Tuesday, 14 December 2010
Monday, 13 December 2010
BHANGEELAAR! Diagnostic preview on the paralytic Pickles programme touted to be unveiled today
BHANGEELAAR! Our diagnostic preview on the paralytic Pickles programme touted to be unveiled today
Our diagnosis as published on the web site of the London Guardian at 1240 Hrs today Monday 13 December 2010
Saturday, 11 December 2010
Contextually citing a Guardian online piece containing significant reference to Tower Hamlets Council abusing its 'powers' via its very own PRAVDA
From the web site of the London GUARDIAN.
Has Pickles chosen the right weapon to kill off council-run newspapers?
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Comments (5)
The Newspaper Society put up a report on its website today about the hearing held on Monday by the communities and local government (CLG) select committee to consider proposals to curb council-run newspapers.
It is, as you would expect, angled to support the newspaper publishers' viewpoint about the evil of council publications.
In short, they attract readers and advertisers away from commercial papers. And, in terms of editorial content, they are little more than propaganda sheets.
I am certainly in sympathy on that final point. To use the epithet beloved of the secretary of state for CLG, Eric Pickles, they do tend to be "town hall Pravdas."
That's why he has drawn up a revised local authority publicity code, which is due to come into force next year.
It will restrict the frequency of council-published papers to just four a year, and it will inhibit any such publications from carrying any paid-for advertising, including the statutory notices that are a lucrative form of revenue for the local and regional commercial press.
The changes to the code have upset local authorities, as their three articulate spokesmen made abundantly clear to the committee.
Richard Kemp, a Liverpool city councillor and vice chair of the Local Government Association, and Jules Pipe, the mayor of Hackney who represented all London councils, were particularly exercised at the way in which the restrictions will prevent them from meeting their obligations to communicate with their residents.
They argue that councils needed to step in because the information job is no longer being adequately done by local papers, due to falling circulations and falling staff numbers. Papers are failing to report comprehensively on what councils are doing.
I have some sympathy for that view. There is no doubt that there are worrying instances of under-reporting (that's precisely the reason for the Press Association's attempt last year to get a "public service reporting" project off the ground).
So there is an information vacuum, but some councils - not many - have gone too far, far too far, in their mission to inform.
A handful of London councils - notably Tower Hamlets, Hammersmith and Fulham, and Greenwich - decided to do more than simply communicate. They sought to publish free papers that looked and felt like paid-for papers.
In order to help defray the substantial costs involved, they then raised revenue through taking advertisements.
The real villain of the piece is the Tower Hamlets weekly, East End Life, which has made life intolerable for the East London Advertiser.
Life has double the staff of the Advertiser. It runs all the editorial you would expect to find in a paid-for commercial weekly. It raises money through running adverts.
It could be viewed as a rogue publication, a one-off. But it is clear that other councils saw it as a template and, as I said in my evidence to the select committee, the NS rightly viewed it as the thin end of the wedge.
Certainly, many councils have spotted the benefits of taking ads. NS communications director Lynne Anderson quoted an Audit Commission study that found 150 council publications were taking third party advertising.
The NS view has obviously prevailed. Hence the code revisions. But I am still worried that Pickles is using a sledgehammer to crack a nut.
In preventing, quite rightly, the disgraceful "passing off" of East End Life, the government is in danger of preventing councils - especially in areas where papers are thin on the ground - from telling voters what is happening. That was surely not the intention.
The code needs reconsideration.
If you want to read a full-frontal assault on the new code, then see Greg Hadfield's piece, What would Stalin think? Council newspapers should be more democratic - not banned, on the Media Briefing blog.
The full select committee hearing can be found here on the parliamentary website. There is also a BBC Radio 4 Today in Parliament report here, about 22 minutes in.
A setback to a democratic, accountable Tower Hamlets Council and others who seek, crave and grab 'post and power' in the name of the people ...
Focussing on the latest setback to a democratic, accountable Tower Hamlets Council and to the cause of democratic accountability by all the others who seek, crave and grab 'post and power' in the name of the people of Tower Hamlets - the 'moving out of the East London Advertiser'
0840 Hrs GMT
London
Saturday
11 December 2010
This moving out is a on the face of it less significant in the Internet age than it would be even five years ago.
Yet the moving out to Ilford in the outer London borough of Redbridge and not to an address in the neighbouring ‘east’ London borough of Newham means that whatever ‘journalistic’ staff the tile may still carry, won’t be based in Tower Hamlets.
They will be physically detached from the borough, which has been the main home for the “East London Advertiser” for such a long time.
There is no longer a point of physical contact between the people in Tower Hamlets and the most closely identified ‘local paper’ about the area corresponding to the three former boroughs that were joined up in the 1960s to form today’s’ Borough of Tower Hamlets.
I first noticed the plain announcement stuck on the wall to a closed office of the “East London Advertiser” when I looked at the Cambridge Road office location to see if I could spot anyone I knew as I walked past.
The shutters were down. And that in the middle of a ‘working’ week, meant something was not right.
When I looked closely at the white paper staring out with the grim notice, I knew that more than an era in local life in the East End had come to an end.
A familiar barometer of East End life had come to an end!
Did I say East End life?
Indeed I did!
What a terrible irony that phrase!
For East End life is being twisted, distorted and undermined by a not unrelated ‘other’ agency whose assaults must have had a signal effect on the presence of the “East London Advertiser” on a piece of land known as the authentic East End of London!
[To be continued]
Thursday, 9 December 2010
BHANGEELAAR! Updating the democratic diagnosis on the role played by Christine Gilbert in Tower Hamlets deprivation......................
London
Thursday
09 December 2010
Editor © Muhammad Haque
BHANGEELAAR! Updating the democratic diagnosis on the role played by Christine Gilbert in Tower Hamlets deprivation.
This exclusive diagnosis has been published on the web site of the London Guardian in the past hour. BHANGEELAAR! Tells the Guardian some very important facts concerning Christine Gilbert.
How she was appointed to the post of town clerk [glorified as ‘the chief executive’] in Tower Hamlets Council and also about her role in undermining democratic accountability whilst she was in that post.
In context BHANGEELAAR! also highlights the fact of the role being played by the Tory councillors’ group leader Peter Golds on Tower Hamlets Council.
That role is the silence by Peter Golds over the questionable way that Christine Gilbert had been appointed to the town clerk post. In contrast, Peter Golds has been engaged in drawing attention to some ‘recent’ events in Tower Hamlets which warrant investigation. Why then is the Tory councillors’ group leader silent on that? Could that be anything to do with the DETAILED knowledge that he has had of how Christine Gilbert had been preferred to a much better candidate?
Is Peter Golds’ silence anything to do with the possible fact that he was involved in appointing Gilbert to that post and that if he opens his mouth about THAT now he will himself be seriously unable to justify his own role?
We shall continue to raise this question about Peter Golds until we see evidence that he has behaved fairly, accountably and transparently about the appointment of Christine Gilbert to Tower Hamlets Council’s town clerk post and his silence on the adverse implications of that appointment on the democratic and accountability by Tower Hamlets Council to the ordinary people in Tower Hamlets.
[To be continued]
BHANGEELAAR! comment on the web site of the Guardian:
You [Polly Curtis] [The Guardian, London, online piece “Ofsted head Christine Gilbert in talks to leave early and join academy sponsor”] [ Wednesday 8 December 2010 22.26 GMT] say:
“A shy media performer, Gilbert is known for being tough on schools. She triggered controversy with headteachers by raising the bar for inspections, insisting that a "satisfactory" grading would no longer be enough and that all schools should be aiming to be rated at least "good", if not "outstanding".
Your report raises questions about Christine Gilbert's appointment as town clerk [Oops! 'Chief executive'] of Tower Hamlets Council. Her appointment to that post had exposed the shallowness and the futility of the role played by "elected" councillors even then.
Christine Gilbert was preferred to a much better candidate because she had given a de facto undertaking to the then leading decision-maker on Tower Hamlets Council that ‘satisfied’ that cliquester!
The facts of Gilbert’s ‘appointment’ are and have been known even to the newly-arrived Tory councillors group on Tower Hamlets Council. Has Peter Golds, the Tory councillors’ group’s de facto leader, taken as vigorous steps about THAT appointment as he is reported by his ‘chums’ in ‘Fleet Street’ to have been busy doing about certain RECENT activities in and on the same Tower Hamlets Council?
Our ongoing inquiries have found that Peter Golds has NOT done so. The implications for the people of the Borough, currently targeted by the CONDEM cuts assault, are deep and far reaching. Just as the implications of Christine Gilbert’s latest promotion are for the educational and allied rights and needs of those affected across the country by the Michael Gove-fronted Dis-Educational attacks.
Contrary to your assertion that Christine Gilbert has been ‘tough’ on schools, the facts of her recorded conduct whilst in Tower Hamlets are that Gilbert had persisted in publicly backing failing schools throughout her time as ‘Education Officer’ in Tower Hamlets AS WELL AS during her subsequent years as the Council’s ‘chief executive’. She had also flouted some of the central tenets of universally verifiable accountability and scrutiny that would have raised standards in the borough’s schools.
Her ‘legacy’ ‘package’ includes the fact that the vast majority of schools and allied institutions and agencies supposedly in place in the name of Education in the Borough of Tower Hamlets continue to be educationally seriously under-achieving.
The same applies to the equally abysmally low standards of democracy that is being ‘delivered’ by the Council as a whole.
Far too many undemocratic practices were inserted in the Tower Hamlets Council bureaucracy during Gilbert’s years in post as the town clerk that their effects are continuing to undermine the Council’s relevance to the duties it has to the people in the borough.
Last night’s [Wednesday 08 December 2010] formal vote at the so-called full [Tower Hamlets] Council meeting once again showed that the anti-democratic ‘procedures’ for the utilisation of the set of ‘elected councillors’ as dummies for the unaccountable controlling clique that had been brought in during Christine Gilbert’s years are continuing to let the community down. ‘No wonder’, Christine Gilbert is being PROMOTED by a ‘new’ Government, again!
Society CONDEM-ed is definitely in for an even nastier treatment in every [approximately] civilised detail than a pre-Home Office Theresa May had seen threatened [‘presumably’ ‘only’] by the Nasty Tory Party!
2020 Hrs
Thursday
09 December 2010
BHANGEELAAR! THE CAMPAIGN AGAINST AN ELECTED EXECUTIVE MAYOR IN TOWER HAMLETS
Wednesday, 8 December 2010
BHANGEELAAR! Exposing the empty charade staged as 'the full Council meeting' by Tower Hamlets last night [8 December 2010].
0315 Hrs GMT
London
Thursday
09 December 2010
Editor © Muhammad Haque
BHANGEELAAR! Exposing the empty charade staged as 'the full Council meeting' by Tower Hamlets on 8 December 2010.
This is the first diagnostic report from Bhangeelaar! Posted at 0255 Hrs this morning as our first comment on the “news’ item as carried by the web site of the “East London Advertiser”. We focus on the key failings by the Council as a whole and especially give evidential instances of how the “elected” Councillors on Tower Hamlets Council have been failing to defend the community against the agenda of CUTS to services that affect the ordinary Tower Hamlets community being continued by the CONDEM regime in the UK.
Your [East London Advertiser”] headline “Hundreds of protestors rally against cuts in East End at fiery council meeting” is not substantiated by the “facts” contained in the report underneath it.
Your report contains no reference to anything [if] said at that [“full Council” Tower Hamlets] meeting by way of a coherent agenda against cuts by any “elected” councillor. The Tower Hamlets ordinary community affected by the CONDEM AGENDA including the CUTS are not represented in anything that Tower Hamlets Council is doing as shown in your particular report.
The overwhelming impression being given by those who are making the decisions in Tower Hamlets Council is that they are not to blame but also that they can’t help it but make the cuts! Is that what people “elected” the Councillors for on 6 May 2010? Is that what the “candidates” “pledged” to voters they would do if “elected”?
You had reported CONDEM Govt minister Mr Gauke [“Government cuts will fall disproportionately on Tower Hamlets, many fear”] [Nadia Sam-Daliri. Wednesday, 20 October 2010 16:37 PM] as justifying the “social rent” changes by asserting that those would bring “balance” [!!!!] for the people in work. In the six weeks since then, there has been no publicly stated policy or strategic response to that false assertion of Mr Gauke from Tower Hamlets Council which in fact has been carrying out the “necessary” preparatory bureaucratic work to ensure that cuts to housing benefits and council tax rebates are in effect implemented.
What has a single “elected” councillor done by democratic demand to oppose that agenda being carried out inside the Council?
Who had DEMOCRATICALLY authorised “Dr” Kevan Collins, Tower Hamlets Council’s chief executive, to take part in that elaborate promotional slot on Channel 4 TV called “Undercover Boss” and positively confirm on that programme that Tower Hamlets Council was making preparations for the CONDEM cuts?
Given that the programme went out in July [“First Broadcast: 9PM Thursday 22 Jul 2010 Channel 4”, according to Channel 4 web site at 0250 Hrs on Thursday 09 December 2010] and had been months in production, doesn’t that show that the “full Council” meeting as staged on Wednesday 08 December 2010 was an empty event? That the actual decisions had already been made and would be continued to be made behind closed doors?
And that the “elected” councillors are IN EFFECT playing colluding, complicit parts in this assault on our community?
0255 Hrs
Thursday
09 December 2010
BHANGEELAAR! THE CAMPAIGN AGAINST AN ELECTED EXECUTIVE MAYOR IN TOWER HAMLETS
Hundreds of protestors rally against cuts in East End at fiery council meeting
Nadia Sam-Daliri
Thursday, 9 December, 2010
0:21 AM
HUNDREDS of angry East Enders descended on the town hall in protest against the unprecedented cuts facing the borough.
Students, union members, residents and an anarchist group gathered at Tower Hamlets Council’s Mulberry Place base this evening demanding new mayor Lutfur Rahman take a hard stance against the government proposals.
Scores of cops held guard both inside and outside the building as the protest turned ugly.
At one point, about ten men from the Whitechapel Anarchists – who warned they would wreak havoc – stormed out of the council chamber shouting obscenities.
The scenes remained raucous, with fiery residents cheering and hissing as the council discussed the 500 job losses and £20 million cuts to be brought in by the next financial year.
Critics claim Tower Hamlets will be hardest hit by the cuts because it relies heavily on the public sector.
Vikhas Chechi, a Unite member who works at Queen Mary university, was one of the many protesting in the cold.
He said: “This borough is the poorest in the country and yet the cuts are bigger than elsewhere. We want to see the mayor do something.”
East Ender Sultana Ali said: “We came here because we are worried. They have to make some cuts but my concern is that they will remove posts from the frontline and save the top jobs. There’s no point in having ten managers. They should look at which projects are delivering and which aren’t.”
Describing his “anger” over the cuts, Mr Rahman admitted the future was very uncertain.
He said: “These are not our cuts. The full extent of what the government wants to take from us is not clear.”
Several groups spoke during the three hour-plus meeting.
Eileen Short, of Tower Hamlets Tenants’ Association made a plea for the council to promise that they would not replace residents’ secure tenancies with fixed term deals.
Mr Rahman responded that housing would be one of his priorities, adding: “People have enough to worry about without the fear of the council taking away the roof over their heads.”
John McLoughlin, Trade Union member, spoke about the scrapping of the £30 a week education maintenance allowance, which more than half college age students in the borough rely on.
He said: “You don’t need EMA in Eton but if you want to keep our children in Tower Hamlets College then you do.”
Councillors also voted to oppose the cuts and support peaceful protest over the coming months, agreeing there is a disproportionate burden of cuts facing Tower Hamlets.
Some 32 councillors voted for the motion, seven against it and one abstained.
Despite loud cheers over vows to resist the cuts, job losses are already being felt by public sector workers.
Up to 99 posts will go at NHS Tower Hamlets and more at the council in the next month.
1 comments
Your headline “Hundreds of protestors rally against cuts in East End at fiery council meeting” is not substantiated by the “facts” contained in the report underneath it.
Your report contains no reference to anything [if] said at that [“full Council” Tower Hamlets] meeting by way of a coherent agenda against cuts by any “elected” councillor. The Tower Hamlets ordinary community affected by the CONDEM AGENDA including the CUTS are not represented in anything that Tower Hamlets Council is doing as shown in your particular report.
The overwhelming impression being given by those who are making the CUTS decisions in Tower Hamlets Council is that they are not to blame but also that they can’t help it but make the cuts! Is that what people “elected” the Councillors for on 6 May 2010? Is that what the “candidates” “pledged” to voters they would do if “elected”?
You had reported CONDEM Govt minister Mr Gauke [“Government cuts will fall disproportionately on Tower Hamlets, many fear”] [Nadia Sam-Daliri. Wednesday, 20 October 2010 16:37 PM] as justifying the “social rent” changes by asserting that those would bring “balance” [!!!!] for the people in work. In the six weeks since then, there has been no publicly stated policy or strategic response to that false assertion of Mr Gauke from Tower Hamlets Council which in fact has been carrying out the “necessary” preparatory bureaucratic work to ensure that cuts to housing benefits and council tax rebates are in effect implemented. What has a single “elected” councillor done by democratic demand to oppose that agenda being carried out inside the Council?
Who had DEMOCRATICALLY authorised “Dr” Kevan Collins, Tower Hamlets Council’s chief executive, to take part in that elaborate promotional slot on Channel 4 TV called “Undercover Boss” and positively confirm on that programme that Tower Hamlets Council was making preparations for the CONDEM cuts?
Given that the programme went out in July [“First Broadcast: 9PM Thursday 22 Jul 2010 Channel 4”, according to Channel 4 web site at 0250 Hrs on Thursday 09 December 2010] and had been months in production, doesn’t that show that the “full Council” meeting as staged on Wednesday 08 December 2010 was an empty event?
That the actual decisions had already been made and would be continued to be made behind closed doors? And that the “elected” councillors are IN EFFECT playing colluding, complicit parts in this assault on our community?
0255 Hrs Thursday 09 December 2010 BHANGEELAAR! THE CAMPAIGN AGAINST AN ELECTED EXECUTIVE MAYOR IN TOWER HAMLETS
Sunday, 5 December 2010
BHANGEELAAR! Evidentially updating our diagnosis of the failing "elected" councillors on Tower Hamlets Council and their GLA "role-models' [!!!] ...
Notoanexecutivemayor
6 December 2010 12:01AM
In view of today’s “news” [Sunday 05 December 2010] featuring Boris Johnson who is being promoted as “doing something” “against FIFA” [“at last”!] by cancelling their reservation at a London hotel during the scheduled London hosting of the 2012 Games, perhaps your piece “Boris Johnson: 'do nothing' approach could do for him” deserves a an update.
You got it about right in saying that “no matter how facile that something may be”. The Murdoch tabloid the SUN, which has published the 'epoch-making' [!] report today about Boris Johnson's cancelling the rooms reservations for FIFA belongs to the school of journalism where the dominant ‘teaching’ motto is: Tory can do no wrong!
Your accurate statement about Boris Johnson that “ his knowing attitude to the media makes him resistant to its demands that he does something at times like these no matter how facile that something may be [.]” could evidentially be applied to most of his utterances that the Daily Telegraph, the Daily Mail and even the BBC have been covering with scarcely noticeable contextual examination of the evidence of the true role this “elected executive mayor” has been playing. He has enjoyed far too cosy a relationship with the predominantly Tory leaning mainstream press based in London. In view of these facts, are the “elected” members of the “London Assembly” going to do their job and create the overdue atmosphere on that Assembly for holding “the executive mayor” of London to account?
We have raised this principled question about accountably constitutional democracy before about the London Assembly as we have done about the “elected” councillors on the inner city London Borough of Tower Hamlets Council. How else are the two “related”? Start with the strangely-licensed [by the “regulator” OFCOM] propaganda outlets carried by Rupert Murdoch-friendly Sky satellite monopoly and you will come across the kind of brazen propaganda for post-holders as “councillors” which would embarrass even the Stalin-era PRAVDA agenda setters! Ordinary people across London are being let down by the de facto paralysis of the elected London Assembly members as are the people in Boroughs like Tower Hamlets who are being similarly let down by the accountability-free “elected councillors” being undemocratically flaunted as constituting “democratic representation on behalf of the people” in the area [Borough, London] concerned.
What happened last week at the Lewisham town hall during that Council’s latest cuts agenda “progress” [!] could only have happened with the unconcealed collusion by the “Labour Party” councillors with the CUTS programme that the same set of councillors are accusing the CONDEM Government of imposing. If there is “an imposed cuts programme”, why are the “elected councillors” AGREEING with that imposition?
That is only the first question that the hundred or so protesters outside the town hall were seeking the truthful answer to.
2110 Hrs
Sunday
05 December 2010
BHANGEELAAR!
THE CAMPAIGN AGAINST AN ELECTED EXECUTIVE MAYOR IN THE INNER LONDON BOROUGH OF TOWER HAMLETS
You [The Guardian, London, web site piece in advance of Eric Pickles later today] say:
[Quote]
Stretching across all public services the implications of the reforms are huge; from revamping the current planning regime to giving communities the right to control local state run services such as schools and libraries.
[Unquote]
The bit of your statement promising the bill to be about “giving communities the right to control local state run services such as schools and libraries” is not valid. What does/can the Pickles mean in reality by LOCAL COMMUNITIES when entire elected councils are in for de facto scrapping?
In boroughs like Tower Hamlets, the ‘communities’ are physically disenfranchised from even looking at what our “elected councillors’ are getting up to, if they are doing anything really good by the electorate!
The Mulberry Place, the exorbitantly rented/leased location of Tower Hamlets Council’s ‘town hall’ was ‘chosen’ by the then Tower Hamlets Council bureaucracy as one of the ways to make the “local communities” access to our town hall as difficult as possible! The same strategy has now covered every aspect of Tower Hamlets Council. Despite the claims that access to information about the Council is now ‘possible’ the Council closely resembles any pre 1989 ‘Iron Curtain’ show-Council, fitted with all appearances and trimmings of ‘localism’ and yet insanely defiant against local democracy. We even hear of a ‘Monitoring Officer’ being in place in Tower Hamlets Council but the public are not allowed access to what that Monitoring is about, who actually decides the criteria and if any elected councillors are allowed access to the supposed monitoring. Dark ages have already been in place in Tower Hamlets and this is even before we refer to the in-house Pravda the ‘East End Life’, which carries ever-smiling images of all ages and from all ethnic, nationality and gender and orientation backgrounds…. Life in the East End has been abolished with the weekly dosage of lies via the Pravda. How on earth is Pickles going to let “local communities” get a word in edgeways when Tower Hamlets Council’s Pravda propaganda and its Pravda like Monitoring Officer between them rule over all they spy on and surveillance in Tower Hamlets via one of Britain’s most extensive "local" networks of spying CCTVs over ordinary people who are constantly obstructed from exercising basic democracy in the Borough that is routinely cited as one of the country’s ‘most deprived’? Going by the behaviour of Tower Hamlets Council's controlling bureaucracy over the past decades, the Pickles measure will only enable the further consolidation of the grabbing groups that are already installed in illicit partnership with the clique and the ordinary community of people across Tower Hamlets Borough will continue to be left out and kept out of what the Council decides on spending and on service.
1240 Hrs
Monday
13 December 2010
BHANGEELAAR!
The Campaign against an elected executive mayor in Tower Hamlets