Interns – a necessary part of the new economy: good training or genteel slavery?
A recent ad from Wandsworth Council asked for trainee social workers to work for free, selling the idea as good for their CV. It sparked some debate in Labour councillor circles and I am interested in where you stand on the issue. We all know of sites like Work4MP where the expectation is frequently that the “job” you get will be an expenses only internship. Is this a scandal, which all MPs should avoid like the plague or is it a useful source of on the job training?
Starting from the perspective of a 1960s graduate, the idea of unpaid work training appears outrageous. The fact that it might be acceptable today shows just how we have allowed the markets to over-ride our ability to organise society. It also is an expression of the regrettable powerlessness of the trade union movement. One inevitably asks whether there is any limit to the power of the market – suppose market forces and a combination of globalisation and automation results in demand for labour being on a permanently downward trend – are we going to see this generation go from being 20 year old interns to 30 and 40 year old interns?
However, younger colleagues argue that there is nothing wrong with internships, especially when otherwise we would have to pay the bill (a dispute as to whether Battersea LP should pay our intern the national minimum wage (NMW)), and if it helps the intern to get something on their CV and a start to a career. But to me this argument seems self-serving as it actually implies that we are not prepared to pay the real price of our politics or (if the intern works for Tesco) the real price of our groceries.
It also seems to me that the use of interns is massively against equal opportunities with only the affluent, OK the comfortably well-off, being able to fund their kids to go through internship. Indeed one of my Labour colleagues is very open about it and, I quote, says “from frustrating personal experience of trying to start a career in politics 10 years ago – these opportunities are by their nature exclusive to those who have parents wealthy enough to support them. I’m generally opposed to totally unpaid internships for this reason.”
Ben, for it was he, went on to say that “social work degrees, like other professional degree level qualifications (teaching), include a lot of practical experience through placements – that’s much of the point of the course. Would you expect NQTs to do free teaching placements too? Or people with nursing degrees? ….. The obvious question therefore is, are these really training posts – and in which case how do the positions differ from the placements that newly qualified social workers will have undertaken as part of their formal training? If not, then this looks like getting people to work for free”. To which I might add that I doubt whether too many bankers, civil engineers or military folk are expected to start their training on a volunteer basis, though I understand that the Met Police is going that way.
Another of my colleagues argued that the training Wandsworth was going to give was of high quality to which my reply is that I am sure that is so but that it is straight discrimination against the truly less well-off just like any free internship is.
My conclusion is that it is all part of the generational warfare that we of an older (and if you are over 40 maybe even 30 that includes you) generation look like starting having had our free education, a vast range of career choices, good pensions, the NHS, owner occupied housing and now refusing to pay our taxes for following generations. We will only have ourselves to blame if the young are revolting!
My Latchmere March Newsletter (# 35)
February highlights
- The biggest news of the month, the year, the decade, was the Council’s decision to “spend” £100 million on Latchmere and Roehampton wards. And at the same time the Big Lottery has also allocated a separate £1 million to Latchmere. Let me explain. At the 29th February Finance and Corporate Resources Committee the Council came forward with its response to the riots. It was not, of course, said to be a response to the riots, indeed it was claimed to be despite the riots but nevertheless it seems to me to be quite a coincidence that one of the largest ever investments in the Council’s housing stock should come just 6 months after the riots and the independent paper the Council commissioned to analyse them.
- You can read the paper in detail at http://ww3.wandsworth.gov.uk/moderngov/documents/s23036/12-218%20-%20Aspirations.pdf but in summary the Council has decided to arrange its finances so that it creates the opportunity to borrow up to £100million on the refurbishment and regeneration of the most difficult estates in Latchmere and Roehampton. After discussing the paper with the Leader of the Council and the Chief Executive, it is clear that they expect about £60million to be spent in Latchmere and £40million in Roehampton. Whilst these are very large sums it should be remembered that the refurbishment of St. James Grove (Castlemaine) cost over £10m
illion. Here it is before and after the refurbishment. There are as yet no specific plans, nor any commitment to timescales, but it is clear that the Council expects most of the i
nvestment to be centred on the York Road and Winstanley Estates. So using Castlemaine as a template, then if the same amount is spent on the large York Road blocks of Penge, Pennethorne, Chesterton, Inkster, Scholey and Holcroft and, say, Sporle Court, then there will not be much left for anything else. However, it is also clear that the Council want to do something substantial with the square at the foot of Pennethorne House and some of the open land around the other blocks. - I did get a commitment from the Housing Director that the community, and your three councillors, will be very much involved in the process of developing plans and seeing through the process, which we all expect to take at least 10 years! So whilst I am sure things will start happening don’t let anyone imagine that it will all happen tomorrow because it won’t. By the way I was very involved in the consultation process at Castlemaine and it was pretty intensive and very successful.
- The same paper also expanded on the Big Lottery Trust’s decision to invest £1million over 10 years in community projects in the area covered by the York Road, Falcon Road, Kambala, Badric and Wayland Road estates. I have been in touch with the Big Lottery Trust and will meet with their contact in what they call confusingly the Clapham Junction/West Battersea area. The intention is that this fund should be used very much for community projects such as funding play schemes or youth clubs. I think that there will be a tremendous emphasis on well thought out, well led local projects and look forward to seeing what might come from, say, the Falconbrook parents or WOW (Women of Wandsworth) or the most active residents’ associations, such as Falcon Road. But it is also a great opportunity for York Road and Winstanley residents. We must all work to get the best outcome from this once in a lifetime opportunity!
- The Planning Applications Committee on 16th February had nothing of immediate significance to Latchmere ward but it did have a massive development in Nine Elms Lane, which had at least 1,500 flats let alone all the retail space, parking, and leisure space that goes along with that. You can read the details, if you really want to at http://ww3.wandsworth.gov.uk/moderngov/documents/s22864/Paper%20No.%2012-134A.pdf although there is not an easy summary of this massive (2
00 page) paper. But here is an artist’s (one might say developers’ propaganda representation) impression of the development. As it happens I voted against it not because I was against it in principle. Indeed on the whole I think that what is beginning to happen in Nine Elms is very exciting, but because there is almost no provision for housing at prices that ordinary people will be able to afford. In the jargon the element of affordable housing is only 15% and not as Wandsworth itself wants 33% – and that leaves aside whether what is called “affordable” is something that ordinary people can afford as it is often geared to people earning £50,000+. 
On a personal note, I went to the David Hockney exhibition at the Royal Academy on 7th February. If you can afford it and have any interest in art then let me thoroughly recommend it – a real gob-smacker. And here is one of the works, simply a scene of trees in North Yorkshire.- And then on the 20th, I went to Oxford to hear Mary Jay give a talk on the diaries of Douglas Jay – who he?
I hear you say. Well Douglas was the MP for what was then Battersea North from 1946-1983. As I have been a councillor since 1971, I knew him and, of course, Mary quite well. - She is just in the process of getting his diaries published on the web. They are not, she says, strictly diaries but rather reminiscences of his time in the Harold Wilson Cabinet from 1964-67. I could write tons about it and him but suffice to say that Douglas was most famous for three things. First, his undying but unsuccessful opposition to British membership of what was then the Common Market, second, his successful opposition to the Motorway Box, which if it had proceeded would have left most of Battersea covered in a spaghetti junction of motorways. And third for being misquoted as saying, in the 1930s, that “the man in Whitehall knows best” – he actually said something rather different.
- The dinner after the lecture was fascinating as it included many of the major political figures of his day including Douglas’s son Peter and the BBC election guru David Butler, who for those of us of a certain age will remember doing TV coverage of elections for every year from 1959-2001 – he was credited with the invention of the swingometer!
- I also went to the “Ken Livingstone Manifesto” discussion on 11th but because I was doing a surgery at Battersea Library that same morning I missed most of it. But not as it happened Ken himself. I have heard Ken many times and he can veer from being pretty pedestrian to simply magnificent – who can forget his great speech after the 7/7 London bombings? Well this one wasn’t on that scale but it was pretty inspiring stuff and perhaps reflects his growing confidence about his chances at the Mayoral election on May 3rd. I am not saying that he looks exactly like a winner just yet but his position is much stronger than it was 6 months ago.
My Programme for March
- The Council meets on 7th March, when the Council Tax for next year will be rubber-stamped. If you don’t know, and I am sure that you do, it is frozen for the seventh year running, which given the impact of inflation over the years is equivalent to a 20% cut in Council Tax since 2005.
- The Falcon Road Residents Association AGM is on the 15th but I can’t make that because of the Planning Committee but I believe my ward colleague Simon Hogg will be there and maybe Wendy Speck later in the evening.
- There are two Planning Applications Committees this month on 5th March and 15th of which more next month..
What do you think?
- At the beginning of this newsletter I said that the Big Lottery was going to spend £1million over 10 years on funding community facilities in the central part of Latchmere, that is the bit nearest Clapham Junction station. That works out at £100,000 each year. We need good ideas for what to do with it. We could for example argue that £10,000 should go on funding York Gardens Library or £5,000 on landscaping near Chesterton House. But what the Big Lottery Trust wants is our ideas. Do send me your thoughts and let’s make sure we make the best possible use of this £1million.
Political Evictions – OK so the last one was easy but what about this one?
Followers will know the position I took about evicting the family of small-scale rioter, Daniel Sartain-Clark. But that one was easy; he wasn’t found guilty of much.
But last week a gang of Latchmere residents was caught for fairly big time drug dealing. Against capital punishment as I am, my reflex action about drug dealing almost demands that the perpetrators are strung up. OK, that goes a bit far but what do you think about the Council’s threat to evict their families? (Though to be fair to the Council, it would be stretching definitions a bit far to call these political evictions).
Here are people actively destroying the lives of their neighbours, almost certainly with the knowledge of some members of their family, and the Council wants to evict them. What do you reckon? Evict immediately!
Well, I am not so sure. To start with, as luck would have it, living on the Kambala and Winstanley estates, some are freeholders, some leaseholders and some tenants and hence the power that the Council has to evict varies. Secondly young siblings and harrassed mothers are still innocent.
Let the judicial system take its course with the unpleasant dealers – on balance I still think that the Council should not evict the families any more than I think any criminal’s family deserves to be made homeless. Have I got this right?
What do you reckon to electing your local police chiefs?
For the first time ever, on November 15 the country, ex-London, will be electing 41 police commissioners. London will do its own thing on May 3 when in effect the Mayor is elected as the Police Commissioner. Labour candidates are being selected in the next couple of weeks and I heard one of them, ex-MP Jane Kennedy standing for Merseyside and Wirral, last week along with Peter Jones, a Tory candidate for East Sussex, and Brian Paddick the Lib/Dem candidate for London Mayor.
Deputy Chief Constable Beckley from Avon, chair of the Police History organisation (sic), stated that this was the biggest change in policing in this country since 1829 and the introduction of the Peelers! And there has been hardly any talk about it!
The debate posed the legitimacy of the ballot box against the politicising of policing. But a few sub-plots came out of it that I had not spotted. For example Kennedy argued that Cameron will not be able to draft in 12,000 PCs to London as he did after the riots, against the wishes of elected Commissioners. She led me to think that soon we will have post code policing just as we have post code health or education.
Beckley also pointed out that the operational independence of the Chief Constable is nowhere defined in the act and that under Boris we have managed to have 3 Chief Constables in as many years. What price operational independence? Whatever Johnson has done for London, he certainly has not brought stability to the Met!
Old political hands will, of course, have their own views about what the turn-out might be for the election on a damp, cold miserable November 15 in deepest Northumberland (How about 10%?), but it is certainly my view that elected commissioners should be totally integrated into the local political scene as in London. At least here we do know that Mayor Johnson is responsible for most things. Here in London accountability is sufficiently focussed that it is meaningful. In the shires I suspect that there will be a confusion of accountability with councils having most of the crime prevention responsiblilties and the Commissioner the traditional reactive policing responsibilities.
I have always thought that a single body would be more accountable than a selection of separate bodies and hence I think that London’s Mayor should have the focal responsibility for health, as well as policing. Whether that body should be a Mayor, or in my preference a Council with a Leader, is another matter.
Councillor Tony Belton’s Latchmere February Newsletter (# 34)
January highlights
1 The worst moment of the month was when Daniel was sentenced on 10th January for his part in the riots. Don’t get me wrong. I have no sympathy for those who were involved in the riots, but I do believe that we need a sense of proportion and quite clearly what Judge Darling had to say implied very strongly that the relatively minor misdemeanours Daniel was involved in would not have led to a custodial sentence at any other time. But for more detail see the 11th January entry below.
2. The best moment of the month, however, was when the Council back-tracked on their decision to evict his totally innocent mother and sister – see 19th January entry below.
3. On 12th January I was fascinated to hear Louise Casey, Head of the Government’s new Troubled Families Unit. Her Unit, a Tory Government initiative, is based on the old 80:20 rule, though in this case the figures are probably more like 99:1 rule, which says that you spend 80% of your effort on 20% of your caseload. This rule, if you haven’t heard about it, applies to all areas of work so a doctor, say, spends 80% of his time on 20% of his patients, a teacher spends 80% of her time on 20% of her pupils, etc. It is certainly true of me, with at least 90% of my constituents (more than 10,000 of you) taking absolutely no more than 10% of my efforts and the other 10% more than occupying 90% of my attention.
So the aim of this Unit is to focus government’s attention (government in this context is meant to mean everything, such as schools, the NHS, the judicial system, the police, social services, probation services, etc.) on the very small number of troubled families – Casey estimates that 120,000 families in the UK are the source of an extremely high percentage of the criminal, educational, health, etc., costs and problems that we face. The argument being that if we put a lot of money into solving their problems then we can save £millions more in the long term on all those mainstream services.
Interesting, but frankly I am sceptical. It seems to me that until we address some pretty basic inequalities in the UK (caused by low pay, youth unemployment, unemployment, poor housing) then resolving the problems of today’s 120,000 families will only mean that they will be replaced by 120,000 others in a few years’ time.
Marco Polo House
4. The Planning Applications Committee on 19th January had two dramatic plans to consider. One was for the demolition of the post-modernist Marco Polo Building in Queenstown Road and its replacement with 15 and 13 storey blocks of 456 flats with associated bars, restaurants and shops. If it goes ahead, this will be one of the quickest re-developments we have seen. The Marco Polo building (pictured) is itself only 25 years old. The other was for a 5-10 storey building containing 116 residential units on the site opposite York Gardens Library and Halfords on the corner of Lombard Road. That one was refused but the Marco Polo replacement building accepted.
5. The 25th January, Finance & Corporate Services Committee had stacks of very important but rather technical, internal matters relating to the running of the Council, which would not I suspect be of much interest to the public at large. One very small matter, however, might be of interest to some Latchmere residents as it concerns the sale of the St. Christopher Clinic in Wheeler Court, Plough Road. The clinic has been relocated and it will be converted into flats.
6. The 23rd January, Housing Committee decided to increase rents Council rents by an average £8.33p per week or 7%. They will continue to be the highest Council rents in the country.
My Programme for February
1. The Council meets on 8th February and the Clapham Junction Town Centre Partnership the day after.
2. The Labour Party is holding its “Ken Livingstone Manifesto” discussion on 11th but as I am doing a surgery at Battersea Library that same morning I will miss most, if not all, of that.
3. The Wayford Residents Association meeting is on the 23rd.
4. The Planning Applications Committee is on the 19th.
Eltringham School
5. For the more nostalgic amongst you I would draw your attention to two demolitions, yes DEMOLITIONS, taking place this month or about to take place. The most important to mention is that of Eltringham School in Eltringham Street, which for those who don’t know it is the Victorian School building on the left just as one drives onto the Wandsworth Bridge roundabout from York Road. One lady, who still lives in Eltringham Street, tells me that she went to school there (if you are reading this did you say in the 60’s?) and that her mother had lived in the same street for years before then.
St. Peter's Church Hall, Plough Road
And the second was featured in last week’s local Guardian and is the hall of the old St. Peter’s Church in Plough Road. The inside of the hall is rather splendid, if somewhat run-down, but the most notable element of it, at least as far as recent local history is concerned is the mural on the south side of the hall. The painting is very faded and it will hardly be a great loss to Battersea. But for some of it brings back memories of Rev Michael Wimhurst, who in the 70’s was a radical vicar at the church, which was burnt down at some point in the 80’s.
Royal Artillery Monument
Did you know?
Next time that you are in Albert Bridge Road, between Petworth Street and Albany Mansions, keep your eyes open for a blue plaque to Charles Sergeant Jagger, (no relation to Mick) who lived there in the 1930’s. It’s on about 60 Albert Bridge Road and very, very near to Jagger House on the nearby Ethelburga Estate.
Jagger born in 1885 near Rotherham, fought and was wounded three times in the 1914-18 War. For 10 years after the war he sculpted many of the First World War memorials that were constructed all over the country. His most famous memorial is the Royal Artillery Monument at Hyde Park Corner and, although it does not come out very well, that is a Howitzer on the monument.
Localism – the Big Lie – and Parliamentary Boundaries
I was having a week-end in the Peak District and stopped for the night at Leek. It is a small, attractive market town, but like many English market towns it seemed a bit dead in the evening. I got chatting to a guy in the pub, who turned out to be a guitarist and singer. I asked him about where he played and apart from the pubs he mentioned, in passing, the Town Hall, where he used to play. I asked him to show me the Town Hall and he pointed to a carpark on the other side of the road.
It got me to thinking about just why it is that, for two decades now, both Labour and Tory Governments have been talking up Localism and yet doing almost everything possible to destroy it. Both Governments have encouraged the growth of out-of-town shopping malls and giant hyper-markets and every time that Tesco announces 500 new jobs we all know that means the loss of many more corner shops and greengrocers. Both Governments have been equally keen on re-organising local government and every time they do, they destroy a little local pride.
On a few rare occasions local pride fights back – some will remember when Rutland fought successfully not to be abolished by Ted Heath’s Government. London, funnily enough for one of the most cosmoplitan of cities, is a particularly interesting example of local pride. Keep your eyes open next time you travel round. Just what has happened to Chelsea Town Hall? or Fulham Town Hall? or Bow Town Hall? or Peckham’s or Battersea’s?
The revision of parliamentary boundaries, due later this year, will provoke similar objections.
Council backs down from evicting rioter’s mother and sister
Today, 19 January, Wandsworth Council decided not to evict the mother and 8 year old sister of the rioter convicted last week (see my blog entry of 12 January). This marks a victory for sanity against the knee-jerk threats of eviction made by both David Cameron and the Council in August.
It is great news for the tenant and an enormous weight off her shoulders, following what Judge Darling had called the biggest tragedy of the many sentences he had imposed as a consequence of the riots. The Council was forced to recognise just how much the family was a pillar of the local community and to backdown from the gung-ho rhetoric used by the Tory party in last September’s Council Meeting.
From my point of view, opposing the evictions policy as self-defeating and deeply malicious, this family could not have been a better test case. As the judge said last week, the family are “Christian with both a capital and a small c” and an integral part of the community. There will be tougher cases coming forward, no doubt, where the convicted rioters will be more culpable than Daniel and the innocent other members of the family less vulnerable than a single mother and 8 year old. But that will not stop those other members of the family being as innocent as Maite.
I will try and defend them as much as I have done Maite.
PS This WBC decision followed an interview between tenant and local housing manager, where essentially the tenant was being interviewed for her general status as a tenant and very unsurprisingly the local housing manager could see nothing wrong with the tenant’s record as a tenant or any reason why the Council should evict her. The idea that the Council backdown was as a result of pressure from various outside fringe groups is simply farcical. Whether it was partly as a result of the pressure Labour councillors put on the Tories in Wandsworth, only senior officers and senior councillors can really say.
Councillor Tony Belton’s Latchmere January Newsletter (# 33)
Editorial
- Frankly this one is dated but I am putting it on the blog for the record!
- Just in case you wondered I have decided to skip the December Newsletter by the simple expedient of changing the naming convention. In the past I have called the Newsletter after the preceding month, but as from now I am naming it after the month at the beginning of which it appears. Hence this is the January and not the December Newsletter.
- I have until now had a Did You Know? section at the end of the Newsletter. That obviously becomes more and more difficult over time and so I am going to make that section more general, including Comment as well as Did You Know?.
December highlights
- On 5th December I attended a meeting at the Doddington & Rollo Association Hall, which had been called by “Wandsworth Against Cuts”. Speakers included Austin Mitchell and John McDonnell, both Labour MPs, and a tenant speaker from East London. The meeting was inspired by the Government cuts and their impact on local government services and by the Council’s response to the riots and specifically the threat to evict the families of rioters.
- Perhaps 50 people turned up, which is not bad for a public meeting nowadays but these protesters are never going to achieve their objectives if they ignore the Labour Party, the most powerful anti-Tory vote in Wandsworth, and for that matter most of the country. So whilst I have a lot of time for left-winger, John McDonnell, I cannot say quite the same about Austin Mitchell, who is, for me as they say, “all mouth and no trousers”. And really what is the point of having that kind of meeting without one single Labour councillor being invited to speak – we are the only real opposition to the Tories and having a protest without us is pointless. (OK, this is a bit of a beef from me because I have done more to publicise the ludicrous policy of evicting innocent mothers and children than anyone else and they didn’t even bother to ask me to speak – but so be it).
- The Council Meeting on 7th December was a curious affair. The Council is pursuing a programme of cuts, which meant a couple of million from education and £1 million from Social Services, but it was very difficult to work out what they meant as the Tories were indulging in salami slicing – a small slice off every item of the budget with a few backroom staff cut here and a few more cut there, enabling them to say that they were not cutting services. Services will, of course, be affected but perhaps not in very public ways – just delays in getting answers and slower telephone response rates – that sort of thing.
- The Tories chose to have the set-piece debate on the economy and its impact on the Nine Elms area, which seemed an odd choice given that the owners of Battersea Power Station went bankrupt in the same week. The other big debate centred on the Council’s decision to abolish Wandsworth’s Parks Police. The proposal is that the Met Police will take over the role and save the Council money. No doubt the debate will be on U-Tube at some point though I can’t find it yet. However, if you haven’t yet seen a Council debate let me give you the link to the speech I made in September against the Council’s policy to evict the families of convicted rioters. The link is:-
- The Planning Applications Committee on 15th December was a very low key affair. But on 19th December I attended a small exhibition at the Council about the Council’s plans for the future of Eltringham School. It was a “Drop-in” style of consultation and it was a bit difficult to assess the number of locals who attended or their general reaction to the plans, which are for a residential development. As a member of the Committee I will have to give my view on this in the next couple of months. Do let me know if you have any views on the matter.
- Did you see the Evening Standard, 14th December? On page 6 there was an article headed “Google puts Battersea on the map after six years of dodgy directions”, which majored on my part in getting Google to move the name “Clapham” from its position on Google maps above the Battersea Arts Centre (the old Battersea Town Hall) to its rightful place over Clapham High Street.
- For the details of the story see this website www.lovebattersea.org.uk. But let me correct the details. As the site says I am a joint-Chair of the organisation trying to get Battersea named “properly”, but the rather jokey quotes attributed to me by the ES actually belong to my good friend Philip Beddows, a maverick rather amusing ex-Tory councillor. Oh, and as for the organisation: it’s called SW11tch – play on SW11 and switch the name from Clapham to Battersea – get it!
- Philip’s grander fantasy is to get the station renamed Battersea Junction but somehow I think that is a trifle ambitious!
My Programme for January
- I have a meeting of the Finance & Corporate Resources Committee, the Council’s premier policy committee, on 25th January.
- The Battersea Park School Finance & Personnel Committees on 23rd.
- The Court Case against a Wandsworth tenant’s son continues to sentencing!
- The Planning Applications Committee on the 19th.
Did you know?
That my fellow councillor, Simon Hogg, has been encouraging me to write a blog. So I have taken him at his word and started one. I am not really sure that it is my style. I write long pieces, which are not the blog style. But my latest entry is about the appalling story from one Tory councillor and his views about Council tenants. Here is the link – let me know what you think! https://tonybelton.wordpress.com/
Yours sincerely
Tony Belton, Latchmere Labour Councillor
Left & right hand at odds in Government policy
At least in principle, one of Cameron’s best decisions is to continue with and develop Labour’s Troubled Families initiatives. Today, I heard Louise Casey, the Head of the Troubled Families Team in CLG, describing her work on the Family Intervention projects (FIPs) and very impressive she was too.
120,000 troubled families cost public services the best part of £9billion per year or about £75,000 per family per year. These particular families impose a work burden on the NHS, the criminal justice system, housing and education services and so on. Some families are said to be “clients” of more than 20 public agencies.
The cycle of deprivation, illiteracy, truancy, criminality and a range of other issues can easily be imagined. Casey, and Cameron, wants to break into this cycle of despair and make life better for these 120,000 families and their neighbours in particular and the rest of us in general.
How strange then that the very same Government is currently consulting on making it easier, and almost mandatory, for Councils to evict the families of the convicted. So one arm of Government is working hard to support troubled families, whilst another arm wishes to impose severe homelessness and stress on many of the same families.
I am not saying that all troubled families are in trouble with the law or that all in trouble with the law are troubled families but only a fool would not accept the likelihood of a very considerable overlap. I plead with the Government (and Wandsworth Council) to drop this punitive and self-defeating policy of evicting the innocent families of rioters – and other criminals.
Is it Clapham or Battersea?
A jokey addendum to the court case featured in my last blog is that the Crown described Curry’s as being in Clapham’s high street. Judge Darling, obviously a south Londoner, questionned this and the two of them did an elaborate dance of misunderstandings. Whilst the judge retired to consider his verdict I pointed out to the Crown prosecutor that Clapham High Road was the best part of a mile away and that Curry’s was actually in Battersea’s main, if not High, street.
When the Judge returned the prosecutor jumped up, apologised for his lack of knowledge of the geography of south London and asked for the record to be put straight. Judge Darling told him that was exactly what he had been trying to tell him but that his ignorance would be forgiven. In future I will have all those guilty of this heinous sin up in front of Judge Darling!
Tony Belton
Tony Belton 