How to cut your council tax bill by 50%

Are you struggling to make ends meet? Would you like to instantly cut your council tax bill by approx 50%. If like me you are paying band F in Barnet, you could save £1019 per year. This saving can be achieved perfectly legally, it's all perfectly above board. What do you have to do? Move to Wandsworth. I found this website which gives you comparisons for the various boroughs. Here's a link for Barnet and Wandsworth


http://www.net-lettings.co.uk/London/Borough-Guide/Wandsworth.html


http://www.net-lettings.co.uk/London/Borough-Guide/Barnet.html

Now I'm not a Tory, I don't subscribe to their politics or policies, but I thought that for you, dear reader, I'd pretend I was, just for the day. As I understand it, the Tories are for low taxes, so surely Edward Lister, Wandsworth Council Leader is the best Tory in London. Lets compare how he runs the show, with our good friend here in Barnet, Council Leader Mike "No one saw that coming" Freer.

Lets start with the local campaigns the Wandsworth Tories are running on their website :-

http://www.putneyconservatives.net/issues.jsp

Now imagine my shock (real Rog T shock, not Tory for a day Rog T shock) -

A campaign for a new local Bus Route
A campaign for a new train line
A campaign for improvements on the district line
A campaign for better local station facilities at Earlsfield
A campaign for better financial Transparency
A campaign to improve the Northern Line


To name but a few. Strangely, all things I thoroughly agree with and all real local issues. No wonder Wandsworth Tories are popular !

Now lets visit Mike Freer's Finchley conservatives local campaigns website

http://finchleyconservatives.com/local-campaigns.html

We get

A letter from Mike Freer about the Equitable life scandal
A campaign to keep some post offices open
The National Dump the Bin Tax campaign
The "Shame on Labour" campaign with this lovely quote from Mike Freer

The Government should be doing more to keep Council Tax down, not finding new ways to tax hard working local residents.

Quite staggering really. The Tory Leader of Barnet Council, rather than ringing up his mate at Wandworth for a few tips, wants Gordon Brown to come and tell him how to run the council.

Now as regular followers of this blog will know, I've been rather critical of Mike Freer's Leaderlistens.com blog, paid for at the taxpayers expense. I thought I'd have a look at Wandsworth's leader blog. Guess what? He hasn't got one, he's too busy running the council.

Now you may wonder what interested me about Wandsworth. Well one of Barnet's Councillors elected at the last election, Jane Ellison decided to up sticks and move to Putney (in Wandsworth) to stand for Parliament. Now Jane decided that she'd not have time to be a Barnet Councillor and a PPC, so she resigned from Barnet Council. I decided to see how she was getting on and to be quite honest I was shocked by what I saw. It seems that not every Tory London Borough is plagued by the problems we have in Barnet. Wandsworth is in many ways quite similar to Barnet, but it seems that they seem to know what they are doing. The Council Leader gets his head down and gets on with it. Personally I cannot understand why two boroughs, both with Tory administrations can possibly have such a massive Council Tax difference. I cannot understand why Barnets Tories are so dead set against anything to improve Transport, whilst Wandsworth Tories are running a whole host of campaigns. Doesn't it occur to the plonkers running Barnet, that the borough is full of commuters?

I'm sure that Wandsworth has it's problems, but I couldn't find a barrage of criticism for the council in the way we see here. Sadly for me, I'm a local lad. Moving to Wandsworth is not an option. I'll just have to stay here and make life miserable for Freer and Co until they actually appoint someone who can do the job properly. From what I've seen of the way they run the show, I can see why Jane decided that she'd be better off being a Tory in Wandsworth.