COMMENTARY about © Muhammad Haque picture of Terry McGrenera struggling to hear about what was going inside the Stockade! at Tower Hamlets Council on Tuesday 08 March 2011
2125 Hrs GMT
London
Thursday
10 March 2011
I pictured Terry McGrenera, seen struggling to hear about the Council's so-called ‘Budget meeting’. He was one of many that were denied entry into the Council building. Although he may not have encountered this in the UK in the normal run of things before, the evening was turned into one of a sub-authoritarian theatre involving banning people, barring most of them from gaining access for no other reason than the ‘fact’ that ‘the chief executive’ had spoken with the statement of a decree to the effect that only 47 people were to be allowed into the ‘notional’ ‘public gallery’. A very ‘familiar’ exercise in internal deportation of democracy in fact.
One of the ‘benefits’ of disposing of the constitution that had a multiplicity of councillors in ‘control’! Again,. notionally in control. For the fact is that the number of councillors which has remained almost unaltered by the staged departure from a collective decision-making constitution has remained the same IN EFFECT. That has not, however, meant that the councillors are saying much by way of democratic audit of the Council’s controlling bureaucracy.
Shortly before this picture was taken, Terry McGrenera had seen the ‘security’ let an apparent journalist get into the Mulberry Place on his way to the Council Chamber! As the apparent journalist was seen being shown into the Mulberry Place, Terry McGrenera repeatedly hurled an insult at the apparent journalist. Show your press pass!he exclaimed. Then he muttered within the hearing of others standing at the barrier, “wanker!” as if the apparently journalist would hear his word of reproach.
It was not all that long ago that Terry McGrenera would be seen sitting behind a desk apparently designated for ‘the press’. Mr Terry McGrenera was often the main fixture at that desk. Occasionally it would accommodate another one almost brazenly, boastfully and arrogantly privileged to be seen as ‘the press’.
What they did with that ‘access’ to and the ‘seat’ at that ‘press table’ during ‘Council Chamber’ proceedings on “Tower Hamlets Council” was not always apparent afterwards. Neither in print nor otherwise. Nor, most certainly, in terms of any discernible emergence of exclusively gathered insights into the workings of the undemocratic Council that Tower Hamlets Council has always been.
What was very apparent and clear on Tuesday night was that everyone was ‘tarred with the same brush’! Of being undesirable! As if Mulberry Place had been transformed into a port of entry into the land of unlimited opportunity! And the faces waiting at the barriers pdf been swept ashore after their ships sank in the ocean they were crossing in desperate bid to escapee the gloomy lands of their origins, births! And this tiny construction by the ‘authorities’ at the Mulberry Place would make such a life-changing difference to the lowly ones waiting for the clearance. That clearance never came. Not on Tuesday night. It is quite likely that the rate and the frequency fo entry clearance will get tougher every day.
A Republic of REPRESSION has been foisted on the East End borough.
Had Terry McGrenera foreseen this state? If he had, where had he published his words fo wisdom and when?
All we could find on the archives are letters in the ‘East London Advertiser’. They were not very encouraging of other who were doing the genuine campaign against a corrupt council.
Mr Terry McGrenera should have looked at the barricades inside the minds of those who had blocked out and barred certain people and denied their work in defending the community.
Had he done that then perhaps on Tuesday night he would not have been reduced to having to rely on a swear word and may be the pavement outside the Mulberry Place would have some people on it shouting such passionate calls for democratic audit that the creepy careerists colluding with CONDEM inside the Stockade would have been unable to feel so smug themselves as they were doing the CUTS to the essential services and chopping off vital democratic rights and civil liberties.
[To be continued]