Conservative courage

This story: the Cabinet at Hammersmith and Fulham's Conservative Council meets to accept the Voluntary Sector Funding report which cuts funding to central and longstanding voluntary groups.

Photo: Hammersmith and Fulham Council leader Stephen Greenhalgh.

Introduction and background to the voluntary sector funding controversy at Hammersmith and Fulham

Photos from the protest at the Monday 16 April Cabinet meeting

Splendid scenes at Hammersmith and Fulham Town Hall this week, when several hundred furious locals shouted the council's largely pale and male Tory cabinet members out of the meeting hall, and down towards the Town Hall latrines - the very place (I'm sure I've got this straight) where the H&F Tories first spawned.

The locals had turned up to protest about the council's plans to cut ('prioritise' is the word that the Tories are using at the moment) funding to Hammersmith and Fulham's voluntary sector.

Groups that work very closely with some of Hammersmith and Fulham's poorest communities have lost all their funding, and they are not thrilled. The Hammersmith and Fulham Law Centre - a group of 12 experienced and committed lawyers that has been the legal brain of the Hammersmith voluntary sector together for nearly 30 years, and so often successfully highlighted council and government uselessness - has lost 60% of its funding.

The really interesting part at this point is that the length of time it has taken the council to get around to telling people that their funding and jobs have gone. Any number of attendees at this week's cabinet meeting accused the council of failing to let them know that a) they were due for the scrapheap and b) that they had a right to bring a group to the cabinet meeting to voice concerns that they had about being thus discarded. One council officer tried to tell the meeting that the council had sent all voluntary groups a letter which touched on the latest developments and gave a web address for the report that explained where the axe was due to fall. Alas for this officer, the muttered chorus of 'no, no, no,' that round the hall suggested that doubts continue around this one. She said something else, but nobody could hear it. Probably best.

There wasn't much love flowing the way of the people's press from the council, either. We don't like to make a habit of autobiography here, but we do it when it brings an instructive dimension to the landscape. To cut a fairly short story shorter, the bumholes on the door tried to chuck citizen reporters such as ourselves out. We were forced to participate in a weird preliminary round with a couple of flunkies from Hammersmith and Fulham security, who started to panic about the size of the mob and the people who were photographing it. Of course, everybody was photographing it, because everybody in the world has a mobile phone with a camera on it, or a camera, or a couple of both, but that didn't stop security trying to chuck us out and confiscate our stuff.

'You have to take those cameras down to reception,' a lead security person called Kevin bustled over to bawl at us. We'd taken a few hundred photos of the whole event by this point, so Kevin's initiative seemed to come a bit late in the picture, but he was getting some sort of recently-assembled policy direction through his earpiece. Or whatever. Anyway, we told him to piss off.

'You can't have those cameras in here! You have to take them out!' Kevin yelled at us.

'Why!'we yelled at Kevin.

'The councillors are very sensitive about having their photos taken!' he yelled. (You will have already enjoyed a picture of council leader Stephen Greenhalgh at the top of this story. You can decide whether he ought to be sensitive about being seen for yourselves). But anyway - bugger Kevin. We kept our cameras with us. A staff member who knew us spoke up on our behalf at this point, too, so Kevin abandoned the camera argument and took the staff member out in the corridor to scream at her.

And hell - maybe Mr Greenhalgh is a sensitive guy. Certainly, he appeared very sensitive about telling a public meeting full of politicised black people why he was cutting their community organisations loose. 'All our funding decisions are all measured against the administration's priorities...' he blethered, eyeing the exits very closely. Assistant Chief Executive Lesley Courcouf, meanwhile, had been detailed off to tell Kevin and his guys to upgrade to a code yellow, or whatever. It was pretty clear that the cabinet was going to vote to accept the Voluntary Funding report's recommendations, and do a runner, and probably not in that order.

Councillor Anthony Lillis, who is the cabinet member for community and children's services and the architect of the whole voluntary funding disaster, was meanwhile trying to calm to hordes with a buttload of garbage re: the reasons why he hadn't bothered to talk to the voluntary groups that were about to lose all their money. He said that if he'd spoken to one organisation, then he would have had to speak to them all, That being the case, he'd decided to speak to nobody. Or something to that effect - alas, the finer points of this address were lost on account of crowd abuse.

The cabinet did the runner at about half-eight. Helena Ismail, co-ordinator of the longstanding West London immigrant support group Horn of Africa (one of the groups that has had all its funding cut by the Tories), got up and tried to speak to the cabinet, even though she wasn't on the official deputations list. Security tried to make her sit down. She got up again. So did everybody in the hall. 'Let her speak! Let her speak!' everyone in the place started to shriek. The cabinet got up and scrammed at that point, citing some rot about public disobedience. Word is that they took the final vote in the second-floor gents.

Conclusions thus far:

David Cameron won't control the Conservatives at Hammersmith and Fulham.
David Cameron can't control the Conservatives at Hammersmith and Fulham.