Swiss Cottage High Court Case Legal Brawl over Spilled Milk !

The ongoing Swiss Cottage fiasco is ample proof that something is not right with Camden Council’s luke warm embrace of ‘democracy’. One undeniable fact is that the 30 Councillors who approved the controversial demolition of Camden’s largest swimming pool ‘represent’ only a minority of the total Camden population, most of whom can’t be bothered to vote. Perhaps for good reason many people don’t believe that electing a representative for their ‘local parliament’ makes the slightest difference to their lives.

As if that wasn’t bad enough, the recent court judgement exonerating Camden from accusations of illegal practices, was made by one judge who has only seen Swiss Cottage once, when he passed in a car. One distant person, unconcerned with the needs and wishes of several hundred thousand Camden residents, listened to over 30 hours worth of legal brawl between a handful of barristers over an alleged conflict of interests within the Councils decision making machine. Passing judgement in favour of the Council this judge concluded that the children, who were granted legal aid to fight for their sports facilities, have actually nothing to do with this matter and should therefor be refused legal aid to appeal against his decision. The expressed wishes of local people to preserve their threatened facilities were not matters for consideration in the High Court. It was held that Camden had not actually broken any planning laws during several years of botched public consultation, in which case these laws have become a legitimate tool for men in grey suits to sell ‘building licences’ to the highest bidder in multi million pound auctions of public property.

Especially where planning decisions involve the permanent removal of essential public health and recreational facilities for generations to come, each and every affected member of public should have an automatic right to have their say, for example in a referendum style vote. Instead of blatantly flaunting Freedom Of Information Law by banning opponents leaflets from all public notice boards, it should be the Council’s duty to actively facilitate the open display of opinions from all sides. Instead of the few stop watch measured token deputations, preservation lobbies should receive similar levels of resources to what Council officials are given for the promotion of their own profit motivated privatisation plans.

Rather than allowing an even handed and transparent debate, Camden conveniently invented and appointed a ‘Citizens Jury’ and submitted a planning brief littered with contradictions that beggar belief. Despite hundreds, if not thousands of complaints and petitions the Council has never openly admitted that even regular users of the Swiss Cottage site were never directly asked whether or not they approved the demolition proposals which had gradually emerged from the murky waters of this ‘consultation’ . The limited group of people, which the Council had carefully selected for their pantomime was nowhere near representative of the total number of users of the affected services. The silent majority who will eventually suffer the multitude of negative effects, if and when Camden’s plan becomes reality, were never consulted at all.

The Council’s most important aim should be to act democratic. The monopoly of power presently exercised by the Council is severely undermining democracy. Ramming decisions down peoples throats does not work. The idea that nothing ever gets built unless Councils have powers to do what they like has proved a costly mistake. Camden’s leisure chief Mr. Mc.Nicols has had the nerve to point his sticky finger at protestors for wasting taxpayers money. The sad truth is that Camden’s faked public consultation has been a far greater waste of public money and the resulting legal challenge perfectly forseeable, if not inevitable. With hindsight most reasonable people would have prefered to see the ‘wasted’ money spent on a proper referendum rather than paying the salaries of a high court judge and several legal teams for a week long argument over spilled milk.

www.camdensport.org