Czars in your eyes
North London Bubble #10: Old faces return, a 'cut and paste' clanger and a chaotic start for Corbyn's new party
NORTH LONDON BUBBLE
It’s edition number 10 of the North London Bubble, the weekly politics column on NewJournal+ written by Richard Osley and Isabel Loubser. You can also read it at newjournal.substack.com and find previous columns under the Bubble tab on the menu bar.
Look out for our digest of news covering everything that’s been happening and coming up in Camden and Islington – sent out to all subscribers tomorrow.
Also available to read now is Dan Carrier’s long-read on the changing nature of London’s musical heritage street Tin Pan Alley
SWEEPSTAKE ON THE LENGTH OF THE SPEECH
DANNY Beales and Georgia Gould, the former Labour councillors in Camden who were promoted to MPs last year, were back in the building on Thursday night as they joined the farewell party for Jenny Rowlands.
It wasn’t the occasion to ask them to explain their vote in favour of the Welfare Bill earlier in the week as they shook hands with old friends and Ms Gould, the former council leader, took to the stage in Vision Hall – the new name for the Camden Centre, next to the Town Hall in King’s Cross – to make a speech about their close relationship. It always felt like the kind of tag-team duo that if one left, the other might soon after.
The new council leader Richard Olszewski also made a speech thanking Ms Rowlands and welcoming her successor Jon Rowney. It took a while, nearly ten minutes, for him to list what he saw as Camden Council’s many achievements of the last few years – “it’s now impossible for our printers to print any more ‘outstanding’ banners but we’ll do our best” – and when it came to Baroness Louise Casey’s turn to speak he had to face some teasing.
“We were all given specific time slots,” said Baroness Casey, the go-to peer whenever an authority wants a czar to investigate something, most recently bad behaviour in the Met police. “But everybody from Camden has completely ignored the running order, particularly Richard – who I thought: is he going to do this for so long I won’t get a drink? I’ve had to be on water because it’s Jenny’s fecking leaving speech and I can’t let her down.”
PLYMOUTH ROCK
IT’S hard to miss the clanger in the opposition groups’ motion to Islington’s full council meeting on Thursday.
The Greens and Independents, working together, filed a wording in which they asked the council to recognise the difficulties people will face from welfare changes in Plymouth – 240 miles away.
“They didn’t even bother to read their copy and paste motion before submitting it,” Labour’s former deputy leader Councillor Diarmaid Ward said.
“They are lazy and unserious. You can’t play politics with people’s lives. The independents are not only outsourcing their opposition to the Greens, but now to the people of Plymouth so it seems”.
The proposed PIP cuts — which have been dropped for now as the government’s welfare bill passed its second reading on Tuesday — had been called cruel by disability campaigners, who added this week that last minute changes would not stop many falling into poverty; presumably both here and in Devon.