Tory Personal Generosity vs Public Meanness
On 10th March, I attended the opening of the CAB’s (Citizens’ Advice Bureau) smart new offices in the Battersea Library on Lavender Hill, where I was approached by a self-confessed Tory constituent of mine, who said nice things about my monthly newsletter. We got talking about how he could possibly be both a CAB volunteer and a Tory. I am afraid that I was a bit rude to him, or perhaps I should say over-dramatic for such a social environment. If I knew for certain who he was I would apologise to him (I hope he sees this) – it was OTT of me.
But this exchange made me reflect on the nature of personal and public morality. Why is it that so many Tories I know are personally pleasant and generous but would no more dream of voting for, say, a 1% income tax rise than the proverbial “turkey voting for Christmas”? After all the Tories I am talking about are not strapped for a bob or two, nor are most of them personally mean or ungenerous.
For example, I remember I once did some fairly aggressive fund raising for the British Heart Foundation (I raised about £10,000) and, as I move in political circles, I knew the politics of most of the donors, who sponsored me. I don’t think it would be much of an exaggeration to say that the Tories were considerably more generous as a group than my Labour colleagues. And yet, when it comes to politics, generosity is about the last quality one expects to find in any group of Tories.
The opposite sign of the coin is, of course, that at least in my observation, many Labour colleagues respect and value what one might call collective action, e.g. having much higher levels of direct taxation, even when this action would be clearly against their own personal and immediate interest (, although all of us would, of course, benefit from not having to step over rough sleepers on our way in, and out of, the opera). Equally Labour members can be and often are contemptuous of “charitable” giving, condemning it as merely a palliative and an inadequate replacement for organised state (or mutual) redistribution.
Take my constituent CAB volunteer as a case in point. I think it would not be unfair to say that his basic argument was (and is) that “you can’t interfere with the market”. He would not, or could not, accept that the market is a social construct, made and designed by human beings and therefore capable of being interfered with very easily. Here in Wandsworth, for example, we have completely changed the housing market by taking 20,000 council homes out of the controlled sector and putting them on to the so-called “free” market, in what I would call a massive interference with the market, both in terms of supply and demand.
My constituent argued, during our conversation, that the Council sales issue was past tense and that I was wasting my time crying over spilt milk. This sounds superficially to be a good point, but the Tories are now in the process of extending this “principle” to housing associations, so it isn’t actually past tense at all.
In reality, of course, the Tory party only claims that the market cannot be interfered with, when it suits their case. They have a very different perspective when the banks face bankruptcy, when of course the opposite applies and the market MUST be interfered with, as a matter of urgency.
But, even at the local level, I well remember senior Tory councillors, now MPs Chris Chope and Paul Beresford and Boris’s Deputy Mayor Eddie Lister, when pushing for more and more privatisations, stating that they were “creating a market”. If you doubt that then just ask yourself what the market was in home helps or meals on wheels 30 years ago before privatisation got going – of course, there wasn’t such a thing as a market then – all such services were delivered by Council manual labour on nationally negotiated rates of pay and conditions.
Whether or not the market has been a “good thing” is another issue; but my point is that my constituent’s argument is that one can’t interfere with it and hence he comes down against political action, whereas I think political action is all and his volunteering is very good-hearted of him but only, at heart, a minimal palliative. Whilst for him, my political activism is useless resistance to market forces – or in the vernacular, “pissing in the wind”.
Is this why I am so often confused by the fact that so many Tories seem so nice but vote for such ghastly, mean, pauperising policies? And no doubt, why so many Tories think that most “of you chaps are well-meaning but unrealistic idiots”?
I think that my side is right; but its surely time that we made the case publicly for the enlightened self-interest, that collective intervention represents, before the rough sleepers return again to more aggressive forms of opposition.
High Rise developments in London – and Battersea
Just in case anyone out there still believes that the development of high rise residential blocks, on the Battersea river-front and all round the Nine Elms Lane area, has anything to do with housing need or provision of housing for Londoners then see “The Super-Rich and Us” on iPlayer BBC2 last night, 8th January at 9 pm.
This is an excellent analysis by Jacques Peretti of the tax haven and property speculation hub London has become with Battersea playing one of the major roles in the property area. The one thing it misses out on is, not only are these properties nothing whatsoever to do with supplying demand, but they are actually worsening the position.
I am not sure quite how to prove my point but I have more than sufficient anecdotal “evidence” to suggest that the ludicrous property boom along the Battersea river-front far from reducing prices in the market (which is surely what classic economics would suggest) is actually encouraging house and rental inflation in the rest of Battersea/Vauxhall, etc.
This should be compulsory viewing for all those Tory councillors and their not inconsiderable number of Labour sympathisers who believe that building more and more is anything like a sufficient response to the housing crisis. We desperately need more control of the market – oh and pretty hefty taxation of the rich!
Thatcher and her Jewel in the Crown
One or two Tory friends have asked me for my thoughts on Mrs Thatcher particularly in the context of me being Leader of the Opposition in Wandsworth, the proclaimed Jewel in the Crown, when she became PM and for most of her time in office. So you can blame this piece – which obviously concentrates on a Wandsworth perspective and not the national one being covered in a million other places – on them.
First here is a short story about the 1982 Borough Election. Although 1986 was statistically the closest Wandsworth Borough Election (Labour won more votes, by a couple of hundred or so, but the Tories squeaked in by 31 seats to 30) for me 1982 was the real turning point. A month before Election Day a Labour victory was a certainty. Mrs Thatcher was as unpopular across the country as was “Chopper” Chris Chope, the Tory Leader of Wandsworth. And then in classic manner her two most famous enemies – the trade unions and Argentinian General Galtieri – jumped in to rescue Wandsworth’s Tories.
Wandsworth Tories had been struggling with the unions over improving refuse collection, which was riven by cronyism and archaic working practises. But there was no real will on the unions’ part to negotiate and so the Tories decided in late March 1982 to gamble on the then innovative policy of putting it out to tender. It might now seem to be a “no brainer” but at the time it was a bold step to take.
My heart sank a few days later when two local union bosses came to see me to announce, with obvious delighted self-satisfaction, that they were calling a strike in time for the election. They were a little taken aback by my negative reaction but not sufficiently to change their minds.
Then on 2nd April Argentina invaded the Falklands; on 2nd May the Argentinian light cruiser Belgrano was sunk by the British Navy and on the 4th HMS Sheffield was sunk by an Exocet missile. On the 6th May Wandsworth went to the polls and although the Tories lost a couple of seats they were back in by 33 seats to 27 with 1 Lib/Dem. In five weeks Mrs. Thatcher’s political career was forged, and you could say mine destroyed, as any hope of Labour winning in Wandsworth had gone with the wind.
This story captures two features of Mrs Thatcher’s career. First, it has to be acknowledged, her boldness and second the luck she had with her enemies, whether Scargill and Foot or Galtieri – these two features were not lacking in Wandsworth either.
Wandsworth’s Tories were bold to take on the unions, who in their turn were crass in their failure to recognise the limits both of their power and of their support. The unions still flush with their “success” in the 1970s did not understand that the public were prepared not to have their bins collected for a week or so if the Council was able to tough things out and to win the conflict.
The Tories were also bold to take on the GLC and the ILEA, though whether for good or ill is of course another matter. Although it is a very different animal, there was no opposition to Tony Blair’s decision to restore some form of city-wide Assembly, now the Mayor and the GLA. No, lack of courage is not a criticism that I would ever have made against Wandsworth’s Tories in the 1980s.
The Labour Party (me?) also made our mistakes, most particularly about council house sales (RTB). Labour councillor Nigel Morgan and I argued that straight opposition to sales was never going to work. We foresaw the consequential modern disaster of the lack of social housing and, therefore, argued that capital receipts should be used to build replacements. But this was a sophisticated position, which got lost in the ferocious and noisy national battle over the issue. Ironically our position is now accepted even by the current Cameron Government – Nigel, if you ever read this, get in touch. We were right and everyone else wrong!
The impact of RTB in Wandsworth has been dramatic. I would argue that it is a major feature in pushing Wandsworth up the wealth leagues of London Boroughs to the considerable benefit of some of the population and at a far greater cost to many of the others. Wandsworth is now one of the most harshly divided of all Boroughs with levels of deprivation in a few areas alongside some of the richest parts of the country.
Populist but heartless, bold and assertive but bullying and overbearing, are descriptions that are almost inter-changeable for Thatcher and Chope and the Wandsworth Tories in the 1980s.
Much of the national coverage focusses on the apparently inevitable long-term impacts of Mrs T. How she put the Gr8 back into Britain – you know the argument. It is the Tory line in Wandsworth too. I guess they would say that it is commanding the narrative. Hence Wandsworth was, in their mythology, sinking in the mire of the winter of discontent until they arrived to rescue it and make it the “Brighter Borough”. Wandsworth even has, in its way, its own Ted Heath: he was Dennis Mallam, Tory Leader through the 1970s and then dropped as soon as decently possible just prior to the Thatcher victory of ’79. Poor old Dennis! He was really wet. He wanted to build more council houses than Labour had done!
Well you don’t have to be very much on the left to have a very different narrative. One that concentrates on community and abhors the individualised “Loadsamoney” culture that is so publicly associated with Thatcherism. And again this division between communal values and rampant individualism is mirrored in Wandsworth, perhaps especially in Battersea where everyone knows how different life is depending upon which side of the tracks you happen to be – the mainline from Waterloo to the south west. Is it a complete coincidence that one of the worst scenes of violence in the riots of August, 2011, the Clapham Junction riots, happened on the very border between great wealth and great poverty?
There are other interesting parallels between Wandsworth and the country, which reflect the impact of both Thatcher and the Wandsworth Tories. Mrs T brought in “Big Bang”, hence liberating the City to become the bloated, dangerously over-powerful driver of the British economy. And, funnily enough, one of the biggest residential concentrations of bankers in the country is right here in Wandsworth, attracted by the once cheap housing that used to be the homes of industrial workers and the low rates/Community Charge/Council Tax. For the wastelands of the industrial north read the very large but completely obliterated industrial area of Wandsworth’s riverside – all now given over to expensive and rather barren flats, many of which are owned or rented not by Londoners and are left empty for long periods of the week and of the year.
So my Tory friends, what in summary is my reaction to the news of her death? To the fact of death – nothing much – but to her heritage. In 1979 GB was the most egalitarian it has ever been and now 33 years later we are at levels of inequality not seen since 1913. In 1979 we had a trade union movement that was clearly out of control but now we have one so palpably weak it is becoming a danger the other way, with the Tory right arguing for yet more “business friendly” rules and leading moves not to a high wage, high skill economy but to a dog-eat-dog, low pay and low skills economy.
In 1979 you Tories feared that we were the sick man of Europe (which we never were, of course) and had lost the respect, which you think other countries should show us. In 2013 we are the tax haven of choice for everyone from Russian pluto/kleptocrats to foot-loose business money. And yet, the mood and moment of the 2012 Olympics, so different and so unThatcherite, has gone far to show that their is another way – success through harmony.
For sure it is a complex heritage and clearly you, Tory friends, do not understand why not everyone does not see it your way. But until you do you will not even see the terrible damage she did to many regions of the country and to many people in all the regions.
Bedroom Tax – the political impact on the Tories
What I did not say yesterday was that in 17 of the 20 tightest Tory:Labour marginals the number of households affected, and I mean households and not voters, is greater than the Tory majority in 2010.
The data is by constituency:
Constituency: Majority: Households affected
1. North Warwickshire: 54: 766
2. Cambourne and Redruth: 66: 454
3. Thurrock: 92: 1140
4. Hendon: 106: 680
5. Oxford and West Abingdon: 176: 572
6. Cardiff North: 194: 1067
7. Sherwood: 214: 804
8. Stockton South: 332: 1431
9. Lancaster and Fleetwood: 333: 555:
10. Broxtowe: 389: 581
11. Truro and Redruth: 435: 500
12. Newton Abbot: 523: 326: majority greater
13. Amber Valley: 536: 559
14. Wolverhampton South West: 691: 1396
15. Waveney: 769: 788
16. Carlisle: 853: 1181
17. Morecombe and Lunesdale: 866: 700: majority greater
18. Weaver Vale: 991: 1397
19. Harrogate and Knaresborough: 1039: 684: majority greater
20. Lincoln: 1058: 1155
One has to ask: Did they know what they were doing when they introduced this abomination and of course the resounding answer is NO.
Affordable Housing Battersea Style
I want to tell a story about affordable housing Battersea style.
Sister’s Avenue is a road full of rather grand Victorian houses, including one Victorian block of Mansions, running from Lavender Hill through to Clapham Common. At some time during WWII a bomb clearly took out 20 or so houses on each side of the road at the Common end – plenty of evidence in Battersea at just how bad the Luftwaffe was at hitting Clapham Junction station.
In the 50s and 60s Battersea Borough Council built some pleasant and ordinary council houses, all gone right to buy, and a small 2 storey block of 6 flats. When Wandsworth Council (as it had now become) went Tory in 1978 they started an aggressive sales policy – by aggressive I mean that rather than just sell when a tenant expressed interest the Council ran sales fairs, gave prizes for landmark sales – the thousandth, etc. – and generally did their level best to stimulate sales.
79 Sister’s Avenue was the first of the block of flats to be sold in 1983 for £13,500. By January, 1989, all six flats had been sold at an average price of £17,950. Good luck you will say to then residents. Wandsworth had created 6 new affordable units for sale and resale – bully for Right-to-Buy and Tory policies.
By 2007 Robinwood Ltd, a property developer was sniffing around. The developer clearly saw an opportunity to increase the asset value. 2007 was a busy year and by the end of it all six flats were owned by Robinwood having bought them from the owners at an average price of £315,000 (NB for accuracy it should be noted that I do not know the price of one of the flats and so this is an average for 5 but there is no reason to think that the sixth would be substantially different).
Robinwood, or their agents, put in a planning application to build six large town houses. These six have just been completed and are on the market with Savills, the top people’s estate agency and the prices vary from £1.725 million to £1.925 million – checked out with Savills today, 13/3/13.
In 30 years we have gone from having 6 council owned flats, which by any standard would have been affordable at a rent of £20 per week (WBC average rent in 1983 was £20.12), to genuinely affordable private flats and now to luxury housing at nearly £2 million a shot.
The strange irony of this is that this tale works for both Tory and Labour Partys. For people of my persuasion it highlights the terrible divisions between the rich and the rest (the people living there were not the really poor) and what Tories have allowed to happen to the stock of affordable housing. It highlights the brutal callousness of Wandsworth Tories and displays why they are so contemptible in the eyes of many on the left.
For Tories it has helped to improve the Wandsworth environment ensuring that the rest of the housing in Sisters, and Battersea in general, continues on an upward curve; it has improved the housing stock; it has made Wandsworth a better place to live in. It highlights the head in the sand, conservative (small c) nature of Labour members.
Matching up these completely disparate views of life is the stuff of political controversy.
Are Wandsworth’s tenancy agreements legal?
Remember Wandsworth Council’s attempt to evict the mother of an accused rioter on the basis of a “so-called” breach of tenancy conditions? This was in the context of the Council’s secure tenancy terms, introduced in 2009. They included a number of things that tenants, “lodgers, friends, relatives, visitors and any other person living in the property are not allowed to do whilst in the London Borough of Wandsworth”, including causing a nuisance to others, causing damage to property etc.
I maintained at the time that surely it cannot be “reasonable” to include in a tenancy agreement matters that are quite outside the specific requirements of the tenancy and that, therefore, the whole basis of the Council’s tenancy agreements were flawed. I understand that in legal terms this might be referred to as “personal obligations” and not relevant to tenancy agreements. Just imagine a contract to buy a car or a washing machine, which included clauses covering personal behaviour!
I know this will sound fanciful to some but this kind of clause covering personal behaviour and not just the main object of a legal contract was the kind of mechanism used by the aristocracy in Tsarist Russia to keep the peasantry under control and in Hitler’s Germany to keep unionists in check and if allowed to pass unchallenged could, in theory, be used by Tory Wandsworth as a reason for evicting Labour voting tenants – or in Lambeth of evicting Tory voting tenants. I jest, but only a little. Clearly contract law should not be used to impose standards of behaviour on anyone – after all one person’s right to protest is another’s riotous assembly.
Well, I have just heard about a County Court judgment in Wandsworth County Court, where the district judge took exactly my position.
The tenant was a Wandsworth secure tenant for some 30 years. There had been no known problems with his tenancy until 2010/11 when he went to another estate, and, for a period of about 8 months, “painted” unpleasant graffiti on someone else’s front door. He had a “perceived” grudge against the other resident.
The tenant was arrested, pleaded guilty and received a prison sentence. About 3 months after he was released. Wandsworth brought possession proceedings on the grounds specified in the tenancy contract, i.e. of causing a nuisance to anyone living in the borough of Wandsworth and/or the local area, of doing anything which interferes with the peace, comfort or convenience of other people living in the borough of Wandsworth, of causing damage to property belonging to other people or council property in the borough of Wandsworth, etc.
The District Judge held that insofar as it applied to the entire borough, the clause was not an “obligation of the tenant”; that insofar as it related to anything which was “local” to his flat then Wandsworth had failed to prove, as a matter of fact, that his ASB (anti-social behaviour order) was in the area or in any event, it too was not an obligation of the tenancy and hence it wasn’t reasonable to make an order for possession. Stripped of the legal phrasing that means that, in the judge’s opinion, the tenant had done nothing to impact his tenancy. The judge did not attempt to justify the tenant’s behaviour or excuse it but he did say that right or wrong it had nothing to do with his rights to contimue his tenancy.
The possession claim was dismissed. In my view, Wandsworth has little choice but to appeal. If it does not, then it essentially accepts that its tenancy agreement is fatally flawed and any management actions taken on the basis of the agreement is doomed to fail. If it loses the appeal then the Council, and many others will have to re-think.
Indeed if the courts throw out Wandsworth’s position then David Cameron and others will have to re-think their unconsidered recommendations to Councils to evict and/or introduce legislation to change the law. However, this would be so controversial that I imagine the Law Lords would have problems with it – once again the Tory tendency to act on the hoof is getting them into trouble.
My thanks to my fellow Councillor Simon Hogg and website nearlylegal for much of the content of this blog.
The Wandsworth Story behind Right to Buy
Wandsworth Tories introduced an aggressive Right-to-buy (RTB) policy a year before Mrs Thatcher came to power and made it a national Tory plank. It was, of course, a barn stormer and won many votes for the Tory party – and lost many more for a Labour Party perplexed about exactly how to tackle a policy, which was so perfectly attuned to an 80s Loadsamoney philosophy and such an anathema to any collectivist dream.
Lost in the political firestorm were some quiet voices on the Labour side, me included, who said as loudly as we could that outright opposition to the RTB policy was pointless but that reasoned criticism was valid and should have been pursued relentlessly. I recall two particular threads to our criticism. One was that receipts from sales should be used to replace housing stock.
Now in the current crisis about the lack of affordable housing everyone, even the Cameron Government, is talking, however disingenuously, about council house sales being accompanied by a policy of like for like replacement. The fact that the Blair/Brown Governments did no more to replace like for like than the Major/Cameron Governments does not make it any easier!
But the second criticism we had was that RTB would in the end result in the loss of affordable housing and would not be a long-term gain to the goal of creating a “property owning democracy”. Perhaps it is a little difficult to recall just how much Mrs Thatcher made of the creation of a share-owning, property-owning democracy but it was a central plank of the Tory philosophy of the 1980s. Now, however, with the first analyses of the 2011 Census figures we discover that for the first time since the war the proportion of the population living in private sector rented accommodation is on the rise and the number of owner occupiers is actually declining. Just what has happened to the property owning democracy?
Well using Wandsworth as an example reveals some interesting trends. Since 1978, the Council has sold 16,000 leasehold properties out of a stock of approximately 40,000 (there have also been thousands of freehold sales, including sales of whole estates). Having done some research on these 16,000 it appears that 5,650, or 35%, are now in the hands of private landlords, who have developed private sector rented empires on many Wandsworth estates.
The Council admits that one landlord owns 93 leases, from where he runs a private rented empire, whose asset value, very conservatively estimated, is worth more than £10 million. These 93 flats are let out almost exclusively to students of Roehampton University.
Moreover the Council admits to the fact that a further 17 landlords own more than 10 properties and another 83 own more than 5. But having done my own research on the figures and talking to the Council about their methodology, I am fairly confident that they have under-estimated the situation. The Council’s own figures are done on a simple spreadsheet exercise against a file of leaseholder names. They have not been asked to look more closely at the data and they have not done so – but I have.
It is clear that there are networks of ownership between members of the same family and apparently independent companies, often sharing the same addresses. Hence there are several small rental empires on, for example, Battersea’s famous Doddington Estate. In these properties, the Council makes an estimate for housing benefit calculations of rents are about 250% higher than the Council equivalent for the neighbouring properties. So for example, a two-bed Council owned flat is let at £123 per week and the privately owned neighbouring flat has a base of £320 per week for benefit calculation – the actual rent might be much higher.
As of early December, 2012, 31 of these properties were leased back by the Council for housing homeless families, all of whom were in receipt of Housing Benefit or Local Housing Allowance. No doubt some of these families will be hit by the so-called Benefits Reform that some Tory councillors defend on the rather ironic grounds that it will force private landlords to lower their rents. What a trick! Essentially guilty of creating a rental market with highly inflated rents they now accuse those very same landlords, they created, of exploiting the benefits system.
What I find extraordinary about this situation is that the Council officers, and the Tories, find none of this surprising. As one officer said to me, “If you return the properties into the market place then you will see the market acting as it always does with tendencies towards monopolies and exploitation”. He was accepting the reality of the situation. The Tory response is, of course, to defend the market despite, or because of, its faults, and actively to work to destroy the collectivist response to a major human need, which was the original purpose of council housing.
They have the temerity to criticise council housing and many of the subsidies that they claim it was based on and yet do not bat an eyelid at those very same once public resources being used for personal profit and gain.
This is perhaps not surprising amongst Tory councillors, who in Wandsworth are distinguished by the rise of its very own rentier class. It is not necessarily easy to interpret from the members’ register of interests but it looks possible that up to 10 Tory councillors, 20% of the whole, rent out properties for an income. But what I do find fascinating is that some Labour members seem to accept the market-place’s role, the place of market rents as a standard and the inevitable supremacy of market forces. Curious, when council housing has for a hundred years been a collectivist and, despite the occasional disaster, a highly successful response to the major problem of housing the totality and not just the affluent in our population. Doubly curious given that the two oldest council estates in the country, the Totterdown estate, and the direct works built Latchmere estates, are both Wandsworth estates!
Tory Housing Policy – Wandsworth style
Wandsworth Tories, along with quite a few other Councils, some Labour as well as Tory, I am afraid, continue to attack the security and stability of council housing. Only last week (17/10/12) they decided to introduce short-term tenancies. Short-term is defined as 5 year limited tenancy agreements.
There are many problems with this policy, which superficially is designed to increase mobility on council estates and free up properties for those in genuine housing need. After all, it is argued, the housing is allocated in the first place on the basis of need, usually lack of money or overcrowding of families, and the only case for moving tenants out after 5 years is that their need might have become less.
The argument presumably goes that if family circumstances have changed then the family no longer needs the letting and the letting should be freed up for new, deserving cases. But this creates some very perverse incentives. Assuming the tenants have established themselves and are putting down roots in their community and don’t want to be evicted from their homes for the last 5 years, then their logical course of action would be to ensure that they do not earn any more money or they increase their family size.
We have all heard the standard Tory complaint that working class girls only get pregnant so that they can get a council house and that many tenants are in effect work-shy layabouts. But right now in Wandsworth, and across the country, policies are being introduced, which almost demand pregnancies or avoidance of promotion or overtime working, in order to avoid eviction.
In order to carry out the policy, the Council will require staff, whose main function will be to check that tenants are not getting too wealthy. The Tory claim that Labour encourages the nanny state will look pathetic in comparison with the snooping, busy-bodying council they wish to create. And the objective? To create a transient population with no incentive to develop within their local community or a pauperised one with no ability or maybe desire to do so? Surely not!
Top Hat
I went to the musical, Top Hat, last week. Great stuff.
I am a bit of a fan of Astaire and Rogers and was a little concerned that the show could not possibly compare with the film. But I was wrong – scintillating stuff, imaginatively staged and beautifully played – especially by Ginger Rogers/Summer Strallen. The second act staged in Venice could not quite compare with either the first act set in London or the film version but that is a harsh judgement on a great show.
Interesting though that the West End should be playing Singin’ in the Rain and Top Hat – the two greatest films from the two most brilliant dancers, Fred Astaire and Gene Kelly – right now. Many have made the point that the great Hollywood era of musicals and comedies coincided with the great Depression – even if Singin’ made in 1952 is a bit outside the period. And now as the world faces the greatest financial storm since then we have these two revivals and the Olympics. As Nero said about the plebs of Rome – give ’em bread and circuses.
One thing in common in both crises is and was a Conservative Government pursuing negative, cutting policies. Cameron and Osborne do not understand that reducing demand by cutting Government spending does nothing but worsen the crisis. In the thirties, of course, GB finally moved out of the depression not by worrying about debt but by responding to the threat from Nazi Germany. Our parents and grandparents did not worry about the national debt – thank goodness and had no choice but to leave the next generation to pay off war-time debt, which we only completed about 10 years ago.
Heaven forbid – we don’t need war but we do need to get rid of this incompetent, deeply reactionary Government as soon as possible. After the Olympics the economy is going to be in serious need of stimulation and if we are to avoid a triple dip recession then we need aggressive investment and a quick reversal of all Osborn’s cuts.
Council wastes £100,000 on consultants
In July, Wandsworth Council decided to spend £100,000 to give our town centres an “identity”. Consultants will have a brief to give our town centres a purpose in this modern world. “Putney by the river”, “Clapham Junction – railway city”, “Tooting – South London’s Bengal city”, “Balham – Gateway to the South” – Wandsworth is a bit tricky I grant you.
OK, so we know that UK town centres are facing hard times with changes to shopping habits (out-of-town shopping malls and the internet) and the recession driving away their customer base. Cameron’s response is to appoint Mary Portas as shopping consultant. Months later her report is a re-hash of views what any halfway competent planner talked about as early as the 1970s. But one end result is that the Government is granting £10 million for nationwide schemes.
Wandsworth’s cut of that is £100,000 or 1% of the whole – we have approximately 0.5% of the population. We also have, despite pockets of deprivation, some of the most flourishing town centres in the country – if you don’t believe me take a look at Preston or Walsall or any of another 100 towns in the north. But what can you possibly do with £100,000? It might just pay to paint one big store.
So what has the Council decided to do with the £100K? Put out a tender to consultants to come up with a vision for our town centres. It seems to me to be money straight from the taxpayer to the ever-growing consultancy industry – better by far I say to give £100 vouchers to 1,000 families on benefits redeemable only in defined shops in Wandsworth.
What do you reckon?
Tony Belton
Tony Belton 