On Friday afternoon, it was my good fortune to meet my neighbour Councillor Mark Bennett (he literally lives in the building next to mine!). He’s a really good guy to chat to, and, made sure he had plenty of time go over things with me, so much in fact that we were able to cover some other areas of concern I had about the community that aren’t relevant to this site.
He’s genuinely excited about this campaign - he’s a proper Streathamite and is interested in anything that can be done to improve our community.
I asked him if he was willing to make any concrete commitments to this campaign, and, he offered the following promises. He’ll provide what ongoing support and advice he can, he will advocate strongly on our behalf within the council and, he’ll arrange for questions to be asked of the appropriate authorities as and when they are needed. Certainly when we need questions asked (particularly of TFL who seem to be a fairly close-lipped institution) he’ll be one of the first people we approach.
We followed on from my discussions with Chuka the previous day, particularly with respect to how to run an offline campaign. He urged a strong focus on petitions and canvassing. Unfortunately, our campaign does not yet have the resources for the latter, but we are exploring ways to do the former.
He’s going to dig through some of his old documents and try and find some of the old materials and petitions he had from when he was part of the charge to bring trams through Streatham.
He’s going to explore giving us some publicity in “Lambeth Life”, Lambeth council’s regular newspaper publication, and, he’s drawn my attention to a couple of other local publications who may be willing to run an article or two on our behalf. I’m in the process of contacting them now.
There was one other publicity idea I shared with him, one that I am quite excited about as it happens, but it would need council support. He’s indicated he’s onboard and will be seeing if he can arrange a modicum of council assistance to get it underway. I won’t say any more, because he’ll need to discuss it with his colleagues before it can go any further - suffice to say, if he succeeds, you’ll be hard pressed to avoid hearing about this campaign if you live in the area.
One particularly good idea he shared was to send an open letter to all candidates in the next Mayoral election, trying to extract commitments from them while they are trying to be elected to office. We’ve mulled this over a bit, and have decided that it will be something we’ll definitely do, but want to wait until a) it is closer to the election and b) this campaign is more widely known.
Overall, it was a tremendously valid use of my time, and, I hope he shares the sentiment.
As I said at the beginning, he’s a tremendously easy guy to talk to, and, I understand he runs regular surgeries where one can raise their concerns or seek his counsel. If you have something council related you’d like to discuss, I’d strongly recommend you go and see him.
His website can be found at http://markbennettlabour.wordpress.com/ or you can get his contact details and surgery dates and locations from here http://www.lambeth.gov.uk/moderngov/mgUserInfo.aspx?UID=153.
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