How much would you bet at Ladbrokes on who will be running the Borough of Barnet in a year’s time? Let’s keep our money safe, and worry instead about the nasty Brent Cross developers. They are now attempting to demolish more than 200 homes, which is just ‘collateral damage’ in building a bigger Brent Cross shopping centre.

They are holding meetings with residents, under ‘independent experts’ who are not actually independent but merely there to smooth out the process. But why does demolition of a settled Barnet community have to happen at all? The high-rise blocks are no different to refurbished ones at Childs Hill. The houses have nice gardens, there are trees and grass, and a proper community.

But the homes have to go, to be replaced by highly profitable medium-rise barracks, like those at Colindale which, to his credit, even Brian Coleman tried to stop. (Barracks have windows of flats all facing one way, and long impersonal corridors. It is cheaper that way.) Perhaps Councillor Cornelius can explain why elderly owners of houses with gardens, fully paid for before retirement, are now forced to move out of London. This would not happen in Totteridge, would it, Richard? Aren’t these ‘your kind of people?’ Apparently not.

The 2009 planning committee to steam-roller this decision was a democratic catastrophe. We were not allowed to record it or even take notes during the meetings, and there were sinister black-clothed security people who reminded me of central Europe seventy years ago.

In order to build a replacement Brent Cross John Lewis store and so on (fine by me), Barnet Borough Council bizarrely created just a single planning application covering several square miles, picking off unrelated sites. The 2009 vote apparently then had to be ‘all-or-nothing’. So it was ‘all’, and any consultation except for the shopping centre had been a waste of time.

I know of nowhere else in the country where such a blatant distortion of reasonable planning has been carried out. The separate sites all the way down to Cricklewood Lane had no democratic decision at all. This was the politics of North Korea, by supreme leader Kim Jong-Freer.

The Brent Cross developers said at a further planning committee last January that they still intended to build five-storey blocks on the green space in Cricklewood Lane – because they can.

They will also concrete over two green triangles where Brent Terrace children currently play. This did not concern Cllr Marshall at last January’s meeting. In fact, his only question to me was whether I thought Brent Cross shopping centre was looking tired. No, only you, councillor. Only you.

Cllr Richard Cornelius could refuse to sell the Cricklewood Lane and Brent Terrace public land to the ugly face of the Brent Cross developers, if he chose to. Perhaps both Tories and Labour (and Lib-Dem Jack Cohen) will give such a public undertaking, in case they are in power in a year’s time, when I pop in for my winnings at Ladbrokes.

John Cox

Chelsea Close, Harlesden