UPDATING the KHOODEELAAR! Manifesto for Tower Hamlets 2013

UPDATING the KHOODEELAAR! Manifesto for Tower Hamlets 2013

UPDATING the KHOODEELAAR! Manifesto for Tower Hamlets 2013: 

By © Muhammad Haque. 

1055 [0925] 0920 Hrs GMT 

London

Sunday

03 March 2013

The “news” is that the “Opposition” councillors on Tower Hamlets Council have “expressed their determination” to scrap the funding for the “East End Lies” [Ooooops! ‘East End Life’] the in-house Propaganda title that is abused by whatever “administrations” is in place in the Council. 

I doubt that the “East End Lies” will ever be scrapped. My inquiries find that every “side”, including the Cons, secretly craves a propaganda platform like the “East End Lies”. So the most that the “Opposition” will do is to make SOME persistent noise, thus “earning themselves” space in the “commercial newspapers”, the “Docklands” “Advertiser” etc. 

The real evidence of the corruption of Tower Hamlets Council is to be found not in the shallow and token “debate” about the future funding of the “East End Lies” but in the absence of any probe by any side on the “elected Council” into the conduct of the very highly and the very undeservedly overpaid employees and contractors. 

This corruption of elected local democracy has made Tower Hamlets Council a DUMBO-cracy and has denied the people, the overwhelming majority of ordinary people, the representations, the SAY that the people deserve on all the SERVICES that the Council IS PUBLICLY FUNDED to deliver, but have never quite been able to exercise due to the perennial dysfunction in the “elected” Tower Hamlets Council.

I say that Tower Hamlets Council has been a dysfunctional outfit ever since the 1960s when the platform was conjured up by putting together the three erstwhile boroughs of Stepney, Poplar and Bethnal Green

[To be continued]

Previously published on Sunday 14 October 2012. On how Tower Hamlets Council created a housing crisis that it must solve now by getting the transferred stock back from the RSLs

0845 [0840] [0800] [0730] [0700] [0640] Hrs GMT 

London 

Sunday 14 October 2012. 

EVIDENTIALLY EXCLUSIVELY 

UPDATING THE PREAMBLE 

to the 

KHOODEELAAR! Manifesto 2013 

By © Muhammad Haque

  The fact that the “East End Lies” is published almost every week and its ‘news and features’ spaces are filled with plugs and PR for “the current administration” means that all “sides” that have ever been in power and control of the Council since this little pravda was introduced have abused their position and taken part in pretending that they were “doing things for the community” when the truth ids that they were inducing in propaganda for their own images and for their own cliques, factions that happened to be “in power” at that particular time.

They have, in effect over the years, abolished even the pretence that the locally “elected” “Tower Hamlets Council” is in place to represent ALL sides and parts of the population in the “London Borough of Tower Hamlets” fairly, without prejudice and without discrimination.

And the fact that the “East End Lies” is “in-house”, that is, it is produced by employees of Tower Hamlets Council means that there is no likelihood that the “manufacturers” of the lies will want to stop lying.

It follows that they will carry on telling the lies. For any questioning of the blind [='unquestioning'] PR for the given “current administration” will result in some sort of disciplinary step being taken by the same administration against the “truth teller/s” or against the raiser/s of the ethical questions.

It is thus not just after the model of the USSR-era Pravdas controlled from their Moscow HQs but also of the “Eastern bloc” type culture of fierce propaganda for the sitting regime so noisily associated with the regime of Nicolae Caucescue in Romania.

It is true that the apparatuses that the Romanian regime [which "ended" with the calamitous fall in 1989] had far outweighed in scale and detail those available to the little local regime based at the overly expensively “hired/leased” Mulberry Place in London E14 2BG [at the community's expense and in the name of the community that is treated with increasing obstructiveness and hostility].

But the detrimental purpose to undermine the local community and to sabotage democratic debate and to obstruct the creation of any atmosphere for good service to the local community has been operated to a traceably corrupting extent via the “East End Lies” just as effectively as any Romanian equivalent with a greater scale would have done in Romania before 1989.  

I here refer again to the lies that were perpetrated against the rights and the futures of the local Council housing tenants when the stock transfer of Council housing was mounted.

On the surface, the claim was that local tenants were able to exercise their utmost freedom to “choose”.

But the truth is that people were given false information, with the aim being to mislead most tenants into “believing” that IF THEY REMAINED WITH THE COUNCIL then their housing needs would suffer and that the ONLY way to make sure that they

  [a] got good housing service  in the immediate future and 

[b] even better hosing service after that was to OPT FOR YES to the transfer of the housing stock.

That that was a lie was confirmed again on Thursday during a radio programme that I presented. A caller [whom I know] made the assertion that the Tower Hamlets Council’s housing stock transfer to the identifiable registered social [!!!] landlords was contaminated by corruption  at all levels of the operation, before, during and after.

The caller, Carole, is a known campaigner AGAINST the transfer of the Council housing stock away from Council control and into the holds of the RSLs.

Carole said some of the things that I have known to be true as well.

Like the fact that quite a few people who sit on the so-called Boards of these RSLs are also involved with the Council where they occupy decision-making positions.

That is a conflicting position.

And it is made worse by the failure or rather the refusal on the parts of these individuals to publish the facts of WHAT they do on the Boards and what they SEE as being the behaviour of the “post transfer” RSLs.

The truth of the ROLE of Tower Hamlets Council in ENCOURAGING the CORRUPTING state of affairs to continue is beyond  denial.

How?

Answer: Four and a half years ago, I started to ask the “DEMOCRATIC SERVICES” [Tower Hamlets Council]  to let me know about Tower Hamlets Council’s “representatives” on the RSLs. I did ask to be given the evidence of these “representatives’ conduct” on OTHER external outfits and agencies too.  

But I particularly focussed on the Council’s “representatives” sitting on the RSLs. 

I asked: what did they do? 

Did they report back to the “democratic Council” on what went on in those organisations and what they, these “representatives” saw there?

Initially, I had asked the then Chief Executive to tell me about these.

The then Chief Executive’s office suggested that I asked the Council’s Democratic Services about my questions.

I asked who in the Democratic Services would tell me what I had been asking to know.

I was told that a man named John S Williams would be the one to tell me all I wanted to know.

I took that in good faith and asked away.

I even sent – over the four years or so since starting to ask these questions – about a hundred separate, constantly updating communications including emails and telephone messages.

But ANSWER there came NONE from John S Williams.

To begin with, it was not John S Williams that I found myself speaking to, most of the times. Or sending emails to, most of the times.

It was a member of the staff, whom I shall not name here, in my voluntary compliance with the standards of ethics that I apply to my public statements and commentaries.

That member of staff turned out to be a partner in the business of misleading, fabrication and fakery too.

So after four years of efforts, I could not get any evidence from Tower Hamlets Council showing WHAT if anything, the same Council’s REPRESENTATIVES on the external “bodies” especially the “registered Social landlords” now controlling the majority of the transferred Council Housing stock DID as they SAT there in the name of the “elected Tower Hamlets Council”.

  [To be continued]

_______________________________________________________________ 

HERE are the texts of the online piece published by ARCHANT controlling the former East London Advertiser, now dubbed ‘Docklands and East London Advertiser’, dated 28 February 2013:

Tower Hamlets Council’s “Pravda” under threat in budget plan

Robin de Peyer

Thursday, February 28, 2013 
2:26 PM

The future of Tower Hamlets Council’s East End Life publication is in doubt after opposition councillors put forward plans to remove its funding.

Labour and Conservative members voted together to force the borough’s Mayor Lutfur Rahman to consider an amendment to next year’s budget which scraps funding for the weekly newspaper.

The coalition government has confirmed it is looking to introduce legislation clamping down on Town Hall publications. Local government minister Brandon Lewis recently castigated Tower Hamlets Council for “waste and unnecessary spending” on its “Pravda”.

Labour and Tory councillors last night confirmed their intention to push for £1.2million in funding to the weekly free sheet to be scrapped, while Independent councillors voiced their continued support for the publication.

The amendment backed by Tory and Labour councillors will be considered by Mayor Rahman this week, before both his original budget and the amended version are voted on at an emergency meeting on Thursday.