July 10, 2017  

Councillor Tony Belton’s North Battersea July, 2017, Newsletter (# 97)

  1. First, apologies for failing to produce a June edition of my newsletter. Mrs. May’s mistaken decision to call an election cost her plenty but it also meant I lost a political bet and didn’t finish the June edition! I lost the bet but, as she discovered, I was absolutely right about why she shouldn’t have called the election!
  2. On the 1st May, I went to the Old Vic to see Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead, a play by Tom Stoppard. R and G are two minor characters in Shakespeare’s classic Hamlet. They are incidental characters in the tragic drama of Hamlet’s decline and death. Stoppard’s genius is to make a funny but tragic story out of the inconsequentiality of their lives and their best intentions. It’s not quite the tragedy of little men within a bigger tragedy for a bigger man, with all the elitism that would imply but it’s pretty near to it – brilliant.
  3. And then the next morning, the 2nd May, news started trickling through that Labour’s candidate for the 6th June General Election was likely to be Marsha de Cordova – “who she?”, I heard, asked by 1,000+ Battersea LP (BLP) members. Marsha, of whom more later, turned out to be a charming and attractive candidate, enthusiastic and friendly. Here she is, front left, at a “candidate adoption party” with GLA member, Leonie Cooper and previous Labour MP, Martin Linton.
  4. The selection was done by a committee of the London Regional Party and the party’s National Executive Committee (NEC), inevitably dominated by party apparatchiks. This was not the way one would ideally choose the candidate and admittedly the election was sprung on us, but all could see that there was at least a possibility that the election would happen before the scheduled 2020 date. The Labour Party should have been more prepared – bad mark against Labour’s Leadership!
  5. I volunteered to be Marsha’s agent for the campaign – what a mug to volunteer for all that work! Party agents, amongst other things, have a legal duty to ensure that their party’s expenditure for the election does not exceed the legal limit, which in our case was approximately £14,000, i.e. we, the agents, are the ones that go to prison if it does. The deadline for the statutory return of election expenditure is 14th July.
  6. Meanwhile I had arranged to have coffee on May 3rd with one Matt Rosenberg to discuss his ideas for making a film of the Winstanley estate with, and even written by, pupils of Falconbrook School, Latchmere. It turned out that Matt had quite a record of making films/DVDs of London communities and neighbourhoods. It seems like a fascinating proposal, which we will pursue in the autumn.
  7. I got back to the office, just in time to meet Marsha, then a quick drive round the constituency with Marsha and a photographer to picture her with the Power Station, Clapham Junction and Queenstown Road stations and, of course, St. Mary’s Church in the background. You may have seen the one of her from the other side of the river with the Power Station in the background. A few days later, I took this one, which was used on her election address. I am quite proud of it!
  8. On 4th May, we had canvassing to be organised, stationary to be printed, members to be contacted, supplies to be ordered. We also had a photo-shoot outside the Battersea Arts Centre with all of the current Labour councillors in Battersea, the GLA member Leonie Cooper and two ex-MPs, Lord Alf Dubs and Martin Linton.
  9. Friday, 5th May was quiet; just Marsha’s election leaflet to write, to design and to send to the printers. A few discussions about apostrophes (‘), split infinitives, spellings, “Are they Tories or Conservatives?” – that sort of thing. (Did you know that it has been a minor Labour Party debate for years “whether to refer to our main opponents as Conservatives, vaguely respectful and formal, or as Tories, more colloquial and less respectful. I belong to the “Tories” school of thought. What do you think?)
  10. On the 6th my partner and I went to the Royal Opera House to see the UK premier of Thomas Adès’s opera, The Exterminating Angel – pretty unusual for me, but Adès’s mother was my partner’s flatmate in London immediately after university and so we are old family friends. It’s not that I haven’t been to the opera a few times; I could almost claim to be a fan of, in particular, Mozart, but Thomas Adès is a very modern, “post-melodic” composer. His opera was staged impressively and sung brilliantly. The story, derived from the Luis Bunuel film of the same name, is of an elite dinner party, symbolically trapped in a stately home, deserted by the servants, helpless at caring for themselves and increasingly and pathetically blind to their circumstances – it could easily be a metaphor for a United Kingdom blindly, blithely and arrogantly trapped into a hopeless Brexit – except that I believe the UK will escape from the current Brexit impasse. How? Let’s wait and see.
  11. On the following day, 7th May, Marsha and I attended a meeting about gun and knife crime at the Battersea Chapel, Wye Street. It was called by Reverend LeRoy Burke and was one of the most extraordinary meetings, of the many I have attended. It began a little after 6 in the evening and was still going strong when we left at 10.30. There must have been the best part of 400 people there, of whom perhaps 10 were white and the other 390 of mixed and Afro-Caribbean background. At least 50 people spoke of their anger and concern about the extent of knife crime in Britain, in London and in particular in Battersea. It was part revivalist, part confessional but, whatever it was, it was so totally different from any Council organised meeting on such an issue would have been. Men got up and spoke, (though sorry to say it of my sex) but much of their contribution was bluster and anger. Women spoke with emotion and passion, they spoke of the need for the community to come together to rid itself of this scourge, but not in a self-pitying manner rather in a determined and encouraging way. It was impressive but is there the will or the organisation to make it any more than a one-off protest?
  12. On Tuesday, 9th May, Marsha and I had a pre-meeting with Wandsworth’s Electoral Registration Officer (ERO), in order to make sure that I submitted her nomination for the election correctly by the legal closure date of 11th May. The ERO had similar pre-meetings with all the parties competing in the three elections of Battersea, Putney and Tooting. I must say that the ERO spoon-fed the political parties in the three Wandsworth constituencies and if any one of us had got the nomination process wrong they would have been be truly and amazingly incompetent!
  13. On the 10th, I took Marsha to meet Victoria Rodney, founder and boss of the Mercy Foundation, in her office in Falcon Road. What a woman Victoria is! As far as I can see she self-funds and supports an organisation, whose sole function is to provide various basic training to under-educated, usually ethnic minorities. I have helped her with teaching English to Somali refugees, but her organisation largely trains people in the use of IT and other basic skills, such as childcare. (So, imagine our surprise to see Victoria appearing in the Tory candidate, Jane Ellison’s, election literature – just shows the difference between us party hacks and someone like Victoria, who is simply keen on support wherever she can get it!)
  14. From there we went to the Katherine Low Settlement (KLS), where Marsha met a couple of client groups, one of the elderly and one of the educationally challenged. I should say that in these days of limited state support, KLS, located in Battersea High Street, is now one of Battersea’s key social and welfare organisations.
  15. Some Council events carry on regardless of elections and they include the Planning Applications Committee on Tuesday, 16th May. But on this occasion, we were very much going through the process of democratic review. I don’t think there was one item on which there was any disagreement – all the applications went through, as they say, on the nod.
  16. Then on the next day, Wednesday, we had the Annual Council Meeting. This is the annual Mayor-Making ceremony: that’s nothing to do with London Mayor Sadiq Khan but the swearing in of Wandsworth Borough’s ceremonial leading citizen: in this case Mayor Jim Madden. It’s a pleasant enough social occasion, the food isn’t bad and the drink is sufficient, but frankly it is becoming a bit of a farce. Every new Mayor adds a little embellishment that appeals to him/her so that the ceremony becomes less and less relevant to the business of the Council. An old colleague of mine would have called it Municipal Tom-Foolery and a new one, Queenstown’s Cllr Dickerdem, commented acerbically that one would never guess from the evening’s processes that the Council was cutting public services.
  17. On the next day, back to KLS with Marsha and a mid-day performance of The Wait, written and performed by the Gold and Silver Players of the Katherine Low Settlement, a troupe whose only qualification is to be 60+. This was a quite brilliantly written, if far too short, very witty take off of life from a modern pensioners’ point of view – about queues in the surgery, young people not offering seats on buses – the stuff of ordinary life – very entertaining.
  18. On the 19th, Marsha and I joined half a dozen other Labour councillors at Wandsworth Foodbank’s presentation of their annual report and the statistics on foodbank use in Wandsworth. This year it was even more startling than in 2016. Foodbank use has risen in Wandsworth, one of the richest areas in the whole country, by three times the national rate of increase and last year foodbank use in the borough rose by 25% compared to a 4% increase across London as a whole. Clearly the safety net for Wandsworth’s most vulnerable residents is broken.
  19. Then on 22nd May came the ghastly Manchester bombing – what a tragic waste of young life. How cruel, how wicked, and yet life does and must go on. So, in what might seem a heartless way, those of us involved in the election campaign started thinking about what it meant for us. To start with Battersea Society’s York Gardens hustings meeting for the 23rd was cancelled. Then all the major parties announced the suspension of campaigning for a couple of days. But what did that mean? All canvassing, all deliveries? We were already on a tight schedule; when would it be considered seemly and decent to start again? Indeed, without military style control and discipline (and communications system) over hundreds of volunteers how could one in any case guarantee a halt? Suffice to say, we worked things out and carried on – sadly.
  20. On 2nd June, my partner and I went to the Barbican to see a concert, conducted by Thomas Adès. The star event as far as I was concerned was his rendition of Beethoven’s 2nd symphony. You could hear Beethoven’s development from his almost Mozartian virtuoso beginnings to the full romantic genius of his maturity. Congratulations to Thomas.
  21. Marsha and I went off to my favourite Street Party, on 3rd June: the Triangle (Poyntz, Shellwood and Knowsley Roads) Party. After years of not winning raffles, tombolas, etc., I have now won two in a row at the Triangle. My partner and I had a very nice dinner at the Nutbourne Restaurant, Ransome’s Dock – and very nice too but I’ll have to avoid winning again!
  22. The next day we attended the much more ambitious Old York Road Street Party. This was on a much larger and more commercial scale than the Triangle, but of course it was less intimate – still fun though.
  23. One of the interesting features of being Marsha’s agent was attending religious events, which I would never usually go near. So, for example, on 3rd June we attended a Muslim meeting at the St. Anne’s Church Hall, St. Anne’s Hill, and then on 4th we went to the Ransom Pentecostal African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church in Mallinson Road, off the Northcote Road. Marsha was invited to speak at both. The Muslim meeting was gender separated, ordered, quiet and orchestrated. The Pentecostal Church was emotional, exuberant and inclusive with a brilliant jazz pianist. Guess which a) I preferred and b) which I think has the greater future in this modern world?
  24. And then on Monday, back to serious campaigning, first with the Borough-wide South Thames College hustings at mid-day. This had 2 Lib/Dems, a UKIP candidate, a Green party candidate and Marsha, Battersea’s Labour candidate. The audience, a group of maybe 50, was a very diverse set of further education college students, some of whom were interested from the off and some were bored and speedy departees (Interestingly enough when the UKIP candidate got into a dispute with the chair, a fair number walked out; they were not interested in any hassle). It was the first time Marsha had “appeared” at a hustings meeting. I was impressed by the amount of homework she did in advance but also couldn’t help noticing how nervous she was. She needn’t have worried. Marsha has such an authentic, enthusiastic personality that she has a head start over almost all competitors!
  25. Then pretty well straight off to Newton Prep, opposite the Dogs’ Home, for a very different kind of hustings. Chaired by the Headteacher and attended by pupils and parents, with pre-written questions carefully presented by pupils, this was a much more ordered occasion. The panel was the Lib/Dem’s Richard Davis and Marsha but also the Conservative candidate, Jane Ellison, seen here at the lectern. Jane, our MP since 2010, knew her stuff, OK, but she does not put over her message with the same passion and belief as does Marsha. I know I am biased but I think Marsha won the hustings competition.
  26. Then to Election Day itself, June 8th and, who should I meet outside my front door but Latchmere personality Joseph Afrane, pictured here – I love the shoes! I have “fought” 13 Council elections, 9 or 10 London elections for Mayor, GLC, etc., a few EU elections and this was my 12th General Election, so I wasn’t up at 5 am delivering polling day leaflets as some of our keenest volunteers were. Nevertheless I was busy from about 9 am until 4 or 5 on Friday morning. So it was a pretty long day. In many ways, it was like all the rest: chaotic, frenetic, a few lost tempers (I got shirty a couple of times, including to one Tory volunteer outside the George Shearing Centre and if you are reading this then apologies – put it down to the heat of the day!), mistakes, heart-warming stories about the great efforts some people make to register their vote, and exhaustion.
  27. On election days, I have never been totally confident of victory, nor indeed of defeat. But I was very confident of a Labour victory in Tooting and knew we were doing quite well in Battersea, so I was looking forward to the count. I stopped off at home and had a quick shower at 10 pm when I picked up the exit-polls announced on TV. Were we really doing that well? It looked good from the start as the Labour votes mounted up but there was a slight hiatus towards the end as suddenly several hundred Tory votes took Ellison into what appeared like a slight lead. I was girding myself up to demand a recount but then suddenly a large bundle of Labour votes tipped the balance into a de Cordova 25,292: Ellison 22,876 victory with a 9.95% swing to Labour.
  28. I know Jane Ellison pretty well. She has always been an honourable opponent and has worked with me on some issues, especially planning. Of course, as a member of a Tory Government she has had to vote for some awful policies, not least Article 5 and, therefore, Brexit. I can only imagine how disappointed she must be and for that reason, if nothing else, she has my sympathies.
  29. On 15th June, Marsha invited me to her “swearing in” in the House of Commons. I had never been to this ceremony before and in some ways it is a very mundane process – after all they need to swear in 650 MPs at about 30 seconds per MP, which makes it a 6 hour process. But after Marsha’s “turn” we went and had lunch on the terrace and toured the balance. This picture shows Queenstown Councillor Aydin Dickerdem, photographing Marsha and her friend and supporter Tracey Robinson.
  30. But over-shadowing all that was the disastrous fire that struck Grenfell Tower late on 14th June. This meant that the Housing Committee on the evening of the 15th was dominated by discussion of Wandsworth’s many tower blocks and in particular the three blocks with similar cladding to Grenfell Tower. The three are Latchmere’s Castlemaine and Weybridge Point and Putney’s Sudbury House. I think the Committee members gave the officers a pretty good grilling, but, to be fair, I also thought the officers responded with conviction and sincerity. Watch for cladding replacement and other remedial works in the next few months.
  31. On 18th June, I went with Marsha to the nation-wide Great Get Together in commemoration of Jo Cox, the Labour MP murdered a year ago in her constituency of Batley, Yorkshire. The Get Together was held in the grounds of the Holy Trinity, Clapham Common. It was the right and positive way to celebrate Jo Cox’s life.
  32. On the 21st June, I had the Planning Applications Committee. This had quite a few very interesting applications all over the Borough but the one that dominated the evening was the Battersea Power Station developer’s bid to reduce the volume of affordable housing that they are committed to deliver along with their total development at the Power Station. You have probably seen some of the controversy around this application with London Mayor, Sadiq Khan, coming out strongly against the application. The Labour members of the Committee, and one of the Tory councillors, hardly needed Sadiq’s exhortations to vote against, which we duly did. But, unfortunately, the Tory majority granted permission.
  33. And then on 24th June I was off to Sardinia with the grandchildren for a week – a break at last! I will report on that next month along with comments on the Finance Committee of 29th June, which had interesting implications for Tours Passage and Falcon Park – both in Latchmere.
  34. During the last month I put out a notice titled, Can you help me? In it I described the predicament of a young single mother in North Battersea, who found herself homeless. The Council provided her with a flat but she had no possessions and so I put out a request for help. I am delighted to say that quite a few of you volunteered furniture, kitchen utensils and even money. Well, in response another of you wrote to me saying, ”A neighbour sent me this as they knew I had some bedding etc. We have a sofa bed in pretty good condition, and single bedding – sheets, duvets etc that has only been used one year while my daughter was at uni. We’ve also got a dining table which is lovely but probably a bit big for a small family. I should also have some kitchen stuff. We live near Battersea Park, is any of it ok for you?” I am not sure that I want to become a volunteer Exchange and Mart, but if any of the above is of interest to you then do let me know.

My Programme for July

  1. On 1st July, there was the Falcon Festival and then there was an Independence Day Party that my colleague Councillor Peter Carpenter gives in honour of his American wife.
  2. On 2nd July, we have organised a fund-raising rounders match in Battersea Park.
  3. On US Independence Day, I had a meeting of the Council’s Design Panel, which is spending time creating and extending a Wandsworth heritage database.
  4. On 10th July, there is a meeting of the Wandsworth Conservation Advisory Committee.
  5. Two days later, there is the last full Council Meeting before the recess.
  6. On 13th the three Latchmere councillors are due to meet the contractors for the Winstanley regeneration programme, which first talked about in 2011, looks like really starting later this year. After the disaster of Grenfell Tower, we will need to take particular note of all fire safety measures!
  7. On the 14th July, there is a BBQ for Doris Emmerton Court residents, to which I have been invited, and the annual Battersea Society Garden Party in the grounds of St. Mary’s Church.
  8. On the 20th I have the Planning Application Committee.
  9. On the 25th we have an inspection of St. James’ Grove, which will be particularly interesting given that “cladded” Castlemaine is a major part of the estate. After Grenfell Tower this will be an important occasion.
  10. On 29th July, it is my turn to take the councillors’ surgery at Battersea Library.

Opinion Piece

Two months ago I wrote that “we in Battersea should, therefore, vote for the candidate most likely to argue (and vote) against Hard Brexit, whatever that is, and fight still for a Remain position”. I did say that the Lib/Dem candidate would also vote for a Remain position but that the Lib/Dems were not a realistic winning option.

In that context, some have argued that Marsha’s vote against the Chuka Umunna amendment to the Queen’s speech was a mistake and, worse, a betrayal of her constituents. I think that is a rather premature judgement. Clearly both major parties have major difficulties coming to terms with Brexit/Remain, especially given the Referendum’s majority in favour of Brexit and given the complex make-up of the Labour and Conservative parties.

I believe that it is probable that either or both of the Labour and Tory Parties will face a major internal crisis over the EU. How they get there and who gets there first will be major factors in the future of the UK. I am sure that there is much more jockeying for position to come and I know that Marsha will take an active, anti-Brexit role in the parliamentary debates.

Do you know?

Last month, I asked whether anyone knew anything about this house, including the simple question “Where is it?”

Well, the only correct answers came from people who lived there or were friends of those who did. The house is 22 Mossbury Road, barely 100 yards from the Falcon and the centre of modern Battersea. Actually, the rather more imposing traditional front is on the west side of the building, the right as you look at it, but unfortunately can only be seen from inside the property.

The house is one of the oldest in Battersea, dating from the very first years of the nineteenth century and so about 200 years old.

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About Tony Belton

Labour Councillor for Latchmere Ward 1972-2022, now Battersea Park Ward, London Borough of Wandsworth Ever hopeful Spurs supporter; Lane visit to the Lane, 1948 Olympics. Why don't they simply call the Tottenham Hotspur Stadium, The Lane? Once understood IT but no longer

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