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Is Eric Pickles up to the job on Tower Hamlets?

Cityslide | 04.09.2014 08:43 | Culture | Indymedia | Social Struggles | London | World

Tower Hamlets is almost always in the News but often it is about stuff that hardly matter to the little people. And in March, Tower Hamlets got in the News about a BBC Panorama programme was aired at the end of the month.

Is Eric Pickles up to the job on Tower Hamlets?
Tower Hamlets is almost always in the News but often it is about stuff that hardly matter to the little people. And in March, Tower Hamlets got in the News about a BBC Panorama programme was aired at the end of the month.
In that programme, as shown, Eric Pickles said he would do something. He later sent into Tower Hamlets Town Hall some accountants on the promise that they were his inspectors, the big guys, in Tower Hamlets Town Hall asserting the power and the authority of big Eric! That was also supposed to serve as proof he was doing something. The accountants have been there for months. No sign yet of them letting on...
In the meantime, the big boys and some girls in and around the Parish of Fleet Street keep making forays into what they refer to as Tower Hamlets.
Most of the stuff they say appears top be linked to the belief that by labelling Tower Hamlets a
Conduit for some of today’s most odious ‘Islamists~, ‘Jihadists’ would do what big Eric could never dream of pulling off: bring dawn the regime of the real infidels that the Crusader Boys have identified as being in control of the Palace they hired on the East India Dock Road!
It must be very frustrating for the Crusaders, for Eric, for the BBC Panorama and their allies who include Cllr Peter Golds of the Conservative persuasion, which they have not brought the pharaohs down!
So what keeps to be keeping the bad guys in place over by the Black wall tunnel?
One clue appears to be that the huffs and puffs are not real; that the criticism of Tower hamlets Council is just a front for the paid professionals to stay being in that vocation without making any difference.
And most people on the streets of Tower Hamlets don’t even know what the hell is going on,

Except that they keep seeing the odd mention on the East London Advertiser that things might not be quite what they should be in the Palace of the Pravda.
And then there is the fact that there 40plus paid councillors.
No squeak from them about anything that might be out of order.
So what seems to be keeping the status quo the same as before at Mulberry Place?
There is a line that says that most of the4 noise about Tower Hamlets Council is coming from useless tossers with not idea about what they are on about.
And that most of them can be spotted in one corner of a redundant East End pub.
Most of them are too disorganised to even find their way home after they’ve had the sessions in the pub.
It is quite possible that another big boy might be behind the apparent show of confidence that is coming forth from the Clove Crescent London E12 2 BG building.
It is big Len MacLuskey of the most revered and respected Unite Union that has paid over £10 million to the Labour Party.
As the big Unite union so revered by the Labour Party, it makes sense for the Labour Party councillors to play it safe at the Town hall.
That is the secret.
More secrets may be known to readers of this post.

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Is Private Eye helping Eric Pickles get a grip on the main Tower Hamlets issue

22.09.2014 10:17

The current (issue 1375) of Private Eye (p14) confidently states that even "the Lutfur camp believes local government secretary Eric Pickles could take draconian action."
It says “could”.
Doesn’t say “will” or “is highly expected to”.
The difference is material and it matters greatly.
Then it states that Tower Hamlets Council has been without a chief executive for three years “exacerbating the borough’s dysfunctional politics”.
Those two claims are so innocent of any knowledge of what Tower Hamlets “politics” are really like that they could be blamed on a very ignorant stringer (most likely) being used by Private Eye.
Council chief executives are not leaders of the “borough’s politics”, dysfunctional or not.
As Christine Gilbert’s appointment panellists saw, the personnel making any decision to appoint the chef executive have a set agenda which they then expect the appointee to follow.
Which is roughly what Christine Gilbert did for most of her term until she “had” to leave Tower Hamlets Council in 2006.
Christine Gilbert was the last holder of that post with any significant tenure.
Her successors have all lasted a fraction of her length.
None of those has “led” the Borough’s “politics” one bit.
When Kevan Collins (the one that Private Eye’s ignorant stringer must have in mind when writing their current rubbish) was given the preferment, he ended up being a damp squib serving the cravings of whoever he had thought was holding the power over his job and benefits!
Many questions still remain unanswered about what actually happened in the months before the “election to executive mayor” in 2010.
Collins was the “Returning Officer” who showed no sign of disappointment when he abonecd Lutfur Rahman to be the “duly elected” candidate.
In fact, in July 2010, Collins took part in a series of higher profile mainstream Media promotions of the line that was coming - directly defying all b basic democratic needs that are still unfilled and unmet in “the Borough”.
The series of costly tussles over whether to appoint Stephen Halsey to the post or to make Aman Dalvi the preferment chief executive have produced their own dimension to what actually has been wrong in the conduct of the Council.
It is not, never has been the absence of a permanent “chief executive”
It is the absence of democratic accountability.
Despite the infantile optimism by Private Eye, Eric Pickles will fail again because he, like Private Eye, scarcely mentions the absence of democracy on the Council.
That is and will continue to be the problem that makes the Council dysfunctional.
Not the people of Tower Hamlets.
The people are disgusted with this dire deficit of democracy..
People do not really believe that any democratic sustainable answer is about to be delivered by Eric Pickles at all.
His track record has been very poor.
Anyone doubting this need only read the pathetic “threats” his “Department” has been issuing to Councils over their in-house PR organs, dubbed “Town Hall Pravdas” as a particular taunt to Tower Hamlets.
Those “threats” amount to summer jokes, in political terms.
They do not relate to the local peoples, let alone the democratic parts of the given populations.
They also fail to context the “pravdas” in relation to the “rival” commercial outlets, like the “Dockhands and East London Advertiser” (and latterly) the Wharf in the case of Tower Hamlets “East End Life”.
At more than one Tower Hamlets Council Meeting, one of Lutfur Rahman’s supposed cabinet members, Alibor C, has denounced Eric Pickles in the harshest language that Lutfur’s advisers and script writers could cobble together.
The Conservatives on Tower Hamlets Council, overly personified in media image terms by Cllr Peter Golds, have failed to match the attacks on Pickles’ records as recited by a
demonstrably tutored (and in programmed) Alibor C on the matter.
It is most certainly the case that those, like the ignorant “source or sources” shared by Private Eye with the BBC’s “Panorama” gang, who are hoping for a “draconian act” by Pickles
will find that under one excuse or another Pickles has not lived up to their
“dreams”.
Or if he has appeared to want top, he’s had to take a step or more backwards.
For all kinds of reasons!
Reasons of Political calculations, Conservative image and so on.
Must do better!

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