Our resident political pundit Tom Brooks-Pollock takes a look at the major issues in Islington running up to the election, and finds an unexpected amount of agreement between the parties.
Isn’t there meant to be an election on?
With only weeks to go before Islington goes to the polls for the general and local elections, you can be sure that, as night follows day, politicians will be tearing even larger chunks out of each other than normal.
Just look at how, only this week, Labour and the Lib Dems have accused each other of “dirty tricks” and “scaremongering” over the pensioner Freedom Pass and cancer statistics.
But hold on a second. Think of the two biggest issues for Islington residents right now and you may be pleasantly flabergasted to find that peace has broken out.
On 27 February, politicians of all stripes – Labour, Lib Dem, Conservative, Green – were among the thousands marching from Highbury Corner to the Whittington Hospital, demanding that its cherished A&E and maternity wards be kept open.
Add this to the long-running battle to save Finsbury Health Centre, where Labour and Lib Dems politicians on the council’s health committee have united in opposition to NHS London’s claim the Grade I listed building is too expensive to keep open, and you start to wonder whether there is more that unites than divides the parties.
Surely a good thing, right? Disaffected voters are always telling pollsters that the one thing they really hate about politics is constant bickering by politicians.
Admittedly, on the Whittington, it has not been all sweetness and light. The Lib Dems are trying to blame the Government for slashing budgets while Labour councillors are turning up the heat on Rachel Tyndall, chief executive of North Central London NHS, whose leaked letter ignited the row last November.
But ultimately, the looming election is actually helping the parties agree: which politician in their right mind would go along with such unpopular cuts just weeks before voters pass judgment at the polls?
It suits elected politicians to paint the unelected NHS managers who threaten to close hospital services as faceless bureaucrats, out of touch with the hopes and fears of ordinary people.
However convenient such a political consensus is though, the fact remains that opposing the senseless closures at the Whittington and Finsbury Health Centre is the right thing to do.
Yes, money needs to be saved in the recession. Last week’s BBC survey of councils up and down the country suggested 25,000 local government workers could lose their jobs due to cutbacks. Many experts think it could be many more. This will affect the hundreds of government workers in Islington too.
But we cannot allow a crash, sparked by crazy risk taking by some of the richest people the world has ever known – the bankers – to damage valuable public institutions delivering free healthcare for all, including the most vulnerable.
That was not what the visionary Soviet architect Berthold Lubetkin had in mind when he designed a health centre for the slum dwellers of Finsbury in 1938. Ten years later, the centre was used as the blueprint for the new NHS.
Such idealism is far beyond the imagination of health service managers today. They would “rationalise” the NHS out of existence if they had the chance.
