‘Partnership administration’ bickering is at fever pitch

Published: 18 February 2010

• I SUSPECT that John Gulliver (Are they Liberal with the truth? February 11) will have his work cut out with his forensic examination of the swaying newsletter battles between “LibDem lies” and “Tory terminological inexactitudes” in the run-up to May elections.

No one seems now to want to claim the parentage of this so-called “partnership administration” which has led Camden into chaos these last four years. 

The bickering between these two erstwhile allies is now at fever pitch. 

But it is of course not just the Libs and their fibs who are being “economical with the truth”.

My own constituents have recently been very amused by the Tory In Touch newsletter for Holborn and Covent Garden, printed as it is at the “Holborn & St Pancras” headquarters somewhere up in the leafy environs of Hampstead.

We are told by the Tories that they are “demanding to know what the Liberal Democrats in charge of Camden Housing are doing about” their “mismanagement”. Surely some mistake, when as you point out, the council has been “politically managed by a coalition of Tories and Lib Dems”?

Then our “local” Tories told us that they themselves had found the proposed site of the secondary school south of the Euston Road, which came as a very considerable surprise to the parents’ campaign and their architects who have very effectively reinvigorated this 30 year campaign for justice for our children in the Holborn area. 

It was, of course, the Tory schools chief who had to apologise for an “oversight” about Wren Street and conveniently blamed it on an “officer who did the searches and left”.

Not content with upsetting parents, our local Tories then claimed that they were the ones who single-handedly fought off the crazed proposal for a centralised needle exchange in Roger Street. Something of a surprise, this, both to the highly effective local residents’ campaign and also, no doubt, to the Town Hall Tories who proposed the needle exchange!

Fortunately, local people are not stupid, so when the Tories claim repeatedly that “Labour didn’t build a school when they were running the council” many parents know all about Christopher Hatton School, which opened with me as a very proud Labour chair of governors in 1997.

I am fully expecting our local Tories to claim soon that they were the architects not just of the Wren Street school site, but of the Great Wall of China – particularly when their hazy geographical knowledge means that their “Holborn Job Club” is based somewhere in E1 in Tower Hamlets…
Cllr JULIAN FULBROOK
Labour, Holborn & Covent Garden