UK politics

I look at how Peabody Sales, the private sales arm of the giant housing association Peabody, has just launched a new development, called ‘The Muse’, at Amersham Vale in New Cross, with the private firm Sherrygreen Homes and Lewisham Council, where 80% of the homes will be for private sale. With breathtaking hypocrisy, Amersham Vale was stealthily twinned by the council with the bitterly-contested Tidemill site in Deptford, where campaigners — myself included — fought a long battle to try to prevent the destruction of a vital community space and environmental asset, the Old Tidemill Wildlife Garden, and a block of flats next door, and where, moreover, the council has been trumpeting the number of ‘affordable’ homes that will be built, without mentioning how those figures are undermined by the number of private homes at Amersham Vale.

One year since campaigners – myself included – occupied the Old Tidemill Wildlife Garden in Deptford to prevent its destruction by Lewisham Council and Peabody, I look at how badly the council handled the occupation and the subsequent eviction, and ask if this and other campaigns have done any lasting damage to the fundamentally disgraceful ‘regeneration’ industry.

In my first article about Boris Johnson since he became the almost unspeakably unsuitable Prime Minister of the UK, I look at his chronic failures, and also profile his chief advisor, the alarming maverick Dominic Cummings, enthusiastically promising to deliver a “no-deal” Brexit by October 31 – in his case, to fulfil some warped dream of destroying the entire British political establishment.

My review of this week’s WOMAD world music festival in Wiltshire, looking particularly at how, although it was a wonderful festival, the global environmental crisis hung over proceedings, as, to my mind, it hovers over everything these days, demanding that we get involved in bringing down the entire suicidal capitalist system that is destroying us.

An article in defence of social housing – and calling for a massive project of building new council homes – on the centenary of the 1919 Addington Act, introduced by the Liberal (and later Labour) politician Christopher Addison, which established the UK’s first major council-led homebuilding programme.

I’m off to WOMAD for a week. While I’m gone, please check out ‘How the Middle Class Ruined Britain’, a really rather good documentary presented by the working class Tory stand-up comedian Geoff Norcott, featuring the Save Reginald Save Tidemill campaign.

My report about the environmental protest group Extinction Rebellion’s ‘Summer Uprising’ last week, and, in particular, the significance of activists’ blockade of London Concrete in east London, as part of protests against the Silvertown Tunnel. This led to immediate arrests, unlike most of the group’s more theatrical manifestations in central London, and my conclusion is that, although the most remarkable consciousness-raising and political engagement has taken place over the last nine months via XR and Greta Thunberg, much more direct action is needed against polluters; for example, against the hugely environmentally polluting housing industry.

Marking 800 days since I first began posting a photo a day on Facebook (and later on Twitter) from my ongoing photo-journalism project ‘The State of London’, in which I cycle around London’s 120 postcodes, recording the fabric of the city and its changes, and which I actually began five years earlier, in May 2012.

In this year’s article marking the summer solstice, I contrast how the free festival pioneers urged revellers to “leave no trace”, in contrast to today’s throwaway culture, and, looking at the bigger picture, I urge anyone interested in the cycle of the seasons that Stonehenge so vividly represents to urgently get involved in environmental activism to try to prevent the worst effects of an already unfolding and unprecedented man-made environmental crisis that requires the whole of humanity to grasp that, collectively, we must all work out how to “leave no trace” if we are to sustain our existence on earth.

It’s exactly two years since the Grenfell Tower fire, in which 72 people people died because those responsible for their safety – from central government to the local council, the management company in charge of the towers, and various contractors involved in its fatal refurbishment – prioritised cost-cutting and profiteering instead. As survivors continue to call for justice, and housing reforms to protect those in social housing, I join those calls, reflecting on how, across London and the country as a whole, those in social housing continue to be treated as disposable, whether through living in towers with unsafe cladding, or living on estates that continue to be cynically demolished as part of the ‘regeneration’ industry that is actually a tool for social cleansing.