Category: Longform
You are viewing all posts from this category, beginning with the most recent.
Live at the Counter Eurovision '79
“without the knowledge of your history you cannot determine your destiny”
Forty-seven years ago, Misty In Roots played at the Counter Eurovision rock festival in Brussels, in response to the Eurovision song contest being held that year in Jerusalem, and in solidarity with the Palestinian people.
Less than a month later, Blair Peach was murdered by the British police on the streets of Southall while defending the town from the National Front.
Ealing Council allowed the march of the fascists to go ahead despite a 10,000-strong petition from local people opposing it.
Clarence Baker, Misty In Roots' manager, was violently assaulted by police that day and left in a coma for five months.
Organist Vernon Hunt was jailed for six months on trumped up charges. He was so broken by this experience of state oppression that he never rejoined the band.
Today the British government allowed another fascist march in London on the anniversary of the Palestinian Nakba.
Today I dragged my 11 year old down to the Dominion Centre and Library in Southall to meet Misty In Roots in the entrance foyer and learn a little history.
The Dominion Centre is the site of the former Dominion Theatre where Blair Peach’s lifeless body lay “in state” for six weeks while thousands visited to pay their last respects.
This iconic photo of Misty In Roots outside the entrance now hangs in the National Portrait Gallery.
We came home with a signed limited edition red vinyl copy of arguably the best live album ever recorded. We spoke to some very nice people. And we bumped into my friend Happy.
And we met Poko, Kazi and Tunga from the band.
“if you’re not conscious of the present you’re like a cabbage in this society”
Unsafe discharge and death by licorice
Mum moved downstairs two months ago. It hasn’t been easy. The previous occupiers, our neighbours, left the house a filthy mess. Me and my brother got the kitchen and bathroom cleaned on moving in day, but it was far from ideal. Another neighbour who I know from work/church repainted her walls and ceilings. A neighbour my wife knows weeded the garden and did some cleaning and washing. Little kid posts the dog jumpers and cat tea cosies she knits to keep her eBay customers happy. Big kid sweeps and mops the floor for manga money. Sainsbury’s deliver a crateful of cat food, fizzy drinks, snacks, and black licorice. The licorice keeps her “moving”. I make her a cooked meal every evening, empty the bins, and keep moving furniture around as and when requested. “When I get the place sorted I’ll be fine” is my mum’s mantra. Mine is more “you need to get your health sorted” and “tell your doctor”.
Mum looks set to move at the very start of next month. Moving house is the most stressful life event, and doing so when you’re 80, unwell, and from the home you bought expecting it to be your final home in the town where you went to school is harder. She’s handled it pretty well, to be fair, although the anxiety has kicked in the closer we got to the desired completion date. It’s not been easy for me, either, as there’s a limit to what I can do from a distance. It’s mostly “ask your solicitor” or “tell your solicitor” and trying to reassure her that everything will be all right in the end.
The first week she moved in, she banged her leg during the night causing a pretty horrible haematoma, which required a couple of trips to the hospital, the GP surgery and ongoing home visits from the district nurse. Yesterday morning I was on my third spoon of cornflakes before the school run when I received a text from mum saying she’d had a fall and was on the floor. Her other leg (not the one she banged before) gave way as she got out of bed and she toppled over on to her side. Remarkably, she didn’t break anything and had got herself sitting upright again, but obviously couldn’t get herself up. I couldn’t get her up either, which is probably just as well, as the medical advice is not to move them. My wife stayed with her while I took little kid to school. Paramedics duly arrived and very carefully assessed and treated her and recommended a trip to Accident and Emergency (A&E) due to her elevated heart rate and medical history. She did not want to go, but the alternative was to wait for a home visit from the GP in the afternoon and s/he would certainly call an ambulance.
After a day in A&E, and after I left her to pick up little kid, she was told she would be discharged that evening. They’d booked hospital transport to take her home, but I drove to collect her as it might have been a long wait. When I got there, she couldn’t get out of her chair into her wheelchair without the assistance of two carers. I wondered if she’d be able to get into and out of my car. And into and out of her bed. Without falling down again. There was general agreement that it was certainly a suboptimal arrangement. My wife, who is a social worker and deals with similar scenarios in her work, advised me that what the hospital was proposing is known as an unsafe discharge.
As soon as I uttered this magic phrase, mum was readmitted to A&E so that she could be discharged safely. She was not happy about that or with me, I have to say. And I can quite understand. Everyone just wants to go home and sleep peacefully, comfortably and privately in their own bed. Today she’s been reassessed. She now has a six-week care package in place for when she goes home so that she can regain her independence without putting herself at risk of another fall. They’ve done more scans and found new problems.
And, seriously, it now turns out that her long-standing licorice habit might be the single cause of some of her most debilitating problems.
Where You Been?
Everyone has been asking, so here’s the deal. Unless you count Butlins in a wet and windy Skegness (and I do), I haven’t been anywhere.
Nowhere that doesn’t have at least a flaky internet connection, or a sleeping family.
While I suppose I have been ill with what turned into an acute exacerbation of my chronic lung disease, that makes it sound worse than it was. I was still here, just under the weather.
Everyday activities became more difficult. Breathing became more difficult. But it’s carry on, or what? Throw in a few anti-sleeping pills and sleeping became more difficult. Concentrating became more difficult. For my sins, I did take a few weeks off work. But I did have a lot of free time on my hands.
As regular readers will know, I recently began excavating my old band Hovercraft from the analog archives of cassette tapes stored in cardboard boxes for thirty years. Why? Well, it’s not the first time, and it sure won’t be the last. It’s something I do periodically. Hovercraft were easily the best band I ever played in, and our life was cut short after an exhilarating nine months. I didn’t know why at the time, and I don’t know why now, but of course I have blamed myself aplenty. As well as Sir Gareth Southgate.
What better way to put all of that self-recrimination behind me than to reinvigorate the band, bring them back to life and tell the world how great we were-and still are?
With my old friend and bass player Aaron (aka Ron Nasty), I resurrected Hovercraft’s songs, created a website (hosted here on micro.blog), and began the boring, expensive, hard work of promoting our songs and searching for our lost singer/songwriter Charlie Pepper. We have a couple of big, exciting album releases planned before Xmas, and more than anything else this project has reinvigorated me, in between coughs and wheezes, and kept me going into the wee hours mixing, mastering and co-producing the whole package.
Another personal project I have been working on is a reorganisation of my website here, and more significantly, thinking about my “social” output and writing. I haven’t been very social recently, and I seem to be less interested or good at it as I get older. Plus, my time has been invested elsewhere. Anyway, I will keep at it, and will streamline my actual, proper writing so it all makes a bit more sense. I started by curating all my diatribes on local democracy and community activism and creating Southall Stories (also hosted here on micro.blog).
Yes, I am an investigative journalist! (According to Claude.)
Hopefully it will be a useful resource for anyone who is interested in all the political shenanigans in Ealing. Another archive restored!
Another personal project, and one I rarely talk about publicly, is my management of a one hundred strong online soccer management gaming community. This summer we celebrated ten years together - no mean feat at all. That’s kept me busy, too, and while the old website isn’t new (or hosted on micro.blog), it did get a makeover and some improvements, and another new website (hosted here on micro.blog) and community, and another archival project (created by Claude and ChatGPT with me as their copy and paste coding monkey like I was a teenager all over again).
Yes, I am a web developer! And an archivist! And a community manager! And (thanks to our AI overlords) yes, I am a coding monkey!
On the work front, which I haven’t forgotten about, before my recent illness, I developed a £1m+ funding application for a cross-borough youth project that will transform young people’s lives in two of the most-deprived areas in west London - and, we hope, support them to become our community leaders of the future. All very exciting, and not a little stressful - a lot depends on it being accepted and successful. I hope we find out soon if we get the grant.
Yes, I am a project development and sustainability lead! On an administrator’s salary!
On the home front, my kids are transitioning from Reception to Year one (so far so good, loss of afternoon playtime is the main complaint) and from Primary to Secondary (so far so good, all the other kids being so much taller is the main complaint).
Mum looks set to move at the very start of next month. Moving house is the most stressful life event, and doing so when you’re 80, unwell, and from the home you bought expecting it to be your final home in the town where you went to school is harder. She’s handled it pretty well, to be fair, although the anxiety has kicked in the closer we got to the desired completion date. It’s not been easy for me, either, as there’s a limit to what I can do from a distance. It’s mostly “ask your solicitor” or “tell your solicitor” and trying to reassure her that everything will be all right in the end.
Lastly, and least (and this has turned into a half-time team talk), I helped raise over £600 for my son’s school PTA. So not a bad half year’s work at all.
I might not have “been” anywhere, but I’ve been here, now. Breathing (sometimes with difficulty), creating, preserving, caring for others. Breathing new life into old. That’s not “nowhere” - that’s everything.
From Antisemite to Anti-American
When confronted with documented evidence of war crimes, defenders of atrocities cycle through predictable stages before settling on a final (final?) position: reframing opposition to genocide as “anti-Americanism.”
This evolution is telling. First came the antisemitism accusation - the nuclear option deployed when hospital bombings and destroyed aid trucks became indefensible. But when that weaponisation of historical trauma failed to silence criticism, the charge quietly disappeared, replaced by a more sophisticated imperial framework.
Now the same critic who was supposedly driven by “rabid anti-Semitism” gets recast as an anti-American contrarian. The accusations shift, but the goal remains constant: delegitimise opposition to documented atrocities through character assassination rather than evidence.
The “anti-American” framing is particularly absurd given the intertwined nature of Anglo-American imperialism. British special forces operate in Ukraine alongside extensive arms sales and military coordination with Israel. When Boris Johnson can veto Ukrainian peace negotiations and the UK maintains outsized influence in international organisations despite its declining economic power, we’re seeing coordinated imperial projects rather than American unilateralism.
The “special relationship” allows Britain to punch above its weight strategically while America provides the military muscle. Royal Marines in “high-risk operations” in Ukraine, deep military oversight of Gaza operations, and the historical legacy of the Balfour Declaration all point to British imperial continuity operating through American power.
Critics who oppose both British and American imperial interventions get labeled “anti-American” because the imperial mindset cannot process consistent opposition to coordinated oppression. It must choose sides in great power competition rather than opposing the system of domination itself.
The accusations will keep shifting - antisemitic, anti-American, whatever works - because the goal was never sincere concern about prejudice, but silencing criticism of documented atrocities.
Digging the Lost Tapes Restoration of Grimsby's No. 1 Band in 1996
Hovercraft (UK) were a real live band, briefly, in 1995-96.
We hovered in, made a lot of noise, broke down and sank without a trace, all in the space of nine months.
We were number one in the first, and possibly only, South Bank Demo Charts in the Grimsby Evening Telegraph.
There’s no chance of a reunion. That will be a relief to many. Our drummer emigrated to Australia. Our singer-songwriter-lead guitarist is MIA, last seen in India (or Boscombe). Our bass player plays in a semi-professional covers band. And our guitarist/tech guy is me.
Every few years I get out the digitised versions of all our old demo and home recording tapes and remix and (re)master them with the he latest free tools available. In the early days, that was Audacity. More recently, it’s Soundcloud’s and Bandlab’s (free) online mastering tools.
The goal is always the same. To transform the lofi, degraded analog recordings preserved on mangled old cassette tapes that were digitised using the cheapest USB analog to digital converter tape deck available twelve or fifteen years ago into something resembling what we actually sounded like in our rehearsal room, the studio, the pub, and - most importantly - in our own imaginations. (If you’re interested in learning more about mastering and how Bandlab mastering works there’s a couple of good articles here.)
Last October I went down the same old nostalgia rabbit-hole. Every time I think I’ve made the tracks sound better with the latest software, which usually means adding reverb or preset effects (which are likely a mixture of reverb and compression). The end result is something which sounds a bit louder, more atmospheric and less rough around the edges. Although all the reverb and compression can also make for a lot of additional noise, when noise is an integral part of the original sound AND the degradation of the original sound that was digitised.
Anyway, it’s all a bit of fun and allows for reconnecting with Ron Nasty, our old bass man (now known as Ronnie Nice). Ronnie and me had a lot of fun writing the band’s not entirely factual or unelaborated back story. Putting that into Claude.ai produced more amusing results, as did giving it some of the lyrics to the songs. These AIs can make pretty good music critics if you tell them that’s what they are, even if they’ve never heard a note. Claude is now like the fifth Beatle.
And that was what got me thinking… Can AI listen to music? That’s how I discovered Suno Music, Microsoft’s online AI music creation beast. And it is a beast. (Other beasts are available.) Me and Ron started off simply pasting in lyrics to the songs Ron had lovingly transcribed by listening to the old songs over and over again (only the other day I realised I had some of the original lyric sheets, but don’t tell Ron). Click on
That was back in March. The originals, if you wanna listen.
Then I realised you could (then) upload and use two minutes of original audio. Not quite a recreation or restoration of the original songs, but getting close. We also enjoyed doing an album of Hovercraft songs as if covered by a female singer in a more chillout style.
Finally (!), Suno v4.5 now allows up to eight minutes of uploaded audio. Frustratingly, I haven’t been able to recreate some songs at all (Mr Tooting Brown seems impossible), and still the AI seems to insist on missing out intros, outros, middle bits, solos, lead guitar work. But it’s getting a lot closer to an actual recreation of the original songs and band sound and style.
We also had fun generating song and album covers with ChatGPT.
Lastly, to reiterate, all of the songs bar the originals were created using Suno. Most of the later ones I downloaded the stems, uploaded them to Bandlab and remixed and mastered them there, before uploading to Bandcamp.
I’m not expecting anyone to listen to any or all of this, but hope it’s a useful contribution for anyone wondering what or how to go about a similar restoration project, or indeed, to create your own new songs (I’ve also done a few of those, too). Some people are pretty sceptical about AI generated art, and that’s fair enough. But this has been tremendous fun, and it’s great for me, Ron and everyone else who remembers our band to be able to recreate, restore, produce and hear the old songs again in a way that doesn’t hurt the ears so much.
While it was never the original “plan”, we’re now looking at releasing tracks through Bandlab’s distribution service, and reworking some of the songs to make them poppier and more accessible to a wider audience. And we’re looking for Charlie Pepper. Last heard of in the Bournemouth area ten years ago.
We should put a card in the local Spar shop window: “Chilled out lamppost wanted to front retro space pop band”. That should do it.
Peak Absurdity on the Ski School Run
Big kid went skiing with school today (his school breaks up for summer a week later than everywhere else). He had to be at school half an hour earlier than usual to catch the coach to The Snow Centre. Real snow, -6°C.
As we arrived, we realised he hadn’t brought his coat.
I quickly dumped little kid in breakfast club, and hobbled back to the car, which I had clairvoyantly parked half a mile away so the kids could scoot in the rest of the way. Bin collection day slowed things down, and the wife was in a state of undress and unable to fling the coat out of the window when I arrived home, meaning I had to haul myself up and downstairs to retrieve it myself, huffing and puffing and effing and blinding all the way.
Miraculously, I managed to walk without crutches at almost Olympic speed into school and presented a relieved big kid with his coat, literally as he stepped on to the coach.
When I got back home, again, in a pool of sweat, wife had gone swimming. She texted me to ask if our lad had got his coat, and to say “I need a Bailey’s after all that stress!”
This evening, when the lad got home, I asked him if he was glad he had his coat with him in sub-zero temperatures. “Nah. They gave us ski jackets.”
The Pied Piper of Ealing
A couple of weeks ago, big kid sang at the Royal Albert Hall in “Ealing Together: Harmony in Diversity,” performing lyrics by Jewish socialist and renowned children’s author Michael Rosen in a new song “Ada in Ealing”, a celebration of a former Ealing resident, and the world’s first computer programmer and a pioneer of mathematical logic, Ada Lovelace.
Tonight he performed in his school’s musical version of The Pied Piper of Hamelin, a story about broken promises and failed leadership. The stage lights went out halfway through, but the show went on - the children kept singing, the story kept unfolding, and somehow the adults pulling the strings behind the scenes got the lights back on.
The biggest laugh from the grown ups watching came when the council leader overcame his cognitive dissonance about political dishonesty by not paying the piper due to budget constraints: “For a politician to lie?! It’s disgusting, disgraceful, dishonourable…. Dis could be the perfect solution!” They all understood perfectly.
Sitting in that school hall, watching children perform a story about adults who make promises they don’t keep, I realised I’d been writing about the same tale in “Perceval House W5.” The Pied Piper isn’t just a fairy story - it’s a documentary about local politics.
The council leader in Hamelin promises to solve the rat problem but refuses to pay when the Piper delivers. Sound familiar? Promise to “put people before buildings,” then close the buildings. Promise “transparent engagement,” then rewrite petition rules to stop residents asking questions. Promise to protect services by cutting them.
From celebrating Ada Lovelace - a woman who saw logical patterns others couldn’t - to performing a story about leaders who’ve abandoned logic entirely. The journey from The Royal Albert Hall to the primary school hall, from Ealing to Hamelin and back again, from songs about a mathematics logician to tales about a corrupt politician.
Ada Lovelace would have spotted the flawed algorithm immediately: spend £1 million on councillor allowances to save £750,000 on children’s centres. The logic doesn’t compute.
But she’d also have recognised the pattern in the Pied Piper story. He who pays the piper calls the tune. In Ealing, we’re discovering who’s really been programming our decision-makers.
Unelected developers and council officers concocted a plan to sell off community assets. Berkeley Group paid for MIPIM trips. The council issued compulsory purchase orders to demolish people’s homes to make way for a new road and Berkeley’s marketing suite opposite the new Elizabeth Line station. The council is “powerless” to prevent Berkeley Group poisoning the Southall community, like the rats in the nursery playground. The algorithm executes perfectly.
In the original tale, the children disappear forever when the adults break their promises. But big kid’s generation might rewrite that ending. They’ve already shown they understand the contradictions better than the politicians creating them.
When then five year old Zion asked the Council Leader directly about the gasworks poisoning and got a “too sciencey” response, he understood perfectly what was happening. Tonight, performing as part of a story about broken promises and failed leadership, he understood it perfectly, too.
The lights failed, but the children kept going. The system breaks down, but the community adapts. Sometimes the show must go on until the grown-ups remember how to keep their promises.
And sometimes, just sometimes, the lights come back on.
URGENT support to fund a legal challenge to Ealing Council’s decision to close 10 children’s centres.
Perceval House W5: Where Local Democracy In Ealing Goes To Die
The Children’s Centres Crusade
Chapter 1: The Art of Political Contradiction
In the London Borough of Ealing, our elected representatives have perfected something remarkable: the ability to hold completely contradictory public positions without experiencing any apparent cognitive dissonance.
Take our Council Leader. On January 15, 2015, he tweeted: “Think its really important that we put people before buildings. Important we keep activities going & that can be done in a different way."
Ten years later, he’s closing children’s centres, buildings where people access those activities.
This isn’t hypocrisy - it’s innovation. Why limit yourself to consistent principles when you can have all the principles, simultaneously?
Mrs. Patel, a parent trying to save her local children’s centre, discovered this when she attempted to navigate Ealing’s democratic processes. What she found was a system so logically perfect that resistance had become mathematically impossible.
Chapter 2: The Democratic Möbius Strip
“Who decides about children’s centre closures?” Mrs. Patel asked at a council meeting.
“The Cabinet,” she was told.
The Cabinet explained they were implementing officer recommendations based on budget pressures created by government policy following community consultation showing residents wanted services maintained differently.
“So who can change the decision?”
“The decision-makers.”
“Who are the decision-makers?”
“The people with authority to make decisions.”
“Who has that authority?”
“The decision-makers.”
Mrs. Patel found herself trapped in a perfectly circular system. To influence the decision, she needed to identify who made it. But everyone who appeared to make decisions claimed to be implementing someone else’s decisions. The decision seemed to exist independently of anyone actually deciding anything.
Image: Jono Hey, [Sketchplanations](https://sketchplanations.com/mobius-strip)
It was like a democratic Möbius strip - no matter which direction you followed, you always ended up back where you started.
Chapter 3: The Mathematics of Progressive Budget Management
The numbers, at least, were clear:
- Cost of councillor allowance increases (2022-2025): Over £1 million
- Savings from closing children’s centres: £750,000
- Council Leader’s pay rise: 70%
- Number of children’s centres being closed in Southall: 3 out of 6
The Council Leader had discovered something revolutionary: you could simultaneously claim budget constraints while voting yourself substantial pay rises. The secret was treating these as completely unrelated mathematical operations.
“We have to make difficult decisions due to budget pressures,” he explained, while awarding himself £58,000 annually.
“But you spent more on pay rises than you’re saving,” Mrs. Patel pointed out.
“That’s a different budget.”
“It’s the same money.”
“You don’t understand local government finance. And we need higher calibre councillor candidates.”
Mrs. Patel was beginning to understand perfectly.
Chapter 4: Environmental Priorities - A Scientific Approach
The Council Leader’s environmental consciousness follows a precise hierarchy, documented through his public responses:
Tier 1 Emergency Response: Eels gasping in the River Brent receive immediate action [pdf) and public concern.
Tier 2 Public Complaint: Someone’s “bag and/or small child” taking up a tube seat merits a public tweet about “Some people.”
Tier 3 Busy Schedule: Children gasping from toxic air [YouTube] in bedrooms get told " I’m very busy.” [YouTube)]
When five-year-old Zion asked him directly, “Peter, why didn’t you help us?” [YouTube] about the gasworks poisoning, the response was so technical that Zion said it was “too sciencey” to understand.
This established a clear principle: if environmental concerns can’t be explained to five-year-olds, they’re probably too complex for five-year-olds to experience.
Chapter 5: The Southall Paradox
Only in Southall can carcinogenic benzene, and naphthalene - which is known to be potentially fatal to some people with African and Asian heritage - be released into the air from the Gasworks development at levels way above legal limits and be simultaneously “not hazardous” according to Ealing Council.
One moment the Headteacher at Blair Peach Primary School is reporting asthma and headaches [p. 10] caused by very strong smells from the Gasworks site; in another moment, the developer’s head of construction is appointed to the school’s board of governors [pp. 7-8] and arranges to remove dead rats from the nursery playground [p. 11]. These events are clearly unconnected.
It’s all perfectly normal in Southall, where kids can be locked in class without ventilation on hot days to protect them from the harmless petrol odour, and the developer’s “community liaison officer” can simultaneously be the chair of Southall’s charity umbrella organisation, an ex-Tory tobacco salesman whose former employer paid for our ex-MP’s research assistant to attend a jolly. Nothing to see here!
Here’s where things get even more interesting. The Council’s own “Southall Reset” [pdf] document acknowledges that “challenges of deprivation, low pay, are particularly acute” in Southall, contributing to “deeply embedded health and wellbeing challenges.”
The Race Equality Commission Report “highlighted the need for an investment in adequate primary care in Southall” and “deeper meaningful engagement, and better conversations with residents.”
The Council’s response to this need for MORE investment? Close children’s centres.
“So you know we need MORE investment?” Mrs. Patel asked.
“Absolutely. The evidence is clear,” they said.
“Then why are you closing children’s centres?”
“Budget pressures.”
“But your own report says we need more investment, not less.”
“That’s a different report.”
“It’s your report. You wrote it.”
“Different department.”
“Same council.”
“Different budget.”
“Same money.”
“You don’t understand local government.”
Mrs. Patel was beginning to understand perfectly. They could officially acknowledge that Southall needed more investment while simultaneously cutting investment. They could document the problem and implement policies that made it worse. Each document existed in its own logical universe, disconnected from actual decisions.
Chapter 6: The MIPIM Negotiations
Every year, the Council Leader attends MIPIM in Cannes - what Private Eye calls a “booze ‘n’ hookerfest” - with expenses paid by Berkeley Group, the company behind the gasworks development that’s been poisoning Southall residents.
He goes to “negotiate hard” with developers.
The documented results of these negotiations:
- More developments approved
- Continued toxic air from gasworks
- Larger councillor allowances
- Closure of community facilities
Either he’s a remarkably poor negotiator, or “negotiating hard” means something different in Cannes than it does in English.
Chapter 7: The Zionist-Anti-Zionist Synthesis
The Council Leader represents Southall Green - 69% BAME, one of the most ethnically diverse wards in Britain. Many of his constituents have strong views about Palestinian liberation.
His attitude? “People who commit themselves to being opposed to Jewish national self determination / liberation aren’t my cup of tea. They can exist, sure, just outside of the Labour movement.”
So he simultaneously represents a diverse community while working to exclude people from that community based on their views about Middle Eastern politics.
It’s a masterclass in representation: represent everyone, except the people whose politics you disagree with.
Chapter 8: The Protection-by-Destruction Innovation
The Council Leader has pioneered a new approach to public service: protecting things by eliminating them.
“We’ve made the decision to protect the front line by working with what we have, rather than allowing Govt Commissioners to slash and burn services,” he explains, while slashing and burning services.
It was like watching someone slash the low-hanging fruit on the trees and then set fire to the orchard; then selling the “infertile land” to developers when there’s nothing to eat.
But that wasn’t even the worst part. Mrs. Patel had discovered something even more troubling. Back in 2012, a group of unelected businessmen had met to play Monopoly [pdf] with public assets. Not the board game - though the principle was identical. They wanted to “sell off our public assets for £20m profit.”
Their target included “buildings used for services for vulnerable adults, children and families.”
“So they planned this years ago?” Mrs. Patel asked the councillor.
“I wouldn’t know anything about that,” the councillor said.
“But you’re closing children’s centres,” Mrs. Patel said.
“We’re protecting services by cutting them,” they explained patiently. “We’ve made the decision to protect the front line by working with what we have, rather than allowing Government Commissioners to slash and burn services.”
“But you ARE slashing and burning services.”
“We’re protecting them by cutting them responsibly.”
“How is closing them protecting them?”
“If we don’t close them, someone else will close them worse.”
“Who?”
“The Government Commissioners.”
“Have they said they’ll close them?”
“Not yet.”
“So you’re closing them to prevent them being closed?”
“We’re protecting them by cutting them.”
Mrs. Patel was beginning to understand perfectly. Round and round she went, trapped in a perfectly logical system designed to make resistance impossible.
The beautiful thing was that everyone was telling the truth. The councillor really didn’t know about the 2012 meeting. The 2012 meeting really had happened. The plan really was being implemented. Nobody was really in charge of implementing it.
Somehow, a decision made by people who didn’t officially exist was being executed by people who officially couldn’t stop it. This allows him to be simultaneously the protector of services and the person closing services - a remarkable administrative innovation.
Chapter 9: Democracy 2.0 - Now With Less Democracy
But the system’s crowning achievement is happening right now. This month - July 2025 - Ealing Council is rewriting the petition rules in direct response to successful community campaigns.
On page 294 of their July 15, 2025 council papers [pdf, see p. 294], you can see democracy being crossed out in real time. They’re removing:
- Residents' rights to ask follow-up questions
- Requirements for senior officers to give evidence
- Meaningful participation in debates about their own petitions
They’ve solved the democracy problem by removing the democratic bits from democracy.
The timing is perfect: after communities proved they could win by building independent pressure (Save Southall Young Adult Centre, Save Southall Town Hall, Save Warren Farm Nature Reserve), the council is changing the rules to prevent it happening again.
Soon residents will be able to petition - they just won’t be able to ask questions, get answers, or participate in discussions about their concerns.
It’s democracy in name only, which is much more efficient than the old democracy where people could actually influence things.
Chapter 10: The Southall Young Adult Centre Miracle
But here’s the thing - resistance is still possible. In 2022, the Council wanted to demolish Southall Young Adult Centre to build 60 flats. The usual process commenced: consultation theater, predetermined decisions, official helplessness.
Then the “Save Southall Young Adult Centre” campaign launched. They didn’t try to work within the impossible system. They built independent pressure. They refused to accept that “decisions had been made.”
They won.
The centre was saved.
“How?” Mrs. Patel asked.
“We stopped playing by their rules,” the organisers said. “We built power they couldn’t ignore.”
Chapter 11: The Impossible Solution
Mrs. Patel realized the children’s centres could be saved the same way. But it would require doing something the system said was impossible: organising outside the official channels, building independent power, refusing to accept predetermined outcomes.
The Council had just changed the petition rules specifically to prevent another people-powered victory. But that only proved they were afraid of effective organising.
The system’s weakness was its strength: it was so obviously absurd that anyone paying attention could see through it.
The Council Leader could tweet about putting “people before buildings” while closing buildings where people accessed services. He could claim to protect services while cutting them. He could represent diverse communities while excluding their political views. He could prioritize eels over children and call it environmentalism.
All of this was only possible because residents had been playing by rules designed to make them lose.
But the campaigns to save the Young Adult Centre, the Town Hall and Warren Farm proved the rules could be broken.
Chapter 12: The Choice
Mrs. Patel had a choice. She could continue navigating the impossible bureaucracy, filing petitions that couldn’t ask questions, attending consultations about predetermined decisions, lobbying councillors who claimed to have no power.
Or she could do what the other campaigners did: build independent power and refuse to accept defeat.
The children’s centres could be saved. But only if parents stopped trying to reason with an unreasonable system and started building the power to change it.
The Council Leader would continue inhabiting his world of simultaneous contradictions, where closing centres meant protecting them and cutting services meant investing in communities.
But Mrs. Patel had learned something important: impossible things happen every day in Ealing politics.
If the Council Leader could be simultaneously progressive and regressive, protective and destructive, representative and exclusionary, then maybe Mrs. Patel could do something equally impossible.
Like save a children’s centre.
The Young Adult Centre campaigners had already shown it could be done.
Now it was the children’s centres' turn.
Mrs. Patel was beginning to understand perfectly. Even this right wing authoritarian Labour government thinks it’s a bad idea to close children’s centres.
Chapter 13: The Engagement Paradox
The Council Leader had perfected the art of simultaneous engagement.
He could tweet about “absolutely committed to engaging, listening and compromising” while sharing photos of residents protesting his refusal to engage, listen, or compromise.
He spoke frequently about “transparent engagement” and “finding the compromises everyone needs to make” - usually while explaining why the compromises residents needed to make were accepting whatever he’d already decided.
Even councillors who were “most responsive” resigned rather than “effectively endorse his toxic brand of politics.”
But the real innovation was tweeting “Welcome to Dystopia” while creating it.
Chapter 14: The Investment Paradox
The Council Leader had achieved something remarkable: he could simultaneously remember genocide while investing in it. “Remember Yesterday, Act Today,” his council posted about the genocide of 8,732 Muslim men and boys in Srebrenica thirty years ago, while investing £112 million in companies enabling genocide of more than 28,000 women and girls in Gaza today. More than 50,000 children killed or injured in Gaza to pay for his pension.
It was beautifully efficient. Why limit yourself to one genocide when you could remember one while funding another? The children understood perfectly.
Equally impressive was his ability to close children’s centres for budget reasons while sitting on the board as a paid director [pdf] of a corporation that had just received £140 million in public funding. The logic was flawless: children’s services were unaffordable, but corporate development was essential.
The Council Leader had mastered the art of proportional response. Children’s centres closing to save £750,000? Budget pressures, difficult decisions, no choice. Sitting on the board overseeing “one of the biggest regeneration schemes in Europe” with £140 million in funding? That was worth £2,000 a year of his valuable time.
It was a masterclass in priorities: Europe’s biggest regeneration project required his oversight, but Southall’s children’s centres were an unaffordable luxury.
He could simultaneously claim there was no money for community services while helping to plan a “mini-Manhattan” in his own borough. The vision was clear: 54-storey towers, yes. Children’s centres, no.
He’d found the perfect balance: cut services locally to save money, earn money regionally to oversee developers' profits. It was like a perpetual motion machine of fiscal responsibility.
Chapter and Verse: The Evolution of Enlightenment
In 2010, our future Council Leader shared his frustration about “sitting around not understanding all this punjabi” at community meetings in the area he would later represent.
By 2020, he had evolved. “Words have consequences,” he tweeted. “Impact is as important as intent. Culture is defined by leadership.”
Ten years of personal growth had taught him that words matter. Which made it remarkable that he could simultaneously lecture about cultural sensitivity while closing community centres in the same diverse communities he’d once struggled to understand. It was a masterclass in progressive evolution: you could acknowledge that words have consequences while ensuring your own words from the past had none.
Disclaimer
Readers who think this is all a bit unfair, unbelievable, unhelpful or downright unlawful…
The most revealing evidence of how the system works came from inside the machine itself. In 2022, leaked WhatsApp messages [pdf] from the Ealing Labour councillors' group chat revealed what they really thought about their leadership.
Mason’s own Labour colleagues called the Council Leader “callous, ruthless, sectarian.”
They discussed votes of no confidence, referenced “corruption and even theft” regarding the previous leader, and debated “bribes” and “rewards” for loyalty. Meanwhile, publicly, they maintained perfect unity and collective responsibility. It was the perfect illustration of how the system works: private recognition of the problems, public performance of harmony.
Mrs. Patel understood perfectly. The same councillors who privately criticised authoritarian leadership accepted Mason’s cabinet positions and pay rises to sit in silent support during council meetings.The leaked messages proved Mrs. Patel wasn’t imagining the contradictions - even the people inside the system could see them. They just couldn’t say so publicly.
URGENT support to fund a legal challenge to Ealing Council’s decision to close 10 children’s centres.
Sources: All tweets, council documents, and quotes are publicly available and linked in the original post at https://davidmarsden.info/2025/07/11/perceval-house-w-where-local.html
Try your hand at democracy in Ealing with our fun interactive FAQs, budget calculator and decision-making process explainer!
Related reading: Southall Under Siege | The Property Lobby | Air Quality Strategy Response | Action you can take | Think of the children | Save Ealing Children’s Centres (official campaign website)
Hometown
Hometown 📷
A few years before I grew up here.
The building on the right of the picture was “Rolie Clark’s sweet shop” as we kids knew it. It was actually a tobacconists and a barbershop. The archway next to it with the small child in it led to three houses, the middle one of which was ours (from about age eleven). You had to get past a very sad and angry dog (Scamp?) who was always chained up by our nextdoor neighbours. Our very elderly neighbours on the other side must yave thought they had dementia every time our cat stole the fresh fish from their kitchen.
Next building along was Arthur Clark’s newsagents, sweet shop, record and toy shop. This is where I had my first job as a newspaper boy delivering the morning papers before breakfast and school. It was great for reading all the back page football headlines and stories before I sat down with my cornflakes and Shoot! football magazine to memorise the starting elevens for all 92 football league clubs. It’s where I bought my first record Permanent Waves by Rush. Spirit Of Radio is still a favourite. It was that or Twelve Gold Bars by Status Quo, or Frampton Comes Alive! by Peter Frampton.
Swiftly moving on, next is (or would be) the NatWest bank. I will always remember answering the telephone at 11:06 am one sunny weekday morning. It must have been during the summer holidays and everyone was out of the house but me. Time for some serious guitar practice with my new massive amplifier and speaker cabinet! I’d just finished a mega feedback infused Jimi Hendrix inspired solo piece (think Machine Gun minus the virtuosity). As it says on Machine Gun’s Wikipedia entry:
Hendrix’s long guitar solos and percussive riffs combine with controlled feedback to simulate the sounds of a battlefield, such as helicopters, dropping bombs, explosions, machine guns, and the screams and cries of those wounded or grieving.
There’s no doubt that my version simulated the sounds of death and dying, and at 11:06 am as the last feedback was dying out and my ears were ringing, I heard the ringing of the telephone, which I duly answered.
“851611”
Hello. It’s the NatWest Bank. Could you please turn your, er, music down? We’re trying to work and we can barely hear ourselves think over your infernal racket!"
I’ve hated capitalism ever since.
In front of the bank was a bench for sitting on and a red phone box. The bench is where tough guy Peter Gissing walked by one day and just punched me in the face for no reason. This is why you don’t tend to find me just casually sitting around on benches.
The very narrow and short road next to the bank is, of course, Bank Street, which leads on to Church Street, which takes you past the Catholic church and down to the Anglican church opposite the grammar school and boarding houses.
The massive building the other side of Bank Street is “The Doctor’s House”, and there must have been some very nice flats above. My doctor, Dr Horsefield, was a known drunk, but he did save my children after “a cyst and and twist” left me looking like a lopsided Buster Gonad (“the boy with an unfeasibly large right testicle”) and had me rushed into hospital for emergency surgery. The Doctor’s House is where I met my first black man, Dr Prasad (from Nigeria), and my first Asian man, the unfortunately named Dr Rakshit, neither of whom seemed to think there was anything wrong with having one testicle the size of a melon.
The policeman in front of the Doctor’s is presumably heading in the direction of the small child to arrest her for being out after curfew, or something.
Finally, next to the Doctor’s is “The White House” which was a mysterious restaurant and guesthouse. Mysterious because I never went in, and never saw anyone go in or come out.
In the foreground on the left is the Caistor Lion, a water fountain and statue of a golden lion holding a red shield commemorating sixty years of Queen Victoria (I had to look that up). It’s still there today, unlike the lamp post. When I was growing up there was a public toilet, which is where I smoked my first “cigarette”.
I can’t remember the last time I went back to Caistor other than a couple of recent drive-throughs to show my unimpressed kids. The place gives me the creeps.
Person of Interest 101
The voicemail asked me to call 101 and quote my call reference number.
It took three attempts to get through to a human being. I guess they really are all busy dealing with emergencies.
“‘Ello, ‘ello, ‘ello. What is the nature of your call today?” (Why do police officers always talk like this?)
“I reported a crime online yesterday. I got a text and voicemail asking me to quote my call reference number…”
“Is that Mr Marsden?”
“Why, yes it is!” (Impressive detective work!)
“I’m afraid the online reporting form isn’t very helpful. It sends the information to us in a way that makes it difficult to understand what actually happened. Just give me a minute while I go through it.”
[A full five minutes on hold later…]
“Hello sir. You want to report the theft of your son’s scooter?”
“Yes, that’s correct.” (By now I wanted to report the theft of what little hope I’d had left when I started dialling the call.)
“Does the school have any cctv footage?”
“Yes, they do, but they haven’t reviewed it yet, as far as I know.”
[Another five-minute intermission.]
“We’ll need to take a statement from you and your son. The earliest I can visit you is next Friday between 8 and 9 a.m., or 12 and 1 p.m.?”
“My son will be either going to school or already at school during those times.”
“What about next Saturday?”
“Yes, that would be better. My only concern is that, by then, we will have lost not only his scooter, but what little chance there was of ever getting it back or finding out what happened to it. When I was growing up, the police would have just visited the school…”
“Yes, same here. Unfortunately, we can’t just go into schools these days. But don’t worry - this case won’t just be sitting on my desk.”
Somewhere out there, Finch and Reese are watching every camera feed in New York, saving lives in real time with the help of an all-seeing AI.
Meanwhile, in my corner of the UK, a ten-year-old’s scooter vanishes in broad daylight, and the only Machine involved is caller id at the local police station.
“OK. Thank you, officer.”