Wise counsel for ‘Leaders’
everywhere.
Guest blog
by Mike Hine
Here’s an encouraging little tale for people anywhere who
are fighting local government secrecy, opposing council leaders who think
they’re above democratic accountability, needing a reminder of what a brief,
focussed, media-savvy campaign can achieve with public backing or just happy to
see a couple of smug Tory bigwigs get reminded of the limits of their entitlement.
(And it’s a particularly happy one for anyone who knows the beautiful,
unspoilt, undeveloped stretch of the Thames riverbank between Twickenham and
Richmond).
It involves Richmond’s Tory council leader Baron True(!) and
old friend of Thatcher and ex head of P&0, Baron Sterling, (who once said
that his Portsmouth cruise-ship customers should have a separate terminal so
they wouldn’t be forced to mix with ‘ordinary’ ferry customers who were ‘mostly
semi lager louts and lorry drivers who smelt of BO’).
Lord Sterling paid for the building of the ‘Gloriana’, the
beautifully-constructed bit of royal bling you see below. It was specially
built and used for the Queen’s jubilee celebrations in 2012.
The problem with a camp old bit of kitsch like this is what
do you do with it after it’s fulfilled its original function? Rather like the
monarchy itself in fact.
Well Baron Sterling
had a word with Baron True and they decided that they’d get local council tax
payers to fork out for an enormous wooden boathouse ( a 10 by 40 metre
glorified shed) on an ‘unused’ bit of the Thames embankment and they’d put it
in there. Baron Sterling would be happy,
Baron True would have a ‘legacy’ vanity project, Richmond might be given ‘Royal
Borough’ status and both of them might get their ‘Barons’ upgraded to something
less insignificant by a grateful old monarch.
All this was secretly planned by the leader of the council 2
years ago, an architect was commissioned and a design approved by the barons
was produced. In June of this year the leader deigned to let his electors know
his plan, correctly assuming that his lobby-fodder councillors (whose claim to
know nothing of the plans didn’t temper the desire of almost all of them to
give it their immediate full backing) would raise little objection. The idea
was that, after the customary fake ‘consultation’, the project would be agreed
in council by September and work would go ahead; they’d start chopping down
trees, destroying the habitats of bats, birds and other wildlife and bring in
the development company’s excavators. It seemed to be a fait-accompli.
But then the shit hit the plan. (And that’s not a reference
to the thousands of people who got involved in refusing to let the barons rob
them of their heritage). The people who loved the fact that this mile-long
stretch of the Thames was pretty much as it had been for the last 200 years,
the people who took their kids to the small playground there, who used the
friendly, scruffy café, who walked their dogs there, who just enjoyed the
tranquil, unspoiled nature of the place, they got together through word of
mouth, through social media, through meetings, through online petitions and referendums,
through the (non-political) local ( but vastly inferior) equivalent to Wembley Matters.
The Barons’ plans have been abandoned and this, in its
untidy, undeveloped, characterful loveliness, has been preserved.
For now.
What’s the relevance of this to Brent? Simply the fact that
certain aspects of local government in
Richmond might ring a bell with
observers of local government in NW London.
Baron
True and Councillor Butt, in the way they conduct affairs and the way they
affect our lives, have more in common than they have differences. The
clandestine nature of the planning of the Gloriana boathouse vanity project has
more relevance to the way councils and their leaders operate in both Brent and
Richmond than do the Labour or Tory labels attached to the main players in
either borough. Vanity and power (and the abuse of ‘procedure’ to lubricate the
exercise of both) are seen to be their own justification. The extravagantly
rewarded council functionaries who knew but kept schtum about the Barons’ plans
in Richmond had no more sense of duty towards the public they served and who
paid them than do their expensively ‘outsourced’ and perpetually interim
equivalents in Brent. In short, the barons’ mentality, the self-serving
arrogance of power, the secretiveness, the sense of entitlement about handing
down prearranged decisions to the ‘ordinary’ people, these qualities are not
just the preserve of the ‘ennobled’.
But the biggest
lesson from the Gloriana boathouse victory is surely one to celebrate and to
take encouragement from: it is that, no matter how ‘noble’, how well-connected,
how apparently secure in power, how self-confident or how devious, the barons
can be resisted and the barons can be defeated,
in Brent as in Richmond.
And
that lovely bit of unspoiled Thames riverside with its scruffy old playground
and its friendly little cafe will now remain a testament and a monument to that
fact.
