Through no fault of our own, we the ordinary people in and of Tower Hamlets are lumbered with these “new" scandals

1705 GMT
London
Saturday
18 February 2012

© Muhammad Haque continuing the original, exclusive and diagnostic reports on the latest series of scandals that has hit the interests of the people of the country’s “most deprived” inner city East London Borough of Tower Hamlets.

Through no fault of our own, we the ordinary people in and of Tower Hamlets are lumbered with these “new" scandals.

I am therefore looking for an ethical, democratic and sustainable way to get the community out of the morass that is closing in on us. Unless these scandals are reversed, the people of Tower Hamlets will lose out even more.

Whose abysmal idea was it to give Tony Winterbottom, Ken Livingstone's ex LDA “aide” a contract costing Tower Hamlets people at the rate of £125.00 per hour payable to him?

And how many hours “advisory” “work” does he have to show before making the “contractually valid” claim for the equally contractually valid and neat sum of £1,000 at that rate?

If he “works” seven hours then that will take the total to £875

He has to show only an extra hour’s worth of “work” to be counted to reach the magic sum of £1,000.

That is exactly the sum that has been highlighted by the EVENING STANDARD!

Nice hourly rate if you can show what you actually do and deliver for it.

So on to the next question: what has Tony Winterbottom done since he acquired contractual access to the Tower Hamlets £Billion?

And is it unheard of that in every ordinary day there are at least 8 hours available to be spent doing any “work”, whether real or faked, as long as there is “agreement” that the necessary logging in and logging out arrangements are all accepted by the parties concerned?

So when Mr Winterbottom put up within the real hard work and actually turned up yesterday [Friday 17 February 2012] to take part in a very private meeting inside the bureaucracy of the Tower Hamlets Council which had arranged the "do” to get him to confirm that the EVENING STANDARD had published a “biased” claim about the contract being worth £1,000, why didn’t Mr Winterbottom deny that claim and thus “help prove” that on that occasion the EVENING STANDARD had published an untruth?

Mr Winterbottom is not the first obsolescent “expert” who has “tasted"

proximity to Ken Livingstone’s “power”. In addition to him, there are several dozens of his likes running around London looking suitably useful and promoting themselves for hire.

There is nothing that they could really offer that the local people in Tower Hamlets have not already provided and with no charge on the Council’s expenditures.

The problem is that in Tower Hamlets, the “elected” councillors, judging plainly on their published and publicly known records, have been in the main, a collection of dormant time-servers and collectors of various perks and petty allowances.

They have not been representatives of the people on the Council on issues that matter.

And the Tony Winterbottom scandal reports merely illustrate the irrelevant existence of those councillors.

To them, the concepts of “morality, ethics, accountability, transparency” do not constitute anything.

Those councillors have shown no respect to the people of Tower Hamlets.

If they had shown that respect and had done so genuinely, there would be no such scandal as we are here diagnosing.

But the councillors are not with the people. In fact they are weary of the community whose scrutiny they are unable to survive.

So the councillors are escapists. Escaping the community.

Hence the fact that it took a very small number of Thatcherite Tory elements who dug up the details about Winterbottom and made those public.

As for the majority of the councillors, they are as useless now as they ever have been.

They are “in post” collectively and they scarcely hide their arrogance of that CAPITAL fact!

Capital as in cash-generating enterprise.

To them, being a “councillor” is like being in a sort of business.

There is no evidence that whoever nominates these as candidates has a clue as to why they should be councillors at all.

As for Mr Winterbottom, the plain fact is that he has already become a liability as has the controlling clique concerned that has been responsible for “hiring” him in the first place.

There is nothing proper that ordinary efficient and accountable employees of the Council could not do.

Quite apart from the fallout that has begun from the publication of the FACT of the EXISTENCE of Mr Winterbottom's particular contract, the people of Tower Hamlets will lose out even more as a result of this latest scandal.

As has been observed, none other than Eric Pickles the man occupying the front seat on “local Councils” has already held forth and has condemned Tower Hamlets people by association as he has lambasted those who have wasted this money on hiring the likes of Tony Winterbottom.

Pickles should not matter. Why?

Because he is already prejudiced against communities like Tower Hamlets.

This is why it is a bad thing that Pickles can now claim ANY moral ground at all over the one held by the ordinary people of Tower Hamlets.

And there is nobody in any of elected posts put there by the people of Tower Hamlets who can really claim a clean moral ground and answer back!

So widespread is the stream of informal reports about the incidence, whether formally reified or not and of abuse, dishonesty, nepotism and fraud associated with people allegedly in “charge of” Tower Hamlets Council that the entity called the “democratically elected local Council” is very near to being a laughing stock.

And that, remarkably, is not the worst of it!

Shockingly, the ones who are “opining” allegedly on behalf of Tower Hamlets Council are in denial about all of it.

Isn’t it extraordinary that a Borough that is also being called the most deprived in England is also the one which is being presented in the "mainstream" AND in the experience of most ordinary members of the public in Tower Hamlets itself as the least deserving of whatever public-sourced financial support it [the Borough Council] needs?

[To be continued]