Youth show how to make a Cabinet

East London News:  Last month, ELN reported that anyone attending a Cabinet meeting ran a serious risk of being bored to death and we implored someone to save us from this fate.  Someone must have been listening, because the Cabinet on 4th April was a much more lively affair.  The improvement came not from the politicians, but from the public, inspired to attend by the Cabinet debate on the Youth Service.

First to turn up was a lively crowd of Bangladeshi boys and young men with two psychedelic hand-painted sheets proclaiming “Bring the Youth Service In House” and “Thank U Mayor!”  They began chanting out their banner slogans and clearly have careers in soft furnishing design ahead of them.

The chanting had the desired effect and lured the Mayor, Cllr Alibor Choudhury and Cllr Oli Rahman out of the Town Hall building to chat with the demonstrators.

Next to arrive was a lonely woman who told ELN “Stella” had asked her to come because “they” were abolishing LAP 8.  Stella had told her to bring some young people with her, but she had not been able to because it was the holidays and the children weren’t in school so she didn’t know where to find them.  Fortunately, the second demonstration turned up at that point, and ELN’s acquaintance was able to join her friends.

The second demonstration was led by adults, some of whom seemed to be youth workers, and included some young people.  They had brought letters painted on small pieces of card – and clearly lost in the home-made visual aids competition.  They also seemed rather disconcerted to see the first demonstration, to the point that they never quite seemed to assemble their letters beyond the word “KEEP”.  They had brought a megaphone with them, and a plastic contraption which looked like Chrisp Street Market’s best attempt to retail a vuvuzela for under a pound, so they should have been able to win the “who can make the most noise?” competition.  The man with the megaphone led his

posse in a rousing refrain of “Keep it local!” and the vuvuzela substitute was sounded.

The audio gauntlet thus having been thrown down, Demo 1 responded.  They began a new chant “Steve the Thief, £100k”, which appeared to be a reference to the annual salary of Steve Stride, Chief Executive of Poplar HARCA (one of the organisations which has had a contract to deliver youth services).

You can judge for yourself which set of demonstrators succeeded in making the most noise from the video on our home page.

All this noise outside the Town Hall had attracted the attention of not only the Mayor and his Cabinet members, but also the Old Bill, who soon arrived in a large van.  With an air of relief at finding that this was not yet a full blown Tower Hamlets Spring but merely a sunny and slightly blustery April afternoon, officers demarcated the pavement and told everyone not to stand in the road or get in the way of Council workers going home.

Inside the Town Hall, the Man from the Met and Council officers were planning Advanced Crowd Control to deal with the initial wave of demonstrators who had had the foresight to ask for tickets to the public gallery (well, the 21 office chairs jammed up against the far wall) when they arrived.  At the appointed hour, the boys and young men duly entered the building.  They lined up in an orderly manner, and one of their number efficiently signed them in as they filed past and handed in their drinks bottles.  Up in Committee Room 1 they sat, listened and applauded quietly at the good bits, all as if they were at the final practical of their NVQ Level 3 in Good Behaviour and steadfastly refusing to resemble the stereotype hooligans the gatekeepers had assumed they would be.

Their presence quite changed the feel of the meeting.  The Mayor welcomed the young public to the meeting and both he and other councillors spoke clearly about the issues, as if mindful that they were addressing an audience rather than each other.  Even the officers seemed affected and many (though not all) abandoned Officerspeke and talked in English.

The boys done good.  We hope they went home feeling that they had made a difference, because make a difference they did.  We hope they come back.  And we hope that next time their sisters will come too.