|
Tuesday, 16 January 2007 |
(from Hackney Gazette, DEC14, 2006)
Cllr McShane says (Gazette letters, December 7) that Hackney Independent's summer newsletter featured a "hand-wringing" article about CCTV, in which we apparently put "human rights" over concerns of residents' fear of crime.
The article in question was about the floundering Shoreditch Digital Bridge project.
It rightly asked whether this was about addressing the issue of crime on our estates, or filling the coffers of major communications companies, and questioned if the money spent on failing CCTV projects could not better be spent on improved estate lighting, design, or youth services, about which Ofsted said of Hackney Council recently : "the range of youth work provision is insufficient to meet the needs of young people".
To quote from the article: "We would like to start a real debate on the (CCTV) issue that doesn't just accept New Labour's solutions. After speaking to local people and doing surveys on estates, we know that many people in Haggerston are pro-CCTV."
It's surprising to learn that Cllr McShane bases his uncritical support for all that comes with the Olympics on the views of schoolchildren.
It's ironic given that we've recently heard that national lottery funding of children's community projects is set to be cut to meet the spiralling costs of the Olympics.
It is also bizarre when you consider how New Labour ignored the brilliant campaign run by pupils at Haggerston against their school becomig mixed sex, just like they ignored the views of the kids and parents of Laburnum school, which they closed in 2003.
Do scoolkids' views only count when they can be used to back up the land grab of east London by developers that the Olympics is fronting?
The solutions to Hackney's problems are much more complicated than "more CCTV" and "hooray for the Olympics".
For once it would be interesting to hear Cllr McShane and his co-conspirators try to engage with these often complex issues rather than make half-baked attempts to smear their political opponents.
Carl Taylor
Hackney Independent
|
Tags
Delicious
NewsVine
Reddit
Technorati