Andy Worthington's Blog, page 12

COVID-19: Workers and Employers Show No Great Enthusiasm for Returning to the Office to Revive “Business As Usual”

An almost entirely deserted Liverpool Street station on April 2, 2020 – a previously unpublished photo from Andy Worthington’s photo-journalism project ‘The State of London.’


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In Sunday’s Observer, the paper’s chief political commentator Andrew Rawnsley related how, a few weeks ago, a group of civil servants at the Cabinet Office were “told to find a way of re-opening nightclubs in a coronavirus-safe way.” Although they were, in Rawnsley’s words, a “bright group”, they couldn’t overcome the fundamental  — one might say fatal — flaw at the heart of the exercise. “The socially distanced nightclub is a contradiction in terms”, as Rawnsley put it, adding, “Nightclubs, by their very nature, are all about social intimacy.”

Rawnsley proceeded to explain that he was telling this story “to illustrate just how very desperate the government has been to release Britain from every aspect of lockdown and return us to something that resembles the pre-coronavirus world as closely as possible.” Our leaders, as he put it, “dreamed of returning to that prelapsarian age in which you could eat out with your family, go drinking with your mates, commute to work, celebrate a religious festival or jet off to a holiday somewhere reliably sunny without having to worry about catching or spreading a deadly disease. While never quite saying it explicitly, their ambition has essentially been to get everything open again.”

This indeed seems to be the case, and it is typical of a government made up largely of inadequate ministers who are only in place because of their enthusiasm for the insanity of Brexit, and who are led by the laziest example of a Prime Minister in living memory, that the nuances of the challenges facing us — and the unexpected opportunities for a less chaotic and more environmentally sustainable world — are being ignored.

Johnson doesn’t have the will, the energy — or, almost certainly, the ability — to engage in anything resembling a vision for the future, and he is supported in this by his chief adviser Dominic Cummings, a man so convinced of his own superiority over everyone else that he seems intent on destroying the civil service and replacing the entire bureaucracy of government with a one-man operation — himself. This was a dementedly arrogant notion before the virus hit, and now, of course, it seems nothing less than suicidally reckless.

Moreover, while the illusion of a return to normality has been created, with pubs and “non-essential” shops reopening, with households allowed to mingle, and with our roads almost as polluted and gridlocked as they were before the virus, the glaring truth that undermines Johnson’s desperate wishes is that economic activity is down — massively — and there is no wonder cure.

Since the coronavirus lockdown began, belatedly, on March 23, I have been watching London closely — and, particularly, the West End and the City, the two areas hardest hit by it. I’ve been doing so as part of my photo-journalism project ‘The State of London’, which has involved me, since 2012, taking photos every day on bike rides throughout the capital, and while the West End is not quite the ghost town it was in the first few months of lockdown, when I would cycle around the familiar sights of the West End — Trafalgar Square, Leicester Square, Piccadilly Circus, Oxford Street, Regent Street, Soho and Covent Garden — and often see no more than a few dozen other people, the thousands of people who are now shopping and eating and drinking in the West End on a daily basis are just a fraction of those who did so before the lockdown — and, most crucially, are just a fraction of those required to keep the West End financially viable.

An almost entirely deserted Oxford Street on April 4, 2020 – photo by Andy Worthington from his photo-journalism project ‘The State of London.’

Foreign tourists are not the only people missing from the West End. Tourists from across the UK also used to visit the capital in droves — often to see West End shows — but the entire live cultural world has been shuttered since the lockdown began, with live music suffering a much as theatre, and, in any case, no one wants to travel to London from across the country by public transport, whether by train or by plane.

Looking at the bigger global picture, the blunt truth is that a shattered airline industry has found itself unable to entice people back on board — either to visit the UK, which, like almost everywhere on earth, is massively dependent on tourism, or, for Britons, to visit their familiar Mediterranean haunts. In the former case, people from other countries cannot have failed to notice that the UK — and England in particular — has the highest rate of excess deaths in the world, and is not a safe destination, while for Brits wishing to ago abroad, the government’s pro-flying rhetoric hit a wall when the realities of quarantine intruded.

For anyone who cares about humanity’s future, the end of unfettered, promiscuous international tourism is, environmentally, absolutely necessary and long overdue, as I have written about before, but adapting to the changes will, of course, be a painful process. However, there is no magic wand to get us out of this mess, however much Boris Johnson wishes otherwise.

No going back to the office

To add to these woes, another key component of London’s economy has also disappeared — the office workers who populated the West End, and who, of course, were also essential to economic activity in the City of London (and its trading cousin, Canary Wharf), which are still largely the ghost towns they have been since the lockdown first began.

As part of the drive to return to pre-virus life, Boris Johnson set August 1 as the date when companies can ask their workers to come back to their desks, but as the Guardian noted last week, in an article entitled, ‘Companies ready to defy Boris Johnson’s planned return to work’, many of the UK’s biggest businesses were “sticking to home working arrangements or delaying a partial return until September at the earliest”, and in many cases 2021.

Google and NatWest, for example, are not planning to have staff return to offices until 2021, with the Guardian describing their decisions as showing “signs of a permanent shift in working culture”, and other firms showing reticence are Facebook, which “has not laid out its plans for reopening its three London offices to its 3,000 staff”, while “other multinationals including Vodafone and publishing firm Pearson are expected to keep employees at home until next year.”

As the Guardian also noted:

Two major employers dealt a blow to the government’s hopes of an office return on Thursday, with travel company Tui announcing that it was shutting high street stores and moving 630 of the workers affected into a home-working unit. Lloyds Banking group also announced on Thursday that it was reviewing the amount of office space it uses as it admitted that working from home had made it “less reliant on office space.”

As the Guardian’s research established, “September, when schools are expected to open again, is being viewed by many firms as a natural restart, once parents are no longer solely responsible for childcare”, with PwC, for example, the massive accounting and consultancy firm (aka PricewaterhouseCoopers), aiming “to have more than 50% of its workforce back in its offices by the end of September.”

As the Guardian explained, “Remote working was hastily introduced by British companies in March, but has generally been viewed as a success, thanks to the availability of high-speed internet and video services such as Zoom. As a result, few of the firms which in pre-pandemic times had thousands of workers in their offices are rushing to bring people back under one roof, despite the installation of hand-sanitiser stations, one-way systems and limits to the number of people who can travel in a lift.”

Although the banking sector in particular has been trying to find ways to ensure that workers can return to their offices safely, with Goldman Sachs, for example, “check[ing] the temperature each day of its 1,000 London staff who have returned out of a total in the capital of 6,000”, as it also considers “offering its employees regular Covid-19 tests”, even the banks already bringing workers back “aren’t expecting to welcome back more than 50% of workers this year”, according to Catherine McGuinness, policy chair at the City of London Corporation, “because of the need for physical distancing”, and fears about transport. As the Guardian added, “More than half a million people usually work in the Square Mile financial district, the vast majority of whom commute in on public transport.”

For further information, see the Guardian’s companion article, ‘Return to work: a sector-by-sector look at the plans of England’s major employers’, in which Barclays explained that it is also “weighing up its needs for office space”, with Jes Staley, the bank’s chief executive, stating, “We are going to think about our real estate mix, given the lessons that we’ve learned.” At the start of lockdown, Staley, famously, said, “I think the notion of putting 7,000 people in a building may be a thing of the past, and we will find ways to operate with more distancing over a much longer period of time”, and its current plans don’t involve bringing “the bulk of its 50,000 UK staff back to the office until at least the end of September”, in addition to the 20,000 employees already working in branches, call centres and its trading desk in Canary Wharf.

For other companies’ approaches, see this Evening Standard article.

So what next?

According to research conducted by recruitment firm Robert Walters, and reported by This Is Money, of 5,000 people interviewed who have been working from home, “[o]nly 13 per cent … want to go back to the office full-time”, while “[t]he remaining 87 per cent of employees want more flexibility to work remotely”, and “21 per cent would rather never go back to the office.”

Robert Walters also surveyed “2,000 companies around the world, including the UK”, and found that 44 per cent of UK companies are “considering a reduction in the size of their premises”, because “[r]emote working, aided by Zoom conference calls, has been judged a success” by businesses “who are now questioning the need for huge office buildings.”

Tom Stevenson, an investment director at Fidelity International, said, “For many office workers, and their employers, the lockdown in March was an eye-opener. The ease with which work could be transplanted from office to home surprised many, and the few hours a day we’ve gained back in place of commuting are very welcome. For some, work will never be the same again.”

He added, “The death of the office has probably been exaggerated because we are naturally social beings. But the new approach will be much more flexible and varied. And few will complain about that.”

Let’s hope that’s the case, as the end to overcrowded rush hour commuter journeys should have happened years ago, but didn’t happen because of a combination of controlling employers and employees fearful of being lonely and isolated if they didn’t work in an office.

If office work continues to be spurned, it will be a blow for those businesses dependant on crowds of workers at lunchtime and after work, but the emptying out of unnecessary offices, and the reduction in tourists supporting overpriced retail outlets, ought to deal a long-overdue blow to the greed of the real estate rental sector, hopefully leading to new and as yet unconceived options for what might be possible in an emptier West End. Meanwhile, those who continue to work from home — whether on a full time or a part time basis — ought to enable independent businesses where they live to continue to thrive, as has been the case since lockdown began.

I don’t mean to sound flippant about any of this. I understand that the chaos that the lockdown has caused to the economy is hugely damaging to many, many people, but the old way of living was unsustainable, however much we had been encouraged to think that that wasn’t the case, as we hoovered up the world’s resources, and gorged ourselves in numerous ways that contributed perilously to the emissions that are heating up the planet in a life-threatening manner — not sometime in the future, but now.

The virus has given us a chance to change our behaviour before it’s too late. The question now is the extent to which we can genuinely embrace that opportunity, and to behave with vision, humility and compassion, and a recognition of the potential enormity of the damage caused by our tendency to self-absorption, and a dangerous sense of entitlement.

* * * * *

Andy Worthington is a freelance investigative journalist, activist, author, photographer, film-maker and singer-songwriter (the lead singer and main songwriter for the London-based band The Four Fathers, whose music is available via Bandcamp). He is the co-founder of the Close Guantánamo campaign (and see the latest photo campaign here) and the successful We Stand With Shaker campaign of 2014-15, and the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison and of two other books: Stonehenge: Celebration and Subversion and The Battle of the Beanfield. He is also the co-director (with Polly Nash) of the documentary film, “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo” (available on DVD here, or here for the US, or you can watch it online here, via the production company Spectacle, for £2.55), and for his photo project ‘The State of London’ he publishes a photo a day from eight years of bike rides around the 120 postcodes of the capital.

In 2017, Andy became very involved in housing issues. He is the narrator of the documentary film, ‘Concrete Soldiers UK’, about the destruction of council estates, and the inspiring resistance of residents, he wrote a song ‘Grenfell’, in the aftermath of the entirely preventable fire in June 2017 that killed over 70 people, and he also set up ‘No Social Cleansing in Lewisham’ as a focal point for resistance to estate destruction and the loss of community space in his home borough in south east London. For two months, from August to October 2018, he was part of the occupation of the Old Tidemill Wildlife Garden in Deptford, to prevent its destruction — and that of 16 structurally sound council flats next door — by Lewisham Council and Peabody. Although the garden was violently evicted by bailiffs on October 29, 2018, and the trees were cut down on February 27, 2019, the resistance continues.

To receive new articles in your inbox, please subscribe to Andy’s RSS feed — and he can also be found on Facebook (and here), Twitter, Flickr and YouTube. Also see the six-part definitive Guantánamo prisoner list, The Complete Guantánamo Files, the definitive Guantánamo habeas list, the full military commissions list, and the chronological list of all Andy’s articles.

Please also consider joining the Close Guantánamo campaign, and, if you appreciate Andy’s work, feel free to make a donation.

3,000 Days of My Photo-Journalism Project ‘The State of London’

Some of the most recent photos from ‘The State of London’ on Facebook, where I post a photo a day from eight years of photos taken on bike rides around the capital.


Check out all ‘The State of London’ photos here!
Please feel free to support my work on ‘The State of London’, for which I have no institutional funding. If you can help, please click on the button below to donate via PayPal.

 

My photo-journalism project ’The State of London’ has just reached a noteworthy milestone — 3,000 days since I first consciously went out on my bike, on May 11, 2012, to cycle around London taking photos to chronicle the fabric of London and the many changes wrought upon it, beginning with the upheaval that attended the capital’s role as the host city of the 2012 Olympic Games. I began posting a photo a day on Facebook on the fifth anniversary of that first trip, on May 11, 2017, and have been posting a photo a day for the 1,176 days since.

In the eight years since, I have taken many tens of thousands of photos, covering all 120 of London’s postcodes in the 241 square miles of the London postal district (those beginning EC, WC, W, NW, N, E, SE and SW), with a particular focus on central London — the City (EC1 to EC4) and the West End (WC1, WC2 and W1), and the immediate surrounding postcodes (SE1, SW1, NW1, N1 and E1) — and with other clusters of repeated activity in the whole of south east London, where I live, in east London, most readily accessed via the Greenwich Foot Tunnel, and in parts of south west London — particularly, it seems, Brixton, Vauxhall and Battersea and Chelsea — and west London; especially Paddington, Notting Hill and Ladbroke Grove.

These 3,000 days have not only been a way of keeping physically fit; they have also played a major role in ensuring some sort of mental equilibrium amidst the general chaos of the state of the world — even if some aspects of ‘The State of London’ have added to my sense of rage rather than placating it; in particular, the colossal and colossally expensive construction projects that have transformed the city to an alarming degree over the last eight years.

Some of these, particularly in the City and Canary Wharf, are office-based, but mainly they are housing projects that are either largely private and astonishingly unaffordable for ordinary hard-working Londoners, or replacements for existing council estates that involve social cleansing, and a mixture of private housing and alleged “social” homes that are actually much more expensive to rent than the council homes that they have replaced.

This is a picture that has been repeated across London — and that was given an adrenaline boost as a result of the Olympics, which, as I recently wrote, “cost £8.77bn, an extraordinary amount for a country suffering swingeing cuts to public services because of a cynical ‘age of austerity’ introduced by the Tories two years before”, and which “also permanently inflated property values, in an already hideously over-priced capital, and contributed to the excessive jingoism that eventually fed into the ill-advised 2016 Brexit referendum and its catastrophic result.”

In addition, approval for almost any kind of development was promiscuously approved by Boris Johnson, when he was the Mayor of London (from 2008 to 2016), a time of extraordinarily inept leadership to which Johnson is now subjecting the entire county as an extraordinarily inept Prime Minister.

Over the last five months, of course, ‘The State of London’ has been transformed, after the arrival of the novel coronavirus, COVID-19, led to a lockdown that, for a while, saw empty roads everywhere, as most work and economic activity stopped in a successful — albeit criminally belated — effort to prevent the virus from spreading uncontrollably.

Throughout this period, I continued to cycle and take photos, building up what I think is a rare if not entirely unparalleled portrait of an empty London; and, in particular, an empty West End and an empty City of London (see here for a ‘My London News’ article featuring some photos from that time).

Gradually, over the last month, since “non-essential” shops were allowed to reopen, people have returned to the West End, although in nothing like the numbers that previously sustained the entire hectic, greedy — and, it should be noted, environmentally unsustainable — edifice of 21st century London. International tourism has, however, not reemerged, and nor, for the most part, has the world of office work, and while this has dealt what looks like a relatively slow mortal wound to the West End, it has left the City like a ghost town, with — still — almost no one in the empty canyons between its now pointless glass towers.

There is a poetic justice to all of this, I’m pretty sure, but it has also, ironically, allowed the buildings themselves — both in the City and the West End — to be appreciated much more intensely than before, and, after 120 days straight of posting a photo a day on Facebook from my lockdown journeys, I continue to chronicle this extraordinary and unprecedented time in the capital’s history, with no clear idea of what the future holds.

Whatever it is, I intend to be there to record it, as my daily bike rides, and the central area I mentioned at the start of this article, which consumes most of my time, has become like a part of me, or I have come a part of it, a perennial wanderer — or a cycling flâneur, as a friend once described me — forever roaming an urban landscape that is like my nervous system, or the vessels that pump life through me.

I’m glad to have you along for the journey, and I’m pleased to be able to announce that I’m currently looking into getting a book published, and am also very interested in setting up a website, and having an exhibition, so if you know a sympathetic and affordable web designer, and if you know of any good printing deals and/or galleries that might be interested in showing my work, please do get in touch.

* * * * *

Andy Worthington is a freelance investigative journalist, activist, author, photographer, film-maker and singer-songwriter (the lead singer and main songwriter for the London-based band The Four Fathers, whose music is available via Bandcamp). He is the co-founder of the Close Guantánamo campaign (and see the latest photo campaign here) and the successful We Stand With Shaker campaign of 2014-15, and the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison and of two other books: Stonehenge: Celebration and Subversion and The Battle of the Beanfield. He is also the co-director (with Polly Nash) of the documentary film, “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo” (available on DVD here, or here for the US, or you can watch it online here, via the production company Spectacle, for £2.55), and for his photo project ‘The State of London’ he publishes a photo a day from eight years of bike rides around the 120 postcodes of the capital.

In 2017, Andy became very involved in housing issues. He is the narrator of the documentary film, ‘Concrete Soldiers UK’, about the destruction of council estates, and the inspiring resistance of residents, he wrote a song ‘Grenfell’, in the aftermath of the entirely preventable fire in June 2017 that killed over 70 people, and he also set up ‘No Social Cleansing in Lewisham’ as a focal point for resistance to estate destruction and the loss of community space in his home borough in south east London. For two months, from August to October 2018, he was part of the occupation of the Old Tidemill Wildlife Garden in Deptford, to prevent its destruction — and that of 16 structurally sound council flats next door — by Lewisham Council and Peabody. Although the garden was violently evicted by bailiffs on October 29, 2018, and the trees were cut down on February 27, 2019, the resistance continues.

To receive new articles in your inbox, please subscribe to Andy’s RSS feed — and he can also be found on Facebook (and here), Twitter, Flickr and YouTube. Also see the six-part definitive Guantánamo prisoner list, The Complete Guantánamo Files, the definitive Guantánamo habeas list, the full military commissions list, and the chronological list of all Andy’s articles.

Please also consider joining the Close Guantánamo campaign, and, if you appreciate Andy’s work, feel free to make a donation.

“I Am Not Even Allowed To Hear My Own Story”: A Letter from Guantánamo by Abdul Latif Nasser, Cleared for Release But Still Held By Donald Trump

A composite image produced by Esquire Middle East to accompany their recent publication of a poignant and powerful letter from Guantánamo by the Moroccan prisoner Abdul Latif Nasser, cross-posted below.


Please support my work as a reader-funded journalist! I’m currently trying to raise $2500 (£2000) to support my writing and campaigning on Guantánamo and related issues over the next three months of the Trump administration. If you can help, please click on the button below to donate via PayPal.

 

I wrote the following article for the “Close Guantánamo” website, which I established in January 2012, on the 10th anniversary of the opening of Guantánamo, with the US attorney Tom Wilner. Please join us — just an email address is required to be counted amongst those opposed to the ongoing existence of Guantánamo, and to receive updates of our activities by email.

Since the vocal British resident Shaker Aamer and the best-selling author and torture victim Mohamedou Ould Salahi were released from Guantánamo, in 2015 and 2016, the prison population has lacked a prominent and well-known face to illuminate its continuing injustice.

This has been particularly unfortunate because, for the last three and a half years, Guantánamo has been largely forgotten by the mainstream media, demonstrating, to anyone paying attention, that a dangerous and unprincipled leader (in this case, Donald Trump) can, in a supposedly liberal democracy, make people forget about a gross and lingering injustice largely by pretending that it doesn’t exist — or, in Guantánamo’s case, by metaphorically sealing it shut and largely ignoring it.

This is particularly shameful because Guantánamo is not just a symbol of injustice; it is also the place where the United States’ notion of itself as a country that respects the rule of law was sent to die on January 11, 2002, and has been dead ever since. At Guantánamo, 40 men are still held, but the majority of those men are still held in the same despicable conditions of lawlessness that first prevailed on that winter morning over 18 and a half years ago when the Bush administration first released photos of the prisoners it intended to hold, without any rights whatsoever, and quite possibly for the rest of their lives.

In the last 18 years, there have been challenges to this grotesque lawlessness. The prisoners, after a long struggle, secured the right to habeas corpus, but that right was extinguished by politically motivated appeals court judges, and has not been reinstated. A handful of the men still held (nine in total) are involved in what passes for justice at Guantánamo — a novel trial system, the military commissions, that is mired in a Groundhog Day nightmare, as prosecutors try to hide all evidence of the men’s torture in CIA “black sites,” while the defence teams constantly try to expose it — but the rest of the men are still, fundamentally, held without rights, their release dependant on the whim of the president, or of lawmakers in Congress, and not on anything resembling the rule of law.

The ongoing imprisonment of 26 of these men is justified because panels of military and intelligence officials approved their continued detention as part of a parole-type review, the Periodic Review Boards, that was set up by President Obama. Under Obama, the PRBs led to the release of 36 men who would otherwise have continued to be held forever, and so, to that extent, they were a success, but under Trump the process has withered under a commander in chief who stated, even before he took office, that “there must be no more releases from Gitmo,” and, as a result, the 26 men still subject to the PRBs have now boycotted the process, having correctly concluded that it is now a sham.

For five other men, the layers of injustice run even deeper, as all were unanimously approved for release under review processes established by President Obama, but were not released before he left office. Three of these men were approved for release by the the Guantánamo Review Task Force, which Obama established shortly after taking office in 2009, and which spent a year reviewing the cases of all the prisoners Obama had inherited from George W. Bush. That task force recommended the release of 156 of the remaining 240 prisoners inherited by Obama, and all but these three men were released before Obama left office in January 2017.

The other two men were approved for release by the Periodic Review Boards, in 2016, but didn’t manage to make it out of Guantánamo before Trump took over. One of the two, Abdul Latif Nasser, a Moroccan national, was particularly unlucky, because the paperwork approving his return to Morocco only arrived on the desk of the defense secretary 22 days before Obama left office, and, by law, Congress was required to be given 30 days notice before any prisoner release. Nasser, therefore, missed out on being released by just eight days.

In the years since, his story has been reported several times, including by us, and earlier this year he arguably became the best-known of the 40 remaining prisoners (with the exception of a handful of the “high-value detainees”), when his story was covered in “The Other Latif,” a six-part podcast by WNYC Studios, part of New York Public Radio, as part of journalist Latif Nasser’s exhaustive investigation into how and why someone with the same name as him was held at Guantánamo.

We promoted “The Other Latif” back in May, and we’re glad to note that numerous other media outlets also picked up on it, including , who ran a long article by Latif Nasser about his project.

Esquire Middle East has now followed up with a poignant and powerful open letter by Abdul Latif Nasser, which we are cross-posting below. In it, Nasser explains how he has coped with being stuck at Guantánamo, under Donald Trump, despite having been unanimously approved for release by high-level representatives of the US government. It was, he makes clear, a process that hurled him into a profound despair, from which it took an extraordinary effort to recover — and the title of our article refers to his reflections on hearing about “The Other Latif.” As he states, “Of course, they had to make it without me. I am not even allowed to hear my own story.”

Nasser’s powerful open letter is a testament to human endurance, and presents a portrait of the most extraordinary grace under pressure that is the very opposite of every aspect of the existence of the man who continues to holds him so cruelly at Guantánamo: Donald Trump.

We hope you will share it if you find it as moving as we do.

An open letter from Guantánamo Bay

By Abdul Latif Nasser, Esquire Middle East, July 21, 2020

Earlier this year, of two men called Latif Nasser. One was a journalist on a quest to track down his namesake, only to find him being held indefinitely without trial within the detention facility in Guantanamo Bay — the world’s most infamous prison.

Following the creation of Nasser’s podcast ‘The Other Latif’, a spotlight was cast on the case of inmate 244. Here he speaks for the first time.

The following is an open letter from ISN 244, Abdul Latif Nasser, written exclusively for Esquire Middle East.

My lawyer tells me people know my name now. I suppose it beats being a number. For the last 18 years at Guantánamo Bay I have been ISN 244. Now there is a podcast about my life, The Other Latif. Of course, they had to make it without me. I am not even allowed to hear my own story.

Three years ago, I was unanimously cleared for release by the six federal intelligence agencies charged with keeping the USA safe. They concluded I was “no threat to the U.S. or its coalition allies” — as I have said all along. But then, before I could be sent home to Morocco, Donald Trump was elected with a promise that there would be “no further releases from Gitmo.”

The time since I was cleared has been the hardest. Before, I experienced the profound isolation of being held in solitary confinement for years, the fear of dying on hunger strike and the helplessness of being force-fed. But there is something uniquely painful about knowing your freedom lies in the hands of one man who will not let you go.

After Trump became president, I lost my desire for sleeping, eating or doing anything except locking myself inside my cell and crying bitterly. For the first time in my life I hated myself, detested everything in this world, and could not stand talking to anyone. I was on the verge of losing my mind.

For three months, I lay awake every night. I only learned how to sleep again after reading a book about Napoleon. When he was exiled to Elba, he too suffered from insomnia, so he took a plot of earth and turned it into a garden. He worked the soil every day, until he was so tired that he needed to sleep.

I started to do something similar. I exercise, read and practice my vocabulary, until I am exhausted.

This is also my way of resisting: I can do nothing about my captivity, but I can stay busy and try to stay healthy. There are many small, pointless cruelties here that seem designed to maintain hostility between prisoners and guards. Many detainees don’t take care of themselves because it will just prolong their suffering. I refuse to give in.

Reading has helped me. I have learned so much about other cultures in the last few years. When you read a story, you immerse yourself in different minds, and start anew. There is a saying I enjoy: you cannot put your hand in a pot of glue without some of it sticking. It’s the same when you start learning about the world.

Books also help me experience those things I have lost. I enjoy books about love, relationships and morals. There are so many things I cannot experience, but in books, you have infinite possibilities. I miss my family terribly, and wish I had the opportunity to start a family of my own. At least I can experience some of this through stories.

I try to make the most of my relationships with the other prisoners, as we only have each other. I especially enjoy my conversations with Saifullah Paracha, the oldest detainee at Guantánamo Bay. We spend our weekends talking in the recreation yard over cups of instant coffee.

One morning, he pointed out that no-one else was awake yet. “The yard is completely empty, except for two crazy people,” he said. What else can we do but laugh?

What must my life look like, from the outside? What do the people listening to my story on the radio make of it? Even President Trump thinks it is “crazy” that the U.S. spends $13 million each year to keep me here — one guy from Morocco, long since cleared by the military and intelligence services. So what is stopping him from taking his own advice and sending me home?

To strip someone of his freedom, to deny him a trial, to reduce him to utter despair — these are violations of basic rights as a human being. I hope readers remember that when they think of me here, trapped in a story I cannot read, hear or control, waiting for a happy ending that never comes.

Yours sincerely,

Abdul Latif Nasser

* * * * *

Andy Worthington is a freelance investigative journalist, activist, author, photographer, film-maker and singer-songwriter (the lead singer and main songwriter for the London-based band The Four Fathers, whose music is available via Bandcamp). He is the co-founder of the Close Guantánamo campaign (and see the latest photo campaign here) and the successful We Stand With Shaker campaign of 2014-15, and the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison and of two other books: Stonehenge: Celebration and Subversion and The Battle of the Beanfield. He is also the co-director (with Polly Nash) of the documentary film, “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo” (available on DVD here, or here for the US, or you can watch it online here, via the production company Spectacle, for £2.55), and for his photo project ‘The State of London’ he publishes a photo a day from eight years of bike rides around the 120 postcodes of the capital.

In 2017, Andy became very involved in housing issues. He is the narrator of the documentary film, ‘Concrete Soldiers UK’, about the destruction of council estates, and the inspiring resistance of residents, he wrote a song ‘Grenfell’, in the aftermath of the entirely preventable fire in June 2017 that killed over 70 people, and he also set up ‘No Social Cleansing in Lewisham’ as a focal point for resistance to estate destruction and the loss of community space in his home borough in south east London. For two months, from August to October 2018, he was part of the occupation of the Old Tidemill Wildlife Garden in Deptford, to prevent its destruction — and that of 16 structurally sound council flats next door — by Lewisham Council and Peabody. Although the garden was violently evicted by bailiffs on October 29, 2018, and the trees were cut down on February 27, 2019, the resistance continues.

To receive new articles in your inbox, please subscribe to Andy’s RSS feed — and he can also be found on Facebook (and here), Twitter, Flickr and YouTube. Also see the six-part definitive Guantánamo prisoner list, The Complete Guantánamo Files, the definitive Guantánamo habeas list, the full military commissions list, and the chronological list of all Andy’s articles.

Please also consider joining the Close Guantánamo campaign, and, if you appreciate Andy’s work, feel free to make a donation.

Is Donald Trump Attempting to Implement A Police State in Portland, Oregon?

Federal officers, from the Department of Homeland Security and other agencies, in Portland, Oregon, where they have been causing huge consternation by teargassing protestors, bypassing local police, and raising fears of the establishment, by the Trump administration, of a police state.


Please support my work as a reader-funded journalist! I’m currently trying to raise $2500 (£2000) to support my writing and campaigning on Guantánamo and related issues over the next three months of the Trump administration. If you can help, please click on the button below to donate via PayPal.

 

I’ve been shocked by the nightly scenes of violence beamed around the world from Portland, Oregon, where Donald Trump has sent in federal law enforcement officers — from the Department of Homeland Security, the US Marshals Service and the border patrol — to bypass Portland’s own police force and to assault and terrify protestors, who, since the murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis two months ago, have been engaged in ongoing protests about racism and police brutality.

As the Guardian explained, Donald Trump sent federal law enforcement officers to “take control” of Portland at the start of July, having decided that it “had been abandoned by its mayor to anarchists and mob rule.” The officers, “often in unmarked uniforms and vehicles”, have been deployed against protesters in Portland since the beginning of the month, “using teargas, stun grenades and munitions to control crowds descending on to federal buildings in Oregon’s largest city.”

As the Guardian also explained, the arrival of the federal officers initially “sent a wave of alarm through the demonstrators after men in camouflage began snatching people off the streets in unmarked vans. Those detained said they were dragged into the courthouse without being told why they were being arrested or by whom and then suddenly let go without any official record of being held. It smacked of police state tactics. So did some of the violence meted out by federal agents who looked more like an occupying army in a war zone.”

For Trump, this is a show of strength, playing to his rabid, far-right base in the run-up to November’s Presidential Election, while for the people of Portland — and those watching from other, non-Republican cities across the US — the arrival of the federal officers, and their behaviour, look like the opening shots in the manifestation of a police state.

Yesterday, the Mayors of 15 major US cities, including Seattle, Los Angeles, Atlanta and Washington, D.C., sent a letter to the Attorney General, William Barr, and the Department of Homeland Security Acting Secretary, Chad Wolf, “demanding a stop to the sending of federal forces to cities and the removal of federal officers from Portland, Oregon”, as the Guardian explained, adding that, in their letter, the Mayors “say that the federal officers are conducting law enforcement activity with no consultation with local police in tactics they likened to ‘authoritarian regimes’”, rather than the US. Complaining that there is “no oversight of the actions of federal forces”, the Mayors also point out that federal officers “have not been trained for urban community policing, including critical crowd management and de-escalation techniques.”

The extent to which Trump’s use of federal officers is proving successful is debatable. In Portland,  the Mayor, Ted Wheeler, who is also the police commissioner, “sided with the protesters against the president”, as the Guardian explained, and, in addition, “a court order limited the city police’s use of teargas and other means of restraint.” For authoritarians, this might justify Trump’s intervention, but for many others it is brutal and counter-productive. Local mothers — describing themselves as a “Wall of Moms” — have now taken to the streets every night to defend Black Lives Matter protestors, and are evidently winning the battle for hearts and minds.

Jane Ullman, the chief financial officer for tech startups in Portland, told the Guardian, “As an upper-middle-class white woman in the whitest city in America, I couldn’t stand by any longer. I’ve been doing a lot of self-educating since George Floyd. Reading and learning. The feds’ part in it pushed me over the top. I wanted to take action. But it was the ‘Wall of Moms’ that brought me out.”

While the protestors clearly have the moral high ground, other commentators have also been criticizing Trump sending federal law enforcement officers to Portland as an example of “made-for-TV fascism” and “performative authoritarianism.”

Josh O’Brien, who had travelled from Seattle to join the protests, explained to the Guardian why he thought Trump’s actions were failing. “It’s a power play by Trump”, O’Brien said. “He thinks he’s going to get his base all riled up by pitting the forces of law and order against the anarchists. But he’s f*cked it up like he f*cks everything up. Look who’s here with us. Grandmothers. Doctors. Because like most Americans they don’t think people should be abducted from the streets by the president’s secret police.”

Yesterday, the already unacceptable situation in Portland became even more shocking when the Mayor, Ted Wheeler, was himself teargassed by federal forces. “I’m not going to lie”, Wheeler said, as, in the Guardian’s words, “he stood with protesters outside the federal courthouse that has become the focus of confrontation.” He added, “It stings. It’s hard to breathe, and I can tell you with 100% honesty I saw nothing that provoked this response. This is flat-out urban warfare, and it’s being brought on the people of this country by the president of the United States, and it’s got to stop now.”

Instead, just hours earlier, Trump “announced a ‘surge’ of hundreds of law enforcement officers into Democratic-run cities including Chicago”, as the Guardian explained, “drawing condemnation from civil liberties watchdogs.” The policy of sending in federal officers is named ‘Operation Legend’, after LeGend Taliferro, a four-year-old boy who was fatally shot in Kansas City, Missouri last month, and initially involved federal officers being sent to Kansas City and Portland. Now Chicago and Albuquerque, New Mexico have been added, and politicians in both cities are enraged.

Trump, outrageously, has tried to blame Democrats for the problem, lashing out at “radical left Democrats running cities like Chicago and so many others”, claiming that “America must be a sanctuary for law-abiding citizens, not criminal aliens”, and adding, “My vision for America’s cities could not be more different from the lawlessness being pushed by the extreme radical left.” In addition, Attorney General William Barr spoke of having “extended Operation Legend to Chicago and Albuquerque to protect the residents of those cities from senseless acts of deadly violence by targeting those involved in gang activity and those who use guns to commit violent crime.”

On Tuesday, Lori Lightfoot, the Mayor of Chicago, who, as the Guardian described it, “has made clear her opposition to federal intervention”, tweeted the following uncompromising response to Trump’s intentions: “Under no circumstances will I allow Donald Trump’s troops to come to Chicago and terrorize our residents.”

In Albuquerque, meanwhile, Martin Heinrich, a Democratic senator for New Mexico, condemned the intervention, stating, “Instead of collaborating with the Albuquerque police department, the sheriff is inviting the President’s stormtroopers into Albuquerque.”

Gauging the extent to which Trump and Barr’s policies are infringing on Americans’ constitutional rights, former defence secretary and CIA director Leon Panetta said, “One of the last holdouts for tyrants is to try to have the military be able to protect them, and that fear that he may try to do that raises a lot of concerns about just how far will he go to try to ‘take over’ a lot of these cities and states in terms of their ability to conduct law enforcement on their own.”

He added, “It’s interesting, because federalism has always been a calling card for Republicans to avoid having the federal government impose its will on states and communities. To have a president who’s prepared to send federal officers into these communities I think represents a step that ought to not only create fear in the people that are impacted by that decision, but should raise a hell of a lot of fear for those Republicans who have defended federalism most of their lives.”

* * * * *

Andy Worthington is a freelance investigative journalist, activist, author, photographer, film-maker and singer-songwriter (the lead singer and main songwriter for the London-based band The Four Fathers, whose music is available via Bandcamp). He is the co-founder of the Close Guantánamo campaign (and see the latest photo campaign here) and the successful We Stand With Shaker campaign of 2014-15, and the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison and of two other books: Stonehenge: Celebration and Subversion and The Battle of the Beanfield. He is also the co-director (with Polly Nash) of the documentary film, “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo” (available on DVD here, or here for the US, or you can watch it online here, via the production company Spectacle, for £2.55), and for his photo project ‘The State of London’ he publishes a photo a day from eight years of bike rides around the 120 postcodes of the capital.

In 2017, Andy became very involved in housing issues. He is the narrator of the documentary film, ‘Concrete Soldiers UK’, about the destruction of council estates, and the inspiring resistance of residents, he wrote a song ‘Grenfell’, in the aftermath of the entirely preventable fire in June 2017 that killed over 70 people, and he also set up ‘No Social Cleansing in Lewisham’ as a focal point for resistance to estate destruction and the loss of community space in his home borough in south east London. For two months, from August to October 2018, he was part of the occupation of the Old Tidemill Wildlife Garden in Deptford, to prevent its destruction — and that of 16 structurally sound council flats next door — by Lewisham Council and Peabody. Although the garden was violently evicted by bailiffs on October 29, 2018, and the trees were cut down on February 27, 2019, the resistance continues.

To receive new articles in your inbox, please subscribe to Andy’s RSS feed — and he can also be found on Facebook (and here), Twitter, Flickr and YouTube. Also see the six-part definitive Guantánamo prisoner list, The Complete Guantánamo Files, the definitive Guantánamo habeas list, the full military commissions list, and the chronological list of all Andy’s articles.

Please also consider joining the Close Guantánamo campaign, and, if you appreciate Andy’s work, feel free to make a donation.

Shamima Begum: Appeals Court Tells UK Government It Was Unlawful to Strip Citizenship of ISIS Child Bride

British citizen Shamima Begum, photographed in the Al Hawl camp in Syria in 2019, where captured ISIS brides and children were being held. She is holding her week-old son, who subsequently died.



Please support my work as a reader-funded journalist! I’m currently trying to raise $2500 (£2000) to support my writing and campaigning on Guantánamo and related issues over the next three months. If you can help, please click on the button below to donate via PayPal.

 

It’s a sign of the extent to which commonly accepted standards of justice and decency have fallen that I even have to write the headline for this article, but the sad truth is that, in the UK, government officials, at the highest level, believe that it is entirely appropriate to strip a British citizen of her citizenship, making her stateless, if, as a 15-year old, she took the decision to travel to Syria to become a “jihadi bride.”

On one level, this is completely wrong because all countries that claim to respect the rule of law, Britain included, have signed up to treaties recognising that juveniles (those under 18) should not be held responsible for their actions. In my main line of work over the last 14 years — writing about the US prison at Guantánamo Bay, and campaigning to get it closed — one of the most shocking aspects of that whole sordid story is the way that the US government ignored its obligations to treat juveniles as distinct from adults, and, in fact, denied that such distinctions even existed.

“These are not children”, foreign secretary Donald Rumsfeld claimed when the story first broke that children were being held at Guantánamo. At least 23 of the prisoners were juveniles — under 18 — when they were first seized, including the most famous Guantánamo child of them all, Omar Khadr, the Canadian citizen who was 15 when he was seized after a firefight with US soldiers, and whose rights were not only denied by the US, but also by his own government in Canada, which eventually had to be told by Canada’s Supreme Court that Canadian agents had deprived him of his rights when they visited him at Guantánamo to interrogate him.

However, although it is very evidently shameful that the British government stripped Shamima Begum of her citizenship when she was discovered, aged 19, in a detention camp in north-east Syria, it would have been no less shameful had she been over 18 — rather than 15 — when she first travelled to Syria, because, as a British citizen, she should be held accountable for any any crimes that she allegedly  committed in her homeland, as would happen in the case of any other British citizen accused of committing a crime in another country, unless (and you may see a pattern here), they happen to be a Muslim, and can be accused of anything resembling terrorism.

In Begum’s case, it is, in addition, unclear if she committed a crime, beyond, at some point, uttering support for ISIS. Instead, her alleged crimes most evidently consist of having borne three children to a jihadi husband, all of whom subsequently died. And yet, in February 2019, then-home secretary Sajid Javid stripped her of her British citizenship, making her stateless, because, although her parents are Bangladeshi, she had never even set foot in Bangladesh, and the Bangladeshi government was under no obligation to recognise her as a citizen.

As I explained when I first reported on Begum’s story, “it is illegal under international law to remove someone’s citizenship if doing so makes them stateless.” I added, “As the barrister David Anderson, who previously served as a reviewer of the UK’s anti-terror legislation, pointed out to Al-Jazeera, ‘Those born as British citizens who are not dual nationals cannot be stripped of their citizenship in any circumstances’ — and many, many other public figures, including lawyers, academics, politicians and journalists, made their opposition to Javid’s decision clear.”

As the legal NGO Reprieve explained in a press release after the ruling was announced, “The court unanimously allowed Shamima’s appeal, ruling that she must be readmitted to the UK in order to fully and effectively appeal against the deprivation of her citizenship. The Court found the Home Secretary’s ‘suggestion that Ms. Begum’s appeal should be stayed indefinitely in circumstances where she is being detained by the SDF [Syrian Democratic Forces] in the camp, does nothing to address the foreseeable risk if she is transferred to Iraq or Bangladesh, which is that in either of those countries she could be unlawfully killed or suffer mistreatment.’”

The court further noted that any risk that Ms. Begum might pose “could be addressed and managed if she returns to the United Kingdom”, adding that, “If the Security Service and the Director of Public Prosecutions consider that the evidence and public interest tests for a prosecution for terrorist offences are met, she could be arrested and charged upon her arrival in the United Kingdom and remanded in custody pending trial. If that were not feasible, she could be made the subject of a TPIM” — a notice under the Terrorism Prevention and Investigation Measures Act 2011, which allows for various forms of house arrest, replacing the “control orders” regime implemented by the Labour government of Tony Blair.

Reprieve also explained that they were “advocating for all Britons currently held in camps in North East Syria (NES) to be repatriated to the UK”, noting, “A very small fraction of the detainees currently held in NES are British. Of these, the majority are children. Reprieve estimates that there are between 15 and 20 family units in total”, and as their director, Maya Foa, explained in an article for the Guardian, many of the women and children “were trafficked into Syria and forced into marriage and domestic servitude.”

Further elaborating on the threat these individuals would face if they were to be handed over to Iraqi forces or the forces of Syria’s President Assad, Reprieve stated, “There have previously been suggestions that Britons could be sent to Iraq, where they would likely face the death penalty with no prospect of a fair trial. Human Rights Watch has reported that trials of suspected IS members ‘are summary and often do not put forward evidence of specific offences’, while ‘interrogators routinely use torture to extract confessions, and in most cases judges ignore torture allegations from defendants.’ The UK Government itself has previously acknowledged the widespread use of torture and the death penalty across the Iraqi criminal justice system.”

Regarding Assad, Reprieve noted that, “In December of last year, the British Government appeared to walk back its previous opposition to Britons being handed to the Assad-controlled Syrian regime, where there is no prospect that they could be effectively tried. Should UK detainees be handed over to the Assad Government, they will face torture, disappearance and death. A UK Government Human Rights and Democracy report acknowledged reports of ‘widespread and systematic use of arbitrary detention, torture and execution of detainees’ in Syrian prisons, while a Human Rights Watch investigation in 2015 revealed at least 6,700 killings in Syrian detention.”

As Maya Foa said, in response to the ruling, “It was always unsafe and unjust to make Brits in Syria someone else’s problem, and [now] it has been ruled unlawful. The Government must urgently revisit its policy and repatriate the tiny number of remaining British families, to face British justice wherever there are charges to answer.” As Reprieve added, “The UK’s justice system is well equipped to deal with returning Britons who are credibly alleged to have committed crimes in Syria”, with Max Hill QC, the Director of Public Prosecutions, suggesting that the UK is perfectly capable of prosecuting “the vast majority [of] returning foreign fighters.”

With this recent decision by the court of appeals, it is time for the long and disgraceful policy of successive British governments, since 9/11, to regard British citizens who are Muslims as unworthy of legal protections, and as candidates for citizenship-stripping, to be brought to an end.

Whether this will happen or not remains to be seen. As Maya Foa also explained in her Guardian article, “Following the court of appeal’s judgment, a spokesperson for the home secretary pledged to apply for permission to appeal. Were permission to be granted, this would set the stage for a supreme court hearing on the government’s citizenship-stripping decisions. A wiser course would be to reflect on the judgment, which notably argued that any risk Begum might pose ‘could be addressed and managed if she returns to the United Kingdom.’”

She added, “The government now faces a choice. It can fight for its disintegrating policy against lengthening legal odds, while the camps holding British prisoners edge closer to total collapse. Or it can conduct a much needed reassessment of its approach, in the manner advised by security and law enforcement experts, as well as many of its own MPs. It was always wrong to suggest the UK could abandon British women, children and men in north-east Syria. The sooner the government accepts this, and changes course, the better for our security and justice interests.”

* * * * *

Andy Worthington is a freelance investigative journalist, activist, author, photographer, film-maker and singer-songwriter (the lead singer and main songwriter for the London-based band The Four Fathers, whose music is available via Bandcamp). He is the co-founder of the Close Guantánamo campaign (and see the latest photo campaign here) and the successful We Stand With Shaker campaign of 2014-15, and the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison and of two other books: Stonehenge: Celebration and Subversion and The Battle of the Beanfield. He is also the co-director (with Polly Nash) of the documentary film, “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo” (available on DVD here, or here for the US, or you can watch it online here, via the production company Spectacle, for £2.55), and for his photo project ‘The State of London’ he publishes a photo a day from eight years of bike rides around the 120 postcodes of the capital.

In 2017, Andy became very involved in housing issues. He is the narrator of the documentary film, ‘Concrete Soldiers UK’, about the destruction of council estates, and the inspiring resistance of residents, he wrote a song ‘Grenfell’, in the aftermath of the entirely preventable fire in June 2017 that killed over 70 people, and he also set up ‘No Social Cleansing in Lewisham’ as a focal point for resistance to estate destruction and the loss of community space in his home borough in south east London. For two months, from August to October 2018, he was part of the occupation of the Old Tidemill Wildlife Garden in Deptford, to prevent its destruction — and that of 16 structurally sound council flats next door — by Lewisham Council and Peabody. Although the garden was violently evicted by bailiffs on October 29, 2018, and the trees were cut down on February 27, 2019, the resistance continues.

To receive new articles in your inbox, please subscribe to Andy’s RSS feed — and he can also be found on Facebook (and here), Twitter, Flickr and YouTube. Also see the six-part definitive Guantánamo prisoner list, The Complete Guantánamo Files, the definitive Guantánamo habeas list, the full military commissions list, and the chronological list of all Andy’s articles.

Please also consider joining the Close Guantánamo campaign, and, if you appreciate Andy’s work, feel free to make a donation.

The State of London: Marking 120 Days of My London Lockdown Photos with Some Previously Unpublished Images

Old Compton Street in Soho, London W1, March 22, 2020, the day before the coronavirus lockdown began (Photo: Andy Worthington).


Please feel free to support ‘The State of London’ with a donation, as I have no institutional backing for it, and it is, instead, a reader-funded project. If you can help, please click on the button below to donate via PayPal.

Check out all ‘The State of London’ photos here.

Yesterday marked 120 days straight that I’ve been cycling around London, taking photos of the coronavirus lockdown — and, in recent weeks, its partial easing — and posting a photo a day on ‘The State of London’ Facebook and Twitter pages.

I first began cycling around London on a daily basis, taking photos for a photo-journalism project that I soon named ‘The State of London’, over eight years ago, in May 2012, and on the fifth anniversary I began posting a photo a day on Facebook. Until the coronavirus hit, the photos I posted were drawn from the various years since I began the project — on that particular day, but from any of the years since the project began in 2012.

When the coronavirus hit, however — and particularly after the lockdown officially began on March 23 — the archive suddenly seemed, if not irrelevant, then relating to another, lost time, as the streets of the capital emptied, and economic activity ground almost to a halt.

This was particularly true of the West End and the City, and over the last 120 days I’ve visited both on an almost daily basis, compiling an archive of photos that will, I hope, have value as an archive of this extraordinary time. At the height of the lockdown, I frequently encountered almost nobody else on my visits, leading to the frequent sensation that I was alone in some sort of post-apocalyptic scenario. I’m delighted that, at the time, a journalist from My London News came across my photos, and interviewed me for an article featuring some of my most striking images from this time.

Gradually, of course, the lockdown has eased — most noticeably, on June 15, when “non-essential” shops were allowed to re-open, but the bounce that the government fervently hoped for really hasn’t happened. There are now hundreds — or even thousands — of shoppers wandering around the West End every day, but Oxford Street used to attract 500,000 shoppers every day, and it remains to be seen how long it is viable for businesses to continue when just the tiniest fraction of that number of shoppers are supporting them. Behind the scenes, one of the great battles is between the retailers and their landlords, because if the latter don’t substantially cut their rents, a huge number of businesses are going to collapse, but it remains to be seen if those involved with one of modern capitalism’s great money-makers  — property — are prepared to take a massive hit, or if we will end up with a boarded-up West End.

In the City, the emptiness is even more pronounced, as there is still almost no one around, and no sign of those who work there wanting to return to their offices anytime soon. Many workers are happy not to be commuting, at great expense, and in hideously overcrowded conditions, and many are also enjoying their new life/work balance. In addition, numerous employers are also happy not to be spending a huge proportion of their income on rents, and, as with the West End (where, of course, there are also, usually, large numbers of office workers adding to the spending of tourists), it remains to be seen how the City, as a physical entity, can be revived, as the virus, though largely dormant right now, has not gone away, and is likely to return in autumn, as the weather cools, with dangerously renewed vigour.

To mark 120 days of my lockdown photos, I’m posting below some additional photos not previously seen. My 120 days started on March 18, the day after I last took a train, when my wife Dot and I visited Hastings for the day. That was two days before the last day that pubs were allowed to open (on March 20), and throughout this period I watched — and photographed — as, in the absence of anything resembling coherent political leadership, the British people themselves voluntarily started lockdown. Sadly, that lack of leadership led to tens of thousands of deaths that could have been avoided, but, in the weeks that followed, London’s almost total shutdown succeeded in keeping the virus at bay.

Tomorrow I’m going camping for three days near Brighton, hence the brief break in my photographic chronicle of this strangest of years, although I’ll be back on my bike on Monday, and probably trying to make journeys further afield to check on parts of the capital that I haven’t visited since before the lockdown began.

Enjoy these photos while I’m away, and on my return I also hope to try and make contact with people who might be interested in publishing a book of my photos, and in putting on an exhibition. If you know of anyone who can help out, please do get in touch.

A deserted Long Acre in Covent Garden, London WC2, March 23, 2020, the day the lockdown officially began (Photo: Andy Worthington).





A deserted Piccadilly Circus, London W1, March 24, 2020 (Photo: Andy Worthington).



Walworth Road, London SE17, almost empty on March 29, 2020 (Photo: Andy Worthington).



James Street in Covent Garden, by the normally very busy Apple store, March 30, 2020 (Photo: Andy Worthington).




An almost deserted City of London on March 30, 2020, in a photo dominated by the bulk of 22 Bishopsgate (aka Twentytwo), a new office block, close to completion, that suddenly looks surplus to requirements (Photo: Andy Worthington).




Harrods, on an almost entirely deserted Knightsbridge, London SW1, April 7, 2020 (Photo: Andy Worthington).



An empty Regent Street, London W1, on April 17, 2020 (Photo: Andy Worthington).

* * * * *

Andy Worthington is a freelance investigative journalist, activist, author, photographer, film-maker and singer-songwriter (the lead singer and main songwriter for the London-based band The Four Fathers, whose music is available via Bandcamp). He is the co-founder of the Close Guantánamo campaign (and see the latest photo campaign here) and the successful We Stand With Shaker campaign of 2014-15, and the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison and of two other books: Stonehenge: Celebration and Subversion and The Battle of the Beanfield. He is also the co-director (with Polly Nash) of the documentary film, “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo” (available on DVD here, or here for the US, or you can watch it online here, via the production company Spectacle, for £2.55), and for his photo project ‘The State of London’ he publishes a photo a day from eight years of bike rides around the 120 postcodes of the capital.

In 2017, Andy became very involved in housing issues. He is the narrator of the documentary film, ‘Concrete Soldiers UK’, about the destruction of council estates, and the inspiring resistance of residents, he wrote a song ‘Grenfell’, in the aftermath of the entirely preventable fire in June 2017 that killed over 70 people, and he also set up ‘No Social Cleansing in Lewisham’ as a focal point for resistance to estate destruction and the loss of community space in his home borough in south east London. For two months, from August to October 2018, he was part of the occupation of the Old Tidemill Wildlife Garden in Deptford, to prevent its destruction — and that of 16 structurally sound council flats next door — by Lewisham Council and Peabody. Although the garden was violently evicted by bailiffs on October 29, 2018, and the trees were cut down on February 27, 2019, the resistance continues.

To receive new articles in your inbox, please subscribe to Andy’s RSS feed — and he can also be found on Facebook (and here), Twitter, Flickr and YouTube. Also see the six-part definitive Guantánamo prisoner list, The Complete Guantánamo Files, the definitive Guantánamo habeas list, the full military commissions list, and the chronological list of all Andy’s articles.

Please also consider joining the Close Guantánamo campaign, and, if you appreciate Andy’s work, feel free to make a donation.

If Elected in November, Will Joe Biden Close Guantánamo?

A composite photo of Joe Biden and a guard tower at Guantánamo.


Please support my work as a reader-funded journalist! I’m currently trying to raise $2500 (£2000) to support my writing and campaigning on Guantánamo and related issues over the next three months of the Trump administration. If you can help, please click on the button below to donate via PayPal.

 

I wrote the following article for the “Close Guantánamo” website, which I established in January 2012, on the 10th anniversary of the opening of Guantánamo, with the US attorney Tom Wilner. Please join us — just an email address is required to be counted amongst those opposed to the ongoing existence of Guantánamo, and to receive updates of our activities by email.

With just four months to go until the US Presidential Election, there is hope, in some quarters, that Donald Trump will lose to Joe Biden. The fact that this is not a foregone conclusion shows how broken American politics has become. Openly racist, Trump has been the most incoherent president imaginable, and is currently mired in a COVID-19 crisis of his own making, as the virus continues on its deadly path, largely unchecked, through swathes of the US population. And yet he retains a base of support that doesn’t make it certain that he will lose in November.

His opponent, Joe Biden, Barack Obama’s vice president for eight years, faces problems of his own. 77 years old, he is even older than Trump, and in terms of representing the people of the US, it is somewhat dispiriting that the choice is between two white men in their 70s. Nevertheless, on many fronts — not least on Guantánamo — it is inconceivable that Biden can do a worse job than Trump has over the excruciating three and a half years since he took office in January 2017.

On Guantánamo, Trump announced in a tweet, several weeks before his inauguration, that “there must be no more releases from Gitmo,” and he has been almost entirely true to his word. He inherited 41 prisoners from Obama, and only one of those men has been released — a Saudi citizen who was transferred back to Saudi Arabia for ongoing imprisonment in February 2018, to honor a plea deal agreed in his military commission trial in 2014.

Of the 40 men still held, five were approved for release by high-level government review processes under President Obama, but they weren’t released before he left office, and there is no legal mechanism that can force Donald Trump to release them. Just nine are facing, or have faced trials, while 26 others have been aptly described by the mainstream media as “forever prisoners.” Some of these men were recommended for ongoing imprisonment without charge or trial in 2009 by the Guantánamo Review Task Force, the first of two review processes established by Obama. The task force recommended others for prosecution, until a number of successful appeals against some of the few convictions secured in the military commission persuaded officials otherwise.

In total, 64 men who had either been recommended for prosecution or for ongoing imprisonment without charge or trial were put through a second review process, the Periodic Review Boards, from 2013 to 2016. This parole-type process led to 38 men being recommended for release (with all but two subsequently released), while the 26 “forever prisoners” still held were recommended for ongoing imprisonment. The Periodic Review Boards have continued under Trump, but have failed to deliver a single recommendation for release, and, as a result, the prisoners are now boycotting them.

For opponents of Guantánamo, as noted above, it is inconceivable that any president could be worse than Donald Trump, but that is not to say that Joe Biden, if elected, would fulfill campaigners’ wishes. After all, Barack Obama campaigned on a promise of closing the prison, and reiterated that promise on his second day in office in January 2009, when he said that it would be closed within a year. Eight years later, he left office without fulfilling that promise, although he did, in the end, release nearly 200 of the men held when he first took office.

Obama blamed Congress for thwarting his plans, but while there is considerable truth to that claim, because Republicans controlled Congress for the last six of his eight years in office, and repeatedly obstructed efforts to release prisoners or work towards fulfilling his promise to close the prison, he failed to take advantage of his control of Congress in his first two years in office, and, after that, refused to spend political capital overriding Congress as the commander-in-chief.

And so to Joe Biden. As Carol Rosenberg explained in a recent article for the New York Times, Biden’s position is that, “if elected president, he would support shutting down the military prison at Guantánamo Bay,” although he “has declined to specify how he would do it or what he would do with the 40 men held there as wartime prisoners, including the men accused of plotting the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks.”

Questioned about his position on Guantánamo, Biden’s campaign team said in a statement that he “continues to support closing the detention center,” adding — as Barack Obama used to say — that the prison’s continued existence “undermines American national security by fueling terrorist recruitment and is at odds with our values as a country.”

However, as Carol Rosenberg also explained, Biden “rarely, if ever, brings up the topic” of Guantánamo, providing “evidence of how politically toxic it remains after intense Republican efforts to cast Mr. Obama’s [efforts to close the prison] as endangering Americans by transferring terrorists to US soil or sending them without adequate safeguards to other countries.”

In a primary debate in December, when asked about Guantánamo, Biden “blamed Congress for thwarting closure, but rather than suggest a path forward, he pivoted to another issue.”

As Rosenberg also explained, Biden’s foreign policy and national security advisers include “veterans of the failed effort by the Obama administration to close it — notably Tony Blinken, a former deputy secretary of state, and Brian P. McKeon, a former Pentagon policy official — who are almost certainly acutely aware of how painful it was to try to make good on Mr. Obama’s promise.”

As Rosenberg also suggested, “If there is any lesson from the previous administration’s inability to overcome opposition to closing Guantánamo, it may be to avoid drawing attention to the effort,” because, as Barack Obama discovered, once it became apparent that closing Guantánamo “meant moving some of the prisoners — notably former CIA prisoners, including five men accused of plotting the Sept. 11 attacks — to detention facilities in the United States, critics cast the plan as a symbol of weakness and the proposed relocation of the prisoners a potential national security threat.”

As Rosenberg proceeded to explain, “Like tampering with Social Security or suggesting locations for storing nuclear waste, closing Guantánamo became a third rail of political discourse” — a “third rail” being, as Wikipedia describes it, “a metaphor for any issue so controversial that any politician or public official who dares to broach the subject will invariably suffer politically.”

Roy Neel, a former Democratic campaigner told the Times that “one legacy of Mr. Obama’s failure was the danger of making promises,” as Rosenberg put it. “You’re not going to gain any votes because not many people are focusing on this issue, at least rank-and-file voters,” Neel said, adding that Obama was “burned” by his involvement in the issue.

As Neel also explained, “It doesn’t do anything politically to get into it. The worst thing that could happen is Biden is drawn out somehow to look indecisive or weak by going down that rabbit hole.”

In May, a number of organizations including Demand Progress, Code Pink, MoveOn and September 11th Families for Peaceful Tomorrows sent a letter to Biden urging action on various foreign policy topics including the closure of Guantánamo, and repealing the 2001 Authorization for Use of Military Force, which is the legal basis for holding prisoners at Guantánamo.

As they stated, “The Guantánamo Bay Detention Center has been a stain on our nation’s conscience and the most effective recruitment tool used by violent extremists. We call on you to commit to using any and all options within existing authority to seek lawful disposition for the remaining individuals at the detention center and close Guantánamo once and for all.”

In addition, the letter stated, “The long-defunct CIA detention and interrogation program, and at minimum the Senate Intelligence Committee report on CIA torture, needs to be declassified, promulgated internally to reaffirm torture’s illegality, and made publicly available.”

As we wait for further news from the Biden campaign, our position, in closing, is that those who can be prosecuted should be transferred to the US for federal court trials, while everyone else should be released. It is shameful that the handful of men still held who are accused of serious crimes cannot be successfully prosecuted because the military commission trial system is so broken, while others — guilty of nothing more than having reacted against the circumstances of their imprisonment for the last 18 years — continue to be held without charge or trial, apparently for the rest of their lives.

* * * * *

Andy Worthington is a freelance investigative journalist, activist, author, photographer, film-maker and singer-songwriter (the lead singer and main songwriter for the London-based band The Four Fathers, whose music is available via Bandcamp). He is the co-founder of the Close Guantánamo campaign (and see the latest photo campaign here) and the successful We Stand With Shaker campaign of 2014-15, and the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison and of two other books: Stonehenge: Celebration and Subversion and The Battle of the Beanfield. He is also the co-director (with Polly Nash) of the documentary film, “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo” (available on DVD here, or here for the US, or you can watch it online here, via the production company Spectacle, for £2.55), and for his photo project ‘The State of London’ he publishes a photo a day from eight years of bike rides around the 120 postcodes of the capital.

In 2017, Andy became very involved in housing issues. He is the narrator of the documentary film, ‘Concrete Soldiers UK’, about the destruction of council estates, and the inspiring resistance of residents, he wrote a song ‘Grenfell’, in the aftermath of the entirely preventable fire in June 2017 that killed over 70 people, and he also set up ‘No Social Cleansing in Lewisham’ as a focal point for resistance to estate destruction and the loss of community space in his home borough in south east London. For two months, from August to October 2018, he was part of the occupation of the Old Tidemill Wildlife Garden in Deptford, to prevent its destruction — and that of 16 structurally sound council flats next door — by Lewisham Council and Peabody. Although the garden was violently evicted by bailiffs on October 29, 2018, and the trees were cut down on February 27, 2019, the resistance continues.

To receive new articles in your inbox, please subscribe to Andy’s RSS feed — and he can also be found on Facebook (and here), Twitter, Flickr and YouTube. Also see the six-part definitive Guantánamo prisoner list, The Complete Guantánamo Files, the definitive Guantánamo habeas list, the full military commissions list, and the chronological list of all Andy’s articles.

Please also consider joining the Close Guantánamo campaign, and, if you appreciate Andy’s work, feel free to make a donation.

“I Can’t Breathe”: Afghan Prisoner Asadullah Haroon Gul on Black Lives Matter and Violent Oppression in Guantánamo

Asadullah Haroon Gul, as featured in a photo taken in Guantánamo by representatives of the International Committee of the Red Cross, and made available to his family.


Please support my work as a reader-funded journalist! I’m currently trying to raise $2500 (£2000) to support my writing and campaigning on Guantánamo and related issues over the next three months of the Trump administration. If you can help, please click on the button below to donate via PayPal.

 

Over the last few months I’ve cross-posted, on two occasions, articles by Asadullah Haroon Gul, an Afghan prisoner in Guantánamo who is seeking the support of his government in securing his release — A Coronavirus Lament by Guantánamo Prisoner Asadullah Haroon Gul and Asadullah Haroon Gul, a “No-Value Detainee,” and One of the Last Two Afghans in Guantánamo, Asks to Be Freed — and below I’m cross-posting a third, written in response to the reawakening of the Black Lives Matter movement, following the murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis, and originally published in Newsweek. In it, Gul takes George Floyd’s dying words, “I can’t breathe,” and draws parallels with the brutal treatment of prisoners in Guantánamo, himself included, expressing support for Black Lives Matter and hoping that, like the civil rights movement, it will bring significant change.

As he states, “America’s business is not my business but if human beings anywhere are struggling for justice, I must support them even from my cell in Guantánamo Bay. Perhaps my brothers and sisters marching in the streets will turn their eyes on this island prison, and witness our common cause.”

One of the last prisoners to arrive at Guantánamo, in June 2007, Gul was apparently seized because of his alleged involvement with Hezb-e-Islami Gulbuddin (HIG), led by the warlord Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, who had supported Al-Qaeda at the time of the US-led invasion. Gul very clearly had no meaningful connection with HIG, his involvement extending only to having lived, with his wife and family, in a refugee camp that HIG ran, but, as in so many cases of mistaken identity at Guantánamo, the US authorities didn’t care.

It took nine years for Gul to get a lawyer — Shelby Sullivan-Bennis, then working for the legal charity Reprieve — and in the meantime Gul had been designated by a review process set up under President Obama in 2009 as someone too dangerous to release, but with insufficient evidence against them for them to be charged. In 2016, just after Sullivan Bennis met him, he had another review — a parole-type process called a Periodic Review Board — but the board members failed to recommend his release, and within months he was left in the hands of Donald Trump, who made it clear that he had no interest in releasing any Guantánamo prisoners under any circumstances.

Gul’s only hope now lies wth the Afghan government. As I explained in April, “recently, the continued absurdity of holding Gul was made clear when a former Guantánamo prisoner with HIG associations, Hamidullah, was repatriated from the United Arab Emirates, where he had been sent with other Afghans in 2016, because Hekmatyar had reached a peace agreement with the Afghan president, Ashraf Ghani. Two other men sent to the UAE, but not aligned with HIG, were also repatriated, and it seems obvious that Gul should also have been freed.”

The article is below, and I hope you have time to read it, and will share it if you find it useful, and I also hope you have time to watch this short video, featuring Gul’s daughter and father, which was posted on Facebook yesterday.

Asadullah Haroon Gul’s daughter Maryam, as featured in a short video released on Facebook yesterday.


After 13 Years in Guantánamo, the Black Lives Matter Protests Give Me Hope

By Asadullah Haroon Gul, Newsweek, June 18, 2020

The killing of George Floyd has reverberated around the world. Sitting in my cell at Guantánamo, I was watching Afghan News and even there, so far from America, they showed a picture saying “I can’t breathe.” When people struggle peacefully for justice, that can only be good.

“I can’t breathe” resonates here, as on countless occasions half a dozen soldiers have pinned me down, grinding my face into the concrete, and it was all I could say. What the officers did to George Floyd has shocked the conscience of America, but it is painfully familiar to me.

The U.S. has become desensitized to state violence, provided it happens out of sight and is done to brown-skinned people. Guantánamo — a GULAG for Muslims, run by America on foreign soil — is the ultimate expression of this.

I have been subjected to what they call an FCE — a “Forcible Cell Extraction” — many times. In 2010 I began protesting peacefully because they started searching my private parts. The soldiers did not want to put their hands inside my pants — it was a rule from on high, collective punishment for one person doing something stupid. For a Muslim like me, it was a cultural anathema.

I went on hunger strike, and told them: “you can only do it to me by force.” So at any time of the day or night, even in the middle of morning prayers, the ERF team would burst into the cell. I don’t know what ERF really stands for but I call them the “Extreme Repression Force.” Five or six soldiers would kneel on me. Another person held a camera, and the leader of the ERF team would be screaming, “Don’t resist! Don’t resist.” I was not resisting. How could I? But they filmed so that if something went wrong, they would have a defence such as the Minneapolis police officers are certainly preparing.

I could not do anything. Sometimes they would use pepper spray and I would weep for 24 hours. Another time, they beat me. Two officers did come along later to apologize for that. But this is a jail. This is what happens. The violent cell extractions became a daily routine for four months until they went back to the normal search process — and I stopped protesting.

I have been FCE’d for refusing to eat when I was on a religious fast. I have been FCE’d for declining a pointless chest x-ray to avoid being exposed to radiation. I have been FCE’d over a bottle of water. Each time, I was doing nothing wrong, but sometimes you just have to assert your human dignity. What they were doing to poor George Floyd is SOP (Standard Operating Procedure) here.

I have had plenty of bruises and scars from the FCE process but perhaps I am lucky. In the early days of Guantánamo they were practicing, using a soldier as their guinea pig, and they did not listen when he cried out in fear and pain. The unfortunate man ended up with brain damage.

That there are now images of cops beating and choking protesters on the nightly news does not solely reflect the militarization of law enforcement — but rather the existence of the smartphone camera. The violent abuse of power these videos show comes as no surprise to those of us who have been on the wrong end of it for many years. This is a country that maintains a prison out of the law’s reach, to detain people indefinitely without charge. It is interested in control, not justice.

This Black Lives Matter protest gives me hope. It will be like the Civil Rights Movement in the 1950s and 1960s, and I believe it will have positive results. America’s business is not my business but if human beings anywhere are struggling for justice, I must support them even from my cell in Guantánamo Bay. Perhaps my brothers and sisters marching in the streets will turn their eyes on this island prison, and witness our common cause.

* * * * *

Andy Worthington is a freelance investigative journalist, activist, author, photographer, film-maker and singer-songwriter (the lead singer and main songwriter for the London-based band The Four Fathers, whose music is available via Bandcamp). He is the co-founder of the Close Guantánamo campaign (and see the latest photo campaign here) and the successful We Stand With Shaker campaign of 2014-15, and the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison and of two other books: Stonehenge: Celebration and Subversion and The Battle of the Beanfield. He is also the co-director (with Polly Nash) of the documentary film, “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo” (available on DVD here, or here for the US, or you can watch it online here, via the production company Spectacle, for £2.55), and for his photo project ‘The State of London’ he publishes a photo a day from eight years of bike rides around the 120 postcodes of the capital.

In 2017, Andy became very involved in housing issues. He is the narrator of the documentary film, ‘Concrete Soldiers UK’, about the destruction of council estates, and the inspiring resistance of residents, he wrote a song ‘Grenfell’, in the aftermath of the entirely preventable fire in June 2017 that killed over 70 people, and he also set up ‘No Social Cleansing in Lewisham’ as a focal point for resistance to estate destruction and the loss of community space in his home borough in south east London. For two months, from August to October 2018, he was part of the occupation of the Old Tidemill Wildlife Garden in Deptford, to prevent its destruction — and that of 16 structurally sound council flats next door — by Lewisham Council and Peabody. Although the garden was violently evicted by bailiffs on October 29, 2018, and the trees were cut down on February 27, 2019, the resistance continues.

To receive new articles in your inbox, please subscribe to Andy’s RSS feed — and he can also be found on Facebook (and here), Twitter, Flickr and YouTube. Also see the six-part definitive Guantánamo prisoner list, The Complete Guantánamo Files, the definitive Guantánamo habeas list, the full military commissions list, and the chronological list of all Andy’s articles.

Please also consider joining the Close Guantánamo campaign, and, if you appreciate Andy’s work, feel free to make a donation.

The Four Fathers Release New Existential Song ‘The Wheel of Life’, As Bandcamp Waives Its Revenue Share to Help Musicians

The cover of ‘The Wheel of Life’ by The Four Fathers, designed by drummer Bren Horstead.

My band The Four Fathers have just released the last of three songs we recorded before the coronavirus hit, with the multi-talented musician and producer Charlie Hart, whose illustrious career involves playing with Ian Dury in Kilburn and the High Roads, many years with Ronnie Lane, after he left the Faces, in Slim Chance, and several occasions spent working with the wonderful Congolese singer Samba Mapangala.

The release is ‘The Wheel of Life’, a meditation on aging, and on the importance of living in the moment, which I hope has some resonance right now, as we all try to cope with the impact of the novel coronavirus, COVID-19, which brought our thoughtlessly excessive lifestyles to an abrupt halt three months ago, but which has also precipitated a forthcoming recession of possibly terrifying proportions, as well as silencing all forms of culture that involves live interaction at close quarters.

Live music is just one the casualties of this strange new world, and while we try to work out how to resume entertaining one another in a live context, creative people are suffering. In an attempt to help, Bandcamp, the US online music service, which we use in preference to streaming companies, has been waiving its fees on specific days throughout the coronavirus lockdowns, starting on March 20, when music fans spent “$4.3 million on music and merch — 15x the amount of a normal Friday — helping artists cover rents, mortgages, groceries, medications, and so much more”, and followed by May 1, when fans paid artists $7.1 million, and June 5, when fans paid artists $4.8 million.

Today (until midnight PMT) is the fourth occasion in which Bandcamp is stepping in to help artists, and if you’d like to help The Four Fathers at all, we’d be delighted.

Below is ‘The Wheel of Life’, which we recorded with Charlie Hart in a session in December, and mixed in February:

<a href=”http://thefourfathers.bandcamp.com/tr... Wheel of Life by The Four Fathers</a>

You may also be interested in the other songs we recorded in that session. Here’s ‘This Time We Win’, an eco-anthem on which Charlie plays Wurlitzer piano:

<a href=”http://thefourfathers.bandcamp.com/tr... Time We Win by The Four Fathers</a>

And here’s ‘Affordable’, our punky rock’n’roll assault on the iniquities of the housing development industry, whose most misused word is “affordable”, for properties that aren’t actually “affordable” at all: 

<a href=”http://thefourfathers.bandcamp.com/tr... by The Four Fathers</a>

And please also be aware that our first two albums, ‘Love And War’ and ‘How Much Is A Life Worth?’ are also available (on CD as well as to download), and that the first two songs were recorded with Charlie and released in 2018 and 2019 are also available: ‘Grenfell’, and our anti-Brexit anthem ‘I Want My Country Back (From The People Who Wanted Their Country Back).’

We’re hoping that, before the end of the year, we’ll be able to record more new songs with Charlie for our third album.

Thanks for taking an interest!

* * * * *

Andy Worthington is a freelance investigative journalist, activist, author, photographer, film-maker and singer-songwriter (the lead singer and main songwriter for the London-based band The Four Fathers, whose music is available via Bandcamp). He is the co-founder of the Close Guantánamo campaign (and see the latest photo campaign here) and the successful We Stand With Shaker campaign of 2014-15, and the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison and of two other books: Stonehenge: Celebration and Subversion and The Battle of the Beanfield. He is also the co-director (with Polly Nash) of the documentary film, “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo” (available on DVD here, or here for the US, or you can watch it online here, via the production company Spectacle, for £2.55), and for his photo project ‘The State of London’ he publishes a photo a day from eight years of bike rides around the 120 postcodes of the capital.

In 2017, Andy became very involved in housing issues. He is the narrator of the documentary film, ‘Concrete Soldiers UK’, about the destruction of council estates, and the inspiring resistance of residents, he wrote a song ‘Grenfell’, in the aftermath of the entirely preventable fire in June 2017 that killed over 70 people, and he also set up ‘No Social Cleansing in Lewisham’ as a focal point for resistance to estate destruction and the loss of community space in his home borough in south east London. For two months, from August to October 2018, he was part of the occupation of the Old Tidemill Wildlife Garden in Deptford, to prevent its destruction — and that of 16 structurally sound council flats next door — by Lewisham Council and Peabody. Although the garden was violently evicted by bailiffs on October 29, 2018, and the trees were cut down on February 27, 2019, the resistance continues.

To receive new articles in your inbox, please subscribe to Andy’s RSS feed — and he can also be found on Facebook (and here), Twitter, Flickr and YouTube. Also see the six-part definitive Guantánamo prisoner list, The Complete Guantánamo Files, the definitive Guantánamo habeas list, the full military commissions list, and the chronological list of all Andy’s articles.

Please also consider joining the Close Guantánamo campaign, and, if you appreciate Andy’s work, feel free to make a donation.

COVID-19 and the Economic Meltdown: Was Global Tourism the Only Thing Keeping Us Afloat?

Grounded planes in Alabama, March 25, 2020 (Photo: Elijah Nouvelage/Reuters).


Please support my work as a reader-funded investigative journalist, commentator and activist. If you can help, please click on the button below to donate via PayPal.

 

Three months since the arrival of the novel coronavirus COVID-19 prompted an unprecedented lockdown on human interaction and on huge swathes of our economy, the primary objective — preventing our hospitals and morgues from being overwhelmed — has been achieved. The cost — economically, and, in some cases, psychologically — has been enormous, but the road ahead, as those in charge attempt to revive a functioning economy, looks like it will be even more arduous.

No congratulations should be extended to Boris Johnson and his government for the achievements of the lockdown. Johnson dithered for far too long at the beginning of the crisis, and the deaths of tens of thousands of people are, as a result, his responsibility, although not his responsibility alone, as the last few months have also shown us that, sadly, this empty windbag of a Prime Minister is largely manipulated by his senior adviser, the sneering eugenicist Dominic Cummings.

Both men were initially prepared to allow the virus to spread unchecked throughout the entire population, with people required to “take it on the chin”, as they let it “move through the population”, as Johnson explained in a now notorious TV appearance. It was only when medical experts pointed out the potential death toll of the “herd immunity” scenario that the lockdown began, following similar conclusions that were, in most other countries, reached rather earlier in the virus’s spread.

Per capita, the UK has the worst death rate from COVID-19 in the world, based on excess deaths; in other words, the number of deaths exceeding the statistical average for the time of year. On June 9, the latest information from the Office for National Statistics showed a total of 63,629 excess deaths since the virus first hit the UK.

The good news right now is that the excess death rate is falling, although that doesn’t mean that the virus has gone away, even though that now appears to be a widely-held perception in parts of the population. As was noted yestoday, the number of identified cases globally has just passed the 10 million mark, while the number of confirmed deaths has now passed half a million. In addition, as the Observer explained, new clusters of COVID-19 outbreaks around the world are currently sparking fears of a second wave.

The difficulties of getting out of lockdown

Meanwhile, as countries begin to work out how to lift their lockdowns, a few key conclusions about its impact are readily discernible: firstly, partly prompted by hypocrisy (Dominic Cummings’ notorious trips to Durham at the height of the lockdown) or general incompetence (step forward, Johnson, and Trump in the US), and partly because of the unprecedented effort of being required to be isolated and anti-social for two to three months, people are responding to the easing of lockdown in sometimes alarming ways.

Two weeks ago, two “quarantine raves” attracted 6,000 people in the Manchester area, and other parts of the country have followed suit, even though the precedent was far from encouraging. At one of the raves, attended by 4,000 people in a country park in Oldham, a 20-year-old man died of a drug overdose, while “a woman was raped and three men were stabbed at a separate illegal rave in Trafford.”

Elsewhere, problems have arisen with out of control revellers on beaches, with perhaps the most notorious example being in Dorset, on Thursday, when “half a million people had flocked to the beaches”, according to the Bournemouth East MP, Tobias Ellwood, and, at Bournemouth in particular, there was “widespread illegal parking, gridlock on roads, excessive waste, antisocial behaviour including excessive drinking and fights and prohibited overnight camping.”

While the excessive drinking is a well-known British problem, other countries in Europe are also grappling with “impromptu parties and illicit raves”, according to the Guardian, which focused on problems in Portugal, France, Germany and Spain. On Thursday, “the World Health Organization warned that some 30 European countries had reported a surge in new cases in the past two weeks.”

If hedonism and uncontrolled drinking are one response to three months of lockdown — aided by the fact that so many people, for one reason or another, are not as tied to the weekday 9 to 5 as they were before the virus hit — it is also evident that huge numbers of people remain overwhelmingly cautious about the virus. Certainly, in the UK it would be reasonable to say that the government’s messaging is so scrambled that individualised perceptions of risk are actually the main driver of people’s behaviour — when, that is, they have the luxury of not being required to go to work in circumstances that may or may not carry different levels of risk.

No return to the office

A survey of parents conducted last week by the children’s nursery company Bright Horizons, for example, found that, of office workers, “[j]ust 13% want to go back to pre-pandemic ways of working, with most people saying they would prefer to spend a maximum of three days in the office.” According to the Guardian, the survey suggested that “many working parents realise that large parts of their jobs can be conducted remotely. And they believe that their employers will agree. Nearly two-thirds think their employers will be open to remote or flexible working in the future as the widespread adoption of Zoom and other online tools has kept many businesses functioning even as physical workplaces have been shuttered.” Nearly half of the respondents said that they were intending to ask for more remote working.

This could make a huge difference to the world of work, hopefully bringing to an end the insanely packed rush hour commute that no longer looks feasible at all. Happily, walking and bike use have increased massively since the lockdown began, but now, with people still avoiding public transport, car use is unfortunately on the rise, which, for environmental reasons, is a disaster. What we need to find is a balance that permanently reduces car use and encourages bike use (many more bike lanes and pedestrianised areas, and far fewer roads and carriageways), but that also entices people back onto public transport, for which the obvious solutions involve permanent working from home, for at least some of the work, for those who can, and perhaps also some form of staggered work hours.

Interestingly, as was reported last week, the sudden revolution in working from home, which employers had failed to engage with meaningfully before the virus hit, despite the technological advances enabling it, now looks set to be permanent. Last Tuesday, the Guardian noted that “demand for office space in City skyscrapers will be diminished even after the coronavirus pandemic is over, with experts predicting a major shift in the commercial property market.”

As the Guardian explained, “Financial institutions were among the companies that completely changed their way of working and sent their colleagues home from city centre offices prior to the government lockdown” in March, and in April, Jes Staley, the chief executive of Barclays, “predicted that there would not be a return to rush-hour journeys to large corporate headquarters, even once Covid-19 no longer poses a risk”, because “[t]he vast majority of the bank’s 80,000 staff were able to work remotely during the pandemic, allowing the lender to function as normal.” As Staley described it, “I think the notion of putting 7,000 people in a building may be a thing of the past, and we will find ways to operate with more distancing over a much longer period of time.”

An almost deserted City of London on March 30, 2020, in a photo dominated by the bulk of 22 Bishopsgate (aka Twentytwo), a new office block, close to completion, that suddenly looks surplus to requirements (Photo: Andy Worthington).

I anticipated the demise of the greedy and environmentally insane housing and office development industry back in May, in an article entitled, Coronavirus and the Meltdown of the Construction Industry: Bloated, Socially Oppressive and Environmentally Ruinous, and I was pleased to see, in the Observer yesterday, an assessment that a future of severely reduced office use “poses a serious problem for multimillion pound skyscraper projects under way in the capital.”

The Observer spoke to some small financial companies that are moving out permanently, like Bishopsgate Financial Consulting, which is closing its head office in the Square Mile, with all 65 workers now working from home. As the Observer described it, “The move will save the company hundreds of thousands of pounds a year, slicing a quarter off its annual costs. Employees will also benefit financially – with some saving thousands of pounds each in annual commuting bills.” The company “has bought desks, laptops, dual screens and printers for its staff to use at home”, keeping only a a “virtual office” in the City, to preserve a City address “along with access to meeting rooms and lounges when it needs them.”

On a much bigger scale, Lloyd’s, “which closed its underwriting room in the Square Mile in late March, for the first time in its 334-year history”, is planning to reopen in August, but, at least for the time being, “expects that only 20% to 25% of 850 corporation staff and 3,000 to 4,000 brokers and underwriters will return” to its Lime Street headquarters.

As a result of these changes, it is anticipated that planned giant office developments that have not yet begun will not happen, including “1 Undershaft, known as the Trellis, which would be the second-tallest building in western Europe after the Shard at 290 metres, and where construction had been expected to start by the end of this year”, as well as “the Diamond, rising to 247 metres; and the Bishopsgate Goodsyard towers.”

In the meantime, ongoing projects, like the fund manager M&G’s 40 Leadenhall Street development, which has been given the nickname ‘Gotham City’ because of its similarity to the fictional skyline in Batman, are unlikely to be stopped, even though they look like the definition of pointlessness. At Leadenhall Street, work on the foundations had just begun when the virus hit, and it was one of the few sites where construction work didn’t stop at all during the most severe phase of the lockdown.

The prospect of the office environment — and its huge profits for landlords, landowners and investors — not bouncing back creates opportunities to think about how the future might be different, and how that space can be re-configured, especially if we factor in the equally doomed towers of overpriced apartment blocks, which looked like a zombie industry even before the virus hit, with investors put off by the broken basket case of Brexit Britain, and with Londoners almost completely unable to afford to buy into the developments, even if they wanted to.

Something better change

Moreover, thinking about a different future not only reflects the hopes of working parents; it also reflects the concerns of society as a whole, as a YouGov poll showed that 59% of people want change, and only 6% wanted to resurrect pre-virus “business as usual.” The polling, as reported by the Guardian today, found that “31% of people want to see big changes in the way the economy is run coming out of the crisis, with a further 28% wanting to see moderate changes”, and with “only 6% of people wanting to see no changes.”

The polling coincided with the launch of the New Economics Foundation’s ‘Build Back Better’ campaign, calling for a “fairer and greener” economic recovery that “provides more funding for the NHS and social care, tackles inequality, creates good jobs, particularly for young people, and reduces the risk of future pandemics and climate emergencies”, which is backed by “350 influential figures” including Bob Kerslake, the former head of the civil service, religious leaders including the former archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams, the heads of the Trades Union Congress, the Confederation of British Industry, the British Chambers of Commerce, Oxfam, Shelter, Save the Children, the Trussell Trust, Greenpeace and Friends of the Earth.

The environmental imperative to drastically and permanently change our economic activity, which I wrote about in April, was also emphasised in a report by Climate Assembly UK, “a group of 108 members of the public chosen to be representative of the UK population and to help shape future climate policy by discussing options to reach net zero carbon emissions, in line with the government’s 2050 target.”

The assembly found, as the Guardian described it, that “[p]eople would be prepared to continue many of the lifestyle changes enforced by the coronavirus lockdown to help tackle the climate emergency, and the government would have broad support for a green economic recovery from the crisis”, with working from home “a popular option, along with changes to how people travel”, giving the government “the opportunity to rethink investment in infrastructure and support low-carbon industries.”  As the Guardian added, “Nearly eight in ten of the members said the measures taken by the government to help the economic recovery from Covid-19 should be designed to help reach net zero, and an even bigger proportion – 93% – said that, as the lockdown eased, the government and employers should encourage lifestyle changes to cut emissions.”

The end of tourism?

The third aspect of the post-lockdown world, which is most significant in terms of the economy, involves, broadly speaking, shopping and tourism, which I looked at in an article in March, Imagining a Post-Coronavirus World: Ending Ravenous Capitalism and Our Consumer-Driven Promiscuity, and which has been preoccupying me as I have been cycling around London’s West End, taking photos for my ongoing photo-journalism project ‘The State of London’, where efforts at opening up the economy after three months of lockdown are meeting with only limited success, and where it has become apparent that the economy of pre-virus London relied to an extraordinary extent on foreign tourists, who no longer exist, and who are clearly not going to return any time soon in sufficient numbers to revive what was a crazed business model — a city of hectic economic activity, groaning under the sheer weight of tourists, with sky-high rents, tiny operating margins and hordes of exploited workers.

At its heart, of course, the problem is safety. To all but the most reckless would-be travellers, planes now look like virus incubators, but even for those who are prepared to overlook the risk, the destination is no longer as enticing as it was, with London’s theatres, music venues and clubs all shut, a situation that is devastating for Britain’s creative people, and that will not be alleviated by the rush, on the government’s part, to reopen pubs, restaurants and cinemas on July 4.

In a major article for the Guardian, The end of tourism?, Christopher de Bellaigue looked in detail at the global tourist industry, beginning with the cruise industry, a largely unregulated $150bn business that is “shedding jobs, issuing debt and discounting furiously simply to survive”, but that really shouldn’t survive because of its hugely destructive impact on everything it touches.

As de Bellaigue explained, “Tourism is an unusual industry in that the assets it monetises – a view, a reef, a cathedral – do not belong to it. The world’s dominant cruise companies – Carnival, Royal Caribbean and Norwegian – pay little towards the upkeep of the public goods they live off. By incorporating themselves in overseas tax havens with benign environmental and labour laws – respectively Panama, Liberia and Bermuda – cruising’s big three, which account for three-quarters of the industry, get to enjoy low taxes and avoid much irksome regulation, while polluting the air and sea, eroding coastlines and pouring tens of millions of people into picturesque ports of call that often cannot cope with them.”

As he added, “What goes for cruises goes for most of the travel industry … [M]ost hotel groups, tour operators and national tourism authorities – whatever their stated commitment to sustainable tourism – continue to prioritise the economies of scale that inevitably lead to more tourists paying less money and heaping more pressure on those same assets. Before the pandemic, industry experts were forecasting that international arrivals would rise by between 3% and 4% in 2020. Chinese travellers, the largest and fastest-growing cohort in world tourism, were expected to make 160m trips abroad, a 27% increase on the 2015 figure.”

Now, however, as de Bellaigue added, “The virus has given us a picture, at once frightening and beautiful, of a world without tourism. We see now what happens to our public goods when tourists aren’t clustering to exploit them. Shorelines enjoy a respite from the erosion caused by cruise ships the size of canyons.”

As he also explained, “Coronavirus has also revealed the danger of overreliance on tourism, demonstrating in brutal fashion what happens when the industry supporting an entire community, at the expense of any other more sustainable activity, collapses. On 7 May, the UN World Tourism Organisation estimated that earnings from international tourism might be down 80% this year against last year’s figure of $1.7tn, and that 120m jobs could be lost. Since tourism relies on the same human mobility that spreads disease, and will be subject to the most stringent and lasting restrictions, it is likely to suffer more than almost any other economic activity.”

Shoppers return to Oxford Street on June 15, 2020, the day that “non-essential” shops were allowed to re-open. However, the numbers were tiny compared to the half a million visitors a day who visited Oxford Street before the coronavirus hit (Photo: Andy Worthington).

Sadly, as de Bellaigue stated, “As tourism’s impact on the world has deepened, so the global economy has come to depend on it.”

As he also explained, “one in 10 jobs in the world depend on” tourism, and its loss will be devastating almost everywhere. However, it is important to remember that, “For all the money the industry usually brings in, one of the prices of allowing a place to be taken over by tourism is the way it distorts local development. Farmers sell their land to the hotel chain, only for the price of crops they once grew to inflate beyond their reach. Water is diverted to the golf course while the locals go short. The road is paved as far as the theme park, not the school.” As de Bellaigue put it, “In its subordination of an economy to a powerful, capricious, external motor, tourism dependency has something in common with the aid dependency that I observed as a reporter in Afghanistan after the 2001 invasion. In both cases, the worst threat is the possibility of sudden withdrawal.”

Moving on, de Bellaigue analysed “overtourism – the saturation of a destination by visitors in numbers it cannot sustain”, looking at Venice, where its 30 million visitors a year “exceeds the city’s ‘carrying capacity’, the number it can accommodate without permanently damaging its infrastructure and way of life, by at least 10 million”, according to Jan van der Borg, a university-based tourism specialist. He is particularly concerned that the majority of the tourists fail to contribute in any meaningful way to Venice’s economy, with de Ballaigue stating, “Some 70% are day-trippers, who after being ‘spat from their tour buses, cruise ships and airplanes’, spend a few hours congesting the historic heart of Venice ‘but without contributing to its maintenance.’ After parting with perhaps €15, enough to buy them a souvenir manufactured thousands of miles away, they are hurried by their guide on to their next destination.”

As de Ballaigue also explained, “In the past 10 years, the curse of ‘Venetianisation’ – the hollowing out of a place, as it fills with tourist-termites – has beset city after city, as budget airlines and Airbnb have brought a weekend somewhere cobbled within reach of millions. That hasn’t just meant long-established destinations such as Venice or Paris, but sleepy coastal towns such as Porto, on Portugal’s Atlantic coast, that were completely unprepared for the numbers of tourists unleashed on them.”

The resistance began in Barcelona in 2015, when the city council “introduced a moratorium on new hotels”, and, in 2016, gave Airbnb “a €600,000 fine for listing unlicensed properties – small beer for a company whose revenues from a single quarter have been known to exceed $1bn, but a sign of growing hostility towards an industry that could make a city unrecognisable to its residents in a short space of time.” As de Ballaigue noted, although the attractions of tourist money are undeniable, “mass tourism displaces other businesses, while the exodus of many creative and productive residents, as well as the stress placed on local infrastructure by visitors in such numbers, carry a cost of their own.”

As he also explained, “Behind the recent campaigns against over-tourism lies a growing appreciation that public goods that were assumed to be endlessly exploitable are, in fact, both finite and have a value that the price of visiting them should reflect. ‘Polluter pays’ is an economic principle that is gradually being introduced to farming, manufacturing and energy. The idea is that if your business produces harmful side effects, then you should be the one who picks up the tab for the cleanup operation. Something similar, incorporating not only environmental harm but also wider cultural degradation or damage to way of life, might become the guiding principle of a properly sustainable tourism industry.”

That may be a forlorn hope, as destinations around the world, outside of the richer western economies, may well be desperate for any and all tourist revenue, but the problem remains, as mentioned above, that we have no way of knowing right now how many people will be prepared, in the near future, to get on a plane to go anywhere.

Instead, for the foreseeable future, tourist destinations are going to have to become more self-reliant — an uncomfortable truth that is going to impact London to a greater extent than, perhaps, most people realise. While I remain extremely concerned about the current loss of culture, via live music and theatre, I cannot even theoretically accept a return to London’s previous tourist levels (up from 11 million visitors a year in 2002 to 21.5 million in 2018), which, while not as dire as the experiences of Venice and Barcelona, were still unsustainable environmentally, however, much they created what looked like a viable economy (even if, in reality, it involved quite shocking levels of greed and exploitation).

I have no illusions that the adjustment to a less tourist-ravaged world will be easy or painless, and I have no wish to be seen to be dismissing the damage it will cause to so many people’s lives, but it is, I think, why we need what we very clearly don’t have in the UK — bold, visionary political leadership. We need creative ideas about how to create new jobs from the wreckage of the old, how to dismantle property-based greed, via a deflated housing market, and reduced business and domestic rents and leases, as well as how to revive live culture by thinking outside the box.

* * * * *

Andy Worthington is a freelance investigative journalist, activist, author, photographer, film-maker and singer-songwriter (the lead singer and main songwriter for the London-based band The Four Fathers, whose music is available via Bandcamp). He is the co-founder of the Close Guantánamo campaign (and see the latest photo campaign here) and the successful We Stand With Shaker campaign of 2014-15, and the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison and of two other books: Stonehenge: Celebration and Subversion and The Battle of the Beanfield. He is also the co-director (with Polly Nash) of the documentary film, “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo” (available on DVD here, or here for the US, or you can watch it online here, via the production company Spectacle, for £2.55), and for his photo project ‘The State of London’ he publishes a photo a day from eight years of bike rides around the 120 postcodes of the capital.

In 2017, Andy became very involved in housing issues. He is the narrator of the documentary film, ‘Concrete Soldiers UK’, about the destruction of council estates, and the inspiring resistance of residents, he wrote a song ‘Grenfell’, in the aftermath of the entirely preventable fire in June 2017 that killed over 70 people, and he also set up ‘No Social Cleansing in Lewisham’ as a focal point for resistance to estate destruction and the loss of community space in his home borough in south east London. For two months, from August to October 2018, he was part of the occupation of the Old Tidemill Wildlife Garden in Deptford, to prevent its destruction — and that of 16 structurally sound council flats next door — by Lewisham Council and Peabody. Although the garden was violently evicted by bailiffs on October 29, 2018, and the trees were cut down on February 27, 2019, the resistance continues.

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