As part of Lewisham’s Fairness Review, which I have been involved in as a member of the Public Accounts Select Committee, we’re trying to help more local businesses to successfully bid for contracts with the council. Currently only 14% of council suppliers are based in Lewisham.

Lewisham, like most local authorities, is under huge pressure to make drastic cuts of up to 30% of our budget. The Fairness Review recommended that the council should work closer with local businesses, rather than huge corporations, to meet this challenge. The Fairness Review has even led to a change in Lewisham Council’s constitution so that for all contracts under £40,000 it will be mandatory for the council to get a quote from a local firms. Lewisham will be adding all tenders to the “Supply4London” portal and publishing all payments to suppliers worth over £250 to show the opportunities available.

This builds on the work of the New Economics Foundation who have demonstrated that buying local is worth 400% more to local authorities due to the “local multiplier”. The multiplier means: –

· that every £1 spent with a local supplier is worth £1.76 to the local economy, and only 36 pence if it is spent out of the area. That makes £1 spent locally worth almost 400 per cent more.

This work by Lewisham Council will drive more money into the local economy with the aim of cutting local unemployment and giving home-grown businesses more hope for the future.

Tony Blair recently met with senior government officials in Burma with colleagues from his governance think tank Tony Blair Associates. At the Presidential Palace in Naypyidaw, the new capital, Blair met the Vice President Nyan Tun (former Commander in Chief of the Navy) and Minister Soe Thein (another former Naval Commander in Chief). The exact reasons for Blair’s visit are unknown and the trip was not publicised. A spokesperson for Blair’s office told the independent Irrawaddy journal that: “At the present time we are simply having wide-ranging discussions with the [Burmese] government on the development of the country because Mr Blair is interested in it.” One government source said anonymously that the talks could pave the way for a “governance initiative” Blair is considering establishing in Burma. It wouldn’t be the only “governance initiative” that Blair is involved in. He is currently working with President Nazarbayev of Kazakhstan.

I have written before about how perilously fragile the political transition in Burma is. As my report on the situation in Burma found, the transition is not underpinned by essential legal and political reform. It will be interesting to see if Tony Blair believes he can help support such reforms.

If, as a local councillor, I was to spend my time consorting with street gangs who exercised authority without consent and packed the Council with political cronies selected on nepotism not merit, I would not expect to be celebrated by the Left. But Hugo Chavez was. No matter that he actively explored cooperation with the planet’s vilest dictators. He developed a “strategic partnership” with murderer Alexander Lukashenko of Belarus. Not as an accident of regional geopolitics – but an active embrace of tyranny. And in return, the government of Belarus has announced 3 days of mourning to mark his death.

It wasn’t just Lukashenko, he joked with President Ahmadinejad about building a “big atomic bomb”. He hailed Robert Mugabe and Idi Amin and was staunch in his support for blood-drenched tyrants staunch Col Gaddafi and Syrian President Bashar.

His celebrated domestic record was patchy. A welcome attempt to alleviate poverty and establish healthcare was shackled by Tammany Hall politics that drove up prices, packed public services with inept political cronies and left the shelves of supermarkets empty for the poor.

The contrast with Brazil, a social democracy whose leadership has served it well, is stark. Brazilians are 3 times less likely to be murdered in the streets, the press is still free and civil society strong.

The finest piece on this social failure is “Slumlord” by Jon Lee Anderson in the New Yorker. The Tower of David, in the centre of Caracus, is totemic of this failure:

Guillermo Barrios, the dean of architecture at the Universidad Central, says: “Every regime has its architectural imprimatur, its icon, and I have no doubt that the architectural icon of this regime is the Tower of David. It embodies the urban policy of this regime, which can be defined by confiscation, expropriation, governmental incapacity, and the use of violence.”

This isn’t a fringe issue. Labour MPs have praised Chavez’s handling of the last elections (I’ve heard silence on the last Brazilian elections), unions pay their members to go on fact-finding missions and Labour’s last Mayor of London built another “strategic partnership” with Chavez (how many did he need?). It is hard not to conclude that the Left suffers from the racism of low expectations.

1. London vs. Toyko

A fascinating piece in The Atlantic on how Toyko, a megacity of 35 million people, has a transport system that copes with a population 5x the size of London – and is almost self-financing.

If you attempt to map their transport network on a single map (the Japanese incidentally, don’t) it looks like this: –

Both Toyko and New York have used bond issues to fund the transport infrastructure upgrades, a model ignored in the UK in favour of the PFI model. Whilst Toyko’s network is mostly private, New York’s is entirely public.

2. The importance of rail transport

The importance of rail transit cannot be understated For the 6,000 years we’ve been building cities, the transportation system you pick dictates the form of the built environment.

From Maria Popova’s Explore.

And a beautiful essay by John Lanchester on the cultural significance of the London Underground and the link between commuting and psychological wellbeing.

Two sets of simple to follow instructions to turn a Raspberry PI into a web server from Instructables and WikiHow. The total power consumption for a Raspberry Pi over the course of a year is roughly £3.50 (400 milliamps per hour), so it’s ecologically friendly too.

Other uses for a Raspberry Pi include:

A Minecraft server.

An OpenVPN (from Remi Bergsma’s blog) or private VPN – perfect to create a secure connection to the internet from a non-secure location (let’s say, Azerbaijan).

A BitTorrent server.

A web cam server.

A personal cloud. And here is an interesting file storage idea.

PingBin has some more outlandish ideas too.

Or, you could even send your Raspberry Pi into space.

Google seems to think I grew up in a Warsaw Pact country. Not impossible I suppose: —

Leaflet delivering to #SaveLewishamAE

I’ll be delivering leaflets today to tell people about the protest on 26 January to save Lewisham A&E. Please join me.

Meeting outside Tesco’s, Lewisham, at 6.30pm

My number is there are any problems (this diverts to my mobile) is:

Azerbaijan has just passed a strict anti-protest law clearly in violation of its obligations under the European Convention on Human Rights. This morning 12 young people were fined a significant amount of money
after Saturday’s protest. I hope they take this all the way to the European Court of Human Rights.

Via – Khadija Ismayilova

Ebulfez Gurbanli-500 AZN (£395)
Babek Hesenov-600 AZN (£472)
Renad Najafov-600 AZN (£472)
Rashad Hasanov-600 AZN (£472)
Zakir Rehmanov-400 AZN (£318)
Vusal Bayramov-500 AZN (£395)
Tural Abbasli – 600 AZN (£472)
Ulvi Hesenli 600 AZN (£472)
Mehemmed Ibrahim 500 AZN (£395)
Isayev Hemid 500 AZN (£395)
Kazimzade Azer 400 AZN (£318)
Elisoy Eltac 300 AZN (£238)

Update (4.45pm), another 8 sentenced:

13. Subhi Hesenov 400,
14. Turgut Gambar 500 azn
15. Abil Huseynov 400 azn
16. Rail Abbasov 300 AZN
17. Turkel Azerturk 600 AZN
18. Ramin Hacili 450 AZN
19. Tezexan Mirelemli 500 AZN
20. Rauf Memmedov 300 AZN
21. Firuz Agayev-300 AZN

1. First download the universal USB installer available from Pen Drive Linux.

2. Then select the variant of Linux you wish to use from the drop-down list

TAILS 0.15 is 853 mb – it’s a distribution ideal for human rights defenders with a TOR-enabled browser included. It also deletes all data stored each time you reboot…

Lubuntu, a lightweight variant of Ubuntu, needs 4 gb to install. But will run on a Pentium III system with as little as 128mb of ram.

3. Set your bios to boot from a USB stick (learn how here). That’s it!

This article on pay day loans was originally published by the News Shopper.

I once borrowed from a legal loan shark. I took out a loan of £100 and a week later, for the privilege, I had to repay £120.

At the time, I was between jobs and the Nationwide had helpfully slashed my overdraft.

I was lucky enough to escape this debt trap and pay back my debt – but for families across Lewisham using a loan shark is an everyday reality. In fact, Lewisham has London’s worst pay day loan problem – according to the Step Change consumer credit counselling service.

If you walk down Lewisham High Street, these pay day firms offer loans at rates up to 4,000 per cent. That’s a rate over 200 times even what an average credit card charges. Rip-off Britain is alive and well.

Yet, it’s clear that people don’t realise how expensive these loans really are. Normally when there’s a lot of competition, the price of a product falls – but even as new shops have opened up in Lewisham, the interest rate charged hasn’t fallen and may have gone up. The market just isn’t working.

In Lewisham, the average person who uses these short-term loans owes £530 and has two separate loans. We’ve got to help these people out of their debts.

At the end of September, Lewisham’s councillors debated legal loan sharks. We heard evidence that made my blood boil. I told our meeting that one loan company had sent an employee out in costume to promote their loans during the Olympic torch relay through Lewisham; another councillor said employees of one firm had given out leaflets outside the job centre queue in Catford.

Unanimously, with cross-party support every councillor backed Labour’s motion to try and tackle these parasites.

There’s a lot we would like to do but sadly the government won’t let us. We want the ability to stop new loan shops opening in the same way we can stop too many late night bars from congregating in the same street, and we would like the government to set a maximum cap on the interest that can be charged.

But there’s a lot we can do. The council supports Lewisham Plus Credit Union, an alternative to the big banks that can provide low cost loans to people. The cost of a loan with the credit union could be up to 20 times less than with one of the legal loan sharks.

You can help too. Instead of the miserly rates offered by the high street banks, you can save with the credit union so they can lend more to families at a reasonable rate – you could even earn a better rate of interest on your savings!
This article on pay day loans was originally published by the News Shopper.

Local people need to pass this message on to their family, friends and neighbours, as credit unions don’t have big advertising budgets but rely on word of mouth recommendation.

I’m also calling for Lewisham’s residents to sign a national petition calling on the government to give councils the powers to hold back the endless spread of legal loan sharks.

The recession has made this problem worse, with more people relying on credit to make ends meet. But it’s a false economy as the unregulated wild west of legal loan sharks is shackling the UK’s poorest borrowers with the highest price for credit in Europe.

Yet, this industry doesn’t need to exist – for most people their local credit union or building society can lend them money cheaper. Together we can help people out of their debt traps, but as a community we need to take action, and now.