Council backs down from evicting rioter’s mother and sister
Today, 19 January, Wandsworth Council decided not to evict the mother and 8 year old sister of the rioter convicted last week (see my blog entry of 12 January). This marks a victory for sanity against the knee-jerk threats of eviction made by both David Cameron and the Council in August.
It is great news for the tenant and an enormous weight off her shoulders, following what Judge Darling had called the biggest tragedy of the many sentences he had imposed as a consequence of the riots. The Council was forced to recognise just how much the family was a pillar of the local community and to backdown from the gung-ho rhetoric used by the Tory party in last September’s Council Meeting.
From my point of view, opposing the evictions policy as self-defeating and deeply malicious, this family could not have been a better test case. As the judge said last week, the family are “Christian with both a capital and a small c” and an integral part of the community. There will be tougher cases coming forward, no doubt, where the convicted rioters will be more culpable than Daniel and the innocent other members of the family less vulnerable than a single mother and 8 year old. But that will not stop those other members of the family being as innocent as Maite.
I will try and defend them as much as I have done Maite.
PS This WBC decision followed an interview between tenant and local housing manager, where essentially the tenant was being interviewed for her general status as a tenant and very unsurprisingly the local housing manager could see nothing wrong with the tenant’s record as a tenant or any reason why the Council should evict her. The idea that the Council backdown was as a result of pressure from various outside fringe groups is simply farcical. Whether it was partly as a result of the pressure Labour councillors put on the Tories in Wandsworth, only senior officers and senior councillors can really say.
Jobless Too Busy Shopping To Look For Work, Says Tory.
Yes, that was the headline over a story in the Evening Standard on 16 November 2011. What followed was a poisonous diatribe from Balham Councillor Paul Ellis. Look it up, if you can, on the ES website; I must admit I have not found the link!
But the article was so irresponsible that I intend to make the following speech at the 7 December Council Meeting.
“Marie Antoinette was tasteless enough to advise that French peasants should eat cake if they could not find enough bread. Jeremy Clarkson was vulgar enough to suggest that strikers should be taken out and shot in front of their families, but at least Antoinette was not the Minister for Wheat production and Clarkson not the Minister in charge of Industrial Relations.
Councillor Ellis was vulgar enough and tasteless enough to make the outrageous assertion that the Jobless in a Battersea estate were too busy shopping to look for work – and he is Chairman of the Housing Committee and responsible for tenant relationships. Louis XVI may have had some marital reasons for not chopping off Antoinette’s head and Cameron does not have any official role in terms of Clarkson’s employment at the BBC, but Wandsworth’s Leader does have the power and certainly has the grounds for guillotining his Chair of Housing.
Put to one side the comparison of an estate, which one I wonder, with the Oxford Street sales; forget the absurd generalisation about people in their 20s, 30s and 40s (his phrase – not mine), who after all have a 40% chance of being leaseholders rather than tenants and are probably employed rather than not – after all nowhere has unemployment rates higher than 50%; putting all that to one side he completely ignores the fact that this Council’s policies are to some extent based on the fact that some of our estates contain some of the most multi-deprived people in the UK.
Now I don’t want to make the same kind of ludicrous assertions about the residents of Balham, those whom Ellis represents, as he does about some unnamed estate but the grotesque assumption that in some ways more will be spent on Christmas on our estates than in the comfortable streets of Balham beggars belief. There is a class war starting in Wandsworth and it is the Tory party that is firing the first shots.
Tony Belton
Tony Belton 