KHOODEELAAR! Manifesto 2012 Questionnaire for Tower Hamlets Council. THE UPDATED PREAMBLE by © Muhammad Haque, the Organiser, the Khoodeelaar!
1835 Hrs GMT London Saturday 13 October 2012
These Questions, which together constitute the Questionnaire, date back to at least 12 March 2012 when I first published the theme of this latest Khoodeelaar! Manifesto. That Tower Hamlets Council is in crisis.
Given that it is exactly SEVEN months since that publication, it is reasonable to say that the decision-makers in the central core of the Council have had a good amount of time in which to prepare the answers to these questions.
For the Questions may not have been spelt out in my original publication dated 12 March 2012 but there was no secret as to what was being asked. Or as to what was being implied, suggested and meant. Or what state of the Council was being asserted in the statement that "Tower Hamlets Council is in crisis". What, then, are the things that make it logical, factual and tenable to say that the Council is in crisis?
From what I have seen of the "full Council" which I have originally described as "the Fool Council" for very clearly obvious reasons, the latest occasion being Wednesday 19 September 2012, Tower Hamlets Council is in a state of serious dysfunction.
If you take away from the proceedings on that date the two or three things that have since reached the "news" outlets in the London "mainstream" then you cannot find one single item of original democratic representation by a single one of the elected Councillors that can claim to be noticeable, far less timely and useful to the community. Sure, there were peripheral matters. There were peripheral performances. And performers! Including some utterers of such plainly inappropriate "moral outrage" that would make the word "ridiculous" totally redundant. For such performers and utterers, the dustbin would not be a humiliation enough as their reward.
Councillors across the notional divide/s were exchanging either words of gross insult to the community in Tower Hamlets or they were exposing the deeply embarrassing selfishness that must drive their every "intervention".
The entire "full council" turned so easily into a "fools' council". In a matter of minutes. The "two or three things that have since reached the "news" outlets in the London "mainstream" were contributed by outsiders to the Council. One was the issue of a very implausible expenses claim and the other was the contract for the annual Boishaki Mela.
The issue that had taken me to the Tower Hamlets Council Chamber on that day was the one about the prosper reduction of the number of Councillors in Tower Hamlets. I had agreed, in good faith, to be the one to put the supplementary Question/s after the originally listed Question would have been put to the "Full Council" by the previously announced member of the campaign.
When it came to my being the presenter of the Supplementary question, a very swift remark BANNING me came from the lips of the man who had only over the past two days taken part in giving me written undertakings to the effect that I WOULD INDEED BE WELCOME to do what he was now banning me from doing!
The man is called the Service Head for a thing called "Democratic Services". Whenever there is a tag called "Services" used by Tower Hamlets Council, it turns out that far from being the "Service" that it literally should be providing, it is in fact an outfit to sabotage that Service. I am thinking there of the thing called "benefit Service".
This is a reference to the bit of Tower Hamlets Council's bureaucracy that delivers the UK central Government's attacks on people in low income or no income but who are in rented accommodations, flats most often, thus having to apply for rent rebate [that is glorified as "Housing benefit"].
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