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The art of successful agitation
WHEN writers and actors mount the barricades, something is astir.
For the first time in many years local artists have joined together to take up the cudgels on behalf of people in Camden whose interests are all too often ignored by politicians and mandarins in the corridors of power.
A few months ago, Tom Conti launched a campaign against anomalous parking restrictions in Hampstead.
Then Roger Lloyd Pack, admittedly an old hand at public protests, took up the cause of locals agitating for the refurbishment of the Kentish Town baths.
The other week, both of them, as well as the writer Deborah Moggach, played a significant part in protests over the possible destruction of Victorian Little Green Street in Kentish Town.
This week Deborah Moggach writes a stinging criticism of the inane proposal by the Royal Mail to cannibalise its network of post offices that play, as she so pungently points out, such a crucial part in the life of the community.
In an era when so many people feel powerless in the face of the growing power of central government and large corporations, we can only welcome these rebels with a cause.
Putting properties under the hammer
is a blow to Camden
ONCE again, the council has gone for the easy option – and sold off the borough’s family jewels.
The great sale occurred on Monday, when seven council homes went under the hammer at an auction that attracted a great many speculators.
Altogether these properties accumulated £7 million that will, undoubtedly, swill around in the Town Hall general revenue account until being disposed of in the coming year.
A cursory investigation may well reveal that some of these properties were bought by the Labour administration in the 1970s when public investment in property was seen as a part solution to the borough’s chronic housing problem.
That was a sound point of view.
It’s a pity successive administrations, both Labour and today’s coalition, have turned their back on it.
While there are signs of a movement by developers to slough some of their portfolios in the face of a threatened downturn of property prices, it would still make better sense for the council to hold on to their piles of bricks and mortar.
Total blame cannot be levelled at the council.
The real cause can be traced back to a growing parsimony in Whitehall grants to local authorities.
Once, purse strings were looser.
Now, they are being tightened.
But the solution isn’t to sell off properties bought by the people of Camden.
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