OLD ETONIAN ATTACKS CONSERVATIVE COUNCIL

When an Old Etonian racehorse trainer attacks a Conservative council over its duplicitous ways something must be seriously wrong...

A BROADSIDE

In this trenchant letter, Charles Egerton lambasts the Council.

Dear Mr Noble,

Thank you for your email of 19^th August and details of the construction programme. I’m extremely disconcerted  that you and your fellow councillors/ council employees  are oblivious to the fragilities of the majority of the businesses in the street and the risk that even minimum disruption  will pose to their survival.  If you weren’t, you would have listened to  and respected their concerns over the past  couple of years.

I got involved in the consultation process in the first place after talking to a few local people who brought to my attention the history of the council’s behaviour and what they believed the council’s intentions were for the area.  A number of them had been involved in preventing previous attempts by the council to change the street and they asked me if I would help them try to protect the future of the community and local businesses.

I was surprised that the first consultation took place in July and August, coinciding first with Ramadan, and then with a large proportion of the community being away on holiday. It seemed to me that this indicated either ignorance on the part of the council as to the number of Moroccans in our community or a desire to involve as few as possible of those who would be detrimentally affected by the council’s plans. My suspicions were fuelled after talking to people in the street and finding that the majority of them were unaware that there was a consultation taking place , as they had not received any consultation papers. 

Because of this , we started the Golborne Association to unite people in order to get their wishes across to the council. We discovered that many who were council tenants were afraid of the potential consequences of speaking out.

The rest is history, and out of this process I have learnt a lot. Coming from a Conservative background, having  run the West Berkshire Benefactors Club and membership / fundraising for a number of years, I was shocked and dismayed to find that  a Conservative council  could behave  so underhandedly and with no regard for genuine localism.

I am aware that the Golborne regeneration scheme was also supported by our Labour councillors, which was certainly bewildering as they were betraying their constituents, like turkeys voting for Christmas.

I found it staggering that at our first meeting Tim Coleridge, the councillor in charge of consultation, did not know what the budget was for the expenditure on the street.  This should have warned us that there was no sincere intention to respect the views of our local group. It was certainly patronising to have come so woefully unprepared.

At the time, I did not think it very democratic that the working party that was set up by Coleridge had a strong pro-council bias – subsequently, I have been shown examples by activists in other boroughs that this is standard practice.

In our naivety, we also were unaware – nor was it ever made clear to us – that the consultation was in no regard a referendum, i.e., we had no power to reject the proposed works.  As Southwark community activists have pointed out, ‘‘Participatory consultation’ without participatory decision-making is not only pointless but harmful to democratic planning processes.’  It is also an abuse of public money to fund a consultation exercise that is nothing but a sham.  It also poses the question as to why the photocopied consultation papers we distributed to those who had not received papers from the council were not counted. They were not ballots; they were simply expressing the views of local people – it seems clear that the council intended to suppress these views to further an appearance of consent. Stupidly, we gave them the opportunity to do so. If the community has no power to do anything but acquiesce, the consultation exercise is a waste of local people’s time and energy.

Due to the policies of the council and successive governments over a period of many years, genuine communities have all but vanished from RBKC.   RBKC should be proud of a diverse community such as Golborne Road and use it as a template to be emulated by local authorities across the country. RBKC have the resources that they have no need to be a corporate property development company, basically feeding a bloated Town Hall and their pensions, and serving private interests  instead of the public they are there to serve. As Peter Oborne has pointed out in the Telegraph, communities are where people learn and practice civic virtue: they are essential to a good society.

I hope that rents and rates will not go up as soon as the Golborne Road is ‘sanitised’. However, having read the report on the consultation from the council, I see that a paragraph has already been slipped in which can only be taken as a warning that they will. Small traders will be unable to survive – which is precisely why we tried quixotically to oppose the council’s plans.

I urge you to be sensitive to these businesses and the community they serve over the coming year, and to listen to the  people you work for.

With love

Charles Egerton