Oh dear. Infighting within the Haringey Labour party has become national news. The main reason for this is the on-going criticism of the controversial development and regeneration council policies.
Supporters of both the council group led by Claire Kober and their critics who oppose them are going through selection contests to see who will represent the party in next May’s local elections. Some of the party’s high profile big hitters who have backed these policies have been deselected, and others who fear they could be next had decided that they would stand down.
Tonight’s/last night’s London Evening Standard newspaper published an article on this issue. Infighting within sections of Labour is nothing new, as the party has been repeatedly prone to entryism throughout its history.
If many commentators think this will lead to the slow meltdown of Labour both locally and nationally, they will be very disappointed. The only thing that is sustaining them is the fact that the vast majority of Tottenham residents either do not, will not or cannot vote, as a result, they stay in power.
While so much attention has been paid by journalists to the selection process, very little has been written about the way Labour has mis-managed the borough for over 40 years. There is a real and worrying prospect next May that another re-elected Labour administration will be led by either a Kober-like council privatising almost everything, or a Momentum-like organisation, spending a lot of energy campaigning against the government rather than actually delivering services.
But there is a choice. It is not inevitable. This represents a big opportunity for the main opposition parties, like the Lib Dems, Conservatives and Greens, to repeatedly attack Labour’s decades of inaction, and to put forward positive and realistic solutions for the borough.
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