Harringay, Haringey - So Good they Spelt it Twice!
Council dimisses views of Blackboy Lane residents
Next week the corporate committee of Haringey Council will make a decision on the Blackboy Lane issue.
According to the report prepared for the committee, the majority of Blackboy Lane residents would prefer no change, However, the report states that this option has been dismissed.
It also says that the option to consider another name is dismissed - not because it's the right thing to do but simply because that wasn't what they said last time!
Below are the results of the second consultation along with the report's somewhat tortuous justification for dismissing the wishes of Blackboy Lane residents.
Of course, those of you who have been following this issue will have little faith in these consultation results. You will have leaned that the Council may have sought to swing the result the way it wanted by approaching select groups through the local Labour Party apparatus and asking them to reply to the consultation to support the name change.
So, there you go, no surprises here: that's how politics is done in Haringey these days.
For the record the author of this post has no objection to street renaming where the existing name clearly causes offence and where widespread support for the change can be proved.
Full text of the Blackboy Lane item in the Council report available here.
Tags for Forum Posts: blackboy lane name change, review on monuments, building place and street names
Replies to This Discussion
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Permalink Reply by Anna on
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Thanks Hugh.
I just want to quickly highlight the minimum budget for the renaming: £186 000.
Haringey’s council budget has a projected loss of £70 000 000 due to the pandemic. (https://www.haringey.gov.uk/news/grant-support-package-leaves-short...). Grants to help people in need are not coming.
Regardless of all the other failings during the consultation, which fell short of its statutory nature, those £186 000 from the tax payers’ contribution will not bring any tangible help to anyone - no one will go less hungry, less cold, less homeless, safer and/or will have access for a proper future.My early petition had many more residents objecting (everyone basically) to the renaming and that somehow is not counted in the ‘results’.
But today, really, my point is just a numerical one - ONE HUNDRED AND EIGHTY SIX THOUSAND POUNDS. Minimum.
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Permalink Reply by Devon Williams on
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£186,000!!!!
How many teachers could be employed to help young black boys with their reading?
How many anti drug/gang/knife initiatives could this fund?
How many youth groups and social workers?
How many regeneration seed funds?
How many community building initiatives?
How many apprenticeships?
How many Oxbridge scholarships?
How many library books?
If they really cared about our black boys they would invest in things that actually make a difference.
Disgraceful!
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Permalink Reply by Geraldine on
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Devon Williams. Among an abundance of well-informed opinion your simple words shine. I could not agree more with what you say. Thank you.
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Permalink Reply by Alan Stanton on
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Hugh, may I make a small correction.
To my personal knowledge, there is nothing to suggest that Haringey Council or anyone claiming to represent the Council has approached any group. I may be wrong, but as far as I know, the only such approach made was by the person then Acting Chair of the Tottenham Constituency Labour Party who wrote to the 2,500 current members of Tottenham Labour giving them an entirely one-sided argument for responding in support of the name change proposal.
I've no idea how many did so. If they were fair minded people - many are - they might have considered the issues and voted against the name change. Or perhaps responded with the suggestion that consultation on such a change - having waited a couple of centuries - was better paused until after the pandemic. And then done properly.
Also that remembering John La Rose could perhaps be better achieved more ambitiously. For example by renaming a library. Or perhaps with a fund for scholarships, grants, and bursaries. Other suggestions might have been made for using the money had the friends, and colleagues of John La Rose been asked at the start of this process.
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"I've no idea how many did so."
I did not.
Receiving the email made me seriously consider if the Labour party is the right party for me. It really was beyond the pale.
But I don't want to be politically homeless.
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Well, voting for a non labour councillor once probably won't be too painful - from my own experience as a recent floating voter, I feel much more like I'm exercing my own free will.
Hopefully the council will be toppled and the new crop of councillors can be less ideologically blinded.
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One of several problems in our local elections is when candidate selection becomes the crucial stage of the election process. Authoritarians in every party know this and exploit the rules and structures for their own ends.
I recently came across a book by Nic Cheeseman and Brian Klaas "How to Rig an Election". It has useful things to say.
A recent review: https://oxfamblogs.org/fp2p/?s=Cheeseman
Video of Brian Klass speaking in Wandsworth.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nWJ4hn0b240
I suspect that both of them may underestimate how toxic UK politics have become. But even so, as the saying goes, if good people do nothing it will get worse.
Back to Haringey, Ejiofor and his cronies are working backwards from May 2022 the next borough Council elections.
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Permalink Reply by Adrian Hackney on
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Election Rigging is one of the episodes in Klaas's excellent podcast Power Corrupts which I recommend. This might be considered off topic except that it is very easy to put the expressions election (/consultation) rigging , power (almost uninterrupted since Haringey was created) corrupts, Labour and Haringey into the same paragraph.
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Many thanks, Adrian. I don't know how I missed that when doing my quick search.
So far I've only had time to listen to the vote-rigging episode. I'd suggest that people may want to start by jumping say to the final 15-20 minutes.
But please don't feel apologetic. It's not entirely off-topic for the UK elections I've read about. We may not have for example, the "shaking the matchbox"; or the extreme Gerrymandering Klass and Cheeseman have researched. But what we often fail to achieve is the aim they suggest: that having more votes should give you more seats, in, say, a Parliament or on a local Council.
By the way that online episode doesn't even scratch the surface of all the more subtle, rarely visible and entirely legal ways in which elections may get rigged by methods we sometimes see in the UK. Examples I know about include whipping-up hundreds of dubious complaints to get people suspended; and people who mislead their fellow Party members about where they live.
I have my own speculation as well. That in some cases our system is being deliberately damaged by people who hate even our flawed and often faltering democratic institutions.
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This is typical political pure black magic, to convince the average public and councillors to vote in accordance with his high priestess our great leader. As has been exposed in another BBL blog, The online consultation was pure black magic. First as mentioned over a month ago, some Councils love these ‘open’ internet consultations as the council only list questions that are one sided and slanted to vote their way, and do not state the truth, just a tiny bit that they agree with (i.e. giving a false and untrue list to vote their way). Second they are ‘open’ so anyone from Russia to Vietnam to Timbuktu can log it stating they live in BBL or Lordship Lane and vote once or 3 times, as it’s an ‘open’ vote. Thirdly as tested by the blogger to the BBL renaming blog here, on this consultation/vote you could put in you lived in the area, when you did not. This type of ‘open’ vote with one sided questions and information, are just political black magic. Remember too it is not their money, they do not care about the total cost, Especially to the residents of BBL.
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I see from page 15, 6. 13, it includes only 67 responses from residents of BBL from approx 183 premises, but we know from someone living in BBL not all households received this information. Also as this was in part an ‘open’ vote, we cannot be sure that all those who voted via the internet actually lived there. That begs the question, are the council ‘accidentally’ trying not inform all the residents who will be directly affected.
Also one does wonder who the Black Lives Matter people that the council contact are and do they even know the facts, or just what the council tell them, that is as we know, not factual, just the usual fiction. Which begs the question are the council trying to use them no matter even if it will bring BLM into disrepute, as long as it pushes through the changing of BBL and the loss of local history.
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