Harringay, Haringey - So Good they Spelt it Twice!
Haringey "the most divided borough" in the "most unequal city in the western world"
London has become the most unequal city in the western world, according to Professor Danny Dorling of the University of Sheffield.
His new book Injustice: Why Social Inequality Persists, shows that the richest tenth of Londoners had an average wealth of £933,563, a figure 273 times greater than the lowest 10 per cent, with an average wealth of £3,420. The gap is bigger than comparable cities such as New York or Tokyo.
And zooming in on Haringey, the data shows our borough as the most divided borough in London. Of its 19 wards, four are in the richest 10% and five are in the poorest 10%.
London's Poverty Profile has been created by one of London's largest charitable trusts, the City Parochial Foundation, and the independent think tank, New Policy Institute. It uses the latest official data to reveal patterns of poverty across the capital. It looks at how London compares to other English regions and cities, and the differences between London boroughs.
See more about how Haringey fares here.
His new book Injustice: Why Social Inequality Persists, shows that the richest tenth of Londoners had an average wealth of £933,563, a figure 273 times greater than the lowest 10 per cent, with an average wealth of £3,420. The gap is bigger than comparable cities such as New York or Tokyo.
And zooming in on Haringey, the data shows our borough as the most divided borough in London. Of its 19 wards, four are in the richest 10% and five are in the poorest 10%.
London's Poverty Profile has been created by one of London's largest charitable trusts, the City Parochial Foundation, and the independent think tank, New Policy Institute. It uses the latest official data to reveal patterns of poverty across the capital. It looks at how London compares to other English regions and cities, and the differences between London boroughs.
See more about how Haringey fares here.
Replies to This Discussion
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Permalink Reply by Clive Carter on
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I think the growth in inequality over the last decade has been perhaps the biggest single indictment of New Labour. If New Labour government cannot reduce the gulf between the richest and the poorest in the country, what is the point of them?
Our divided Borough is an artificial construct: the forced marriage in 1965 of three boroughs in a huge experiment in social engineering that manifestly has failed to reduce inequality. The purpose was deliberately to create an unequal Borough, presumably in the belief that over time, wealth would even out. It is probably true for the Borough as for the country, that inequality has increased.
That experiment was begun under Harold Wilson's Labour government and as we all know, there has been continuous one party rule since 1965.
Is it not time to declare the experiment a failure?
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Permalink Reply by John McMullan on
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The thing is, Europe has come along in the mean time and two things have screwed us:
1. Tottenham the constituency gets some money (and rightly so) for being one of the more deprived parts of Europe but I don't think it's that much.
2. As a borough the deprivation in the east is hidden by the wealth in the west.
If we were looked statistically more like Hackney or Tower Hamlets we'd get a lot more European and Government money (it is a function of government to redistribute wealth). I agree that it't time to call time on the experiment of Haringey but I don't think it's constructive or fair to call the original experiment a failure. We've been let down by poor representation. As it stands the Labour led council should easily be able to take money from the west and spend it in the east but they can't.
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Permalink Reply by E. F. Salzman on
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What poor representation has let us down?
Local Labour I'd voted for so many years.....until now?
The people just voted back in?
Yes, exactly the issues New Labour were meant to address.
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take money from the west and spend it in the east
Is this perhaps a little crude? Re-distribution of wealth is better done by national governement rather than by (incompetent) local government. In recent years, our council has attempted this by means of selling off public assets "in the west" such as Alexandra Palace, Hornsey Town Hall, Highgate and Stroud Green libraries (then branch libraries in the 'near east'). These one-off sales have been successfully opposed.
If you go to the far east and west side there are extremes of wealth. For example, our Borough contains the single richest street in the country (Courtney Avenue), where the average house is worth £6.5m. But this is unrepresentative of "the west".
I live only just to the west of the railway line (basically in the south of the Borough). Harringay Ward is just to the east of the tracks and in the middle of the Borough: and yet some regard the railway line as equivalent to the Berlin Wall.
On the other hand, the north east of the Borough is amongst the poorest areas in the land. That this occurs in a single Borough is a direct result of the Grand Gerrymandering of 1965. Haringey Borough is the most divided borough because it is the Borough with the most artificial boundaries. By which I don't mean to minimise the problems of Northumerland Park.
I don't think that poor representation is the whole reason. I think it has suited the Haringey Council Majority Group to keep large swathes of the east in a state of dependency; that the electoral boundaries have suited them for 45 years is beyond doubt.
I have long believed that the size of Haringey is too big for many purposes and too small for other purposes. Any electoral reform will have to wait. It won't be a priority for the government which has the mother of all financial messes to sort out first.
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Permalink Reply by Michael Anderson on
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Why is local redistribution of wealth not a good idea?
The simplest model is doing away with nonsensical council tax, where someone on a medium income can be living a high value property simply by virtue of having acquired it cheaply many years ago, while their well off next door neighbours pay exactly the same level of CT.
Wouldn't a locally levied income tax be a fairer way?
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Permalink Reply by Old-Age-Emporium(OAE) on
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Towards our next Five Year Plan:
It's nearly half a century since the Guyanese Walter Rodney published How Europe Underdeveloped Africa. Time for a companion volume, maybe, How New Labour Underdeveloped Tottenham. Who better to write it than another son of Guyana and Tottenham, David Lammy, now that he's free of the burdens and restrictions of government? In tribute perhaps to his parliamentary predecessor, Guyanese-born Bernie Grant ten years on. I guess his volume may lack something of Rodney's Marxist analysis but we can't have everything, can we, and I'm sure we wouldn't want to see David assassinated by agents of his own local government in cahoots with his local SNT.
Meanwhile, from his West-Central vantage point, he's in a good position to exert pressure on both our Muswell Hill/Seven Sisters Leaderene and his fellow Haringey MP to begin rolling back the East's underdevelopment and mitigating the divisions of this most divided borough with a little helping of wealth redistribution:
e.g. Four or five of the West's wealthiest wards adopt their four/five most deprived counterparts in the East, paying their Council Tax bills over the next five years. Courtney Avenue leads the way by adopting Northumberland Park as its very own noblesse oblige project for investment and tourism.
Highgate School and Challoner merge with Northumberland Park and John Loughborough as a four-campus New Academy with open exchange of staff, students and governors.
All Western Sixth Form leavers spend their gap year somewhere East of Eden under the aegis of more experienced graduates of the Highgate Peace Corps or CrouchEnd and Muswell VatTs (Volunteers across the Tracks). All Orientation & Foreign Language Courses courtesy of St Giles College, Shepherds Hill.
Our remaining nine or ten Non-Aligned Central Wards (including less affluent enclaves of Stroud Green and Hornsey and less deprived pockets of the Near East) from Bounds Green & Woodside to South Harringay will continue to pursue our balanced Middle Way, careful to avoid the extremes of Western depravity while not slipping into the deprivation of the East.
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Permalink Reply by Alan Stanton on
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When you order Daniel Dorling's book at our local independent Big Green Bookshop do remember to mention Harringay Online.
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Permalink Reply by Andrew Stillman on
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Oh that's sad news. We should feel very lucky here in Harringay I suppose - best of both worlds.
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Permalink Reply by pamish on
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A small start would be for Graingers to give back the two million quid 'down payment' that no-one seems quite to know how to get back. It would very nicely cover the first phase of the alternative plan for Wards Corner: the urgent repair and opening up of the Wards store. Then see the Crouch End mob come flocking 'cross the divide. We even have decent public transport.
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Can you tell me mroe about Wards Corner, Graingers and the down-payment: to whom, from whom and for what? Many thanks.
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Permalink Reply by Hugh on
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Think you should find that in this recent post. [Probably the best place for further discussion on Ward's. :o)]
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Many thanks.
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