• I CONCUR with Oliver Cooper, the Camden Council Tory group leader, who said his party would abstain from matters that did not relate to council powers at the November 12 meeting.

This was, in reality, an attempt to create 17.4million disenfran­chised voters across the UK who had already voted to leave the EU, the customs union and the single market.

This would have disgruntled 52 per cent of the electorate, leaving them with the feeling that the political classes do not really represent them.

Labour councillors’ hypocrisy defies belief. The very same Labour-led Camden has over the years ducked and dived to avoid giving local people a vote on issues that affect them directly.

Indeed when local people pushed for a vote in 2003 and the result contradicted Labour’s agenda, they ignored the result and went ahead with their own plans anyway. I refer to the covert “selling off” of council housing.

They tried this without consulting council tenants whose homes they would have privatised and it would have meant the destruction of council housing in Camden as we know it.

Tenants’ homes would have been controlled by an arms-length management organisation (Almo) and run by a private financial consortium.

Fortunately in 2003 the tenants’ group Defend Council Housing forced a judicial review on this mass transfer of council housing until the tenants were able to vote on the matter. At that time Labour was dead against the idea of a local “people’s vote”.

They spent thousands of pounds of council taxpayers’ money on glossy brochures to dazzle tenants with the benefits of their proposals. There would be wonderful PFI-installed new bathrooms and kitchens in their flats and PFI cladding on the exterior of their blocks of flats.

Labour under Tony Blair and Gordon Brown told the council that unless they agreed to private finance carrying out the refurbishments, there would be no money from the government to refurbish the homes.

Luckily the tenants saw through the hype and voted against the mass transfer to the Almo and private finance refurbishment. But even after the tenants won the vote Labour, in their arrogance, disregarded the will of the local “people’s vote” for tenants on the Chalcots estate.

For five years they disrupted our lives by giving Rydon – the company that clad the Grenfell Tower – free rein on our estate. Our persistent calls to check the standard of works were ignored.

So now the Labour council­lors’ thumping their chests and bleating that they have people’s interests at heart in trying to force a people’s vote for a second referendum is utter hypocrisy.

For years they tried to deny people a vote on local issues, then tried to jeopardise any vote local people managed to obtain through the courts.

FIONA CUSSEN
NW3