The Waltham Forest Guardian has it that discussion of the controversial plans for a drug treatment centre in the former St James Street Library has been shelved.
The council's overview and scrutiny committee were to discuss the plans at a meeting tonight in advance of next week's cabinet.
The Guardian reports that as the item has been removed from the agenda (on the feeble excuse that the relevant report was not prepared in time) there will be no discussion. Nothing could be further from the truth. There will be a fair bit to discuss in the tiny clique and their pals which runs the slightly bigger clique which makes up the Labour 6 tenths of the cabinet of 10 which allegedly runs our fair borough.
What they won't be doing though is actually considering the merits of their cockamamy plan to put yet another drug treatment centre into the wrong place in one part of the borough while ignoring their duty to meet the needs of drug abusers elsewhere. Nor will they be discussing the impact on the four primary schools in the immediate vicinity or on the elderly and vulnerable people who live nearby in what is basically a residential area.
Instead, there will be some fine calculations being made as to whether Councillor Ali can be made to insult the intelligence of every voter in this part of the borough and back a project he says he does not in the least believe in. Only raw political thuggery can achieve this, but that is not to say it will not be applied to him.
Is Robbins' ruling clique's inability to face hard facts and change a bad decision, in any way news? Anyone who has walked past the EMD cinema over the years or the arcade site, will recognise the pattern of indecision, spinning of false hopes and then neglect caused by people in his party who simply can't ever admit that they got it wrong. So they are putting a hard decision off yet again while hoping it will go away. It won't.
It is sad to have to say this of a once great political party, which in many ways had some of its foundations in Walthamstow, but it seems one of the few things the local Labour party are good at organising these days is the sticking of knives in each others backs.