated, and then is out of the hospital again before their feet have a chance to touch the ground. Now this may work for ingrown toenails, but for mental health issues it simply doesn't. Drugs are not always the appropriate solution and attempting to diagnose and treat too quickly can exacerbate things.
Perhaps even more of a problem is that the lack of mental health beds resulting from this policy means that people more or less have to sit in a queue waiting for treatment - just the same as for an eye operation. However, whilst they await a place in hospital, those people around them - friends, neighbours and family - have to try and manage desperately difficult situations. In the same way, the police have been aware of the drug dealing from the property, but the drug dealing has continued.
It is also an interesting case study into the problems caused by buy-to-let landlords. The landlady, who lives in the south of England, is an elusive character who seems to change her telephone number regularly and makes a point of being as difficult to contact as possible - so much so that, in the time since the problems began to occur, the police have never been able to speak to her. There is an answer to this - in Scotland, where landlords fail to take reasonable measures they can be recharged for doing so by the local authority. In my view, this ought to go much further - if landlords fail to co-operate with other agencies, then the local authority should be able to take over the property for a specified period of time - say five years - and should receive all rent due on the house in that period of time. Unfortunately no legislation has been enacted in England and Wales to allow this to happen.
In any case, I can only hope his situation improves. Whatever the answer is, we certainly haven't found it at the moment.
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Just got a leaflet through our door today and was wondering what you think the chances are that a vote for Green could split the Labour vote and lead to Tory victory? Also your link to your profile is broken as it has http in twice.
ReplyDeleteFirstly, thanks for the tip about the broken link, which should now have been fixed.
ReplyDeleteSecondly, what of the Tories' chances in York Central? Like most other constituencies that will be contested at the forthcoming election, its boundaries have been altered. However, some groups of academics have calculated "notional" figures for each of the current seats - this is basically what would have happened at the 2005 election if the boundaries were as they are now. This has to do with local election results, and I wouldn't pretend to understand the full methodology, but the important thing is that they are all non-partisan, so they aren't biased towards the view of any political party.
I'm aware of three sets of these projections - those by Martin Baxter (featured on the Electoral Calculus website), Anthony Wells (UK Polling Report) and Rallings and Thrasher (Telegraph election map - the figures that will probably also be used by the BBC).
Just to explain, the seats that aren't notionally Conservative can be ordered by the swing that would be needed for the Tories to overtake the party that currently holds the seat (Labour, Lib Dem and sometimes the SNP or Plaid Cymru in a few cases). You'll note that York Outer is notionally Lib Dem held and is amongst the top Tory targets on all the projections. The picture is that the Tories would need to gain around 118 seats for an overall majority, then each constituency gained after that would increase their majority by 2. As the swing needed gets bigger, each subsequent seat gets harder and harder for the Tories to win.
You may have to look very hard for York Central because it's so low on the list it isn't actually considered a serious Tory target. However, according to my own number crunching, it's No.258 on Martin Baxter's list, requiring a swing of over 13%. That means it would give the Tories an overall majority of 282 if they managed to capture it, and reduce Labour to 150 seats or less - just for comparison, Michael Foot managed to win 209 seats in 1983. The other projections show York Central as target No.247 and No.256. That's the scale of the task facing the Tories if they seriously hope to win - which of course they don't. It would be insane to divert resources by seriously targeting seats they need for an overall majority of nearly 300.
Incidentally, don't take my word for it - look at www.electoralcalculus.co.uk and www.ukpollingreport.co.uk to see just how difficult it is for the Tories to win in York Central. I would also be interested to know of any serious non-partisan political commentator that regards it as a realistic Tory target.
However, one still tends to run into two arguments:
(a) York was a marginal seat back in 1987; and,
(b) There are some nice tea shops in the City Centre, so somehow it must be good for the Tories.
Well, York was marginal in '87, but that was 23 years ago and in the meantime it's swung away from the Tories much more than the national average. The boundary changes have also removed 10,000 voters in the Dringhouses and Stockton Lane areas, which were some of the best Tory and Lib Dem-voting parts of the old constituency.
Secondly, there are other historic cities where the Tories do rather badly - Durham, Oxford and Cambridge are all examples. They also seem to have particular troubles in University towns.
P.S. I don't know whether any Labour literature will appear trying to convince people not to "let the Tories in through the back door," but if they are genuinely concerned about protecting us from the evil Tories, they could start off by standing down in the York Outer seat, which is without question a Tory-Lib Dem marginal.
Thanks that's a very thorough answer! Although it's probably also a good argument against the chances of the Green Party. Statistically it looks like there's little point voting at all in York Central but I'll probably go vote Green anyway.
ReplyDeleteThanks for your comment - sorry it took a little while to moderate it as I've been otherwise occupied.
ReplyDeleteIn answer to your point, I would acknowledge that it would take a political earthquake for the Greens to win in York Central, but then it would also take an earthquake for the Lib Dems or Conservatives to do so. As far as I'm concerned, I'm working to increase the Green vote and whether or not I can challenge Hugh Bayley this time, I'd like to make sure that a future Green candidate in the area has the chance to do so.
You'll never succeed if you don't try!
Just as a very brief addendum - I saw the BBC's list of the top 250 Tory targets on the news tonight and apparently they have York Central on it, about 10 places from the bottom as far as I could see (though I had a bit of trouble because Jeremy Vine's head was in the way). I believe they may have excluded a small number of seats where the swing is technically smaller because of the way the vote is split, but where the Tories are coming from a distant 3rd or 4th place which is the reason for the difference. However, it confirms my view that it can hardly reasonably be considered a cliffhanger Tory/ Labour marginal.
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