This morning at 7am I went to investigate a complaint that a utility company had dumped spoil next to a disabled parking bay belonging to one of my residents. I have represented the Murrays in council on a previous issue. See the previous story here.

The Murrays returned from a weekend away to discover this spoil last night and they could not get their wheelchair-bound daughter out of the car, unless they moved the car out of the bay itself. How are they then able to get their daughter, Naomi, back into the car safely for school this morning? You can see from the photo above that they have no access now to their car side door where Naomi is supposed to get in.

One can only ask: What were the utility company thinking?

I have alerted my county colleague, Diana Smith, to investigate the marking out of the area next to their disabled bay as disabled too. Otherwise hare-brained jobs like this one are carried out thoughtlessly. Hopefully the utility company will remove the spoil today. I will keep you updated.

 I’m alerting you that from 8pm tonight (22 January 2010), the A320 northbound route through Victoria Arch will be closed for 6 to 8 weeks to undertake the replacement of gas mains at the junction of Goldsworth Road and Victoria Way to Market Square, Woking Town Centre. This work will be done by Southern Gas Networks. 

This will mean that northbound traffic will be diverted via Triggs Lane and Wych Hill Lane. Access through the tunnel for pedestrians, cyclists and southbound traffic from the Town Centre will be unaffected.

What is worse is that the same company are doing roadworks on Maybury Hill and they will be digging up the pavement on Triggs Lane, which will cause more chaos and traffic disruption. My county colleagues will be urging the Surrey County Council to co-ordinate these roadworks to minimise disruption as far as possible.

Please let me know what problems you experience so that I can inform my colleagues.

So let me get this right?

We, the taxpayer, bail out the Royal Bank of Scotland with billions of taxpayers’ money. We are told that this was necessary to save the economy and save jobs.

This week we learn that RBS have funded an American food company called Kraft to takeover one of our British firms, Cadbury’s. We are also told that thousands of Cadbury’s jobs could be at risk. Now - I don’t know about you but I don’t want taxpayers’ money being used to destroy British jobs. It is precisely these sorts of mergers and deals that almost tanked our economy 16 months ago. We are funding the loss of British jobs and we need serious banking reform to address it.

Yesterday our Shadow Chancellor, Vince Cable MP, wrote to Lord Mandelson stating the following:

“Cadbury is a national institution which provides thousands of jobs in the UK and there is a real danger its takeover by Kraft will lead to job losses.

“It is particularly galling then that state-owned RBS should part fund this takeover when it is clearly not in the interests of the UK economy.

“This takeover also raises broader questions about how hedge funds, out to make a quick buck, can destabilise even the most established companies.

“We have seen Cadbury shares rapidly bought up by hedge funds that are keen to accept the Kraft takeover regardless of whether it is in the long-term interests of the company.

“As the City minister Lord Myners himself notes, it is becoming too easy for good British companies to be taken over by foreign predators.”

I am sure that you have been just as horrified as I have been about the scale of the earthquake disaster in Haiti with at least 30,000 to 50,000 people feared dead. It does put our political concerns over here in the UK into stark perspective. The scale of the devastation can clearly be seen from all the videos posted on YOU Tube footage.

If you can, please donate to the Haiti relief efforts. You can donate through various aid agencies such as Action Aid and the British Red Cross here. But please be careful of donating money through any sham relief agency pages operating on social networking sites such as Facebook. Some are genuine but others are not. So do be careful.

It is great to see various people from South East England doing their bit to help Haiti such as these firemen from Horsham. Click here for their story.

 Woking refuse collections have been suspended today due to the dangerous road conditions. If like me, your refuse was due to be collected today, please keep your black-lidded wheelie bin out at your normal collection spot. I suspect that today’s collection will be collected tomorrow or at the first opportunity when it is safe to do so. I’ll let you know as soon as I know.

Full current details about refuse collections can be found at this link. Other council services at this link to the Woking Borough Council website.

Please contact me if you are experiencing any problems. I am at work but contactable by e-mail and mobile. My school has been closed to the children.

Up to 2,850 pensioners will miss out on Cold Weather Payments in Woking triggered by the recent weather, according to analysis of Government figures by the Liberal Democrats. 

Cold Weather Payments of £25 a week are paid to people on low incomes who receive a qualifying benefit, such as Pension Credit, which goes unclaimed by as many as 1.7m pensioners nationally. 
 
It is a scandal that pensioners on the breadline are missing out on these payments, worth an estimated £42.5m. 
 
Fuel prices are at an all time high, making Cold Weather Payments all the more important to people already struggling on a poverty pension.  

Labour has failed pensioners by creating a complicated system that makes it difficult for them to get the help they desperately need. 

The Government should be making every effort to identify pensioners who are missing out and get them this extra cash.

This is a reminder to all my residents that the food waste collection service will be starting later this month. The majority of households will receive a silver 7-litre kitchen caddy and one green 23-litre collection bin for the weekly collection of food waste.

For more information, please click on the link here to the Woking Borough Council website. Please contact me if you have any further queries or problems with the service as it begins.  

The latest update on Woking Council services can be found at this link to their website. For the latest information regarding refuse collections, please look here. Please contact me if you are experiencing any problems. My contact details are to the right of this page.

 It was announced today on the Woking Borough Council website that all refuse collections have been cancelled this week. They will resume on Monday. Full information is available here.

Please put out your black-lidded bins on your normal collection day next week beginning Monday 11 January. The blue-lidded bin collection has been cancelled next week.

Please put out your black-lidded bins again on your normal collection day in the week beginning Monday 18 January.

Your blue-lidded bin collection will begin again in the week beginning Monday 25 January. They will collect surplus recyclable material if placed next to your bin.

For more information about Woking council services, click on this link here.

The Woking Borough Council website has information regarding current council services. For instance, all refuse collections have been suspended until tomorrow morning’s review. Please check this page for updates.For Surrey schools information, check out this link. For Hampshire school closures, check out this website. Both Beaufort School, where my son attends, and my school, Halstead, where I work are closed on Thursday.

On a lighter note, Amanda sent in our photo of Josh and Lola the cat below to BBC Surrey. It features on their website here.

For the latest updates, please consult the Surrey and Hampshire websites as well as BBC Surrey Radio (104.6 FM) and website for information about school closures, power cuts, road closures, etc. I am keeping myself posted about any latest developments via BBC Surrey Radio. The A3 near Guildford is a no-go area. The M25 and M3 appear to be running fairly smoothly. No South West trains are running from Portsmouth at all. There are power cuts reported in North East Hampshire.

To cheer you up is a photo of my son, Joshua and cat, Lola staring at the snow in awe.

It is expected to snow heavily in Woking, Hampshire, Berkshire and London tonight and tomorrow with a possibility of 30cm of snow falling in places. It has been predicted that it could be the heaviest snowfall for 30 years.

Some useful information can be found on the Surrey website including a list information about school closures. Please take extra care as only A roads in the County will be gritted.

 I condemn the planned march by the extremist Islam4UK organisation through Wootton Bassett in Wiltshire. According to the Daily Mail article today, 500 hardline Islam4UK supporters, led by hate preacher Anjem Choudary, plan to march with empty coffins through the town highlighting the “merciless murder of Muslims” in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Surely there are other forums for Islam4UK to make their concerns and feelings heard? Instead Choudary intends to provoke a nationwide backlash because a town, which has seen too many British war dead, is now the target of his extremist campaign to destabilise the UK. It certainly does not appear that he and Islam4UK want to discuss their concerns about the war in Afghanistan via peaceful means.

Please support the Facebook campaign calling for this planned march to be banned. Both PM Gordon Brown and Home Secretary, Alan Johnson, support such a ban. There are already a number of moderate Muslims on this site condemning the march. I am heartened by this despite the sadness I feel at some of the anti-immigration and anti-Muslim feelings expressed by some people on this site. But is it really surprising? I had warned about this in a previous blogpost calling on moderate Muslims to be even more vocal than they are now to condemn Islamic extremism within their communities. We need as many moderate voices expressed on this site as possible.

I’ve been to what was then the tallest building in the world - the Taipei 101 tower in March 2007, which has a total height of 508 metres. To me, it is a far better-looking artistic creation than the Burj Khalifa Tower, which was opened in Dubai yesterday standing at a height of 828 metres.

Taipei 101 looks better as it is built in the shape of a tall bamboo plant and is the pride of a nation not scared to stand up to mainland China for its vibrant liberal democracy. Taipei 101 is a symbol of its democratic and economic achievements in East Asia, which is having an impact on China. China no longer intimidates Taiwan like it used to. Instead it recognises Taiwan’s economic clout and Chinese and Taiwanese alike are able to fly directly across the Taiwan Strait since mid-2008. When I flew there before 2008, every time I had to fly via Hong Kong. How times have changed!

To me, the Burj Khalifa Tower is a symbol of the opulent capitalist excess orchestrated by a authoritarian emirates in the UAE, where there is no functioning democracy and the local people are suffering some of the worst effects of the global recession because Dubai grew too far too fast without democratic oversight of financial transactions. There is nothing attractive about this “Tower of Excess”.

Amanda and I had the privilege to be in the audience of the BBC1 show, The Big Questions, on Sunday morning at Whitgift School in Croydon. It was a fascinating experience. Why I love this show is that it does not shy away from debating the difficult issues. One such issue was whether the UK is too tolerant of Islamic extremism?

The consensus among debate participants was that we are too tolerant. Ironically the fact is that our anti-terror legislation is already very tough against terror and, in many cases, the police have gone too far in applying racial profiling and stop-and-searches under Section 44 of the Terrorism Act 2000. Some of these “over the top” stop-and-searches are well-documented here.

Then even tougher legislation emerged after the 7/7/05 London bombings in the form of the Terrorism Act 2006, which explicitly criminalises the encouragement of terrorism.

So where is the problem?

Had I been the given the chance to speak on the show, I would have highlighted the fact that Muslim organisations themselves are too tolerant and should do much more to speak out against extremism within their communities. Otherwise people like Kelvin MacKenzie, the Sun Columnist on the show, will have their way meaning that fewer students from Muslim countries will be allowed into the UK to study and even more intrusive “stop-and-search” powers will be applied to innocent Muslim citizens. In my view, the public clamour for “over-the-top” stamping out of terrorism will have harmful repercussions for inter-racial relations and tolerance within our communities.

Clearly the contributions from speakers on the show, such as Sultan Sabri from the Croydon Muslim Association and Dr Ramazaan Saeed of the Muslim Public Affairs Committee showed that their protests against Muslim extremism are limp and weak to say the least. The contribution from Tehmina Kazi from the British Muslims for Secular Democracy was far more forthright in criticising extremism than Sabri or Saeed did. Hopefully voices like her will become even louder if Muslims don’t want to suffer the indignity of racial profiling.

I was very moved by the testimony of Beverli Rhodes (see picture above) on the show, who was on one of the bombed trains on 7/7/05. She stated that more stringent racial profiling would have caught the 7/7 bombers before they struck. I sincerely hope that Sabri and Saeed took these views on board because more stringent racial profiling will be a consequence of British Islamic organisations failing to speak out forcefully against Muslim extremism.

My final question on this point is why were Islamic Society Presidents such as the failed Delta plane bomber, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, tolerated at University College London when it was very clear that he and other Presidents before him were hosting radical Muslim speakers using language straight out of the “fascist lexicon” that we would normally associate with the BNP? Surely Muslim students and universities can do more to speak out against this virulent “hate speech” instead of playing the victim at the hands of excessive policing?

I am afraid that the cost of doing nothing within Muslim communities themselves will be worse for all concerned across the UK. 

You can see the full show at this link until Sunday morning.

Firstly, Happy New Year to you and your families! May 2010 bring great things for our party.

To kick off my year with a bang, Amanda and yours truly will be participating in the BBC Big Questions audience this Sunday 3rd January 2010 in Croydon. It will be broadcast live at 10am on BBC1 and presented by Nicky Campbell. The topics for debate will be:

Are we too tolerant of Muslim extremism?

Do miracles happen?

Is the pub more important than the church?

Hopefully we will be able to contribute to one of these debates. Please tune in to BBC1 on Sunday at 10am. It should be very enlightening.