Andrew Gilligan: Park Olympics: A Potential Nuclear Bomb for the Council

After giving the Olympics planning permission in March, Greenwich Council may dare to hope that the issue is over. I’m much less sure. It would, for instance, be wrong to see the recent council elections, at which Labour was re-elected, as providing any endorsement for the council’s policy. All the opposition parties supported the Olympics, too.

More importantly, and more dangerously for the council, the way Greenwich made its decision appears to be in direct breach of two key principles of planning law and the Local Government Code of Conduct, and of broader legal principles governing the way in which public bodies must make decisions.

Under these rules, local authorities and their members have a duty to approach planning applications with an open mind and without prejudgment. They are under an absolute legal requirement to invite objections, consider them properly and go through a full consultation process. They are supposed to judge each application on its merits, carefully examining the details presented to them for compliance with their planning policies.

And there were many details. Locog’s application amounted to thousands of pages – setting out all the things the council was supposed to think about before it gave the go-ahead. We can, however, definitively prove that the entire process was a charade. Long before any actual application was presented, the council stated publicly that its mind was made up. Before even a single objector was heard, the council said, in effect, that they would all be ignored. Before even a single page of evidence was produced, the council made clear that the application would be passed.

The key piece of evidence is Greenwich Time, the council’s propaganda newspaper, performing a useful service for perhaps the first time in its sorry life.

On 9 September 2008, more than a year before the planning application was even submitted, a Greenwich Time headline about the proposal piped: “Course the Royal Park will be fine!” and described the park’s hosting of the events not as an if, but as a when (“The o2, Greenwich Park, Woolwich Barracks – three world-class venues that will put Greenwich firmly on the world stage when they host up to a third of the events at the London 2012 Olympic and Paralympic Games.”)

On 30 September 2008, Greenwich Time trumpeted: “A first look at the new [Olympic] cross-country [course] map – and it looks just great!”

On 6 October 2008, Greenwich Time described the park’s use for the Olympics as a “field of dreams” and stated: “The Olympic and Paralympic Games are coming to London – and Greenwich – in 2012… at the 02, Greenwich Park and Woolwich Barracks… Let the excitement sink in.” It described the use of the park as a “’natural’ for the Games” which would offer an “unparalleled opportunity” for the area. This is the council’s official voice speaking, don’t forget. Does it sound a bit like prejudgment to you?

On 8 December 2009, just after the planning application went in, Greenwich Time announced: Greenwich will host a number of Paralympic sports in 2012… The Paralympic equestrian events will be held at Greenwich Park.” The same words were used in an official council press release, four days before.

And on the morning of the planning meeting itself, 23 March 2010, Greenwich Time plopped onto my mat complete with a big map showing the Park as an Olympic venue and a double-page spread on how “a temporary arena will be built within the Park to host the equestrian events.” Actually, boys, at that stage it was still theoretically an “if” – because you hadn’t made your decision, remember?

In an age when even the most trivial decision has to be consulted on, at the risk otherwise of being struck down by the courts, Greenwich Council has left a huge flank open here. Of course, many such decisions are fixed well in advance. Consultations and suchlike procedures are usually shams. But great care is normally taken to pretend, to go through the motions of open-mindedness. I can’t remember any case in the past where a public authority has so blatantly announced the outcome at the beginning of the decision-making process.

This indisputable evidence that the council acted with predetermination and a closed mind seems to me to offer significant scope for legal or other challenge.

Andrew Gilligan: The Election Verdict and the Council Leader’s Bottom

CHRIS Roberts, newly re-elected leader of Greenwich council, reacted to his victory at last week’s polls with characteristic grace. “Chicken run, my arse, that’s my comment for greenwich.co.uk!” he shouted, according to site contributor Darryl Chamberlain. (Mr Roberts, as we revealed here last year, performed a moonlight flit from his previous ward, Peninsula, to safer territory in Glyndon.)

We need not dwell on Mr Roberts’ arse in this space – we already see more than enough of his fine, manly jaw in the pages of Greenwich Time – but close analysis of the results shows some interesting patterns.

In the council elections, across the borough as a whole, the Labour vote share was 46 per cent. This delivered them nearly 80 per cent of the seats – ah, the joys of first-past-the-post!

The Labour vote rose by 4.7 per cent in the borough as a whole, though some wards in the east of the borough showed rises of up to 12.6 per cent. Such a rise is not that surprising given that 2006, the last time the council was fought, was a shockingly bad year for Labour in London.

Fascinatingly, however, all three wards covered by greenwich.co.uk – Greenwich West, Peninsula and Blackheath Westcombe – saw falls in the Labour vote.

Not huge falls, for sure – Labour dropped by 5.6 per cent in Peninsula, 2.6 per cent in Blackheath Westcombe, only 0.2 per cent in Greenwich West – but still very much against the trend. It does seem as if the residents of SE10 and SE3 are growing gradually more sceptical of the council’s general wonderfulness. Perhaps Mr Roberts was right to be cross with this website after all!

There does also seem to be a bit of an anti-Olympic vote. As well as the three wards around Greenwich Park, the two Woolwich wards, Common and Riverside, both very solidly Labour, also saw a drop in the Labour vote, against the trend. Woolwich Common is, of course, the place where the Olympic shooting events will be held. (The new Royal Arsenal development, with its influx of middle-class residents, will have been another factor in the Labour drop in Woolwich Riverside.)

The only other ward in the borough where the Labour vote fell a bit was Glyndon. There are no Olympics there, no bolshy websites. But Glyndon was the ward where Chris Roberts was standing.

Greenwich will be even more of a Labour fiefdom for the next few years, even though the majority of voters did not vote Labour. But relief may soon be at hand. One of the “political reform” proposals being batted around in the Lib-Con coalition talks this week was changing local council elections to a form of proportional representation. That feels like the kind of thing the Tories could give the Lib Dems to make up for opposing PR for Westminster.

Maybe, just maybe, the next few years will be the swansong of the Greenwich one-party state. Remember that, councillors, won’t you, in the hugely unlikely event that you’re tempted to behave arrogantly?

Labour vote share – 2010 council elections by ward

Seats: Labour 40, Conservative 11

Andrew Gilligan: How To Make The Most Of Your Vote

This column – unlike, say, Greenwich Time – does not do party political propaganda. Since living in Greenwich, I’ve voted for all four parties contesting our three local council wards. I’m not going to tell you how to vote,  and I doubt you’d take any notice if I did. What I can do, however, is give you the information to decide how you can best use your votes to produce the effect you want.

If you are broadly satisfied with the council, the choice in any of our local wards is easy – give all three of your votes to Labour. If you are dissatisfied, and want change, you’ll have noticed that all the other parties have, at various points, been sending round leaflets claiming that they are the only ones which can beat Labour, that it is a “two-horse race” and that voting for anyone else is a “wasted vote.”

In a sense, each of them is right – depending on where they say it. In each of the three wards, a different opposition party has the best chance of defeating Labour. First, you need to know which ward you live in.

Greenwich West is anything west of the park and Naval College. This includes the town centre, West Greenwich, and the bits of SE8 that are in Greenwich borough, such as Millennium Quay. All three of this ward’s councillors are currently Labour.

Greenwich West is a contest between Labour and the Liberal Democrats, with the Conservatives some way in third.

Peninsula includes East Greenwich (between the railway line and the river) and GMV. The boundary starts at the Trafalgar Tavern, goes down Park Row, turns along Park Vista (including the houses on both sides), and then follows the railway line. All three of this ward’s councillors are currently Labour – though, in a sign of potential vulnerability, one of the sitting Labour councillors, council leader Chris Roberts, has done a “chicken run” to a a safer ward.

Peninsula is probably a contest between Labour and the Greens, though the challenger here is less clear than in the other two wards.

Everything south of the railway line, east of the park and west of the A102 (M) is in Blackheath Westcombe. This includes nearly all of Maze Hill, the Blackheath Standard area, Westcombe Park, and the bits of Blackheath Village that fall in Greenwich borough. One of this ward’s councillors is Labour and the other two are Conservatives.

Blackheath Westcombe is a contest between Labour and the Conservatives, with the Lib Dems a long way in third.

The ward map is here and you can check any specific address here.

The judgments I’ve made are based on the results at the 2006 council elections (and on no other elections – the Mayoral vote is not really comparable.) There are three councillors in each ward, so you have three votes. Last time, Labour, Lib Dems and Conservatives each stood three candidates in each ward. The Greens only stood one candidate in each ward.

The percentage shares of the vote for each party in 2006 were as follows:

Because the Greens only stood one candidate in each ward in 2006 (they are standing three in each ward this year), they limited their capacity to get votes and these figures probably understate their level of support. Many Green supporters would probably have cast more than one of their votes for the party had they been able to. There are also substantial differences between candidates of the same party – in Peninsula, Mary Mills got 250 more votes than her two Labour colleagues.

So I have also worked out each party’s share based on average votes per candidate. They were as follows:

One last thing – you can, of course, register a qualified endorsement of/ protest against the council by splitting your votes, giving some of them to Labour and some to the opposition.

Happy voting!

Andrew Gilligan: Local News – The “Greenwich Time” Way

THE DAY that Greenwich Council’s propaganda newspaper, Greenwich Time, announced the BRILLIANT news that this is to become a royal borough, it seemed only right to put a picture of the monarch on the front page.

No, silly, not that absurd interloper, the Queen. She was rightly relegated to page 3. Page 1 was reserved for the traditional anvil-jawed photo of our very own age-old symbol of pomp and majesty, council leader Chris Roberts. “Residents, businesses and the millions of visitors to Greenwich will share in our delight at this wonderful news,” said King Chris (note the use of the royal we.) That issue was billed as a “souvenir edition.” But for Mr Roberts, every edition of Greenwich Time is a souvenir!

Inspired by a discussion this week on greenwich.co.uk, I went through some recent back numbers of South London’s very own Court Circular, to see just how many times Mr Roberts and his Labour chums have been puffing themselves at our expense. And the results from the international jury are now in.

Total number of mentions of Labour politicians: 98.
Total number of mentions of non-Labour politicians: 0.
Total number of pictures of Labour politicians: 29.
Total number of pictures of non-Labour politicians: 0.

Mr Roberts, by the way, features on the front page in 8 out of the 12 issues I examined, often with a picture. And when, by some terrible oversight, he is left out of the front-page story, he nearly always gets a column and picture inside (“I was surprised to be told today that I will receive an award as the Greenest Leader in South London…”)

Other very special Greenwich Time stars include Greenwich West’s own Maureen O’Mara – who must, on this tally, be a bit worried about holding her seat – and John Fahy, never pictured without a shovel in his hand. And we mustn’t forget Nick Raynsford MP. He might be hard to find on the streets of Greenwich, but he makes up for it in Greenwich Time. Lib Dems? Tories? Greens? You what?

There isn’t space here for a full list of all the Pravda-esque inanities of “the newspaper campaigning for a greater Greenwich,” but the one that made me laugh the loudest was the fearless scrutiny by one Nick Day of the council’s response to this winter’s snow.

“The extended spell of severe weather must have been testing the council’s resources to breaking point,” wrote Mr Day. “I’ve been frankly amazed at the impressive response…I’ve often been quick to hold the council to account, so I must be equally quick to praise the grit (sorry!) and determination that officers and workers have been applying to their immense task.”

You certainly should be sorry, Nick. Actually, I seem to remember that there was relatively little snow in south-east London by comparison with the rest of the country, and what there was was not cleared conspicuously effectively in Greenwich.

Some stories have been so good that Greenwich Time did them twice – like the one on falling bus crime and burglary figures, front-paged on both the 5th and 19th January (“Making you much SAFER”) and based on a possibly dodgy comparison. The shortage of space created by the repetition of such stories was no doubt why other news – like the excoriation of Greenwich’s social services as “shocking,” “arrogant” and “very poor” by a High Court judge – never made it into Greenwich Time.

My tally of councillor and MP mentions, by the way, covers less than three months’ worth of Greenwich Time, between 5 Jan and 23 March. Some vestigial respect for democratic decencies (or more likely the fear of court action for breaking electoral law) has kept the politicians out of the paper over the last month.

But, even during the election campaign, Greenwich Time has found a sneaky way to push the Labour message. The front page of the April 13 edition (“Spring in our step… Local businesses crack on despite the credit crunch”) told everyone that the “green shoots” of recovery were back: “Confidence [in Greenwich businesses] is growing by the day… There is a realisation that they have survived the abyss… Some businesses have sadly disappeared, but far fewer than may have been feared,” wrote the chair of the local chamber of commerce.

In the 1950s, as part of some dastardly imperial plot against the French, civil servants of the Colonial Office successfully persuaded the people of the Pacific island of Tanna to worship Prince Philip as a god. Portraits of the deity still hang in many a grass hut. Mr Roberts is clearly trying the same trick with what he believes to be the simple, credulous people of Greenwich. In me and others, the sheer clumsiness of the operation has had the opposite effect – making me automatically mistrust everything the council does, even if it is worthwhile.

The Tories are promising, if elected to the council, to close down Greenwich Time, which sounds like a good idea. This ridiculous apology for a newspaper has become the prime symbol of a council that treats its citizens like idiots.

Blackwall Tunnel to be closed even more, foot tunnels closed from this week for months

As a revelation, I know the following will rank alongside the religion of the Pope and the sanitary habits of bears in woods. But Greenwich Council has not been straight with us.

They promised to give three months’ notice of the dates when the foot tunnels would be closed. In fact, they gave eleven days. The closure – between 9pm and 6am weekdays in Greenwich, and between 6.30am and 8pm weekdays in Woolwich – was announced on April 8. It took effect this Monday, April 19.

I particularly enjoyed the council’s claim that “alternative crossing arrangements have been made to reduce the impact of these closures.” No new crossing arrangements have been made. The only alternatives are those which already existed – the erratic Woolwich ferry, and the Thames Clipper riverbus between Masthouse Terrace and Greenwich piers.

The last departure on the latter is at 11.18pm northbound, and 12.37 southbound. There is also the DLR, but that shuts before 1am too, and does not carry cyclists, a big component of the tunnel’s users. There will be no way at all of crossing the river at Greenwich for more than five hours.

And I mean no way. To add to the pain, this week it emerged that “Transport for Livingstone” is further extending its highly controversial closures of the Blackwall Tunnel. The tunnel is already closed to southbound traffic between 9pm and 5am, five nights a week, and between 1am and 8am on Sundays. Now, it will be closed the entire rest of the weekends, too. The exact number of weekends is still to be announced. Who knows, maybe it’ll be all of them!

The closures will run continuously from 9pm on Friday to 5am on Monday, meaning that this vitally important tunnel will spend more hours in the week closed than it spends open. The next step, no doubt, will be the arrival of men in white boiler-suits and gas-masks to seal Greenwich off with giant plastic sheeting, like in the film Outbreak.

The Blackwall closures will last until 2012 and the foot tunnel a fair while, too. Last year one faithful Labour blogger, with a reliable record of being wrong about most things, bought the council’s spin that the foot tunnel closures would be “short.” The shutdowns will, in fact, last for at least eleven months – even longer than I predicted. And it was only sustained pressure from Greenwich Cyclists and others, including this column, that persuaded the council to keep the Greenwich tunnel open at all during the day. Woolwich users, lacking the same voice, have been stuffed.

Despite the damage limitation exercise we managed to do, the whole foot tunnel project still makes me very angry. It symbolises, on a local scale, our rulers’ addiction to spending money we do not have on things that we do not need.

For the £11.5 million the project is costing us, we get not just months of disruption, but a finished facility in some ways significantly worse than before. The claimed objectives of the refurb include “improved safety” and a “more welcoming environment.” The council’s own study showed that the main deterrent to use of the tunnels was that people felt unsafe using them, especially at night. But this project will see the lifts permanently de-staffed and all human presence removed.

For £11.5 million, we could afford to double-staff both tunnels, with a lift operator or security guard at each end, 24 hours a day, seven days a week, for the next 23 years. That might be worth spending money on. It would even create a few jobs, as well as improved “safety and welcoming.”

Instead, at Greenwich, our money is paying for “feature lighting” to “allow colour and animation to be subtly manipulated to create different moods at different times of the day.” This will provide “the infrastructure for contemporary art installations so that the tunnels can contribute to cultural life in the locality.” Walking through the tunnel will become “an event in itself.” Let’s hope the event’s not a mugging, eh?

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