Harringay, Haringey - So Good they Spelt it Twice!
Councillor Stanton Sent into Wilderness by Local Labour Group
The Labour whip was withdrawn from long serving Tottenham councillor, Alan Stanton last night.
A meeting of the local Haringey Council Labour group last night took the rarely used step of withdrawing the whip from one of its longest serving councillors. The official reason given was Councillor Stanton's voting in opposition to the appointment of new Council Chief Executive, Nick Walkley.
The action was taken by the Labour political group on the Council. It's party business, rather than official council business. However, I do wonder at the meaning of that distinction; when it's a decision by the ruling group over the issue of the appointment of the Council boss, it seems barely relevant to draw a line between the two.
Being deprived of the whip cuts a concillor off from the party’s support machine, labels them as a bad boy, and can lead to their being deselected as the party’s candidate for the next election. It's the grown up political equivalent of playground kids sending someone to Coventry.
So that must be awful for a serious councillor like Alan Stanton with fifteen years of office behind him, right? Wrong. Stanton made clear how he felt about it at 3:00AM this morning on Twitter:
Kober threw me in the briar patch. This is really gonna be fun!
— Alan Stanton (@AlanStanton_) December 7, 2012
(For those of you less familiar with Uncle Remus, Stanton's briar patch refers to an apparently awful thicket into which clever B'rer Rabbit tricked Bre’r Fox throwing him and from which he quickly escaped to make more mischief.)
In conversation with Alan, some hours before the briar patch tweet, Alan told me, "I'm so disillusioned with the level of secrecy in the local party, the need to control from the top, that I'm glad to be out of it".
The current censure applies to Alan for three months. Whist it's by no means certain whether the party want the independent minded Tottenham Councillor back amongst their number when that time is up, this Councillor is certainly not for turning. Alan told me, "No, I won't reapply to rejoin the Labour group that's enough for me." Their loss I'd say. Independent minded he may be, but he's a politician who is a serious thinker and has his heart in the right place. I have to question where a party who doesn't have room for someone like Alan is headed.
As for Alan's future, he has a big agenda he wants to get his teeth into with the big issues around making Tottenham a better place to live, short of simply allowing it to gentrify. He seems to think the chances of his serving as a councillor again are slim though since he sees little chance of an independent councillor ever being elected in his neighbourhood.
Let's not bid farewell to Alan yet, though. This is after all a rabbit that lives by its wits.
Replies to This Discussion
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Permalink Reply by pamish on
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Your vote on the first Wards Corner planning committee is not forgotten Alan, even though you may be regretting it now. Hey, it's still a live issue here, thanks to your Labour Party comrades, when we could have spent the last seven years getting on with the alternative real regeneration plans.
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Permalink Reply by Alan Stanton on
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Permalink Reply by Clive Carter on
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http://www.bailii.org/ew/cases/EWHC/Admin/2007/606.html
Alan I have now uncovered the photocopy of the article I mentioned. Although it has no date on it, it appears to be from 2007, probably April or May.
It came a month after resident's representative Ms Joyce Oyeyi-Effiong won a Judicial Review on 22 March 2007 about a decision to throw her off the Board of the NDC. It refers to an investigation "carried out in May 2006." The title is:
"Leaked report reveals serious concerns about £50m project"
by Alison Campsie alison.campsie@archant.co.uk (although the paper version has finished, of course).
I won't reproduce all of it, but the largish article begins:
Hundreds of thousands of pounds of public money has been spent by officials in charge of the £50 million upgrade of Seven Sisters without the proper controls in place, a damning secret report has revealed.
I will make further inquiries to see if I can identify the date; let me know if you'd like me to send you a photocopy of the article.
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Thanks, Clive. I've just seen your post and read the Court's 2007 judgement abut the events in 2004. As you know, it does not refer to a leaked report. (Perhaps because that document was not available at the time of the Court hearing?) The Court judgement does refer to a "complaint about financial irregularities". But that was not the subject of the Judicial Review and appears irrelevant to it.
I suggest that if someone has a copy of the "secret document" they can post this report, the whole report and nothing but the report online. Then if we wish, we can all read it from cover to cover. I certainly would. (If someone would send it to me, I'll put it on Dropbox - at least as far as this doesn't breach data protection rules.)
Perhaps the Hornsey Journal has a copy? In which case, Clive, maybe you'd like to contact Stephen Moore. (Alison Campsie now works in Glasgow.)
Until then I've no idea what, if anything at all, it has to do with Sir Stuart Lipton's recent report.
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The NDC/The Bridge engineered the whole Wards Corner fiasco, including the £1.5million cash bung to Grainger. We have looked for minutes of how this came about but we can't find them. Cllr Stanton is not unrelated to former members of the NDC so perhaps he can track down those minutes in their lost box file, while his duties are reduced during this period of reflection for him.
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I'm not related to any former members of the NDC.
As you know perfectly well, Pam, my partner Zena Brabazon was not a New Deal for Communities Board member. Nor were she or I related to a Board member. Zena was a council officer given the task of leading a small team which wrote the bid for £50 million. Having been seconded to this task, and then having helped set up the NDC and its Board, Zena returned to her substantive job in the Council.
If you are really interested in learning what happened why don't you ask her about it? Including how that team put together the successful bid in a few weeks and prevented the money from being lost to the area?
Pam, if you want to spend your time hunting for lost box files from the past, (files which may or may not exist) good luck to you. I'm having far too much fun living in the present.
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hunting for lost box files from the past
Alan are you familiar with George Santayana's comment that Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it?
Do you think it might hold any lesson for the council?
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Clive, I sometimes wonder if you actually read what I write.
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Apologies, I was not engaged with this when the NDC was set up, I thought Zena was a continuing NDC member.
The question of how that bung was given to Grainger remains one of the burning issues around Wards Corner and I suspect will ultimately bring about the end of the Grainger plan. Better researchers than me may be able to track its history, I don't have those skills.
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And I apologise Pam, for assuming you knew the history. I asked Zena who's happy to talk to you about her early involvement with the NDC.
_________
I had a very unsettling experience a few weeks ago listening to the radio. Peter Hitchens, who I find one of the most loathsome people on TV, was on the BBC Radio 4 programme A Good Read. He chose Josephine Tey's "The Daughter of Time" as one the most important books he's ever read.
I wouldn't go that far. But he's right that as an entertaining detective story it's also a good introduction to historical method and weighing conflicting evidence. And that it encourages healthy scepticism about received "wisdoms", and what other people say and believe.
Though I can't quite match this to the apparently almost religious way Mr Hitchens pronounces right-wing certainties.
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Permalink Reply by Seema Chandwani on
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Oi.... Grumpy old man, dont call the APFT Report a prospectus?!!! That thing cost over £5,000 to print, so call it a bloody jokebook!
As you were!
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