Nicholas Botterill

Meant to publish this at the beginning of the year, but forget to queue it over Christmas.

It's a report from a December 2008 Hammersmith and Fulham council cabinet meeting where local spoke against council plans to move the council contact centre to Rochdale.

Thought it might be a timely reminder of the realities of Hammersmith and Fulham council's much-vaunted council tax cuts: 

We go to a mid-sized meeting room at Hammersmith and Fulham Town Hall, where a group of local people and council contact centre staff sit before the cocky, elitist and - in the case of councillor Lucy Ivimy, racist - Tory cabinet, to beg to keep the council's contact centre in Hammersmith, and to keep their jobs.

The locals have exactly five minutes to talk the council out of its plans to move its local contact centre to Rochdale. Those plans include making everyone who currently works in the contact centre redundant, and doubtless form a crucial part of the council's ongoing campaign to move moneyless people who use and provide public services out of Hammersmith, and rich people who don't need public services in, a la Wandsworth and Westminster, etc. 

The local people in the room aren't talking about that at the moment, though, because they're being distracted by an unexpected, if revealing, side act. The council's deputy leader - one Nicholas Botterill, who sits alongside council leader Stephen Greenhalgh - is pulling faces and laughing at the local people who've turned up to address the cabinet. It's an extraordinary display, and not a heartening one. Botterill is giggling at the the locals and their plight and screwing his little rat face up at them, presumably for the benefit of Tory sympathisers in the audience. Krissy O'Hagan - the locals' spokesperson, and contact centre union rep - is reading, nervously, a speech in favour of keeping the contact centre in Hammersmith, and public services generally, and Botterill is wrinkling his face up and laughing at her.

He makes such an ass of himself that council leader Stephen Greenhalgh is forced to tell him to shut up.

'No! No! Don't!' Greenhalgh hisses in full view of all. Greenhalgh has grasped that it's no longer the done thing to jeer publicly at low earners, but maybe the message hasn't trickled down to Botterill. Greenhalgh's cabinet has learned that mocking black people isn't on - a full year has passed since the earlier-mentioned cabinet member Lucy Ivimy revealed the H&F Tory hand on race with a remarkably bigoted commentary about Asian hygiene standards - but low earners with working class accents are still fair game.