WITH the lurching into near bankruptcy and a controversial budget meeting due on March 3, the travails of Haringey Council in north London tell a sorry tale of our country’s 21st-century decline brought about by the folly of elite politicians.
 
Haringey Council, like many local authorities after a decade and a half of austerity, is teetering on the brink of financial collapse. 

The mainstream narrative on this will swing from Labour’s perspective of its dire inheritance of 15 years of Tory misrule and the consequences of years of cuts and the subsequent decay that has followed, to the right-wing media’s usual reporting of a failure of Labour local authorities to manage their household budgets.
 
There’s no denying the economic and social vandalism that austerity has visited on the UK has decimated public services, turbo charged income and wealth inequality and almost wrecked the economy.
 
However, there’s another angle to this story which will of course be ignored by the mainstream media and political analysts. 

Haringey Council provides a view, in microcosm, of the plague that has infected British economic and social policy for the past 40-plus years and two policies in particular showcase this.
 
The council for nearly a decade froze council tax. This was sold as a progressive policy protecting the poorest residents from a regressive tax as the Tory-Lib Dem coalition had stripped away national subsidies for poorer households. 

However, all this policy did was undermine the council’s overall fiscal position and ensured the continued violation of desperately needed public services for the borough’s poorest communities.
 
The second policy was the proposed privatisation of the council’s property assets including all of its council housing through a joint venture between the council and a private developer. 

The Haringey Development Vehicle (HDV) took the model of big city regeneration/gentrification schemes and turbo charged them.
 
The HDV was defeated by a campaign that united forces in a coalition drawn from trade unionists, civil society campaigners, socialists within the Labour Party and council house tenants.
 
But the damage wrought on the council’s services by this scheme is evident in Haringey’s current position teetering on the brink of insolvency. 

The HDV saw years of neglect of the council’s housing stock as the mass privatisation loomed. 

The council, since 2018, has had to deal with the consequences of a policy that was effectively OK with the managed decline of basic housing management and maintenance to a level bordering on abrogation of duty.
 
Even Dame Shirley Porter, former leader of Westminster Council, who famously used local housing policy to instigate a programme of gerrymandering in the north of the borough in the 1980s and ‘90s, wouldn’t have had the audacity to come up with a scheme like the HDV. 

One of the architects of the HDV is now the MP for Sedgefield, Blair’s old constituency. How poignant!
 
This story has huge lessons for the country and the Labour Party in particular. We know Keir Starmer and Rachel Reeves have agreed a deal for private finance to invest and ultimately own new infrastructure developments. 

This will be a short-term fix that will produce a disastrous legacy long term for the country and will be paid for by working-class people, their children and future generations.
 
We have a choice within our communities and across our country. We can submit to this agenda of profits over people in all walks of public life, the consequences of which we see exposed in Haringey and across the nation.
 
Or we can fight for a future that has hope, places addressing economic inequality, averting the worst consequences of the climate crisis, shifting the blame from migration and fuelling racism as a scapegoat for economic vandalism of the type we’ve seen in Haringey and across Britain over the past decades under Labour and Tory governments and build a better future for this country.
 
In order to do so we need a new political vision and a vehicle that challenges the mainstream narrative and unites people across regions, class, religion, gender and race to fight for a better future.
 
Cllr Mark Blake is a member of the Independent Socialist Group on Haringey Council and is associated with the national independent councillors’ network.