Border patrol: drugs, slugs and the Garden of Enid
After years spent ignoring the drug dealing problem on Blackbird Leys there are signs that New Labour is now trying to appropriate the issue for itself. At a recent area committee meeting Labour councillor Val Smith echoed the words of Leys Independent, saying that we need to ‘reclaim the estate’ from the drug dealers.
Residents will no doubt be pleased to see that the Labour councillors finally feel able to talk about the issue. Predictably, this new-found concern doesn’t yet extend to actually doing anything. Despite promises from Val Smith in May that money was available to fix the street lights for the Starwort Path flats, where crack dealers are known to operate under the cover of darkness, the lights are still out over five months later.
So if New Labour aren’t actually going to go so far as to support residents in the fight against the dealers then why are they suddenly trying to appear interested? One clue was offered by a headline in the Oxford Mail on 29 October, ‘Estate park will get makeover to deter dealers’, a reference to plans for a community garden in Gillians Park.
The article features Enid Foster, acting secretary of the Leys Residents Association, who says, ‘It seems an ideal opportunity to reclaim Gillians Park from the drug dealers,’ once again borrowing the language of the IWCA.
Interestingly, the community garden was proposed by the LRA months ago, and was entirely unrelated to the drugs issue. In fact the IWCA offered to dig the garden itself to save the cost of doing it commercially.
So it’s a bit strange that the Oxford Mail should suddenly present the scheme as part and parcel of a counter-offensive against drug dealing in Gillians Park. Particularly as the IWCA press release about crack dealers operating outside the house of cabinet minister Andrew Smith and his wife Val (‘What’s the crack Mr Smith?’, Leys Independent, issue 11) was studiously ignored by the Mail on the grounds that it was ‘political’.
One explanation for this U-turn might lie in Enid Foster’s involvement with the Labour Party. Add to this the tip-off from one member of the Residents Association—that New Labour actually has Ms Foster in mind as their candidate to stand against the IWCA in the Northfield Brook ward—and a plausible scenario starts to emerge:
New Labour, with the assistance of the Oxford Mail (no friend of the IWCA), is setting up Enid Foster as a rival spokesperson on the drugs issue in an attempt to restore their tattered reputation in this area.
A conspiracy too far? Perhaps, but time will tell.
Leys Independent, issue 16, December 2002
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