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In Dalby Street, Mayor Ken has finally done the right thing
SOMEONE, somewhere, will listen if you cry foul long and loud enough!
Cynical amenity and political campaigners may disagree. But that’s the lesson that may be drawn by neighbours in the Dalby Street, Kentish Town area.
Their guardian angel is none other than London Mayor Ken Livingstone (see page 1).
After an extraordinary sustained campaign of leafleting, filling our postbags week after week, holding public protest meetings and button-holing councillors, the opponents of the very questionable development for Dalby Street may now feel they are on the home stretch.
Ken Livingstone is to call in the scheme that has been mistakenly approved – in our opinion – by the coalition of Lib-Dems and Tories.
We have long pointed out that the scheme is crawling with question marks.
Not only does it threaten to take away precious public space, but its history is such as to put a new meaning to the profession of property development and dealing.
Ken Livingstone
would no doubt have liked to have been given greater powers to run the capital’s transport system, but his wings were clipped by Tony Blair’s government.
Even so, he has invested heavily in a better bus service, and who can doubt that, perhaps for the first time in decades, the London bus is king again in the capital!
However, when it comes to planning the future of London, here Ken Livingstone has much more muscle.
Old hands in politics will dismiss Ken Livingstone’s intervention in the Dalby Streer row as a piece of crude opportunism – he announced it on Tuesday, two days before a vital by-election in the Haverstock ward where Labour and the Lib-Dems are neck and neck.
There may be something in this. But will the Dalby Street campaigners care? We doubt it.
Especially, if Livingstone goes one step further, and either rejects the scheme or circumscribes it with enough caveats to make it more digestible to the doughty protesters.
Lifting the veil on a shambolic school decision
WE have said it before – and, unfortunately, we have to say it again.
We said the consultation over the siting of the new school in Camden was a paper-thin sham.
Education chief Andrew Mennear wrote to this newspaper last week saying we had got it wrong.
But he would say that, wouldn’t he?
This week we have learned that the report due to be published next week will make it clear that the new school will be put down in the Swiss Cottage area – despite cries of protests of parents long-denied a secondary school in the south.
We say the minds of the politicians were made up before they went through the motions of asking people what they wanted.
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