Our cash strapped citizens in Lambeth look forward to another year of hard Labour in 2008, safe in the knowledge that a leading Labour Cabinet member is organising cookery lessons for disadvantaged children. Sounds admirable and at least it's a change from cooking the books. Christmas and the early new year is, of course, a good time in which to bury bad news or indeed for Labour councillors to start listening to David Cameron.

Yet it seems only yesterday that Labour was organising hordes of foul mouthed tee-shirted children and their bully boy parents to lobby the previous Conservative-Liberal administration with abuse in the name of the proposed Nelson Mandela Secondary School for BrixtonHill.

In a sudden U-Turn just before the Christmas shutdown, when our highly paid officers (three at the latest count) fly off to the sunny Southern Hemisphere for rest and recreation, Labour ditched its erstwhile allies and offered instead a new school in Tulse Hill only hundreds of yards away from at least two other secondary schools.

And what a difference a year or so makes. When it was voting time in 2006, the Brixton Hill Mandela School option made absolute sense to Labour, especially if some of its more naive supporters were prepared to stand for election against Conservative and Liberal Democrat candidates. They did - generating huge publicity for Labour in the press - but got virtually no votes or I'd imagine even a thank you letter from the victorious Comrades. After all what good is a used political condom to anyone the morning after the indecent proposal?

This cynical Faustian pact was always bound to disintegrate. Instead some GB pounds 100,000 of tax payers money was spent validating the same numbers that had been available to the previous administration. Land assembly alone for Brixton Hill would cost GB pounds 25 million. As it is the new Tulse Hill Hill option will cost more than GB pounds 10 million and puts the Territorial Army base at risk.

The most sensible option is to invest money in existing secondary schools to provide extra places. That seems like a vote of confidence in the present and helps to future proof the next generation. At least five existing Lambeth secondary schools have to physical capacity to take more students if funding can be arranged over and above the current Building Schools for the Future programme. Perhaps there will be another U-Turn - oddly when David Cameron visited Brixton for a major policy announcement a prominent Labour woman councillor was present. A spy in the cab - maybe? There was no heckling so I think she may have got the message and there are rumours of at least one possible defection from Labour's Class of 2006.

Labels: building school for the future, Education, School places

Our long suffering citizens are being lined up for yet more punishment from our masters. First, our secondary schools are being starved of resources, except for a handful of institutions favoured by the 'Blair Babes' running the education service. One angry secondary school headteacher, who I interviewed last Friday, described some of our Council's officers as "incompetent" and told how she'd been hectored by a Labour councillor who told her Lambeth had no need for more faith-based school places, but needed more places for the children of the middle classes. The particular school in question is much favoured by parents from all walks of life especially our black community and has eight applications for every place. It is not likely to get any resources under the so-called Building Schools for the Future programme until 2009. Some of the metrics used here have been changed to protect the innocent from reprisals.

In the Shrek movies, they had a particular name for the 'Blair Babe' fantasists in our Town Hall who think church schools are unpopular - 'the land of far far away'. But in the meantime, our customer friendly Comrades have been lining up collective punishments for those areas in the south of the borough that don't vote Labour at local elections. Gone is the proposed GB pounds 500,000 in Norwood lesiure facilities. Cut is the proposed GB pounds 1.387 million investment at the Vale Street recycling site, a popular facility that badly needs a makeover to keep local people satisfied about its green credentials. Slashed is GB pounds 500,000 of investment in street wardens and cut to GB pounds 100,000 are the budgets for the area committees which are especially well attended in Norwood and Streatham.

Hardly any of these proposed 'deletions' from the budget have any impact on Brixton or Vauxhall, but motorists everywhere are not going to escape unscathed. Not only are there plans for differential charging based on the size of engines, but there are strong indications, leaked to Conservative members by some of our more upstanding officers, that the GB pound 60 parking permit will have its price at least doubled and perhaps put up even more. Our people are told that this will be offset by improvements in the parking service where courtesy and fairness are now the proper way of working. Yet only the other day I received a letter from a woman in Deronda Road who says she lived in Czechoslovakia under Communism. The sight of a marauding pack of traffic wardens (they operate in threes like buses) makes her wonder whether they are coming to get her or a neighbour. It can only be a matter of time before everyone is hammered.

Labels: Area Committees, Education, Leisure, Parking permits, Parking wardens, Play areas, School places, Street wardens