Battle for Britain: Fighting the Tory Government’s Vile Ideology

Video of my interview with the London-based activists of Team Assange, about the new UK police bill, the right to protest, Guantánamo and Julian Assange. Also included is an update regarding genuinely shocking incidents of police violence in Bristol over the last week in response to protests about the bill.

My assessment of the first year of Covid lockdowns, and how, on two occasions — last June, and last weekend — political protests have erupted, regarding racial oppression and women’s rights, when the logical limits of strict lockdowns have been reached. Plus a much more critical analysis of the parallel world of Covid denial.

My response to the police violence at the peaceful vigil for Sara Everard on Clapham Common, and its curious timing, coinciding with the second reading of home secretary Priti Patel’s horribly authoritarian Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Bill 2021, which seeks to legislate meaningful protest out of existence.

Here’s a link to, and my detailed description of a recent interview I undertook with Andy Bungay for his show on Riverside Radio in Wandsworth, including discussion of the Save Reginald Save Tidemill campaign, the Grenfell Tower fire, and, of course, the impact of Covid-19 on residential and business rents in the capital. We also discussed my photo-journalism project ‘The State of London’, and Andy also played three songs by my band The Four Fathers.

Drawing on an excellent article about COVID-19 and American exceptionalism by the anthropologist Wade Davis for Rolling Stone, I look at the crisis of leadership in the US when it comes to dealing with the unprecedented challenges for our economic future caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, and compare how similar failures of leadership also plague the UK.

As Boris Johnson encourages employers to urge their workers to return to the office, to revive the businesses that serve office workers, and to keep the real estate business happy, I look at how recent research has established that just 13% of workers want to return to the office full-time. I also point out that office workers are not the only ones causing problems for businesses and their landlords, with the collapse of tourism also playing a major part.

Marking 3,000 days since I first set out on my bike on a daily basis to take photos of the changing face of the capital for a project that became known as ‘The State of London.’ On the fifth anniversary of the start of the project, I began posting a photo a day on Facebook, where I have now posted 1,176 photos.

My response to the good news that the appeals court has ruled unlawful the British government’s patently unlawful — and cruelly immoral — decision last year to strip the citizenship of Shamima Begum, a British citizen who was just 15 when she travelled to Syria to become a “jihadi bride.”

An update on the coronavirus crisis, looking in particular at the difficulties accompanying the lifting of lockdown restrictions, with a positive focus on reduced office use and an end to overcrowded rush-hour public transport, but cautionary reflections on a general economic over-reliance on mass tourism, which afflicts London almost as much as it does other overcrowded holiday destinations like Venice and Barcelona.

Today marks three years since the Grenfell Tower fire, which led to the deaths of 72 people, and which only occurred because those responsible for the safety of the residents put cost-cutting and profiteering before their lives. Three years on, shamefully, no one responsible has been held accountable.