by
Les May
LISTENING
to the news reports of the response by the different agencies one
might have expected to have taken action earlier to shut down the
Leicester
‘sweat
shops’
I had a strong sense of deja
vu;
I’ve heard it all before. I
saw it in my own town a few years ago when a ‘marked
register’,
a precaution against voter fraud, went missing, possibly stolen, from
a polling station. There
should have been a police investigation; there wasn’t. A candidate
who should have been informed that this had happened and wasn’t,
tried to pursue the matter and found nobody
would take responsibility. He described it as the ‘sloping
shoulders syndrome’.
I saw it again when a Rochdale
Labour
councillor, Faisal
Rana,
who had voted twice in the election failed to declare his interests
within the specified time. Council
officers wriggled and squirmed to avoid taking any action. Once
again nobody
would take responsibility. It
reached scandal proportions with
regard to the Grenfell
Tower
fire.
It
was Mr
Nobody
who was responsible yet again.
In
Leicester it not even true to say the existence of the sweat shops
and what was happening in the decrepit buildings
that housed them
was ‘an
open secret’;
it wasn’t even a secret! A
journalist had written an article for the Financial
Times
drawing attention to them. In January 2020
Tory MP Andrew
Bridgen
had
raised
serious concerns over the conditions in garment factories.
Nobody took notice.
The
agencies which
might
have been involved, HMRC
to check no one was fiddling the furlough scheme, the Health
and Safety Executive
that social distancing by workers was being enforces, the Fire
Service
that the decrepit buildings were not a fire risk, the Police
to
check
that no one was being forced to work in unsafe conditions against
their will, do
to some extent have the excuse that that they were no asked to
intervene by the body that has ultimate responsibility for what goes
on in Leicester, the local council.
It
seems Mr
Nobody
was responsible once again.
What
is perhaps most disturbing about this is that responsibility for
keeping the rate of transmission of the SarsCov2
virus which causes Covid19
disease is being placed in the hands of local councils. Will
Mr
Nobody
be responsible if they don’t do the job properly? Figures
released on Friday show that
Rochdale
where
I live has
149
cases which is an
infection rate of 68
per 100,000
of the population. (These
figures are based on data for the fortnight up to 12 July)
If
you actually look at the advice being given by RMBC
to bring down the rate of infection, limit visitors in your home to
two, wear a face mask in public and keep two metres apart from at all
times they are not really much
different from the
vague advice coming from Boris
Johnson et
al.
Where
is the guidance about work? About travel? About eating out? But
should I really expect better from a council which feels
it is acceptable that a councillor who admitted voting twice in the
same election should be appointed to a committee which deals with
planning applications?
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