COMMENT Say the opposite of the truth confidently enough, get enough likes, and you can pretend it’s real, no matter how absurd.
So it was this week at Wandsworth Council. On Monday, at a Cabinet meeting, Labour councillors mocked claims by the opposition that they were planning to saddle taxpayers with billions of pounds in debt. We’re debt free! they scoffed.
The next day, such was the merriment that the council put out a press release pointing to the fact that Wandsworth has the lowest debt levels in London.
And then on Wednesday, the very next day, the Finance Committee agreed to saddle Wandsworth residents – which means you, and likely your children – with billions of pounds of debt, far outstripping anything that has gone before.
The performance
The Monday Cabinet meeting was, as it always is, political theatre; without an audience. “I was really struck by the fact we don’t have any external debt,” noted Cabinet member Graeme Henderson. “But I have to say, that position is in marked contrast with a number of leaflets which the Conservatives circulate across the borough claiming that they are landing residents in billions of pounds of debt. I just wondered if you had any comment on that.”
Finance lead Angela Ireland swung at the softball: “The point is we have not saddled residents with the billions of pounds of debt which seem to be claimed in these leaflets.” Stirring stuff. Except the leaflets are right and Ireland’s own papers confirmed it 48 hours later: £1.1bn in debt likely rising to £2.5bn by the time it’s paid off.
How is this cognitive dissonance possible? It would appear Cabinet has persuaded itself that future rental income from unbuilt buildings mean that debt isn’t really debt. Tell that to Thurrock, Croydon and Woking councils who got into serious trouble for this exact kind of wishful thinking. Those councils and the lessons that should be learned from them are explicitly mentioned in the papers: a sign that council staff are already preparing for the worst?
Wandsworth council overspent by £40 million this year. It’s burning through reserves. It can’t balance the budget. The £1.1 billion borrowing plan isn’t visionary investment – it’s patching over policy failure.
Developers won’t touch Wandsworth because the council demands 45% affordable housing in new developments. Even Sadiq Khan acknowledges this is impossible, having reduced London’s target from 35% to 20%. When developers won’t build, the council borrows billions to build housing itself.
Wednesday’s Finance Committee confirmed the numbers. When Conservative councillor Aled Richards-Jones challenged the absence of lifetime cost figures, Finance Director Fenella Merry explained: “I intentionally didn’t put lifetime figures in because I didn’t think they represented what we were trying to communicate well.”
The figures in question? “Significant and scary,” according to Merry.
A senior officer admits deliberately excluding scary financial data from the committee meant to scrutinise it. Labour members said nothing. They voted to note the paper. They moved on.
What actually matters
While cabinet scored partisan points about leaflets, children in the Leader of the Council’s own ward live in fear. A child went missing twice in three months. Multi-agency safeguarding processes failed both times. The council promised to implement an independent review’s recommendations 15 months ago. They still haven’t.
Station platforms remain dangerously overcrowded three years after improvements were promised. Traffic junction fixes drift from “autumn” to “winter” while residents endure gridlock.
The council makes time for partisan theatre. But it doesn’t have time to implement safeguarding recommendations or fix dangerous platforms.
Some will defend this as normal politics. But when your own finance director admits intentionally withholding figures, someone on the scrutiny committee should ask why. When Cabinet dismisses warnings as false that are confirmed just hours later, someone should note the contradiction.
This matters because £1.1 billion in borrowing affects every resident. Because when you’re burning through reserves while taking on massive debt, someone should ask whether this is sustainable. Because the council has finite resources and finite political attention, and every hour spent on partisan theatre is an hour not spent fixing things that desperately need fixing.
Democracy doesn’t die with a bang. It dies with press releases issued between denials and admissions, with scrutiny committees that rubber-stamp rather than scrutinise, and with partisan theatre performed for tiny audiences while the real work goes undone.
