Here is my latest column for the Highgate Handbook and the Muswell Hill Flyer:

Last year there were six deaths in Haringey – as well as injuries. One little girl, for example, had both legs broken and will never be able to do sport or such like again – in her life.

By the time you read this – the Liberal Democrat group on Haringey Council will have put forward a proposal for 20mph in residential streets across the whole of Haringey.

From evidence elsewhere, 20mph saves lives, reduces seriousness of injuries and cuts pollution. 20mph as a pan borough speed limit has the downside of being a blanket policy – but the big upside of being simple, uniform policy. It’s a common complaint of motorists that rules are too complicated and are enforced wrongly.

Because of simplicity – there are no physical measures like humps or chicanes – 20mph across the whole of Haringey’s residential streets would end up being massively cheaper than putting in separate schemes for each street with humps or other measures. The estimates are something like £22 million to deliver a 20mph speed limit street by street (30% of Haringey’s streets already do have traffic calming) but £600,000 for the pan borough option. That’s quite a difference!

There would clearly be a need for enforcement to make sure that there was a penalty to not observing the limit. Of course, ultimately, there needs to be more than one policy to tackle traffic and vehicle management. One aspect won’t be the total answer. Education is vitally important because in the end – the objective must be to get people to change their own driving behaviour rather than change the fabric of our streets.

However, in the meantime, on financial grounds alone – in the middle of this economic crisis – perhaps we should consider the pan borough idea. For every road traffic accident where the injured person is provided with NHS ambulance services, the charge is £177 for each occasion. Where the injured person receives NHS treatment, but is not admitted to hospital, the charge is £585. The daily charge for NHS in-patient treatment is £719. That’s not to even begin to count the personal cost, police time on accidents, loss to the economy of working days that someone has to take off and so on.

You can imagine what this comes to in mega-millions across the country. The savings would be huge to the NHS – where despite funding being ring-fenced with real terms increases – budgets will be under enormous strain. But more importantly – lives would be saved and injuries minimized – and pollution will be reduced.

Can we really afford not to introduce pan Haringey 20mph speed limits? Let me know what you think!

The way we have been living, spending and behaving – combined with an overweening state – has led to a diminution of human potential and to operating in ever decreasing circles. We seem to value ourselves by what we do and what we buy (or cannot buy) – rather than whether we are good, kind, thoughtful or have other personally admirable and altruistic traits. We follow prescribed routes from centralised diktats where thinking, personal responsibility, professionalism and non-conformity are driven out by targets and tick boxes.

In 2007 I wrote a chapter for a book ‘Reinventing the State: Social Liberalism in the 21st Century’. This starts from the basis that New Liberalism was the outcome of a process of inventing a new kind of state a century ago and that after decades of over-centralisation we need to reinvent it now along social liberal lines.

Much of what I wrote was to do with how we adapt to the ending of the old order, where state, church (or other religions), family, schools, the judiciary and other pillars of society that governed our ‘norms’ no longer held their previous sway or respect.

An increasingly authoritarian approach to almost everything under Labour moved us towards a population controlled by legal parameters rather than social ones.

Change has to come from within – and it is about the behaviour of the people who are part of those structures. This is not about morality – but more about engagement – where consideration for others and the common good comes as high at least on out list as simply our own well-being.

There is a genuine and urgent need to radically reform and change the balance between the state and the people  – that is now under way and part of the answer. The even bigger challenge is  – how do we change behaviour?

Delightful visit to Muswell Hill children’s library to open it now it has been restored to its former glory. You really have to go there to see how fantastic it now is. The roof has huge, ornate sky-light type windows in – glorious – but in all the years I did my surgery there when I was a Muswell Hill councillor – you would never had noticed – as the dirt and grime of years obscured their magnificence. The walls had always been peeling and decrepit – and an old mural across the length of one wall was dingy and dark. The mural had been lovingly restored – and now the library is quite magical. No doubt lots of local children will spend many a happy hour. Congratulations to everyone who worked so hard to make this finally happen.

I went to two events yesterday that epitomise Haringey’s finest: the Haringey Dance Showcase at the Asian Centre and then Young Haringey Heroes awards at the Bernie Grant Centre.

The Dance Showcase was a delight. It was a collaboration across three of our community centres –  the Asian Centre (which hosted), the Irish Centre and the Afro-Caribbean Centre. The performance started with a chair dance with very beautifully clad older ladies in amazing saris who told the story through their hands and movements sitting in chairs and went all the way through to Irish dancing with the most wonderful young girls (pictured) giving us a real Irish flavour. So from Bollywood to belly and from street to Turkish – Haringey’s diversity was danced to us.

In a borough as diverse and multi-cultural as Haringey with 225,000 residents , nearly 200 different languages and over half the population here from a culturally diverse background – this was Haringey at its best.

I went straight onto the Bernie Grant Centre for the Young Haringey Heroes Awards 2010. This was the third year of these awards where we celebrate the achievements of children and young people from Haringey. As always in Haringey – there was an array of performances as well as the awards themselves.

The awards I was there to present was for the Junior Outstanding Progress by a child new to the UK – winner Andre Toth – and then the award for Outstanding Progress by a young person new to the UK where there were joint winners – Andres Ladino and Mohamed Mohamed. These three had all faced the challenges that coming to a new country, new culture, new language and new everything – and had learned English and then helped others to adapt, passed exams with flying colours and generally adapted to this strange new world brilliantly.

Congratulations to all the awards winners – as ever – a very uplifting occasion.

The former Labour government withdrew its offer of nearly £9million it had promised Haringey for new primary school buildings. Yes – it was Labour who renegged on the money – not the coalition. I am putting this out there – because locally Labour are trying to say this is down to the coalition. No – it’s not.

PS This is not the money already committed to Rhodes Avenue primary school expansion. But of course – now Labour want to whip that funding away as well.