Probably because like most areas of London it’s been swamped by uneducated, non-English speaking, un-skilled migrants and their many kids.
No?

I was getting quite excited. It was all sounding so convincing and going so well until:

• Check the proliferation of fast food outlets near schools

What on earth has that got to do with equality and is there any evidence of any such proliferation near schools?

And you wonder why people don’t take these initiatives seriously. How about a 5 or 10 point plan featuring things that everyone can support? Just an idea.

Fast food outlets?
I guess you only mean the evil American Burger King and McDonalds and the evil British fish and chip shops…
And not the massively increased in just a few years Middle Eastern/Asian kebab/curry takeaways (All genuine Halal folks) that have swamped our cities recently?

I guess they are good fast food, yes? The fast food of peace?

Good work! Ignore the weirdo @3, I presume he’s incapable of forming any thought that doesn’t involve whinging about brown people.

@2 – that’s the now obligatory genuflection to the Foodie Left and animal rights lobbyists, Ivan – this is Islington!

4 – the comment was undoubtedly racially motivated but he probably does have a point – would the closing down of food outlets mean the closing down of kebab shops etc? Or has the originally author just got an image of an evil yellow M in his head?

Frankly I don’t think it’s any of his business whether people CHOOSE to buy a kebab or burger.

@OP, Andy Hull:

This report would be more compelling, more sellable, if you concentrated on the first few arguments. Those arguments are acceptable to many people on the basis of respect, social order, pragmatism etc as well as fairness. They are winnable arguments.

Padding out the list with proposals that generate heated but unproductive debate distracts from the worthy stuff.

“Check the proliferation of fast food outlets near schools”

This has been given a kicking already and deserves it. Are your intentions to tackle poverty or to manage people? Do fast food outlets proliferate around schools, or around where fast food purchasers congregate?

“Make school sports facilities available to the local community to use”

I have no idea how this proposal relates to equality or poverty. The proposal has featured in council campaigns for at least 30 years and if there are any decent case studies for it, copy them. On paper, it seems like common sense so we have to assume that implementation is more difficult than it sounds. Where do the difficulties arise?

@ Richard

“the comment was undoubtedly racially motivated but he probably does have a point – would the closing down of food outlets mean the closing down of kebab shops etc? Or has the originally author just got an image of an evil yellow M in his head? ”

As he’s talking specifically about fast food near schools, I would guess that it would include all fast food shops, not just multinationals. I might be wrong.

“Frankly I don’t think it’s any of his business whether people CHOOSE to buy a kebab or burger”

Agreed – it’s annoyingly authoritarian and it also muddies an otherwise good initiative. But between Andy Hull, evidently a decent guy with whom I happen to disagree vis-a-vis local fast food distribution, and When Horses Attack, evidently a bigoted pillock, I know who I’m backing.

Well – one interpretation of progress to date would be:

- a load of interfering committees telling people what to do
- forcing people out of their homes because you’ve decided they can live somewhere smaller
- teaching kids to read – FFS what is a school for?
- and the classic equality – reduce the salary of the CEO which makes everyone more equal. Why did you pay them that before?

Dreadful.

If left-wing councils are still drawing up makework schemes for bureaucratic busybodies like this, then the cuts clearly haven’t been deep enough. Hope Eric Pickles reads this OP and lops a million or two more off Islington’s settlement next year.

Just stick to collecting rubbish, delivering meals on wheels, keeping kids safe from drunken, abusive stepdads….oh…. and fill in the potholes in the roads. That’s what councils are for.

If you want to campaign for equality – stand for Parliament.

Come on. Addressing health inequality is clearly linked with addressing diets and getting people to exercise – because quite frankly we are a fat country, and the poorest suffer more of the consequences of that than the better off.

The best parts of the above though in my opinion are the increases through the living wage the pay for the lowest paid council workers and including the outsourced contracted staff in that – combined with slashing the pay of those at the very top. No one can say there isn’t room for meritocracy in a system that allows 10-fold pay differences – so let’s have that cap!

Glad to see my home council of Blackpool taking up some of the ideas (the slashing chief exec pay etc has already been done). I suspect some of the other ideas will be different. I’ve got my fingers crossed for free school meals. We have 9th worst child poverty and 6th worst overall deprivation after 4 years of Tory rule here. The new Labour council have a lot to sort out!

If the intention is to prevent schoolkids from having chips for lunch, maybe they could make the school dinners tasty, rather than going for a policy based on compulsion.

@ 12 Phil Hunt

We’re wandering far off the original course here… but when you say “make school lunches tasty”, do you mean at the expense of health? Cos you could, y’know, stop kids from going off to town to buy chips by giving them cheaper chips at school, but that would kind of defeat the object.

Kids need a certain amount of compulsion. Without it they wouldn’t be in school in the first place.