After it was discovered at the St Ann's Labour Party selection candidate selection meeting that there were people present and voting who should not have been, I came home from the pub (where I'd heard about it) and wrote this article. It has subsequently been edited by site admins to remove the names of people who were embarrassed or in the final case where a journalist said it was potentially libellous. Well here I will attempt to summarise what we have subsequently found out and hopefully take people's attention away from my original appalling rant.
*An individual has asked that their name be replaced with their function in this post on the grounds that they are not seeking public office. This has been done.
Tags for Forum Posts: election2014, labour, st ann's labour, stanns
Given the closeness of the selection and the bloc voting I don't think you can say anyone is legitimate. Without the five fraudulent members the blocs would have been 10 and 8 with 3 "impartials". All the same, is this any basis for effectively choosing who will be the councillors in St Ann's next year? If it hadn't been Ali's people it could have been anyone else. These things are just not safe unless you have more real members.
But that's just how it's always done, minus the five blow-ins. Not just for LP selections, for any selection. Real members, hard to define. The self-selected ones who are prepared to spend hours of their lives in bleak meeting rooms earn the right to vote, but there are many legit reasons to be absent. Where's the creche, for example? At Tottnm Green I did not recognise about two-thirds of those who turned up, but I'm sure they had all been assiduously reading the minutes and watching what was happening.
The ability to pack a meeting is of course part of the person spec for any wannabee politico. Who can persuade the most people in the relevant catchment area to sign up, in time to legally cast their vote for you?
Local politics is not party based in New Zealand but you do tend to find that it's mostly local businessmen who have the resources to get elected. So if you live in a ward in Haringey east of the railway you should join the Labour Party so that you can have a vote that counts.
....only needs to be for six months every four years... just make sure you get the form in in time, and have chosen the most useful address.
What, I wonder, did the Labour Party apparatchiks make of the leaked result — the day before Polling Day — of Azerbaijan's Presidential election
Maybe, to practice their skills, they combed through Azerbaijan's Constitution to find a rule which completely justified the result?
Look to be slightly fairer Alan, The Labour Party in Britain cannot afford to rerun every single selection meeting where the losing candidates have been able to object to someone AFTER the fact. Every other meeting may need to be rerun if this was allowed.
They encourage both candidates and the Ward Secretary to be vigilant and on the look out for entryism. Joe Goldberg did this in Seven Sisters and he's cagey about who the other person was who helped him but I presume it was his Ward Secretary. In Harringay, Gina Adamou and the Ward Secretary Jon Vellapah spotted entryism from business addresses on Green Lanes and kicked them out.
The problem Zena and David had is that their Ward Secretary was at best, not doing this. For the record, it is obvious from the voting that both the Ward Secretary and his partner voted for the winning candidates.
John-this is how you find the home address of any pharmacist- contact the Royal Pharmaceutical Society and ask for the serial number for the pharmacy you require. When the number is put in the societies search engine you will get the home address. It is a statutory requirement that the pharmacist registers their true and proper home address as a business address only is considered transient. Good luck John.
Well I don't see how to do this now. They are split into the Royal Pharmaceutical Societey and PharmacyRegulation.org...
This is what I got:
http://pharmacyregulation.org/registers/pharmacist/registrationnumb...
John, I'm sure there are hundreds (maybe thousands?) of very disappointed councillors who've not been chosen as candidates by their parties. Some may be complaining how unfair this is. I agree that the parties can't investigate every one .
Nor should they. In my own experience local Labour Party branches have legitimate reasons for deselecting councillors. And they should probably do this far more often. For example, the bed-blockers; the lazy; the no longer capable; and those uninterested in much except the allowance. Some councillors are even tolerated although one morning, they woke from troubled dreams, to find themselves transformed in their beds into Tories.
But there's a key difference in the case of the St Ann's selection. It seems to me that the basic idea of a ward branch ballot is that people are judged by their peers. In the room are people who live in the ward and know something of its issues and problems. They try to make an honest judgement about the potential candidates' qualities and ability to represent all the people of that ward.
But in St Ann's, Labour Party apparatchiks are colluding with a selection process distorted by votes of people who live somewhere else. If ordinary members - and other Labour candidates - go along with this, they are complicit in the rule-breaking.
Some members and candidates do have principles and spines; they've spoken-out.
Others haven't even bothered to ask what's gone on. For them, I assume that standing-up and speaking-up about abuses of an electoral system only applies to other countries.
But if you have a cabinet system like Haringey does then you need some superstar performers who can knuckle down and do what the cabinet leader wants. So this is Peter Morton perhaps. Is Barbara Blake there as reward for giving up the Ward Secretary job? And Ali...? Well, just those five votes got him a councillorship.
Claire Kober has been Council Leader since November 2008. She took over when Cllrs George Mehan and Liz Santry ("cabinet" councillor for Children) were finally forced to resign following the death of Peter Connelly ("Baby P"). Kober was an adequate Chief Whip. But it was like asking a school secretary to take over when the Headteacher has to leave in a hurry.
"In a high percentage of the moribund institutions so far examined the final state of coma is something gained of set purpose and after prolonged effort. It is the result, admittedly, of a disease, but of a disease that is largely self-induced. From the first signs of the condition, the progress of the disease has been encouraged, the causes aggravated, and the symptoms welcomed. It is the disease of induced inferiority, called Injelititis ..."
"... The injelitant individual is easily recognizable ... from the persistence with which he/she struggles to eject all those abler than him/herself, as also from his/her resistance to the appointment or promotion of anyone who might prove abler in course of time. He/she dare not say, "Mr. Asterisk is too able," so he/she says, "Asterisk? Clever perhaps--but is he sound? I incline to prefer Mr. Cypher." He/she dare not say, "Mr. Asterisk makes me feel small".
... If the head of the organization is second-rate, he/she will see to it that his/her immediate staff are all third-rate".
I blame myself. When Claire Kober became Council Leader I suggested she read C.Northcote Parkinson's Injelititis. I recommended it as a light-hearted but broadly accurate analysis of the Haringey disease - what was going wrong with Haringey Council at the time.
It never occurred to me that she would totally misunderstand Parkinson's little sketch. Taking it instead as a model of how to run her "cabinet" and relationships with other councillors.
(Tottenham Hale ward councillor)
Just so that people know where we are with this. Fewer and fewer Labour Politicians are prepared to give me straight answers, some have even changed what they were saying before and are "on message". You know what that means? They think they have gotten away with it. People are picking winners. I think I ended up a lone looney voice that they could ignore.
Ali will move into one of the properties he owns in Haringey in time for the election (and no doubt move out again once elected). He will scrape in by a small margin, St Ann's will return the three Labour candidates that they have selected. Apart from getting a kick out of people going out of their way to play "la la la, I can't hear you!" with me on Twitter, this has been sad, sobering and at times scary.
Thanks of course to those individuals who have tracked me down in bars in Harringay to buy me beers and those that have voiced their concern on here but I'm afraid the tide looks like it has turned.
Should I keep going?
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