Hammersmith and Fulham Council Tories

Meant to publish this at the beginning of the year, but forget to queue it over Christmas.

It's a report from a December 2008 Hammersmith and Fulham council cabinet meeting where local spoke against council plans to move the council contact centre to Rochdale.

Thought it might be a timely reminder of the realities of Hammersmith and Fulham council's much-vaunted council tax cuts: 

We go to a mid-sized meeting room at Hammersmith and Fulham Town Hall, where a group of local people and council contact centre staff sit before the cocky, elitist and - in the case of councillor Lucy Ivimy, racist - Tory cabinet, to beg to keep the council's contact centre in Hammersmith, and to keep their jobs.

The locals have exactly five minutes to talk the council out of its plans to move its local contact centre to Rochdale. Those plans include making everyone who currently works in the contact centre redundant, and doubtless form a crucial part of the council's ongoing campaign to move moneyless people who use and provide public services out of Hammersmith, and rich people who don't need public services in, a la Wandsworth and Westminster, etc. 

The local people in the room aren't talking about that at the moment, though, because they're being distracted by an unexpected, if revealing, side act. The council's deputy leader - one Nicholas Botterill, who sits alongside council leader Stephen Greenhalgh - is pulling faces and laughing at the local people who've turned up to address the cabinet. It's an extraordinary display, and not a heartening one. Botterill is giggling at the the locals and their plight and screwing his little rat face up at them, presumably for the benefit of Tory sympathisers in the audience. Krissy O'Hagan - the locals' spokesperson, and contact centre union rep - is reading, nervously, a speech in favour of keeping the contact centre in Hammersmith, and public services generally, and Botterill is wrinkling his face up and laughing at her.

He makes such an ass of himself that council leader Stephen Greenhalgh is forced to tell him to shut up.

'No! No! Don't!' Greenhalgh hisses in full view of all. Greenhalgh has grasped that it's no longer the done thing to jeer publicly at low earners, but maybe the message hasn't trickled down to Botterill. Greenhalgh's cabinet has learned that mocking black people isn't on - a full year has passed since the earlier-mentioned cabinet member Lucy Ivimy revealed the H&F Tory hand on race with a remarkably bigoted commentary about Asian hygiene standards - but low earners with working class accents are still fair game.

Why the Tories will forever be old hat.

Hello, all.

This lengthy piece (tis a bit long - got carried away) is the first in a number that will look at Conservative behaviour on the ground. Yours truly wonders if the Tories are fit for public office, exactly, and/or if social responsibility is really their bag...   

This week, staff at Tory council Hammersmith and Fulham will meet to organise a response to the latest attack by the council's Conservative leadership. What a distasteful attack this one is, too - all council staff have been told they will be dismissed and forced to sign new employment contracts on much-reduced terms and conditions. 

So.

I know exactly how the Tory trollies among you will greet this news: you'll say (sans deliberation, as always) that lazy, fat arsed public sector staff - those you doubtless imagine operate the schools, housing offices, libraries, street cleaning and social services at Hammersmith and Fulham - deserve it (do you class bankers as fat arsed, overindulged public sector workers now, btw?). You'll say that public sector workers deserve the awful hours, and the lack of union representation and employer sympathy and flexibility that your average working stiff in the private sector gets. 

As we have been reporting, the Hammersmith Law Centre will lose 60% of its funding in cuts voted for by the Tory Hammersmith and Fulham Council. Thousands of poorer people in the borough will lose access to the free legal advice and representation that the centre has provided for nearly 30 years.

This site is adding interviews with people who have gone to the law centre for legal help and advice over the years. Law centre clients are often immigrants and people seeking asylum.

Below, law centre client Salah Almesaouil talks a bit about moving to London. He has been a client of the law centre for some years, and had help with Home Office and housing problems.

Salah Almesaouil is a small, witty guy from Syria who lives with his wife and eight young children in a three-bedroom council flat in a West London block called Hamlet Gardens. 'Good flat,' he says, as his four littlest kids stampede through it. 'Bit small, maybe, for ten of us living here. Bit small.'

He's not complaining about his general direction of travel, though: the UK remains a land of opportunity as far as he is concerned, and he and his kids are taking it.

His three eldest - teenagers Heba, Mohamad and Hamza - are doing well in school, particularly in the scary subjects: Heba is studying A-level chemistry, physics and maths, Mohamad, is taking A-levels in maths, applied science and computing, and Hamza is sitting GCSEs in science, double science, maths, English language and literature, RE, design and technology, history, French and Arabic.

They want to be doctors and computer engineers and that kind of thing. Almesauouil is a happy Dad.