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Cheering the Leaders

Dictatorships are such easy targets of parody that many productions fail to raise above the slapstick comedy level and seldom we see proposals that live up to the benchmarks set by Charlie Chaplin and Mel Brooks.

This week Lewisham Council tries its luck at the genre with a motion that wants to recreate the grim atmosphere of Stalin's Kremlin.

Motion in the name of Councillor Donnelly to be seconded by Councillor McGarrigle

Council commends the plan for £186 million of new invesment in our secondary schools agreed by Mayor and Cabinet on 11 January.
Central to the investment package is the proposal for a new 600 place secondary school on the Ladywell site, alongside the expansion of Deptford Green and Prendergast schools.

The Building Schools for the Future proposals complement the existing and planned investment at Crossways, and through the Academies and PFI routes. Taken together these programmes represent a historic transformation of our secondary schools, putting them at the hear of a sustainable Lewisham community.

In addition, council commends the planned investment in swimming pools at Wavelenghts, Downham, Lewisham town centre and Forest Hill. This will provide a comparable and unprecedented improvement in swimming facilities across the borough.

The exquisite detail of the Cabinet Member for Education seconded by the Cabinet Member for Culture (therefore in charge of sport facilities) asking the Council to act as cheerleaders for the work of the Mayor and Cabinet on schools and pools perfectly portrays that lack of taste so characteristic of the awkward brutality of the totalitarian regimes of the past century.

Like in all regimes, there is no space for subtleties here and the direction firmly puts the emphasis on allegiance to the party.

The audience is drawn into the play by the knowledge that the project is an unprecedented shamble that will not solve the schooling problems of the borough but will deprive it of a perfectly good swimming pool for many years to come.

Fortunately we can now laugh at the performance of Stalin's entourage and the hopeless incompetence that the regime showed in those 5 years plans that we so much ridicule now.

The title of this farce is Full Council Meeting and it goes on stage this Wednesday at 7:30 pm at Lewisham Town Hall.

Will the ending of this production manage to surprise us?
Will the Labour members of the Council show some spine and refuse to vote for this tasteless motion?
That would be a first!

Not to be missed. ...read more...

Overview and Scrutiny ratifies amid opposition's hard questioning

A tense meeting of the Overview and Scrutiny (Education) Business Panel agreed with the Mayor and Cabinet decision to approve the Strategic Business Case (SRB) for the Building Schools for the Future program of investments in Lewisham.

The two opposition Councillors on the panel expressed great concerns about the Council's plan and questioned the officers that on some important matters gave some very polished replies rather than clear answers.

At the end Cllr Barrie Anderson (conservative) asked for his reservations to be noted, Cllr Mark Morris (Libdems) asked for the decision to be called in.

Unfortunately, though some evidently uneasy about it, the Labour members present at the meeting put party loyalty before their electors and approved this shamble.

They will undoubtedly look back at this as the day that they could have made a difference in this Council but felt that the Mayor's re-election comes before publicly questioning his fallibility.

Sad.

You can read about much of what's wrong with this decision in the open letter that the New School campaign sent to the members of the committee. ...read more...