Protests as Lib Dems dump paper mountain in Dollis Hill

I was out with Brent Green Party colleagues in Dollis Hill today enjoying a beautiful day, good company and meeting local people.

One seriously pissed of woman who was washing her car begged me not to put a London Green News  through her door. "Not another political leaflet! I'm fed up with all these political leaflets through my door every day.  Every day another leaflet. My place is covered in leaflets! No more leaflets!"

Clearly she is not the only one. We found one house where a bin was carefully placed beneath the letter box so the leaflets could drop straight in.  It takes a lot for political leaflets to replace pizza menus as the most hated junk mail.

So what is the cause of this?

The Lib Dem leaflets of course. Showing scant regard for the forests and even less for the feelings of local people they are now on about their 8th or 9th leaflet. A process could be called political fly-tipping on people's doormats.

What is worse,  as my previous posting showed, many of them are not immediately identifiable as Lib Dem leaflets. The latest have been printed in red to look, at a glance, like a Labour leaflet and today there was a blue one which was trying to mop up some Tory votes. Alison Hopkins name was prominent but the fact that she was a Lib Dem candidate hardly figured.

The problem with the Lib Dem's approach is that people's annoyance rubs off on all parties and the political literature which should be a vital part of deciding how to vote in a democratic system becomes discredited and therefore ignored.

Apart from LGN, which is a general Green newspaper for the whole of London, we will be distributing just one modest A5 Green by-election leaflet in the Dollis Hill by-election.

And the woman who was washing her car?

She allowed me to chat to her about the Green Party and why we need some independent Green councillors on Brent Council, while she continued to wash her car in the sunshine. Nothing for her to recycle except the air I breathed.

Demanding a voice at Willesden Green on Saturday

It was a great day down at Willesden Green on Saturday at the Brent Council-Galliford Try 'consultation' on the Cultural Centre project. The people presenting the proposals and  answering questions from the public seemed increasingly uncomfortable faced with well-informed and incisive questioning from local residents. Many of their answers were vague or shrugged off with 'that was before we got involved'. Clearly the developers have been dropped in a thicket of brambles and stinging nettles by Brent Council and are not very happy about it.

Outside the public were anxious to sign Keep Willesden Green's petitions and the campaign's yellow stickers were everywhere along the High Road.

This campaign means business!

'Who put the CON into Consultation?' asks Michael Rosen

After Keep Willesden Green had a successful morning outside the Brent Council - Galliford Try Consultation I came across this on Michael Rosen's blog. LINK  Michael is the children's poet and BBC broadcaster. It may ring bells for you!

In many streets, there is a scarcely visible process going on: developers eye up land and properties with a view to convincing councils that there is a place or space which they can make a profit out of. They don't call it that. They call it 'regeneration' and proceed to line up various agencies or authorities to back them: eg the local transport people, some 'business people', some kind of 'development agency' or ngo in the area and so on. They will also try to capture some key members of the council (elected or non-elected). Sometimes this process is initiated by a council committee as part of their own 'regeneration' scheme.

In fact, more often than not, it's a con. The 'affordable' housing that is sometimes promised at the outset, starts diminishing in numbers as the developer pleads economy and 'returns  on investment'. Quite often some kind of half-hidden subsidy is engineered by either the council or one of the ngos whereby the developer gets the land cheap or received some kind of suspension in the council tax etc. And when it comes to the 'retail units', more often than not, this is in fact an effort to bring in the multinational chains.

Prior to all this, the land or properties that the developers have been eyeing may well have been deliberately run down by the public authorities eg the council or transport authority. The 'dereliction' they talk about in their glossy brochures may well have been engineered, by refusing to let tenant holders, short-term occupiers or some such stay and develop their own property. Groups (eg council subsidised self-help groups, community organisations and the like) are often told that they can be moved out at any time. Another trick is for the council to have not updated and upgraded some properties they owned so that they are in effect falling down.

At this point the developer's plan is presented as the only viable alternative. The possibility of people on the ground developing their places and spaces has been eliminated by refusing to let them (!), some deal is on the cards whereby the developer is getting some kind of subsidy from us, the council tax payers, but which may well be hidden as a non-ask eg a very low payment for a slice of property, and the council and the developer produce some great big brochure of blather saying how this is all a marvellous retail opportunity, everything is going to look smart and nice, Marks and Spencer are going to be on your doorstep etc etc.

Now to the council meeting to see if they can get it through.

At this point, I'll break off the story...with this:

Just up the road from a historic defeat for the people, places and spaces of Dalston in Hackney, comes a historic victory:

http://opendalston.blogspot.com/2012/03/dalstons-voice-is-heard-hackney-reject.html

When is a Lib Dem leaflet not a Lib Dem leaflet - see for yourselves

In a previous post I mentioned Pete Murry's puzzlement at an anti-Labour leaflet that came through his door without any advocacy of another candidate or party. He eventually discovered after forensic analysis where it came from. Here is the evidence as requested by someone who commented on my earlier posting LINK

The leaflet distributed in the Dollis Hill by-election

Now here is a challenge. Can you find the imprint which is required by electoral law? Put on your specs or get out your magnifying glass. Still can't see it?

Okay, look carefully at the fold on the first page of the leaflet.... can you see what looks looks like an ant's footprints? Yes?

Well done - you have won the '2012 Spot the near anonymous Lib Dem leaflet imprint competition'.

How dodgy is that? If cigarette manufacturers tried the same trick with the 'Smoking Kills' warning they'd be hauled through the courts.

PAUSE, LISTEN AND REFLECT, Brent Council told

Keep Willesden Green have launched a new paper and e-petition on the Willesden Green Regeneration issue that encompasses the various concerns of the local community are by calling for Brent Council to Pause, Listen and Reflect before proceeding.

You can sign the E-Petition HERE

PETITION TEXT

We the undersigned petition the council to Pause the Willesden Green Library Centre regeneration plans to allow for full consultation with residents in order to ascertain their views on how the area should be developed and the amenities that should be provided or retained.

Brent Council is handing over public land worth £10.4 million to a property developer in exchange for rebuilding the Willesden Library Centre. The original 1894 library building on the High Road will be demolished, The Willesden Bookshop is likely to be driven out of business, the public car park will be reduced to 8 spaces and a children’s play area will be lost. Over 18 months, three five-storey blocks of 90+ luxury flats will be built behind the existing Library Centre.

We all want a thriving, welcoming and dynamic library and cultural centre, but the current deal has been sealed with virtually no public consultation and very little available information, ignoring the wishes of over a thousand local residents who have expressed opposition to these plans in two Brent e-petitions.

While the developers get a healthy profit from the sale of luxury flats and Brent councillors get some fancy new offices, the cultural and financial cost to rate-paying citizens is disproportionately high. It smacks of ‘profits before people’.

Borough residents need to have a say in the content and design of the library centre redevelopment, but we have not yet been given the chance to do so.

The Council says: Plans for the development of the library centre were raised at the executive committee in February 2011, and quickly followed by two public consultations to ‘test the market’. The council had to abide by commercial confidentiality, so no detailed plans could be made public until a deal was signed with the developer on 15 February 2012.

We say: Did you know about this in 2011? Not a single local resident or tradesperson we spoke to knew about the plans until Jan 2012, and only then through word of mouth. The Feb 2011 consultations were conducted with, respectively, 5 and then 7 people. One person present recounted that they were asked for their opinion, then shown plans for the centre that were drawn up before the meeting. This does not conform to the generally understood definition of a ‘consultation’

REMEMBER TO MAKE YOUR VIEWS KNOWN AT THE EXHIBITION ON SATURDAY 10AM-2PM, WILLESDEN GREEN LIBRARY. YOU WILL BE ABLE TO MEET KEEP WILLESDEN GREEN CAMPAIGNERS OUTSIDE AND SIGN THE PETITION.

Big push on Willesden Green tomorrow

The Keep Willesden Green campaign has had excellent coverage in the Brent and Kilburn Times this week. They will be out in force tomorrow for the Brent Council-Galliford Try Exhibition at Willesden Green Library.

Campaigners are pushing to get 5,000 signatures on the petition to save the historic Old Willesden Library building from demolition. Reaching 5,000 will mean that the issue has to be discussed at full council. E-petiton is HERE and the paper version will be outside the Library tomorrow morning and lunchtime.

The main issues are summarised in the video below:

Ann John challenged on free schools

 I hear that there was a right old ding dong at Labour's Brent Local Government Committee last night when they debated the Brent officers' recommendation that the Council should get involved in setting up a free school.

Nationally Stephen Twigg has failed to issue a clear policy and this has left local Labour parties in a quandary. When a new secondary school was required under the last Labour administration it was argued by Brent officers that there was no alternative to an academy because of the Labour government's policy that all new school should be academies. This opened the way for the ARK Academy and the subsequent conversion of other former local authority schools in Brent to academy status.

This  argument is now being repeated on free schools and the Coalition government policy. Andy Donald, Director of Regeneration, who seems to be directing education policy rather than Krutika Pau who is Director of Children and Families, told Brent Labour Group a week ago that in order to address the shortage of school places that there was no alternative to the Council setting up a free school in partnership with an outside body. I have argued before that the 'numbers' approach to school place shortage was leading to school expansions and bulge classes which paid little heed to the quality of education on offer. Putting builders rather than educationalists in charge is likely to have major repercussions in the future.

In my previous post on this issue I remarked that Brent officers' wouldn't have put forward a free schools strategy without the tacit agreement of Labour leader Ann John. This proved to be the case last night at an emergency meeting.  Ann John and Mary Arnold (lead member for children and families) supported by half a dozen others argued that although they didn't like free schools there was no alternative to supporting them because otherwise children would be denied a right to be educated.

Former Brent South MP Dawn Butler was joined by Cllr Moher (not a Trot as far as I know!)  and veteran Brent Labour activist Colin Adams in opposing the principle of free schools and only agreeing if further work by external consultants established that there was no alternative. Their motion was narrowly carried.

Ann John was not happy as she is used to being 'She who must be obeyed' and suddenly the cavalry arrived in the person of several more councillors who appeared to have been mysteriously summoned and a new motion was put. This opposed free schools in theory but stating that Brent Council should choose a free school partner to work with.

This motion was also carried so Labour now has two policies both opposed to free schools in principle with one seeking delay for further research and the other advocating an immediate partnership.

This debate need to move outside the Labour Party so that Brent teachers and parents have a say in the future of educational provision in the borough. Free schools do not have the democratic accountability of local authority schools, take a disproportionate amount of funding and open the way to experimental teaching and curricula with a potentially damaging impact on children. As with the ARK Academy the first free school in Brent will open the way for others to follow, producing an ad hoc competitive system where working class children may well lose out.

All Souls give Kensal Rise campaigners hope

The Friends of Kensal Rise Library have received good news from the Bursar of All Souls College.

 I am writing to confirm that All Souls College has contacted the council via its solicitors to inform them that the College would be happy to consider the library being kept open as proposed in the Business Plan prepared by the 'Friends of Kensal Rise Library, Ltd.

This puts the ball firmly into Brent Council's court. I await developments with interest.