Localism – the Big Lie – and Parliamentary Boundaries
I was having a week-end in the Peak District and stopped for the night at Leek. It is a small, attractive market town, but like many English market towns it seemed a bit dead in the evening. I got chatting to a guy in the pub, who turned out to be a guitarist and singer. I asked him about where he played and apart from the pubs he mentioned, in passing, the Town Hall, where he used to play. I asked him to show me the Town Hall and he pointed to a carpark on the other side of the road.
It got me to thinking about just why it is that, for two decades now, both Labour and Tory Governments have been talking up Localism and yet doing almost everything possible to destroy it. Both Governments have encouraged the growth of out-of-town shopping malls and giant hyper-markets and every time that Tesco announces 500 new jobs we all know that means the loss of many more corner shops and greengrocers. Both Governments have been equally keen on re-organising local government and every time they do, they destroy a little local pride.
On a few rare occasions local pride fights back – some will remember when Rutland fought successfully not to be abolished by Ted Heath’s Government. London, funnily enough for one of the most cosmoplitan of cities, is a particularly interesting example of local pride. Keep your eyes open next time you travel round. Just what has happened to Chelsea Town Hall? or Fulham Town Hall? or Bow Town Hall? or Peckham’s or Battersea’s?
The revision of parliamentary boundaries, due later this year, will provoke similar objections.
Council backs down from evicting rioter’s mother and sister
Today, 19 January, Wandsworth Council decided not to evict the mother and 8 year old sister of the rioter convicted last week (see my blog entry of 12 January). This marks a victory for sanity against the knee-jerk threats of eviction made by both David Cameron and the Council in August.
It is great news for the tenant and an enormous weight off her shoulders, following what Judge Darling had called the biggest tragedy of the many sentences he had imposed as a consequence of the riots. The Council was forced to recognise just how much the family was a pillar of the local community and to backdown from the gung-ho rhetoric used by the Tory party in last September’s Council Meeting.
From my point of view, opposing the evictions policy as self-defeating and deeply malicious, this family could not have been a better test case. As the judge said last week, the family are “Christian with both a capital and a small c” and an integral part of the community. There will be tougher cases coming forward, no doubt, where the convicted rioters will be more culpable than Daniel and the innocent other members of the family less vulnerable than a single mother and 8 year old. But that will not stop those other members of the family being as innocent as Maite.
I will try and defend them as much as I have done Maite.
PS This WBC decision followed an interview between tenant and local housing manager, where essentially the tenant was being interviewed for her general status as a tenant and very unsurprisingly the local housing manager could see nothing wrong with the tenant’s record as a tenant or any reason why the Council should evict her. The idea that the Council backdown was as a result of pressure from various outside fringe groups is simply farcical. Whether it was partly as a result of the pressure Labour councillors put on the Tories in Wandsworth, only senior officers and senior councillors can really say.
Councillor Tony Belton’s Latchmere January Newsletter (# 33)
Editorial
- Frankly this one is dated but I am putting it on the blog for the record!
- Just in case you wondered I have decided to skip the December Newsletter by the simple expedient of changing the naming convention. In the past I have called the Newsletter after the preceding month, but as from now I am naming it after the month at the beginning of which it appears. Hence this is the January and not the December Newsletter.
- I have until now had a Did You Know? section at the end of the Newsletter. That obviously becomes more and more difficult over time and so I am going to make that section more general, including Comment as well as Did You Know?.
December highlights
- On 5th December I attended a meeting at the Doddington & Rollo Association Hall, which had been called by “Wandsworth Against Cuts”. Speakers included Austin Mitchell and John McDonnell, both Labour MPs, and a tenant speaker from East London. The meeting was inspired by the Government cuts and their impact on local government services and by the Council’s response to the riots and specifically the threat to evict the families of rioters.
- Perhaps 50 people turned up, which is not bad for a public meeting nowadays but these protesters are never going to achieve their objectives if they ignore the Labour Party, the most powerful anti-Tory vote in Wandsworth, and for that matter most of the country. So whilst I have a lot of time for left-winger, John McDonnell, I cannot say quite the same about Austin Mitchell, who is, for me as they say, “all mouth and no trousers”. And really what is the point of having that kind of meeting without one single Labour councillor being invited to speak – we are the only real opposition to the Tories and having a protest without us is pointless. (OK, this is a bit of a beef from me because I have done more to publicise the ludicrous policy of evicting innocent mothers and children than anyone else and they didn’t even bother to ask me to speak – but so be it).
- The Council Meeting on 7th December was a curious affair. The Council is pursuing a programme of cuts, which meant a couple of million from education and £1 million from Social Services, but it was very difficult to work out what they meant as the Tories were indulging in salami slicing – a small slice off every item of the budget with a few backroom staff cut here and a few more cut there, enabling them to say that they were not cutting services. Services will, of course, be affected but perhaps not in very public ways – just delays in getting answers and slower telephone response rates – that sort of thing.
- The Tories chose to have the set-piece debate on the economy and its impact on the Nine Elms area, which seemed an odd choice given that the owners of Battersea Power Station went bankrupt in the same week. The other big debate centred on the Council’s decision to abolish Wandsworth’s Parks Police. The proposal is that the Met Police will take over the role and save the Council money. No doubt the debate will be on U-Tube at some point though I can’t find it yet. However, if you haven’t yet seen a Council debate let me give you the link to the speech I made in September against the Council’s policy to evict the families of convicted rioters. The link is:-
- The Planning Applications Committee on 15th December was a very low key affair. But on 19th December I attended a small exhibition at the Council about the Council’s plans for the future of Eltringham School. It was a “Drop-in” style of consultation and it was a bit difficult to assess the number of locals who attended or their general reaction to the plans, which are for a residential development. As a member of the Committee I will have to give my view on this in the next couple of months. Do let me know if you have any views on the matter.
- Did you see the Evening Standard, 14th December? On page 6 there was an article headed “Google puts Battersea on the map after six years of dodgy directions”, which majored on my part in getting Google to move the name “Clapham” from its position on Google maps above the Battersea Arts Centre (the old Battersea Town Hall) to its rightful place over Clapham High Street.
- For the details of the story see this website www.lovebattersea.org.uk. But let me correct the details. As the site says I am a joint-Chair of the organisation trying to get Battersea named “properly”, but the rather jokey quotes attributed to me by the ES actually belong to my good friend Philip Beddows, a maverick rather amusing ex-Tory councillor. Oh, and as for the organisation: it’s called SW11tch – play on SW11 and switch the name from Clapham to Battersea – get it!
- Philip’s grander fantasy is to get the station renamed Battersea Junction but somehow I think that is a trifle ambitious!
My Programme for January
- I have a meeting of the Finance & Corporate Resources Committee, the Council’s premier policy committee, on 25th January.
- The Battersea Park School Finance & Personnel Committees on 23rd.
- The Court Case against a Wandsworth tenant’s son continues to sentencing!
- The Planning Applications Committee on the 19th.
Did you know?
That my fellow councillor, Simon Hogg, has been encouraging me to write a blog. So I have taken him at his word and started one. I am not really sure that it is my style. I write long pieces, which are not the blog style. But my latest entry is about the appalling story from one Tory councillor and his views about Council tenants. Here is the link – let me know what you think! https://tonybelton.wordpress.com/
Yours sincerely
Tony Belton, Latchmere Labour Councillor
Left & right hand at odds in Government policy
At least in principle, one of Cameron’s best decisions is to continue with and develop Labour’s Troubled Families initiatives. Today, I heard Louise Casey, the Head of the Troubled Families Team in CLG, describing her work on the Family Intervention projects (FIPs) and very impressive she was too.
120,000 troubled families cost public services the best part of £9billion per year or about £75,000 per family per year. These particular families impose a work burden on the NHS, the criminal justice system, housing and education services and so on. Some families are said to be “clients” of more than 20 public agencies.
The cycle of deprivation, illiteracy, truancy, criminality and a range of other issues can easily be imagined. Casey, and Cameron, wants to break into this cycle of despair and make life better for these 120,000 families and their neighbours in particular and the rest of us in general.
How strange then that the very same Government is currently consulting on making it easier, and almost mandatory, for Councils to evict the families of the convicted. So one arm of Government is working hard to support troubled families, whilst another arm wishes to impose severe homelessness and stress on many of the same families.
I am not saying that all troubled families are in trouble with the law or that all in trouble with the law are troubled families but only a fool would not accept the likelihood of a very considerable overlap. I plead with the Government (and Wandsworth Council) to drop this punitive and self-defeating policy of evicting the innocent families of rioters – and other criminals.
Is it Clapham or Battersea?
A jokey addendum to the court case featured in my last blog is that the Crown described Curry’s as being in Clapham’s high street. Judge Darling, obviously a south Londoner, questionned this and the two of them did an elaborate dance of misunderstandings. Whilst the judge retired to consider his verdict I pointed out to the Crown prosecutor that Clapham High Road was the best part of a mile away and that Curry’s was actually in Battersea’s main, if not High, street.
When the Judge returned the prosecutor jumped up, apologised for his lack of knowledge of the geography of south London and asked for the record to be put straight. Judge Darling told him that was exactly what he had been trying to tell him but that his ignorance would be forgiven. In future I will have all those guilty of this heinous sin up in front of Judge Darling!
Justice for a rioter and his family?
I went to the Crown Court on 10 January to hear Daniel’s sentence – you will remember I was interested in his case following his involvement in the riots on August 8th in Clapham Junction. The headline is that he received 11 months, which Judge Darling said would mean that he would serve half that time in custody and the other half “free” on licence. The Judge also said that the 83 days he had been on conditional bail would be counted against the sentence leaving, according to my calculation, Daniel serving about a further 87 days in custody.
Judge Darling said in sentencing that this was the “most tragic” case he had come across in the whole riot aftermath. He accepted Daniel’s story about how he happened to be in Clapham Junction and that he arrived on the scene after Curry’s had been broken into. He acknowledged that Daniel was of good character (that is had no previous of any kind) indeed the Judge went on to say that Daniel was an exceptional young man with some level of educational achievement. Daniel was a Christian with both a capital and a lower case c, he said, working for the good of the community – the Judge said “an aid worker”, a helper, a doer with many good character references.
But in the aftermath of the riots despite all mitigation and against the PSR (Pre-Sentence Reports done by the Probation Service)recommendation, he, the Judge, had to take into account society’s concerns and fears about the events of August and that he had no choice but to impose some level of custodial sentence. (I should add that the Judge retired for 46 minutes to consider the sentence – he clearly did not do it lightly)
I have two comments: first that Wandsworth Council shows zero respect for the “family” if it pursues, as it intends to do, its policy of eviction with all the consequences that this will bring to bear on the mother and sister. I know the mother quite well and it is clear, and totally unsurprising, that she is under some considerable stress.
Secondly, that the establishment has got itself into a bit of a mess about sentencing in this situation. Whilst Daniel aged 18, with no previous record at all, got 11 months, a man aged 30, sentenced at the same time as Daniel with 11 previous convictions for 22 offences having served two separate terms of 6 and 7 years, got a custodial sentence of 20 months! I cannot believe that this variation of sentence 11:20 for these two men would have been the same in normal circumstances. The establishment has in my view put its fears before the cause of justice
Tony Belton
Tony Belton 