COMMENT: "Sssh! TOP SECRET"

4.02.00pm GMT Tue 15th Jan 2008

Secret Service? Lambeth's Labour Politburo base

Labour-run Lambeth Town Hall has been likened by opposition councillors to the Moscow Kremlin as party bosses get more and more paranoid about maintaining a dense shroud of secrecy around their affairs and closely manipulating news.

Opposition councillors and community leaders complain that they are being kept more and more in the dark about what's going on. Critics say consultation is now a thing of the past, with the Labour politburo taking all the decisions in secret or ignoring the wishes of residents.

Area Committees were the first damsels of democracy to be led the scaffold by the Labour commissars now stalking the corridors of power. Then they tried holding Cabinet meetings in the afternoons in the hope that no-one would come. Now anyone daring to speak from an alternative point of view to Labour is slapped down with ruthless Stalinist brutality.

Then, just before Christmas, came Project Secret Clapham. This is a stunning Labour wheeze to regenerate Clapham using private developers to give people something they'll be proud of - the developers that is. Only don't, whatever you do, mention the swimming pool.

Meanwhile in Streatham, in another victory for the cloak and dagger brigade, the nine month long embargo on talking about the project to replace the ageing swimming pool and ice rink has just been successfully concluded - with another six months silence while Labour decides whether to go ahead or not.

Education is a vitally important issue in Lambeth. So, important in fact, that Labour likes to keep things firmly under wraps. Having talked-up about how important it was to have a brand new school to serve Brixton Hill, Labour decided to have a really hush-hush feasibility study into a previously discarded site for eighteen months.

Then, abracadabra, the proposed new school is announced - only it's somewhere else. And not anywhere near Brixton Hill. And it's currently upsetting just about everybody.

And quite how they've arrived at some of the figures to justify their bizarre decision is, like so many things in Secret Lambeth, a complete mystery. Rather like how they're going to afford it.

And now comes news of another triumph of secrecy over success. Labour has told its Environment Department not publish its monthly Performance Digest. After all Labour Lambeth only wants to trumpet success not let anyone know about their failures. Someone might get the right - sorry - wrong idea.

You can have too much information flying around for people's own good you know. Anyone would think Lambeth was a publicly accountable body for goodness sake!