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