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Richard Wilson |
Voting: we’re polls apart from politicians
HELENA Kennedy QC was on the warpath this week in what amounts to a one-woman campaign to bring common sense to the Commons.
For several years she has spoken, written and led reforming committees about little else than the need to make our voting system more democratic and our politicians more accountable.
She wrote a letter to the Observer dripping with 37 signatories calling for a proportional representational voting system.
Among the signatories were Richard Wilson, a near neighbour of Kennedy’s in Hampstead; actor Jonathan Pryce; music producer Brian Eno; philosopher AC Grayling and the political thinker David Marquand.
The letter was headed: “When will MPs start to listen to the people?”
Listen indeed!
On Tuesday she popped up at TV studios finding holes in David Cameron’s pledge to clean up politics.
I couldn’t agree with her more than when she said politicians promise change but when they’re in office they won’t surrender power.
In a recent article she wrote: “...This waywardness in the political sphere goes beyond personal gain. It also means fudging statistics and cherry-picking research as has happened in the Home Office; it means manufacturing dodgy dossiers on intelligence as happened in the run-up to the Iraq war. It means public consultation exercises which are purely cosmetic and where the outcome has been decided in advance...”
When it comes to consultation exercises it’s not only Whitehall that engages in sly manoeuvring – local authorities are guilty too. True or false, I don’t know, but many people in Camden give a groan when they hear the council is “consulting” residents.
Oh, not that again, they moan, believing that the outcome – invariably favourable to the council – has already been decided.
Can you blame them?
‘New Town Hall’ sale an exercise in wasting money
SOME Camden councillors can’t wait to dispose of that modernish office block tagged on to the end of the Town Hall, known as the “New Town Hall” or, in officialese, the “Annexe”.
They spent a few thousand pounds last week advertising it in the Estates Gazette, hoping to entice a developer.
They must feel pretty desperate because any fool knows you shouldn’t sell property in a falling market – certainly not commercial property which is plunging headlong down a vortex today.
A flurry of publicity from council leader Keith Moffit and others seeks to persuade us that the council is doing us a favour because the “Annexe” costs us £2million a year to maintain – the lifts creak, the drains are rotten. It’s a wonder it still stands!
Perhaps, not unexpectedly, they’ve failed so far to produce properly signed reports by surveyors on the state of the building.
I can’t help wondering why the Annexe is in such a bad state when the old Town Hall next-door, built in the 30s, is hardly ever complained of. Mind, there’s always been a bit of a history about the Annexe. A colleague recalls the prescient remarks of that rascally and loveable Labour councillor Ivor Walker who waded into staff critical of the plan to build the Annexe in 1974.
“Can’t you see?”, he argued “a site like this in central London will be worth a bomb in the future, that it would be a sound investment to build on it now?”
Shrewd Walker would never have wanted to sell it 35 years later, I’m sure, in a falling market.
The staff, namely
the then union Nalgo, nicknamed the building “The White Elephant” and that was what the canteen was always known as – that or “Nelly”.
They complained the council was designing an “open plan” office block ruining privacy among staff. In one protest, they dressed up as a panto elephant and paraded around the Town Hall.
For reference, it was the same year that John Major was trying to beat Jock Stallard in the general election.
No ordinary Joe Stalin
?HE’S known as Stalin, but put that to one side when you consider the case of Joseph Stalin Bermudez.
The picket lines due to surround the School of Oriental and African Studies in Bloomsbury today (Thursday) are all for Bermudez, who works in the post room.
The story goes back a few months when Bermudez, union chairman, agitated for better pay and was then sacked for alleged misconduct
The fact that SOAS cleaners now receive the London Living Wage minimum of £7.45 per hour – rather than the measly £5.35 per hour they were paid before – is largely down to Bermudez, an Ecuadorian.
Sandy Nicoll, union branch secretary, insists the disciplinary process in Bermudez’s case has been “unfair and fundamentally flawed”.
They and the SOAS students’ union, are demanding that Stalin, as he is known to colleagues, is reinstated.
The university now faces an embarrassing climbdown or a summer of demonstrations. Watch this space.
Ruth’s nobel gesture?
PERHAPS unfairly, I had a go last week at Ruth Padell who won Oxford’s prestigious poetry chair after her rival was attacked for possible sexual peccadillos.
Padell, who lives in Hampstead, had been associated with the poison-pen attack on the great Nobel prize-winner Derek Walcott. This week Padell admitted she had been foolish to send emails to journalists containing “information” on the West Indian poet Walcott. In radio interviews Padell couldn’t stop saying: “I’m sorry.”
But should she have resigned?
Anyone who knows anything about academia or medicine knows that skullduggery goes on in the unseemly scramble for higher positions.
Whispering campaigns by candidates, the odd scurrilous email, often anonymous, of course, these disciplines are a veritable bear-pit at times.
I don’t mean to condone this, but did Padell really do anything so bad that she had no alternative than to leave the battlefield? |
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