Gun Factory Closed down, Obama campaign off and running, Edinburgh Festival comes to an end and Hibs out of League Cup at first hurdle!

The national news this week carried the story of the conviction of 34 year old Grant Wilkenson who ran a replica gun importers and converted 90 of them in his back yard into lethal Mac -10 Sub-machine guns. To bring it all a bit closer to home they have been used in at least 7 fatal shootings in London including the murder of 15 year old Michael Dosumnu shot as he slept in his bed, and Jamail Newton murdered outside of Aristocrats in Camberwell in November 2006. This is especially close to home for me as I heard the shots and a bullet went through my bedroom window into the frame! Wilkenson has deservedly be sentenced to Life Imprisonment!

Barack Obama's Campaign launched at the end of the DNC last night with a Stadium address supported by the Boss, Bruce Springsteen. I wish him well in the Campaign and the world really needs a Democrat US President!
I am in Edinburgh for the weekend and it is my 49th Birthday today! The Festival is coming to a close with the Fireworks Display on Sunday bringing it all to a close for this year so it should be a spectacular show!

Hibs were dumped out of the Cup at the first round losing 3-4 to Morton after Extra Time at Easter Road!
I am still very nervous about the season but Keenan and Pinau both played and scored and rumours abound about us getting Riordan back on loan from Celtic so there are glimmers of hope ! I am at Easter Road tomorrow to see Hibs take on a very good Motherwell team so a home win would be a good result for us!

The death of Councillor Anne Yates, London 2012 Visits Camberwell and Hibs score first goal in Inverness!

We all had very sad news over the weekend on hearing of the death of Councillor Anne Yates. Apparently it all happened very quickly so took us all by surprise.
Anne was a very committed local activist and Ward Councillor. Not very "political" and would probably been a Labour member if she had lived further south in the Borough. I always got on very well with her as a Councillor an a fellow Scot so my thoughts are with her very close family and friends, we will miss her!
Well the Beijing Olympics ended with Team GB's best medal haul for a Century, 19 Gold, 13 Silver and 15 Bronze, 47 in Total and a very creditable 3rd in the Medals Table behind China,USA and Russia!
The News this morning reported cash injections of over £20Million in all of the key sports of Athletics, Sailing, Rowing and Cycling and it seems to have paid off?
The success of Team GB is a real boost to the 2012 Campaign and I am sure will carry public support all the way through to 2012! I cant wait!

We had a really nice event in Camberwell Green to welcome London becoming the Host City and after Boris grappled with the Olympic Flag we raised our own London 2012 Flag in Camberwell Green.


The real highlight of the day was my friend Ian
Wingfield sprinting away (Usiah Bolt like!) to win the Councillor Handicap against stiff Tory/Lib Dem Coalition forces!!
Ian's heroic win will not be forgotten in the months and years ahead so I salute him!! Well Done Ian!!
Hibs managed to score in against Inverness for the first time on Saturday and took a point in an entertaining game. Whilst not at full throttle Hibs are improving and Nish in particular is really finding the sort of form he had at Kilmarnock.
I will be at Easter Road on Saturday with dad to see Hibs take on Motherwell which will be a good test of how they are improving against a very well organised 'Well!

Arsenal win at the Emirates, Hibs beat Falkirk and a Golden weekend in Beijing for Team GB!

I watched Arsenal beat West Brom at the Emirates in the first game of the English Premiership Season. it was good to catch up with Tsui again and great to get back to the Emirates, a truly fantastic stadium!

Hibs also opened their account with a 3-2 win over Falkirk. I saw the highlights on Setanta and it was good to see Nish score two and look like his old self but still worrying to see such sloppy defending which will really be a problem for us unless we can get some more "steel" in there!

I will be at Easter Road for the next home game against Motherwell on August 30th!

Team GB had an unparalleled weekend with lots of medals including 8 gold and the cyclists picked up another one today!

The table looks like this today:

Country Gold Silver Bronze Total
1 China 35 - 13 - 13 - 61
2 USA 19 - 21 - 25 - 65

3.Great Britain 12 - 7 - 8 - 27
3 Australia 11 - 10 - 12 - 33

It all looks good and for 2012 we need to get more cycling, rowing and sailing events in the Olympics!!

Youth Scrutiny to go to OSC, Arsenal first game against West Brom and Hibs play Falkirk at Home!

The Youth Scrutiny Report is going to the first OSC Meeting after the break and I hope that it will really push youth provision and engagement up the political agenda which is where it really needs to be!
I think that we have highlighted a lot of good practice but a lot of creative and administrative improvements that need to be made so I look forward to following it through OSC to Executive and beyond!


I am going to Arsenal's first game of the season on Saturday at the Emirates against West Brom, first time at the Stadium since the Springsteen Concert. I have renewed my Red Card with Arsenal so hope to see a few games this season.

Hibs take on Falkirk at home this season and really need a good performance and more importantly a win!
Dad has his season ticket and will be at the game and I will be joining him for the next home SPL game against Motherwell!

Hibs play Morton in the Scottish League Cup (pictured with Ian Murray)
Hibs have signed French Under-21 Steve Pinau on a season's loan deal from Genoa. he apparently did well in trials and played well with Yantorno so looks a good deal. Hertha Berlin Goalkeeper Christian Person is on trial for the second time and is likely to be Mixu's 6th signing of the season? Sadly Benji has gone on loan to Charloise and I suspect he wont be back but good if we can secure £1M for him. Don't know where that leaves Zemmama?
For the next Scotland game against Northern Ireland I see that Stephen Fletcher is in the Scotland squad and Dean Shiels in the NI squad. Gives them a chance to have a fight when they are not wearing the same shirts!

Edinburgh Festival and Beijing Olympics begin as does SLP with Hibs losing opening game!

The Edinburgh Festival is up and running and I shall be spending a weekend up there at the end of the month.

Gordon Brown was interviewed by writer Ian Rankin at the start of the Book Festival and it looks like this year's Festival will be breaking records with over £2M in advance ticket sales!

Well the Beijing Olympics have kicked off and I really enjoyed the Opening Ceremony and am a bit of an Olympics junkie so watched lots of it over the weekend. Good to see a couple of GB Gold Medals already in cycling and swimming and it looks like it could be a very good Olympics for Team GB!

The SLP kicked off at the weekend with Hibs away at Kilmarnock. It looks like it was a good end to end game with Hibs having the better chances but all was lost when Van Zanden had to off with a serious head injury with 10 minutes to go and Hibs were left with 10 men after using all their subs. Hibs midfielders failed to drop back to cover the missing player and we lost a goal almost straight away! A real schoolboy error that infuriated Mixu!

I remain unconvinced about our defence, midfield or attack, apart from that we look ok!! The squad is not strong enough and I think we will struggle for a top 6 place on this performance!

Gordon takes a holiday!, A weekend by the Sea at Broadstairs and Hibs stil losing! (but playing much better!)

In the aftermath of the Glasgow East By-Election defeat Gordon is on holiday, Harriet is in "charge" and number 10 is having a wash down (picture).

There is a lot being said and links made to the Thatcher/Major end game of the late 90's but I think that there is a real, in fact "Major" difference! In 1997 we had had to put up with the Tories for 18 years and were absolutely sick of them and all that they stood for, it was their policies that did for them. I think that the present Labour Government's present problems all stem form the current economic dowturn caused by bad US mortgages and rising oil prices.I dont have a sense of dissatisfaction with the massive investment in the NHS, Education, Decent Homes etc. or the National Minimum Wage, or family tax credits or etc. etc.! (What did the Romans ever do for us!)
A new US President in the New Year, hopefully Obama , may have a quick impact if troops start to leave Iraq and their is an economic upturn in the US,. both which will help us in 2009 turn things around, well before an Election. Talk of a Leadership challenge now is madness we have to tough this one out and expose the Tories for the "slash and burners" what they really are and the Lib Dems for the political irrelevance that they are!! Bring it on!!

I spent a long weekend with my good friend "The Alderman" Ian Driver and his family in Broadstairs with Shauna and although not as hot as May still lots of splashing about in the water(and a bit of crazy golf!).

Ian and Jo are doing really well on the South Coast and the house really is coming on well!

Hibs continue to lose their pre-season games but at long last are starting to perform and gave two good performances against premiership opposition, losing 3-2 to Middlesborough after being 2-0 up and last night going down to a late goal 1-0 to Wigan. Reports were off good performances in both games and it looks like the team have eventually woken up just in time for the opening game against Kilmarnock at Rugby Park on Saturday! Still not convinced about the strength of the squad but hopefully a few more players will be joining in the next week or so?

"Put Down Your Knives" Campaign launches in Camberwell Green, Weekend on the South Bank and Hibs buy new players!

Yesterday Harriet launched her "Put Down Your Knives" campaign with us on the Crawford Estate in Camberwell Green Ward. It was especially poignant to have the mother and brother of Edvin Johnson who was murdered on the Estate earlier this year! Over the next month we will be delivering a letter and poster and asking for the community's support in tackling the scourge of knife crime in Camberwell, Southwark and London.

I spent Saturday with Shauna in the South Bank and we went to see the new production of the "Wizard of Oz" at the Royal Festival Hall which was excellent and afterwards Shauna played with the science experiments which were good fun and interesting.

Hibs have signed a couple of new players. Steven Thicot is a 21 year old defensive French midfielder signed from Nantes who played well enough in the 6-0 Barcelona drubbing to suggest that he may be good for us. Joe Keenan, a 25 year old Australian who has played for Chelsea in the past, is the second signing after a thorough trial at Easter Road. ex-Gretna player Fabian Yantorno is also in the squad recovering from injury and should be another good signing. Other players on Mixu's Radar are Watford's Brazilian Douglas Rinaldi, Aberdeen's Steve Lovell and Leeds' Curtis Weston so perhaps a few more players in before the start of the season?

A bad night in the East End of Glasgow, week at Wivenhoe, Camberwell Labour Party Barbeque, Hibs thumped by Barca and "we're off to see the Wizard.."

A really bad night at the Bye-Election and the BBC reported it as follows:
"The Scottish National Party has pulled off a stunning by-election victory by winning Glasgow East, one of Labour's safest seats, by 365 votes.
The SNP overturned a Labour majority of 13,507 to win with a swing of 22.54%.The SNP polled 11,277 votes in the contest, while the Tories came third with 1,639 and the Lib Dems, with 915 votes, came fourth."
I really dont get was is up with people voting Tory and even worse SNP but there is a momentum building up that we have to put a stop too or people will "sleep walk" their way to a Tory Governmnet and even an Independant Scotland, neither of which I truly believe the population of the UK really want!
I really felt that we could hold on to Glasgow East and it is a really bad result for us! The SNP are a real danger to democracy in this country and all parties should be united in doing whatever it takes to stop them!! Always good to see the Lib Dems do so badly!!
I spent most of the week at the rather splendid Wivenhoe House Hotel Just outside Colchester running a 4 day Health & Safety Course for Managers at the University of Essex and the Campus University of Suffolk. all went well but weather a bit too warm for a training course and strange to see lots of rabbits hopping around outside my bedroom window each morning!
May be doing something similar for Bath University soon?


Got back in time to put the record button on for the Hibs Vs Barcelona match and get off to the Camberwell Labour Party Summer Barbecue in the gardens of St. Giles.
It was a lovely evening and we have a really good relationship with the members and get out together more and more. CLP Quiz night next Thursday with yours truly as Quiz Master so I need to get my thinking cap on next week and trawl the net for good questions!

Actually Hibs were 1-0 down before I even had time to get out of the flat with Gudjohnson scoring after 4 minutes and when I got back I found out that a further 5 had gone in for a 6-0 final score!
My dad, sister and nephews were all there and my sister sent a few pics back so a good day had by all but a really shocking performance from Hibs albeit against one of the best teams in the world!
Barcelona were unbelievably good for their first competitive game of the season but it was suggested that the incentive of impressing a new Coach was also very strong! Messi (above) was outstanding and was the named Man of the Match. It really was a "man against boys" situation 4-0 down at half time and only the fact that the second team came out for the second half and the fact that they clearly dropped down a few gears to save further embarrassment saved us from an even worse score! I cant imagine that we learned anything useful from the exercise and I am really concerned that we have seriously dropped back in terms of quality from where we were 2 years ago! lots of players moved on and very few coming in and I really dont think that we are even a top 6 side at the moment. It will be interesting to see how we do against Middlesborough and Wigan as last season we beat Boro and Bolton before going onto a 10 game unbeaten run to put us at the top of the SPL. That seems a very long way off at the moment!! Oh dear it could be a long hard season!!!

I am taking Shauna to see the Wizard of Oz at the Royal Festival Hall tomorrow and probably going to see Wall E as well on Sunday. We are off to Broadstairs again the weekend after!
Will be good to see the RFH after it's lottery make-over and of course Oz is much more my thing rather than the HSM of a couple of weeks ago! Oliver to come in the new year as well!!

Where has the £6.8M gone?, OSC (inc. Camberwell Leisure Centre update) and the Southwark LGBT, the Zutons and Hibs go out of the Intertoto!

Peter John, leader of the Southwark Labour Group rightly asks in today's Southwark News "where has the money gone?" We have to put up with the tedious rants from Nick Stanton about how this horrible Labour government is not giving him enough money but he has been strangely quiet on the Labour Government announcement two weeks ago that and extra £6.8M was being given to Southwark principally intended for business development. Why then, no announcement at last week's Council Assembly, no Press Release, no member briefing?? The Labour Group will press Stanton hard for his plans to spend this money that could make a real difference in the deprived centre of the borough where employment and economic development come at a premium and where local jobs are desperately needed by local people!!
I had an OSC Meeting which gave a positive update on Camberwell Leisure centre from new Exec Member Tory Lewis Robinson, who seems to be genuinely trying to get a deal together for the refurbishment of the Centre including keeping the Pool and is much brighter and much more trustworthy than any of his Lib Dem colleagues so we have to wait and see if he is genuine when he takes a final Report to the Exec probably in October?
I was also invited to the Southwark LGBT Forum in the week as the subject was Community Safety and was very impressed at the well run and focused meeting with very knowledgeable members and local residents alike! An excellent meeting and a very impressive group!!

I went with Alison and Ashwin to see the Zutons at Somerset House this week and it was a great gig with an on form group and a fantastic venue! More pictures on my Facebook!

Hibs fell at the first fence in the Intertoto going down 2-0 (4-0 aggregate!) to Elfsborg FC from Sweden (currently 2nd in their League)....not a very encouraging start!!

Now a hard few weeks with Barcelona at Murrayfield (wonder if new signing from Arsenal Alexander Hleb will play?) and two friendlies against Premiership opposition in Middelsborough and Wigan.

Ma-Kalamby is off to the Olympics with Belgium (who can blame him really?) so a few goalkeeping problems over then next month! Still no news on the future of Fletcher and Benji and new boy Keenan still trialling so no decision there either! Mixu seems keen to get shot of many of John Collins signings but no real indication of players coming in so we do seem a bit short? Hopefully we will see some new blood coming in over the next month?

Knife Crime, Council Assembly, Jeremy ordained and Hibs go to Sweden and I go to High School Musical!

With knife crime still high in the national and local media Southwark News are organising a Knife Crime Summit and I wrote them the following letter:
Dear Southwark News,
With both national and local news full of knife attack stories, and Southwark being very prominent in a number of them, I fully support the Southwark News plans for a Knife Crime Summit and would very much like to involved. I think there can be a clear separation in terms of strategy between the "stick" and the "carrot" and we need clarity of position in both of these areas. I support the current Met Police's "Operation Blunt 2" and, like Deputy Mayor Kit Malthouse, that it proves as successful as Operation Trident has been and the early signs I think are positive. I fully supported the Labour Government's tough sentencing policy of gun possession and the current policy of longer sentencing for murders with 20 and 30 year terms being given out by the Courts. I also think that longer and consistent sentences for knife possession should follow accepting the difficulties in knives, unlike guns, having legitimate uses. But as one police officer reported to me last week he found a man with a knife hidden in his buttocks which suggested that he perhaps was not a catering student on his way to class! In terms of this current Administration in the Town Hall we still believe that the lack of a strong coherent strategic view of serious violent crime and how to tackle it is a serious flaw and can have the effect of lessening the impact, or even undermining, some excellent work currently being undertaken on the ground. Last year we raised this 3 times in Council Assembly and three times were voted down. That I believe is a serious mistake! On a more positive note the Council has run a very good in my view "Enough is Enough" poster campaign and in the past had an equally good campaign highlighting the consequences of carrying a knife, ie the risk of being a victim as well as a perpetrator, with split screen images of a family at a graveside and a young man in a prison cell. perhaps this campaign could be resurrected at this present time? We do need to up our game in terms of the "carrot" elements of youth engagement, be it educational, sporting, cultural and political. The Government have provided, and are providing more, significant for youth activities and a promise of a "youth offer". Mayor Livingstone committed to significant funding for youth provision in London which, as far as I am aware, Mayor Johnston has not re-committed to yet? Southwark Council puts a lot of resources into youth provision in the borough and I have been involved, in my past role as Chair of Education and Children s Services Scrutiny Committee in a significant review of existing needs and provision for young people involving meeting lots of dedicated and hard working youth providers and lots of very positive young people! My colleague and new Chair Councillor Barrie Hargrove will hopefully be taking the Report and it's recommendations to the Executive in the autumn, the key recommendation being that the views and needs of young people need to be moved up the political agenda and we need to more closely match what young people want with what we can reasonably provide! With a Labour Government, a Tory Mayor and a Lib Dem/Tory Council there is lots of scope for political posturing and arguing as we clearly have differences in our approach but we need to continue to work together to bring about a short term and longer term solution to this problem and me and my Labour Group are committed to doing that with anyone who wants to achieve the same end!
Councillor John Friary
Labour Group Spokesperson for Community Safety

Wednesday night's Council Assembly was different from the norm as we actually made a decision, and a cross party one at that!, to agree to get the much needed redevelopment of the Aylesbury Estates moving. Whilst there is nothing that can be said about the detail it was clearly the best deal available and it had to be agreed when it was!
Of course that was not good enough for The Leader Nick Stanton who, despite the unanimous support, dusted of his blame the Labour Government for everything speech ( to Labour cries of "change the record!") . He has had to change his one and only speech slightly and omit criticism of the horrible London Mayor now that he is a Tory and a Lib Dem friend! Not surprisingly new backbencher Richard Thomas joined in and even Lib Dems and Tories seemed frustrated by their incoherent rants!! As I have said before "toy town politicians playing toy town politics!" Worst thing is of course they do it in our name!!
It was interesting to see the only two good Executive performances on the night from David Noakes and Paul Noblet which really brings into contrast the woeful performance of the rest of them! The two of them must have been cringing all night!
It was great to see that my good friend Jermey Fraser was ordained at the weekend at Southwark Cathedral after a number of yeasr preparing for the Ministry!

He of course will become one of the official clergy for the London 2012 Olympics so I am sure that will be an interesting and exciting challenge for him?

To Jeremy and his family many congratulations and best wishes for the future!

On the Hibs front they go to Sweden to play the second leg of the Intertoto Cup match against Elfsborg, 2-0 down against a team currently second in the Swedish League, the prospects are not good with even the Manager's comments suggesting a bit of a lost cause!
New rumours of Portsmouth interest in Stephen Fletcher to join Peter Crouch with a £4M+ bid likely and Anderlecht looking to buy Benji for £1M!
With a new stand being build and the Training Centre up and running it may be a "treading water" season for us! Could be a long hard and frustrating season ahead!!
I am off with Shauna to see High School Musical on Saturday at the Hammersmith Apollo and, as not being a HSM aficionado, I really dont know what to expect apart form the fact that "Sharon" from Eastenders is in it!! Report back on Monday but with the Zutons at Somerset House next week and Wizard of Oz at the Royal Festival Hall in two weeks I am sure that I have enough to look forward to!