Getting into Hot Water By Describing Chiswick as a Backwater
Chiswick Gunnersbury councillor Jo Biddolph reports back
Cllr Jo Biddolph
March 4, 2023
It can’t have escaped many residents’ and business ratepayers’ notice that Hounslow’s Labour leader Cllr Shantanu Rajawat has got himself into rather deep hot water for trying to insult the Conservative councillors who he described as being “consigned to the backwaters of Chiswick”.
His words, spoken during the debate on the council’s budget during Tuesday’s borough council meeting, were immediately interpreted, including by journalists, as describing Chiswick as a backwater. Despite Cllr Rajawat’s attempts to deny that’s what he meant, that is what he apologised for, if you can call his defensive comments an apology. You can read his attempt at re-interpreting his own words in The Hounslow Herald , Brentford Nub News, several stories in Brentford Today & TV, The Chiswick Herald, The Chiswick Calendar and this publication. You can’t read it on the council’s website, though.
He tried to justify his ill-chosen words by blaming some of us (yes, including me) of only talking about Chiswick issues. Unfortunately for him, he’s wading into deeper hot backwater with this attempted fob off. It isn’t true. My two principal contributions during the budget debate were about issues that apply across the borough, as were the three policy points I picked up on from Labour councillors’ comments. First, my main contributions: the increases in council fees and charges, which apply across the borough ; and the increases in councillors’ allowances, when I emphasised the need for all councillors to prove to residents and business ratepayers that we are worth the money we receive.
On the three points I picked up: Cllr Unsa Chaudri accused we Tory cllrs of talking during the debate so I reminded everyone that the cabinet member for housing had chatted with a colleague during our motion on the devastating impact of damp and mould in homes wherever they occur in the borough; I re-raised the council’s lack of a policy for dealing with homophobic attack, which can occur anywhere; and the council’s slowness in introducing an initiative we suggested long ago to bring in big skip collections to reduce fly tipping, which we formally included in our amendment to the council’s budget this year, and which blights every ward in the borough. Yes, we Chiswick councillors raise issues in our wards – that’s what we were elected to do – but we look at the whole borough, as we all should.
You can hear council leader Cllr Rajawat’s precise words, as he speaks them, on the Hounslow YouTube channel starting at 2.04 hours in. In that short section, do watch the Chiswick-dwelling Labour chief whip grinning and applauding at the description. I assume he now doesn’t like what Chiswick has become under his party’s watch – and will soon be moving from the borough’s backwater to Isleworth, the ward he represents.
From comments made by residents to councillors since the budget debate, seeing Cllr Rajawat squirming in the hot water of his own boiling, trying to say he didn’t say what he said, has not been enough for the Chiswick’s residents and ratepayers he and his supporters have insulted.
Cabinet member Cllr Katherine Dunne, council leader Cllr Shantanu Rajawat, and Chiswick-dwelling Labour chief whip John Stroud-Turp listening to Cllr Rajawat’s description of Chiswick as a backwater
Cancel culture across the borough
Cllr Rajawat’s ill-judged description wasn’t just an insult to Chiswick’s residents and business ratepayers. In saying the Conservatives had been “consigned to the backwaters of Chiswick” he has in effect cancelled our two councillors in the west of the borough – Cllr Allan Joseph in Hanworth Village and Cllr Kuldeep Tak in Feltham North. Like the eight of us in Chiswick, they are busy taking up residents’ concerns from their own wards – and from other wards when residents there have been ignored by their Labour councillors. As an example, I’m currently supporting residents in Cranford, Heston West and Isleworth, plus three people who are homeless in other parts of the borough.
Overview and Scrutiny Committee
The current preferred practice is for the scrutiny committee to have a pre-meeting a week before the formal meeting to decide lines of questioning. I’m in favour of meeting to consider, in broad terms, what our collective concerns are and what to probe, but I am not in favour of being restricted to asking questions set in advance. I can’t think of a meeting when no questions on our lists were answered in the presentations to the committee, upsetting the pre-determined list, or when we haven’t wanted to ask questions on new issues that had arisen in the presentations. I don’t think we fulfil our scrutiny roles by sounding like automatons who haven’t listened.
Another limitation is when councillors suggest questions that are lifted from the council’s corporate plan or some other highfalutin policy paper. The bland, blind faith wording doesn’t aim to probe; it aims to endorse. It’s another planted question from the pen of the Labour chief whip or its group political assistant and it doesn’t do justice to the role of this important committee. It’s from the same policy approach that led to the instruction that all Labour councillors wear something red in borough council.
The agenda for next week’s scrutiny meeting is overly full which limits the degree to which we can look beneath the surface of each subject, discussion being ruled by a timepiece not what we might hear or, indeed, not hear. I would like fewer subjects on the agenda which might well mean more meetings. Cramming an agenda means we don’t necessarily get to the heart of a subject and who knows what might slip through. The main subjects this time are the pandemic; special educational needs and/or disabilities (SEND); and cycle parking.
The most important topic is the council’s response to the pandemic. Reading the officer’s report reminded us just how much happened during the crisis including the death of the Duke of Edinburgh, floods and fires, the Ukrainian resettlement scheme and the death of HM The Queen. Reviewing a crisis always throws up tensions, failings and criticisms but that’s the point: lessons to learn must be identified, listed and implemented. There isn’t a single councillor who experience the pandemic who doesn’t appreciate the constant hard work done, mostly behind the scenes, by officers throughout … and it’s not over yet.
The bike parking paper includes a plan to introduce dockless e-bikes and, I kid you not, e-scooters. Given Chiswick’s experience of the disastrous Mobike scheme that landed without warning, and the failures of the current providers of e-bikes which create obstacle courses for visually impaired people or anyone with walking difficulties, in a wheelchair or with a buggy to push, it would be irresponsible of us not to look at the entire paper, rather than the relatively uncontroversial subject of bike hangars though another attempt to purloin parking space hasn’t been missed by me.
The pre-meet became rather fractious when I resisted the guidance that, as the committee had originally only wanted to ask about the council’s policy for bike parking, I couldn’t ask questions about e-bikes or e-scooters. It became tricky again when I noted that I had raised some of the points in our SEND provision, about which Ofsted found “significant areas of weakness”, and been met with defensiveness. I am concerned that this defensiveness is rooted in the council’s culture. We saw it in Cllr Rajawat’s non-apology for calling Chiswick a backwater and it often crops up. It doesn’t indicate a supportive corporate culture.
Gunnersbury Park events and a failed licensing process
The eight of us take it in turns to host the weekly Chiswick surgery. Cllrs Ranjit Gill, Ron Mushiso and I provide an additional surgery, monthly, in the Gunnersbury part of the ward. Held on the first Saturday of the month, it’s usually a group session in an area with a very strong sense of togetherness and community.
There was one principal top of conversation this time: Gunnersbury Park events – the noise levels, especially the booming and vibrating base, and the bullish approach of the park management team at its event last weekend launching this year’s programme including up to eight festivals in August organised by Festival Republic. Four have been booked so far: NDubz; Kygo plus MK, Sofi Tukker and Frank Walker; Joji; Boy Genius.
Last year, a Chiswick resident with a background in organising music festivals provided extremely helpful information and guidance on how sound travels, including the impact on noise of weather and temperature, and what could be done to mitigate and minimise the impact on residents. I included his report in my report which went to Hounslow’s licensing department and Gunnersbury Park’s management team. The park team has employed an acoustics consultant to advise on lessening the impact.
Residents aren’t persuaded by the information given at the festival launch event on Saturday, 25 February having had assurances before that amounted to nothing. I couldn’t attend as I had tested positive for Covid the day before. However, I will be meeting Hounslow’s licensing team in the next week or so to discuss last year’s report and explain the near-anger that so many residents feel about the dominance of festivals during summer, with set-up and de-rig adding weeks of restrictions for locals, and the huge amount of space they take up in the park – no-one believes it is only nine per cent.
Inconsistency in planning applications
The other subject that arose at the Gunnersbury surgery, by residents unconnected with the group I’d met the day before on the same subject, is the inconsistency residents experience and see around them in the way planning applications are dealt with. The Gunnersbury Park Garden Estate (GPGE) is in a conservation area with Article 4 Directions. But it seems some can do what others can’t; that many feel strongly about conserving character and characteristics and the precedents set by feeble enforcement; and that the planning and enforcement teams are out of tune with the strength of feeling there is about not letting owners get away with it.
Suicide and Turnham Green tube station
It’s impossible not to be moved by the news – far too often – of a death on the tube tracks in the heart of Chiswick. I fear another every time I hear a helicopter hovering nearby, knowing its possible meaning. Residents want something to be done whether slowing speeds or installing screens such as are on the Jubilee Line. I remember, decades ago, Samaritans posters on the platforms encouraging people to talk about their darkest feelings, to get them through their despair, and more recently the Small Talk Saves Lives campaign about how a neutral comment with a stranger on a station platform can interrupt their thoughts and help turn their attention towards getting support.
Samaritans works with Network Rail and TfL to help reduce suicides and to support staff who might experience a suicide on the rail and tube network, but it’s a long time since I’ve seen anything directed at people who live near or use Turnham Green tube station. So I contacted the director of the Ealing, Hammersmith and Hounslow branch of Samaritans and our GLA member Nicholas Rogers who is on the GLA transport committee (and a career railway worker). Ealing Samaritans had already been in touch with Turnham Green station staff and will now meet Nick and Chiswick councillors to consider what might be done locally to raise awareness of Samaritans and the support there is for people who might be at risk of suicide. You can ring Samaritans free, email, write a letter and, in some branches such as Central London, drop in. Please talk.
Coming up next week …
In addition to the overview and scrutiny meeting, I will be attending the licensing panel hearing for Food St, an application for a fourth market in Chiswick for which the now published papers reveal facts about the impact of markets on local business. I worked with local café/restaurant businesses to organise two meetings with the applicant. One trader has provided a useful list of forms of symbiosis to illustrate the risks to existing food businesses of having a food market:
Commensalism: where one species benefits while the other is unaffected
Mutualism: both species benefit
Parasitism: one species benefits while one is harmed
Competition: neither benefits
Predation: one species benefits while the other dies
Neutralism: both species unaffected
Cllr Joanna Biddolph
joanna.biddolph@hounslow.gov.uk
07976 703446
DATES FOR YOUR DIARY
Tuesday, 7th March at 2.30pm: Licensing Panel
Tuesday, 14th March at 7:00pm: Chiswick Area Forum
Tuesday, 28 th March at 7:00pm: Cabinet
CONSERVATIVE COUNCILLOR SURGERIES
Chiswick: Every Saturday from 9.30am to 10.30am at Chiswick Library (the eight Conservative councillors take this surgery in turn).
Gunnersbury: First Saturday of the month from 10am to 11am at The Gunnersbury Triangle Club, Triangle Way, off The Ridgeway, W3 8LU (at least one of the Chiswick Gunnersbury ward councillors takes this surgery).
CONSERVATIVE COUNCILLORS and CONTACTS
Chiswick Gunnersbury (was Turnham Green) ward
Cllr Joanna Biddolph joanna.biddolph@hounslow.gov.uk 07976 703446
Cllr Ranjit Gill ranjit.gill@hounslow.gov.uk 07976 702956
Cllr Ron Mushiso ron.mushiso@hounslow.gov.uk 07976 702887
Chiswick Homefields ward
Cllr Jack Emsley jack.emsley@hounslow.gov.uk 07977 396017
Cllr Gerald McGregor gerald.mcgregor@hounslow.gov.uk 07866 784821
Cllr John Todd john.todd@hounslow.gov.uk 07866 784651
Chiswick Riverside ward
Cllr Peter Thompson peter.thompson@hounslow.gov.uk 07977 395810
Cllr Gabriella Giles gabriella.giles@hounslow.gov.uk 07966 270823
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