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Face the facts on schools
WHEN it comes to a search for the site of a new secondary school in the south of the borough, the attitude of the mandarins who run our local authority seems to be: “Our minds are made up – don’t bother us with the facts!” .
A suggestion this week by a reader, a retired teacher, (page 13) that the old St Martin’s College of Art buildings in Bloomsbury would make a good secondary, has been batted away – without as much as a nano-second of real thought – by the Tory education chief Andrew Mennear.
It isn’t the first time this site has been offered up to the Tory-Lib-Dem coalition. Parents in the south proposed it a year ago.
Until satisfactory facts and figures can be supplied to this newspaper showing a thorough cost-benefit analysis has been made on this site by the combined team of officers and councillors, we see no reason why the old St Martin’s site could not become Camden’s first secondary south of the borough. It would be too costly. It’s too small. These are the counter-arguments of the head-in-the sand brigade who appear so irritated whenever alternatives are put to them.
There are defining moments in the life of a local authority that decides how the electorate will cast their vote at the next election. This may be one of them.
Where has all the commonsense gone?
THE borough’s planners – aided at times by elected councillors – stagger from the sublime to the ridiculous.
Having rushed through the King’s Cross redevelopment scheme they now have to start preparing a case to be heard in the High Court.
They approved – without consulting councillors – a proposal to build a gym and swimming pool in a house in Hampstead, and have succeeded in arousing the ire of neighbours.
This week they have gone further down the road of insanity by demanding that a couple in Primrose Hill pull down a Wendy house used to store bicycles . Arguments that this goes against the council’s green policy and efforts to beat crime fall on ears stopped up by stodgy rules and regulations. Commonsense is beyond them.
The rule book dominates all.
All this leads to a widening gulf between politicians and apparatchiks on one side and the electorate on the other.
It feeds a sense of fatalism which, if unchecked, will help to destroy what is left of confidence in the political system. We are constantly amazed at how politicians and civil servants are out of touch with the real world.
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