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Thatcher’s daughter.

Reeves is still peddling the household analogy https://www.taxresearch.org.uk/Blog/2025/01/18/reeves-is-still-peddling-the-household-analogy/ Reeves is still claiming she is running the economy like her mother did their household when she was growing up. That's crazy. Her mother could not create her own money. As Chancellor, that is what she has to do. If Reeves cannot spot the difference, no wonder we're in deep trouble.

Not sure why this wasn’t prosecuted under anti-terrorism laws?

White supremacist jailed for asylum seeker attack at hotel bbc.com

More than two years after I suggested this should be a priority, my sons' school will have a school street during the school run times.

The new President of Israel.

Israel has changed since Donald Trump's last term – has he? bbc.com

AI, ETHICS AND DEMOCRACY

I keep reading that AI is dumb, dangerous and demented. And I’ve no doubt it’s all true. Ethan Mollick, author of Co-Intelligence, describes ChatGPT as “a very elaborate auto complete like you have on your phone”

AI slop is contaminating our lives with worthless junk, and while I’ve played with and been briefly amazed and entertained by Google NotebookLM’s auto-generated podcast creations, they can get repetitive, boring and stupid very quickly.

We can rail against AI all we want, but it’s not going away. I expect AI to get smarter and to have fewer hallucinations even if the danger level remains high.

What is Al good for?

Micro.blog uses Al to generate Alt-Text descriptions of images and that seems to work well enough for its intended purpose. What it can’t do, of course, is generate descriptions that are personal to the uploader or post context, e.g., if I have a picture of my son the description will be a generic “boy with curly hair” or such like.

I’ve used Google’s Gemini on blog posts I’ve written and it’s given me some very positive feedback about my writing, enough to make me feel good about myself (certainly much more so than any human reader). Although it also got into the habit of creating its own alternative versions, which often were funnier and more interesting (to me) than my own writing. (It will also roast you if that’s your thing.)

Similarly, Google NotebookLM has fed back on my entire year of posts in 2024, and was very nice about it, too. It is quite therapeutic to hear that, as long as you take it for what it is - an elaborate auto-complete that ultimately will rot your brain, take your job and ruin your life.

I’ve also used both for work in some limited ways - drafting a job description, drafting cases for support for funding applications, and summarising or analysing documents. Both require some degree of human intervention, but the process and product was useful in helping me get started, and complete the tasks.

One area where I found Al to be most interesting was in commenting on and forming an ethical response to a local democracy issue where I live. I found the response to be in line with what community campaigners (including me) had been asking for, and in total contrast to the response from our elected representatives, authorities and business leaders. That must be the auto-complete.

While I don’t think I would yet call for all politicians to be replaced by AI, I do wonder if there is a potential use case here for analysing policy implications, or at least highlighting ethical considerations?

I ran these thoughts past Claude.ai and this is a summary of what it had to say:

• democratic processes need human judgment, accountability, and the ability to balance competing interests the ways that AI currently cannot
• core ethical principles that should guide public service:
• transparency about conflicts of interest
• accountability to the people
• clear acknowledgment of problems rather than minimisation
• practical solutions for reporting complaints and response
• the fundamental duty of public officials to serve their constituents

Human decision-makers can, of course, choose to prioritise other interests over ethical imperatives

I suggested to it that the AI response to the Southall Gasworks issue demonstrated more “empathy” than the human political response:

• The AI’s response prioritised human wellbeing and acknowledged suffering, in contrast to the actual political response, which was bureaucratic and dismissive, treating hundreds of complaints as isolated incidents and prioritising procedural responses over human impact
• A truly empathetic human response to such serious health impacts should have been immediate and decisive action to protect public health

Of course, the AI response wasn’t actually empathetic. It applied logical ethical principles that prioritise human wellbeing. What looks like empathy is actually systematic ethical reasoning unclouded by personal interests, political considerations, or institutional self-protection.

I suggested that it might not be uncommon for political leaders to lack empathy, and that it’s therefore so much easier for them to allow personal, and powerful political and institutional interests to take precedence over what most ordinary people would see quite clearly as the interests of human wellbeing:

This connects to research on the prevalence of psychopathic traits in leadership positions. In the Southall Gasworks case, a leader with normal empathetic capacity might find it psychologically difficult to:

• dismiss hundreds of health complaints from suffering residents
• accept substantial gifts while community members develop serious illnesses
• continue business as usual while learning of deaths potentially linked to their decision

Of course, even someone with empathy might not be able to resist powerful institutional or financial pressures.

Bye bye Biden. A genocidal war criminal with the blood of tens of thousands of women and children on his hands. Paved the way for fascism.

This Lino government is fucking awful.

Patients dying in corridors at overwhelmed hospitals, say nurses bbc.com

Liz Truss’s lawyers have sent me a cease and desist notice for writing:

Liz “Pork Markets” Truss.

Oh, fuck. She might not have been a liar, or a racist, or a murderer, but boy was she stupid. She killed the Queen, trashed the UK economy, and blew up Russia’s Nordstream pipeline…

I posted on my blog about Jimmy Carter. Hoping to post more in 2025 but don't hold me to that - https://www.danlynch.org/blog/2025/01/rip-jimmy-carter/

#music #creativecommons

Tl;dr: we’re doomed!

DEVELOPERS: IF YOU REALLY WANT TO HELP THE COMMUNITY

This was survey feedback given to developers proposing to build a massive data centre on the site of the industrial estate down the road from me, but it applies more broadly to all big developers, especially those with annual profits of half a billion pounds.

I’m concerned about noise from the site causing a nuisance and health problems in an area that is already susceptible to multiple environmental health stressors, and exacerbated by deep-rooted poverty, deprivation, low pay and systemic racism and power imbalances embedded in the local authority planning system.

I’m also concerned about the local power grid. Only a couple of years ago it was reported that Ealing doesn’t have enough capacity to power more new homes that are so badly needed, particularly in Southall which suffers from chronic overcrowding. A data centre requires a lot of power. How will this work?

If you really want to do something for the local community how about you plant thousands of trees to compensate for the fact that Southall has the lowest tree canopy cover in the whole of Ealing?

How about building homes for the street homeless and providing ongoing support they will need to live in them sustainably?

How about building a drug and alcohol rehab unit to treat the ever growing numbers of addicts roaming our streets and parks?

How about using all that information processing power to work out how to provide more frequent, more reliable, free public transport in Southall and to reduce the congestion caused by all the traffic?

How about building a secular community centre, a library, a youth club, a health centre, a school? Southall is so overdeveloped now, and Ealing Labour Council sold off all our community assets to developers.

Quite the confession.

Gabriel said the agency duped Hezbollah into buying the pagers, making advertising films and brochures, and sharing them on the internet.

“When they are buying from us, they have zero clue that they are buying from the Mossad,” he said. “We make like [movie] Truman Show, everything is controlled by us behind the scene.”

At the heart of neoliberalism is the fantasy of escape: escape from taxation and regulation, escape from the European Union and international law, escape from social obligation, escape from democracy. Escape, eventually, to a starlit wonderland beyond politics and beyond people.

Currently reading: The Invisible Doctrine: The Secret History of Neoliberalism (& How It Came to Control Your Life) by George Monbiot 📚

…streets were relatively clean, traffic lights and lamp-posts worked, and officers were present in the busiest areas. Simple things absent in other parts of Syria, and a source of pride here.

Traffic lights and lamp-posts usually work in Southall. Seems like Idlib is cleaner and safer?

All we need now is an authoritarian ethno-nationalist leader….

They are reduced to playing a game of politics which lacks any substance, with their only reward (apart from those that might come when they have left office) being the dopamine hits that they get as a consequence of the appearance of their being in power.

Sounds like someone I know.

Via Richard Murphy.

A shame we only get to choose one.

“…Netanyahu said the move was necessary because a “new front” had opened up on Israel’s border with Syria after the fall of the Assad regime to an Islamist-led rebel alliance.”

How (in)convenient.

Israel plans to expand Golan settlements after fall of Assad bbc.com

SOUTHALL ODOURS

I step out of my house and immediately notice the artificial “cotton fresh” scent of odour suppressants wafting south from the old Gasworks site. How can this be? They finished remediating the contaminated earth in 2019, and people have been living there in the new homes they built since 2021.

Still, it’s better than the smell of petrol, which is what we had to put up with day and night for months on end in 2018. Bad enough to wake us up in the night during the long hot summer.

And it’s better than the smell of tar, which we still get when the wind is blowing from the west. Before the asphalt plant was built, we didn’t get any odours even though there is also a Tarmac plant nearby. The Asphalt plant owners say that is because the Nestle coffee plant closed. The (burnt?) coffee smell masked the tar.

I get around the corner of my block, on my morning walk, and see the small industrial estate that was the bane of our life for months in 2022. The main culprits were the paper recylcling company, which had its own incinerator for burning (believe it or not) plastics and coated wooden pallets.

Their neighbour opposite was a custom kitchen furniture maker, which also had its own incinerator for burning laminated particle fibreboard. The garage at the front regularly burns stuff in an old oil barrel.

All of which contributed to some of the most disgusting odours imaginable blowing into our kitchen, bathroom and hallway whe the wind blew from the north-east.

I walked down the street to the corner where the local council installed a tiny corner “wildflower garden”, which my wife and kids loved because it smelled so good. Two years later, it’s reduced to a dumping ground (no one could have foreseen this).

Further on my walk, past the homes reeking of marijuana, and weaving in and out of the obstacle course of bed bases mattresses and pallets stren across the pavements, I reach the town and smell the food aromas.

I’m reminded of the old Honey Monster factory, which used to regale us with the smell of roasted (burnt?) onions (I know, right?).

And my first visit to Southall (in daylight hours), twenty odd years ago, turning left out of the old station and naively going into the underpass. The stench of piss that hit me! “Welcome to Southall!” indeed.

I finished my walk through the town and back up round and through the park. If I’d gone further up the canal by my sons' school I would have got the smell of the narrowboats' wood-burning stoves, which sometimes fills the school playground and causes kids to have to use their inhalers.

And if I’d walked along the main road home or by the junction with the big industrial estate I would have choked on the heavy air filled with the exhaust fumes from cars and lorries.

Southall stinks so bad that the council set up its own Southall Odours web page, email and hotline where you can report bad smells. Because if you don’t report it, the council can’t do anything.

If you’re lucky, you might see something done after a year or two of complaining, as long as you can withstand the constant gaslighting.

If you’re unlucky, and you’re not already dead or too ill to complain, you’ll be branded a troublemaker and excluded from local democracy.

Or you’ll be told to move by the council’s community safety director.

WHAT'S GOING ON IN SYRIA?

If I understand this correctly: it’s illegal in the UK to say or do anything that could be construed as support for the democratically elected government of Gaza and likewise for a party of the democratically elected government of Lebanon because we designate them as proscribed terrorist organisations.

The outgoing US president brokered a one-sided ceasefire between Lebanon and Israel, which allows Israel to continue bombing Lebanon and illegally invading and occupying its sovereign territory.

As soon as this ceasefire was in place, the Israeli prime minister threatened the president of Syria, and the armed militia formerly known as al-Qaeda/ISIS/Daesh/al-Nusra (who we designate as proscribed terrorist organisations) proceeded to violently overthrow the government of Syria (who we did not designate as a terrorist organisation despite all the bad press).

Incidentally, the leader of this armed militia formerly known as al-Qaeda/ISIS/Daesh/al-Nusra was previously held in US detention facilities in Iraq for several years and was coincidentally released just in time to form Al-Nusra at the start of Syrian Civil War in 2011.

The leader of this armed militia formerly known as al-Qaeda/ISIS/Daesh/al-Nusra has now formed the new government in Syria.

They are the good guys and are really very moderate compared to the former government of Syria - the bad guys (which is presumably why we didn’t proscribe them as a terrorist organisation).

While all this is happening, Israel is bombing Syria and illegally invading and occupying its sovereign territory. And Israel continues to obliterate Gaza. All paid for by the good ol' US of A.

Don’t most start-ups fail?

Maybe a pop-up government would work better?

Government wants state to be more 'like a start-up' bbc.com

The Queen had the IRA over for tea, so I can’t see what the problem is?

UK will review Syrian group's terror ban, cabinet minister says bbc.com

My friend Tim has been busy…

Dull Men's Club - the 'mundane' Facebook group that became an unlikely hit bbc.com

Luxury flats newly built by the canal.

The absence of windows on the sides of the blocks is presumably so that the residents don’t have to see the people in the poor houses next door.

I don’t understand how people think Joe Biden is a good guy. He’s probably done more than anyone to drag the political centre to the right, and paved the way for fascism.

Suggesting that pardoning his drug addict son is somehow good and righteous is obscene.

Blaming smartphones is laughable.

Is this the end for Greggs sausage rolls?

I knew where this is before clicking through.

Wife wants to know what I think about the Assisted Dying Bill.

She’s strongly in favour: “It can’t come soon enough for some people,” she says.

BYE BYE BIDEN

Some highlights and thoughts from Yesterday’s Man: The Case Against Joe Biden by Branko Marcetic 📚

Against Biden’s best efforts, disaster had been averted. (p. 127)

This seems to sum up his career neatly. Far from the popular public image that he has cultivated and that the media have happily gone along with for the most part.

Foreign policy

“I’m not going to start World War Three for you!”

Not Biden, but British army General Mike Jackson refusing to follow Biden’s friend General Wesley Clark’s orders to confront Russia in Kosovo. (p. 172)

The book was written before Russia invaded Ukraine. It seems that Biden wants to go out with a bang, despite his previous utterances.

”There is no such thing as a winnable nuclear war.” (p. 152)

Biden saying one thing and doing another is characteristic of his entire political career. He’s not unique in that respect, of course, and perhaps he’s actually better at it than most. He did get elected president after all.

Israel

Biden was the ultimate Friend of Israel. He helped provide Israel with huge amounts of US aid money, and Israel lobbyists on his campaign staff returned the favour helping Biden raise huge amounts of money to run his various election campaigns.

Biden spent his entire career giving unqualified support to Israel, and claimed that Americans “couldn’t afford” to criticise Israel in public.

Yugoslavia

Toward the end of Bush’s term, the ex-communist Eastern European country of Yugoslavia began disintegrating in a miasma of nationalism and ethnic and religious sectarianism, forces unleashed by a Western-imposed program of economic “shock therapy” that in essence exported Western neoliberal policies to the once prosperous country, running its living standards into the ground. War soon broke out. (p. 156)

Later, Biden agitated for Clinton’s military intervention in Serbia, which lay the foundations for future “humanitarian” bombing campaigns elsewhere.

If you cared about political survival, it was safer to err on the side of war. (p. 158)
###Iraq

Despite [or because of?] his role in starting the war, Biden was still considered one of the party’s wisest heads on foreign policy. (p. 173)

George W. Bush apparently followed Biden’s instructions on selling the war on Iraq to the American people and the United Nations.

Biden proposed an ethno-nationalist “three state solution” for Iraq similar to Israel’s proposals to came up Arab states into weaker sectarian units.

He proposed to Balkanise Iraq into smaller ethnic and religious sectarian states with limited freedom of movement and borders controlled by foreign troops.

A bit like Gaza and the rest of the illegally Occupied Palestinian Territories now.

Flawed as it was, the plan burnished Biden’s credentials as a foreign policy expert. (p. 179)

Iraq duped Biden forcing withdrawal of US troops. In response, ISIS ‘emerged' from an oppressed religious minority.

War on Terror

Biden’s ‘counter-terrorism plus’ policy saw the US bomb seven Muslim countries without declaring war, much like Israel is now doing with more American bombs.

That helped to fuel anti-Americanism and an immigration and prisons crisis.

Instead of providing homes for the poor, he would spend the following decades housing them in jails. (p. 85)

Domestic policy

Race relations

Racist Clinton doubled the American prison population and achieved the world’s highest rate of incarceration. Mostly with black people.

This policy usefully helped to reduce official unemployment figures and paint Clinton’s neoliberalism as an economic miracle.

Another lesson Biden had first wrongly internalised from American apartheid: that people of different backgrounds simply couldn’t live together in harmony. (p. 177)

Instead Biden backed segregation (busing) and individual states' rights over a united federal states of America.

Women’s rights

”I don’t think that a woman has the sole right to say what should happen to her body.” (p. 184)

Biden on the Roe v. Wade decision in 1974

Biden’s neoliberalism

Biden presented as a progressive liberal on the side of the working class. But he spent his career siding with Republicans and moving the Democrats ever further to the right.

At one time even a former Klan recruiter thought Biden had gone too far. Another Klan leader praised Biden’s election platform claiming it was as if it had been written by a Klansman.

Supporting spending cuts

Biden said Jimmy Carter was nothing special, and welcomed Reaganomics as a step in the right direction. Although in typical Biden fashion he also claimed Reagan’s first budget would be an economic disaster before voting for it (along with 29 other Democrats).

Reagan’s cuts cost 270,000 jobs and reduced access to financial support for millions of Americans. Rather than reducing the deficit, it increased it, and made the rich richer, and the poor poorer.

Like Thatcher in Britain, Reagan’s greatest achievement was in transforming his opposition into his mirror image. You still get a choice at the polls, but there’s very little, if any, substantive policy difference between the two.

”Biden isn’t a liberal anymore.”

Ayn Rand acolyte Paul Ryan, who lost to Biden in the 2012 vice-presidential election, but declared a more important victory.

Biden’s support for tax cuts for the rich wasn’t a one-off. This was a repeated pattern of voting indicating where his true loyalties lay. Indeed, later he proposed his own tax cuts that were more severe than Reagan’s, and “right out of the Tea Party playbook”.

Where once the tyranny of “special interests” meant the control of government by big business and the super-rich, it now referred to the ordinary Americans the New Deal had sought to protect from those same powerful entities. (p. 68)

No longer aligned with the working class, Biden now focused on the middle class, solidly Conservative, tax-and-government fearing supporters of the super-rich.

”It’s the middle class, stupid.” (p.147)

Much like the South where Biden always pivoted for support of anti-union, pro-slavery and white supremacist votes. Biden could have tried to bring Southern voters to the Democrats, but instead chose to lead the Democrats to align with the politics of the South.

Biden had successfully facilitated the decades-long wholesale robbery of working- class Americans by law enforcement. (p. 91)

Enter Bill Clinton, who with Biden’s full support, carried on Reagan’s economic policies leading to ever more cuts in government spending and hardship for millions more Americans.

Biden again offered trillions of dollars of cuts to retirement funds, Medicare, Medicaid and food stamps, giving Mitch McConnell everything he asked for.

As president, much of Obama’s job involved cleaning up messes that Biden had helped create. (p. 191)

The major legislative accomplishments that Biden had racked up in prior decades had succeeded because they had been in pursuit of Republican goals. (p. 199)

Biden did what he always did: plead fealty to working class voters in public speeches filled with references to his Scranton roots while privately appealing for the support of big-money interests. (p. 214)

By 2020, Biden had shifted (and shifted the Democrats) so far to the right, he was finally electable and the safest establishment option to defeat Trump as president.

The air outside is thick with the smell of tar and vehicle emissions.

Not doing my cough any good.

Starmer is proving to be every bit as reckless and depraved as Johnson.

PEOPLE DON'T CHANGE

People don’t change, but they can make good decisions.

This is a quote, or the gist of a quote, from an episode of Person of Interest, a TV show I watched avidly for two and a half seasons before rapidly losing interest after the scriptwriters killed off one of the only characters with a fully functioning sense of empathy (who happened to be a black woman) and which therewith descended into a cliched, repetitive, and all-too predictable (yet surprising) slapstick parody of itself.

If I wanted to watch a bunch of psychopaths endlessly escalate a brutal war on humanity I could just look at the news. Americans sure like their guns and shooting people for entertainment. Personally, I prefer a nice cup of tea and a good book, and a bit of peace and quiet.

Anyway, people don’t change, but they can make good decisions. Especially when they have enough guns pointed at their head. That’s the takeaway, or the moral of this story. But they always escape, and then they’re back to making bad decisions all over again, usually involving pointing guns at other people’s heads.

And maybe that’s right. People don’t change. Not until there’s a compelling reason to. We carry on mindlessly making the same old bad decisions over and over again like in Einstein’s theory of insanity, repeating the same mistakes and expecting a different outcome.

It’s a horrible take. But it’s true to some extent. Getting better (it can’t get much worse) can be a bit of a song (and a dance). Recovery is a long and winding road. They tried to make me go to rehab, but I said “No, no, no!” There’s a lot of resistance to change, and even to making good decisions.

But is much of this also a result of the world we live in, and who we are? We live in a world consumed by neoliberal orthodoxy. We are in thrall to the ideas of freedom of the market, the decimation of government and public services, and the freedom of individuals (and individual responsibility, even while what’s left of the state bails out the greed and mistakes of unaccountable banks and corporations).

There’s no such thing as society, Thatcher told us. There is no alternative.

Trump was right, Americans will never vote for a black woman. Hell, they wouldn’t even vote for a warmongering white woman. The white supremacist patriarchy is strong. Yes, they voted for a black man, but he turned out to be the most murderous president in history.

Is there an alternative? There’s always an alternative. It’s just that usually the alternative is more of the same, or worse. Take it or leave it. And even when there is a different option, one which might slightly rein in the excesses of this neoliberal onslaught, it’s demonised as a Stalinist coup that will murder Jews. “Nothing. Has. Changed.” implored Theresa May, quite rightly, as she continued as Prime Minister despite losing her massive parliamentary majority and failing to obtain a mandate to deliver Brexit, or anything other than her own resignation. Calling that election was the most audacious thing she ever did, aside from running through a field of wheat as a child.

Despite the people obviously voting for change, and genuine hope, it was clear that what we really needed instead was a lying, racist killer clown to run the country into the ground.

At least he had a plan. An oven-ready plan to deliver Brexit on a plate just in time for the New Year. It would be served cold, and thoroughly unappetising to everyone, toxic even. But it was the will of the people. It’s what we wanted. We voted for it! We wanted to sever our economic ties to our nearest and biggest trading partner and experience the freedom of going it alone in the big wide world, unleashed!

But that wasn’t enough! The killer clown told too many lies, and hosted too many parties in covid lockdown. He had to go. A tiny minority of elderly rich right wingers then voted for a new leader for us. One who would be more honest, less racist, less murderous, and not as stupid. Liz “Pork Markets” Truss.

Oh, fuck. She might not have been a liar, or a racist, or a murderer, but boy was she stupid. She killed the Queen, trashed the UK economy, and blew up Russia’s Nordstream pipeline, all in less than a month. Talk about a whirlwind. And some bad decisions. She now has a very nice pension. You reap what you sow.

People don’t change, but they can make good decisions. Neoliberalism doesn’t change, and the more that the people are subjected to its bad decisions, its lust for war, for death, for oil, for money, for making the rich richer and the poor poorer, the harder it gets for people to change, and the fewer good decisions are made.

WFH SAVED MY LIFE

I’ve worked from home since the end of February 2020. I transferred all my work and systems online to do so, and while I’m still part-time, in practice I’m now available 24/7 for every conceivable administrative emergency (“Hi David. Please order me some large coloured post-it notes and have them delivered to my home tomorrow” or “Hi David. Please bring £200 in cash to my house this morning so I can pay for my lunch meeting today.").

I won’t pretend I’ve always been highly productive, in the office or at home. But I always get everything done that needs to be done, and I’m super-flexible and adaptable. I’ve been asked to do - and done - huge, complex projects at short notice and with short deadlines that are outside of my remit and frankly beyond my skill set, but I’ve done them, learned how to do it on the spot or got help.

I do go into the office for occasional in-person meetings and social gatherings (“xmas lunch” looms) when necessary, and indeed spent a solid three hours working last Thursday with a masked colleague (she had a fever) in a freezing cold office. I’d just recovered from a bad reaction to the covid vaccine. Next day was a write-off. I was exhausted and worried about whether the work we did was really good enough. The day after and since I’ve had a terrible cough and cold, shortness of breath, wheezing. (Since my COPD diagnosis, every rasping breath I take is assessed and rediagnosed by my non-medic wife as requiring medical attention.)

My workplace is bad for my health. Pre-covid I had multiple chest infections that kept me away from work and reduced my productivity to zero for weeks at a time. Since I worked from home, and catching covid aside, I’ve had zero time where I’ve been unable to go to the office for essential work that can only be done there. Even when I’ve had coughs and colds, I’ve felt well enough to do the work that needed to be done. Somehow (until now with this new cough) I don’t seem to get so ill or feel so bad when I’m at home.

Working from home has given me the time and space to transform how I work for the better. I’m better organised, more thoughtful, less rushed and distracted. I can honestly say that I’m now the most productive I’ve ever been thanks to a more comfortable, relaxed and focussed personal work space.

And, yes, being part-time, and flexible, I can take a nap if I need one.

Why should people work at home? https://youtu.be/bQN_Fb03RfE?si=CZoQagrotTA_urw8 The ‘return to work’ now being enforced by many organisations makes no sense for many people, or the planet. It really is time that we have some enlightened managers who did what is best for people and the world, and not what they see as being best for them.

The politics of envy?

A genuine laugh out loud moment from Jonathan Pie, who is definitely not having a liberal meltdown.

NOT FAKE NEWS

Convicted felon, fascist and fake news king, the 45ᵗʰ President of the United States paid the porn star ‘stormy Daniels’ hundreds of thousands of dollars not to tell anyone that she had sex with him.

Last night, she appeared on a Channel 4 US election special with disgraced former UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson, who was there to plug his memoir “Unleashed.”

Daniels wanted to know if Johnson had any children, and wondered if Johnson would leave his daughter alone with Trump. (Trump has a whole series of very serious sexual misconduct allegations against him.)

Johnson explained that he has met Trump and he’s perfectly polite and well-mannered, so of course he would have no problem with him.

Johnson himself, of course, is famous among other things for being a serial liar and not knowing how many children he has.

Needless to say, Trump won the election, and Johnson is trying to make a comeback.

Wasn’t Harris ahead in the polls until the UK government started interfering in the election?

LIZ KENDALL - MAD, BAD AND DANGEROUS

Trials of employment advisers giving CV and interview advice in hospitals produced “dramatic results”, Work and Pensions Secretary Liz Kendall told the BBC.

No. No they didn’t.

The Secretary of State for the Department of Work and Pensions was referring to her experience of visiting a severe mental illness Individual Placement and Support (IPS) programme.

In the community.

Mental health patients are in hospital usually because they are incapable of living life in general let alone getting a job. Plus, mental health units are usually secure wards, so they can’t get out.

IPS works because people are in recovery, receiving treatment that makes them feel better and well enough to start thinking about work.

Factional right-wing neoliberal think tank “Labour Together":

The Budget is a Winner with Tories

Now we can all agree that Biden was a total failure of a president.

THE SOUTHALL GASWORKS STORY

The story of how the remediation of Southall Gasworks highlights the environmental injustices faced by communities of colour.

The disregard for the health and concerns of these residents raises questions about the inequitable distribution of environmental burdens and the role of local government in protecting vulnerable populations.

It also highlights the potential conflicts between development, profit, and public health, and the need for greater transparency and accountability from authorities and developers.

(This is a Google NotebookLM creation, based on selected sources from my blog posts on Southall Gasworks.)

Every word speaks the brutal truth.

The Year After Al-Aqsa Flood | Black Agenda Report

Dear President Biden…

IMPOSSIBLE DEMANDS

Starmer is cynically setting up the NHS to fail in order to present private healthcare as the fix.

Starmer: a man way of his depth when dealing with the NHS https://www.taxresearch.org.uk/Blog/2024/09/13/starmer-a-man-way-of-of-his-depth-when-dealing-with-the-nhs/ Starmer's speech on the NHS yesterday offered view of a man unprepared for office who sends out incompetent messages to those who now work in the organisation he leads and who has no comprehension of the economic environment in which he must manage healthcare.

It's not surprising that now the UK public is seeing Starmer in action that his popularity is falling.

DEATH CULT

OBR: We have to kill old people and starve the children of the poor in order to keep funding our expensive wars and ensure the rich get richer.

Labour: Let’s get to it!

The Office for Budget Responsibility’s forecast for the national debt is a worthless exercise by economically illiterate fantasists https://www.taxresearch.org.uk/Blog/2024/09/13/the-office-for-budget-responsibilitys-forecast-for-the-national-debt-is-a-worthless-exercise-by-economically-illiterate-fantasists/ The Office for Budget Responsibility has forecast that UK debt will rise to 300% of GDP in 50 years because they think it impossible that taxes can rise above current levels, even though state spending will reach 60% of GDP in their opinion. All they prove is their own lack of imagination and competence by doing so.

Labour’s self-imposed, arbitrary and “binding” “fiscal rules” are the same as the Tories' Austerity policies.

Political choices.

The same choices.

So much for change.

Original link to the article from 11 years ago:

My polling station was empty when I went to vote around 1:30 pm.

My nearly ten year old looked at the TWELVE names on the ballot.

“Don’t vote Labour, Dad”.

He looked some more.

“There’s Joe!” he said.

“VOTE FOR JOE!”

ELECTION FEVER

My inbox is full of people asking for my opinion and personal experience of this UK general election campaign and who to vote for.

(Un)fortunately, as I sat down to type the words from my fingertips, my four year old decided he needed to express his thoughts instead.

It’s obviously not to scale (he’s only four!), but you can clearly see the Labour supermajority in red, and the Tory wipeout in blue. That they are a ‘uniparty’/two cheeks of the same backside is encapsulated in the red triangle atop the blue square in the centre.

The Green surge in vote share (in green, on the left) isn’t reflected in seats won, of course. In pink, you can see the rise of the independents, black is the Workers Party, and to the far right (in grey) is Reform.

The Lib Dems are an irrelevance (except in the South West) in yellow (this is where we had to stop, as he got very upset at the lack of orange).

New e-scooter and cycle hire infrastructure in Southall Green.

[Edit]

Not the ideal location.

THE CUCKOO'S NEST

Ealing Genocide Supporters Club (aka Ealing Labour Party) held their Southall Branch meeting yesterday at the Dominion Centre in Southall. Under the guise of a “Your Town, Your Voice” community get together, our local elected repellents gathered on masse in all their finery. I couldn’t help myself as they posed for a group photo all gurning inanely as the photographer encouraged them to “say cheese!”. “Say genocide!” I offered. “Genocide supporters!”

Cllr Dr Murtaza of their number aggressively reprimanded me. “What evidence do you have that we support genocide?” he demanded to know. Well, I told him, my main piece of evidence would be that you have done nothing to oppose it.

Ooh! There’s Cllr Martin! Our locally elected anti-Traveller racist! “What evidence do you have to support that?” Well, here it is.

Oh, and while you’re at it, Cllr Dr Murtaza. Next time you are chauffeuring our glorious leader around in your Porsche, try not to park in a cycle lane, please.

Then there was illegal samosa factory proprietor Cllr “I own half of Southall” Anand.

I hadn’t realised until yesterday quite how visceral my revulsion for these people is. The grand cuckoo in the nest arrived about half way through the event. I would have confronted him myself, and previously I have done. Maybe I was just worn down from a week with the ‘flu, but I felt like I really had to keep my distance for my own sanity. In any case, a few council officers made beelines for me and made sure I was busy answering their questions.

Interestingly, one officer suggested to me that resident-led ward forums would be the likely outcome of this event. Fantastic news, if that’s the case. Another officer I spoke to later, knew nothing about this idea, though, but took copious notes. A neighbour and friend told me that she spoke to the cuckoo himself who told her that this meeting was in fact the replacement for he old (councillor-led) ward forums. That’s that then.

The event itself was a repeat of several resident[pdf] surveys and failed plans over the past twenty years or so (for which I’ve seen records, or taken part in). The problems are always the same. The responses from the council are always the same. Nothing.

“…when you look at it on a personal level, if Nelson was your friend or your neighbour, you would absolutely agree that he should be given the immediate right to settle.”

You. Absolute. Bastards.

If anyone knows of a crowdfunder to support this man’s legal challenge, I would like to contribute to it.
https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-merseyside-69016539

Natalie Elphicke said Labour can’t be trusted and doesn’t listen. She said the victim of her husband’s sexual assault was a liar even after he was convicted.

Does she really share Labour values?

Starmer: “I’m delighted to welcome Natalie Elphicke to my changed Labour Party!”

“Zionism is rooted in trauma and fear. It’s about survival and love for the Jewish people. But like any other ethnic nationalism, Zionism establishes a hierarchy: It’s about prioritizing our safety and well-being, even at the expense of others. It relies on an alternate historical narrative that justifies the occupation and rationalizes the status quo. And it cannot produce a just peace on its own.”

Via Zionism cannot produce a just peace. Only external pressure can end the Israeli apartheid.

M.S. Panesar hit wicket b Panesar 0

Tbf, he lasted longer than I thought he would.

WHAT MARXISM TEACHES US

What Marxism teaches us is simply to approach questions of society from a material basis: how does human life persist? Through production of the goods and services needed to live.

How are these things produced under capitalist society? Through exploitation of the labor of the working class, that is, by requiring one class of people to sell their labor as a commodity to another class to produce values.

What is the result of this system? That workers are “alienated” from their labor, meaning from much of their waking life, constantly required to produce more and more with an ever-precarious access to the means of subsistence.

Via Jacobin.

STOP THE PLANES

My wife was born in Uganda. She’s Black, like our kids. She came to the UK when she was five.

She’s just told me she feels like she should put herself on a plane to Rwanda.

Then she said she realised she came here legally, she has indefinite leave to remain, and she’s a British citizen.

I asked her what was it that made her feel like she should deport herself.

Unsurprisingly, she said it’s because of all the anti-immigration rhetoric in the news. As she said,

It’s obvious no one wants my Black face here.

A local shop owner asked why big kid wasn’t at school. When I told him it was closed because it was being used as a polling station we got talking about the elections.

He asked me who I voted for, and then he told me he thinks “it’s going to be another hung parliament”.

My local polling station was deserted when I went to vote around 11am.

Zack, 35, says: “I got pretty disillusioned after I found myself consistently matching with anti-Zionists, even when I set it to ‘Jewish only’.”

Zack put an Israeli flag emoji on his profile to rectify the situation. “It’s annoying because the more creative personalities I normally go for tend to be more anti-Israel.” Now he’s having fewer awkward conversations about the conflict, but the people he’s matching with are “less interesting”.

Source: Hinge and Tinder are swamped with anti-Zionism, say Jewish singles - The Jewish Chronicle

…blanket denial of Israeli war crimes has served to quiet the consciences of Israel’s most ardent supporters, ensuring their unreserved backing for the war. After all, if it can be argued that the rest of the world is lying, or, failing that, the devastation and casualties in Gaza can all be blamed on Hamas, then what is there to feel guilty about?

Source: Six months of liberal Zionist doublethink

The agenda now is all-Israeli: There is no one else but us. Only our disasters, our suffering, our sacrifices – and everything else can burn for all we care.

We have become as monsters. Not only in our actions, but above all in our apathy.

Gideon Levy via Hippy Steve

WHERE'S DADDY?

We have AI that can decide who is a terrorist and then track their every movement so we can wait until they're home to drop a bomb on their whole family.

But the 3 successive precision air strikes on #WCK aid workers coordinating with and following route instructions from the IDF was just a 'tragic mistake' because it was night time.

Hippy Steve

Hamas wants a permanent end to the war and full Israeli withdrawal from Gaza.

Mr Netanyahu’s office said the proposals were “unrealistic”.

Currently reading: Yesterday’s Man by Branko Marcetic 📚

He would indeed spend his Senate career showering Israel with unquestioning support, even when its behavior elicited bipartisan outrage. He helped to secure an unparalleled amount of US aid for Israel early on and to scuttle a 1998 peace proposal with Palestine, and he told an assembly of lobbyists that Americans “cannot afford to publicly criticize Israel.”

Back cover image of the dec 1975 issue of “issues in radical therapy” (via danielle carr on Twitter.)

File under HamasIsrael don’t care about their own people?

THRIVING?

My son’s school’s Thrive teacher is leaving. She helped transform my lad’s experience of school from being one where he had weekly if not daily challenges with regulating his emotions and his behaviour, to one where he enjoys school every day. She’s going to be very greatly missed.

I managed to tell her this today and thank her for her work. It was so sad to hear her story.

She has committed ten years of her life to helping our youngsters get the best start in life, and done lots of extra work getting accredited to do so. But, at the end of the day, she can no longer afford to continue, and has taken a job elsewhere in sales and marketing.

What a stupid, shit country we live in.

TORYBOY

ToryBoy The Movie is the account of filmmaker John Walsh’s disillusionment with what he saw as the corruption, lies, hypocrisy and general incompetence of Blair’s Labour government, and his conversion to the Conservative (Tory) Party general election candidate for Middlesbrough in 2010.

Under his own steam and £15,000 of his own money, John found his opponent, Sir Stuart Bell, the serial incumbent Labour MP, invisible and unknown to his local constituents who nevertheless voted him back in every four or five years (albeit with an ever diminishing majority). Bell was too busy, it seemed, living in Paris, and employing his family not to answer phone calls at his parliamentary office. Worse, his son stole £8,000 worth of stuff from Bell’s parliamentary colleagues, eventually serving sixty days in prison for the privilege.

Despite this record of failure, Bell was duly elected again, with Walsh coming in third behind the newly Nick Clegg-revitalised Lib Dems.

Last year, I had my own attempt to counter what I (and many others) saw as corruption, lies, hypocrisy and general incompetence of our local elected councillors. Standing as independent candidates, me and my two friends came fourth in the safest Labour ward in Ealing. It was good fun campaigning, and I enjoyed the physical activity of walking almost every street in my ward dropping leaflets, and the social activity of actually talking to people in person. And we helped to reduce Labour’s vote share and majority (not that it makes any difference to the result).

Still, people voted in their thousands for two councillors who have been in post for twenty four years each, while the problems everyone complains about are the same but worse.

Ultimately, it was another failure to add to my CV.

WRITING TO MY MP: ICJP - COMPLICITY IN WAR CRIMES

Adapted from this template letter.

Dear Mr Sharma,

My esteemed representative: I write to you today with a heavy heart, weighed down by the profound disappointment I feel in your recent actions. Your unwavering support for Israel, despite its blatant disregard for international law and its commission of war crimes, has cast a shadow over your impartiality and your ability to hold office effectively.

The recent decision by the International Centre of Justice for Palestinians (ICJP) to serve written notice to Rishi Sunak and Keir Starmer of their intention to prosecute UK governmental officials for their role in aiding and abetting Israeli war crimes has sent shockwaves through our nation. Your name, unfortunately, stands out locally among those who have failed to condemn these atrocities, a silence that could have serious criminal ramifications.

I urge you to reconsider your position on this matter. The evidence of Israel’s war crimes is overwhelming, documented by the United Nations, Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, and the International Service for Human Rights. These are not mere accusations; they are indictments of a government that has flagrantly violated international law and caused immense suffering to the Palestinian people.

Your constituents, including myself, have repeatedly implored you to vote for a ceasefire. You claimed to support a ceasefire, but when you had the opportunity to cast your vote to represent your constituents, you failed to do so. Worse, you claimed you did. But “humanitarian pauses” are not enough; they merely provide Israel with a respite to regroup and continue its assault on innocent civilians. The lack of leadership and condemnation from our elected officials is a stain on our country’s reputation.

If you are unwilling to do the right thing and support a ceasefire, then I implore you to step down from your position. You have lost the trust of your constituents, and your continued presence in office is an insult to the values of peace, justice and humanity that we hold dear.

Sincerely,

Your concerned constituent,

David Marsden

CURRICULUM VITAE (REPETITUM)

Following on from my success delivering the news to my local community, I took a break from the world of (very part-time) work to focus on… playing in my first bands. And learning to play the guitar. Much of which came at the expense of any interest in or motivation to study, or revise for ‘O’ Levels, and later ‘A’ Levels.

Living in a small rural market town, some of my friends, and my own younger brother, in fact, had Saturday jobs bush beating - literally (as far as I know) beating bushes to encourage game birds to fly to their sporting deaths. Let’s never forget that killing is a sport for our aristocracy and their hangers-on. Famously, at the time, the host of these shootings was “peppered in the buttocks” by our drunken home secretary Willie Whitelaw. You couldn’t get away with a name like that now.

My brother graduated from bush beating for toffs to hunt sabotage.

I did well enough in my ‘O’ Levels (one A, eight Bs, and a C), that my maths teacher told me I would “never amount to anything”. He wasn’t wrong.

My dad tried to motivate me after my mock ‘A’ Level results by leaving me a drunken handwritten note and caricature drawing of me with an arrow pointing to it (I mean, in those days what else could he have done?) saying: “THICK CUNT”.

Then he got me what felt like a punishing summer job at the duck processing plant where he was a line supervisor. Being the boss’s son was no fun when they put me on the killing floor. I became a vegetarian for nine years after that (although since returned to meat eating - that’s another story).

I messed up my ‘A’ Levels (three Es, and failed General Studies writing about the punk band Stiff Little Fingers). I was profoundly depressed, but had no one to talk to about it. Mainly because I had been brought up not to talk about or express any “bad” or “difficult” feelings. Random people used to come up to me and say “Cheer up, it may never happen”, but it in my internal world, it already had.

Music, and playing guitar in a band, was my only outlet, but we were young and totally delusional. We were a three-piece, but believed we were the next Fab Four. We played a successful debut gig in Cleethorpes at The Sub, but instead of building on that, we immediately packed our bags and gear into a van, and drove to London to live in a series of squats in Stepney, Poplar and Limehouse.

An older ex-school friend was part of an anarchist community based out of a bookshop, and helped us find, gain entry to, and occasionally get the water, gas and/or electricity working. In those good old days, you could easily “sign on” the dole and get enough to actually live on.

I read and heard a lot about the politics of anarchism, which I found very attractive to my idealism. That said, I couldn’t ever see how it would work in practice, in the real world. It would need a revolution, of course, but even then, it would need a revolution in people’s minds and thinking first.

Six months living in squats, a couple of lousy gigs and a demo tape later, we packed our bags and returned home.

Last night, I watched ToryBoy The Movie.

This morning, I watched unelected former Tory Prime Minister and Jewish National Fund patron David Cameron become the UK’s new Foreign Secretary.

Where we’re at.

“Humans are complex and flawed.”

“Nazis were only human.”

“Hamas are animals and must be slaughtered.”

“Palestinians don’t count.”

After more than three weeks of Israel’s “targeted” bombing of Hamas in Gaza, Starmer claims that a ceasefire now “would leave Hamas with the infrastructure and the capabilities to carry out the sort of attack we saw on October 7.”

PROPAGANDA

Last night, I was away in the middle of nowhere with no wifi and very poor data connection, so put on the TV to watch the BBC/ITV news at ten.

Haven’t watched it for fifteen years or more.

It was pure propaganda for Israel.

Jeremy Bowen even said as much: “This is what they want you to see” (as opposed the genocide in Gaza).

PAY RISE

I haven’t had a pay rise since April 2017.

Taking into account the cost of living increases year on year, and especially in the last year or two, I’ve effectively taken a pay cut every year.

To be fair, I was thankful to have a job at all during and after covid.

Thanks to Kate Morley’s historical UK inflation rates and price conversion calculator, I now know how much I should be earning if my pay had kept up with inflation.

FREE PALESTINE

There seems to be a co-ordinated drive to obliterate Palestine, and Palestinians, from the map.

I find it very upsetting that my government, and many other “Western” governments are wholeheartedly supporting Israel’s genocidal “self-defence” narrative.

Nothing justifies carpet-bombing innocent people - mostly women and children.

Nothing justifies cutting off their supplies of electricity, water, food, fuel.

The sadistic Netanyahu told Palestinians in Gaza to leave, then bombed the crossing into Egypt while they tried to do so.

These are war crimes.

Now, our fascist government is attempting to outlaw any expression of support for the people of Gaza and Palestine.

Fully supported and enabled by our fascist “opposition” party.

The Labour Mayor of London helped to spread what turned out to be fake news about an alleged anti-Semitic attack on a Jewish-owned shop. Known liar Luciana Berger, MP, did the same. As did countless other “sensible, adult centrists”.

It’s not anti-Semitic to support the people of Palestine in their long struggle for freedom from Israel’s oppression.

CLASS

Thinking about Maths at school, got me thinking about the origin and meaning of class.

It’s a classic word, and means so many different things depending on the context in which it’s used.

Its Roman origin relates to the dividing up of society, or groups of people for war or military objectives.

My Latin teacher at school was obsessed with lining up the desks and chairs at the end of each lesson.

“Caecilius pater est” is the only Latin I can remember.

We rebelled, and persuaded our headteacher to teach us Classics in Translation instead. That was fun. Reading, and learning all about ancient Greek philosophy and mythology.

RESPONSES TO MY OPEN LETTER TO PETER MASON

I got a reply to my open letter to Peter Mason[pdf], Leader of Ealing Council, and one of my local ward councillors.

Slightly oddly, he addressed it not just to me, but also to CASH (Clean Air for Southall and Hayes, and my neighbour Angela Fonso (who heads up the campaign group. You can see a record of all Mason’s Letters to CASH, if you’re interested in the history.

I’d also submitted two Freedom of Information requests(FOIs) to try to get answers, as I didn’t expect a reply (as he has never replied directly to any of my previous questions).

The FOI response on the developer Berkeley Group’s sponsorship of council events stated:

The Mayor of Ealing had sought sponsors for his Pride reception. Berkeley responded to this request and offered a £500 contribution to the event. However, while the offer was publicly acknowledged, the money was never accepted or received because the Council is committed to not accept sponsorship from Berkeley for corporate events.

The FOI response on the council’s relationship with developers was, to my mind, wholly unsatisfactory and generated a third FOI:

In other words, plain English perhaps, it took two years to put in place any formal procedure to uphold the Leader’s stated aims, and there is literally nothing to see to evidence that councillors are following the procedure, or will do. And the fact that there is nothing to see to evidence your claims is, you claim, an indication of the council’s commitment to transparency?

Anyway, here’s my reply to his reply (via his Head of Cabinet Office).

Thanks for passing on Cllr Mason’s response. Please pass this on to him.

I appreciate Cllr Mason’s honesty in acknowledging that the Mayor accepted Berkeley Group’s offer of sponsorship, contrary to council policy.

I also appreciate that the Mayor, councillors and officers have been reminded of the policy going forward.

However, the Mayor’s original tweet still stands, published, thanking Berkeley Group for sponsoring the event.

I would like to know why this tweet has not been retracted or clarified, because it continues to give what I am now asked to believe by Cllr Mason is a wholly misleading statement of Ealing Council policy, as well as free good marketing publicity for what is a proscribed organisation. That’s even worse than accepting sponsorship. (I hope that Berkeley Group were asked to donate their sponsorship directly to one of the Mayor’s charities instead.)

I would like Cllr Mason, the council leader, to ensure that the Mayor removes and publicly clarifies and apologises for his tweet, and mistakenly accepting Berkeley’s offer. I would like him to explain why it was a mistake and why it’s necessary to apologise.

In Southall, we’ve suffered, as Cllr Mason recently acknowledged in one of his self-promotion videos, six years of “many, many terrible smells and certainly some bad chemicals released into the environment”, which have undoubtedly caused long-term mental and physical health problems for residents young and old.

I hope I don’t need to remind anyone that Southall is home to by far the largest South Asian and Black community in Ealing, and the lowest average incomes, who are among the most vulnerable to the adverse health impacts of these “bad chemicals”. In addition, Southall residents live with some of the worst air pollution in Ealing from traffic congestion, FM Conway asphalt plant, and non-permitted incinerators. Some environmental justice campaigners describe this as a “sacrifice zone”.

So, it’s very hurtful, insulting and offensive to people in Southall, who have suffered and sacrificed so much, to see the new Mayor break the council leader’s pledge, and offer no public retraction, acknowledgement, clarification or apology. It’s as if his words have no consequences. It’s as if South Asian and Black lives don’t matter, or South Asian and Blacks don’t count.

I would also question how the offer of sponsorship came about. We all know that the person responsible for “Community Liaison” for Berkeley Group is Jags Sanghera, who was a Labour Party councillor candidate in last year’s local elections. Why is Jags, who came close to being elected as a councillor, offering sponsorship to the Mayor? It does make me wonder if councillors (and prospective councillors) have ever been told of the council policy, and when? Not to mention the obvious conflict of interest.

Will Cllr Mason establish a “zero tolerance” policy for accepting sponsorship, gifts and hospitality going forward (and, perhaps, apply it retrospectively)?

With regard to Cllr Jassal’s participation in Berkeley Group’s “Community Engagement” steering group, I’d have more confidence in Cllr Mason’s assertion that this is to hold them to account if the group wasn’t set up and controlled by Berkeley Group and Jags Sanghera. Were CASH invited to be members? Was I? No. Why not? Because as far as I can see, we are among the only people who do consistently try to hold Berkeley Group to account, and their relationship with the council.

As Cllr Mason addressed his reply to me to Angela and CASH as well, I’ve copied them in to this.

Yours…

Open letter to Peter Mason davidmarsden.info

OPEN LETTER TO PETER MASON

Publishing this as it’s in the public interest and I’ve had no reply to my original email sent on 1st July (Mason has, as far as I know, several personal assistants who read and respond to his emails, even if it’s just a holding acknowledgement response - I’ve had one before, as well as a next day reply, and a ‘no reply at all’).

I’ve also now submitted two Freedom of Information requests to get answers to my questions.

Dear Peter,

In your open letter to Angela Fonso and CASH dated 12 July 2021, you pledged that:

“[t]he Council will not take any further sponsorship from Berkeley Group.”

I was shocked, therefore, to see the new Mayor of Ealing tweet to thank Berkeley Group for their sponsorship of an event he organised and hosted.

In your letter mentioned above, you also stated:

“I am determined to ensure that the Council’s future dealings with developers are transparent, arms-length and do not give rise to concerns that it is privileging the relationship with developers above that with residents.”

I was dismayed, therefore, to discover (from Berkeley marketing material, hand delivered, photo attached) that a Southall councillor (Cllr Jassal) and a council officer (Evelyn Gloyn, Ealing’s Community Engagement Manager) are members of Berkeley Group’s new “community engagement” steering group. This clear conflict of interest with the health and wellbeing of residents who Cllr Jassal is elected to represent does not appear on Cllr Jassal’s declaration of interests on the council website. Cllr Jassal and Evelyn Gloyn are literally standing shoulder to shoulder with Berkeley Group, not at “arms-length”, as you pledged two years ago.

I note also that various councillors have continued to attend Berkeley Group’s marketing events (sold as “community events”).

I know you have a very strong commitment to leading an open and transparent administration, and so, therefore, I ask you to tell me:

1. the monetary value of “sponsorship” Ealing Council (councillors, officers, Mayor) has accepted from Berkeley Group since your letter of 12 July 2021, and for which events?

2. the Ealing Council policy for councillors, officers, Mayor, for accepting sponsorship, hospitality and gifts from developers, and to ensure that the Council will not take any further sponsorship from Berkeley Group?

3. the action you will take to prevent councillors, officers, Mayor accepting sponsorship, hospitality and gifts from developers in future, and publicly returning sponsorship already received from Berkeley Group.

4. the Ealing Council policy for councillors, officers, Mayor, to ensure future dealings with developers are transparent, arms-length and do not give rise to concerns that it is privileging the relationship with developers above that with residents?

5. the action you will take to prevent councillors, officers, Mayor privileging the relationship with developers above that with residents, and publicly disengaging from Berkeley Group’s profit-driven marketing schemes dressed up as “community engagement”?

Yours sincerely,

David Marsden

Based on [residents'] feedback, Ealing Council has drawn up a list of ideas to reduce congestion and to make walking, cycling and using public transport easier in Southall.

There are links to the survey results and to a new survey.

Adam Curtis (1984), The Great British Housing Disaster, on how local councils dealt with unsafe new housing developments.

“Privately, they know that their tenants are at risk, but publicly they have to try to defend the decision to leave them…”

Local council elections today in many areas.

Don’t forget you now need to take some form of id with you (passport, driving licence, or something else from this list).

RISKS TO HEALTH FROM REMEDIATING SOUTHALL GASWORKS

AI is more ethical than Ealing Labour Party. No money was exchanged.

What are the risks to health from remediating Southall Gasworks on site in the open air? The land is highly contaminated with benzene, naphthalene and a while host of other VOCs, PAHs, heavy metals, “blue billy” and asbestos, and surrounded by residential streets. The local community is mostly of south Asian and African heritage, and it is known that people with this heritage can be genetically vulnerable to naphthalene poisoning. What response from the developer and regulatory authorities should there be if levels of benzene and naphthalene are consistently above the legal safety guidelines and local residents complain of eye, nose and throat irritation, new or worsening of respiratory conditions and infections, or other health problems as a result of odour and air pollution?

The health risks from remediating Southall Gasworks on site in the open air are significant. The site is highly contaminated with a variety of hazardous chemicals, including benzene, naphthalene, VOCs, PAHs, heavy metals, “blue billy” and asbestos. These chemicals can cause a variety of health problems, including cancer, respiratory problems, neurological problems, and birth defects. The local community is mostly of south Asian and African heritage, and it is known that people with this heritage can be genetically vulnerable to naphthalene poisoning. This means that they are more likely to experience health problems from exposure to naphthalene.

If levels of benzene and naphthalene are consistently above the legal safety guidelines, and local residents complain of eye, nose and throat irritation, new or worsening of respiratory conditions and infections, or other health problems as a result of odour and air pollution, the developer and regulatory authorities should take immediate action to protect the health of the community. This may include:

• Stopping the remediation work until the levels of contamination can be brought down to safe levels.
• Providing air filters and other protective equipment to residents who live near the site.
• Evacuation of residents who are most at risk.
• Conducting a health study of the community to assess the impact of the contamination.

The developer and regulatory authorities have a responsibility to protect the health of the community. If they fail to take action, they could be held liable for any health problems that result from the contamination.

Here are some additional information about the health risks of the chemicals found at Southall Gasworks:

• Benzene: Benzene is a colorless, flammable liquid that is used in a variety of products, including gasoline, paints, and solvents. It is a known carcinogen, and it can also cause leukemia, anemia, and other health problems.
• Naphthalene: Naphthalene is a white, crystalline solid that is used in mothballs and other products. It is also a known carcinogen, and it can cause respiratory problems, skin irritation, and other health problems.
• VOCs: Volatile organic compounds are a group of chemicals that can easily evaporate into the air. They can come from a variety of sources, including gasoline, paints, and solvents. VOCs can cause a variety of health problems, including respiratory problems, headaches, nausea, and cancer.
• PAHs: Polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons are a group of chemicals that are formed when organic matter is burned. They are found in a variety of sources, including gasoline, coal, and tobacco smoke. PAHs can cause cancer, respiratory problems, and other health problems.
• Heavy metals: Heavy metals are a group of metals that are toxic to humans and other animals. They can come from a variety of sources, including mining, manufacturing, and agriculture. Heavy metals can cause a variety of health problems, including cancer, neurological problems, and birth defects.
• “Blue billy”: Blue billy is a type of asbestos that is found in coal tar. Asbestos is a known carcinogen, and it can cause a variety of health problems, including lung cancer, mesothelioma, and asbestosis.

It is important to note that the health risks of exposure to these chemicals vary depending on the level of exposure, the length of exposure, and the individual’s health. If you are concerned about your health after being exposed to these chemicals, you should see a doctor.

I AM THE LEADER OF EALING COUNCIL

I asked Google Bard to advise me on a local matter.

I am the leader of Ealing Council. I have received more than 250 reports about a BAD odour nuisance and air pollution from the remediation of the highly contaminated Southall Gasworks land. We had a public meeting where 250 angry residents complained about health problems as a result of the air pollution, including eye, nose and throat irritation, respiratory problems and infections, and even cancer and death of loved ones. The developer has implemented increased odour suppression to the satisfaction of the Environment Agency. I’ve given residents three numbers to call, each of which takes twenty minutes or more to get through and treats every report as an isolated incident. By the time my investigating officers arrive hours later the smell has gone. I’ve accepted over £30,000 in gifts and hospitality from the developer. What should I do?

What you should do:

1. Resign as leader of Ealing Council. Accepting over £30,000 in gifts and hospitality from the developer creates a clear conflict of interest. You are no longer in a position to objectively represent the interests of the residents of Ealing.
2. Publicly apologize to the residents of Ealing for your actions. Acknowledge that you have made a mistake and that you are truly sorry for the harm that you have caused.
3. Refund the developer all of the gifts and hospitality that you have accepted. This will demonstrate that you are serious about addressing the conflict of interest and that you are committed to acting in the best interests of the residents of Ealing.
4. Work with the developer to find a solution to the air pollution problem. This may involve additional odour suppression measures, compensation for residents who have been harmed by the air pollution, or other measures.
5. Ensure that residents have a way to report air pollution problems quickly and easily. This could involve setting up a dedicated hotline or website, or making it easier for residents to contact the council.
6. Investigate all reports of air pollution promptly and thoroughly. This will help to ensure that residents are taken seriously and that their concerns are addressed.
7. Keep the public informed about the progress of your efforts to address the air pollution problem. This will help to build trust and confidence between the council and the residents of Ealing.

What you should not do:

• Do not deny or downplay the seriousness of the air pollution problem. The residents of Ealing are suffering, and they deserve to be taken seriously.
• Do not try to cover up your conflict of interest. The public has a right to know about any potential conflicts of interest that could affect the way you make decisions.
• Do not try to blame the developer or anyone else for the air pollution problem. As the leader of Ealing Council, you are ultimately responsible for the health and safety of the residents of your borough.
• Do not give up on finding a solution to the air pollution problem. The residents of Ealing deserve to live in a clean and healthy environment, and you have a responsibility to do everything you can to make that happen.

UNDER POISONED SKIES

Watched Under Poisoned Skies on BBC iPlayer last night.

It’s the sad and shocking story of children in Iraq dying from leukaemia as a result of toxic air pollution from mega rich oil companies burning off excess natural gas in the open air near their homes.

Benzene (found in the air) and naphthalene (found in the children’s urine samples) are the main carcinogens.

Levels of benzene are between 3 and 9.6 Micrograms per cubic meter or “µg/m3”.

Levels of benzene by the so-called soil “hospital” at Southall Gasworks were between 4 and 12 Micrograms per cubic meter or “µg/m3”.

SOUTHALL RESIDENTS TO GIVE BLOOD SAMPLES

After six years of campaigning for justice:

“The fact that gas used to be manufactured from coal has been lost to the public consciousness, but the chemical legacy remains.”

“These communities already have multiple disadvantages with air pollution, overcrowding and poor housing. This is another burden being placed on them.”

Via: Scientists to examine health fears at west London luxury development

HORSESHIT PARADE

I visited the Palace of Westminster this week with my big kid on an educational school trip.

It was a very cold, wet and windy day, and we were patriotically under-dressed and sans brollies. We took a good lashing from Mother Nature.

The tour of the Houses of Parliament was cool, dry and stuffy, and the little radio headphones we were given so we could hear better were sub-optimal.

The House of Commons was closed to ordinary commoners like us, but the House of Lords was open as long as we refrained from parking our cold, wet and windy working class bums on our superiors' ‘holier than thou’ red leather benches. Police guards armed with sub-machine guns would forcibly remove any insubordinate eight or nine year olds, and presumably march them straight to the Tower of London (or shoot them dead if they looked like Jean Charles de Menezes.

The children asked a police officer why he carried a gun, and they learned it is to keep them safe. That may be true, but I didn’t feel safer, and there were no buses to flag down.

The children learned that murderous megalomaniac misogynist King Henry VIII is still held in very high regard in these parts, despite beheading two of his six wives, and creating a new religion and laws to divorce two more.

I asked the children how the chamber of the House of Lords made them feel.

Small.

We had lunch across the road outside Portcullis House where we could shelter a little from the wind and rain. Portcullis House is where elected Members of Parliament (MP) and their staff have offices. There were lots of posh-looking mostly white men going in and out and getting frisked inside by more armed guards. Out in the cold, we shared our lunch with toothless and homeless Len, who we found sleeping in the doorway next to us, and looking very wet and cold. Len told us he was “a midget, a dwarf from Burnley” and he’d come to London to sort his life out, but his marriage failed and here he was. He was very pleased to have a homemade tuna mayonnaise sandwich, a juice drink and a satsuma. My wife told me off when we got home, claiming that he will have sold or exchanged the sandwich for drugs.

We waited for our own MP Virendra Sharma to come and meet us as the teachers had arranged. No one knew what he looked like, so they asked me as my lad told them I had met him before (which is true). Then we played a game “Where’s Sharma?” until he appeared. Mr Sharma thanked the kids for coming to meet him, and asked them who wanted his job. His two assistants took photographs.

We ended the day by getting drenched walking up to see Downing Street and the Horse Guards Parade. Downing Street was, of course, guarded by more armed police and totally inaccessible to us ordinary folk, and the parade smelled of horse shit.

Finally got around to watching Our Friends In The North.

‘None of the issues the show mines so brilliantly – from inequality, deindustrialisation and the parlous state of Britain’s housing to homelessness and the corruption of our public officials – have gone away.’

‘…housebuilders appear to be making ever greater profits.’

‘[they] …blame the planning system, the costs of materials and labour for elevated prices. It’s also popular to blame land prices.’

‘The evidence to back up this claim is hard to find.’

‘…according to research by the London Tenants Federation, we are demolishing more social housing than we are building. Economics makes that inevitable.’

www.architectsjournal.co.uk/news/opin…

Solidarity with all teachers today, especially those striking for better pay.

Eight year old is at home, and refusing to practice for his spelling test tomorrow because he doesn’t want to be a scab.

‘…financial liberalisation, mortgage reform and lack of investment in the existing building stock has transformed English homes into crumbling vehicles for the accumulation of wealth.’

We need more than new homes - Positive Money

No tipping or dumping.

‘…prioritises the maintenance of public housing, which is crucial in ensuring that people have a roof over their heads and a comfortable place to live’

Singapore housing policy

RESPONSE TO EALING'S AIR QUALITY STRATEGY AND ACTION PLAN

Ealing Council’s draft Air Quality Strategy is a 64 page document together with a 40 page Action Plan, and the consultation period runs until 30 January 2023. It’s taken me the best part of six weeks, all my spare time over Christmas and New Year, to get through it all, make notes and cross-reference to try to make sense of it all and offer some feedback.

Really, there must be a much longer consultation period if Ealing Council is genuinely interested in residents' views.

The following is a summary of what the key points of interest are for me, and in particular in relation to Southall, where I live and work. My additional suggestions are in bold, and my comments and questions in italics.

Warning

This is a LONG post. I’ve tried to break it into sections to make it easier to read.

Disclaimer

I don’t claim to be an expert, other than through experience. I am just an ordinary resident living in the midst of four major industrial and construction site polluters for several years. I have campaigned alongside my family, neighbours and friends for clean air after my then nearly four year old said he wanted fresh air not stinky air. He’d been hospitalised three times when he was two and diagnosed with asthma. We soon discovered people who had lost loved ones, had heart attacks, ectopic pregnancies, cancer, all attributed to the foul petrochemical stink.

I welcome any corrections.

My Summary

If Ealing is serious about “fighting” inequalities, action must be targeted to protect vulnerable people in Southall to reduce air pollution and its impact on the health of its large, mostly economically deprived and non-white population.

The Strategy and Plan must target children and older people, people with lung conditions, and pregnant women: outside schools and school run hours. The Council must question if it is ethical to promote active travel in Southall when it knows that it is a high pollution area and that most of its population is particularly vulnerable to its adverse health impacts.

The draft strategy and action plan don’t do this at all.

Clean Air for Ealing!

To begin, I think it’s fantastic that Ealing Council has stated its vision for clean air for all Ealing residents, in alignment with that of local residents’ campaign group Clean Air for Southall and Hayes (CASH).

CASH has been asking for clean air for residents in Southall and Hayes since 2018.

Summary of the Strategy and Action Plan

Ealing’s draft air quality strategy’s five stated priorities are to:

• Reduce road traffic emissions
• Improve indoor air quality and reduce emissions from wood-burning
• Reduce emissions from construction of new developments
• Invest in green infrastructure
• Raise awareness of air quality

It would be useful to see the strategy and action plan follow the same structure with clear definitions of terms, and specific and detailed aims and objectives for each priority, along with baseline air pollution levels and equalities data for each in order to monitor and measure impact.

Somewhat confusingly, the action plan groups its actions into six categories:

• Emissions from Developments and Buildings
• Public health and awareness raising
• Delivery servicing and freight
• Borough fleet actions
• Localised solutions
• Cleaner transport

This maybe because they are copied and pasted from the previous 2017-22 action plan.

It would be better for understanding, monitoring and evaluation to have consistency and coherence between the two documents, updating the action plan where necessary to reflect this.

Also somewhat confusingly, Ealing’s draft air quality strategy has nine stated goals, starting with the obvious. I’ll say more on these later:

1. Improve air quality
2. Tackling the climate crisis
3. Fighting inequality
4. Protect biodiversity
5. Protect health and wellbeing
6. Raise public awareness
7. Promote sustainable infrastructure
8. Support the transition to clean energy
9. Creating good jobs

Inequalities

There’s a lot of talk in Ealing’s air quality strategy about being inclusive and “fighting” (“reducing” would be better?) inequalities, and recognising that not everyone will be able to reduce their own air pollution “footprint” (“exhaust trail” might be more apt?). I’m not convinced that the strategy actually does this consistently, if at all. More on this later.

Public Health Policy

The strategy sets out how it fits into national, regional and local policy frameworks.

When I first read the strategy, I felt it fell very much within an environmental policy framework (which in Ealing seems to come under the Cabinet portfolio for Climate Action), with its focus on reducing air pollution, and as we’ll see later, promoting active travel.

In contrast, the draft action plan is explicitly a legally required document that falls directly within a public health policy framework (Ealing’s Healthy Lives cabinet portfolio).

*There’s obviously a good deal of crossover between the two, and other policy frameworks and cabinet portfolios, too, not least of which is housing policy (or Good Growth), and social policy (Tackling Inequalities).

It would be useful to see this joint responsibility formally recognised in both the strategy and the action plan, too. This work is important, and there needs to be joint working and accountability.

The strategy goes on to make the case for why air pollution is bad and needs to be reduced. The headline figure that around 150 people die every year in Ealing due to long-term exposure to toxic air is not insignificant.

Ealing’s Health Profile from 2019 puts that figure in some context:

Air Pollution in Ealing

Pollution Sources

The strategy states that the two worst air pollutants in Ealing are nitrogen dioxide (NO2) and particulate matter (PM10 and PM2.5). Short and long-term and/or frequent exposure to high levels of both can cause irritation to eyes, nose, and throat, and cause or worsen heart and lung disease in children and adults, and reduce life expectancy.

Those most vulnerable to the adverse health effects of toxic air are children, older people, people with pre-existing lung disease (e.g., asthma), and pregnant women.

It would be sensible and ethical for the strategy and action plan to focus on reducing air pollution in and outside schools, sheltered housing, residential and nursing homes, and in and around identified local air pollution “hotspots”, especially where these are located in areas of known multiple inequalities (e.g., Southall).

I don’t believe the strategy or the action plan really does this at all.

The strategy explains in further detail what the main sources of NO2, PM10 and PM2.5 are in the borough.

Again there is what appears to me, to be some inconsistency about sources and their health effects within the same document. For example, on page 19 there is a graphic showing that wood burning is a source of particulate matter (PM2.5 - 20%, data from 2019).

On page 11, another graphic suggest that wood burning is a source of nitrogen dioxide (but not particulater matter):

In the graphics from the 2017-22 action plan, wood burning doesn’t get a look-in at all, data from 2013.

It would be useful for the strategy to have clarity and consistency on air pollution sources.

The good news is that road traffic emissions, the council’s key action area for 2022-30, reduced significantly in Ealing between 2013 and 2019.

It would be useful if the strategy could make clear and explain how the reduction in road traffic emissions between 2013-19 happened.

Air Quality Monitoring

The strategy notes the air quality targets set by European Union, United Kingdom and World Health Organisation (WHO) guideline limits.

It’s worth noting here (and in the strategy), that, as things stand, the background levels of PM2.5 in London (i.e., particulate matter that comes into the borough from outside Ealing and even from abroad) is around double the WHO’s target.

The draft strategy document continues by identifying the areas in Ealing worst affected by air pollution from nitrogen dioxide and particulate matter. There are eight Air Quality Focus Areas, including one in Southall covering South Road (remember the name), The Green, King Street and Western Road.

Ealing has 67 air quality monitors acrosss the borough, all recording levels of notrogen dioxide, but only four measure particulater matter (PM10 only).

It seems remiss not to have more PM10 monitors, or to have any PM2.5 monitors (although their are three NO2, PM10 and PM2.5 monitors around the Southall Gasworks site, rather erroneously remarketed as The Green Quarter.

Ealing publishes annual air quality status reports.

Ealing also has an interactive map showing all its NO2 diffusion tube monitoring sites where you can see graphical annual data summary charts. Unfortunately, none seem to have been updated since 2021.

It would be useful to have more monitors for particulate matter, especially PM2.5, across the borough, and in Southall, and for published data from all air pollution monitors to be kept accessible and up-to-date.

Priorities for Action

Back to the strategy’s priorities for action, and my comments and questions, and suggestions.

• Reduce road traffic emissions.

The biggest reduction in road traffic emissions came during 2020 covid lockdowns, and while it’s not practical, feasible or desirable to replicate that going forward, it might be worth promoting the idea that employers should encourage and support an increase to the 36% of Ealing’s working age population already mainly working from home whenever possible, as opposed to the current political groupthink that everyone must return to the office in order to be productive.

• Improve indoor air quality and reduce emissions from wood-burning.

There are two wood-burning incinerators close to my home, which frequently create disgusting burning plastic odours forcing us to stay indoors and close all our windows. Not very good for healthy lives or improving indoor air quality, and the Council’s response to mine and my neighbours’ complaints has been infuriatingly slow and unhelpful. It doesn’t give me much confidence that the council really believes all these fine words about reducing air pollution and improving health outcomes when it comes to enforcement action.

• Reduce emissions from construction of new developments.

Wouldn’t this be fantastic?! Again, the Council’s response to the Southall Gasworks poisoning has been shameful, and bears no resemblance to its 2017-22 Air Quality Action Plan pledges to reduce emissions and enforce construction management plans. How can we have any confidence that the council will put residents' needs for clean air first, and above developers' desires to enrich themselves and their shareholders by cutting corners by compromising the health and quality of life of the most vulnerable population in the borough already faced with multiple inequalities?

• Invest in green infrastructure.

Southall has the least tree canopy cover in Ealing, yet is subjected to massive overdevelopment. This almost entirely terraced town is being transformed into a new Manhattan.

The one concession negotiated hard for by our elected representatives, and granted by the London Mayor for overruling local democracy to allow the Gasworks development, was to widen the South Road bridge by the train station to ease the often gridlocked road. Now, the Council Leader has undemocratically pressed the ‘reset’ button. Having sat on the Mayor’s money and done nothing for so long it’s no longer nearly enough to do the necessary work. We are promised £9.5m worth of cycle lanes, a tiny new ‘pocket park’ outside Lidl on the High Street, and a couple of mini-‘orchards’ planted in existing parks, instead. And we have the ‘Poison Park’ to look forward to, the ‘green space’ crafted by Berkeley Group from the contaminated old Gasworks land.

If the council’s air quality strategy is to have any real meaning and intent to address air pollution and multiple inequalities in the Southall Air Quality Focus Area and beyond, it must surely include a vast tree-planting project, and proper maintenance of our existing parks if no new ones can be created on non-contaminated land.

Instead, the council Leader has undemocratically proposed a ‘compromise’ to destroy most of the already re-wilded Warren Farm Nature Reserve in Southall in order to build new sports pitches that the vast majority of local people he consulted don’t want. I don’t understand how the Leader’s desires complement the Council’s stated strategies to reduce air pollution, tackle the climate emergency they declared, and to protect and promote biodiversity and our ecosystem.

• Raise awareness of air quality.

The council also wants to (and must) lead by example.

If the council really wants to lead by example on reducing air pollution, then the council Leader cannot accept or request car rides to or from meetings in Southall, councillors cannot park in cycle lanes in Southall, nor fly to the property developer festival in the south of France. They must engage with Southall residents suffering the worst of the air pollution from multiple sources, and stop denying or minimising the existence and extent of the problems, and proactively and collaboratively work to reduce or stop such pollution episodes continuing.

Otherwise, the council’s strategy isn’t worth the virtual paper it’s printed on, and is just more hot air.

What we have in the draft plan, however, is largely a copy-and-paste of the previous 2017-2022 plan, which was, at worst, a demonstrable failure of ambition, leadership and political will, and, at best, a simple failure of the council to do what it said it would do.

Strategy Goals

1. Improve air quality. Protect the health and wellbeing of Ealing residents from the harmful effects of nitrogen dioxide (NO2) and particulate matter (PM) air pollution.

The strategy MUST have the inclusive goal of protecting residents from the harmful effects of ALL air pollutants (not just nitrogen dioxide and particulate matter)..

2. Tackling the climate crisis…. by aiming for the highest environmental standards.

The “highest environmental standards” must be clearly stated and defined.

3. Fighting inequality…. to ensure that no-one is left behind… [and] residents feel safe.

The strategy must ensure that inequalities are reduced, that ALL residents are included in this process, and that their concerns for the safety of their air are taken seriously and acted upon. Promoting the uptake of expensive electric vehicles and discounting parking spaces for them is discriminating against economically deprived mostly non-white people who suffer most from air pollution.

4. Protect biodiversity. Ensuring our parks, open spaces and nature are protected and enhanced.

This is particularly relevant right now, as the Council Leader pushes on with his undemocratic desire to destroy much of the already rewilded Warren Farm Nature Reserve in Southall, and killing off a quarter of London’s endangered skylarks, in order to build new sports pitches and/or a football stadium.

5. Protect health and wellbeing. Protecting and enhancing the physical and mental health of all.

Except in Southall? Public Health England’s four risk assessment reports into the Southall Gasworks poisoning clearly stated that “Odours can cause nuisance amongst the population possibly leading to stress and anxiety. Some people may experience symptoms such as nausea, headaches or dizziness."

6. Raise public awareness. Promoting awareness of the causes and impacts of air quality issues, as well as the available local solutions…. encouraging community activism….

Except in Southall? At every opportunity, Ealing Council has sought to erase, deny or minimise the the causes and impacts of air quality issues related to Southall Gasworks, refused to enforce any local solutions, and actively discouraged and attempted to prevent community activists' voices from being heard.

7. Promote sustainable infrastructure. Ensure local transport and development planning supports investment in sustainable infrastructure, that limits impact on air quality, enabling a shift to low-emission transport and energy options.

Except in Southall? The Council recently decided NOT to widen the South Road bridge in Southall. Widening the bridge, as promised, would ease congestion, and improve air quality, public transport and active travel options. The bridge widening was the one concession granted to the Southall community when the London Mayor overruled local democracy to give the go ahead to developement of the highly contaminated Southall Gasworks site.

8. Support the transition to clean energy. Supporting the uptake of low-emission energy technologies and improvements in efficiencies, and reducing reliance on the consumption of fossil and solid fuels.

Like in Chile? Simply promoting and encouraging more (low emission) cars isn’t going to reduce congestion, emissions from brake and tyre wear, or help to reduce our “reliance on the consumption of fossil fuels”. Ealing reportedly doesn’t have enough power on the electricity grid for new homes until 2030.

9. Creating good jobs. We want to… deliver an ambitious programme of building more genuinely affordable homes.

Ealing is building fewer genuinely affordable homes than ever, and making the housing crisis in Ealing worse by demolishing more social rent homes than it is building.

Spotlight on Southall

These are all my comments, so I’m not putting it all in italics.

My suggestions and questions for the strategy are still in bold.

Southall cannot be used as a good example of how Ealing Council takes air pollution seriously.

Inequalities

Southall has a BAME population of more than 90%.

Southall Broadway/West and Southall Green are the two council wards that border the old Gasworks site, and which are downwind from the FM Conway asphalt and Tarmac plants, and the two wood-burning incinerators, depending on wind direction. They are connected by the Gasworks site and by the Air Quality Focus Area from South Road to The Green, King Street and Western Road.

Southall is already a high pollution area (and an Air Quality Focus Area as a result), but has several additive sources of unmitigated, uncontrolled air pollution.

Economically poorer, BAME people, children, older people and pregnant women are the most vulnerable to the health impacts of toxic air pollution. Certainly not a fairer start for Southall’s children.

We know from bitter experience over the last six years in Southall that the council has failed in its duty to protect some of its most vulnerable residents from harm.

Raising Awareness

To add insult to injury, the council failed to raise public awareness of the risks and the air quality monitoring data in an open and transparent manner before work on the site began, and while the work was in progress. It was only thanks to local residents and CASH campaigners that a Public Meeting was held in 2019, and it was only then that Public Health England (PHE) acknowledged that some people with African and South Asian heritage are genetically vulnerable to naphthalene poisoning. PHE stated that “levels of naphthalene [at the Gasworks site] must be urgently reduced”. Residents were never informed if, when or how levels of naphthalene were urgently reduced.

It’s noteworthy that the Council claims it asked PHE to get involved only “following concerns raised by local residents” and not because the Council itself carried out an Equalities Impact Assessment prior to works starting in 2016, knowing that the Southall population was significantly more vulnerable to air pollution due to high pre-existing levels and multiple inequalities.

Similarly, the council says it responded to residents' concerns by installing “independent” air quality monitors on site in 2021, but this is five years after the work started, and two years after the main source of air pollution and odour complaints (the so-called soil “hospital”) was decommissioned. The monitors now installed record near-real time data for “urban background” emissions of odourless particulate matter, nitrogen oxides and carbon monoxide.

The odours and air pollution that residents are concerned about originate from polyaromatic hydrocarbons and volatile organic compounds (i.e., the hundred years’ of toxic waste from town gas, coal tar and petrochemical work sites). We are told that there are diffusion tubes monitoring these emissions, but there is a total lack of openness and transparency as to their locations and the data they have recorded. The council has refused to answer the most basic questions (e.g., what chemical or chemicals causes the odour of petrol? What level of this chemical or chemicals in the air is detectable by the human nose?) So much for raising public awareness!

Public Health

We are also told that the emissions from the site are not harmful to health (this despite hundreds of residents reporting that they have suffered ill-health as a result), so it is surprising that the council then spent £200,000 (albeit paid for by Berkeley Group) on these monitors. Is the air pollution from Southall Gasworks harmful to health, or not? The money would have been better spent on statutory nuisance enforcement. Why did Berkeley Group agree to pay for these monitors?

Moreover, the council must have known in 2016 that the economically poorer, mostly BAME population of Southall carried a higher burden of risk to the potential ill-effects of a hundred years' of highly contaminated toxic waste being dug up and “cleaned” in the open air in the middle of a densely populated residential area. Why wasn’t truly independent (i.e., not paid for by the perpetrators Berkeley) air quality monitoring put in place before work started (to record a baseline), and open and transparent near-real time data published so that residents could see for themselves the reality of what they were forced to breathe night and day for the best part of two and a half years?

Enforcement

Why didn’t the council force Berkeley Group to stop work and make the site safe in the three month heatwave of 2018 when residents pleaded with the council leader, local councillors and Member of Parliament to do so?

The council failed to act on enforcing the construction management plan (CMP) at Southall Gasworks. Indeed half of the plan was missing from the planning portal and the council admitted that it didn’t have a full copy of the original CMP.

How on earth was the council planning to enforce a CMP it wasn’t in possession of? This was a gross dereliction of duty to care for the health and wellbeing of (by its own definition) the most vulnerable residents in the borough.

The Council was committed to full enclosure of waste sites in its 2017-22 Air Quality Action Plan. Why wasn’t the one hundred years of petrochemical waste “soil cleaning hospital” enclosed?

National Grid have enclosed their enclosed their soil remediation work specifically to avoid causing odour nuisance to the local community (and thanks no doubt to campaigning by local residents and activists at Clean Air for Southall and Hayes).

On Whose Side?

Why did the former and current council leader accept over £30,000 in gifts and hospitality from developers including Berkeley Group to fly (!) to the south of France for what Private Eye Magazine describes as a booze and hookerfest?

The new council leader claims he went there to negotiate hard. If that’s the case, what did he negotiate? He also claimed that it wasn’t what he expected and that it was a mistake to go. If that’s also the case, why was it a mistake?

How can we be sure that the new council leader and his administration won’t continue making these mistakes and taking the side of developers rather than standing up for the residents they are elected to represent?

Local Action

If the soil is now clean and the air is safe to breathe, why would stopping works during hot weather (which didn’t happen in 2018), and covering stockpiles (why weren’t they covered already?) be given as examples of possible mitigating actions?

There must be a new commitment to work with and for residents where these are issues. Air pollution and odour nuisance reporting and investigation procedures need to be overhauled as they are currently not fit for purpose (reporting process too convoluted, each one investigated as a single, isolated incident rather than as part of an ongoing problem, residents are simply not believed and our reports are minimised and invalidated).

Work on the Gasworks site is due to complete in 2038. Why is the date for net-zero emissions set for twelve years after this date in 2050?

There’s a similar commitment to target zero-emissions for construction vehicles by 2040, which is two years after the new draft local Plan period for new developments ends.

What has Ealing Council done to date to campaign for greater regulatory powers and for a Clean Air Act? Please give examples.

This draft Air Quality Strategy is fine in many respects in terms of the words it contains, but what concerns me is that these are empty words if they are not acted on and enforced.

Recent history strongly suggests the council doesn’t have the leadership, organisational culture or political will to act in the interests of its most vulnerable residents in Southall.

Active Travel

There’s a lot of talk about active travel and Ealing Council’s multi-million pound Let’s Go Southall campaign in the draft Strategy, but very little on its real cost and impact. They seem to have about 50 regular weekly activity groups. Over two years that’s 5,000 sessions. 30,000 attendances (not individuals). So average of six people per session? 1,000 people attended at least two sessions (repeat attendances). My guess would be not many more than 1,000 in total, most will be repeaters (thinking GP referrals, lots of organisers?). If it’s helped 1,000 individuals, that’s £5,400 per person. If 10,000 it’s £540 per person (still seems like a lot of money). And there’s no evidence that it’s helped anyone!

The council must be open and transparent with residents that Let’s Go Southall is a top-down neoliberal behavioural change (“nudge theory”) programme led by a retired stockbroker, and not the “grassroots social movement” of the council’s Orwellian publicity.

If the Council is serious about improving safe active travel options in Southall, then it must improve road and pavement conditions and safety first. Many of the roads and pavements are not fit to cycle or walk on, especially for children and families, older people, and people with disabilities.

Air Quality Action Plan

The 2017-2022 Action Plan

a. Included a number of no-or-low-impact schemes such as Low Emission Neighbourhoods (LENs), implemented in 2021 as Low Traffic Neighbourhoods (LTNs). The Action Plan itself states that there is no (or, elsewhere, conflicting) evidence that LENs/LTNs reduce air pollution within the designated area, and that there is evidence that they increase air pollution outside it. The Action Plan also states that LENs/LTNs are often implemented in areas of relatively low air pollution. Surely it would be better to reduce traffic in areas with high levels of air pollution?

b. Similarly, a 20mph zone was implemented borough-wide, yet the Action Plan states there is no evidence that speed reduction zones produce a reduction in emissions. The Plan states that there is a perception that road safety is improved. Perhaps the Council will reflect on the road safety issues associated with its promotion of the uptake of much heavier electric vehicles while reducing road space for vehicles.

c. Another low impact scheme was Play Streets. How many Play Streets are there now? How often do they run? Where are they?

d. How many Pocket Parks are there? Where are they?

e. How many Green Screens are there? Where are they? Why were green screens not erected at Southall Gasworks even after residents complained of dust from the site in their homes?

f. How are these schemes evaluated in terms of reducing air pollution? Where are the air quality monitors located to record baseline measurements to compare against air pollution levels during or after the scheme is in place?

g. Enforcement of anti-idling laws was deemed “not cost-effective”. Smoke control was not deemed a problem and therefore not promoted or enforced. Who made these decisions?

h. What is the wider ‘cost’ to residents in not taking enforcement action against these criminal behaviours?

The 2022-2027 Action Plan (AQAP)

If air pollution monitoring data cannot inform the efficacy of individual actions, how can it be used in combination with secondary data to do so? I’m sure there must be a sensible explanation, but to most people I suspect this statement makes little sense. In Southall, we have continuously been asked to ignore our own lived experience of health and quality of life problems attributed to the open-air ‘cleaning’ of a hundred years of petrochemical waste at the Gasworks site, in favour of the developer Berkeley’s assurances that it’s own monitoring of air quality is ‘within acceptable limits’ and harmless to health. Public Health England published four risk assessments based on Berkeley’s data, and came to similar conclusions, although neither looked at any secondary data. The air pollution data has still to be published so that the public can make up their own minds.

I’m not sure how imperceptible changes that cannot be detected by monitoring or modelling can be interpreted as Low Impact or a step in the right direction.

The Action Plan here seems to contradict the Strategy by stating that changes in the levels of air pollution above a certain level can be attributed even to individual actions (although more likely to be due to multiple actions).

If the council is serious about using air pollution data and secondary data to establish efficacy of its air quality strategy and action plan, (which sounds sensible enough), then it must explain what measures it will use, and publish baseline data and regular updates.

Like it does with its performance dashboard.

Looking at the Council’s own evaluation of it’s 2017-22 Action Plan, I would suggest that it’s achievements are minimal, and misleading.

Electric Vehicle charging points (p. 30 of 2022 AQAP) were not actually a specified target in the 2017 AQAP, so I’m unsure how this can be claimed as an achievement? Similarly with School Streets and specific cycle lanes. LENS/LTNs were specified as a target, but there is no mention of that fiasco here. Air quality monitoring data must be used to locate pollution hotspots for any future implementation of LENs/LTNs

The 20 mph speed limit was implemented borough-wide, but only since December 2021. Why did it take so long? What is the use of it if it isn’t enforced, especially in Southall?

New podcast, International Marxist Radio (IMR).

The first episode features Ealing’s own Joe Attard speaking to In Defence of Marxism (IDOM) editor-in-chief Alan Woods.

Well worth a listen, Alan is a very knowledgeable and engaging speaker.

THE PROPERTY LOBBY: THE HIDDEN REALITY BEHIND THE HOUSING CRISIS IN EALING

There will be 14,800 new homes in 23 new developments in Southall over the next few years. 14 units over 10 stories high, and 7 over 20 stories high. Up to 40,000 new residents (and their cars)!

One third of the total new developments in the whole of Ealing borough (only Acton is getting it worse).

So not happening so much in the ‘white’ or richer areas of the borough, for some reason.

None of these homes will be genuinely affordable to most people currently living in overcrowded homes in Southall or Ealing, as Studio bedsit flats start at around £300,000!

Most will stay empty until they are sold to investors from China, Malaysia, Singapore, Bahrain(!) where they are actively marketed by the greedy property developers.

The same property developers who gave former Ealing Council ‘Leader’ Julian Bell and new Ealing Council ‘Leader’ Peter Mason (also a Southall Green ward councillor) over £30,000 in recent years to holiday in the south of France at the MIPIM property festival in Cannes described as a “booze ‘n’ hookerfest” by Private Eye Magazine.

Bell says, “it didn’t cost the taxpayer a penny”, but in Southall we are already paying with our health and quality of life thanks to the poisonous air from the development of the contaminated old gasworks site (due to complete in 2038!).

Town planner Mason says it was a mistake, and not what he expected(!).

Where will 40,000 new residents' children go to school (and how will they get there and back), how will they get an appointment to see a GP, which hospital will they go to when they need emergency treatment, and how will they get there on the roads already regularly gridlocked by too much traffic?

Worth taking the time to have a look at stopthetowers.info/other-cam…

Cllr Mason recommended we read Bob Colenutt’s ‘The Property Lobby: The Hidden Reality Behind the Housing Crisis’.

So I did.

What Colenutt says (and he has a wealth of experience in local authority housing and planning, and in the community resisting property developers), is that developers do have too much power (as Mason argues), but also that local councils and councillors do not do enough to resist, do not have the negotiating skills (contrary to how Mason originally described the importance of trips to MIPIM to ‘negotiate hard’), and too readily embrace the ‘financialisation’ of the land and property market brought about by David Cameron’s and Nick Clegg’s ConDem government in 2010.

So now, we have a very real housing crisis fuelling the huge profits of private developers, all facilitated and egged on by mostly Labour councils too easily rolling over and allowing them to build fewer and fewer ‘genuinely affordable homes’ (because “where’s the profit in that?").

What Colenutt says loudly and clearly is that without ordinary people’s and communities' resistance it would be so much worse, and that to all intents and purposes councils and councillors are in bed with the developers.

Non-fiction: The Property Lobby: The Hidden Reality behind the Housing Crisis by Bob Colenutt 📚

Surprised I haven’t been asked to remove this review of FM Conway. Is 5,000 views a lot? I guess, at the end of the day, it makes no difference.

Got soaked the skin collecting big kid from school (who, it turns out, ate and drank nothing all day…). Last time I got this wet was on my way to record this interview for the BBC…

Regular exposure to even low levels of air pollution may cause changes to the heart similar to those in the early stages of heart failure…

Low levels of air pollution linked to changes in the heart

Public concerns over remediating the toxicity of the land… have not been addressed in the revised plans…. “no details have been provided” on the proposed remediation strategy.

Brighton Gasworks developer changes plans to include affordable homes

STRAWBERRIES FOR PIGS?

Little did we know at the time, but these little strawberries were usually engulfed in a toxic plume of benzene, naphthalene, and god only knows what else.

Sensibly, the wife refused to eat them.

We later discovered that official planning documents for the nearby old gasworks, which was being dug up in the open air for new homes to be built on the contaminated land, stated that no vegetables should be grown on the land. Ever!

Ealing Council Leader Julian Bell publicly blamed 'the wrong kind of wind', and – quite possibly – privately blamed 'fucking moaners'. All the while racking up over £30,000 in declared gifts and hospitality from developers including Berkeley Group, who were digging up the gasworks land.

Our soon-to-be local ward councillor and (ex-)Head of Planning Peter Mason knew all about the dangers (he tells us on Twitter) from the contaminated land back in 2009 when he campaigned against its development along with our MP Virendra Sharma (who said the development would be 'a disaster environmentally').

Yet no one told people living nearby to expect to be gassed in our own homes and gardens during the three month heatwave that was shortly to arrive.

In fact, Ealing Council announced on Twitter that the odours, while 'unpleasant', were 'not harmful to health' would be 'gone in a few days'.

I later discovered that there is scientific evidence that some people with Asian and African heritages are genetically more vulnerable to very serious and sometimes fatal health conditions from inhaling naphthalene, a fact acknowledged (although later denied, despite the published evidence) by Public Health England at a packed public meeting in July 2019.

No one told us.

Ealing Council, despite being fully aware of the potential dangers to health (and to the environment) failed to carry out any kind of Equalities Impact Assessment, and only helped Berkeley Group to rush through the decontamination process to maximise their profit from Crossrail in Southall.

Profit over people. Labour Council. Our lives didn't matter to them.

Now, we are being asked to believe that our MP (who has begun making the right noises two years too late – what happened to the nearly 1,000 signature petition I gave you in 2018 Mr Sharma?) cares and is on our side, and that our local ward councillor cares and always has done. Only Bell is – unusually for him – honest enough not to suddenly pretend he gives a shit about anyone but himself and looking after his own family.

At the packed public meeting in 2019, which our local ward councillor chaired, he and Bell refused to declare their financial interests with Berkeley Group, refused to let me speak with the microphone so that people couldn't hear that the Council, Berkeley Group, the Environment Agency and Public Health England had all colluded to cover up the real level of toxic and carcinogenic air pollution – that it was consistently above legal limits and rising – by manipulating, removing, and presenting the air quality data in such a way as to make it look like it was mostly within legal limits.

At the same meeting, our MP arrived late, mostly unseen, sat silently at the back of the room, and left early, mostly unseen. At the same meeting, a strangely truthful Bell admitted that he had 'known about the nuisance, the BAD nuisance, for two and a half years'! Yet nothing could be done.

Now Peter Mason, free from his constraints as Head of Planning after resigning following his failed coup attempt to take the leadership from Bell last year, is telling us that something could and should have been done, yet all of them remained silent and did nothing for years.

Unbelievable!

CHAOS AND CONFUSION

If you thought last year was bad…. No one could have foreseen this!

British coastguard sued by French charity for failing to save drowned refugees.

Broccoli and cauliflower thrown away.

A shortage of lorry drivers.

Renationalised energy companies.

NATIONALISING SAUSAGES

Navy gunboats defending our fish from the French.

An army of Sikhs feeding European lorry drivers caught up in Kent.

Shortages of broccoli and lettuce.

Nationalising sausages doesn’t seem like such a crazy idea, now, does it?

HIGH TRAFFIC NEIGHBOURHOOD

Took me an hour (as opposed to 10 minutes) to drive my lad home from school this afternoon, thanks in part to the High Traffic Neighbourhood (‘Improving access for HGVs’) in Southall ‘Green’.

Like a rat, I tried the side streets and back roads option and found those to be jammed, too, and Scotts Road - although confusingly still two-way throughout - is now No Entry from the eastern end.

I would have abandoned my car and got out and walked/scooted home, but there was nowhere to leave it - all the pavements (and even the double yellow lines) were parked on, or being used by, er, pedestrians.

The more virtuous brothers and sisters amongst us may righteously question why me and my lad weren’t scooting/walking anyway? Why are we driving when Southall is known for its traffic gridlock?

We have done it a couple of times. It takes us 40 minutes each way in fine weather. My lad would love to do it every day, I’m sure, although not in the wind, cold and rain. I don’t believe my dodgy feet/knees/hips/back would manage it daily, either.

And why are we going to a school so far away from where we live?

Well, it’s the best (and happiest) school in Southall. And it’s the one that is furthest away from the gasworks stink and toxic air. We wanted to give our little asthmatic boy some clean air five days a week, if we could. (Of course, we since found out the school is under the Heathrow flight path, and next to the smoky narrowboats moored on the canal….).

(In case you are wondering, the ambulance somehow squeezed down the middle of Western Road, fortunately no well-intentioned bollards or planters in the way.)

RETURN TO WORK

I returned to work last week after my extended absence due to respiratory illness, which may or may not be related to three years of breathing the poisonous gasworks' air.

I find I now have to literally climb over two rough sleepers camped outside the door of my workplace in order to get in. There is no more space in the nearby doorway, and the doorway around the side entrance is similarly occupied.

By my reckoning, we have five more rough sleepers than we did two months ago, or two years ago, or four years ago.

Meanwhile, Southall’s skyline is rapidly changing from terraced family houses to much-needed ‘genuinely affordable’ skyscraper studio flats, while ‘parklets’ are opening up in the posher parts of Ealing.

To be fair, I did see that the Bell regime have cut a deal with Compton’s foldaway bikes so that residents on the Copley estate can hire them without having to pay a membership fee, and improve air quality at the same time.

TRIGGER VOTE FOR SHARMA

In July 2019, I attended a public meeting with Public Health England to discuss air pollution problems created by the development of the old gasworks site.

At this meeting, I asked Public Health England if it is true that people with Asian and African heritage are genetically more at risk from poisoning from naphthalene – one of the main causes of the stink coming from the gasworks site.

Do you know what they said?

Yes.

Yes, Asian and African people are genetically more at risk from poisoning from naphthalene – one of the main causes of the stink from the gasworks site.

Our MP, Mr Sharma, who had been publicly supporting the need for this meeting, arrived ten minutes after it started. He sneaked in, sat at the back mostly unseen by anyone there, and then left early.

A bit like his time as an MP!

So, at this meeting.

We discovered that Asian and African people, the majority of people in Southall, are genetically more at risk from poisoning from naphthalene.

What did Mr Sharma have to say about that?

Nothing.

For two years or more, Southallians have complained to Mr Sharma about the oppressive stink, and poison air, coming from the old gasworks site. I have suffered numerous chest infections, my wife had serious and severe health problems, and my young son has been hospitalised with asthma and now has to take steroids every day of his life so that he can breathe. I know neighbours whose loved ones have now got cancer, and some who have died from cancer. All, we believe, caused by the poison air.

What has Mr Sharma done to help us?

Nothing.

A year ago, a group of us presented Mr Sharma with a petition signed by 900 Southallians and their families and friends begging Mr Sharma to do something to get Berkeley Group, the developer of the old gasworks site, to stop poisoning Southall.

What did Mr Sharma do?

Nothing.

Finally, throughout the last couple of years, while his constituents in Southall Green have been poisoned by the toxic air from the old gasworks site, and getting ill with breathing problems, and cancer, the developer Berkeley Group has sponsored numerous local events, mainly to 'clean up' Southall.

What did Mr Sharma do?

He attended every one and was photographed smiling broadly wearing his hi-viz jacket with the Berkeley Group logo emblazoned across it.

So tonight, I'm voting in favour of the trigger ballot for Mr Sharma, so that we have the opportunity to have a new Labour MP for Ealing Southall, one who will stand up for local people rather than help those who oppress them.

And I ask all of you to do the same.

Solidarity!

UPDATE: Sharma was triggered for reselection, but survived without having to stand again thanks to his old pal Boris Johnson, who called a general election shortly after.

SOUTHALL UNDER SIEGE: THE NEIGHBOURS FROM HELL

‘A lack of scrutiny,’ says John Freeman, Regulatory Services Officer at Ealing Council.

He’s talking about lessons to be learned from the council’s response to the new asphalt plant built in neighbouring Hillingdon borough in 2014.

‘We didn’t expect there to be so much odour from a new building, or so many complaints.’

Moving swiftly on.

Oppressive odour

The highly contaminated old gasworks site in Southall has been kicking up a stink, too.

Carcinogenic benzene and naphthalene, among a cocktail of polyaromatic hydrocarbons, heavy metals and particulates large and small, are in the air.

‘The odour is oppressive,’ says Damian Leydon.

There are twenty or thirty people in the room.

No one bats an eyelid.

Upset residents

Damian is the Operations Director at 'Southall Waterside', as the gasworks site is being marketed.

It's wedged between the grand union canal, Yeading Brook and Minet Park to the north-west of the site, and two of the twenty percent most economically deprived council wards in England. Southall Green to the south, and Southall Broadway to the north and north-east.

‘The last thing we want to do is upset residents,’ says Damian.

It’s a bit late for that.

Please stop

Damian previously worked as the Construction Manager on Hinkley Point C nuclear power plant in Somerset, and the Athletes Village at the 2012 London Olympics.

Presumably, there were no carcinogenic leaks, oppressed, or upset residents there.

Three times I ask Damian, ‘How many residents are you prepared to upset before you will stop?’

No answers

As for almost every question that night, at Ealing Council’s Air Quality Scrutiny Panel meeting in September 2018, there is no answer.

The meeting concludes, and later the ‘minutes’ are published, but such minutiae do not make the cut.

Was I at a different meeting?

The final report of the ‘scrutiny’ panel, six months later, reads as if the problem is in the past, finished, with yet more ‘lessons to be learned’ (and immediately forgotten).

Friends with benefits

As I leave the meeting, I see Damian having a cosy-looking chat in the corridor (of power) outside the meeting room with Julian Bell, Ealing Council's Leader.

Councillor Bell sat through the two hour meeting in silence.

I ask Julian if he’s booking his holiday in Cannes?

The south of France resort hosts the annual MIPIM property developers’ ‘booze and hookerfest’ (as Private Eye magazine calls it).

Julian is a regular attendee, all expenses paid for by Damian’s employer Berkeley Group, despite claiming to be teetotal. Peter Mason, my ward councillor, is a new attendee. He is not teetotal.

‘If my son gets cancer because of this, you better not stand so close to me,’ I say to Leydon.

He rolls his eyes.

‘David, don’t let’s make this personal,’ says Bell.

We can't breathe!

For two and a half years, my family, my neighbours and friends, have been harassed, attacked, and gassed in our own homes and gardens.

Our children have been forced to breathe ‘stinky’, poisonous air in their school playgrounds, and in our public parks.

We have been laid under siege through three hot summers, including last year’s extended heatwave.

Despite many repeated requests to stop, Damian’s uncovered, unenclosed cesspit of decontamination of a hundred years of toxic waste continues unabated.

Good neighbours

‘Be a good and respectful neighbour,’ says Councillor Mason, at the ward forum.

‘It’s unpleasant’ we are told. ‘It will clear in days, and it’s not harmful to health,’ Ealing Council namelessly tweeted. In June 2017.

Round and round we go.

Is this corrupt?

‘It’s the wrong kind of wind,’ claims Bell.

‘It’s not our responsibility, it’s the Environment Agency.’

‘It’s not us, it’s Public Health England.’

‘I’ll phone Julian and get him to put a councillor on it for you,’ Tony Pidgley, founder and chair of Berkeley Group tells us.

“Cash. Always cash.” (Tony Pidgley)

We started a campaign. Clean Air for Southall and Hayes. CASH for short.

‘I DO NOT TAKE CASH! I DO NOT TAKE CASH!’ is our MP Virendra Sharma’s frankly bizarre opening statement, shouted at us when we go to meet him.

What’s going on?

When is remediation NOT remediation?

Back to the future with John Freeman.

I email John to ask him when remediation of the soil (the cleaning of the contaminated land) is due to be completed. It’s the excavation, the turning, the moving of the toxic waste that has laid at rest for fifty years or more that we’re told is likely to be the main source of the odour nuisance and air pollution.

‘March 2019. It’s finished already.’

‘But it still stinks.’

‘Did you leave the cooker on?’

‘But I’ve seen the planning documents where it says remediation is scheduled to be completed in 2038.’

John consults his colleague, James Potter, Ealing’s Contaminated Land Officer, whose post was initially funded by none other than Berkeley Group.

A very simple explanation as it turns out.

‘The remediation for the next nineteen years is, in a sense, NOT remediation.’

Berkeley bribes?

Then there is the fact, confirmed (and denied) by Public Health England, that the majority Asian and African population of Southall, due to genetic factors, have an increased risk from exposure to naphthalene.

And then there’s Berkeley Group's track record of paying off their former finance director to keep quiet about allegations of bribery and corruption at the top of the company.

Understandably, we doubt the veracity of their own reports of the air quality monitoring data recorded by their business partner, data which they refuse to share with us.

Enough is enough.

Stop the work at the gasworks site while it is made safe.

Stop poisoning Southall.

Please donate to our legal campaign for justice: https://www.crowdjustice.com/case/cleanairforsouthallandhayes/

INCONSIDERATE CONSTRUCTOR

Lorry driver on his phone while leaving ‘Southall Village’ building site, right next to school entrance during school run.

Got a load more verbals from the driver and his colleagues on site - ‘Did he hit anyone?’, ‘He doesn’t work for us!’

All part of the Considerate Constructors Scheme, aka Couldn’t Care Less Scam.

TWENTY TEN (THE PREQUEL): THE CHEESEMAKER

Originally intended as a follow-up to part one of my milk-based food product styled personal review of 2010, this post quickly regressed into a metaphorical guide to the cheesemaking process, as you will see.

By the end of the first week of March 2010, I felt like I was several thousand feet above sea level. High up a mountain, again, perhaps mostly due to the ever-decreasing capacity of my right lung, but plummeting to new emotional depths thanks to the leaden weights of my ever-increasing self-doubt and sense of despair, perhaps partly as a reaction to stopping taking my antidepressant medication (although I stopped because I was feeling worse, not better).

One of the problems I found with officially going a bit mental is that I started to lose all confidence and trust in myself and the rest of the world. I think it’s fair to say that I’ve always been a bit of an independent-minded so-and-so and generally not afraid to say out loud whatever comes into my head. This invariably leads to me getting punched in the face. Or some other non-violent conflict.

The Big Cheese

A few years ago, I worked for someone who was responsible for making the lives of a few of her staff abjectly miserable, quite contrary to our organisation’s stated raison d’être ‘for better mental health.’ It appeared that she would move from one person to another and to another and then, it seemed to me, it was my turn. I decided I wasn’t going to take it.

During a torrid six months as her primary target, I had to undergo hospital tests on my heart for still unexplained and not since repeated vomiting and blackouts. When I told my GP what was going on at work she immediately signed me off with stress and didn’t want me to go back when I did. By the time my boss had finished with me I was unemployed and unemployable. Never underestimate the power of a bully.

I learned from painful experience quite a lot about how bullies and psychopaths operate. I learned that, while part of me wants to stand up to them and expose them for what they are, the sane part of me wants to avoid them altogether. So when I did manage to find a new job with a decent manager and then moved on from that with a good reference into my current post four years ago, I was delighted to be in a position where I was ‘the boss’, although, of course, I still had to report to a management committee made up of volunteers, led by a truly wonderful Chair.

When I say I was glad to be in charge, I don’t say that because of any desire to have power over others. Quite the contrary, in fact (unless I’m deluding myself). I’ve always believed in sharing power and responsibility as much as possible, but you can’t do that if you have an egomaniac boss or a rigidly hierarchical organisational structure. Yes, there are differences between staff and service users (staff get paid being the main one), but I try to minimise these as far as I can.

Cheese Grating

It was also gratifying to work in a London borough that not only funded my new organisation’s work, but whose commissioners seemed genuinely supportive. Within two weeks of me starting my new job, however, it was grating to be informed that the local authority would be able to fund us for only 40% of what we had budgeted for on their advice of just three months earlier. My first significant and highly unpleasant task, therefore, was to have to ask staff to reduce their hours from full-time to two days a week or to make them redundant in order that the organisation could survive.

Over the next two years, we began to flourish and I was able to bring in external funding to supplement the local authority’s money so that we could provide a still much-reduced service to what we had originally planned. Even so, it seemed popular with members, staff were highly skilled and dedicated to their work and feedback from carers and professionals who referred people to us was without exception, I think, almost worryingly positive.

Cheese Ripening

By working together on daily household and business tasks, we had established a sense of community, friendships and social engagement from a safe and supportive workplace. A lifeline for people whose experience was often one of many years of loss of sense of self and worth and an absence of meaningful relationships and occupation. A second home, where they were welcomed back with warmth and kindness into the human family (cite Richard Bentall’s ‘Doctoring The Mind’) and encouraged to believe that they had real reasons to hope for - and expect - better lives.

We had people going out into the community to volunteer and set up our own catering service to employ some of our members in very part-time casual work, based on their existing skills and interests. For all but one, this was the first paid work they had done in years. We weren’t able to find anyone permanent full-time employment during a time of global recession, but still I felt proud of what we’d achieved in difficult circumstances and with fairly limited resources.

Cheese-Induced Nightmare

So when I attended our annual review in 2009 with our main funder and described what we did and the impact it had on people’s lives I was gobsmacked to be told ‘We don’t care what you do or how you do it. We just want people off benefits and into work.’ I felt physically sick and faint.

While I understand (and, in principle, support) government targets to help people with disabilities to return to work, I’ve always been sceptical about the management-theory driven obsession with outcomes and, worse, the introduction of outcome-based contracting - where service providers get paid only if they meet agreed targets. What happens, is that the largest national providers are able to tender for local contracts with the lowest unit cost, inevitably, in my opinion, sacrificing quality (process) in the name of quantity (outcomes). Except that they fail to deliver.

Processed Cheese

To me, what we do and how we do it - the process - is of fundamental importance. There are plenty of organisations who work in completely different ways and who consistently fail to get people with diagnoses of schizophrenia (who form 60% of our membership) off benefits and into work and who receive considerably larger sums of money for doing so, making their CEO’s rich (and famous) in the process. Pushing people who lack confidence and don’t feel ready to work into inappropriate and unsupported employment simply doesn’t work for most and carries the very real risk of being detrimental to their mental health.

In order to massage their figures, these organisations ‘cherry-pick’ or ‘cream’ the most able and likely to find employment while ‘parking’ those with the most complex needs and severe disabilities, the very people small, local organisations like mine tend to work with. This is not to say that these people are not able. My experience tells me that indeed they are, but that they require much longer to build up sufficient confidence and trust and need much more support to do so. Time and support costs money, but so does a lifetime of unemployment and welfare dependence, not to mention the personal and social costs of inactive and isolated lives.

Cheesed Off

Well, that was a rather long-winded way of saying that in 2009 I began to feel that I was being fucked about at work. What I believed to be the right way of working and what I was being told to do by my paymasters conflicted and didn’t make any sense to me. A year later, while I had time on my hands due to my own physical and mental illness I ‘discovered’ that evaluations of the way I was being told to work clearly stated that this approach doesn’t work, either. I felt angry for not trusting my own judgment (based on experience and advice from mentors) and felt like I’d been bullied into submission, yet again.

Join me for another cheese and whine morning next time.

WATERBOARDING ON THE NHS

Abstract: Gagging for it. Tags: waterboarding, NHS, bronchoscopy, torture, worklessness, Nazi, psychotherapy, banana, splat

On Another Planet this week: controversial new government plans to tackle ever increasing worklessness using waterboarding.

Techniques refined and perfected by secret military personnel known only by their codename ‘Our Boys’ are being piloted by the NHS in an effort to ‘encourage and empower’ people claiming statutory sick pay to return to work.

One persistent malingerer, who asked not to be identified, claimed that he was subjected to an horrific ordeal at the hands of his torturers and says he was tricked into believing he was just playing a game of ‘doctors and nurses’.

‘I always liked playing doctors and nurses when I was a kid,’ said Roger (not his real name).

Over to Roger to tell the rest of his story.

Nazi

I received a phone call from my local hospital telling me I had an appointment with the chest consultant I’d seen before. I thought it was a bit odd, because I’d seen the surgeon who operated on me only the previous day, but I went in anyway. I felt I could trust these people after they did such a great job of fixing my lung. Anyway, when I got there, they made me wait for an hour as usual, then a pretty young student doctor asked if I minded if she sat in on my appointment? How could I say no? I could barely speak with my tongue hanging out like that. So I just nodded and wiped the dribble from the side of my mouth hoping she hadn’t noticed. When I got to see the consultant himself I thought it was a bit odd that he was wearing full Nazi regalia, but he seemed like a nice guy and to know his stuff.

‘Don’t rush back to work", he said.

‘Now, about this bronchoscopy. Don’t worry, I’m sure everything will be OK. I’m 90% sure everything’s fine. People say it tickles a little bit, but you’ll have a sedative and some local anaesthetic that they put up your nose and on the back of your throat. That will make you cough, but it’s really nothing to worry about.’

‘Fine, I’ll do it,’ I told him.

So this week I went in for my ‘bronchoscopy’. After waiting the requisite hour, I was hurried into the day surgery operating theatre by a pretty young nurse and ignored by the doctor. Another nurse made small talk with me to reassure me. I clambered on to the operating table so that I was sat upright with my legs outstretched. The second nurse put a bib on me to deal with my dribbling while the doctor chatted with his friend on his mobile.

‘Hi, I’m Dr Heydrich,’ he said to me finally.

Although I had been feeling relaxed, at this point I suddenly felt a twinge of anxiety.

‘I’m going to put some anaesthetic gel up your nose,’ he said, as he squirted anaesthetic gel up my nose.

The second nurse then stuffed a tube up my left nostril, saying, ‘Don’t worry, it’s only oxygen.’

Banana splat

I looked at her and she had donned what looked like a welder’s visor. ‘You look like you’re about to do some welding,’ I said.

‘It’s just to protect myself from any splatter,’ she replied.

Another twinge.

‘OK, open your mouth, please,’ barked Heydrich. ‘I’m going to spray some anaesthetic on the back of your throat. It tastes very strongly of bananas,’ he added, as he sprayed what tasted like banana flavoured liqueur on to the back of my throat, making me cough. ‘Just a little bit more,’ he said.

‘UURRRGGHHH!!!’ I splattered.

‘UURRRGGHHH!!! UURRRGGHHH!!!’ I repeated.

‘It’s OK,’ said the second nurse, holding my head down with her hand. ‘It makes you feel like there’s a ball in your throat and you can’t swallow.’

‘UURRRGGHHH!!! UURRRGGHHH!!!’ I repeated, desperately.

Heydrich then took what I had thought was a stethoscope and zoomed towards me with the bright flashing end of it and shoved it up my right nostril.

AARRRGGHHH!!!" I said.

‘Let’s try the other one," said Heydrich.

They swapped the oxygen for the stethoscope, which then dropped out of my traumatised right nostril.

‘AARRRGGHHH!!! AARRRGGHHH!!!’ I repeated.

That hurt even more than the right one did. The second nurse (I don’t know what the first nurse was doing, but she was there afterwards) then pushed something into my mouth, saying, ‘Open your mouth and hold it with your teeth.’

Heydrich zoomed back into view.

‘We’ll try it through the mouth’, he said, as he pushed the thick black fibre-optic tube down my throat.

‘UURRRGGHHH!!! UURRRGGHHH!!!’

I tried to cough and splutter, but my throat was numb and I couldn’t breathe. I felt like I was drowning.

‘UURRRGGHHH!!! AARRRGGHHH!!!’

I panicked and pulled the tube out, gasping for breath.

‘I can’t do it!’ I cried, literally, tears rolling down my cheeks.

‘I can’t do it. I’ll go back to work. I promise!’

Over. Roger and out.

Another Planet understands that if this pilot is successful, then the procedure will be rolled out to the rest of the UK in the coming months.

As Nick Clegg-Hess, Deputy Prime Minister, said:

‘What we need is strong, stable government. That means we must weaken and destabilise people who are not working for whatever reason and by any means necessary to get them to conform and work to pay our taxes. This is about control and maintenance of the status quo. Anyone who thinks otherwise is sadly deluded and will be dealt with accordingly. Waterboarding is an effective and reliable means of manipulating even the craziest of people to do what we want them to do. It’s in the national interest to get people off benefits and into work and we will do whatever it takes to make that happen, even if it means torturing people after they have already confessed."

On a more serious note, I’m open to suggestions for other medical procedures you’d like me to blog about. Let me know your ideas in the comments!