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Despair of abandoned youths shouldn’t be ignored
SEVERAL weeks ago Camden Council security staff had stones thrown at them by youths on an estate in Gospel Oak.
Last week, in an escalation of this incident, stones were thrown at a car in Peckwater estate in Kentish Town driven by Police Community Support Officers.
A letter sent to this newspaper from youths on the estate spoke wildly about “War Against the Police”. Diplomatically, community police offices are sensibly playing down the incident. If these were isolated incidents a quiet, distant approach would be a sound strategy.
But there is a certain brooding tension in society expressing a form of Islamophobia – a few weeks ago vicious attacks on Muslims in Luton, and on Saturday street fighting in Birmingham, again, over Muslims.
The latter may be attributable to the side-effects of publicity given lately to the British National Party – the recruiting power of their victory in the Euro elections should not be discounted.
But, irrespective of this, the rise of unemployment among youngsters and the continued – and tragic – lack of support given to local youth services can only foster political apathy and despair, the seedbed of civic tension.
Politicians will ignore this at their peril.
Hospital waste
IF anything illustrates the sheer anarchism – and failure – of the free market in the local community it is the death of the once-famous Middlesex Hospital in Goodge Street, Fitzrovia.
It logically followed the effective financial independence granted to Foundation hospitals, a child of New Labour policy.
To get their balance sheets in order, independent hospitals will – like any private enterprise – take any measure to stabilise their finances. This is to be expected.
It was this approach that led the University London College Hospital to sell off the famous Middlesex Hospital to property developers.
Almost immediately, the bull-dozers moved in. Alas, as if to emphasise the Alice in Wonderland world of today, the developers, embroiled in the financial crunch, have left.
Now, if you glance at the hospital grounds you see the saddest of sights – a barren waste, reminiscent of the blitzed sites strewn throughout the East End and central London at the end of the last world war.
Let us hope that strenuous efforts being made by the civic-minded Charlotte Street Association for a mixed development on the site will succeed.
At present, though, we are left with a disgraceful scale of human folly.
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