Sporting Unreality in “Hackney Today”
Stop me if I’ve mentioned it before, but I really do resent the fact that local residents have to fork out for for the Council’s propaganda rag, Hackney Today. Enough is enough: it’s time to scrap this disgraceful newspaper and spend the money on something worthwhile. Like poverty. Or crime. Or the educational rationing that sees so many kids rejected from all of the five Hackney secondary schools they’ve applied for.
Anyway, what’s got my goat this time is this:
And because the Council is now run more efficiently, this hasn’t added a penny to Council Tax, with local tax rates frozen in Hackney for the past three years.
Jules Pipe, Mayor of Hackney, writing in Hackney Today, 21 July 2008
Now try this:
A Gazette investigation has uncovered millions of pounds of taxpayer’s money written off by Hackney Council.
Almost £40million of debt went uncollected in the last financial year, an audit of the town hall books revealed.
Hackney Gazette, 7 August 2008
And there’s the real story: if Hackney Council wasn’t so badly run, we might have benefited from a Council Tax cut. Or the missing £40 million could have been used to improve residents’ lives for the better.
Jules, as I’ve observed, is a statistics machine. He reminds me of the people I met in the voluntary sector who believed that quoting inspirational snippets was an adequate alternative to actually doing something for the people they were employed to help.
Oh well. At least we’ve got the Olympics to give us a shot in the arm in 2012. Jules says so:
Hackney is at the heart of where the Games will happen in four years’ time, and we are making the most of this by working hard to secure the best possible benefits for residents.
Jules Pipe, Mayor of Hackney, writing in Hackney Today, 4 August 2008
Well, five of them anyway - assuming that the Council staff and councillors just sent to Beijing at the cost of £30,000 all live in the borough. Here’s a table, just in from the Telegraph (Jules’s old paper), showing how much each of the so-called five “Olympic Boroughs” have just spent sending officials over to China.
1) Hackney. 5 staff. £30,000. (£6,000 per person)
2) Greenwich. 6 staff. £14,000. (£2333.33 per person)
3) Newham. 4 staff. £9,000. (£2250 per person)
4) Tower Hamlets. None. £0. (£0 per person)
5) Waltham Forest. None. £0. (£0 per person)
Value for money, eh, Jules? Oh well, at least you’ll be on the trip yourself. Here’s the Telegraph again:
The Olympic park site also spans parts of Hackney, whose council are spending £30,000 of public money on sending the Mayor of Hackney Jules Pipe, the Cabinet Member for Regeneration and the 2012 Olympic and Paralympic Games Cllr Guy Nicholson, the chief executive Tim Shields, the assistant chief executive Sue Primmer and the Council’s chief officer for the 2012 Games Charlie Forman.
Much as one could argue that £30,000 is great value for getting these people out of the country where they can’t do quite so much damage, this remark is rather telling.
A Hackney spokesman said: “Hackney’s key legacy opportunity from the 2012 Games is to ensure the media centres are transformed into a regional hub for media and creative industries after 2012, with the potential to create 8,000 jobs locally.”
In other words, despite saying only three days ago that “Hackney is at the heart of where the Games will happen in four years’ time”, Jules is off to China in a desperate taxpayer-funded bid to beg a few scraps for Hackney from the Olympic table. Because, quite frankly, we’re going to get feck all:
The borough’s business community fears Hackney may not receive the expected boost in tourism during the 2012 Olympic Games.And their concerns could be well founded after John Armitt, chairman of the Olympic Delivery Authority, admitted in an exclusive interview with the Gazette that most visitors would bypass the borough.
With the man below in charge, is it any wonder?
Published on 7th August, 2008
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