Wandsworth Council failed to show leadership on the Trump travel ban at the full council. The Labour Party were proposing the council leader and opposition leader should jointly formally state their opposition. This, however, was too much.

Even when the opportunity to show leadership was thrust upon him, the leader was unable to grasp it. Wandsworth does not have a foreign policy we were told. Wandsworth can do nothing about it we were told, petitions about road speeds were more our level. It was an awful, pernicious, measure we were told, but it really isn't our place to do anything about it because every issue under the sun will affect some of our residents and we can't take a stance on everything.

These are arguments against doing anything, to be sure. And they have been used repeatedly throughout the years all over the world. I know the council leader is not in the most secure position and there may be good short-term politics in avoiding a stance some of his members will not support. But this is one of those issues on which the right thing might not be easy—it might not be business as usual—but it should still be done.

Wandsworth doesn't have a foreign policy

It doesn't. The council takes a perverse pride in this. We are happily parochial. Except when we're not. The lack-of-foreign-policy policy is only deployed when convenient for the majority group.

You could equally argue that we don't operate an airline, or that we don't own an airport (a few councils do the latter) but we somehow manage to spend great time and effort on our aviation policy.

We don't manage Clapham Common, but we have plenty to say about how Lambeth manage it.

That is not to say that these are bad things to do, but to highlight that when it chooses the council is perfectly happy to take a strong stance on those things that happen outside its borders.

We can't do anything

This is a stronger argument. What's the point of doing anything when we have no control? The council leader was clear that there are all sorts of things we could take a view on, and say affects our residents, and perhaps hinted that because there were so many it was easiest to do none.

But how seriously do we think our chances in getting the government to back down on Heathrow? Exactly what powers did we think we were going to bring to bear when expressing our support for Wandsworth's EU citizens at the last council meeting?

The fact is that by raising awareness, by hoping to influence decision makers, we do and should take those stances on issues we don't control.

Even in the day-to-day life of the council we constantly adopt positions that seek to influence other partners. We hope to persuade TfL on issues around their roads. We seek to influence the police on their tasking. We try to entice businesses to invest. It is not just uncommon for the council to seek to influence: it's a crucial part of how it works.

We can't take a stance on everything

I wholeheartedly agree. We could debate every single issue endlessly. But sometimes there are issues that are important enough to make an exception. I would contend this is most definitely one.

In some ways I think it's an irrelevance whether or not one, 100 or 10,000 Wandsworth residents are affected. Trump's policy is nasty and dangerous. By discriminating against millions of people purely on the accident of where they were born or because of their choice of faith doesn't make them second class citizens, it potentially makes anyone and everyone a second class citizen: it impoverishes us all and acquiescence is not an option.

Doing something

We can all sit around and say we don't have a foreign policy, or we can't do anything, or it doesn't affect us. But I think we should be better than that. As a council and councillors we have to strike a balance between service and leadership. A big part of leadership, something the current council either can't, or won't, do is creating the narrative for their community. A vision for the future.

While this is absent in Wandsworth, the contrast between Obama and Trump's narratives for their nation and the world could not be clearer. And faced with that it is clear now is not a time for parochialism.

The council may not have power, but it has influence. It can set the tone for residents, highlighting the type of borough and world we value. And it can seek to influence decision makers; directly in the case of local MPs and through them indirectly influence national leaders and diplomats.

Over one and a quarter million people could have said they don't have a foreign policy. They didn't: they signed a petition.

Thousands and thousands of people in towns and cities could have said they can't do anything. They didn't: they attended demonstrations.

But contrast that with a group of Conservative councillors1, in the comfort of their chamber, who were given the chance to do something and show leadership…

They didn't: they sat on their hands.

And that was literally it. Rather than supporting an adjournment that asked the leader to express his opposition to the ban on behalf of the council, they waited 30 seconds and stuck their hands up to vote against instead. You could hardly have asked for less, but still they couldn't give it.

It was a failure of leadership.

  1. With one exception, Jane Dodd voted for the Labour motion and should be commended for that.

I've long seen council meetings as pointless.

When I was part of majority group and on the executive I shared the view with most colleagues that council meetings were necessary formalities: set-pieces we had to put on to show democracy being served knowing that the decisions had all been taken in the Leader's office, before being ratified in a private group meeting and then whipped through a public committee meeting.

Now I'm just an independent councillor I think the same way. I just don't like it anywhere as much as before.

Having gone down to four meetings a year makes them even less relevant, too infrequent to be meaningfully effective at anything. But, occasionally, timings help. And so it was at this week's meeting when almost all the evening was given over to a debate surrounding the EU referendum and the Brexit decision.

The role of local government may seem unconnected with our membership of the EU, but like every other part of the country Wandsworth benefits from EU funding. Perhaps more importantly local government has its role in providing community leadership and after the worrying increase in hate crime since the referendum I'm pleased the opportunity was there last night.

The basis of the evening was a motion moved by the Conservative and Labour party leaders. Perhaps inevitably for a bipartisan motion it became something of a mishmash to satisfy everyone, but it contained what I think were key clauses to:

ensure that all voices and points of view are listened to, and in particular that all Wandsworth residents and employees continue to enjoy the respectful, inclusive and cosmopolitan quality of life which makes this such an attractive part of inner London;

and to

condemn racist language and behaviour in all its forms.

I was particularly pleased to see those elements. Following the referendum the failure of the council and its leadership to use its voice to condemn the increase in hate crime (and Wandsworth has not been immune from this) concerned me.

But while a bit late (and taking a bit of prompting from the independent's statement and motion) it became an evening of optimism and unity. While I suspect from many of the majority group speeches that their membership, from top to bottom, is far from representative of the 75% remain vote in Wandsworth, there was a unanimity among councillors to make the most of the situation and most importantly to condemn hate crime and racism.

There were two attempts to amend the motion, both from the Labour side. One sought to strengthen the commitment to fight hate crime by declaring Wandsworth a zero-tolerance zone and working with other agencies, like the police, use their combined resources to identify and tackle hate crime. The Conservative group defeated this.

The other was related to the refugee crisis, and sought to commit the council to signing up the government commitment and house 10 Syrian families. Again, the Conservative group voted against this. However, one Conservative councillor tweeted afterwards that it was because they felt it should be more than ten families. I can only assume that position had been agreed at the Conservative group meeting, so have written to the council leader asking for clarification to see exactly what number they are committing to accept.

There was one more motion, it came at the end of the night, despite being the first submitted and, arguably, the one that started it all. The motion was moved by Malcolm Grimston and me to allow the council to make a statement following the Brexit vote. Bizarrely the Conservatives amended this to something that meant almost exactly the same.

No-one could explain why, the closest we got to an answer was from Cllr Cook, who told Malcolm Grimston the amendment meant the same thing, but was different. In a rare night of a council meeting showing leadership, I suppose it had to have a little bit of what usually passes for leadership in Wandsworth too.

I am not alone in spending a lot of time thinking, possibly brooding, about the recent disorder, and one of the things that has struck me is that, in many ways, there are things we can learn from the rioters. Just as we can learn from the responses of public agencies and things like #riotcleanup.

That might seem controversial (I’m not aware of anyone praising the looters organisational skills) and to some it might seem offensive. It certainly isn’t meant that way. Instead, it has struck me that just as we can learn from the positive public response and from how the police responded, we can learn from how a huge group of law-breakers formed, seemingly quickly enough to avoid giving enough advance notice to counter them.

Part of my thinking is influenced by recently re-reading a Demos report, Resilient Nation into the role of the public in resilience which I referenced in my speech at our recent Neighbourhood Watch conference and have had a blog post sitting in various states of drafting on exactly the topic of how we work, collectively, in those extreme circumstances like riots.

You could argue there are two case studies here: the rioters and the cleaners. I’d stress I have no inside knowledge other than what is publicly available.

Case study one: the rioters
From what you can gather via the media, it would seem they organised via Blackberry Messenger, nominating a meeting point at which they could congregate and then descend en masse to begin their looting.

It doesn’t seem there was any particular leadership structure, although obviously some people would have more influence than others. Indeed, it might well be that the method of selecting the unfortunate area to suffer was almost democratic, with unpopular suggestions being deleted and popular suggestions being forwarded until they became the dominant proposal (such a model could account for a number of the rumours circulating, as well as creating a few strong contenders until late in the day, meaning the police had to spread resources between them).

However, there was a clear vision of what they were doing: arriving in such numbers that the police would struggle to control them, leaving them able to loot with relative freedom.

Case study two: the cleaners
It is easier to see what happened with the clean-ups, because they organised far more transparently via, predominately, Twitter. Essentially, a number of people had the idea of turning up to help clean up. I was even one of them, and was going through the motions when it became clear that some of the meeting points and times were becoming very popular and gaining a lot of support.

Again, there doesn’t seem to have been any real leadership structure, but again, like any large group some people took on more responsibility, such as setting up the Riot Clean-up website.

And, again, there was a simple, clear and utterly compelling vision of what they were doing: they were going to clean up the mess in their town.

Parallels between the two
There are obvious parallels between the two, but I would argue the simplicity of the vision they both shared was a real strength — it resulted in a distributed leadership model that was incredibly powerful in achieving its aim. It didn’t actually matter that not everyone followed central orders, if they turned up late, or somewhere else, so what? There were plenty of people in the right place at the right time who all knew what they wanted to do.

The lessons are perhaps in how we work with that sort of model. With the cleaners it was easy. They actually had a shared vision with the police, council and businesses — they worked with them and were perfectly willing to respect their decisions. I’m willing to bet a lot more man-hours were spent patiently waiting behind cordons than cleaning, simply because those wanting to help recognised the police’s need to examine the scene took precedence over their will to clean.

But how does one deal with the distributed leadership of the looters? That’s the tricky question, and one I’ll leave for another time.