Haranguing

Since irritating millionairess-heiress Lynne Featherstone appeared on the local Lib Dem scene and her cronies have substantially increased their number of seats in our borough of Haringey without gaining overall control, the tiny Labour majority that is left seem to have resolved to piss on Crouch End from a great height. Over the past few months we’ve seen them try to force through a Controlled Parking Zone without any attempt at a sensible assessment of (or consultation about) local needs and announce their plans to sell off the Town Hall car park to a property developer to create several new apartments with nowhere to leave their cars at all - which would be fine if every resident were prepared to be green and stick to public transport, which alas is unlikely in an affluent area such as this. We’ve also seen them start to chop trees down on Crouch End’s leafy (and supposedly protected) avenues and a total lack of opposition to all the chain stores that have moved into the Broadway, forcing up rents and bankrupting many local independent shops and restaurants and leaving a worrying amount of boarded-up buildings.

I’ve just walked to the Broadway and back to run a few errands in preparation for our trip to Montreal tomorrow (booked before we realised we’d have to spend £2,000 on domestic repairs in a single month, otherwise we’d have stuck to something more economical like a visit to a few of our various relatives in Cumbria). I had to step over more dog shit than I’ve ever seen on a pavement before and at least five different patches of smashed glass bottles, including one on the path in lovely Stationers Park which is full of toddlers playing. It seems Labour Haringey won’t be content until all the Lib Dem voters of Crouch End have been forced to live in something resembling a no-go Tottenham ghetto.

REBECCA