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So Labour Lambeth is to be the new John Lewis?
February 19, 2010 12:16 PM
What a curious week. Struggling Lambeth Leader Steve Reed grabbed a few cheap headlines to demonstrate that there's life in the old dog yet, suggesting that if the electorate were to give Labour another chance down at the Town Hall after May's crucial poll he would rebrand the place as a branch of John Lewis.
Warming to his theme - and to prove that he hadn't just spotted a Waitrose Ocado Home Delivery van passing outside his office window - he pressed the 'nuclear' co-operative button as well just to prove that he is still vaguely in touch with traditional Labour roots.
All of which is strange given his past fervent allegiance to the failed Blair/Brown 'Third Way' New Labour experiment which was specifically designed to divest itself of any last lingering links to Labour's social history.
What is the voter to make of such seemingly promiscuous behaviour - probably that some politicians will make a desperate grab for any passing bandwagon when they are drowning in quick sands of their own making. We would not be so uncharitable, however, so let's look at the so-called evidence that Reed uses on his own website to support his new-found community-led ideology.
He states that he has opened the first parent-promoted secondary school, Elmgreen - and so he has, only he didn't think of it, pave the way for it, or even approve it, the Liberal Democrats did. The school just got built during his term in office. And - BOY! - has he dined out on it since.
Reed then suggests that Lambeth has pioneered the way with Tenant Managed Organisations in Housing and that Lambeth has more of them than anywhere else. Also true - to a point. He just doesn't mention that Labour has consistently starved TMO's of funds and that residents were generally desperate to create them just to get away from his own Council's sheer neglect and sky-high charges.
Curiously he then mentions Coin Street Community Builders on the trendy South Bank as a role model for his New Jerusalem - the very same people that were criticised by Liberal Democrats for proposing a swish 50-storey residential tower block behind the National Theatre with not a single unit of social housing in it. Labour, of course, gave that shining glossy edifice of private privilege its solid seal of approval.
And Reed is curiously silent about Lambeth Living, the All-Singing and Dancing privatised Arms-Length Management Organisation that he and his Labour chums sprung on council tenants after the last local elections. Despite simply enormous injections of cash from tenants' pockets over the past two years, the more-dead- than-alive Lambeth Living remains on Life Support and all the promised new kitchens and bathrooms seem to be a fast receding hope.
The Lambeth Labour Leader then suddenly espouses closer co-operation with communities giving them more of a say - and this from someone who scrapped local area committees, slashed local community funding, and regularly tells members of the public that they are there only to silently observe cabinet meetings while they pass judgement on savage service cuts while boosting their own salaries and then disgracefully set charges for social home care to the highest level in the land.
Of course it may just be that this new co-operative model from Lambeth Labour marks a genuine - if last minute - conversion in their thinking, or it could just be the latest in a long-line of Labour twists and turns simply so they can hang onto power in the Town Hall.
On May 6th it will be for the voters to decide whether to take the risk. Whether New Reformed Co-operative Labour is now to be trusted to deliver a so-called John Lewis Council - or whether it is just traditional New Labour spin - or maybe just so much hog wash.
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