Councillor Tony Belton’s Latchmere January Newsletter (# 56)
December and 2013 highlights
1. There really wasn’t much to say about December except that I went to the Xmas socials/parties/fairs of the Falcon Road and Kambala residents, the Big Local organisation, Battersea Arts Centre and of constituents Vicky and Jacob – thanks to all. There was also nothing of any great interest at the December Planning Applications Committee, and so with nothing much to say about December I thought I’d pull out my highlights of 2013 as recorded in the newsletters. And here they are.
2. No. 1 for me has to be the trip that we three Latchmere councillors, Wendy Speck, Simon Hogg and myself, made to Palestine in February. This, of course, had nothing to do with Latchmere, Battersea or Wandsworth (!) but your three Labour councillors went on this fact-finding trip, purely for interest – and it was certainly packed with interest. Here is a picture of the three of us with a banner given to us by the Mayor of Hebron. (As I said then, before any cynics out there think otherwise, it was all paid for out of our own pockets and had nothing to do with the Cou
ncil!).
The trip did give me a chance to take my picture of the year, and here it is – a cactus caught by the flash-light in the Judean desert at sunset, high above Bethlehem – and my was it cold.
3. The most significant ward issues of the year were the Council’s decision to spend up to £100 million on the regeneration of Latchmere and Roehampton wards, of which our share could be about £60 million, the development of the Big Local project in the Winstanley Estate area and the Mosque planning application. The regeneration project is at the stage where major decisions are soon to be taken about the extent of demolition and new build and the Big Local is also at a crucial consultation 
stage. I think we will know much more about the regeneration programme later in January. For some of the problems as well as the potential in the regeneration project, see Tony Belton, ‘All Change North of the Junction’, Battersea Matters: Newsletter of the Battersea Society (Winter, 2013), pp. 4-5.
4. In May I was delighted to report that Wendy Speck, Simon Hogg and I were re-selected as Labour’s candidates for the Council elections this coming May 22nd. Two months later my friend and colleague, Will Martindale, was also selected as Labour’s Parliamentary candidate at the General Election in 2015. Here he is pictured after the selection.
5. I was very pleased to take 30 or so local kids to meet the Mayor and to learn something about the Council and its functions. Here they are with the Mayor, and their mentor Victoria Rodney of the Mercy Foundation, on the “marble staircase” in the Town Hall.
6. A sad feature of the year – for me at any rate was the Government’s decision to take Battersea Park School out of the Borough’s control and make it a Harris Academy. As a consequence of this decision I resigned as Vice-Chair of the Governors after more than a dozen years. Rather more important the Head, Gale Keller, also decided to resign as of 31st December.
7. On a very practical level, with considerable support from many of you, I have fought off an idea from Network Rail to close the Grant Road exit from CJ at an earlier time of night; I have got the bus-stop replaced opposite the end of Culvert Road; addressed the Ahmadiyya Muslim Community Eid Celebration in York Gardens Library; dealt with pr
obably a couple of hundred cases to do with housing, planning, transport and jobs. I also attended probably about 40 Council and Committee meetings and another 20/30 resident meetings. Wendy Speck and Simon Hogg are equally active in different and complementary ways. Wendy is the Chair of Chesterton Governors and does a tremendous amount in and about the school as well as being a very conscientious councillor. Simon is a policy man and very active in the Committees as well as being very involved in the Winstanley Estate regeneration.
8. And of course my review of 2013 would not be complete without a brief mention of the dreaded streptococcal G poisoning; what a pain, literally, but it is at last showing mild signs of recovery!
9. Finally my Did You Know sections last year were about the Katherine Low Settlement, the Latchmere Estate, Maureen Larkin, Senia Dedic, Darius Knight, Elizabeth Braund, the London, Chatham and Dover Railway Tavern, London’s major transport problem 100 years ago – horse manure; Caius House, Caroline Ganley and John Archer.
My Programme for January
1. On the 9th January I had the Borough Residents Forum, which is actually a bit of a misnomer as by residents is meant Council tenants and leaseholders, and in the week beginning 13th January I have the Passenger Transport Liaison Committee, a Winstanley Estate Steering Group and the Met Police’s Special Neighbourhood Team.
2. The Planning Applications Committee this month is on the 20th and that is followed by the Strategic Planning and Transport and Housing Committees on the 22nd and 23rd.
3. There is also an important Big Local consultation meeting on the 25th at the Wilditch Centre.
Did you know the connection between Maysoule Road and the Victoria Embankment Gardens?
You may remember that in my December Newsletter I had a picture of 
Hyacinth Stone of Buxton House at the John Archer plaque unveiling and that I promised that I would tell her about the connection between Buxton House, Maysoule Road, and Victoria Embankment Gardens. Well here it is.
Not long ago I was early for a meeting in Westminster and so I went for a short walk in Victoria Embankment Gardens. When there I had a look at a monument I had seen before but never particularly noted. Here it is with its inscription. Imagine my surprise to discover that it was a monument to one of the early campaigners against the slavery and below is the inscription.
And of course all the blocks in Maysoule Road are named after many of the men responsible for the abolition of slavery in the British Empire, as it was then. Buxton House is almost certainly named after T Fowell Buxton, who took over the leadership of the anti-slavery cause in the House of Commons in 1825 after Wilberforce retired. Wilberforce, who of course has another Council block on York Road named after him, had succeeded in getting the slave trade abolished in 1807.
But that was the trade in slaves from Africa to the New World. The abolition of slavery in the 
British Empire had to wait until 1834 and was achieved under Buxton’s leadership. Charles Buxton was his Liberal (i.e. radical, as there was no Labour Party then) MP son, who had the monument built.
The monument is in easy view for any passenger on the 87 bus into Westminster, on the right immediately after Lambeth Bridge. And you will note the names include Clarkson, after whom another block in Maysoule Road is named.
Twelve Angry Men – The Garrick Theatre
Why would you wish to see this very faithful production of a classic film? Partly, of course, for the bravura ensemble acting, but also, in this cynical age, for its statement of faith in the American (and hence the British) legal system and the implicit trust and belief in the democratic system. The play, an undoubted minor masterpiece by Reginald Rose, a journeyman 1950s TV writer, is a beautifully crafted story of a jury’s deliberations on the guilt or otherwise of an 18 year-old accused of killing his father in a fit of rage and impotence.
For those of us, who have been fortunate enough to have been jurymen (or women) in interesting cases, there will be references, which relate to our own experiences. Some of us may even have felt that we played the part of Juror 8, played exquisitely at the West End’s Garrick Theatre by Martin Shaw and in the film by Henry Fonda. For me Fonda’s film character comes over as a rather pompous, almost saintly figure. Shaw is a much more convincing and far less sanctified and hence a more human character.
The play is, of course, dated. There are no women or ethnic minorities in the jury. The closest approximation is an Eastern European, probably a Jewish emigrant from 1930s fascism, who is both a vehicle for the most explicit pro-democracy speeches and the butt of the most virulently bigoted and prejudiced comments from the “know-nothing”, hard-liner “hang ’em and flog ’em” brigade.
The dominance of white men expresses a truth about the time. Rose wrote the play following his own experience in a 1954 New York jury. But in his play, originally called Thunder on Sycamore Street, the story was about a black family. However, to appease the powers that were on 1950s Broadway, it was changed to what I guess was meant to be a Puerto Rican family (the play is not explicit on this point).
The scene is set in the sweltering heat of a New York summer afternoon. The claustrophobic atmosphere is heightened by the coming storm, after which the play was first named.A big baseball game is dues to start in a couple of hours. At least one juryman has a ticket and so there are time pressures to add to the climatic ones.
The action unfolds with the bigotry and indolence of some jurors, plus a fair amount of apathy, slowly but surely losing out to the voice of reason expressed by others “led” by the Shaw/Fonda character. But it is a close struggle. The message is not exactly hidden, or perhaps even subtle, but it is a peaon of praise for democratic values, whilst at the same time sharply observing how dependent they are upon the importance of “taking part”, of standing up for individual rights and for defending individual liberties. It should be compulsory viewing for anyone intending to take part in political or civil processes – my fellow councillors (not to mention MPs), please take note and go.
Rose is rightly dismissive of one juror, who wants a quick decision so that he can get to the game, and of another, who gets bored with the argument and will go whichever way brings a quick result regardless of whether an innocent man gets sent to the electric chair or a murderer goes free. Rose is not, however, without compassion for the troubled juror 3, who has covered up his own inadequate parenting, by holding out to the last for a guilty verdict. And, for my money, Lee J Cobb in the film and Jeff Fahey at the Garrick take the acting prize. In towering performances they display arrogant prejudice, gradually collapsing and leading to personal, political and moral disintegration.
Finally, it was interesting to note that this classic film, known and seen by millions, had by West End standards a relatively young audience, who gave it a storming curtain call. Rose clearly has a message which many of today’s audience believe still to be highly relevant. And they are right.
30/12/13
The Duck House – a comedy of modern politics, Vaudeville Theatre, 20/12/13
Sir Peter Viggers’ Duck House was almost certain to star in a comedy at some point and here it is in the eponymous play by Dan Patterson and Colin Swash. It appears on the Vaudeville stage along with hanging baskets (Margaret Beckett), wisteria (David Cameron), elephant lamps (Michael Gove), a glitter toilet seat (John Reid) and a massage chair (Shahid Malik).
The star of the show is Labour MP, Robert Houston, played enthusiastically and manically by Ben Miller. The story centres on his attempt to jump the Labour ship as the June, 2010, election approaches, hopefully to become a Tory Cabinet Minister under David Cameron. To do this he has, of course, to appear squeaky clean to Tory grandee, Sir Norman Cavendish.
Houston’s desire for a more sophisticated lifestyle compares the cultivation of his ambitions with the pathetically low aesthetic tastes of so much of the expenses saga – a glitter toilet seat – really! And it therefore becomes a beautiful target for farce especially when Sir Norman’s bizarre sexual habits are revealed.
It’s great slapstick stuff and well worth a visit, especially to see how many of today’s news stories appear in the script. We had amusing references to Nigella’s problems as a witness and to the current “recommendation” to raise MP salaries by 11% and the audience did have fun working out how many particular references they got. But how the German tourists sitting in the seats behind us were doing I couldn’t quite imagine.
But the amount of custard pie thrown at Sir Norman smacked a little of desperation. Both the play and the players found it difficult to keep a consistently high volume of laughs. I rather wonder whether this displayed a difficulty between the two authors. That obviously works well on occasions – see Frank Muir and Dennis Norden but the Duck House left me feeling that sometimes we were watching a not completely happy compromise between a subtle political satire and an uproarious Whitehall farce.
At the heart of the saga is the belief, of course, amongst many MPs (and residents of what Washington would call the Beltway – not exactly the metropolitan elite more the M25 Ringway) that they are under-paid and, since they deserve to get paid more, then clearly it is perfectly acceptable to buck the system. Indeed, as the curtain falls, Miller as the hapless Houston, his career falling apart, makes a very explicit plea for some decent objectivity from the audience.
But surely the problem is that most people do not think of £70K being a very low salary. Moreover, there is no evidence that the pay levels are seriously detracting from the numbers wishing to become MPs. And the script did not look at both sides of what is surely a valid debate. As a result, the audience was left feeling that, if anything, MPs as venal and incompetent as those on stage are over-paid and not under-paid.
Councillor Tony Belton’s Latchmere December Newsletter (# 55)
November highlights
1. Thanks again to everyone asking about the streptococcal G poisoning – slow improvement but not brilliant prognosis is all I can say at present. Maybe a knee replacement is called for!
2. I never like to resign. I always think it better to stay in the battle fighting away for one’s corner. But I am afraid that the saga of Battersea Park School (BPS) just became too much! When the Board of Governors are, in effect, ordered to vote for the school to be made a Harris sponsored Academy despite being overwhelmingly opposed in principle and told that they will be replaced by Harris appointed placemen then it is time to stand up, as they say, and be counted. Not, I am afraid, that my resignation in mid-November will be seen as any more than a gesture but given that I think Michael Gove is destroying our educational system, I didn’t have much choice. STOP PRESS since the end of November the Chair of Governors has resigned and the Head, Gale Keller, who has been main man behind the resuscitation of the school over recent years 
has also resigned. There is now an eight month hiatus until Harris take over – this does not look good for the students and all thanks to the Government’s cavalier attitude towards our schools!
3. On the 13th November I attended the unveiling of the John Archer plaque at 55 Brynmaer Gardens, which despite being on the “wrong side” of Battersea Park Road is in fact in a small enclave of Latchmere ward. Here is a picture of the plaque itself, the Mayor, Wendy Speck, my fellow councillor, and me.
John Archer was the first black mayor in the UK (actually not true as there was a little known black mayor of the small Norfolk town of Thetford, but people conveniently forget that one!) and I have covered him before in one of my Did You Know sections. I have never done this before but since November was the centenary of his election by 30 votes to 29 to be Mayor of Battersea I thought it was fair enough to do a repeat – see below.
Oh and by the way here is another picture of me with Hyacinth Stone, a Latchmere resident and constituent who was at the unveiling. Hyacinth lives in Buxton House and in her honour I am goi
ng to do a “Did you know” next month which links Buxton House directly to Victoria Tower Gardens, Westminster.
4. The November Planning Applications Committees really was very thin, at least from the point of view of any Latchmere resident and hence unusually I will not even report back from it.
5. The Survey of London’s long awaited volumes on Battersea were produced in November. They are truly massive books and tell you all that there is to tell about the buildings past and present of Battersea. They do not come cheap, indeed the pair sell at £100+ and are clearly meant for libraries, but if you want to find out anything about your street or block then here is the place to start looking. However, I must say it is le
ss good on the council estates than it is on anything else and so Latchmere misses out a bit! I attach one of the illustrations from the book – a watercolour of the Battersea river front by Cecil Hands painted in the early 1930s. Note that the Power Station only had two chimneys and stayed that way until after the War.
6. BAC (Battersea Arts Centre) had the 120th anniversary of the opening of Battersea Town Hall on 15th November. In many ways it was a launch for a big fund raising effort for the Town Hall and its re-furbishment but it was also a launch of a small booklet produced by BAC of the “Great Hundred”, who had contributed to the Town Hall over the 120 years. At the moment the list has about 76 names categorised under headings such as social, architectural, political and artistic. They are looking for another 44 to make the 100 actually 120. There are some odd omissions such as Douglas Jay, Battersea’s MP from 1946-79, but if you think someone you know should be on the list then let me know and I will see if I can get them included.
7. I went to the SERA annual general meeting in Manchester on 23rd November. This green lobby group, of which I am the Treasurer, is concerned with all kinds of green issues but a growing area of concern is the quality of the air we breathe. Did you know, for example, that Putney High Street regularly has the worst air pollution ion the country. Cleaning up our roads is a major aim for SERA.
8. And on the 27th I attended the Civic Awards dinner at the Town Hall, where fellow constituent and resident of Scholey House, Marlene Price was presented with an award. Marlene has been involved with the York Road Estate Residents Association for over 30 years and has been the Chair of the Police Special Neighbourhood Team (SNT) for well over ten years. The photograph shows her being presented the award by Mayor Graham.
9. I had a Strategic Planning & Transportation Committee on 19th November and a Housing Committee on the 21st. I realise that most of you will think these meetings are dull although I usually enjoy them, but I must confess these two were really dull. You would not think it possible, would you, for us to be facing a real housing crisis in this country with a desperate shortage of affordable housing and for the Housing Committee to be dull but it was. Governments have done so much to strip local councils of power and/or money that we seem unable to re-act and I am afraid that this Council actually doesn’t want to act. After saying something like “It is all up to the market” they have nothing to say – pathetic?
10. But on a much more cheery note I went to the GCSE – Success organisation’s Annual General Meeting in York Gardens Library on Saturday 30th. Not heard of them, understandable but they are great. Led by Ella Spencer, they are a group of young professionals and/or post-graduates, who live or work in and around Winstanley and York Road estates, and have set up a “homework club” running out of the library on Saturday mornings. They started with an aim of lifting up the average GCSE grades for local kids. Their main areas of study are English and Maths. Last year GCSE – Success provided over 800 hours of free one:one tuition.
My Programme for December
1. On the 4th December we had the Council Meeting itself followed on 10th by the Planning Applications Committee.
2. I also met the Chief Executive of St. George’s Hospital on the 10th.
3. Unsurprisingly perhaps there are many Christmas events from the Falcon Road and Kambala Estate residents’ Xmas events, from the Big Local Xmas lunch to the BAC (Battersea Arts Centre) show. Needless to say, like for you I hope, December is not a good month for the waist-line.
4. Finally a Merry Xmas and a Happy New Year to you all or in modern twitter speak MX&HNY2U.
What do you know about John Archer?
John Archer came to Battersea in the late nineteenth century, when he became a friend and ally of John Burns, the charismatic working class leader of the Metropolitan Borough of Battersea. What was unusual about Archer was that he was from Barbados and in 1914 he was elected the first Black Mayor in the UK. He is pictured on the left and appears in the mural on what used to be the Haberdasher’s Arms in Dagnall Street.
Archer, and his Bajan wife, lived and worked in Latchmere ward. He had a photographic studio at 220 Battersea Park Road, where there is today a small plaque of commemoration. The building is not very interesting, being a 1950s infill of a bomb site, but it was well located for Archer’s business as the tram from town terminated at the junction of Albert Bridge and Battersea Park Road and his business clientele could come in on the way back from work.
Archer had humour and charm, which I think shows in the photograph, and is commemorated in a couple of other places in Battersea. There is John Archer Way, the new bridge over the railway, which leads to what used to be John Archer school, before it was demolished 20 odd years back, and Archer House, the ex-Council block in Battersea village.
Councillor Tony Belton’s Latchmere November Newsletter (# 54)
October highlights
1. First of all a big thank you to all those who sent me good wishes for a speedy recovery from streptococcal G poisoning. I am making reasonable but not exactly speedy progress as some of you will have seen as I struggle around, but now on one and not two crutches!
2. Second an even bigger thank you to all those who responded about the possible closure of the CJ Grant Road exits at an earlier time than currently. I got 40 responses between when I put the message out at about 11.30 am and 5 pm on Day 1. I immediately sent those responses off to the Town Hall and then onto the railway companies. I have heard nothing since – hopefully we have nipped that one in the bud.
3. The Battersea Park School (BPS) saga rolls on. You may remember that I suggested that the Government was intending to make the school into an Academy sponsored by Harris (the carpet people). Well this month the Governors were invited on a trip to see two Harris academies in Merton. I am afraid that I thought that I could hardly manage to stumble around a couple of schools in one day and so I did not go. But nothing definite has happened since then and indeed the Government has sent a relatively “soft letter” about the school’s reactions to the original Ofsted Report – perhaps the rather good GCSE results announced in August have resulted in a couple of second thoughts.
I would still bet on the Government pressing on with their dogmatic policy of moving BPS out of local democratic control and making it a sponsored academy. But given the pressures on the Government and the very public failures of their policies in a couple of recently well-publicised cases, there is just a little chance that they might back down.
4. The 8th October Planning Applications Committees had a number of interesting applications, most particularly for the Prince’s Head and the one-time Chopper or @Battersea pubs/clubs. Both of these pubs have been the centre of considerable local concern over the years but now it seems as though both are going to be re-developed. There have been a number of applications, which have reached an advanced stage of consideration on both sites but finally applications came to Committee and were approved.
The Prince’s Head application was for 19 flats (16 two-bed and 3 three-bed), of which 5 would be of a shared ownership type, and therefore classified as “affordable”. These would be built above commercial lettings on the ground floor. Given the nature of the Falcon Road shopping frontage I am not absolutely certain that the shopping units will work – for a start most of the shops in Falcon Road are on the opposite side of the road. But I guess it rather depends upon the nature of the shopping. If it is one of those Tesco/Sainsbury locals then I am sure that it will be a success – but we will have to see. I know that for some of the residents almost anything would be a plus when compared with the Prince’s Head at its worst!
The Chopper application was similar but slightly larger with 29 flats being built above commercial properties, including a new pub. 6 of these flats would be of a shared ownership style tenure. Hopefully the pub will replace the rather belligerent character of the old pub with a pleasant recreational but modernised pub. Both applications were accepted.
I thought three other applications were particularly interesting. One was for 157 flats and houses to be built round the old Elliott School site just off Putney Hill. I mention it because I know lots of kids from Battersea went to Elliott. I couldn’t help noticing the outraged protests of Putney residents. The sale of the land and the use for private residential housing was to pay for the Council’s costs in building the new Ark Academy to replace Elliott. The point was that these were luxury housing built to low densities and costing, well we will have to wait and see, but my guess is north of £2 million – and the locals were protesting!
Another application for a 7 storey building, providing 12 flats, on a miniscule site opposite the Battersea Dogs’ Home provided an interesting contrast. Seven storeys squeezed in on the space of a tennis court as opposed to spacious large properties, two contrasting sites, one in Battersea and the other In Putney – I hardly need to say more!
But I was surprised that the one application that was refused was for a large (13 storey) commercial and residential development on the Upper Richmond Road near to East Putney station. Surprised because the Council has appeared to allow applications of almost any scale in “town centre” sites but on this occasion the recommendation was for refusal and refuse it we did. Was it because it was in the Council Leader’s own ward and his own constituents were protesting?
5. On Thursday, 17th October, I managed to drag myself around the Caius House (Caius is a latinised word for keys and is actually pronounced KEYS) development just behind Badric Cour![647293_f644bcdc[1]](https://tonybelton.blog/wp-content/uploads/2013/12/647293_f644bcdc1.jpg)
t. Caius House will mean nothing to many of you because the “old” Caius House youth club was demolished in about 2008. (See below for the history of Caius) The new youth club, and the residential properties above, which are paying for the development, are due to be handed over in spring, 2014. I and several other councillors went round the site and although it is difficult to tell from this photograph it is obvious that we are soon going to have a splendid new club right next to York Gardens, the Kambala and the Winstanley. We were told that it will be the largest youth club in the UK. Let’s hope that it is also the best. The top picture is of the new sports hall at the club and the bottom one is of the old building demolished in 2007/8.
6. The 16th October Council meeting did consider the cuts that the Council is going to make in the housing department (and others). Currently the Housing Department is taking the brunt of the cuts, but we will see many more. It is a little difficult to describe all the arguments for those of you who wonder what Council meetings are like look at this link http://www.wandsworth.gov.uk/info/200318/decision_making/1606/council_meetings_online_16_october_2013/4. showing a U-Tube stream of the housing cuts debate. If you don’t want to watch it all – which I could well understand then Cllr Hogg’s speech is 12 minutes into the stream and mine is at 21.20 minutes!
7. On Sunday, 27th October, I attended the Ahmadiyya Muslim Community Eid Celebration in York Gardens Library, where I was asked to give a speech on peace!. I am hardly an expert but I did to an audience of about 50 Battersea residents. The Ahmadiyya mosque in Putney is the first in London and was built in 1913 and their Merton mosque is the largest in western Europe. Some of the local organisers live on the Winstanley estate.
8. Finally a grudging congratulations to Jane Ellison, our MP, who has just been made Parliamentary Under Secretary of State (Public Health). Despite our pretended enmity across the party divide, Jane and I get on quite well and if this appointment is recognition for her work opposing female genital mutilation then it is well deserved even if I hope she loses the job at the next General Election!
My Programme for November
1. Once the clocks go back we are in to the busiest time for councillors, especially in the winter before the next Council Elections – Yes, they are next May and so the rounds of canvassing and leafleting will be starting up soon. I do hope you accept me knocking on your door with patience and humour!
2. On 7th November I have as ever the Planning Applications Committee. On the 19th I have the Strategic Planning and Transport Committee, followed on the 21st by the Housing Committee.
3. The Borough Residents’ Forum, a committee of Council tenants and leaseholders, meets on 13th and I am the Labour Party’s representative on that.
4. The 15th November marks the 120th anniversary of the opening of what was Battersea Town Hall, now Battersea Arts Centre (BAC). BAC is laying on some kind of an event, which I will be attending. I look forward to seeing what exactly they are going to do – fireworks? A theatrical review? An exhibition? I will report back!
5. For my pains I am also the Treasurer of an organisation called SERA, which is a “green lobby” group with the Labour Party. SERA has its annual general meeting in Manchester on 23rd November and so on that Saturday I will be in Manchester.
Do you know anything about Caius House? I guess not.
Caius House is a charity and youth club which has been serving the community of Batt![collegehistory-loganprint_0[1]](https://tonybelton.blog/wp-content/uploads/2013/12/collegehistory-loganprint_01.jpg)
ersea for over a century.
Gonville and Caius (see picture and pronounced Keys) College, Cambridge, is a 14th century foundation created by Edmund Gonville, a Norfolk cleric, and refounded two centuries later by John Caius, a successful and very wealthy student from the college. In 1887 some undergraduates and fellows from the College rented a house in what was then the very poor London industrial suburb of Battersea. They started a College “settlement” where former undergraduates from the College lived and ran a range of clubs for local residents. Shortly afterwards they started a boys club (and later a girls club) and found that it attracted members from the poorest and least educated young people in the area.
By 2008 the Caius House youth club building (located on Holman Road) had served the local the young people of Battersea well for about a century but was badly in need of renovation; however the layout was thought to be totally unsuitable for a modern youth club. The Trustees decided to sell the plot of land to a developer who would build residential accommodation with space for a modern youth club on the first two floors. After consultation with youth members, the community and the Council, the derelict old building was demolished and the process of re-building a modern state of the art youth club began.
The #Wheatsheaf, Tooting Bec
I cannot reply in 140 characters for Twitter lobbyists but here is the longer version that I sent to email lobbyists campaigning to save the #Wheatsheaf this afternoon.
“Can I make a friendly comment? When sending lobbying letters it is usually better to change the opening sentence from the standard one. Councillors tend not to rate lobbying letters, which have simply been copied, anywhere near as highly as ones that are individually crafted! Plus one of your stereo-typed letters contains a typo, repeated ad nauseam. You were surely contacting me and not “contracting” me – implies that you hadn’t even read the lobbying letter that you are expecting councillors to read – not convincing.
But enough of the pompous lessons in lobbying and down to the meat. If you have read the Council paper 13-733 (and for those who are really keen then see link http://ww3.wandsworth.gov.uk/moderngov/documents/s29843/13-733%20THE%20WHEATSHEAF.pdf ), you will see several interesting features. I will particularly pick on two:-
1. There is considerable emphasis on Government policies designed to get the local economy moving and that includes allowing permitted development rights in all kinds of locations (NB I am not agreeing with this so don’t argue please but like it or like it not it is the Government’s position). As it happens both parties in the Council are almost equally opposed to these policies, especially as regards permitted development. The Tory Council is no more keen than the Labour Opposition to have planning controls taken away from us. We have to deal with the consequences of un-neighbourly development far too often to be as cavalier as Government Ministers! BUT to help Tory councillors to stand against their own Government it would be very helpful if one or two of you could come up with a contradictory Government policy, apart from “localism”, which seeks to protect the fabric of the existing townscape – short of listing.
2. Paragraph 31 is the key. Members are “asked whether or not they wish to pursue making any Article 4” etc. That is very unusual. Officers usually come to a conclusion and make a definite recommendation to do or not do something. This means they do not really know and/or they have not yet been given political direction by the Tory majority. (the only equivalents that I can think of are when the Council is operating in a semi-judicial way such as licencing committee and occasionally planning applications, when they legally cannot predict what the members may decide.) That could mean that there is still everything to play for on this matter, which means to say that you have to get at more Tory councillors than just those on the Committee and to whom you have sent this email to. For starters you need to email the Leader rgovindia@, the relevant Cabinet member rking@, and the ward members for Nightingale and Bedford, namely adunn@,ajacob@, ihart@, smcdermott@, and swilkie@wandsworth.gov.uk.
I didn’t notice any comments re the Trafalgar Arms? Not worth making a point?
I will do my best, as I am sure my colleague Peter Carpenter will do, to protect the pub, partly because we both would like to extend the precedent to other places such as the Falcon at Clapham Junction, the Spread Eagle in Wandsworth High Street, etc. Oh, and I know it’s a pain but members really are a little frit of a massed public gallery quietly making their point – a simple placard saying Save the Wheatsheaf will do. Heckling does NOT go down well with members.”
Grangemouth – The Deal
Most news media billed this as a “good day” for Scotland with many commentators criticising Unite and by implication the trade union movement. There is little doubt that Unite’s tactics were flawed and they had not thought of how to re-act to Ineos’s counter-attack or the strength of the employer’s position. Rather reminiscent of the NUM in the 1980’s!
But surely we are blinded by the immediacy of the good news. I suggest that the more significant feature of the deal, in the long-term, was the total and effortless victory of international capitalism over the interests of the workforce. Ineos threatened to transfer production, at the stroke of a pen, to the cheapest source of supply, interestingly the USA because of the cost of energy and nothing to do with wage costs.
Add to that the “unaccountable” nature of management decisions made by multi-national billionaires and surely we are faced with a sea change in the centuries old battle between capital and labour. This plays out on an international stage but also at a very local level as we can see from this week’s other headline claiming that Council Compulsory Competitive Tendering (#CCT) is forcing many big out-sourcing suppliers to pay below the legal National Minimum Wage.
The implication is surely that labour is now fatally weak and international capitalism so powerful that the divide between the world’s mega-rich and the rest of us is bound to grow. Faced with this prospect the majority of us – the People – will either resort to national and international legislative control of the market or to violence.
Am I being too alarmist? Commentary from Greece or Spain suggests perhaps not. Politicians have to re-act.
Councillor Tony Belton’s Latchmere October Newsletter (# 53)
August & September highlights (or was it lowlights?)
1. Funny that in August I should have written about the 65th birthday of the NHS, because for the last two months the NHS has been at the centre of my life! At the beginning of September I was in Holland just about to come home and write up my September newsletter when I got streptococcal poisoning! A month later having spent much of the time in St. George’s, I am on the path to recovery!
Streptococcus is a form of bacteria, which we all apparently have, usually lying around dormant in various parts of the body. Streptococcal infections are also fairly common and usually pass without much comment, especially in babies. However, when it gets infectious and rampant, as it did with me then the quacks (and me) get really worried. As soon as they diagnosed it, I was under the knife faster than you can say Jack Robinson.
In my case it was the left knee that was infected and, let me tell you, I can’t use the proper adjectives in a family newsletter to describe the pain! Anyway I am now on 6 painkillers, 3 anti-inflammatories and 6 antibiotics a day and will be for another month – I am also hobbling round on a pair of crutches!
How did it happen? I don’t know and the medics don’t seem to know either. It could be an external infection but there was no break in the skin or anything like that. It could have been a jolt – well I did jolt to a halt on one occasion. But it’s not true (contrary to some reports) that I was knocked off my bike or hit by a car or lorry.
Anyway that is my excuse for breaking my sequence of monthly newsletters and not producing one in September!
2. Oh, and the holiday? Well it was great and I attach a photograph of
me cycling in Delft main square (and most of the time the weather was better than that day) but there was one other unfortunate incident! Two days before the streptococcal started my partner and I had our bicycles stolen in Amsterdam! OK, sounds like a holiday from hell, but it wasn’t really and if anyone fancies cycling in Holland it is terrific! There are miles of cycle routes along the coast, where you do not see cars at all. On roundabouts bicycles have priority and so you don’t have to stop peddling and losing all that energy and except in Amsterdam it appears largely theft and vandal free! I thoroughly recommend it for an active but not over-taxing holiday.
3. Meanwhile back to the day job! Battersea Park School, as you may have heard by now, had exceptionally good results this year. But neither Ofsted nor Gove’s people look like changing their mind and the odds on the school being made an Academy sponsored by Harris (the carpet people, owned by a personal friend and sponsor of both the Tory Party and David Cameron) are shortening. In my view Harris intend to take over the site from the Council and then make many millions (well over £10 million) by building flats on much of the site, and, to be fair, using some of the money to re-build a modern school.
It goes without saying that all parties in the debate claim to be doing what is best for the students. But some parties, and specifically the Tories, believe that means taking schools out of local democratic control and making them sponsored academies or free schools or whatever Mr. Gove’s fad this week happens to be. I, on the other hand, believe that local education authority run schools have served us pretty well since instituted in 1944. If Battersea Park is handed over to Harris carpets I rather doubt that they will have me as a governor!
4. There were two Planning Applications Committees on August 6th and September 10th. There were quite a number of interesting applications at these meetings although you will understand I was not at the second and would have been drugged to the eyeballs if I had been! Not that any were specific to Latchmere, but nearby the Committee gave approval for the redevelopment of Salesian College and the now nearly completed Caius youth club and residential development just across York Road behind Badric Court. There were also quite a few approvals related to the Battersea Power Station development, which looks very likely really to go ahead after goodness knows how many false starts.
5. At an important but much less grand scale I am told by friends and constituents that the bus-stop at the junction of Beechmore and Battersea Park Road, which I incorrectly trumpeted ahead of time is now, at last, really in place!
6. Meanwhile there has been the usual array of Committee meetings but as I missed them all and have not really caught up with them I won’t bore you with details EXCEPT to say that on October 3rd there was a special Finance Committee, where the Tories hacked several £millions out of the budget. The damage to services is now becoming so great that in this week’s South London Press, even high-ranking Tory Councillor Guy Senior is quoted attacking the Government for the severity of the cuts.
7. These cuts will be considered further at the 16th October Council meeting by which time I hope to be able to make a fuller contribution and report back next month.
8. On 5th October I looked in on the public consultation at York Gardens Library about the £100 million regeneration. I didn’t feel so good and didn’t stay long but I think we need many more before any real decisions can be taken about which blocks might be demolished, which refurbished, etc.
My Programme for October
1. Primarily I hope to get back to normal! That means as ever the Planning Applications Committee on the 8th, but also the Council Meeting on 16th and the usual round of other committees and visits – however, I have a sneaking feeling that I might miss rather more than usual. I hope you forgive me!
Did you know that 100 years ago London’s biggest transport problem was where to keep the horses?
And what to do with the manure? It was a particular problem in North Battersea because of the scale of the Mansion blocks built round Battersea Park. There was a huge demand for horses both for pleasure (riding in the Park) and for work and they had to be kept somewhere. The answer was the development of Mews, hundreds of them all over London. And now only 100 years later there are almost none left.
Kersley Mews, pictured here and very little known but only 100 yards from the Latchmere pub, is the only traditional mews left in Battersea – at least to my knowledge. Do you know any others? There are a couple in Lambeth/Clapham off Cedar’s Road behind the large mansion flats on the edge of the Common but are there any others in Battersea?
Hope you all keep well, or at least better than me!
The Housing Crisis – Is a massive building programme sufficient to resolve the housing crisis?
It is a common-place that a massive building programme is the way, even the only way, to resolve the housing crisis facing the young, those on low and middle incomes and the homeless. Well if my Borough of Wandsworth is any indication the answer is definitely NO.
In Nine Elms, less than a mile from Westminster a development of 20,000+ flats, home to maybe 60,000 people, has begun and will be largely completed in ten years time. But no one imagines that this development will have any affect whatsoever on the housing crisis in London. It is not a problem we have with the construction industry, nor with the planning system. The problem is distribution!
Nine Elms and Battersea Power Station, with first sales going to rich Malaysians but also rich Europeans (including Brits) may not be absolutely typical but what if the higher earners continue to trade up and use their market power to invest in the housing market and use rental income as an alternative to final salary pensions? What if they act as the mortgage lenders for their children – the so-called Bank of Mum and Dad? What if the massive growth of the buy-to-rent mortgage industry is clear evidence of a long-term trend to yet more exploitive rents.
The Tory mantra about the market clearly just doesn’t work – at least not in the UK in housing. We have to take back control of the market; as a society we have to resolve the issue of distribution. The Tories recognise this to an extent and are trying to tackle the issue in the socially rented sector with the mean-spirited Bedroom Tax, but it only tackles a small sector of the market and it only tackles an easy defenceless target – the poor, social tenants. Meanwhile the social sector gets smaller and smaller and the better off collar more and more of the market.
There are three interesting and dramatic examples of this process apparent in my analysis of how “right-to-buy” has operated in Tory Wandsworth. Firstly let’s look at the overall impact. Of the 18,000 Wandsworth Council properties sold nearly 6,000, 1 in 3, are now privately rented. (see my blog of December, 2012) Some of these rental properties are part of quite large portfolios. Several millionaires have been created. Their millions have, of course, been created out of the increased rents imposed on private tenants, rents ironically frequently paid by the state in the form of housing benefits. Many examples exist in Battersea’s Doddington estate, where Council flats being let at £200 per week to families classified by the Council as being “in need”, sit side by side with others being rented out at over £500 per week using landlord practises not far short of what fifty years ago would have been known as Rachmanism (Google Peter Rachman for a brief history).
Another completely different example is where small council blocks have been bought up by developers and redeveloped as very expensive town houses. One example is in Sisters’ Avenue (see March, 2013, Blog), where six modest post-war family flats were sold to sitting tenants in the 1980s at an average price of £17,500. In the late 1990s and early 2000s they were sold on to a developer at about £300,000 each. Now the six replacement town houses are being bought at £1.95 million a time. The end result has no doubt been a major improvement in the quality and scale of the housing stock and certainly the relative enrichment of six working class Battersea families but also a complete loss of affordable housing. The effect, unintentional of course, has been of some lucky people pulling up the ladder behind themselves.
Whatever the rationale, the benefits for the original purchaser, the enormous political gain for the Tory Party, there can be little doubt that “right-to-buy” has been disastrous for the future of affordable housing in Wandsworth and by extension much of London.
To counter this situation the London Labour Housing Group (LLHG) has produced a powerful and useful manifesto for the London Borough Elections of 2014 but it admits that as long as the Government and the London Mayor are under Tory control there are limits to what can be done. Typical of the dilemma facing Labour is the comment of Councillor Peter John, Leader of London Borough of Southwark at a recent Battersea Labour Party meeting, where he asked, “Just what are the prospects for social housing in Southwark, when the new council housing we are building now is subject to government subsidised right-to-buy schemes”?
The LLHG understands the problem but it is beyond its competence or political power to challenge the real issue, which in my view is the way that much of politics in general and property taxation in particular is so warped in favour of higher income groups. There is clear evidence of the former in George Osborne’s introduction of the “Help to Buy” incentive aimed at encouraging house price rises but doing very little for housing construction – a plan many economists clearly believe to be about creating a feelgood factor and not a sustainable housing boom. As to the latter the inequity of property taxation in the UK hardly needs mention – in Wandsworth for example the Council Tax on the many expensive £1 million+ properties in the Borough is currently £1,357 per year, exactly double that on the average property (serious comparisons difficult as no revaluations since 1991 – another example of the moneyed classes, scaring Governments off re-distributive taxation).
Unfortunately, the only policy remedies that I see are to take control of the market, to close the market in social housing and to control the private rented sector. But the politics of controlling the market (subsidising large scale construction for the social sector), abolishing “right-to-buy” and controlling rents is beyond the Labour Party as at present and, to be fair, beyond political reality unless the political mood can be changed in the same radical way that the Tories managed in the 1980s.
Trade Unions – more power to their elbows
There can be little doubt that in the battle between capital and labour, the shift of power from capital to labour which characterised early post-war Britain, has gone into reverse. The apogee of union power was the moment of the collapse of the Ted Heath Government in February, 1974.
The unions had exercised great power in the fifties, when they did much to raise worker standards of living to unparalleled heights in a far more equal society than we see today. This also happened in the United States and in the rest of the English speaking world, especially Canada, Australia and New Zealand.
The unions did not get much credit for this achievement especially from the overwhelmingly hostile press, but they were generally recognised as a pillar of British society. One dramatic symbol of this rise was Harold Wilson’s promotion in 1964 of Frank Cousins, General Secretary of TGWU (Transport and General Workers’ Union), to be Minister for Technology, a post of high importance to the Government, focused as it was on the “White Heat of Technology”. (pictured right)
It was reasonable to expect that the unions were likely to become a long-term, central element of the corporate state – rather as they are in modern Germany, their historic role being to a considerable extent a product of British advisors in the immediate aftermath of World War II. Unfortunately the unions over-reached themselves and missed this historic opportunity, perhaps for all time.
Even in the sixties, Hugh Scanlon (AEU – Amalgamated Engineering Union) and Jack Jones (TGWU) were the media’s “Terrible twins”, as they exercised union power in many a disruptive industrial dispute. But more damagingly they also took on the politicians and thwarted Barbara Castle’s attempt to draw them into the corporate state through the mechanism of her policy white paper In Place of Strife.
There was little doubt that the trade union movement was a powerful voice in the land. So much so that one opinion poll in 1977 showed that 54% thought Jack Jones was the most powerful man in the country. But many others thought that unions should keep to “their proper role” of defending and strengthening workers’ rights and pay and conditions and not indulge in political activities. The battle over the trade union role in society was to be joined in earnest in the 1980s.
In 1973-74 the miners’ leader, Jo Gormley, had led the miners in a successful campaign for higher pay, which had ended with Labour’s General Election victory of February 28th. Ted Heath had gone to the country asking, “Who rules?” The country replied, “Not you mate” (The Tory Election Manifesto was called “Who Governs Britain?”). But an apparently great miners’ victory sowed the seeds of the unions’ downfall, most especially the NUM (National Union of Mineworkers). The unions arguably became complacent and expected favours from the incoming Labour administration. But by the time Thatcher became PM, the Tories were adamant that they would never be subject to union power again.
So when Thatcher decided to close mines and reduce the size of the mining industry, she set up quite deliberately the battlefield for a war against the miners. Unfortunately for the left, and I would argue for the country, the miners were now led by Arthur Scargill. He was keen to exercise power but had neither the native cunning nor the considered approach of Gormley. Scargill went into battle when British coal stocks were at a record high and British dependence on coal was declining as North Sea oil and gas was coming on stream. (It was ironic that at the same time as she was condemning trade unions in the UK, Mrs. Thatcher considered them to be a bulwark of freedom in communist Poland!)
The decline of union power had begun and has continued ever since, with New Labour almost as keen not to go back to the days of union ascendancy as the Tories.
But now we can see what a long-term disaster that decline has been for the majority of the workforce and for the country. Now neo-liberalism is in command. We have millions on zero hours contracts – not just working for exploitative private employers but also for local authorities, the NHS and the civil service. As a country, we “compete” for having the most flexible work-force, for having the weakest labour protection laws and for paying the lowest wages.
As a Councillor I know only too well the pressures on local authorities to put every task out to competitive testing or rather to the ruthless exploitation of labour. Once we had women, and they usually were women, providing home help and meals on wheels to pensioners, and working regular hours at trade union negotiated rates. Now we have temporary part-time workers, possibly paid at lower than legal minimum wages – many of whom are not paid for travel time between jobs. Just imagine what the salaried middle classes would make of not being paid for travel time between clients.
My colleagues are so beaten down by standard clichés such as “the users do not care who delivers the service, they only care about the quality of the service” that they just do not see that the logical end of this process is a low paid, low skilled, low spending labour force. Not many years ago Wandsworth’s Tory Leader provoked derision on the Labour benches when he claimed that the workers’ pay and conditions were no concern of his. Now his remark would pass without comment or criticism; it would be the statement of the obvious.
The Tories used to say that Labour only cared about the providers and not the consumers. If it was ever true, it is no longer, at least for the workers by hand – workers by brain, such as doctors, airline pilots, lawyers, still have their unions (and the Labour Party), or professional associations to look after them. But the workers by hand are left helpless against the neo-liberals. And they get little help from Labour, hence the party’s weakness amongst its traditional supporters.
But now – at last – the public at large are becoming more aware of the imbalance between labour and capital with large and growing campaigns for the “the living wage” and against zero hours contracts. The Labour party is in danger of being way behind public opinion.
The brightest of the capitalist class knows well that a low paid and low spending workforce is not of much benefit to them; they recognise, even if Tory politicians don’t, that the demand element of the economy cannot be ignored. Labour must campaign for higher wages, a doubling of the minimum wage, the end of internships, the death of zero hours’ contracts and a closer and healthier relationship with a vibrant trade union movement.
The trade unions in general are weaker today than they have been for a hundred years. We need them to be more powerful and to take a more active role in the guidance and direction of business in this country. We need works councils and trade union involvement in management, defined in law as it is in Germany. We also need fair but restrictive legislation on the right to strike – again Germany would be a good model. We need a workers’ movement, which is stronger than it is today. We need more power to their elbows.
Tony Belton
Tony Belton 