TMP Online

Many congratulations to Jennette Arnold AM (left) who was last week elected as Chair of the London Assembly, becoming the first black woman elected to the post.

The Greater London Authority has a total budget of £11 billion and it is the London Assembly which is the body responsible for holding the Mayor of London to account for how he administers this budget on policing and community safety, transport, fire and the other strategic areas of capital city responsibly.

Jennette was born on the ‘small’ Caribbean Island of Montserrat, where her extended family-home in Long Ground was destroyed in 1996 by the Souffriere volcano.

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Is Obama all spin and no substance asks Tim Caswell.

Barack Obama is a charismatic, eloquent, possibly even sincere, pretender to the United States’ Presidential throne who lacks gravitas and policies. Support for this proposition can be found in every newspaper in the English language. There is a technical term for the journalists who write such drivel – “lazy Idiots.”

They are mostly the same people who told us simultaneously that Tony Blair would do anything to appease public opinion then criticised him for defying half the population to fight fascism in Iraq or prevent ethnic cleansing of Muslims in Kosovo. Apparently Blair stood for nothing but changed the Labour Party fundamentally. I can think of one or 50 Labour MP’s who will appreciate him a little more when they sign on the dole for the first time in May 2010 (Things are too bad for my last prediction of a June 2009 General Election to be credible now, although Gordon may have another dither in the autumn next year).

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TMP editor, Chuka Umunna, reflects on last night’s local elections.

“Ken Livingstone has five children by three women” screamed one headline, “Johnson admits using cocaine as a teenager” shouted another.The other candidates for London mayor were never really going to get a look in. Two larger than life characters, oozing charisma, the personification of their politics. This was no ordinary election.

After a decade of national success for the reds, the blues are allegedly on the march and politics has got interesting again, it is said. Last night’s results will be viewed in this context.

It was always going to be a difficult set of results for Labour, though it was not quite as bad as many had expected, with Labour down 162 councillors around the country at the time of writing. However, it is the London result that everyone is waiting for. What happens in the capital will dominate the weekend’s headlines and set the political scene for next few weeks. So what will the London result tell us about the state of the parties and, most importantly, the forthcoming general election? In the short term, it obviously matters; in the long term, its significance is surely questionable.

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