In this report, I have provided a summary of all the work I have been doing over the past few weeks. As well as my role as a ward councillor, I chair the Council’s Overview and Scrutiny Committee and the Turnpike Lane Strategy Group.

Walkabout on Turnpike Lane with Met Police

On 16 September 2021, I joined police officers and Harringay councillor colleagues for a walkabout on Turnpike Lane. The area around Ducketts Common has unfortunately become a crime hotspot with four murders taking place this year. This has led to an increase in the fear of crime in the area.

I also raised concerns about drug dealing taking place from addresses on Alexandra Palace and antisocial behaviour around the area. Police officers assured that additional resources are being put into Turnpike Lane.

Sandbunker Community Centre’s 21^st anniversary

On 25 September 2021, I joined the community at the Sandlings to celebrate the 21^st anniversary of the Sandbunker Community Centre. This was one of the first community events that I attended since the pandemic began. I spoke about the commitment that this Labour administration has in building council homes. We are on target to deliver 1000 council homes by 2022. This is the first time in over 40 years that the council is building council homes.

Turnpike Lane Joint Strategy Group

I chaired the meeting of the Turnpike Lane Strategy Working Group on 6 October 2021 from 4pm to 5.45pm. A series of short, medium and long term improvement plans for Turnpike Lane have been drawn up. Met Police also provided an update on the work that they are doing to address crime and grime in the area.

Overview and Scrutiny Committee

Haringey is the worst borough in London for knife crime. It is the sixth highest in London for gun crime. There is renewed focus on VAWG in the aftermath of the brutal murder of Sabina Nessa.

We are appealing to residents to take part in the scrutiny review. Please contact me if you want to provide evidence to the scrutiny committee.

High Road West

In my role as chair of the Overview and Scrutiny Committee, I have overseen a major scrutiny review into the High Road West scheme. Although this is not in Noel Park, the recommendations from the review will be relevant to any regeneration scheme that takes place in Haringey. We are currently finalising the recommendations with a view to publishing them towards the end of this month.

Café Roj

There is good news about Café Roj in Ducketts Common. Works are due to start on 11 October 2021 and complete by the end of March 2022.

As well as providing a nicely designed café for the park, the facility will have:

•           A fully accessible toilet available to the public and managed by the café leaseholder.

•           The café will have capacity for seating 20 people.

•           A community, bookable event space managed by the café leaseholder that can be used for community groups.

The police have been involved throughout the design process and the cafe will provide a 360-degree view of the park (see indicative image attached).

Face to face surgery

On Saturday 9 October 2021, I resume my face-to-face surgery at the Wood Green Library at 10.30am. I will continue this every second Saturday of the month. I am also available for a roving surgery to meet residents or residents’ groups at their place.

*Post covid Cllr surgery set-up*

Today, I resumed my face to face surgery for the first time since the pandemic began. My surgery is every second Saturday of the month at Wood Green Library at 10.30am. Hopefully, you can see the transparent partition in the picture which should give residents added comfort. Plenty of hand sanitisers are available and all the surfaces have been sanitised.

It is a worrying time for Noel Park residents and the population at large. We are supposed to resume business as usual, but infection rates are still high and a third wave is on the way this winter. Many people (especially schoolchildren) are unwell and self isolating.

Residents do not need to come to my surgery for my assistance if they are self isolating or are not comfortable going out just yet. I can be contacted on khaled.moyeed@haringey.gov.uk or on 07976973851.

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On Wednesday 28 July, Tottenham Constituency Labour Party held its annual general meeting in which members re-elected me as Vice Chair (Campaigns) for the second time. I am honoured that comrades put their trust in me again for such an important role. There is a lot of work ahead in the next 12 months.

Boundary changes across the Tottenham constituency mean that the existing nine wards will change quite fundamentally. Currently, all nine wards have three Councillors each meaning that there are 27 Councillors across the constituency. This number will go up to 30 Councillors with 11 wards. Three wards will have two Councillors each. They are: St Ann’s, Seven Sisters and Hermitage and the Gardens (which is a completely new ward). The remaining eight wards will have three Councillors each.

As the Vice Chair responsible for campaigns, I will have to play an important role in ensuring that members are familiar with the new wards where they will have to campaign for the local elections in 2022. At the last local election, Labour won all 27 seats across Tottenham. If Labour wins all 30 seats across Tottenham in 2022, it will already have a majority on the Council which has 57 Councillors in total.

On Friday 23 July 2021, I was really pleased to canvass residents in Noel Park after a very long time with other colleagues from the Labour Party. We could not go door to door during the pandemic because of health and safety concerns. Although the pandemic is not over yet, people are now a lot more confident to go out and about given the vaccine rollout has been fairly successful.

This is the part of my job as a Councillor that I like the most: speaking to local residents, listening to their concerns and coming up with solutions to address them. I have missed this the most during the pandemic which seemed to go on for a very long time. Well, 18 months is a long time. That’s nearly half the time of my tenure as a Councillor.

Quite a number of residents spoke to me through their living room window. Perhaps they became accustomed to not opening their doors for other people during the past 18 months. It could also be because we were canvassing around 7pm, which is probably most people’s dinner time. People were generally very pleased to see me and talk about local issues or even politics generally. I did meet one resident who believed that the 2020 US presidential election was stolen from Donald Trump!

Nye Bevin, the Labour health Secretary who founded the NHS said, “No society can legitimately call itself civilised if a sick person is denied medical aid because of lack of means.”

On the 73rd birthday of the NHS, I take my hats off to all NHS workers. I remember all those doctors, nurses and healthcare professionals who died in the pandemic trying to care for the nation. The NHS is a diverse organisation with professionals from all over the world. The first four doctors who died of Covid during the pandemic were Muslim immigrant doctors.

As a Labour politician, I am proud that my party founded the NHS. However, we all have a duty to protect and preserve the NHS from Tory privatisation plans. A future Labour government should re-nationalise the NHS fully.

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There appears to be two factions in the Conservative Party right now.

Rishi Sunak, Michael Gove and Dominic Cummings are on one side. They want to bring Boris Johnson down and effect a regime change. Cummings tweeted yesterday disappointed with the news of Sajid Javid’s appointment as the new Health Secretary ending his tweet with “#RegimeChange”:

“So Carrie appoints Saj! NB If I hadn’t tricked PM into firing Saj, we’d have had a HMT with useless SoS/spads, no furlough scheme, total chaos instead of JOINT 10/11 team which was a big success. Saj = bog standard = chasing headlines + failing = awful for NHS. Need #RegimeChange”.

Given Cummings’ recent successes in winning the Brexit referendum and an 80-seat majority for Boris Johnson, I would not put anything past him. He is capable of effecting that regime change.

As for the wider media, they do not want to get involved in the internal Tory party shenanigans. Hence, there is not much reporting of the scandals and corruption in the Boris Johnson government that Cummings is exposing. BBC is afraid that the government will want to privatise it like it is doing to Channel 4. For the moment, BBC does not want to fall out with the government either.

Battle of Plassey happened on this day in 1757 marking the start of the British colonialisation of India (representing modern day India, Pakistan and Bangladesh).

Before the British rule began, India’s GDP accounted for approproximately a quarter of the world’s total GDP. Its economy was richer than all of Western Europe. Over the next 190 years, the British colonialists stole a total of US$45 trillion from India. This is 17 times more than the UK’s annual GDP.

In total, 35 million lost their lives in various famines because of the scale of pillaging, looting and wealth extraction by the British. The Bengal famine killed around three million people in 1943 because of the direct policies of Winston Churchill who had blamed the famine on the people of India. He said that the famine was their fault for “breeding like rabbits”.

Today marks 73 years since the Empire Windrush arrived at Tilbury Docks carrying British citizens from the Caribbean islands who helped to rebuild Britain after the Second World War.

The Windrush scandal, a legacy of Theresa May’s hostile environment, led to the marginalisation and deportation of British citizens from the Windrush generation. Although the Conservative government was shamed into admitting its failures over the Windrush scandal, the victims are still awaiting compensation and justice.

Incidentally, my very first speech after I was elected as a Labour Councillor was at the ‘March for Windrush’ on 5 May 2018. You can watch the video of my speech here:

Today is World Refugee Day (20 June 2021). There are more refugees in the world today than there were at the end of the Second World War. Yet, the rise of populist, rightwing politics across the West means that refugees are being turned away. In recent years, I went on refugee solidarity trips to Calais, France to help refugees stranded there. In 2013, I travelled to Jordan to help Syrian and Palestinian refugees. Below, I have reproduced my blog of that memorable journey.

“In July 2013, I took part in an amazing journey to Jordan to give financial assistance to Palestinian and Syrian refugees. I raised money from friends and family and set off with 10 other friends from Dubai, where I was living at the time. Below is an account of our two days in Jordan.

Day 1 – Friday 19 July 2013: We set off in the morning for Mafraq, a small town 80km north of Amman to distribute donations to widows, single mothers and orphans who have fled Syria since the uprising began in 2011. Close to the Syrian border, Mafraq is one of the poorest parts of Jordan. Although its population is 70,000 strong, it now had over 100,000 Syrian refugees. 

We arrived at a community hall where the Jordanian Association for Orphans and Widows Care had pre-selected 250 Syrian women to receive donations. We gave each woman a sealed envelope with 50 Jordanian dinars (enough to live on for 2 months).

We then made our way to a small village called Turrah. It is 3km from the Syrian border. A local NGO invited a group of Syrian men and women to receive donations from us. Aid agencies and UN did not reach this very remote village. The money that we gave out was the first donation of any kind that they received. Aided by local volunteers, we made a number of home visits to Syrian refugees to give out donations. They were living in extremely overcrowded conditions. For example, we visited two families of 14 people who were sharing a two-bedroom flat. There were no beds – just mattresses lying on the floor. Local Jordanians accommodated Syrian refugees by sub-letting rooms in their homes or building makeshift extensions. Most people had arrived from Syria within the last few months. 

We made a stop at the open border between Syria and Jordan in the village of Turrah. It was guarded by Jordanian army. In the distance, you could see Syria. Minarets and domes of mosques and buildings were clearly visible. It was a surreal moment for me. I was in Syria back in 2000 learning Arabic and it has a special place in my heart.

Day 2 – Saturday 20 July 2013: We made our way to Jerash Gaza camp, which had 40,000 people living in it within one square kilometre. It was set up in 1967 and successive generations have been born and raised there. Palestinians living in this camp had no official status. They did not have identity cards and therefore not considered to be citizens. They could not access health, education or any other services. Their existence was very much as second class citizens.

Our first stop was at the Jerash children’s nursery which was run by volunteers. Children were aged between four and eight. I spoke to one volunteer who taught them English so that they could learn to use the internet and be exposed to the outside world. We gave an envelope with a donation to 50 children as gift for the upcoming eid ul fitr.

We then visited the Green Crescent Society, a charity that runs a number of projects in the camp. Khaled Abdullah, the General Manager explained that the two key priorities for their projects were health and education. Palestinians living in the camp could tolerate poverty and lack of food, but serious illness often proved much more difficult to handle. We were told that an individual died in the past 10 days because of a lack of proper medical treatment. Education was important because it gave them hope that they could break out of the cycle of poverty and destitution.

Khaled Abdullah outlined a number of projects where they needed funds. We chose three projects to help with our donations. First, a home nursing project which had six nurses visiting homes in groups of two. Second, a number of students needed to pay off their outstanding university fees so that they could graduate and receive their certificates. They had been working in fruit and vegetable stalls or doing unskilled jobs, because they had not officially graduated. Finally, a project to support orphans.Our final stop was at a community hall where the Green Crescent Society had invited 400 men, women and a substantial number of students to receive donations from us. They were the most needy in the camp. I sat in the audience and engaged with a number of students.

Ahmed Sa’ad recently finished school and was looking forward to starting university in September to study business and IT. Husam Muhammad, a local Imam was studying Shari’ah at university. Mus’ab Al-Kurdi was in third year of university studying Arabic language and literature. They were intelligent young men and very humble at the same time. They were driven by ambition, but paying tuition fees was a constant worry for them.

After distributing cash donations in the community hall, we returned to Amman.I left Amman for Dubai on Saturday 20 July 2013 at night having spent two incredible days in Jordan. Three of our friends stayed behind. They visited a camp for Syrians of Palestinian origin on Sunday 21 July 2013. These were Palestinian refugees in Syria and had now become refugees for the second time in Jordan. They also visited a camp for undocumented Syrian refugees – they were not registered by the UN’s refugee agency and as such had no official status as refugees in Jordan.” 

On 19 June 2017, a rightwing extremist killed Makram Ali outside Finsbury Park Mosque during the holy month of Ramadan. It has been exactly four years since that terrorist incident. It could have happened outside my local mosque in Tottenham where we had been subjected to a number of Islamophobic incidents. We received hate mail and white powder in an envelope designed to cause alarm and fear. An individual came inside the mosque premises declaring “kill all Muslims” and another person went to the hall upstairs burning a copy of the Qur’an.

While my mosque was subjected to fairly low levels of hate, Makram Ali was not so lucky. Nor were the worshippers in the Christchurch mosque in New Zealand. And the recent murders of four members of the same family in Ontaro, Canada. All of these islamophobic incidents did not happen in a vacuum. Hatred against Muslims or Islamophobia has been institutionalised in the western media. It has become an acceptable form of racism. Muslims are also easy targets for politicians across the world from Emanuel Macron to Narendra Modi.

There are condemnations and statements denouncing such terrorist acts after they happen. However, this is rarely followed up with concrete action. In the UK, we need Islamophobia to be recognised as a specific form of hate in legislation. The All Party Parliamentary Group on British Muslims recently proposed a new definition of Islamophobia as a form of racism. It is high time that this is recognised in law. Our politicians need to step up and act rather than put out empty words of solidarity for their social media followers.