Citizens in defence of local democracy…

I particularly like the comments about a certain hedge fund manager looking to a future making money from “distressed debt”. This particular gentleman’s idea of profit-turning philanthropy is investing in the privately-funded “academy schools” beloved of New Labour, and which US experience shows segregates students by social class and economic status.

Academy schools investors may be on to a winner here. Among Labour’s core supporters in the south of England, the 4×4-driving middle class professionals who recycle, and will use any means necessary to get their children into the best state schools and keep everyone else’s out, are said to support academy schools. These people are far better organised than the mass of economically-depressed humanity that inhabits Britain’s urban areas. Unless that situation changes, we are likely to witness the continued erosion of local democracy and community-led planning.

For this report thanks are due to video journalist Jason Parkinson, who on his website has a second clip from the public meeting presented above. Jason’s work is an excellent example of how political journalism should be. We are talking here not of opinionated blogging, but reporting of stuff the corporate media so often ignores.

This particular story is about the London Borough of Brent (famously satirised by Private Eye as “Bent”). But it illustrates a problem affecting the entire island of Britain, and further afield.