At 239 High Street, Perfect Fried Chicken is one of those fast food shops which the leader of our local council has scapegoated in the Waltham Forest Guardian. He apparently wishes to blame them for many, if not all, the ills of the local neighbourhood. Given the chance, Councilor Loakes would like to shut it down, lest in four years time some person from abroad who has decided to visit London for the Olympics should stray into the High Street, and see that people here like to eat fried chicken among all the myriad other cuisines on offer in Walthamstow. They will apparently say 'tut tut' and head straight off to Heathrow in disgust, muttering how the Olympics have not been so ruined since Hitler made everyone give him a stiff-armed salute back in 1936. Our Olympics will, of course be the most politically correct Olympics, ever, despite protests to the contrary.

Its a pity that our current council has lost the plot and come to have such a downer on this and businesses like it, because as far as I can see the people inside it are just trying to earn an honest living. What they do is simple: they fry up some chicken in a coating and sell it to the public with some chips. Soft drinks are 50p. People like this food. I don't, but when I visited they had plenty of satisfied customers eating in.

This particular business is not even trading as a full-on take-away at the moment. They are under a new management and are not currently doing take-away over the phone. They do not even have a phone number yet or have their take-away menu printed up.

So are they so bad? Should Councilor Loakes have picked on businesses like theirs, posing with a photo by which it is implied that the sale of these products are part of the cause of the breakdown of social cohesion and harmony which inflicts parts of our borough at the moment? I do not think so.

I do note that this business doesn't sell the alcohol or drugs that fuel the anti-social behaviour around the benches in the Town Square. These benches are some thirty yards from their shop, so if anything, they are victims not perpetrators. I also noticed they don't sell pirate dvds, smuggled cigarettes, or mug people. They just sell cheap food. (Chips are 70p for a small, £1 for a large portion).Is that so bad? Is shutting them down such a priority for a councilor whose leadership led to the 'loss' of £3.5million pounds from the education budget?

Yes, the litter is a bit annoying, but seeing as the street has to be swept up every day anyway because of the rubbish left by the market traders who are pitched on the doorstep of Perfect Fried Chicken, couldn't we cut them a little slack? Its not, after all, the people in Perfect Fried Chicken who fail to put the litter in the council's ill-placed bins: (Some of them are in places which I also would shy away from, given the dodgy folk lurking about nearby in this well-known crime hotspot). Its also not Perfect Fried Chicken's fault, or that of Mega Bite, down the road, (or Favorite Chicken and Ribs in St James's Street) that their customers, many of them at or just above school age, don't see an area that gives them a sense of pride in their surroundings, or have as strong a sense of social responsibility as Councilor Loakes would like. This is ironic as this should have been fostered by the education system Councilor Loakes has provided them with.

Between Super Grow Foods and Gul Enterprises.