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
25 years of the “urban jungle”
It’s a rare article about Hackney that makes me want to stand up and give the writer a standing ovation, but that’s pretty much what I did when I read this:
Hackney needs activists, not socialist revolutionaries (whom Mr Harrison rightly says adore picking at sores) and theorists, not just the very necessary agencies to make claimants more efficient at their sad profession. It needs busybodies, preferably among the deprived themselves.
It reminded me of something I wrote on my old blog in December last year, when I was making a faltering, contorted case for localism in the face of a indifferent, one-size-fits-all council:
If we can’t get our representatives to listen, we need to get angry on other people’s behalf as well as our own. Because if we don’t, we’re not just going to get rancid public toilets, we’re not going to get respite care for the people who need it, or make sure that members of our community don’t have to sleep rough because the council has failed them. And if we can’t do any of those things, how do we really imagine we’re going to improve life on those gang-ridden estates?
But whilst I was blogging towards the end of 2007, the first writer was making his case in The Times as long ago as 7th December 1983. The journalist was Richard North and you can find his article in the newspaper’s archive. It must have caused a stir because, as many as twelve years later, he mentioned the same article in an Independent piece:
I can remember, even in palmier days, I was excoriated by liberal types for writing in the Times that Hackney’s public spaces were in need of busybodies - middle class or not - who could assert that swiping little Jewish children wasn’t on.
Few would disagree with that; although I suspect that what he originally said would cause a stir, particularly now:
…the burly little goys in Clissold Park need to be cuffed and talked to when they insult the pale Hasidic families who go there on Sundays.
I don’t advocate cuffing anyone, but I certainly advocate putting the fear of damnation up any child who does that. Certainly, these days, it’s relatively rare to see a Orthodox Jewish family walking in that park, even though a large number of them live on or near its north eastern edge. It’s not the only depressing vision conjured up by North’s article. Indeed, a heavy sense of plus ça change weighs you down further with each paragraph. Any Hackney resident of today will soon spot these 25-year-old remarks are at least as relevant now as they were then.
Hackney is a place in which the vast majority of adults dare not speak to children, even when the children are inarticulately crying out to talk. The adult seems not to dare speak to the teenager, even though I have always found the glue sniffers, and even the illicit parker, glad to be spoken to.
And:
…beyond cruel petty officials and being broke, what most assails the hopeless minority in Hackney is our modern society in which only competence makes life manageable.
I am, of course, being highly selective. Some of North’s suggestions, and particularly his solutions, betray a tendency to wish his own pet ideas on other people’s difficulties. This one’s a gem:
The unemployed… need to boycott the canned drinks makers and the pubs and start brewing their own wine.
Home brewed wine? He clearly hasn’t tasted the stuff, even if it is a cut above Carlsberg Special Brew. Or how about this tour de force?
For many hopeless people… Permissiveness has broken their immediate family. Increasingly mobility has broken their wider world, robbing them of relatives. Planners have broken their communities. Teachers and welfare workers have robbed them of responsibility. The liberal creed has broken their will to self discipline.
So, on the one hand it’s not their fault but, on the other:
I have to accept that Hackney’s misery is in part the fault of its inhabitants, and in part of people like me who won’t do more about chivvying and informing them.
People like him? Yes, the middle class, or rather more gobsmackingly:
What a double pity that those who have always been good at poverty - the drop-out middle class, who go hippy at the drop of a hat - never taught the working class how to do it.
It’s the same old flaw: a middle class person comes to the conclusion that, despite the terrible state society is in, the poor could do more to help themselves and each other; but then can’t accept it could be done without middle-class involvement and - preferably - leadership. All whilst pointing out that (middle class) liberals knackered society in the first place.
It’s hardly any surprise, therefore, that liberals tend dismiss all elements of the argument as bollocks. Take a look over at Dave Hill’s London blog: it’s still going on today. Well-off liberal Dave has got rather froth-flecked by new City Hall Policy Director Anthony Browne in general, and about this Daily Mail article in particular. Fair play. Especially when confronted by this bit of circular logic:
If people don’t learn the difference between right and wrong, it is not just that they become anti-social. They don’t learn the fundamental lesson that there is only one person responsible for what they do — and that is themselves. Nothing is wrong, and nothing is anyone’s fault; it is always someone else’s. Don’t blame me for what I do; it’s society’s fault.
The logic as I read it is:
1) Some people haven’t been taught the difference between right and wrong.
2) They therefore have no idea that they are responsible for their own actions.
3) Even though they don’t know they are responsible for their own actions, it is wrong of them to blame other people. Including those people in society who didn’t teach them the difference between right and wrong.
And the people responsible for this moral vacuum? Yep, middle-class liberals:
This Left-wing moral neutrality comes from the best of intentions — wanting to sympathise with victims and other vulnerable people. If they do something anti-social, it is because anti-social things have been done to them — they are not at fault. And if you can’t judge someone for their actions, there can’t really be a right or wrong thing to do.
As I said earlier: plus ça bloody change. Theorists are theorists, whether they’re socialist or patrician Tory. And as Richard North rightly pointed out, Hackney needs fewer of them - even if he was, to a degree, one himself.
Sadly, in amongst all the moralistic finger pointing, the fact remains that - after 25 years - Hackney residents (and many other) are even more terrified of speaking to children, teenagers or - often - other adults. Which is a shame because, whoever you blame, it’s not government, or theorists, or socialist revolutionaries who have the power to solve the problem - it’s us.
If we dare.
Published on 29th July, 2008
Huge Fire Response at Stamford Hill Filling Station
Spotted earlier, just over the border in Haringey at Craven Park Road.
Published on 31st May, 2008
Sketch: Flies in the champagne as Hackney elects a new Speaker
Last night, I went to the town hall to watch the new Speaker and Deputy Speaker for Hackney get voted into office.
No, please: come back. I won’t take long.
It’s a simple procedure: the elected mayor (and leader of the Labour group) nominates someone from his own party and speaks in his favour; the leader of the much smaller Conservative group commends the nominee personally, but points out that as his own party members are de facto excluded from the office of Speaker, they’ll be abstaining; members of the Labour group shake their heads vigorously and pretend to look outraged; and the leader of the two Lib Dem councillors makes a pleasant speech commending the choice of candidate. So, as fixes go, it’s a good natured and tolerant one - which is quite in keeping with our diverse borough.
I can’t be arsed to do the maths, but with the backing of all the present Labour councillors, both Lib Dems and one Tory (I don’t know about the Green), the new speaker is:
- Councillor Ian Rathbone.
And, thanks to a similar process and result, his deputy is:
- Councillor Muttalip Unluer
That was the easy bit. When the appointments were over, the elected mayor, Jules Pipe, told us what his policy priorities were for the coming year.
I’d not seen him speak before, but a few seconds were enough to reveal that he falls into the personable and well-prepared school of public speaking, rather than in the devastatingly charismatic camp. I’m not sure how he does it, but there’s some sort of switch he flicks that transforms him into state-of-the-art Soviet statistics transmitter: “….waste recycling up from less than 1% in 2002… crime down 32% since 2004… 53% of students achieving five GCSEs at A to C compared to less than one-third in 2002… 36% of Labour councillors beatified by the Roman Catholic Church in 2007 - up from only 27% in 2004.”
Okay, he didn’t say the last one, but he might as well have.
It’s a terrifying sight: the seemingly affable man, suddenly endowed with the power to bore his political opponents to death. My eyes glazed over repeatedly, but I think that, when you penetrated all the “coming year going forwards” and the like, the gist of what he was saying boiled down to “in the six years under my most excellent rule, Hackney Council has learned to sweep streets, collect rubbish and admit that a schools system that fails over two-thirds of teenagers is not acceptable. We are now excellent at improving, so I might as well tell you that we’re improving at being excellent. It’s the same thing really. I am, incidentally, most excellent.”
In the new, improved Hackney, in which teenage gunmen throw aside their weapons and launch renewable composting schemes with small business start-up grants, dissent is frowned on. So when Tory group leader Matthew Coggins stood up to dissent, everyone on the opposite side of the chamber knitted their brows in the way Churchill might have done when discovering an insect or three in his morning glass of champagne.
“Yuck,” they thought as they picked out Hackney’s pisspoor SATs results from amongst the bubbles. “Eeergh,” they muttered as they grasped rising knife crime between thumb and forefinger and flicked it into a clump of cow parsley. “Not again,” they hissed as stuck their pinkies in the glass, fishing out the suggestion that their consultations were more faits accomplis than any genuine attempt to listen to residents.
There was lots more of this, but as the occasion was a celebratory rather than an adversarial one, the Tory refrained from snapping the stems of his adversaries’ flutes. Not so Lib Dem leader Ian Sharer, who poured the champagne down the drain whilst drawing attention to the poisonous sight of a Labour Mayor campaigning to save Post Offices that his own Government had condemned. Then, as the Pol Roger bubbled down the grilles, he pointed out how vast numbers of parents couldn’t get their children a place in any Hackney secondary school.
Pipe wasn’t going to let that lie. Standing for a second time, he muttered something about how he had planned to let the Conservative speech pass, but really had to respond to the more recent outrage. How could anyone, he said, believe that he had the ear of Government? (Answer: no-one does. Besides, that wasn’t the point). Surely it was right for him to campaign against post office closures? (Answer: yes, if he wanted to look like a hypocrite). And as for the schools situation, surely the fact that so many parents were being turned away was a sign of the borough’s success? Why, back in 2002 parents didn’t want to send their children to Hackney’s schools. Now they simply couldn’t (I paraphrase, but that’s essentially what he was saying).
There was no stopping him. Within seconds he was back on the statistics. I averted my gaze before it was too late, only to find it resting on the expensive propaganda that had been laid before me. There was an Olympic folder/booklet with a velcro fastener and a fold-out chart entitled “Hackney highlights: a 12 month summary”, taking credit for - amongst other things - the opening of Clissold Leisure Centre, retaining Investor in People status (woo-hoo!) and the CSCI rating of “Hackney’s Adult Social Servcies [sic]” as ‘good’. All these publications were printed on gold paper, making me wonder whether the colour is a sort of socialist rank entitlement for an elected borough mayor - kingly gold to Livingstone’s Imperial purple.
Pipe finally ground to a halt and it was time to head next door for drinks and supper. As I stood in the queue, I looked behind me to see a man who was clearly by himself. I wondered who he could be. He didn’t look like an organic farmer or race relations expert. And he looked way too content to be a politician. Nor did he emanate the aura of a businessman. Yes, from all the Hackney folk who hail from every continent and walk of life, I’d found the sole representative of the borough’s single army base. Damned nice fellow he was too.
–
(Sadly, I took no photos of the Council meeting, nor has anyone posted any footage. But for the curious and disbelieving, I have discovered this wonderful clip of our esteemed mayor defending one of the world’s most ridiculous education selection policies.)
Published on 15th May, 2008
Blue Letterbox, Yellow Pages
Something battered and beautiful I spotted this afternoon.
Allen Road, Stoke Newington N16.
Published on 11th May, 2008
I wasn’t going to say this…
Stoke Newington sunshine and a hairdryer breeze. Baby moorhens with sealing wax beaks. Empty Sunblest bags tied to pond railings; orderly waste in a park crammed with bins. Toddler and pink pushchair: ‘ello, kwack, g’bye.
Out into Church Street, boy sucking juice from a beaker. Arrogant mother slams pram into our wheels, her brood bob in her wake as she scowls into her phone.
Past the library and peer into shop windows. A man walks alongside and says:
“Your wife get you to look after the baby?”
“Yes, she’s not too well this afternoon. So I took him to the park.”
“I’m sorry, I didn’t mean anything by…”
“No, no. It’s just lovely to be out in the sunshine.”
I pause and look at my new companion. He’s got the dead eyes and walled-up face of the kid who grew up amongst violence, but the smile of a man who draws strength from hope. He’s wearing an England football shirt, his slight stoop making it hang loosely down the central margin of his back.
“I’d like meet someone and start a family some day,” he says.
“Yes, that would be nice. I’m sure it’ll happen at some point.”
“I hope so,” he continues. He’s in his forties. “I need to at my time of life.”
“Well, sometimes wonderful things happen.”
“I’ve had girlfriends before,” he says. Then: “I’ve had a few girlfriends. But…”
A heartbeat of a pause.
“So you’ve been to the park?” he continues.
“Yes”
“My dad used to carry me on his shoulders. I loved that.”
“I carry William, but these days he wants to clamber off and play.”
“I’ve just been to the library. For a course called Learning Direct. Have you heard of it?”
“Sort of. It’s a government-backed learning thing, isn’t it?”
“Yes. It helps you get back into work.”
“So what are you going to be doing?”
“I’ve been a bit lazy, so I’m thinking of doing a course in Maths and English. There were two really nice women. The course is recognised by some employers, but not all - I think it’s about 50 per cent who do.”
“Well, I’m sure the fact you’ve made an effort to improve your skills will go down with any employer.”
“I hope so. What I’d really like, if it goes well - in the future… .” He pauses for a moment. “What I’d really like is to go on, and actually do GCSEs in English and Maths.”
“That would be fantastic. I hope you do.”
“It would help me get a better job. Oh, is that the bus stop?”
“No, that’s just down there, near the cemetery.”
“Should I have gone back that way?”
“No, you’d have had to go round the corner. It’s probably a bit quicker this way.”
“What do you do?”
“Oh, I’m a writer. I write things for companies.”
“What sort of things?”
“All sorts. Newsletters, contract bids, websites, marketing materials - anything really. The good thing is that, when I get to know a company, I end up writing all the stuff they want to read nicely.”
We arrived at the bus stop.
“I wasn’t going to say this,” said my companion, reaching in his pocket.
Oh no. Here it comes.
“I just thought it was such a nice day, and I’d talk to you. But… .”
He presses a card into my hands.
“Please take this.”
“Thank you,” I say, thrusting it into my pocket. “Lovely to have met you.”
“Goodbye,” said the man.
I steered the pushchair round the corner and took the card from my pocket.
It read: “NORTH LONDON CHURCH OF CHRIST”, and in spidery writing on the back a name and telephone number. “Children’s classes are provided”.
Published on 7th May, 2008
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