Council leader Claire Kober has quit. Rightwingers claim it’s a Momentum plot,but this was all about residents fighting to save their homesThe day Claire Kober quit as head of Haringey council in north London, I remembered a car ride from long ago. It was 2016, or just after Christmas,and I was in a Fiesta, being driven around by a couple from Tottenham. We shared sepia-tinted memories – their favourite park, or the market where my mum used to shop – and then they pointed out the vast swaths that Kober’s team wanted to knock down. The estates where thousands of families lived,small businesses trading for generations, the library … all were going to be thrown into a £2bn private fund, and the Haringey Development Vehicle (HDV),which would be owned jointly with the developer Lendlease. Then they would be flattened.
That couple had no big organisation, no grand procedure – just a determination to pause the bulldozing of their neighbourhood. They had nothing in common with the so-called militants described this week on the BBC and in the papers as having toppled Kober. Momentum? Not members. Bullying? These retirees believed they were going to lose. But then no one I own met in the year I’ve been writing here about Haringey fits the nonsense that’s been spewed about them in the past few weeks.
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Source: guardian.co.uk