SMALL PEOPLE: BIG VICTORY
For one of those brief periods before the rain starts again, the sun is shining this morning. It’s quiet here at the desk, all but for an insistent, buzzing fly which keeps dive-bombing like a Stuka in my direction. But I’ll deal with the nasty little devil as soon as I’ve finished writing this. Despite the rigours of age and health, some mornings are better than others, and this is one of them.
I try and keep domestic stuff away from this blog, but last night was something approaching the almost successful culmination of a local campaign to have the 4.5 acre derelict hospital on our doorstep demolished. 14 years of residents’ meetings, countless letters in the local press, demonstrations, petitions, radio and TV appearances, all these seemed to be of no avail. Yet at the last local elections, the balance of power on Mansfield District Council shifted from the Independents (who I always regard as closet Tories) to Labour. In a defunct mining town like Mansfield, we can forget the Conservatives, who have a snowball’s chance in hell of running anything. At least we have that fact going for us. The Labour Party of today is a disgrace to its roots, and since the organisation dumped Clause 4 from its manifesto, for myself and thousands of other former supporters, there was nowhere to go to place a socialist vote. I resigned from the Labour Party when Neil Kinnock refused to visit a Miners’ Picket Line during the strike.
The original version of Clause IV, drafted by Sidney Webb (left) in November 1917 and adopted by the party in 1918, read, in part 4:
To secure for the workers by hand or by brain the full fruits of their industry and the most equitable distribution thereof that may be possible upon the basis of the common ownership of the means of production, distribution and exchange, and the best obtainable system of popular administration and control of each industry or service.
Those were the days .... Following its transition from ‘Labour’ to the Coca Cola /MacDonald’s-flavoured consumer package called ‘New’ Labour, it has been incurably infected by the Blair virus, and whatever pale beacon of socialism once flickered there has been long extinguished. Yet at a grass roots level, there are still councillors who carry a dim candle for what Labour used to be about. Last night was a good example.
The Mansfield General Hospital closed its doors in 1992 and was bought from the local health authority for the staggeringly low price of £230,000 by a Nottingham ‘entrepreneur’ called Mumtaz Hussein Adam. His pipe dream has always been to develop the ramshackle collection of conflicting architecture into something he thinks will be luxury ‘executive’ apartments. Fine for Liverpool’s Albert Dock or Canary Wharf. Sadly, there is no Millionaire’s Row in Mansfield. The last attempt at ‘luxury apartments’ – the old shoe factory conversion on Stockwell Gate, was abandoned only weeks from completion when the bank refused to lend the developer any further money. It now stands like a ditched dream wrapped in fluttering polythene. Adam, the hospital owner, has had ample opportunity to sell the site on to bona fide developers, yet his massive asking price (which at one time reached the £6 million region) has always killed the deal with his procrastination. As the buildings fell into rapidly advancing decay, each year he has had everything he wanted from the Council; planning permissions, political support, and his annual statement that ‘the first apartment will be built by Christmas’ has been as empty as the site’s crumbling old operating theatre. As Chairman of the West Hill Residents’ Association, I have often been accused of standing in the way of his plans. Yet the ‘plans’ don’t really exist; they appear to be the fantasy of a modern-day Micawber who always believes that ‘something will turn up’. It would appear that his property’s golden necklace has now been transformed into an albatross.
Last night Mansfield District Council, urged by the Labour Group Leader, lawyer Martin Lee (I find it curious that a solicitor should lead the local labour party … but then I remember what the Blairs once did for a living…) voted unanimously on a motion to look into both the possibility of a Compulsory Purchase Order to wrest the site from Adam’s grip, or, failing that, to raise funds to buy it outright and take the site into council ownership. There was only one abstention. Well, it’s hardly the Bolshevik Revolution, but it does give an old lefty the heart to carry on. Maybe the campaigning, the letter-writing, the demonstrations, the leafleting, the stalls in the market, the arguments – perhaps all this might have been worth it after all.
Of course, we’re still in the foothills, and although the mountains don’t seem as high as they did, we could still be adding another 5 years to the 20 years of dereliction we’ve had to put up with. Yet last night was exhilarating and we celebrated in Boothy’s Club, a wonderful old hostelry on our doorstep which at one time was the hub of old Labour. It was a 4-pint event, but when (or if) the bulldozers finally arrive, we shall drain the barrels. Since I started to write this, it's raining again. Still, never mind. Onwards and upwards!
