Oh boy! Next door’s MP for Kensington was ousted by Labour – and this in a previously staunch Tory area. Sadly Victoria Borwick (previous Conservative MP) suffered from Tory arrogance, and voters turned to a hard-working local, Emma Dent Coad (Labour), overturning a 7,000+ majority by an exciting 20 votes!
It seems that the Conservatives assumed everyone was interested in Brexit, whereas the NHS was uppermost in most people’s minds here. The five major cancer hospitals in the area are riddled with ‘private’ companies that are creaming off NHS funding, and short changing patients. By all means get in local expertise supplied by Harley Street and probably best private hospitals in UK, but don’t expect to get this on the cheap – as happens now and lets patients down. The Council, which is almost totally Conservative, has knocked cancer off the Healthwatch list of priorities, and after the horrendous fire in Grenfell Tower high rise, has even more questions to answer.
KCTMO (Tenant Management Association), who ignored residents pointing out that it needed a disaster to get something done about concerns, currently shows a photo of a balloon-waving partying tenant as a heading for its home page.
As a Borough, Kensington and Chelsea are unique; rich and very poor live next door to each other and get on well. In the days when you did good with your money rather than add another car or yacht to your possessions, Victorian millionaires realised the poor needed housing, and built huge Estates for them in Chelsea. Developers, encouraged by the Council, are now moving in to ‘gentrify’ these, and they will be lost forever to descendants of those for whom they were intended. Let’s hope RBKC Council think – take back the flats they have shamefully given over to private developers, and use them to house the homeless from Grenfell Tower. At least this way dis-placed residents won’t have to move away from friends and family in the borough.
You get what you pay for – and if you live in Kensington and Chelsea and have money, you can buy excellent cancer care. But if you rely on the NHS, you suffer today what is going to be rolled out across the UK tomorrow.
P.S. Good heavens – the KCTMO has finally removed their offensive photo !