Category: Southall
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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.)
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).
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.
M.S. Panesar hit wicket b Panesar 0
Tbf, he lasted longer than I thought he would.
<img src=“https://eu.uploads.micro.blog/2588/2024/screenshot-20240508-131547.png" alt=“Screenshot of my WhatsApp comment “I don’t think he’ll last five minutes, tbh” on Monty Panesar’s political interview with Times Radio where he suggested leaving NATO would help control immigration “>
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”.
Catwoman
Last week, we had a visitor.
Catwoman appeared, to save the day!
All the way from leafy Surrey, she turned up in her Porsche 4x4 and catsuit to catch our community cats and take them to the vet “because they have cat flu”.
With her ten year old assistant, and cat trap, she tried for (what seemed like) hours to catch a cat, or a kitten, to no avail.
Community Cats
Just around the corner from my lad’s school by the canal is a cul-de-sac which is home to some “community cats”.
Having spoken to a few of the people who live there, it seems that none of the seven or eight cats and kittens have homes or owners, but are looked after by the people who live there.
So they’re not strays, but they’re not feral, either. They’re community cats.
These cats have been around for as long as I can remember (which admittedly isn’t so long these days), but it’s only in the last few weeks that they have become of growing interest to my lad and some of his friends on their way to and from school.
What started off as simply “aw, look there’s a cat”, has now become a financial investment in daily supplies of cat food, and extra time in the morning and afternoon to stop, feed and stroke Tab, Abby, Popcorn, Tiny, Smoky, Toffee and one or two others I can’t remember the names of.
I made the mistake of sharing a few photos of these cats with my cat obsessed mother, who was very upset that they don’t have warm, dry homes and owners who overfeed them with specially bought and cooked fish. I’ve tried to reassure her that they look healthy (shiny coats), well-fed and looked after.