Despite All, Our Community Is Stronger Than Ever

Despite having returned to rainy England some fourteen days ago, this is my first new post on this blog.

There have been two reasons for this.  The first was the simple imperative to prioritise the need to make a living.  Work that earns me money and enables the family to keep afloat must at most times take priority over what is in effect a labour of love.

The second is that what has been by far the most significant event since I returned was the hugely successful residents' march to Save Our Libraries and Public Hall which took place last Saturday.

 Christine Diwell of The Isleworth Society and ICG Chair Ian Speed celebrate the opening
of the new leisure centre and library with a symbolic cutting of a green ribbon.
  Despite millions having been spent on the refurbishment of the facility, Hounslow
Council was considering it for closure just a few weeks after its official opening.
______________________________________________________________

In the build-up to the march I have to say that I wanted to post, but didn't have the courage.  Despite past experience teaching me that Isleworth people come out with a vengeance when called out onto the streets in support of a good local cause there was always a nagging fear that something would go wrong.  Inclement weather, a whispering campaign by the local Labour Old Guard spreading the false news that the libraries were safe, combined with some uncertainty as to whether the spirit of the active local community had been broken following last year's election to leave me wondering whether the whole thing would be a washout.  There is only so much humble pie that one can eat without being sick, and cowardice got the better of valour.  So I kept away from the blog.

In the event it seems I had nothing to fear.  The weather was lousy, absolutely rotten, and yet over 300 people (some suggested as many as 500) came out to demonstrate their opposition to the cuts.  Brentford and Isleworth MP Mary Macleod joined our demonstration, as did Isleworth ward councillors Mindu Bains, Ed Mayne and Sue Sampson.  The event received an excellent write-up in the Hounslow Chronicle as well as a mention in the London Evening Standard.  Nobody was left in any doubt whatsoever as to the opposition that will come from Isleworth should any suggestion of closing or curtailing our community facilities in Isleworth be revisited by this council administration or by any other.

ICG leader Ian Speed with Mary Macleod MP and the three Isleworth
ward councillors at the head of the column ______________________________________________________________
 

As I've said before I sympathise with the local authority in its current predicament.  I know from personal experience that its task of having to find £18 million in savings this year and next year, and £12 million in each of the subsequent two years, will be nigh on impossible without having to make some cuts to frontline services.  Especially in the light of the fact that the previous administration, of which I was a part, took out much of the fat from the bureaucracy which the current administration could have done itself as part of its savings programme had it still been there.

Nonetheless I believe that whatever pain we must take we must never, ever be prepared to attack the core of our community life.  Once libraries, public halls and community buildings close they will be closed forever. 

I also reiterate my belief that Labour administrations tend by nature to be less well disposed towards organised communities than to dependent communities.  All else being equal they would prefer to spend what little resources they have on those whom they believe need them rather than those whose aspirations for our community may diverge a little from their own.

But at least they are listening.  I was massively inspired and reassured by the fact that the councillors came along and spoke to concerned locals, and I believe they quite rightly earned a lot of respect for doing so.  The idea of the previous Labour councillors back in the 1990s and prior to 2002 attending any activity organised by the community, let alone one organised by the ICG itself, would have been simply unthinkable.

Things have changed.  And just possibly we have achieved at least some of our objectives in spite of our reverse last May.

Seeing the Bigger Picture

By mutual agreement Sunday for me is "family day", and the two most recent members of my family like nothing more than to spend it sprawled on the settee watching the television, or doing something similarly unadventurous. So when I travelled to Gunnersbury Park for the London Mela I did so alone, and on the understanding that my visitation would be a short one.

Organisers of the London Mela describe the event as "the biggest festival of South Asian music and culture to take place outside of the Indian sub-continent". The London Evening Standard takes the view that it is "a secret to be shared with the wider community". However it is described, each summer 75,000 people converge on Brentford for an afternoon of festivity, food and fun.

The Hospitality Tent is always a mixed blessing. It is very rude to turn down free food, however having consumed an appropriately sociable quantity of it one is invariably less disposed to sample the various dishes on sale around the field, notwithstanding the lure of the aggressively aromatic spices which make them rather difficult not to notice.

Some of my (non-ICG) colleagues on the council are a little cooler about the Mela than I am. The naked cynicism of the old council administration which lauded the Mela yet refused to recognise St. George's Day on the grounds that it was "racist" - a stance which, insultingly, it believed would impress the Asian community and thereby lock in its votes - has left scars which will take time to heal. There are some people, people whose commitment to cohesion and integration is no less than mine, who see the Mela in that context and with that memory in mind, as an expression of cultural triumphalism.

Speaking personally I take a much more optimistic view. For the Mela, in fact, places South Asian culture within the context of a Western environment. The layout of the stalls, which purveyed a welcome mixture of ethnic and indigenous wares, was more akin to that of a London market than an Eastern bazaar. Even the music which blared out rather too loudly from the huge stage under the direction of the DJ "Crash" (last year's Master of Ceremonies, the hilariously named "Abdul Cool", obviously had a prior engagement) came across as a curious blend of traditional bhangra and that repetitive rapping stuff that the kids seem to go for today.

On the bus going home it struck me, from a Community Cohesion perspective, what an opportunity we had missed a couple of years back with all that pernicious St. George's Day nonsense. Imagine 75,000 people attending a St. George's Day festival, bedecked with English flags and populated by British people of all cultural and ethnic backgrounds, with food, music and dance from South Asia, China, the Caribbean, as well as from the UK. A festival which would flaunt the proud Englishness of the diverse society which we enjoy today. What better way could there possibly be of putting across the message that we are an integrated community, contemptuous of prejudice and disharmony, diverse yet cohesive, brought together by the common values that unite us in a society in which Everybody Matters?

It isn't rocket science, but sometimes I feel like a voice in the wilderness railing unheard against the powerful but ultimately false dichotomy of diversity and integration.

A St. George's Day festival to celebrate multi-cultural Englishness in the 21st century. I wonder whether anybody will have the courage to suggest it?

Goodbye, nothing to say

If they were ever to introduce tolls for our roads I would find myself investing in a season ticket for the M3.

Sticking with our usual policy of little, cheap and often when it comes to our family holidays (being a community councillor is not conducive to disappearing for a fortnight at a time) the Andrews household, accompanied on this occasion by my mother and father, spent the weekend just gone at Landguard Holiday Park in Shanklin on the Isle of Wight, returning on Monday evening.

Then, the very next day, it was back down the motorway to Bournemouth for the Local Government Association (LGA) Annual Conference, which is where I am as I write.

In an earlier article I spoke of how Kevin Maguire, the Political Editor of the Daily Mirror, had made an inaccurate statement about me in one of his columns implying that I still held the same views which motivated me as a member of the National Front back in the 1970s and 80s, which as anybody who knows me at all will confirm I do not. In that article I conceded the possibility that Maguire had made an innocent mistake, and in order to enable him to reflect upon the falsity of his words I forwarded the contents of my blog article to him. Needless to say I have not heard a word from him since, neither an apology for misrepresenting me nor even an acknowledgement.

As a consequence Maguire has been admitted to my Deliberate Liars Club, where he takes pride of place alongside fellow journalist and Lying-Scumbag-in-Chief Andrew Gilligan of the London Evening Standard.

Those who read that article will recall my admittedly mischievous suggestion that I might challenge Maguire over his remarks at the LGA Conference, where he was listed as a speaker at a plenary event on the subject of "Homes fit for local people".

Now to be perfectly truthful, I never really did have any intention of raising what is essentially a private matter between myself and Maguire at an open forum. It would have been hugely disrespectful of the other 250-300 people attending the session who had gone along to listen to a debate about housing. Nevertheless I did attend the session, strategically positioning myself in a row of seats all of my own at the top of the meeting where I was likely to stand out before any properly-sighted individual seated at the top table.

As soon as the session began I was disappointed to discover that Sir Bob Kerslake (to whom no offence is intended) was to be the only actual speaker and that Maguire had been relegated to a mere member of the six-person panel behind him. Unlike the other panel members, he didn't even receive a personal introduction from the Chair.

Nevertheless I couldn't resist a bit of fun, so I raised my hand and was eventually given the microphone. Congratulating Sir Bob on his speech and expressing my pleasure at seeing "an old Hounslow boy doing so well for himself" (as Chief Executive at the London Borough of Hounslow in the early 1990s it would be fair to say he was not a particularly strict observer of the statutory requirement for senior officers not to engage in political activity, but these were after all the bad old, pre-ICG days of cronyism run rampant), I introduced myself by name and office in a manner which must have left Maguire in no doubt as to who I was. Then, after asking an innocuous question (which, in the event, only Sir Bob made any attempt to answer), I shared my hope that "those on the panel who haven't spoken yet will let us have their views on this subject".

Unfortunately it was not to be. The vaunted speaker turned panel member rose from the table at the end of the 75-minute session without having uttered a single, solitary word. When, as the audience began to make its way out of the impressive Windsor Hall, I headed towards the stage in the hope of engaging Maguire in a few minutes of private conversation, he hurriedly turned around and found somebody else to speak to. Not only a conscious liar, it would appear, but a moral coward to boot.

Tomorrow David Cameron, Nick Clegg and Hazel Blears will be addressing the Conference, then it's off home for a presentation to the Heston & Cranford Area Committee.

And on Friday morning, for the first time in ages, I am minded to buy a copy of The Sun.

We meet at last?

I'm back from Harrogate and eager to take up where I left off but my first offering is more on the antics of my friends in the New Labour Party, I'm afraid.

When it was first announced, in May 2006, that the Conservative and Community Groups would be going into coalition to form an administration at the London Borough of Hounslow, the response from the surviving remnants of the previous administration was both predictable and entirely in character.

Having themselves walked voluntarily into opposition in preference to having to work with councillors from any Group other than their own, New Labour embarked immediately upon a clumsy but flatteringly high-profile campaign to bring the new administration down. Their instrument of choice was myself, or rather my much-publicised, well-known and unambiguously renounced former membership of the far-Right National Front back in the 1970s and 1980s.

The campaign began in the usual way, with letters to the local newspapers and postings on internet forums announcing their "new discovery" about my political history. However it soon became clear that the local Conservative Group were made of sterner stuff than Labour had previously realised and would not take fright and buckle under the strain of the resultant local publicity - which in itself was underwhelming due to the fact that it had already been done to death and was no longer considered newsworthy - and the dirty tricks machine was forced to raise its game in an effort to persuade Conservative Central Office to intervene.

And so the big guns were called in. Embarrassed and angered by the incompetent blundering of the Labour Group in Hounslow, which had voted unanimously to approve a new Executive which included two members of the Community Group (as it did again this year, having abstained in 2007), Hounslow's two alleged Members of Parliament Ann and Alan Keen wrote to the Council Leader announcing effectively that they would not co-operate with the new administration for as long as I remained a member of the Executive. When this absurd and frankly irrelevant threat was laughed off with the contempt it deserved (we had never expected the Keens to work with us anyway - let's face it, they didn't do a great deal to help their own administration!), Ann Keen made a rare parliamentary intervention to ask the then Prime Minister Tony Blair to condemn the Conservative Group on Hounslow Council for going into coalition with us, a request which he quite deftly side-stepped.

Armed with the news of her question to the Prime Minister Mrs. Keen continued to pursue her campaign with a zeal which her long-suffering constituents, many of whom have to go to extraordinary lengths just to get her or a member of her staff to even acknowledge a letter or an e-mail, can only have looked upon with envy. Next stop was the regional and national press.

Understandably the Labour's Party's own Tribune newspaper was first into the fray, the bolshie reporter interrupting my holiday with a message on my voicemail demanding that I furnish him with an explanation for my membership of the new Executive. I didn't return his call - it's not as though I didn't know where he was likely to be coming from, and he didn't disappoint.

The piece in the Tribune then in turn provided the hook for stories in other, wider-circulation rags. It was perhaps inevitable that the first to report for duty would be the completely unscrupulous guttersnipe Andrew Gilligan at the London Evening Standard.

Despite the fact that the Standard is essentially pro-Conservative Gilligan had already, in the run-up to the local elections, acquired a reputation with the ICG as a man with a suspiciously close (and one-sided) relationship with the Keens and who was pretty much indifferent to the truth or otherwise of what he wrote in his political columns, at least where we were concerned.

As well as covering the ludicrous "Reichstag Fire"* (as the alleged "firebomb attack" on a rubbish sack belonging to an Isleworth Labour Party candidate just before the publishing deadline of the election-day issue of the local newspaper has affectionately come to be known) as though it were without question the work of the ICG, during that campaign Gilligan had also wilfully repeated the New Labour lie that I had a criminal conviction for a racially-motivated assualt on a black police officer. Giving him the benefit of the doubt, I wrote at the time to both Gilligan and his editor to point out that this allegation was untrue.

This didn't prevent him from repeating the accusation, which he now knew to be false, as part of Mrs. Keen's campaign against the new Executive (when, having done so, this low-grade piece of human manure had the effrontery to call me last June to request a quote for a third hatchet-job on the ICG which he was planning to write at Mrs. Keen's behest, he was offered a short piece of advice pertaining to sex and travel along with an assurance that any factual inaccuracies contained in his article would meet with a legal response. The article never appeared).

If the reason for Gilligan's apparent subservience to the Keens remains a mystery, there was nothing mysterious about the willingness of the Daily Mirror to lend their campaign a helping hand. The Mirror is an openly pro-New Labour paper which seems to have readily forgiven its political masters for their fraudulent war in Iraq, a war which has resulted in the loss of hundreds of thousands of innocent lives and which to its great credit the newspaper opposed at the time). Giving pride of place in his full-page column to Labour's problems in Hounslow, Assistant Political Editor Kevin Maguire announced to the tabloid's readership that I was "a former member of the National Front and a Holocaust denier".

The word which stood out for me was the second "a", which seemed to suggest that whilst Maguire acknowledged that my membership of the National Front was something which belonged to the past, my denial of the Holocaust (which comes as part of the deal with senior membership of a fascist party such as the NF) belonged to the present, which it most certainly doesn't.

Why mention all this more than two years on? Well, while in Conference mode I decided yesterday morning to peruse the agenda for the forthcoming LGA Annual Conference in Bournemouth and discovered that on the afternoon of the second day there will be a plenary session on the topic of "Homes fit for local people". What caught my eye first of all was that the session will be chaired by Sir Bob Kerslake (to whom I was introduced in Harrogate), who is currently the Chief Executive for the Homes and Communities Agency but who also, slightly before my time in office, was once the Chief Executive of the London Borough of Hounslow.

Reading on through the list of participants involved in this session I was even more interested to see the name of one Kevin Maguire, yes he of the Daily Mirror. These kind of sessions seem to attract a modest attendance, and there is every chance that somebody in the audience with his hand raised will get the opportunity to ask a question once the speeches are done.

As we have seen above, that Gilligan is a conscious liar is a matter of demonstrable fact. But did Maguire really mean to misrepresent me in the way he did or was his just a completely innocent act of typographical clumsiness?

Seems I may get the opportunity to ask him!


* In February 1933 the German parliament building, the Reichstag, was subject to a serious arson attack. Adolf Hitler, who had only shortly before been elected Chancellor of Germany, blamed his Communist opponents and used the fire as the justification for a policy of repression against the Communists. Most historians today believe the Nazis themselves to have been responsible for the fire.