UK politics

Today, Bandcamp, the US online music service, is waiving its fees to help musicians, so please feel free to buy any of the studio recordings by my band The Four Fathers, including our brand-new online single, ‘The Wheel of Life’, a meditation on mortality and living in the moment.

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.

My thoughts on the summer solstice this year, as COVID-19 kept revellers from Stonehenge for the first time since the 1990s, when an exclusion zone imposed after the Battle of the Beanfield was in place. Also included: a video of my band The Four Fathers playing a set for the Virtual Stonehenge Free Festival set up by my friend Neil Goodwin to tide us through these times of isolation.

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.

It’s 35 years since 1,400 police, on the instructions of Margaret Thatcher, violently crushed a convoy of men, women and children trying to get to Stonehenge to establish what would have been the 12th annual Stonehenge Free Festival. The Battle of the Beanfield remains one of the most indefensible episodes of state violence in our lifetimes, and, while it didn’t crush dissent, it paved the way for sustained efforts to do so on the part of successive governments.

As Boris Johnson defends Dominic Cummings’s shameful flouting of the coronavirus lockdown rules back in March and April, the outrage shows no sign of diminishing, as is entirely appropriate. Cummings has shown contempt for all the people who observed the lockdown rules, even when it involved great sacrifice and personal loss, and his refusal to resign – and Johnson’s defence of him – shows how both men believe, very fundamentally, that there is one rule for them, and another for the rest of us. Both of them must go.

I look at the impact of the coronavirus crisis on the construction industry in London, enthusing about the shutdown of sites, and hoping that the entire bloated industry will collapse – not only because its developments are either unnecessary or overpriced, or both, but also because the entire industry is so environmentally ruinous. My critique is also part of a wider analysis of the huge drop in emissions since the lockdown began, in which massively reduced car use has played a major part, although this progress will be rapidly undone without a renewed commitment to a permanent reduction in emissions as countries begin to try to ease their way out of lockdown.

My new article about the impact of the coronavirus, with a particular focus on rental problems, both in a domestic context, in which furloughed workers, and those suddenly laid off, are facing unprecedented problems paying their rent, but have received no help from the government, and, in a business context, with numerous businesses, including restaurants and pubs, calling for rents to be suspended to prevent them from going under.

Today I’m marking the eighth anniversary of when I set out on my bike, with my camera, to take photos in all of London’s 120 postcodes. Eight years later, I haven’t stopped, and, in the last seven weeks, I’ve been seeing the capital through new eyes during the unprecedented coronavirus lockdown.

A link to – and my discussion of – an hour-long interview I recently undertook with Chris Cook in Canada for his Gorilla Radio show. We discussed Guantánamo, the ninth anniversary of WikiLeaks’ release of classified military files relating to the Guantánamo prisoners (on which I worked as media partner), the coronavirus, and how it has changed the world to an extraordinary extent (with both positive and negative repercussions), and my photo-journalism project, ‘The State of London.’ Chris also played ‘This Time We Win’, an eco-anthem that is the new single by my band The Four Fathers.