UK politics

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.

Marking 1,400 days since I began posting a photo a day, with accompanying text, on my Facebook page ‘The State of London’, from my nearly nine years of photos taken on daily bike rides throughout the capital, with particular reference to the last year that I have spent photographing and reporting on London under Covid.

As Judge Vanessa Baraitser denies bail to Julian Assange, I point out how necessary it is for the incoming Biden administration to conclude, as Barack Obama did, that prosecuting Assange poses too grave a threat to press freedoms to proceed with, and to drop the extradition request.

My response to the totally unexpected ruling today by Judge Vanessa Baraitser, who refused to approve WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange’s extradition to the US, on the basis that “his autism spectrum disorder” would “caus[e] him to commit suicide.”

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.

Marking 1,300 days since I first began posting a photo a day on Facebook from my photo-journalism project ‘The State of London’, which I began five years earlier, in May 2012, this article provides some of my reflections on the last eight and half years, including, of course, the unprecedented upheavals of the last eight months, since Covid-19 turned the world upside down, and largely shut down the City and the West End.

As the second Covid lockdown bites, I wonder how many “non-essential” businesses will survive, but take heart from the news that office rents are collapsing, and that residential rents in inner London are down by 14.9% on this time last year. I can only hope that the uncontrolled property greed that was so dominant before Covid has finally hit a wall, and will be unable to recover.

My thoughts on the eve of England’s second Covid lockdown, set to last for a month from November 5, in which, as well as being critical of the government’s typically slow and muddled response, I also reflect on the importance of live music and other forms of culture, and how they have flickered to life, against all the odds, since Covid hit, as well as how they might resume when this lockdown ends.