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Commerce has its place, but it’s not in our public parks
LOCAL government can be dull, unadventurous and – efficient.
Council tax payers, worried today about rising prices, may like it that way.
Westminster Council has picked up a reputation of just being pretty boring and sound, administratively.
Camden Council has always been different.
Perhaps it is in the historical sinews of a borough whose radicalism can be said, at times, to be in its blood.
In the 1970s it led the way in social welfare. Municipal leaders came from far and wide to gaze in wonderment at Camden’s achievements.
Today’s Tory/Lib Dem administration, like so much of local government in Britain, is almost strangled by an over-regulating central government.
Whitehall doesn’t want to put municipal government anywhere near the financial comfort zone.
Camden strives mightily to cut here, trim there, all in the sensible pursuit of what is thought to be prudent financial control.
Not a few of today’s councillors still appear to be imbued with that zeitgeist of Thatcherism which denied there was such a thing as society, keen to worship the private over the public.
But is that age going?
Today, the new Tories under Cameron can be said to be sniffing the change.
An economy with a bit more room for public control over commerce, especially in view of the mess the bankers have made of the credit industry, gets more of a nod of approval nowadays.
So what bright spark at the Town Hall came up with the current idea to “marketise” the little bits of public open space in the borough such as Waterlow Park and the Bloomsbury squares? (See page 1).
What’s public should stay public. Commerce has its place – but not surely in our precious open space designed by the Victorians to be the lungs of the capital.
Once, in the 1990s, there was a move by the modernisers to slavishly copy everything American.
The great retreat from our British – and European tradition, for that matter – in the running of local government was sounded.
Stubborn resistance rebuffed the modernisers.
Local government, as we have known it for more than a century, obstinately hangs on. Public involvement and public accountability is the basis of our system.
The Tory/Lib Dem political collective have honourable motives. Financial trimming makes sense at all times.
But this meddling with our parks is a trimming too far.
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