Another planning application for an ex-Conservative Club

The Red House behind hoardings

Hot on the heels of the sale of the Queensbury pub in Willesden Green by its former Conservative Club owners, a planning application has been made for another former Conservative Club.

The Red House in South Way, next to the Ibis Hotel and opposite Wembley Stadium Station, used ot to be the Wembley Conservative Club. It has been empty since 2006. There still seems to be a linen cloth and glasses on a table in the upstairs bar.

Now a planning application has been made on behalf of a company called Anitan Limited for change of use to a leisure facility. Anitan was only registered with Companies House in July 2012 with capital of £100,000.

The proposal, unlike the Queensbury application, leaves the Red House itself intact. The planning application is for the building to be used as a indoor play facility with a soft play area, storage area, room for classes and a cafe for customers of the play facility only.

The play facility is for younger children and aimed at visitors to the nearby London Designer Outlet Centre as well as local residents. The application claims that it will revitalise the area and provide up to 10 jobs.

Climate Change: Fears and Failures

Submerged footpath at West Hendon Playing Fields last weekend

Let's face it, the turnout at Saturday's Climate Change march, whether the BBC estimate of 300 or the organiser's 500, was poor. A climate crisis billed as threatening the very future of humankind could only get a handful of humans out on the street.  In the circumstances the media coverage we achieved was generous helped by the spectacle of a the erection of a fracking rig outside the House of Parliament.

Chatting in the crowd we speculated why with Hurricane Sandy, the floods in the UK, harvest failures in the US, more people were not concerned enough to come out. We joked that perhaps we needed the Thames Barrier to fail and Westminster to flood, before MPs took notice.  After all it was only when the stench of the Thames got severe enough to penetrate the Palace of Westminster that action was taken to build a proper sewage system.

However, also on Saturday, Anne Karpf's article in the Guardian LINK  reviewed the recently published Engaging with Climate Change, Psychoanalytic and Interdisciplinary Perspectives LINK .

Confessing to being a 'Climate-Change Ignorer' she says despite not being a sceptic she 'tunes out' when she hears apocalyptic warnings about global warming:

The fuse that trips the while circuit is a sense of helplessness. Whatever steps I take to counter global warming, however well-intentioned my brief bursts of zeal, they invariably end up feeling like like too little, too late.  The mismatch between the extremely dangerous state of the earth and my own feeble endeavours seems mockingly large. 

She goes on to describe some of the coping mechanisms described  in the book, including blame-shifting, technoptimism, hedonistic fatalism and dark optimism. It is argued, against the view of my colleague Brian Orr, that apocalyptic warnings are counter productive:

As Ed Miliband has observed, Martin Luther King never inspired millions by saying 'I have a nightmare'.

I would argue that the sense of helplessness is caused by the failure of politicians, governments and the UN, to face the crisis head on. It is as  if, faced with the Nazi menace in the second war, the government had, rather than mobilise troops and the economy and pour money into production and research,  instead asked everyone just to perform the home front task of digging for victory. Of course people would have felt helpless as German troops massed at the channel and bombs fell on our cities. Politicians now are in the equivalent position of those who ignored or down-played the rise of Nazism for fearing of frightening the people.

Here in Brent, in our own small way, following the briefing for councillors and the public, a paper has been produced outlining the extent of the crisis and some ideas for moving forward. A copy is available by clicking the link below:

 

Another dimension is making a link between the current economic crisis and climate change and on Sunday the following resolution from Green Left was passed by an overwhelming majority at the AGM of the Coalition of Resistance:

This conference notes that the current economic crisis is closely linked to a global ecological crisis particularly involving human caused climate change,. Neither crisis, in so far as they can be separated, is soluble under capitalist socio-economic arrangements. Technological fixes and geo-engineering enacted under capitalism can only be short term at best, since ecologically damaging forms of consumption and production are engendered and maintained by capitalism.

We therefore call on the coalition of resistance to recognise this publicly and include combating climate change in its campaigning agendas.

Scenes from the Climate Change March

Green Party stall at Grosvenor Square

Laying the pipeline from US Embassy to Canadian Embassy

International support

At Wesminster

The fracking rig is erected outside Parliament

Natalie Bennett's speech at Climate Change Rally

Join the Brent contingent on Climate March today

As often happens at the weekend  I am torn about which of the several events happening Saturday  I should attend. The Counihan Family March takes place in Kilburn High Road at 1pm, the Chalkhill Community Festival from 1-4pm and a crucial conference on the future of primary education is being held in Lambeth. All these events are important and worth supporting.

The Campaign Against Climate Change March in taking place in Central London. The threat posed by climate change is huge, so huge that it is almost impossible to comprehend its impact, and therefore so tempting to turn to something more manageable. It is almost like knowing we our all going to die eventually - too difficult to really take in so we ignore the inevitable and carry on living day to day because worrying about it will do no good.

Well, I believe we can do something, although the window of opportunity is shrinking rapidly. We have to shout from the rooftops about the issues and demand action from governments across the world. Tomorrow's march is a tiny part of that campaign.

Reasons to march tomorrow:

• The rapid melting of the Arctic ice cap.
• Floods and droughts driving up food prices and world hunger.
• Hurricane Sandy the most powerful Atlantic tropical storm since records began.
• Over 200 Flood Warnings and one Severe Flood Warning in Britain recently.
• Climate change will worsen the economic crisis as food prices soar and land is used to grow fuel instead of food
• Food and water shortages will cause armed conflict between countries
• Mass migrations will take place from affected areas with homes and livelihoods lost.
• The greed for fossil fuels will see oil companies turning to more and more dangerous extraction methods  that damage the environment.

Whatever the outcome of the UN talks in Doha, we have to step-up the pressure on governments to take the necessary action NOW to limit climate change.

NATIONAL CLIMATE MARCH  DECEMBER 1st
Assemble 12.00 noon in Grosvenor Square
or
Join the Brent contingent at the entrance to Willesden Green tube at 11.15am  

12.00 -1.30 Assemble Grosvenor Square and build the "Grosvenor Square Keystone pipeline" from the Canadian High Commission to the US embassy !
1.30 - 3.30 March to Parliament
3.30 - 4.30 Build a giant mock fracking rig outside parliament !

Come to the Chalklhill Community Festival on Saturday

This Saturday 1st December there is a Community Festival from 1-4pm at Chalkhill Community Centre with 35 stalls and activities offering the chance to try out and meet many of the groups and activities in Chalkhill including:

• Team GB Olympic fencer James Honeybone
• Magician
• Jewellery making
• Pilates
• Singing
• Free hot lunch from 1-2pm, choice of Caribbean, Asian, British and African with halal and vegetarian options
• fire engine
• football skills
• taekwondo
• pampering

The choir of Chalkhill Primary school will be performing.

The event is completely free and for all ages.

113 Chalkhill Road,  Wembley, Middlesex HA9 9FX

"A farrago, a sham, an utterly dishonest exercise"

It reminded me of those Victorian pictures of the ragged, scrawny child, barefoot in the snow, with nose pressed against a restaurant window staring at the big-bellied rich tucking into their suppers in a warm glow of complacency.

We were in the opulent surroundings of a ballroom in the Hilton Metropole, Edgware Road trying to tell the smooth, expensively suited gentlemen from NW London NHS on the platform just what untold damage their 'Shaping A Healthier Future' (SAHF) proposals would do the people of Harlesden and Stonebridge, two of London's poorest wards. The whole consultation exercise to reach a foregone conclusion has cost £7,000,000

We were presented with a IPSO/MORI consultation report that ignored the thousands who had signed petitions against the proposals but instead went on to suggest that that the far fewer people who had submitted a response to Options A, B or C (all rejected by the petitioners) somehow represented some kind of democratic endorsement. 66,000 signatories on 18 petitions were apparently counted as 18 responses.

Andy Slaughter MP summed it up:

This is a complete farrago,  a complete sham, a completely and utterly dishonest exercise!

This was the beginning of many exchanges about the consultation which I felt rather let IPSO/MORI take the fire that should have been aimed at NW London NHS for the inadequacy and downright dangerousness and dishonesty of their proposals.

Ann Drinkell, put her finger on the dangers towards the end of the Q and A session. She claimed that SAHF had been dishonest about the ability of community care being suddenly able to pick up on the slack when fewer people were admitted to hospital or stayed for a shorter period.

Everyone know we aspire to good community care, good palliative care, but everyone also knows how difficult it is.  It is disingenuous to suddenly think it will be unproblematic. The impact of restructuring and budget cuts on community care and social care will be enormous. You are treating us like children.

Dr Mark Spencer then proceeded to do just that, treating us to a couple of anodyne PowerPoint slides on the 'Programme of Work' and 'Clinical Review of Responses' that would now begin. We were not allowed to ask questi9ons about this.

After a buffet supper (those ragamuffins in my head again) we went into 'Stakeholder Workshops'. These were introduced by Lucy Ivimy, Chair of the Joint Health Overview and Scrutiny Committee, a Conservative councillor in Hammersmith and Fulham.

She said that the initial impetus for the proposals had been the rationalisation of Accident and Emergency wards in the area and the fall out was a consequence of this, The virtual closure of two hospitals had been hidden deep in the plans, Given the wide geographical area and the propensity of people wanting to protect their own local facilities it had not been possible for the Committee to reach agreement.

She said that there were two main concerns:
1. SAHF was premised on success of the out of hospital strategy. This had been promoted for years but in real life admissions had continued to rise. We need more evidence on the strategy and a firm path to follow.
2. Transport was a big issue. Although there was a claim from the ambulance survey that there was little impact on the 'blue light' journeys the majority of journeys to hospital are by other means including public transport. There had been no analysis of these journeys.

A skirmish followed about whether this represented the committee and it emerged that an initial very critical report had been replaced by a much sifter version which was the 'official report'.

The workshops that followed were actually very interesting and dealt with issues that should have been discussed prior to the formulation of the plans. The public were feeding back on their real lived experiences - not going through a desk-top exercise. The world turned upside down.

In the workshop I attended I protested once again that schools as stakeholder had not been consulted at all and that children had been left out at a time when the child population is rising and they will be making demands on the health service. Gurjinder Sandhu, a specialist in infectious diseases, working at Ealing Hospital backed this up describing the importance being able to access hospitals and their presence aiding recovery, how A&E picked up child protection issues and that the difficulty schools would have in trying to deal with fragmenting services.  A&E had a role in detecting TB which was very high in Southall and Ealing - not to mention  HIV.

In the workshop on Urgent Care Centre a disagreement became apparent between practitioners about how reliable UCCs were with a suggestion that staffing levels and expertise were poor and that this represented a risk to patients. This was even more so when there was no A&E on the same site as will be the case with Central Middlesex Hospital.

The strong underlying thread was that health services and access to health services would worsen for the most vulnerable. The ragamuffin has been left out in the cold.

Consultation feedback below:

Brent forms Waste Warriors team to beat fly-tippers

Following an increaser in fly-tipping this year Brent Council is to create a 'Environmental Crime Prevention Team' to tackle graffiti and fly-tipping. There will be a refreshed focus on waste enforcement, dealing particularly with fly-tipping and business waste.

A report going before the One Council Overview and Scrutiny Committee on December 5th admits that one reason for the increase in fly-tipping is the 'council's new household waste collection arrangements that restrict the volume of waste that is collected'.

The council no longer collects additional sacks that are left next to the bins. They say 'this has led to residents dumping excess/uncollected waste on footpaths and near litter bins in some areas'.

A second reason is to do with the street cleansing cuts introduced last year. The report says that less frequent sweeps mean items are left for longer and more likely to be reported.

A third reason is increased commercial waste disposal charges which has led to 'dumping by unscrupulous trades who wish to avoid these charges'. The report notes that commercial waste disposal cots rise each year and 'can be particularly burdensome' for small and medium-sized businesses in difficult economic times.

If the 'no side collection' rule is causing more fly-tipping there is likely to be pressure from some quarters for this rule to be relaxed. 

These impacts were predicted by campaigners at the time the new recycling system and street cleaning cuts were introduced last year.

The immediate impact of the £2m cut in street cleansing has been addressed through various measures including paying particular attention to known problem areas and 'bespoke' arrangements around very difficult areas such as Harlesden town centre. Veolia have now introduced a 'recycling pick-up of waste dumped in town centres which ensures a second additional early morning clearance in those areas.  A concerted anti-litter campaign is being considered.

On a more optimistic note  the council claim that the measures they have taken to increase recycling have resulted in an average of 45% for 2012-13 compared with 32% in the same period last year. The target is 60%.