Max Calo, the secretary of the save
Ladywell pool campaign, makes a number of points in the comments section of a
recent post and it seems to me that the response should be a post in itself.
As far as I can tell Max makes three
points:
1.
That people vote for
individuals rather than political parties;
2.
That internal debate inside the
Labour Group is not a transparent way to conduct politics; and
3.
The site of the new secondary
school remains controversial.
If I’ve missed anything I’d be delighted
to come back to anything crucial, but in the mean time I’ll
take these three in turn.
If Max votes for individual on the basis
of who they are rather than which party they represent then he’s unusual (but
perhaps not exceptional). All the
evidence suggests that most people vote for the party with very few bothering
about the individual strengths and weaknesses of the individual candidate,
particularly at local government level. Let’s
take me as an example; at the last elections in 2002 there was a turnout of
just under 30% of the eligible voters across
the ward and I received 1189 votes.
There are about 13,000 people in Blackheath ward and on average when
asked about 6% can name their ward councillor.
If you do the maths that makes about 800 people who can name me, and I’m
sure that quite a proportion of them voted against me in the election and
others didn’t vote at all.
The other point to make is that I stood
on a Labour Party Manifesto as did all the other Labour candidates in
2002. I’m sure that all the other
candidates who stood against me also had party manifestos that they would have
sought to implement if they’d had the chance.
The manifesto is important because it sets out our plans for what we’ll
do with the services we’re accountable for and provides the common ground
between candidates fighting under the same party banner.
It’s the fact that I sign up to the
common manifesto and agree to abide by a set of rules about my conduct as a
member of the Labour Group that means that I can become a Labour
candidate.
So while Max might vote for the
individual we don’t stand as purely individual candidates, we stand as a member
of a political party that has rules about how we conduct ourselves.
On the second point (debate behind closed
doors doesn’t allow for transparency) I’ll concede that it doesn’t, but from my
point of view it’s vital that we have a private space where we can debate what
we want to do and come to a settled position.
Without the opportunity to have our arguments
in private – where we can be more challenging with each other – there would be
less debate about the decisions we take.
Let me explain why I think that would be the case; politicians have a
strong loyalty to their parties, and know that while members of the public may
like iconoclastic individuals in politics, they’re wary of parties that appear
split. By having the debates out of the
public eye we hope we improve the decision making while remaining cohesive.
The final point is back to the nature of
the decision we took over the site for the new secondary school and what that
means for Ladywell swimming pool. Clearly
the decision to site the new school on the leisure centre site wasn’t our first
choice; we’d wanted to build it across the road at the Playtower site, but to
do that we needed to buy the redundant police station. As I understand it there was an informal
understanding that we’d be able to do that, but the Metropolitan Police
Authority then changed their mind and decided that it needed to put the site on
the open market. This left us with a
problem and a clash of priorities; we had promised to open the new school by
2006 (and to do that the only site which could then be open as a permanent
school by 2009 is the Ladywell leisure centre), at the same time we had said we
would not to close the pool until the new one was built in the centre of
Lewisham (2010). We chose to honour our
pledge to open the new secondary school over the desire to have the pool see
out the final three years of its life.
This leaves us pretty where we were; Max
and the opposition councillors arguing that this was a wrong decision, my
colleagues and I believing that it was the right one in the circumstances.
Cllr Andrew Brown
