Finsbury: the final insult

There's a fashion among commentators to find some particularly egregious New Labour act and declare it the final death of the Labour Party as a reformist, social democratic entity, let alone anything further left. George Monbiot did so quite convincingly a couple of days ago on the issue of dodgy peers, a sleaze scandal of the sort that led to the final disgrace of the Tories in the mid-90s. Regardless - the story in the new AJ that today, Islington Primary Care Trust are likely to vote to sell off Tecton's Finsbury Health Centre is surely the perfect symbolic death of the Labour Party. The health centre that prefigured the NHS, that stood as a symbol of English socialism in Abram Games' wartime posters, that occasioned Lubetkin's declaration that 'nothing is too good for ordinary people', and that has been giving a free, publicly owned service for over 70 years, is to be flogged in order, no doubt, to raise a bit of cash that can then be squandered on some profiteering PFI parasite. There's no doubt whatsoever that PFI is the reason for the sale - the AJ story quotes an 'insider' that here, 'the government's PFI model for new group medical practices is driving the agenda'. So while more public money is thrown desperately at the mostly-nationalised banks, health is still utterly in hock to the ridiculous notion that private companies have any use, expertise or role in the health service, when it's blindingly obvious they can't organise the proverbial piss-up in a brewery.

Well - another 'insider', an architect from John Allan's Avanti practice, who are experts on and the usual restorers of Lubetkin and Tecton's buildings (name obviously withheld), told me at a conference a year ago that they'd been asked to do the allegedly unaffordable restoration, and agreed to do so only on the condition that it stayed an NHS practice. They were told where to go. In fact, Finsbury already feels like a beleaguered building. It's surprisingly tiny and intimate, while in pictures it appears the size of the Festival Hall (which took obvious inspiration from it), the facade is obscured by trees - intentionally, no doubt, but managing to almost hide the centre - and incarnating the change from collectivity to individualism, it's faced by a row of postmodernist cottages, as if to inoculate neoliberal London against this little enclave of socialism. Which, now, will no doubt become either Luxury Flats or a little clinic for the neurasthenia of Clerkenwell media professionals. We can expect those who use the Finsbury Health Centre's NHS facilities to either go to a clinic several miles away, or to some sort of Darent Valley-style out-of-town PFI colossus. Somehow this is all even more depressing than all the other defeats, acts of cowardice and betrayals of the last 11 and a half years - a wilfully ignorant desecration of socialist symbolism, this sell-off is the architectural equivalent of James Purnell publicly pissing on a photograph of Aneurin Bevan.

NB: there is a campaign, website here (petition here) and it deserves all the help it can get.