We just want our bins collected
On the most boring subject in politics
As a journalist in the 1980s, my father claimed to have invented the phrase ‘the loony left’. I’ve never found out whether this was true or not, but if so it was a notable contribution to the lexicon, the term being hugely popular during the Thatcher era to denote the sort of crazed Trotskyite politics that dominated London local government.
The inside pages of the Daily Mail and Sun always seemed to be full of stories about Lambeth or Hackney council giving taxpayers’ money to Nicaraguan lesbians or banning the word ‘family’ because of political correctness gone mad. Many of these stories may have improved in the telling, to put it mildly, but there certainly was a radical undercurrent in local government.
While this genre of story was usually treated as a bit of a joke, I suspect that the impact on national politics was not insignificant; just as political correctness came to embed itself in the academy and spawn the Great Awokening a generation later, local government served as an incubator for identity politics. Many of the activists went on to have roles in Westminster under Blair, even if they’d replaced their youthful enthusiasm for Latin American revolutionaries with talk of ‘stakeholder engagement’.
We don’t hear much about the loony left these days, but local government remains a laboratory for national politics, a training ground for future politicians and, most damaging of all, a mechanism for voters to express their frustrations with Westminster, as will be demonstrated again next month. The system seems obviously dysfunctional, but the impetus to change it is hampered, I suspect, by how boring the subject is.
Many local authorities are one-party states, with all the downsides that brings: Haringey, where I live, has been Labour since 1971, because the two constituencies that broadly comprise this north London borough (although there have been boundary changes that make them slightly mismatch) are heavily, tribally Labour: David Lammy’s Tottenham in the east, and to the west Hornsey and Friern Barnet, represented by Catherine West (no relation).
The two sides of the borough have very contrasting social make-ups, the western half wealthy and BoBo, and quite continental – you hear a lot of French and German spoken in the streets. The eastern part is poor, historically quite Caribbean but with a smaller population of Orthodox Jews; the middle third, especially the neighbourhood confusingly spelt ‘Harringay’, has a large Turkish population, and is especially famous for the array of outstanding restaurants in Green Lanes.
