Remembering Stephen Lawrence

After so long, it is easy to forget how seriously the murder of Stephen  Lawrence, and its aftermath, stigmatised the whole of south-east London, and Eltham, in particular. Everyone who lived in Greenwich at the time of the murder will have their own memories, and their own feelings about the long wait for justice. Here are mine.

The conviction of two of the murderers last week is not a cause for celebration – and nor is it the end of the story as several members of the gang of five or six thugs who murdered Stephen Lawrence are still free. But it is a chance to reflect on how the determination of the Lawrence family over 18 years has lead to some profound changes in our society – changes for the better.

My Mum and Dad got to know the Lawrences slightly after the murder, and my sister (who happens to be black) was born just a  few months before Stephen Lawrence and they had a few friends in common. For my family, bearing the brunt of racial abuse in the street in the 1980s and 1990s was an occasional, and thankfully rare, shock. The Lawrence murder was a stark reminder that there were those on the streets who would kill people because of the colour of their skin.

I remember, after the horror of the killing had subsided, above all a sense of burning anger  – and shame that the part of London that I had grown up in could harbour such murderers.

I remember Doreen Lawrence being referred to for a time as “the other Mrs Lawrence”, as at first the murder was given much less coverage than another appalling murder in 1993, of the west London headteacher Philip Lawrence. Now, the police, media and the public are less liable to judge the importance of a murder victim on their race alone.

I remember Eltham being described as a no-go area for back people – somewhere where black people would not buy houses. That has changed, too.

I remember going on a demonstration in late 1993 or early 1994, with some friends from University, against the presence of a BNP “Bookshop” in Welling. The demonstration ended with an angry confrontation at the bottom of Wickham Lane in Plumstead, where the police prevented marchers form proceeding any further. We headed up to Abbey Wood to avoid the confrontation and got a train back towards London, being verbally abused on the way to the station by white youths who saw us wearing Anti-Nazi league badges. “Nice part of London you live in”, my friend told me.

Thank goodness that Greenwich and Eltham are now no longer juts thought of as an epicentre of racial hatred, and have been put on the map in so many other, better ways.

I remember talking to a police sergeant at the (now-closed) Westcombe Park police station in the late 1990s, shortly after I first became a councillor. He told me he could not understand what the police were supposed to have done wrong. Such attitudes are never expressed to me now by police officers.

I remember going to one of the Memorial services at Trinity Church at the top of Burrage Road a few months after Stephen’s murder. My daughter now goes to a primary school around the corner from that church. About half of the school’s students are of black African origin. Parents at the school gates discuss their jobs, inflation, their children’s progress, the dog fouling problem in the common – but hardly ever race.

Stephen Lawrence’s death had a huge impact: one of its consequences was the slow (and incomplete) dwindling of racist attitudes and distrust in the 18 years since. That it took such a brutal murder for these changes to come about shows how such changes are fragile – and need to still be fought for.

Lost in the Maze: residents demand station access to be opened

Residents of Seren Park (the new development on the south side of Maze Hill station) and residents of Woodland Heights (the former nurses’ home on Vanbrugh Hill and Restell Close) held a photocall this morning, December 1st, to urge Network Rail and the developer to see sense and open the path to the Station that they were promised several years ago.

At the time the new flats were given permission six years ago, the council made building a new path from the development to Maze Hill station a condition of the planning consent. But railway bureaucracy has meant the path has been built but still not opened, and while a gate to the path has been installed, it is still padlocked shut.

As well as about ten residents and I, the other two Conservative councillors for the ward were there and have been active in the campaign, which has been cross-party and which I hope will bring results soon. Nick Raynsford MP has also been very active, writing to the chief executive of Network Rail several times about the issue.

While we were there this morning, we saw two commuters squeeze through a hole in the chainlink fencing next to the padlocked gate – clearly people are already voting with their feet and have had enough of going on a detour of 300 or 400 yards to get from their homes to the station. If the path was open, it would only be a walk of ten or twenty yards to the station platform.

Network Rail say they are not bound by the planning condition, as it was signed by Connex, the old train operating company, not by Network Rail themselves. Southeastern Railway (the railway operator that took over from Connex about five years ago) says that they are happy for access to be provided, but that Network Rail has the ultimate say as they own the freehold of the station, which is leased to Southeastern.

There used to be three blocks of flats on the site (then called Restell Close): Lister, Jenner and Norfolk Houses, which provided nurses’ housing for the former Greenwich District Hospital. In those days there was a path used regularly by local people that ran from the end of the cul-de-sac parallel with the railway platform and emerged near the Maze Hill station building.

Network Rail says this was never a right of way, and to reopen a path along a similar route is fine in principle – but only if the developer pays a hefty fee for access rights for their residents (who have of course already paid for their railway journeys through costly season tickets) to walk up a ten–yard path, already built at the developers’ expense, to the station platform.

This bureaucratic muddle has left residents understandably bewildered- all they want is for the path to be opened so they can enjoy the easy, direct access to Maze Hill station they were promised when they bought or rented their flats. They are fed up with years of excuses from Network Rail and the developers, and I can see why.

What’s to be afraid of at St Paul’s?

Walking through the ‘Occupy London’ protest at St Paul’s one evening last week, what struck me was not how large it was but how small – a small crescent-shaped areas around just one corner of the cathedral. Smartly dressed in a new suit, I could easily have been mistaken for a banker. But I encountered no hostility or abuse, and saw no aggression of any kind – indeed the Camp is a place of bookstalls, neat tents. The only raised voices I heard were an animated discussion between two Rastafarians about whether or not the Occupy London protest was on a par with the Tiananmen Square protests of 1989.

I could see no graffiti – only posters tidily sellotaped up on the columns on the adjacent shopping arcade of the Post-Modern development alongside,Paternoster Square. Apart from some ordure left by a police horse on a pavement, I saw no rubbish, heard no loud noise, and saw no sign of access to and from the cathedral, or any other adjacent building, being impeded. City workers and Vergers in white tie from the cathedral walked by without any impediment. Just yards away from the tents, a sports retailer and a branch of an upmarket deli (called Paul, oddly) were trading as normal (so much for shutting down the capitalist system).

So why has the protest prompted so much fury amongst some City types, and commentators like Sir Simon Jenkins (see http://www.thisislondon.co.uk/standard/article-24004611-this-camp-is-not-a-proper-protest—remove-it-now.do), with his ludicrous argument that the camp should move on now because it is “not a proper protest”. Presumably, the protest would only qualify as a “proper” protest, and the campers earn the right to stay, if they were throwing missiles at the police and the Cathedral. The tented city may not face the kind of violent clearance of Tiananmen Square 20-plus years ago, but the glee with which politicians like Deputy Mayor Kit Malthouse have fantasised about hosing the protestors down with “high powered sprinklers” brings more discredit on London than the protestors themselves ever will.

The fact is the dignity and peacefulness of the protest has caught many institutions – the Cathedral authorities, the Corporation of London, and the right-of-centre commentariat – off-guard. The arguments in favour of the removal of the camp have had to resort to barrel-scraping to cover their short-comings, resorting to strictly legalistic arguments about ownership of land, and even– the last resort of the bureaucrat. – Health and Safety.

If the sole test of the validity of a protest is whether it complies with the exact letter of the current law, then just about every single protest on British soil in the last thousand years – the Peasants Revolt on Blackheath in 1382, the Suffragettes, the Chartists and the Levellers – would have been declared invalid.

There is certainly an argument that such protest in effect privatises public space – people who wanted to go for a quiet stroll in St Paul’s Churchyard, or in parliament Square, cannot now do so (although it has to be said that reaching the middle of Parliament Square is always a great achievement, so unfriendly to pedestrians its girdle of roads is).

There is also a security argument – the permanent camp on Parliament Square, just across the road from the main entrance to the Houses of Parliament, is a clear security risk, which makes its survival after eight years all the more remarkable. But at St Paul’s, the Cathedral has recanted its earlier argument that the camp was somehow a “Health and safety” risk that meant the cathedral could not safely open to the public.

 But this sort of “privatisation” by protestors is less insidious than the genuine privatisation of land which is considered to be public by its owners, who at the first sign of protest suddenly remind the public passing through that they can only do so with landowners’ permission. The fact that corporations can declare large parts of the City out of bounds to people they don’t like is very worrying – I was very disturbed to read recently (http://www.london24.com/news/politics/police_stop_protesters_occupying_london_stock_exchange_1_1091614 ) that someone taking photos in Paternoster Square, the new development juts to the north of St Paul’s, was asked to move on. Notices have been affixed to the area saying “Paternoster Squareis private land. Any license to the public to enter or cross this land is revoked forthwith. There is no implied or express permission to enter any premises or any part. Any such entry will constitute a trespass.” A similar notice has gone up around the Canary Wharf estate, backed up by an injunction for good measure.

There is also an argument that the protestors’ demands are confused, contradictory, or naïve. Many of the views espoused by the protestors are probably all three of these things. But given the confused, contradictory, or naïve arguments put forward by the financial services industry to explain the recent Financial crisis, if confusion and naivety justified the removal of a camp set up by the protestors, surely it could also be used as an argument in favour of the immediate demolition of much of the City of London – something not even the most extreme of the protestors are calling for.

A little more humility and tolerance seems in order. I welcome the fact that the protest seems set to remain until Christmas. If it encourages us to think about why we are in the current economic mess, why it is worsening under the current Government, and why the right to protest needs defending more now than ever before, then I can live with the fact that the camp was not erected with its owners’ consent. Live and let live.

Two cheers for journalism

I hope that politicians come to realise that, with the appalling massacre in Norway in July, and the riots in the UK in August, the first big news story of the summer – the phone hacking scandal – needs to now be put in some perspective.

There are, of course, aspects of modern society even more unpleasant than tabloid journalists. The focus of public attention has moved on – much to the relief of the tabloids.

As an ex-journalist (who still dabbles in the blogosphere with contributions such as this one) I have as a councillor met good people locally who have been badly treated by the media.

Two particular cases come to mind: one local family unfairly maligned as irresponsible dog-owners when a family pet unexpectedly attacked and killed another dog. The second case was the sensationalist and inaccurate reporting of the suicide of a shopkeeper, some years ago, which did little to help his family and colleagues recover from the shock.

But if there is anything more unpleasant than journalists thinking they are above the law and hacking into the phones of murder victims and their families, it is sanctimonious politicians who may try and use the outrage as a pretext to close down a free press. Clearly the useless Press Complaints Commission has to be replaced by a much tougher form of independent regulation, but it is worrying hat several senior politicians have called for statutory regulation of the press – a little like the official censorship of the London theatre by the Lord Chamberlain that persisted until the late 1960s – or a new Privacy law.

A note of caution needs to be introduced. In London boroughs like Greenwich the problem is not too much media activity but too little: there is too little reporting of (let alone misreporting of) the council and local news in general. While the Mercury remains a good paper, its resources are limited and the news-breaking is now increasingly done by local blogs of varying quality. The local community would benefit from more high-quality local journalism both digitally and in print – much of which I and other councillors would probably not like much – to report local news and hold the council and other bodies accountable.

Politicians and journalists have much more in common than they realise. Both trade in words. A very cynical Tory MP once said that being a good backbench MP (or councillor) boiled down to the ability to write a good letter. Like a good news story, a good letter has to grab the reader’s attention and have a good beginning, middle and end.

Why else would so many ex-journalists enjoy a rapid rise as politicians (Michael Gove is a case in point), and so many ex-politicians go on to be successful journalists and broadcasters (Matthew Parris, Michael Portillo and Robert Kilroy-Silk – always a better broadcaster than a politician  among them).

 At a recent debate about the matter at the London School of Economics, the dangers of both the phone-hacking scandal – and the coming backlash – were laid bare. One solicitor involved in acting on behalf of phone hacking victims, Charlotte Harris, said she had been warned some years ago that pursuing the matter would be career suicide – if hacking had taken place, the charges would never be proved.

 But the tables have now been turned. It is now clear that the Phone-hacking scandal was a spectacular own-goal by the British press, who may have only themselves to blame for the fall-out, even though it took everyone by surprise. Even a few days before its closure, no-one would have predicted the closure of The News of the World. As one speaker at the LSE argued, the NOTW was like a villainous husband – like a long-suffering wife, its readership wanted it to change, not up sticks and leave.

 I recently bought an old paperback copy of All the President’s Men – Woodward and Bernstein’s account of the Watergate scandal (I have always been fascinated by Watergate, partly because the week in October 1973 when the scandal really got going – with Nixon’s attorney general Elliot Richardson resigning and the first Oval Office tapes being released – also happens to be the week I was born in).

 Woodward and Bernstein may not have paid Deep Throat for information, let alone bugged his phone, but the only way the story was broken by Woodward, Bernstein and others was a lot of camping out on people’s doorsteps, offering them money for the story. Carl Bernstein candidly admits that he impersonated other people on the telephone and paid a contact to go through credit-card records – illegally – to stack up his story that the Watergate burglars had been paid with money from the White House.

 America is famous for its supposedly high journalistic ethics – newspapers there have fact checkers and are very careful to always correct errors, however slight. When I worked for a small-town American paper in the late 1990s, I was solemnly given a copy of its style guide, containing pages and pages of journalistic do’s and don’ts.

Did all the actions of reporters covering Watergate comply with all aspects of the Washington Post’s code of ethics? Probably not – but these journalists were unearthing the most serious criminal conspiracy in American history, in which the President was authorising the burglary and bugging of his opponents’ campaign office and then coercing other officials into covering it up.

Cutting a few journalistic corners was clearly justified, as the ends justified the means and otherwise the story may never have been broken. If there had been an absolute ban on all such journalistic methods, with no public interest defence, the story may never have been broken.

The trouble is that too many journalists think they are Woodward and Bernstein. The most arresting part of the recent LSE debate was when a victim of the 7/7 bombings spoke up from the audience, to say he had been pressurised by the press to confess to a (non-existent) criminal record, and threatened that if he did not do so it would be unearthed anyway by the journalist’s police contact, who had access to confidential Criminal Records. Even if this gentleman, who had only been thrust into the public spotlight by being on the wrong tube train at the wrong time, had a criminal record the public interest in reporting it is negligible. The use of such unpleasant and unlawful methods to expose his criminal record, even if it did exist, is indefensible.

But just as the spirit of Watergate should not be invoked by journalists too often, it is important that the rage that the phone-hacking scandal has unearthed does not lead to new legislation, or regulation, than will strangle the free press. Difficult cases really do make bad law.

The Leveson Enquiry, which has juts started examining the relationship between the press, politicians and the police, has too many sensible members sitting on it to fall into the trap of recommending privacy laws, statutory regulation of the press, or removing any public interest defence for investigative journalism. But there are lots of sanctimonious politicians, hypocritical celebrities, and powerful corporations who must be hoping and praying that they will do just that.

And it is worth remembering that many of the reasons for the decline in tabloid ethics is economic: newspapers are chasing fewer readers, and fewer advertisers, as both migrate to the Internet. Newsrooms have fewer resources, but just as many pages to fill, so journalists felt they had to employ more and more questionable methods to get the stories that will sell papers and keep the wolves from the door.

Like good public services, good journalism needs to be paid for. News International has done something right in the last year: by introducing a pay-wall for the Times, it is pioneering a way of getting revenues from online journalism that may one day save the British press from oblivion.

Why am I an ex-journalist? Partly because I caught the politics bug and preferred that to the harder slog of getting ahead in national newspaper journalism, a crowded field in which I never thought I had the talent or determination to make it. But also because print journalism is a shrinking industry.

The two media outlets I wrote for in my twenties – a weekly newspaper in the US, then a weekly trade magazine in the UK– have both since ceased publication, being thrown to the wall by competition for dwindling advertising revenues. The handful of stories that I am proud of breaking, about uncomfortably close relations between developers and small town politicians in the US, and industrial unrest and unscrupulous printers here – simply don’t get written so much nowadays. That can’t be a good thing for democracy, or for journalism.

We are all vigilantes now

There will be many feelings a week on from the start of the riots. Anger that large numbers of people feel so detached from society that they feel the need to loot and commit arson. Surprise that, for one night at least, the police appeared to have lost control of our streets. Exasperation that areas of London that are already deprived – Tottenham, Peckham, Hackney and Woolwich – will now be further stigmatised by the riots, and will now have to overcome that stigma to attract investment.

Commenting on this kind of social unrest is, as always, a minefield for politicians. For Labour, raising concerns over government policies that may encourage more people to join such rioting can be misinterpreted as sympathy for criminals.

Equally, as the Government is realising, it is difficult to take credit for resorting peace on the streets, while at the same time praising the police, and simultaneously ignoring their warnings that cutting police numbers will make future disorder more difficult to police. While both the police and politicians were recently dealt a blow by the phone hacking scandal, the police retain a bedrock of public trust which politicians have completely lost, possibly for ever.

But there are clearly some questions for the police to answer. Locally, as late as the early evening of the Monday (August 8^th) the police said that they did not expect any trouble in Woolwich – with hindsight, not a good call as a few hours later there was serious unrest in the town centre. There clearly are questions about the shooting of Mark Duggan earlier this month, and the way the police communicated with his family and friends afterwards. 

But a priest who had worked in and around Brixton in the early 80s told me yesterday that compared to the systematic prejudice many police officers showed then, today’s Met is light years away.

Preventing such trouble happening again is not just a matter of police tactics, the deterrent effects of tough sentencing, or re-opening youth clubs, and certainly not hot air from politicians.

What is needed is watchfulness – in effect a “new vigilantism”. For every young person who did riot or loot this week, there were hundreds who did not. They were being watched out for by family and friends. In many cases, those who would otherwise have joined the rioters had been kept off that path some time ago by the vigilance of their mother, father, teachers, or friends, who instilled a sense of responsibility at an early age.

 The term “vigilante” (derived from the Latin for “to be watchful for”) has a bad press, particularly on the Left, as it conjures up images of self-appointed community guardians, more interested in pursuing their own, often extremist, ideology than protecting all members of the community from harm.

It is high time that the term vigilante is re-appropriated, and its derivation remembered. The real heroes of the last week – those who have watched out for each other, and defended their neighbour’s property without taking the law in to their own hands – are kinds of “vigilantes”, even though the may not recognise or even like the term.

In Greenwich, the problems were concentrated in Woolwich and the Charlton retail area on Monday night. In Woolwich, Wilkinson’s, the Wetherspoons pub and a shop near M&S onPowis Street were all burnt out, though the fires attracted surprisingly little media coverage, other than recycled YouTube footage, as camera crews were not in Woolwich on Monday night and there has been no trouble there since.

Locally, there has been no trouble in Blackheath  and Westcombe Park thankfully, other than a few shops looted in Blackheath Village. The shops at the Royal Standard escaped trouble.

The only serious trouble in Greenwich since Monday night has been from so-called “vigilantes”, whose actions show how much that term has strayed from its proper meaning. On Tuesday, tensions were increased in Eltham by the arrival of outsiders from the odious English Defence League to “defend the community”. Shortly afterwards, people were being filmed attacking bus passengers because of the colour of their skin (with friends like these, who needs enemies?).

To term these people vigilantes – “watchful ones” – is as absurd as saying that the looters of Monday night had been vigilantes as they were “watching out” for things to steal from shop windows. Just like the looters, the EDL only seemed to be keeping a watch out for trouble to create, not calm down.

I have been in Woolwich several times since the riots and a better kind of watchfulness – or vigilantism if you like – is very apparent. The streets were all cleaned up the morning after the trouble, and buses and traffic running normally (only Wellington Street remains closed).

The hoardings outside the burnt-out Wetherspoons have become a kind of community message board, whose messages are ones of hope. There is a good spirit in the town, which will not let a few mindless idiots threaten its future.

Police say there have been more than 40 arrests in the borough so far and most of those charged are over 18. So this was clearly not a rebellion by young people objecting to the abolition of EMA, or high youth unemployment. Many people are angry about these things, but they had the good sense to realise that looting and arson is not the right way to make their point. They watched in despair, and did not join in.

Nor is race a factor – not only were those arrested from a range of backgrounds, but many of the victims are people – often from ethnic minorities – who run small businesses that have been looted or burnt.

Self-appointed “Vigilantes” like the English defence League see the recent trouble as an opportunity to peddle their own agenda, and hold one ethnic group responsible for the trouble. They are anything but vigilant.

We should all be vigilantes now: watching out for each other, our friends and neighbours, and vigilant against both the rioters and those who wish to provoke more trouble.

Tories threaten hundreds of private tenants in Blackheath and Westcombe Park

Think the new government’s changes to Housing Benefit will only effect people living in Kensington and Westminster? Think again. They may well force dozens of households in Blackheath and Westcombe park to economise or move out.

In Blackheath Westcombe ward, there is a real mixture of housing types, with millionaires often living next door to low-income families, the unemployed, and pensioners on low incomes. The 2001 census showed that only slightly more than half of households are owner-occupiers – another fifth live in the private rented sector, and a further quarter live in council homes or housing association homes. The 2011 census currently being carried out is not expected to show any great changes to these figures.

By and large, the different groups of people get on together well. There are no ghettos in Blackheath Westcombe ward – almost every street will contain people from all three groups (owner occupiers, private renting and social renting), and even on the Cator Estate there are some council homes. There are no large council estates containing only people renting – the council estates in the area are small, dotted about, and they all contain leaseholders who have bought their homes, and people who rent these homes from private landlords, as well as council tenants.

This rich mixture is now under threat. Like many areas of London, Blackheath and Westcombe Park could increasingly become somewhere where only the affluent or those lucky enough to have a secure tenancy on a council or housing association home can live (The new government is also threatening those secure tenancies, but that’s another column).

Council and housing association tenants may be mostly unaffected, as their rents fall below the threshold for the new caps that the Tories are introducing. The real sting in the tail is for those who rent private accommodation because they cannot find council housing locally, or have always lived renting from a private landlord and do not wish to move into more affordable homes, which in Blackheath and Westcombe Park are in very high demand.

These tenants will be faced with a double whammy: the Local Housing Allowance (the kind of Housing Benefit that most of them receive, known as LHA for short) will in future be fixed at 30% of the highest rents in the area, not 50%. There will also be a maximum cap on the total housing benefit payable, and for those who are under 35 the LHA they can claim will only be enough for a room in a shared house or flat, not a flat itself. Some may be able to absorb the extra rent bill, but many will be forced to move – it is estimated that across London as whole, 80,000 households may be forced to move.

Greenwich Council figures – and these are from politically neutral council officers, not Labour party spindoctors – estimate that most, if not all, the 114 households in Blackheath Westcombe ward which currently get LHA will lose out. Almost all will lose least £10 a week, many will lose more than £20 a week, and a few will lose more than £30 a week. Indeed, the highest average loss of Housing Benefit of any ward in the Borough (almost £16 a week on average) is here in Blackheath and Westcombe park . Many people living in privately-rented one-bed flats in outer areas of borough like Eltham and Abbey Wood will not lose out. But in areas like Greenwich, Westcombe Park, and Blackheath, where rents are higher, hundreds of households will lose out. These people are your neighbours, and many will have to either economise or move. And don’t fall for the tabloid myth that most of these people are workshy scroungers: 40% of Housing Benefit claimants are in work, and many of the others will be disabled or retired.

The government says it has put measures in place to help ease the pain, The first is a “Transition scheme”, which means that for some tenants the changes will not happen for another 21 months from now. But whenever the transition occurs (and the date is pretty arbitrary, based on the calendar month when your housing benefit claim was first made) it will be a cliff-edge, not a gradual transition – you will suddenly lose up to £50 a week from your housing benefit, with no phasing.

The government is also putting some extra money into the “Discretionary Housing Payment” budget. Discretionary Housing Payment (or DHP) is an extra pool of money that the council can use to top up people’s Housing Benefit in cases of genuine need, and I have seen its good effects: when a working single mother living locally approached me fro help some months ago to say her private landlord had put the rent up higher than the LHA level, I helped her obtain a DHP to tie her over while she looked for somewhere cheaper to move to locally, so she did not need to uproot her children from school by moving suddenly to somewhere cheaper far away.

But just as the total Housing Benefit bill for Greenwich is likely to be cut by £1.6m, the DHP allocation for Greenwich is being increased by a mere £20,000 from £320,000 in 2010/11 to £340,000 in 2011/12 – a small sticking plaster to cover a gaping wound left by the Tories’ cuts.

Fighting Nationwide Closure

Greenwich and Woolwich Labour Party has criticised Nationwide for planning to close its branches in Blackheath, Greenwich and Woolwich and also most other South East London branches. Labour Party members strongly urge Nationwide to reconsider the decision to close local branches.

Following the resolution adopted by Greenwich and Woolwich Labour Party on the Nationwide branch closures in Greenwich, Blackheath and Woolwich, local MP Nick Raynsford raised the issue in a debate in the House of Commons on Friday.

Greenwich, Blackheath, Woolwich, Lewisham, Catford, Peckham and Elephant & Castle Nationwide branches are planned for closure by the end of May this year. This means that every single Nationwide branch in inner South East London will shut, whereas all branches in the leafy outer London suburbs of Bromley and Bexley will be unaffected.

Nick Rainsford MP said: “I was shocked when I heard of Nationwide’s decision, and even more so when it became clear that they were indifferent to the concerns of their customers across such a large part of our capital city – an area with a population of almost 670,000. How can a building society, with cooperative roots and a supposed commitment to mutual banking, effectively walk away from the whole of the inner South East London region? “.

Why we’re marching

On Saturday, people from across Britain will come to London to tell the Conservative-Liberal Democrat government how their cuts are damaging our communities. The coalition claims there is no alternative to massive cuts in the public services we all rely on – in the police, in help for those forced out of work by the recession, in the health service, in school teaching assistants, in childcare – and many many other vital public services.

The Tories and LibDems claim the cuts are necessary to get Britain’s public finances back on track. We do need to cut the deficit – but what they’re doing is too fast and in the wrong place. The cuts will damage the local institutions we all rely on to live in a decent society. Cutting so many jobs will slow down the economic recovery, and restrict economic growth in the private sector – George Osborne had to reduce the forecast for economic growth from 2.1% to 1.7% in today’s budget because of the effects his cuts will have on the economy. Meanwhile, prices are rising, and it’s getting harder for everyone to make ends meet.

We in Blackheath Westcombe Labour Party believe there is an alternative. The City of London needs to be governed properly and pay its fair share in taxes – banks need to properly start paying back the billions which taxpayers used to bail them out. The government needs to clamp down on tax evasion, treating the rich in the same way they treat the very poorest. And they need to slow down the rate at which the national debt is paid back. It’s only the Tories’ blinkered, out-date economic ideology which stops them and their LibDem colleagues from not seeing that the cuts will harm us all. It’s time the people who got us into this mess were made accountable to the democratic power of people in this country.

That’s why we’ve been out on the streets encouraging local residents to come on Saturday. And that’s we’ll be marching in central London to tell the government that the cuts are unnecessary and very very damaging. We’ll meet at Temple tube at 12.00 – but all get the 11.17 train from Westcombe Park beforehand. Join us – and get involved in Labour’s campaign to protect our livelihoods.

For more information on the march, see www.marchforthealternative.org.uk

Listening to people where they are

St. Benet’s Catholic Church in association with Bexley and Thamesmead Multi-Faith Forum are holding a Free event to celebrate the 100th anniversary of International Women’s Day .
The G and W CLP Women’s Officer, a member of the Multi-Faith Forum will be speaking at the event by way of ‘GOING TO THE PEOPLE AND THE COMMUNITY’ her strategy for 2011 on the topic:

International Women’s Day – You can make a difference.

Date : Saturday, 19th March, 2011

Time: 12.30 p.m – 3.30 p.m

Venue: St Benet’s Catholic Church ,31 Abbey Grove,Abbeywood,London, SE2 9EU

There will be refreshments.

The Labour Case for AV

The Alternative Vote (AV) is simple. It retains the link between our MP and the constituency and – above all – it is fair in that every vote counts. There are no wasted votes. Political parties will need to work harder to win votes for second and third preferences – not just the first.

AV means the voter places a 1 (or X) against their first choice candidate and, if they wish, a 2 against their second preference, a 3 against their 3rd. and so forth transferring as far as they choose. Every MP will command the support of over 50% of their voters compared to a small minority now.

This means that rather than a General Election just being fought among a few swing voters in a few marginal constituencies – it will be a truly national election. Turnout will increase as everyone sees a purpose in them voting in their constituency.

While we are luck to have a Labour MP, there are some 200 constituencies mainly in the south of England where Labour is third, often a poor third place. Labour voters face that awful dilemma of whether to vote with their principles for Labour and risk ending up with a Tory MP or to grit their teeth and vote Lib Dem tactically to keep the Tories out. AV will mean they will be able to Vote Labour 1, Lib Dem 2 etc. so their vote counts for Labour but will then be used to keep the Tory MP out.

The same with stopping the BNP and other ultra-right forces. They have only ever picked up seats in first past the post elections with around 30-35% of the vote. All the evidence is that supporters of other parties would transfer to the party most likely to beat the BNP.

Just think about Blackheath Westcombe ward in the last three local elections, had we used an AV voting system then Green votes and the largest proportion of Lib Dem votes would have transferred to Labour probably giving us two if not three Labour councillors – and reflecting the progressive majority in the ward.

Labour promised an AV referendum in our General election manifesto. It will help put some trust back in politics and more power in the hands of voters. Some Labour people have claimed that the Tory-Lib Dem coalition will only lead to a pact whereby they will just give each other second preferences and pose a threat to Labour. However, all the polling and actual evidence from elections suggest that Lib Dems are (still now) more likely to prefer Labour to the Conservatives. For all the evidence on this….and more about the Labour Yes campaign go to http://labouryes.org.uk/

David Gardner