Why is it that the default response of council officials faced with the impertinence of requests for information from the Hackney residents who pay their generous salaries is to go completely doggo? Ask about the surreptitious withdrawal of recycling waste collections from Hackney's housing estates? Response: silence. Ask about the long-overdue academy in the north-east of the borough just at the time that many families are desperate for good-quality secondary school places? Response: silence. Ask about the amounts of regeneration funding siphoned into the pockets of consultants, developers, bureaucrats and their friends? Response: silence.
Is it too much to say that this is part and parcel of the institutional contempt for public accountability that is provoking the G20 protests just down the road? Pity that, as so often in the past, this popular reaction looks like being hijacked by the ego-fuelled freaks and vandals noisily clamouring for their few seconds of media space. It masks a great deal of pent-up exasperation shared by thoroughly decent people with the culture of corporate arrogance and immunity that has blighted far too many lives for far too long.
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