It is the slowest to re-let council homes; it is one of the worst in handling council tax benefit applications; it is one of the slowest to collect council tax and rent; and it is one of the most expensive to run. It also has some of the lowest-performing schools in Britain. Recent scandals at Hackney are some of the worst that have hit local government in recent years. There is the Mark Trotter affair: a leading Labour Party member and council social worker turned out to be a serial child abuser who eventually died of Aids. For years, some council staff ran a “keys for cash” fraud: council homes were left “unlet” while housing officers rented them out for personal gain.
Then there was the internecine conflict between Hackney’s chief officers, only matched by the open warfare which split in two its majority Labour group.

One of several outstanding inquiries is dealing with racism allegations. Complaints of nepotism by councillors are legion.If there were a case study on how not to run a council, it might look very much like Hackney over recent years. You might expect that the Labour Government’s commitment to send in “hit squads” to sort out the worst councils would make its first stop at Hackney.Is it, then, a coincidence that one week after the new government was elected, Hackney announced a complete overhaul of its internal structure? The council says the timing was fortuitous, and that it has spent the last two years getting ready to put an end to what even it admits are bad services.The east London borough will re-launch in September as if it were a new authority, with a new structure and a new team of chief officers, who will have performance targets far in excess of what the citizens of the borough have been used to.”The big cultural challenge is that an incremental approach of doing slightly better than last year is not good enough,” says Tony Elliston, chief executive of Hackney, who gained a reputation of being tough and uncompromising as head of the revolutionised Brent council in north- west London.”New Hackney” will focus on service standards above all. Hackney is probably the worst council in Britain. Lawes himself, a great favourite of Charles I, was shot at the siege of Chester in 1645.The whole evening was a scrupulous and moving demonstration of the fact that, although poets and classical musicians may occupy different worlds of discourse, these are nevertheless contiguous, and civilised behaviour is the least that can be expected of them.. Is he alive or dead? Will the wounded soldier who has turned up in the village reveal his fate to her? All is fear, fantasy and emotional perturbation, constrained within the formal rigour of Maxwell’s verse form.On a couple of occasions, words and music overlapped to great emotional effect – when, for example, the consort played William Lawes’ passionately baroque Consort Set in C Minor immediately after “A Tale Told Once”, the long narrative poem that finally reveals the terrible fate of the village men.

There was a generalised atmosphere of emotional restraint – which was entirely in keeping with what was happening on the stage, for although the programme was a general call to weeping and emotional outpouring for grievous wrongs suffered, those Elizabethans and Jacobeans did this sort of thing within extremely constraining forms, musical and literary.Music and poetry alternated for the most part (unlike when poets and jazzos get together: they usually try to drown each other out in wave upon wave of gloriously unrestrained feeling). On Monday, at the Purcell Room, there was a much more unusual marriage of music and poetry, and thus a much more unusual answer to the question: what are these two forms supposed to do for each other anyway?

The music, courtesy of the viol consort Concordia, consisted of pieces written between the last quarter of the 16th century and the start of the Civil War. First the head of Maxwell would appear, illuminated in a fierce orange halo of light. Having said his piece, he would disappear and the viol consort seated to his left would be lit, so dimly and quasi-religiously that they looked rather like over-serious night-watchmen huddled around a vat of home-made minestrone soup.Maxwell’s sequence of nine poems, loosely set at the time of the Civil War, concentrates entirely upon the emotional predicament of a village woman, called Rachell, who is expecting news of the Royalist husband who has gone off to war.