What Katie did best

Published: 3 September, 2010

• DO our politicians spend any time in thinking what they can do to improve things for the people of Islington.

From reading the Tribune and seeing their behaviour at council meetings, it appears they expend all their energy in attacking each other.

Just last week we had the Labour housing chief accusing the Con-Dems over restricting money for building new council homes, leaving people living in “horrendously” overcrowded conditions.

This housing problem has not developed in the last three months.

It developed due to the failure of housing policy from the 1980s onwards and Labour must take a good share of the blame for that.

But, yes, the government’s policies look likely to exacerbate this serious problem.

The Lib Dems are no better.

From Councillor Terry Stacy we hear the criticism “in less than a month we have seen Labour councillors cut £2.8million from Islington children’s services, £3million from Islington tenants and now they are closing pensioners’ day centres”.

This is the most breathtaking hypocrisy.

Is this not the result of Lib Dems in government colluding with the Conservatives to push through a level of cuts driven more by ideology than need? Nick Clegg might try to deny it, but we know the Institute for Fiscal Studies is right when it says the poor will suffer the most.

Terry, if you want to protect the vulnerable it’s time to find a new party.

What I find most depressing of all is that due to the media’s focus on this pathetic, tit-for-tat politics, and with the general election falling on the same day as the local election, we lost a councillor who showed what can be done by rising above the politics of the playground.

Katie Dawson, our Green Party councillor, left an “extraordinary legacy” (Tribune, June 25) by thinking about solutions, not opportunities to attack rivals.

Times ahead are going to be hard. Can our politicians learn from Katie’s approach and engage honestly with us about cuts and work together to minimise their effects on the most vulnerable in our community?

CAROLINE ALLEN
Address supplied