Labour Councillor: Closing libraries is 'the best thing we've done'.

I am just back from holiday and catching up on local news. It was no surprise to hear that the Brent Executive voted through the library closures as that decision was anticipated by the budget approved by the Council earlier, by the officers' report to the Council and by Cllr Powney's utterances throughout. 'Consultation', 9,000 petition signatures, 'Big Society' schemes and even two hours of eloquent  presentations to the Executive. mean nothing if the Labour leadership and its supine councillors have already made up their minds.

The attitude of some Labour councillors is summed up by this comment posted on the Save Preston Library Facebook page. Cllr Colum Mahoney was alleged to have said at the end of the meeting when demonstrators said how gutted they were at losing their library:

He said with a wide grin on his face, "It's the best thing we've done." As we he was walking out of the Town Hall doors, he shouted back at us, "Go and read some books."

The issue of the Civic Centre has come to the fore as a result of the press and TV coverage and the Conservatives on the Council, despite being part of the previous Council Coalition that initiated the project, are now more vocal in their opposition. When all the political parties on the council voted unanimously for the Civic Centre, the Greens were the only voice of opposition.  Cllr Reg Colwill can bee seen on the London ITN News criticising the project:



Interestingly even the Wall Street Journal LINK suggests that Brent Council could move into cheap office space:

......instead of constructing what it aims to be "the greenest building in the U.K." Forgoing the new center's wedding garden, winter garden, terrace, and charging points for electric cars might also leave a little more cash for libraries.

My colleague Shahrar Ali has posted a report on the Executive Meeting HERE

The question for me remains, 'What price local democracy?' The Willesden and Brent Times last week in a editorial echoed my warnings about the impact of poor consultation procedures, decisions made in advance of consultations and the rubbishing of active citizenship on the electorate's long-term relationship with the Council. The Council may express concern that only 20% of residents use the public libraries - those same 20% are probably a much bigger proportion of those people who actually vote at local elections (only just over half of those on the electoral roll last May).

I'll be missing all the action on Monday

I will not be posting for a week as I am taking a week's holiday.  Many thanks for all those who at various meetings, demonstrations etc have made positive comments on Wembley Matters and encouraged me to 'keep on blogging'. I look forward to hearing how things went at Monday's Executive Meeting when I return.

Tribute to Jayaben Desai, Sunday April 17th

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LOBBY EXECUTIVE MEETING FROM 6.00 PM ON MONDAY TO SAVE OUR LIBRARIES

Brent Fightback along with library campaigners will be lobbying the Executive Meeting on Monday outside the Town Hall from 6pm. The Executive is the decision making body on library closures. The Extraordinary Council Meeting later in the week is not empowered to change Executive decisions. 

Public attendance arrangements for Monday's Executive meeting are the same as for the recent budget setting Council meeting. Admittance will be by ticket on a first come - first served basis.  Tickets will be distributed at the Town Hall door from around 6pm.  There will be 48 tickets only for the public gallery.

There is a notice on the door of the Town Hall Library saying that the library, which usually closes at 8pm on a Monday, will be closed at 5pm 'Due to the Executive Meeting'. This presumably is to avoid any repeat of the Council Meeting when protesters,  frustrated at the limitation on attendance,  circumvented security and the police by entering the Town Hall through the adjoining library.  Certainly 48 is a very small number of the public compared with the more than 9,000 who have signed petitions to keep the libraries open..

Both The Willesden and Brent Times and Wembley and Willesden Observer have editorials critical of Brent Council this week. The WBT says Labour councillors have 'steam-rollered' their original plans through and ignored the results of consultation. They state along similar lines that I have argued here:

As one activist said, the impression is that the council is just going through the motions rather than taking people's views into account. If the council are not careful residents will just stop engaging with them or, in their eyes, worse, take their votes elsewhere.

 The WWO says residents have never been so vocal as on the libraries issue and say it has left campaigners wondering what the point of consulting was if their views were always intended to be ignored:

It seems the protesters were unfortunately always doomed to fail in this sham of a process which has now been deemed a farce by campaign groups. Brent Council had already made up its mind when it set the budget back in February - before the consultation finished.

They call on the Executive to look beyond the closure report and:

consider the overwhelming community spirit which has united the borough in the crusade to save their beloved reading rooms...

 It is rare for our local newspapers to criticise the council in such harsh terms and great to see them making a firm stand alongside local people in the best tradition of a strong local press holding the council to account.  A huge turn-out on Monday is essential to reinforce the message: The fight for our libraries and our other services is not yet lost. The ConDem government is doing a u-turn on the NHS, Brent Council should think again.

Brent Library Closures Hit Evening Standard

Follow this link for today's story LINK  The story contrasts the library closures with the £3m to be spent on a mega library at the new Civic Centre

The Future Under Carbon-rationing as Climate Change Hits Crisis Point

Author Saci Lloyd will visit the Willesden Green Library Centre on Saturday 9^th April  to read from her acclaimed teenage novels “The Carbon Diaries 2015” and “The Carbon Diaries 2017”. Following the readings there will be discussion with a teenage audience about the prospect of carbon rationing in the UK and feelings about the threat of Climate Change.

This event is the first in a series of “Green Writers” at the Willesden Green Library Centre, where authors will read from their books about an environmental aspect and discuss them with the audience. The series is organised by the Brent Campaign against Climate Change in liaison with the Willesden Green Library.

Saci Lloyd's first novel “The Carbon Diaries 2015” was shortlisted for the Costa Book Awards in 2008.  Its heroine is Laura Brown, a teenager who struggles to cope with her family, dreams of a breakthrough with her punk band and fancies the boy next door. When on 1^st January 2015, the UK is the first nation to introduce carbon dioxide rationing, Laura chronicles the events of  this drastic bid to combat climate change and illustrates how carbon rationing is threatening to turn her family, her local environment and the whole country out of control.

In the sequel “The Carbon Diaries 2017” Laura tours Europe with her punk band and becomes involved with an increasingly dramatic sequence of climate change-related events that include drought in Europe and Africa, a tidal-wave of desperate immigrants, a water war in the Middle East and clashes between Londoners and the army in the town centre.

Ken Montague, Secretary of the Brent Campaign against Climate Change says, “After the failure of the Copenhagen Climate Summit and the limited outcome of the recent climate talks it is easy to forget that if we don’t act now climate change will be a far worse threat to our future than the economic crisis. It will be the generation of Laura Brown's children who will see the fight over natural resources. ”

The reading and discussion is from 2- 4pm on Saturday, 9^th April 2011 at the Willesden Green Library Centre, 95 High Road, Willesden, NW10 2SF. All are welcome. Please bring your copy of the “Carbon Diaries” along if you would like it to be signed by the author.

Park Lane celebrates 100 years of primary education

 

 

The whole school assembled on Park Lane to mark 9/11

Park Lane Infant and Junior School, Wembley will be marking its 100th anniversary this evening from 6pm. Former staff and pupils are all invited to attend the celebration.  This week staff and pupils have been dressed in Edwardian clothes and lessons have taken place on Edwardian lines.  I popped in yesterday to find pupils seated in  rows facing the front and each class stood in unison as soon as I entered the room. 

I inspected finger nails and unfortunately found one boy who appeared to have been planting potatoes before school and several girls with painted finger nails! There were several cases of tardiness and one of non-return of homework. Fortunately I found a cane in the teacher's cupboard...

Interestingly it was corporal punishment in a Welsh school that set off a series of children's strikes also one hundred years ago in the autumn of 1911. Eventually, in those days before social messaging or even radio,  the strikes spread to more than 60 towns throughout the UK. There is still debate amongst historians about whether the strikes were merely copycats of the industrial unrest then occurring across the country or something more.

Children walked out of school over Iraq in 2003, striking children in 1911

One hundred years later there is again social discontent and children are suffering disproportionately from public spending cuts.

More on 1911 Children's Strikes HERE

Urgent short-term solutions put forward for school places crisis

Children out of school - click image to enlarge

 

 

The Brent Executive will be considering further expansions of primary schools at their meeting on April11th and the report they will consider contains an unprecedented delegation of decision making on sums above £1m to the Director of Regeneration and Major Projects due to the urgency of the situation.

The map above shows the distribution of need for September 2011, although an important caveat is that the smiley faces do not indicate a 1 to 1 relationship and that positioning is only approximate.  The actual numbers for March 2011 are in the last two columns below

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Regular readers will know that I have long been pressing for a borough-wide long-term strategy to address the problem rather than the ad-hoc approach of the last few years. The report says the council is developing a four year medium-term strategy which should be presented in the next two months, but this will not be in time for the September 2011-August 2012 school year. They say there are several options being considered to increase capacity without compromising educational outcomes.

These include:

• All-through schools (5-19 yr olds) - no educational discussion has yet take place on this despite the council's approval of Preston Manor's conversion into an all-through school and ARK's development into an all-through school.
• Five form entry primary schools (which would give a primary school of 1,050 pupils - larger than many secondary schools in the rest of the country)
• Larger classes with 'qualifying measures' to take account og legislation. This will ring alarm bells for headteachers, teachers and parents.

Such measures would require a thorough-going public educational debate - not one just based on the urgency of the school places crisis.

As an interim measure the report puts forward plans to expand eight schools on a temporary basis.  'Bulge' classes are an additional class added to a school on a one-off basis. It progresses through the school as an additional class of usually 30 children in that particular cohort and suitable accommodation has to be found as the children get older. In contrast a one form entry expansion eventually requires space for 7 classes of 30.

After assessing the risks attached to the possible expansion of 14 schools, including Capital City Academy and Wembley High taking primary classes, the report lists eight schools which it intends to temporarily expand:

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