Category: Politics
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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!