Crime is an issue that concerns many around my little patch of South London. Not wanting to sound like Nick Ross, but it’s usually a fear of crime, rather than crime per se, that is often the real threat.
I’ve managed to have a look at a presentation delivered by the Safer Lambeth Partnership, an organisation that includes the council, police force, probation service, health agencies and other organisations who work together to deliver the Community Safety Strategy.
The data presented was used to assist the Police Tasking and Coordination meeting in the allocation of resources to help reduce crime in Lambeth over a two-week period in February.
But hopefully by looking at some of the micro level crime taking place around here right now, it will offer a more positive response to crime in Stockwell than simply posting up a fear of crime video.
The Burglary Performance is steady around my area. The Oval and Larkhall wards both report a rise of one. Stockwell shows a decrease of two, showing that the figures are more or less stable over the previous period. Ferndale and Tulse Hill have been highlighted as priority locations.
The recommendations are for Lambeth Living to identify vulnerable homes. This is an issue that the @LambethLabour #labourdoorstep team have been electioneering with over on the Bolney Meadow estate area of late. I’m still not sure why a party in power has to organise a petition to get security grills placed on council owned stock. I’m not alone, either.
Speaking of door knockers… My personal policy is to never answer the door unless I am expecting someone at my home. This may mean that I don’t get to engage with the good local door knocking politicians; it also means that I am unlikely to be taken in by the many chancers that come door knocking with their tales of endless woe.
As the presentation identifies, door knocking is also used as a tactic to assess if a property is empty or not. I usually get around this concern by playing rather loud music.
It’s incredibly depressing that I can’t feel safe to open my door to strangers. The constant tales of needing bus fare to visit a sick relative, or a girlfriend about to give birth, sadly means that community around here has been reduced to living behind a bolted door.
I feel very uneasy about the deployment of mobile CCTV as a safeguard. I feel equally uneasy about the current fear of crime. It’s a tough balancing act, and one that is hard to equate. Possibly the timely call for a higher policing presence on the streets is a solution?
On a micro local level and it seems that CCTV is being employed to tackle “night time economy issues.” This is a euphemism for binge drinking and drug dealing around Clapham High Street.
Sticking with ASB and I was rather shocked to see that Larkhall suffers from the highest level of substance abuse in the borough. Twenty calls relating to substance misuse were made in the Larkhall ward during the two-week period.
This is a figure higher than areas such as Brixton Hill (17) and Coldharbour (7) where blatant drug dealing is seen as the norm. I wonder why the figure is so high for Larkhall? My only thought is that Larkhall Park becomes something of drug dealing hotspot once the evening falls.
The presentation concludes by stating that the Partnership Action Team will be deployed at the weekend around Clapham. This is once again related to the nighttime economy.
There is nothing new in the presentation to suggest that crime around my little patch of South London is running at a level that I wasn’t previously aware of. It’s not a positive news story, but at least it is being addressed.
Ah, so this is the <irony>real</irony> reason that are friends from @lambeth_council are so busy closing leisure centres all around the Rotten Borough: to fleece customers for the joining fee each time they are forced to become a swimming refugee elsewhere.
You may remember how I was asked to pay a £10 hidden cost when I tried to transfer my GLL Lambeth membership to a wider Swim London membership. I could see that the leisure policy of Lambeth Labour was in meltdown, and for the same monthly £26 payment, I wanted other options.
A bit of behind the scenes work from the lovely GLL management, and my £10 online membership was refunded. Rightly so, seeing as though I had already paid to join (join what?) when I first purchased my GLL Lambeth membership.
Fast forward to this week, and for the first time since the privatisation of leisure in Lambeth, I was able to see the nice man from the GLL membership office during the daytime at Brixton Rec.
We were reassured at the Clap’ham Users Forum to signal the end of swimming in SW4 that all memberships would be automatically transferred over. I wasn’t too concerned at the time. My Swim London membership is valid at all GLL pools throughout London, and I had indeed used it up at Oasis and London Fields.
But then once I became a Clap’ham refugee, my card failed to swipe early each morning. It was a mild irritant at first, but then given the 7am opening time, the lovely smiling receptionist and I came to an agreement.
That agreement was to take up the issue in the membership office at The Rec. Seeing as though kicking out time for public swimming in SW9 is 9am, and the membership office isn’t open until 9:30, this wasn’t exactly practical.
Until half term week that is, where I took the opportunity to sort out my non-swipeable card.
“Your membership has expired,” said the GLL membership chap. “You’ll have to pay £10 to renew it.”
Eh? Where the chuffers did that one come from?
There was more…
“You’ll only be able to swim at Brixton.”
Overlooking the minor issue that there isn’t actually anywhere else in the Rotten Borough where I can swim right now, I would rather like the option of swimming up at Oasis or London Fields. My membership is called Swim London, not Swim Brixton (But Only Between the Hours of 7-9am.)
I was extremely confused, and so it seems was yer man from GLL. It turns out that my original Swim London membership was linked to Clap’ham Pool. For some unknown reason, the swimmers of SW4 were given the status to be able to swim anywhere. Maybe GLL knew what was coming all along with the Streatham and Clap’ham closures?
Highly unlikely. A more sensible analysis is simply the confusion that crept in at GLL, following the pimping out of leisure by our friends at @lambeth_council. No one is entirely sure right now which particular swimming packages exist, and exactly where and when you can use them.
It’s all about the swimming, isn’t it?
I can’t get angry with the lovely smiling GLL receptionist at 7am each morning (she really is rather lovely.) Likewise I can’t get angry with the other GLL staff on the ground at the Rec, who always stop and make a point of filling me in with the political pressures they are operating under. GLL management are also rather decent, and go out of their way to contact me over any woes I have with my membership.
The real reason for the complete meltdown of leisure in the Rotten Borough comes when the party in powers allows *anyone* but itself to take responsibility for leisure provision.
Once again it took some online intervention from the lovely GLL management to resolve the issue. I have very kindly been given a free month of membership to make up for the inconvenience, which makes for all of the above moaning seem slightly over the top.
GLL is proving to be very decent at managing a near on impossible situation that it has inherited with the provision of leisure in Lambeth. Staff from the shop floor up to the management have made the most out of a very difficult situation.
I was peeved though at being asked to pay a joining fee that I have already paid twice. Imagine if the 5,000 daily users at The Rec are also peeved? That’s a lot of political muscle to exercise out there.
I filed a Freedom of Information request a few weeks ago, asking how many Greenwich Leisure Limited memberships have been cancelled in Lambeth between 1st December 2009 and the 31st January 2010.
The £177, 000 figure is calculated by multiplying the £26 basic GLL monthly membership price with the 567 cancellations as stated in the FOI request. This gives a monthly figure of £14, 742. Multiply this figure by twelve, and you get the annual revenue loss of £176, 904.
The £177, 000 in lost revenue only relates to leisure users in Lambeth that had signed up to become GLL members. The figure doesn’t take into account the number of lost swimming sessions by pay as you go users, who also now have nowhere to swim in Lambeth.
The reduction of monthly cash flow becomes something of a convenient self-fulfilling prophecy for local politicians. Streatham was closed because it needed investment. With nowhere to swim in SW16, the users cancelled their memberships. The council is then left with a reduced money pot in which to justify making the necessary repairs.
The FOI request also states that 308 cancellations took place in the corresponding timeframe twelve months previous. I accept that this suggests that there may be a seasonal trend happening here. Losing 259 further members in a calendar year is still a pretty heavy loss in income.
A combined figure of 875 cancelled memberships over a two year period indicates that something is pretty rotten to the core in the way that leisure is currently managed in Lambeth.
It is interesting to view this £177, 000 shortfall in the context of the John Lewis cooperative style of government that Lambeth Labour proposed this week. GLL was name checked as a success story in this style of local governance.
The John Lewis model is a social experiment imposed on the people living in the Lambeth Petri dishdirect response to the Tories up in Barnet and their Easy Jet two-tier system of local government:
“The Tories in Barnet have come up with a plan to offer no-frills public services along the lines of budget airlines like Ryan air. What that means is minimal or sub-standard services offered to most people with better services only available to people wealthy enough to pay more for them.
Looking at the options open to leisure users in Lambeth, and there is little to choose between the two main parties and their high street branding attempts to become electable.
Leisure is already run as a two-tier service in the Rotten Borough. If you want to swim, then you have to go down the private route of paying up to join Fitness First. The standard no thrills service offered by @lambeth_council is a closed Streatham Leisure Centre, a Clapham Leisure Centre that is in the hands of private capital and a bonkers opening timetable at Brixton Rec.
But it’s not all about costings – what about the health benefits of leisure? The real price for the privatisation of leisure by Labour led @lambeth_council is the reduction in exercise taken by local people at facilities in the borough. You can’t even begin to put a costing on this
After all the pessimism coming out my little patch of South London over the past seven days, how fantastic to finish on a high. Sunday afternoon saw me suited and booted as I cycled the short distance to Clapham Trinity Church, and the Civic Ceremony for the lovely @mayoroflambeth.
The service was a celebration of the civic duty of Mr Mayor, as well as the opportunity to raise the profile of the various charities that he has supported over the past nine months of public office.
It takes something quite special to get me into a church these days. Having seen how Mr Mayor has represented the borough so proudly, an hour or so spent sitting in the SW4 pews was the least I could do.
I wasn’t alone in wanting to honour such fine civic duty. Mayoral representation from almost every other London borough had gathered in Clapham, to pay tribute the work of Mr Mayor in Lambeth.
I tweeted “What is the collective noun for a gathering of Mayors?” Three replies of “a chain” came back to me, just as I somehow managed to blag my way into the church crècherobing chamber to mingle amongst all the fake mink fur.
Mr Mayor shook my hand (white gloves! *pristine* white gloves!) and very kindly agreed to my door-stopping request for a brief @audioboo.
We rightly touched upon the fine parallel work of @LamYouthMayor, an initiative that bodes well for democracy in Lambeth over the coming years. It is no coincidence that Lambeth’s Youth Mayor, Samueal Manley, has been such an equal success to his civic elder. Aiming high is infectious.
I took up my place in the pews, and by a strange twist of fate, was joined by the good Councillor Rachael Heywood, the Cabinet Member for Culture (leisure) and Communities, sitting right next to me.
Aye aye. Tempting, but now wasn’t the time.
Mr Mayor made his grand entrance with the Mayoral procession, and I tried to remember the words to some long lost hymns from Sunday school. Even for a non-believer, the service was rather uplifting. The emphasis was on charity, with speakers from all of the main organisations that Mr Mayor has campaigned for, being given the opportunity to speak.
Clapham Trinity Hospice, Clapham Youth Services and Lambeth Women’s Aid have all worked incredibly close with Mr Mayor throughout the past nine months. The main sermon reflected this, with the message of charity as a vehicle for change passed on.
Time for a *proper* tune and an uplifting solo performance from a fine young lady within Lambeth. This was followed by a reading from @cllrstevereed. It would have been interesting if the roles had been reversed, but I don’t think the occasion suited such humour.
With work commitments back at base beckoning, I slipped out of the back door, having unfortunately missed @CllrMarkBennett’s reading. Our friends from the Lambeth Labour cabinet were singing Jerusalem, in hopefully an attempt to reclaim the Socialist anthem back from the playing fields of the public schools.
With Mr Mayor still having three months remaining of his year of civic duty, I can’t but help think that the incumbent chain rattler has something of a hard act to follow. @mayoroflambeth has been truly unique during his year in office.
It’s not just the use of social media to help spread his message that has impressed. This has been a genuinely inclusive period of office, and one that has greatly helped to raise the profile of the many charitable and campaigning groups around Lambeth.
Many thanks Mr Mayor. Good luck in his transition back to Councillor status. Here’s hoping that the civic optimism can continue in the cut and thrust of proper local politics.
Prologue – high hopes and plenty of political optimism ahead of a public meeting to try and resolve the Streatham Hub project. Steady the buffers, old boy. I think you know that there is unlikely to be a happy ending here…
And so how do you solve a problem like the Streatham Hub?
We may be screwed for leisure in La La Lambeth Land, but at least we can still have a laugh. The refusal of Tesco to attend a public meeting on Wednesday to explain why a new ice rink and leisure facility still hasn’t been built by the supermarket giant, was met with the time honoured tradition of placing a big bag of lard on the empty seat.
Not just any old big bag of lard either – this was the finest lard procured from the shelves of the newly opened Morrisons in SW16. I think that’s what you call a double political whammy for the absent business partner for Labour led @lambeth_council.
The headline news (pay attention @streathamguardian) is that the multi-national will decide in March if it can be bothered to continue with the whole project. A high-powered board meeting will deliver the judgement on the Little People of Lambeth. I hope they have some decent sarnies to eat during their pow wow.
And then…
The Man from Tesco, he say YES! …we can hold the supermarket to account and make sure it delivers what it promised almost a decade ago.
The Man from Tesco, he say No! …@lambeth_councilwe’re screwed. Our elected politicians will squirm out of the affair with continued claims of “commercial confidentiality,” before then going to erect a temporary gym at The Rookery on Streatham Common – SERIOUSLY.
You’ve heard of the Lambeth Lego Pool, but now a tent in the great outdoors with a few dumb bells (oh the irony) is actually being considered by @lambeth_council as a serious alternative, irrespective of Tesco continuing with the project.
The meeting was told that it would take “two to three years” to build the hub, and in the meantime, the tent / gym is a temporary option.
And what if Tesco walks away from SW16 after a wasted decade? No guarantees of a Plan B were given. Back to The Rookery it is then. The temporary becomes the future and a generation of lard arses, deprived of leisure in Lambeth, will eat their own weight in microwave chips. But not from Tesco. Obviously.
As the good @CllrMarkBennett tweeted in reflection after the meeting:
Cripes. It really was one of those seismic evenings. There was a sense that a turning point has been reached. The good folk of Streatham have long since lost all patience with the supermarket giant, and the issue now seems to have divided Labour in Lambeth.
@CllrMarkBennett wasn’t alone in breaking from the party line being spun so disastrously from the stage by Councillor Rachael Heywood and her cabinet colleague, Councillor Lib Peck. Nu Labour poster boy @ChukaUmunnalater told me that he “doesn’t trust Tesco,” and that he “honestly doesn’t know” if @lambeth_council will be able to deliver on the Hub.
Blimey.
Time maybe for a bit of backtracking. With the Tesco owned Streatham Ice Rink being held together by a bit of gaffer tape, and the Leisure Centre next door not looking much better, @lambeth_council did the dirty with Tesco to build a brand new rink and leisure centre. In return, the multi-national gets to set up a rather large corner shop in SW16.
But this was all some seven years ago. By now and the Hub should be complete. Instead we have an ice rink that is unable to stage Redskins’ matches, and a leisure centre that has been shut because it is unsafe.
The public meeting on Tuesday evening called by the fine @streathamaction was supposed to be the opportunity for Tesco to come clean. You get an indication of the company’s commitment to Streatham by its absence on the night.
Instead we had the Cabinet Member for Culture and Communities, Councillor Heywood, and the Cabinet Member for Housing and Regeneration, Councillor Peck, left to squirmexplain away on the stage almost a decade of mismanagement.
I’m not the greatest flag waver for the failed Nu Labour privatisation project in the Rotten Borough (you don’t say…) but even I felt pity for the local politicians that have been left to hang out to dry by the corporate beast with all the economic and political muscle.
Ever danced with the Devil in the pale moonlight, and all that?
This was an angry political floor, with its constituents made up of beefed up hockey players, muscle-toned swimmers and mischievous bloggers that really have nothing better to do on a wet Wednesday evening in South London.
Actually, that’s not true. My agendaconcern is the lack of swimming in Lambeth. As a Clap’ham refugee I’ve been forced to dip my toe in the waters of Brixton. So have all the Streatham refugees, being bussed down Brixton Hill for the magical 7-9am only timeslot in SW9 each morning.
Apologies if I railroaded the start of the meeting with my Clap’ham interjections, but the good Councillor Heywood started off on the subject first.
Likewise with Councillor Lib Peck. It was a basic point of order, as she insisted that the Labour administration was in control of the timetable of closure in Clap’ham. Um, not true, my friend. If you had attended the User’s Forum to explain the closure of Clap’ham (actually if anyone from Lambeth Labour had attended the forum,) then you would have found out that the poor, sheepish folk at Greenwich Leisure Limited were told to shut up shop by the Cathedral Group on New Year’s Eve.
But anyway, I sat back, started a bit of @audiobooing and took in the debate.
@streathamaction did a fine job in trying to keep to the agenda of (i) leisure, (ii) ice rink and (iii) library (um, falling down as well.) But the passion and anger from the electorate on the floor made the meeting rather different to cabinet two nights previous (@cllrstevereed: “this is a cabinet meeting and you have no right to speak. Be silenced.”)
Too many political mistakes have been made in Streatham over the years. This has led to uncertainty in the different services provided by @lambeth_council, and consequently a confused agenda of different interest groups on the evening.
Questions were asked concerning what cost is involved to re-open Streatham leisure centre (“no costs have been carried out,”) does an ice rink still feature in the Hub plans (“probably” – major hooter HONK!!!! alert: this is a retraction from the previous cast-iron guarantee) and how can @lambeth_council hold Tesco to account?
There was no answer given to this question, likewise for a very articulate point raised by a young girl who must have been of primary school age:
“You said ten years ago that you would build a new ice rink. If we can’t believe you on that, what can we believe you on?”
Someone give that young girl an @audioboo account now. Fine work, madam.
The point was also made that Tesco is prepared to let the ice rink run down. The suggestion is that it will then be easy to close the old rink, and conveniently forget to build a new one. Even Streatham is experiencing gentrification, and the land is ripe for some poncey new flats.
The meeting then went slightly bonkers. There was some fine fighting talk calling for @lambeth_council to take back control of the project with a Compulsory Purchase Order. A public boycott of Tesco was suggested, which then somehow descended into a Shoplifters of the World Unite moment. Only in the Rotten Borough…
Representation from the Redskins was strong. One player spoke of how the rink is the “laughing stock” in hockey circles throughout the country. It’s a very real danger to both players and spectators.
Having already lost London’s only Elite Ice Hockey League team, the Racers, because of a dangerous rink, it would be shocking to also lose the proud name of the Redskins (point of order: I gave up watching the ‘Skins some years ago, partly to do with work commitments, partly because I really didn’t want to spend my Sunday evenings in a freezing old barn.)
“I’m not proud of the state of the rink,” interjected the good Councillor Heywood, before bumbling her line when heckled about when she last went there. “Um, oh, um, I think about four months ago.”
Which all leaves us back where we started some ten years ago. It’s difficult to judge who has been more culpable over the whole sorry Hub saga, @lambeth_council or Tesco?
Both organisations are intertwined with a total lack of credibility. The utter failure of the leisure policy by @lambeth_council is a direct consequence of Nu Labour being totally dependent on big business. We’ve seen it in Clap’ham with the Cathedral Group calling the shots, and now it seems that Tesco are about to show who really is in control in Streatham.
Ah, but events dear boy, events. Something wicked this way comes, and it’s called a ballot box.
As I remarked to @Chris4Streatham, the LibDem parliamentary candidate for Streatham in the @audioboo below, ultimately it is the good people of Streatham that may just be able to resolve the Hub farce; vote back in Lambeth Labour, and the cabinet is locked into some form of unexplainable commitment to sticking with big business to try and sort out Streatham.
Vote *elsewhere* and solutions are on offer to actually establish who is in control of Streatham – the democratically elected and accountable political party, or a multi-national big business that probably can’t even locate Lambeth on a map, let alone the mean streets of Streatham.
Yer man @ChukaUmunna was equally good company, and also very kindly agreed to an interview after I door stopped him. With preposterous expectations laid upon Chuka, leisure is clearly an incredibly prickly issue for him, come polling day.
Being aligned to the same political party that has closed the pool in his chosen constituency has led to some distance being put between the Labour parliamentary candidate, and the local party on the ground. Will the voters buy into it? Listen to yer man…
A final footnote – many thanks, as ever, to the server testing patience that is @markrock and @audioboo. The medium really is the message (well, apart from the other minor message of almost a decade of development being lost in SW16, thanks to a reliance and misguided belief in big business.)
The boos below are embedded in no particular order or priority. They are just a flavour of the feeling from the floor on the night.
Time to return to an old theme around my little patch of South London. Regular readers may remember the outlandish case of the local landlord who takes a laissez faire approach to planning permission. It seems however that @lambeth_council has completely forgotten all about Mukesh Andani.
Mr Andani waved two fingers in the air to local authority planning permission, and then added an extra storey to his rented property on the corner of Clap’ham Road and Crewdson Road. Our friends at Lambeth Council clocked the error, probably on account of Mr Andani having past form on forgetting to apply for planning permission at Stockwell Green.
A £10,000 fine was imposed, and the threat of a six-month jail sentence loomed. Mr Andani was instructed to remove the part of his property that was built without planning permission. And so six months in the clink, or the restoration of the Clap’ham Road / Crewdson Road corner, back in line with the conservation status that other residents so rightfully respect.
Six months is a useful time frame to focus upon here. It was this exact same time span when the story was first reported. Three months later, and Mr Andani erected some scaffolding on the property.
I trust this isn’t a ruse to confuse those oh so clever people at Lambeth Council, I jested at the time. Three months later and the scaffolding remains, as does the top floor of the flat. The army of builders are as absent as the missing planning permission.
Someone is carefully monitoring the situation. I know this because ‘Mukesh Andani‘ has been the top search on m’blog for the past three months. I don’t think it is the award winning Lambeth Council Planning Applications department though.
It’s official. Lambeth Council’s planning department is tops for turning applications around in record time. Councillor Lib Peck, Lambeth Council cabinet member for housing and regeneration said: “This is fantastic news.
The fact that the service has turned around from a once failing service into one that is a top performer, is testament to the hard work and dedication of planning officers and the good work of the planning committee”.
I’m sure Mukesh Andani shares the same enthusiasm for the Lambeth Council planning department as the good Councillor Lib Peck. A three-month scaffolding bill must be the better option when compared to a six-month jail sentence.
The real losers here are the local people of SW8. The scaffolding is more of an eyesore than the extra storey. It’s now started to come loose, making the Clap’ham Road conservation area appear rather shabby.
And so in the interest of the user(s) searching m’blog for ‘Mukesh Andani,’ I shall continue to monitor the Clap’ham Road / Crewdson Road corner at regular intervals. Three months from now, and Mr Andani may even be waving two fingers in the air at a brand new administration in the Rotten Borough.
Rejoice! Hang the bunting outside Lambeth Town Hall! I’ve found the mythical fool’s gold here in La La Lambeth Land. Lucky me. Looks like the leisure “success story” than Labour Councillor Nigel Haselden was trying to spin out to me last week can be found right here on my doorstep.
Fresh off the printing press, and the latest issue of ‘information newssheet’ Lambeth Life leads with the good news story of a “12m long temporary pool” being loaned out to the disused Lilian Baylis old school site in Kennington.
Well slap me in the face with a wet pair of Speedos and force me to have a cold shower with the entire Labour led Lambeth cabinet.
Cripes.
I knew our good friends at @lambeth_council wouldn’t let us down. The good Councillor Haselden stressed that he was “alarmed at my observations” that the leisure policy in Lambeth has failed the electorate.
I thought I was being objective in my observations. Streatham and Clap’ham pools are both shut, and Brixton is the only place in the Rotten Borough where Lambeth residents can now swim (but only between 7-9am, and with no recognised changing room.)
But nope. Looks like the two-month loan of a Lego swimming pool in Lambeth is the success story I’ve been searching for. Councillor Haselden mocked the idea of a temporary pool after we had finished recording our podcast. Seems like his Labour colleague Rachel Heywood, Cabinet Member for Culture and Communities, hadn’t informed her colleague of the Kennington paddling pool.
Any swim is a good swim, but twelve metres is just poxy. A kick off from one side of the temporary structure and then you’ve touched down at the other end. With the local election looming, it’s this exact form of panic-driven policies that has come to be the legacy of the current administration.
Whatever next? Tents at Brockwell Park to cover up the £1m spunked up the wall to housing consultants during a six-month period last year? Something wicked this way comes. It’s called a ballot paper and so best make sure that temporary arrangements are in place, to see us through until May.
It is with apt timing that Lambeth Life has decided to share the leisure “success” story on the exact same day that the Audit Commission took the spineless decision to allow local authorities to continue to publish this blatant form of political propaganda.
A front-page picture led splash (aha!) in Lambeth Life, yet diddly squat mention of the closure of the three main pools in the Borough. I’m surprised that my Lambeth Life delivery boy doesn’t actually knock on the door wearing a big red rosette, grinning like a buffoon and asking to kiss a baby before leaving me with the latest Lambeth Labour endorsed literature.
Oh, and top marks for the use of kids swimming in the La La Lambeth Land Lego Pool for the picture. Once again it has been conveniently forgotten that the current administration pulled down the 25m pool at Stockwell Park High School, despite concerns from local Labour MP Kate Tally Hoey. It really is saying something if it takes the fragrant Tally Hoey to tick of an administration for cutting public services.
And so the good people of Lambeth are left with a temporary Lego pool in the Rotten Borough, and a local election looming. Leisure shouldn’t be a political hot potato; it should be something that any local authority supports and funds, aware of the wider benefits to the local community.
The electorate can see the privatisation of leisure in Lambeth by the Labour administration as evidence where priorities lay for the current party in power. Knee jerk policies as the election looms are always the sure sign of a party that is sinking. Even in a poxy 12m temporary Lego pool.
Alex Bigham: Well this is generally an interesting and thought out blogpost, though a little harsh to say all that we do @labourstockwell is post fear of crime videos on national issues – we...
