Save the Granville and Carlton Centres - they bind our communities together

This guest post is by Leslie Barson. It is ironic that at Brent Council's Time to Talk event on Extremism earlier this week, a strong theme from workshops was the need for neutral, accessible, affordable spaces where different communities could mix and get to know each other.  Like Stonebridge Adventure Playgound, demolished by the Council, these are examples of existing spaces that do precisely that job being threatend by Brent Council's actions.

Please watch the short film above and sign the petition HERE

Many of you will have heard about the 'consultation' that ended recently concerning the South Kilburn Master plan and the plans to include The Granville Plus Centre and The Catrlton Centre. The plan is to tear both buildings down and replace with them  with flats, businesses  and community spaces.

The plan to tear the heart out of South Kilburn by getting rid of these iconic buildings is scandalous. These two loved buildings that carry the memories and history of the area. You may remember going to youth club there, having a special birthday party there, a Christening or even the funeral of your loved ones. You may have learnt a trade in Carlton  or gone to school there. Your children may have gone to nursery there, or your young people attended the Youth Service activities in Granville.

We are told the buildings are 'under utilised'. If this is so it is because of Brent Council's policies over the last few years. I know it the case of Granville: the building was full to the brim in 2013 with events every weekday and weekends. There was a problem with  neighbours and noise. The money was found by the council to deal with the problem by upgrading the windows and installing sound insulation.

However, suddenly this money was taken back by the council  and the work did not go ahead. Instead the Granville was told to no longer hold functions emptying the building. The Brent Youth Service was scrapped 31 March this year with the loss of classes and activities  to over 800 young people a year in Granville.

The Granville Community Kitchen with the local community decided to do something to remedy this. As a community with the help of John Lyons Charity we held a 2 day a week summer scheme and had over 85 children and young people attend over the 5 weeks; This shows the tremendous need in the area for free local services for children and young people. We all know the need for community space is there so if these buildings are under used its due to policy not need.

Both these buildings are also in need of renovating. There is no denying that. This again is used as a reason to tear them down. But actually they are run down again due to  council policy, but Granville has attracted £1.8 m of GLA money in May this year. And the South Kilburn Trust are adding £2m to that to renovate Granville. So there is no need to argue that the buildings need renovating,. We agree and the money can be found!

These buildings were both built around 1908 to serve the people of South Kilburn, The Carlton  Centre as a primary school and the Granville Plus centre as a mission hall.  They are still serving the people of South Kilburn:

We need  that continuity in the area.
We need our rich history and heritage  buildings  more than ever with such massive changes happening in South Kilburn.
We need a place that is distinctly South Kilburn.
We need community memories and community history that bind us.
We need Carlton and Granville  renovated for the people of South Kilburn to use for generations to come.

Eroding Trust: Discussion of Open Society report on Prevent Wednesday October 19th

The launch of of a new report by the Open Society Justice Initiative assessing the human rights impact of the government’s Prevent strategy in health and education.

The report, entitled “Eroding Trust: The UK’s Prevent Counter-Extremism strategy in health and education” seeks to contribute to the debate on Prevent, at a time when the government is preparing to update the CONTEST counter-terrorism strategy of which it is a part.

Based on legal analysis, case studies of individuals directly affected by the Prevent strategy in health and education, as well as interviews with health and education professionals, current and former government officials, religious leaders, and community advocates, this report presents the most comprehensive account to date of how Prevent is being implemented in these areas.

The launch will take place on Wednesday 19th October in Committee Room 10 at 6pm. I would be delighted if you could attend.

RSVP to Priya Dev – devp@parliament.uk

Eroding Trust: Discussion of Open Society report on Prevent Wednesday October 19th

The launch of of a new report by the Open Society Justice Initiative assessing the human rights impact of the government’s Prevent strategy in health and education.

The report, entitled “Eroding Trust: The UK’s Prevent Counter-Extremism strategy in health and education” seeks to contribute to the debate on Prevent, at a time when the government is preparing to update the CONTEST counter-terrorism strategy of which it is a part.

Based on legal analysis, case studies of individuals directly affected by the Prevent strategy in health and education, as well as interviews with health and education professionals, current and former government officials, religious leaders, and community advocates, this report presents the most comprehensive account to date of how Prevent is being implemented in these areas.

The launch will take place on Wednesday 19th October in Committee Room 10 at 6pm. I would be delighted if you could attend.

RSVP to Priya Dev – devp@parliament.uk

Chance to care for the Welsh Harp, including canoeing for litter!

Readers asked for early warning of the next Conservation Day at the Welsh Harp Environmental Education Centre, so here it is.

Billy Coburn, Thames21 Development Officer, writes:

The next Welsh Harp event is going to be taking place on Sunday 23rd October starting at the usual time of 10am. Please see the attached poster and here is a link to details for the event,  http://www.thames21.org.uk/event/welsh-harp-nature-conservation-day-4/  People seem to like the format of:

10-12: Complete and activity;
12-12:45: Have some lunch;
12:45-2pm: Finish the task at hand;

So we are going to keep that format.

We will form another glade as part of the woodland management plan, cut some of the wild meadow or remove some of the blackthorn which is trying to find a home in the meadow grass and needs to be removed. I will send another email the week leading up to the 23rd to confirm after my site visit.

The footpath clearing group

 What happened at the last event

At the last event we cut back the vegetation around Birchen Grove leading up to the education centre. Thames21 led education sessions AM and PM for the whole week after the last event  leading to approximately 300 children using the education centre that week. They could use the path rather than the road as access because of you. We also undertook a number of other smaller tasks. Great work everyone!

Sunday November 20th Canoe clean up on the Welsh Harp.

For the November volunteering event, we are hopefully going to be completing something a little different. As you may know, many canoe and sailing clubs use the Welsh Harp. A lot of litter gets stuck in the environmentally important reed beds and we are going to be canoeing to those locations and removing rubbish from the boats. It does not matter if you have canoed before so if you would like the chance to paddle for free, do some good for the environment and see the beauty of the Welsh Harp from a different perspective, please do give me an email to register your interest. Full details will be released when we have them. We will also have some land based activities as well to cater for everyone if you do not wish to canoe on the day.

'Nothing About Us, Without Us' - Statement on Brent's Time to Talk 'Extremism' discussion

This is the statement that Monitoring Prevent in Brent distributed at Monday's Brent Council discussion on Extremism:

“Nothing about us, without us”

Tonight (3 October 2016) Brent Council is holding the second of its Time to Talk series of events.
The Council believes ‘it is time to talk’. But for two years now, An-Nisa Society and other local organisations have been trying to raise our concerns about the Prevent Strategy and, in particular, the Public Sector Duty, which makes public sector employees liable to prosecution if they don’t report signs of perceived ‘extremism’ or ‘radicalisation’. Almost all of those referred are Muslim, often children as young as 10. Frustrated by months of silence from the Council, we held a public meeting on 10 December 2015.

With the help of Cllr Harbi Farah, we finally met the Leader of Brent Council, Mohammed Butt. Promises made by Councillor Butt to continue the conversation and to take some positive actions have not been followed up. As a result, we released a public statement on Prevent. (http://monitoringprevent.blogspot.co.uk/ ).

Serious questions need to be asked about the purpose of Time to Talk meetings. At the first one in July - a slick, well orchestrated ‘information session’ - we were left feeling that rather than a ‘time to talk’ it was in fact a time to be ‘told’ and ‘to listen’. The purpose of the workshop in the afternoon was unclear: it was really a theoretical tick box exercise. There were more officers and councillors at the meeting than ‘community’ and there was no opportunity to really scrutinise and question.
We view with extreme caution the meeting on ‘Extremism’. The speakers are once again highly qualified individuals who appear to have very little relationship to Brent. The programme offers little or no opportunity for local organisations to raise their concerns freely – the council has requested sending in questions in advance via email before we even hear the speakers.

So, what is presented as ‘community engagement’ and ‘community consultation’ appears to be a public relations exercise by Brent Council designed to validate and implement policies that impact on all our communities without any input from those most affected.

We call on Brent Council to engage transparently with individuals and organisations in Brent affected by government policy on ‘Extremism.’

Statement by Monitoring Prevent in Brent

Members include: An-Nisa Society, Brent Against Racism Campaign, Brent Stop the War, Brent and Harrow Palestine Solidarity Campaign
Email: MonitoringPrevent@gmail.com Facebook: Monitoring Prevent in Brent

LINKS:

• An-Nisa Responds to Prevent, the PSD and outlines our anti-Prevent campaign http://bit.ly/2cXE6ek
• Brent Council meeting on 'extremism' leaves community voices off the platform http://wembleymatters.blogspot.co.uk/…/brent-council-meetin…
• Preventing Violent Extremism (PVE) & Prevent: A Muslim response by An-Nisa Society, 2009 http://bit.ly/2cLQIXA
• Anti-extremism drive puts British values at risk, says Greater Manchester chief constable Sir Peter Fahy who says government strategy could alienate Muslims and damage free speech and religious freedom, The Guardian, 2015 http://bit.ly/2amvIqD
• Andy Burnham calls for 'toxic' Prevent strategy to be scrapped - Shadow home secretary says policy is today’s equivalent of internment in Northern Ireland, Guardian, 2016 http://bit.ly/1UprOqA
• Edinburgh College drops Prevent from its staff training, 2016 – SACC http://bit.ly/2dLG1lj
• Anti-radicalisation strategy lacks evidence base in science, Letters, The Guardian http://bit.ly/2d7ZJGx
• Anti-radicalisation strategy lacks evidence base in science, Joint letter by academics and practitioners, The Guardian Letters, September 2016 http://bit.ly/2dd8WyJ
• Alienation and extremism, 2016, Prevent has merely institutionalised the process, which creates alienation and separation said speaker Imran Khan at a Wadham College Human Rights Forum roundtable discussion. http://bit.ly/2dDwuMm

'Appalling' Brent STP engagement meeting short on detail and understanding

From the official video LINK

The following item is published with the permission of Eric Leach who publishes an occasional Newsletter  researched, written and edited by a group of concerned residents in Ealing, West London who want to preserve our NHS. 

This is his account account of the recent Brent 'engagement' event on theSTP (Sustainability and Transformation Plan) LINK  LINK

Appalling STP Public Meeting in Brent on 26 September 2016

I attended this STP public meeting which was organised by Brent Council and Brent Clinical Commissioning Group (CCG). Two of the five North West London ‘Footprint’ bosses spoke at the meeting. They were Carolyn Downs, Chief Executive of Brent Council and Local Authority STP lead in NW London, and ex-advertising executive Rob Larkman who is Chief Officer for Brent, Harrow and Hillingdon CCGs.

The STP aspirations were summarized as closing the ‘gaps’ in health and wellbeing, care and quality, and finance and efficiency. Ways to close these gaps will be prevention, self-help, more home care and less hospital care. Also care for those with long term conditions, and for old and mentally ill people would be improved.

What was sadly missing in the presentations was detail on:

+ The Brent STP

+ How the Brent STP relates to the NW London STP

+ Five years of cost cutting

+ Loss of 500+ beds

+ Changes to access to GPs

+ How integrating healthcare and social care will be implemented

+ Seven day working

+ Care staffing levels

+ Any mention of Accountable Care Partnerships (ACPs) – the future delivery vehicle for all care services and cost cutting

+ Evidence to support the STP.

No-one will ever argue with efforts to improve healthcare and social care. However it’s quite clear that many who spoke in the audience had serious doubts as to whether the money, staff and facilities would be available to make improvements.

Carolyn Downs seemed surprisingly ignorant about the national STP dimension. She stated that just two STPs out of 44 nationally had been published. In fact seven regional STPs have been published. It was news to me that when the initial STP submission was made by NW London each of the eight CCGs/Local Authorities submitted their own STPs. Given that Ealing and Hammersmith & Fulham Councils failed to sign up to the NWL STP, one could only wonder at the time what these local STPs actually contained. 

In the Q&A the issue of ACPs was raised twice. Rob Larkman gave hopeless answers to the questions. In his answers he failed to explain the nature of ACPs and refused to identify their supreme importance for care service delivery in the future.When asked about capitated budgets for ACPs he just waffled. One wonders whether he was genuinely ignorant about the ACP details or he was being deliberately economical with the truth.

Doctor Kong, a GP from Harlesden, was on the panel. She is Chair of Brent CCG. She repeatedly gave her spirited opinion that healthcare and social care would become integrated because everyone was so committed to make it happen. An ex-Brent Councillor in the audience said that in the 1980s we were all committed to make healthcare and social care work together. But commitment was not enough to bring about improvements then and she doubted it would be in the future. She also said that getting people to do what they were supposed to do has always been a problem. She asked how the performance of the new services would be monitored. This question was bizarrely (not) answered by a diatribe on the STP community engagement strategy!

Questions were asked about social care costings, delivering out of hospital services and improved provisions for respite for carers - but no clear answers emerged. This meeting was described as ‘community engagement’. How such a label could be attached to this event is baffling – given that the draft Brent STP was delivered to NHSE on or before 30 June 2016.

This occasional newsletter is researched, written and edited by a group of concerned residents in Ealing, West London who want to preserve our NHS. We view the wholesale engagement of private, for-profit healthcare service suppliers as unnecessary, profligate and dangerous. Process improvement is what is needed in our NHS – not revolution.

Labour stifles the anti-cuts movement

A year ago I published a piece on Wembley Matters which asked what Jeremy Corbyn, then the new Labour leader, would do about local council cuts.  I drew attention to the contradiction that under him Labour claimed to be an anti-austerity party while local Labour councils were implementing the Tory austerity agenda by making cuts to services. LINK

In December last year Corbyn and McDonnell, responding to pressure from local council leaders who in turn were under pressure from anticuts campaigns, threw the towel in and wrote to Labour councillors telling them to set 'legal' budgets:

Failing to do so can lead to complaints against councillors under the Code of Conduct, judicial review of the council and, most significantly, government intervention by the Secretary of State.

It would mean either council officers or, worse still, Tory ministers deciding council spending priorities. Their priorities would certainly not meet the needs of the communities which elected us.

In effect this meant implenting cuts.

In March this year, just as Councils were formally approving budgets, the People's Assembly Against Austerity LINK  asked councillors to sign the following letter:

As Councillors we believe this Tory Government's ideological opposition to public services lies behind the deliberate underfunding of Local Authorities.

Councils have faced unprecedented cuts; Local Authority grants in England have been slashed, with £12.5 billion of cuts and half a million Council workers losing their jobs since 2010. Osborne has forced through 40% cuts to Council budgets meaning that local authorities face the reality of cutting frontline services including Adult Social Care and Children's Services, leaving those that rely on them at risk.

We believe that austerity is a political choice. We oppose all cuts from Westminster and believe Osborne’s plans for Local Government will only make a bad situation worse.

We call on the government to reverse cuts to council funding so we are able to provide essential services our communities rely on. Furthermore we call for an end to austerity that is seeing living standards for the majority fall.

Given the Labour leadership's instruction this meant paper opposition only, although councils tried to find alternatives by rising charges and rents and finally raising council tax. This still meant of course that the poor were paying for austerity - but by a different route.

The situation is now worse as a result of cuts in real terms to local authority education grants. LA education budgets have not been increased to take account of increased pension and national insurance contributions or the increasing number of pupils in schools.

The anti-cuts movement had argued for councils to refuse to set budgets, set illegal budgets or devise a needs based budget, as an alternative to making cuts. This to be accompanied by a mass campaign involving councillors, trade unions, voluntary organisations and the public. 

In practical terms combining the two approaches didn't work because no group of councillors took the former approach although some individual councillors voted against budgets losing the whip as a consequence.  It was then difficult for local Labour parties to mobilise the public against cuts when they themselves had implemented them.

This year, by agreeing to the freezing of the Revenue Support Grant and the associated four year action plans, councils have accepted the government cuts and boxed gthemselves in for 4 years.

The Labour National Executive Committee has now strengthened control over Labour councillors with the following  rule change:

Members of the Labour group in administration must comply with the provisions of the Local Government Finance Act 1988 and subsequent revisions and shall not vote against or abstain on a vote in full council to set a legal budget proposed by the administration.

Members of the Labour group shall not support any proposal to set an illegal budget. Any councillor who votes against or abstains on a Labour group policy decision in this matter may face disciplinary action.

My interpretation of this is that when in opposition Labour groups can decide to vote against cuts budgets but where Labour is in power individual Labour councillors cannot vote against cuts budget.  These are not just any cuts, these are Labour cuts - and therefore preferable?

I searched in vain for any reference to challenging cuts and mobilising mass campaings in Jeremy Corbyn's Conference speech.  I publish the section on local councils in full. He praises local councils for what they have done despite the cuts and describes (rather than advocates) some councils' decisions to take services back in-house. In doing so he says that this is cheaper and preserves working conditions. However this presents difficulties as year after year Labour administrations have argued that out-sourcing to private providers has saved council tax payers money whilst not acknowledging that lowert costs have been achieved by lower wages, worse working conditions, poor pensions etc.  

Even worse some councils have argued that the private and voluntary sector is more able to respond to local need in araes such as youth provision and social care.

Already, across the country, Labour councils are putting Labour values into action, in a way that makes a real difference to millions of people, despite cynical government funding cuts that have hit Labour councils five times as hard as Tory-run areas.

Like Nottingham City Council setting up the not-for-profit Robin Hood Energy company to provide affordable energy;

Or Cardiff Bus Company taking 100,000 passengers every day, publicly owned with a passenger panel to hold its directors to account;

Or Preston Council working to favour local procurement, and keep money in the town;

Or Newcastle Council providing free wi-fi in 69 public buildings across the city;

Or Croydon Council which has set up a company to build 1,000 new homes, as Cllr Alison Butler said: “We can no longer afford to sit back and let the market take its course”.

Or Glasgow that has established high quality and flexible workspaces for start-up, high growth companies in dynamic new sectors.

Or here in Liverpool, set to be at the global forefront of a new wave of technology and home to Sensor City, a £15million business hub that aims to create 300 start-up businesses and 1,000 jobs over the next decade.

It is a proud Labour record each and every Labour councillor deserves our heartfelt thanks for the work they do.

But I want to go further because we want local government to go further and put public enterprise back into the heart of our economy and services to meet the needs of local communities, municipal socialism for the 21st century, as an engine of local growth and development.

So today I’m announcing that Labour will remove the artificial local borrowing cap and allow councils to borrow against their housing stock.

That single measure alone would allow them to build an extra 12,000 council homes a year.

Labour councils increasingly have a policy of in-house as the preferred provider and many councils have brought bin collections, cleaners, and IT services back in-house, insourcing privatized contracts to save money for council tax payers and to ensure good terms and conditions for staff.

Corbyn's election campaign inspired many independent activists (and not a few Green Party members) to join the Labour Party and gave the left inside the Labour Party fresh energy. 

The problem now is that on the ground, and impacting on the poor, they face 4 more years of local government cuts, 'efficiencies' where fewer workers do the same or increased amounts of work, council tax rises, increased service charges, dodgy regeneration projects to increase the council tax base and privatisation.

Maintaining the morale of new recruits in such circumstances will present a real challenge.

The Great Grunwick Strike - Film & Guest Speaker Saturday October 8th

From Preston Library Campaign

Doors open at 7.15, and the programme will start at 7.30. Our films are free, but we ask for donations which help us to run the library. Preston Community Library is in Carlton Avenue East, Wembley, HA9 8PL. The Great Grunwick Strike 1976 - 78: A History, is being shown as part of the commemoration of the fortieth anniversary of the strike. The film will be introduced by Tessa van Gelderen, Treasurer of Grunwick40.