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Stroud Green Focus
Does anyone else get sick of Lynne Featherstone's newsletters, just had the Autumn one. It's the way they assume her finger on the pulse of the community, when it's all just her trying to get involved/credit for the micro management of general council services. Is there a Wood Green Focus and a Hornsey Focus too, or is it just Stroud Green that's been focused?
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Where ω is a measure of the repulsiveness of the fizzog in question.
how do you know that? how do you know that for every baby p there weren't 100 success stories? you don't, because the council can't shout about them! all their successes are confidential by law.
tottenham is the poorest area of the country, it is the youngest area of the country, it is the most ethnically diverse area of the country (imagine for a moment the costs involved in buying in translation services in area with 180 first languages). yet they have less than half the front line staff of many of richer, less needy boroughs in london.
now, how do you define your "baseline of competence"?
you're basing all this on two similar, very high profile fuck ups (which i'm incidentally not trying to defend - heads should and did roll). you have no way of measuring successes, you have no clear idea about the relative staffing, funding, and need of the boroughs in question. you've made you judgement on woefully inadequate information and are now resorting to this kind of sophistry:
"Your defence gets very close to saying that people can only expect crap outcomes because they're poor. And it's not good enough. "
what i'm saying is that deprived areas are more likely to require intervention from social services, therefore providing those services costs more. does haringey get more money from central government because of this? you don't have any idea.
Am no fan of hers, have never voted for and never will, and i hate the dickhead LibDems, but give me her as my MP any day of the week over some crusty backbencher who's been in Parliament for 30-plus years.
Oh, and Haringey council actually is a load of bollocks (skip permits notwithstanding, where i concur with David - remarkably efficient!).
i don't work for the borough, but i do work with a lot of haringey social workers - people working crazy hours and caseloads for not much money and near constant armchair abuse from catch-all blunderbuss comments that tar everyone working at the council with the same brush - like your comment above. i wonder if you'd make a similar comment to the face of someone tearing their hair out and failing to sleep at night because they're trying to protect 30 different kids from abuse at the same time (for the same money as a bloke who orders photocopier toner in the city) and there simply aren't enough hours in the day?
i'm not trying to "let the council off the hook" in the terms you describe, i'm just trying to contextualise how you would define success and failure - but since you're quite happy to make sweeping pronouncements whilst having no definition for either - nor any methodology to measure either, nor any definition for other terms you're quite happy to use like "baseline of competence" it's not that hard to present a compelling case that you don't know what you're talking about is it?
i'm not arguing that laming doesn't have cogent definitions and methodology to support *his* carefully worded conclusions, i'm arguing that you don't have the definitions or methodology to support your armchair blunderbuss conclusions.
the point for me is that people should be careful to have some idea what they're talking about before pontificating about it, but the day everyone on the internet limits themselves to issues of which they have the vaguest knowledge will be a sad one for this site and many many others.