BNP councillors oppose money for new housing

Sonia Gable | Saturday, 13 January 2007 Source: Searchlight

The BNP councillors in Barking and Dagenham always witter on about wanting more council housing for local people yet when it came to a vote, they betrayed their electors and opposed a call for government money to build council homes.

The BNP had proposed a motion to the council's assembly demanding that council homes go only to people who were born in the borough or have lived there for ten years. Brushing off the inconvenient fact, raised in the debate, that hardly anyone has been born in the borough since the last maternity unit closed in 1993, Barnbrook was forced to agree that Muslim Kosovo Albanian refugees who had lived there since the early 1990s would be entitled to council homes under his policy.

Labour councillors, more interested in genuinely increasing the supply of council housing than in making racist points about "local people", proposed an amendment to the motion calling for an end to the government policy of giving money for new social housing only to housing associations and registered social landlords, and for it to go to councils instead.

The BNP councillors opposed the amendment – that is they voted against councils being able to build new council homes. Remember that when they next put out a leaflet complaining about council housing policy.

The BNP councillors also received short shrift over their other racist motions to the assembly meeting on 6 December and showed their ignorance of local governance into the bargain. Motions to ban halal meat in schools and to require pupils to sing the National Anthem in school assemblies were rejected after Jeanne Alexander, the borough's executive councillor for children's services, pointed out, "The headteacher and the governing body run the school. The councillors can't decide. It is down to the headteacher and the governing body."