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Ruth’s Revenge?
IT’S either the pettiest of petty politics or simple hardcore ideology – there cannot be any other reason why the New Labour government has cruelly snubbed Camden Council over a pilot scheme to refurbish down-at-heel estates.
Within days of coming into office, the new coalition of Lib Dems and Tories at the Town Hall, quite naturally, asked housing minister Ruth Kelly to put their name down on the list of local authorities able to take part in an experimental scheme on raising money privately to finance improvements to council estates.
“Sorry, but not you, I am afraid,” came the firm reply yesterday (Wednesday) from the omnipotent, benevolent Ruth Kelly.
The very fact that Ruth Kelly could dash off a reply so quickly smacks of revenge.
It is possible to imagine Ms Kelly and her entourage of budding Alastair Campbells stamping their feet and saying to themselves: “Is Camden joking? What give that shambles of a collection of Tories and Lib Dems the right to raise money for their estates? The bloody nerve!”
Of course, the government reply was couched in more diplomatic language but in real terms that’s what it amounted to.
If anything this week demonstrated why people turn their noses up at politicians and think politics has an unbearable odour it is this response from the government.
The reaction from Camden’s Labour group practically underwrites our interpretation of events.
According to Labour in Camden the government cannot trust the new set of rulers at the Town Hall because they contain that most contaminated body – the Tories!
Isn’t something being missed here?
Has Labour thought of the borough’s 30,000 tenants who would have benefited from the scheme, even if it had been badly managed by the Tory-Lib Dem coalition.
Basically, politics is supposed to be about people. Political parties are supposed to exist so as to run local or national institutions in the interest of the people. The governance of a nation should also be in the interests of the people.
Ruth Kelly has given a new interpretation to the concept of ‘personal politics’.
Sour about the loss of Labour’s jewel in Camden, the housing minister wants to make sure the new upstarts at the Town Hall should be punished!
Labour’s deputy leader Lucy Anderson should have seen the whole of a problem, not one of its parts, when considering the deadly shake of Ruth Kelly’s head.
She has simply left the people out of the equation.
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