Andy Worthington's Blog, page 14

Coronavirus and the Meltdown of the Construction Industry: Bloated, Socially Oppressive and Environmentally Ruinous

Part of the massive development site at Nine Elms in Vauxhall, photographed on April 16, 2020 (Photo: Andy Worthington).


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.

 

Just for a while there, it was bliss. The roads were almost entirely empty, the air was clean, birds could be heard singing in central London, and, most crucially, the din of huge construction sites was almost entirely silenced. Construction sites not only generate vast amounts of noise and pollution; they also choke the roads with hundreds of lorries carrying material to them, or carrying away the rubble from buildings that, in general, should have been retrofitted rather than destroyed.

This is because the environmental cost of destroying buildings is immense, and we are supposed to have woken up to the environmental implications of our activities over the last few years, because, in 2018, the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) warned us that we only had 12 years to avoid catastrophic climate change unless we started arranging to cut our carbon emissions to zero, and, in response, the activism of Greta Thunberg and Extinction Rebellion helped to persuade central governments and local governments to piously declare “climate emergencies”, and to promise to change their behaviour.

Little has been seen in terms of major changes since these “climate emergencies” were declared last year — until, that is, the coronavirus hit. Since then, global pollution levels have dropped significantly — 17% on average worldwide, by early April, compared with 2019 levels, with a 31% decline recorded in the UK.

In London, meanwhile, measurements of carbon dioxide and methane were taken from the top of the BT Tower, and analysed by scientists at the UK Centre for Ecology and Hydrology and the University of Reading, who discovered a 58% drop in carbon dioxide emissions, which, as the Daily Mail noted, “closely mirrors the daily reduction of 60 per cent in traffic flow in central London which Transport for London recorded during the first five weeks of the UK’s lockdown.” The Mail added that, “For May 3, the most recent data available, CO2 emissions were down more than 70 per cent while methane emissions had been slashed by around 56 per cent.”

Sadly, however, as scientists also warned, the changes — described by the Guardian as the “sharpest drop in carbon output since records began” — will swiftly be undone without further concerted political action. As the Guardian noted, “As countries slowly get back to normal activity, over the course of the year the annual decline is likely to be only about 7%, if some restrictions to halt the virus remain in place [and] if they are lifted in mid-June the fall for the year is likely to be only 4%.”

The Guardian added that this “would still represent the biggest annual drop in emissions since the second world war, and a stark difference compared with recent trends, as emissions have been rising by about 1% annually”, but, according to Corinne Le Quéré, a professor of climate change at the University of East Anglia, and the lead author of the study recording the fall in global carbon emissions, which was published in Nature, it would make “a negligible impact on the Paris agreement” goals of keeping the increase in global average temperature to 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels to prevent the onset of catastrophic climate change.

In London, after the lockdown was declared on March 23, the majority of the capital’s heavily polluting construction sites — contributing significantly to the level of emissions — shut down, although in some cases only as a result of criticism (for one example, see the ‘Shut the Sites‘ campaign).

The result was inspiring, as the city fell silent, and the roads were almost entirely empty, because, before the coronavirus hit, London’s roads were almost permanently choked with traffic, creating homicidal levels of air pollution.

In addition, the city, as a whole, had for many years been at war, invaded by an enemy that most people didn’t even recognise: the global corporate construction industry, involved in the creation of huge numbers of new housing, office and retail developments — often through “mixed use” developments that combin all three, and that, as noted above, also contributed massively to air pollution.

These huge developments purport to be beneficial to Londoners, but the housing is way beyond the reach of ordinary hard-working Londoners, and is intended primarily for foreign investors, and the entire programme is actually only a means for parasitical transnational investment entities to take over prime inner city real estate, and to hire the bloated egos of superstar architects to design these monstrous new developments.

The results — some completed, but many others only partly completed — are now scattered across London, with particular concentrations at Nine Elms in Vauxhall and Battersea, in Canary Wharf and in the City of London, but with other examples springing up in almost every borough.

A key component in this land grab has been developments involving so-called “social housing”, whereby, in general, housing associations, which trade on their reputation as kindly providers of affordable housing for poorer workers, have hooked up with the same parasitical transnational investment entities, with the full support of central and local government, to create new housing developments.

These often involve the demolition of existing — and, crucially, structurally sound — council estates, which are replaced, primarily, with properties for private sale, along with two other scams: “affordable” housing that is much less affordable than the housing it replaces, and “shared ownership”, in which people buy a share of a property (say, 25%), and pay rent on the rest (as well as unregulated and often grossly inflated service charges), but are only secure tenants until they own the property 100%, and stand to lose everything if they fall into arrears.

After the lockdown began, and the sites that had initially stayed open were pressurised to shut, I was relieved to discover very few sites open on my daily bikes rides around London, to take photos for my ongoing photo-journalism project, ‘The State of London.’ The whole of Nine Elms went quiet, as did most of the sites at Canary Wharf and the City, although a noticeable exception was at 40 Leadenhall Street, where work clearing the ground for a proposed £1.4 billion, 900,000 sq. ft. development, nicknamed ‘Gotham City’, continued as though there was going to be some sort of demand for it when the worst of the crisis is over — which it clearly isn’t yet, despite the government’s false and cynical optimism about nudging us towards a return to “business as usual.”

Another notable exception was on the Aylesbury Estate, in Walworth, in south east London, where demolition contractors continued to demolish Chiltern House, one of the great concrete housing blocks on what was once one of Europe’s largest housing estates, an act of double vandalism — both socially, because of its intent to socially cleanse the area of its poorer inhabitants, and, environmentally, because, as the academics Mike Kane and Ron Yee have demonstrated, “The carbon cost of constructing this building was extremely high. The reinforced concrete structural frame (excluding partition walls and internal elements) is estimated to weigh in excess of 20,000 tonnes which equates to approx. 1,800 tonnes of emitted CO2 for the concrete alone. This figure is significantly increased with the remainder of the construction process and transport emissions. Demolition of Chiltern House requires in the region of 800+ HGV truck journeys through London’s congested streets, and the use of heavy demolition machinery will greatly add to the figure again. Clearly, the CO2 emission cost of reaching just the cleared site (after only 40 years of housing use) is very high, moreover, if the replacement building is of conventional construction (with only 30 year warranty), then the overall environmental cost of providing additional homes is enormous.”

Since last week, however, when Boris Johnson suggested that everyone who could return to work should do so, sites have been reopening. Most of Nine Elms is still quiet, but work has resumed on the biggest project of all, Battersea Power Station, and other sites are also starting up again.

Inside the massive and soulless Battersea Power Station development on April 16, 2020 (Photo: Andy Worthington).

This is a great shame, because, to anyone paying attention, the construction industry was already a “zombie” industry before the coronavirus hit, in part because of the cumulative damage caused by its remorseless greed, and in part because of the Tories’ obsession with fulfilling the morbidly flawed EU referendum in June 2016, whose sole purpose, in terms of Britain’s international business prospects, appears to have been to turn us from a “safe pair of hands” into an untrustworthy basket case.

The entire parasitic global construction industry assumed its current prominence after the global economic crash of 2008, which was, of course, caused by criminally greedy investment bankers who were not subsequently punished. After their sub-prime mortgage scam unravelled so spectacularly, their attention soon turned to these new developments that plague not only London but also any other city whose elected leaders can be manipulated by false promises of unparalleled wealth creation, exciting new “communities” and job opportunities — fables that some politicians actually seem to believe, while others merely embrace them cynically.

The reality, as was revealed in a Guardian exposé two years ago, entitled, ‘Ghost towers: half of new-build luxury London flats fail to sell’, is that “[m]ore than half of the 1,900 ultra-luxury apartments” built in London in 2017 had “failed to sell.” Henry Pryor, a property buying agent, frankly told the Guardian that the London luxury new-build market was “already overstuffed but we’re just building more of them.” He added, “We’re going to have loads of empty and part-built posh ghost towers. They were built as gambling chips for rich overseas investors, but they are no longer interested in the London casino and have moved on.” He also pointed out that the developers had “failed to sell homes despite offering discounts, incentives and freebies – including free furniture, carpets and curtains and even cars”, because, while they offered “luxuries including concierge, gyms and spas”, fundamentally “they’re all the same” — and over-priced.

The same is true of the office blocks being built, for which no market seemed to exist even before the coronavirus hit — and which may become substantially less popular in the post-virus world. In an article on May 1, entitled ‘The end of the office? Coronavirus may change work forever’, the FT noted that, “Facing a sudden need to cut costs, chief executives have indicated in recent days that their property portfolios look like good places to start given the ease with which their companies have adapted to remote set-ups.”

Jes Staley of Barclays said, “The notion of putting 7,000 people in a building may be a thing of the past.” Dirk van de Put of Mondelez said, “Maybe we don’t need all the offices that we currently have around the world”, while Sergio Ermotti of UBS said they were “already thinking about moving out of expensive city centre offices.”

Let’s hope that this really is the end for this zombie business of hideously overpriced housing and offices, and the relentless shops that accompany them — trying, it seems, to make sure that we can’t walk more than a few feet without spending money.

What we’re going to need when we come out of this crisis is genuinely affordable housing, at social rents (think £50 per adult per week) to support all those people who, even before the crisis hit, were clinging on by their fingernails while the frantic world that collapsed two months ago was still engaged in what we all seemed to regard as an endless party, but one in which we were not encouraged to ask too many questions about who was being exploited, and how fundamentally, terrifyingly unsustainable it all was.

* * * * *

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 seven 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 Use of Power and Ideology in Guantánamo”: New Academic Paper Focuses On My Book “The Guantánamo Files”

The cover of Andy Worthington’s 2007 book “The Guantánamo Files.”


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.

 

Imagine my surprise last week when a post popped up on Facebook, which I was tagged in, that read, “The Use of Power and Ideology in Guantánamo: A Critical Discourse Analysis of Andy Worthington’s The Guantánamo Files.”

Clicking through, I found that it was an entire academic article focusing on my 2007 book The Guantánamo Files, published in the latest issue (June 2020) of the European Journal of English Language and Literature Studies, a publication by EA Journals (European-American Journals), part of the UK-based European Centre for Research Training and Development, which is “an independent organisation run by scholars mainly in the UK, USA, and Canada.”

Written and supported by students and supervisors at GC University, in Faisalabad, Pakistan, the abstract explains that “[t]he research deals with the use of power and ideology in Andy Worthington’s The Guantánamo Files (2007) as the narratives (generally called Gitmo narratives) of the detainees show the betrayal of American ideals, [the] US constitution and international laws about human rights. Since its inception, Guantánamo Bay Camp is an icon of American military power, hegemony and legal exceptionalism in the ‘Global War on Terror.’”

As the article proceeds to explain, “There are a number of stories available about what happened to the inhabitants of the Guantánamo Bay Detention Camps in the form of books, articles, news and online stuff. These narratives are told and retold by many authors with multi perspective approach, but Andy Worthington’s The Guantánamo Files is one of the most prominent works of Gitmo narratives covering all issues of the topic. The goal of this work is to highlight the dark and unknown secrets of the detainees’ lives inside Gitmo and to know what is happened to the detainees in Guantánamo and why they are inside this limbo.”

The article also states, “For the first four years only the top American officials knew the exact number and names of the detainees. It was almost impossible to recount the stories of these male Muslims as they were detained without any charge or trial and they had no contact with their families. They were unable to make any contact even to their lawyers in the beginning and they were simply the apparatus of a lawless experiment conducted in the Torture Lab of America in the remote area of Cuba outside the jurisdiction of American law.”

Furthermore, the article adds, “Guantánamo, in terms of Foucault [“Discipline and Punish” (1979)], saw a new theory of law and crime. It was a new moral or political justification of the right to punish. Old laws were eliminated and old customs died out in Guantánamo. The working of military tribunals was also illegal and deeply flawed. The prisoners were not allowed to have any legal representation, and were stopped from seeing the classified evidence against them. The evidence often consisted of allegations based on unconfirmed reports or torture.”

The main body of the article subjects the stories of Abu Zubaydah, Mohamedou Ould Slahi and Mohammed Al-Qahtani, as discussed in my book, to “critical discourse analysis,” concluding, through examining these three stories of particularly abused individuals, that Guantánamo stands as “a symbol of civilizational breakdown through self-serving and pre-planned power abuse.”

My thanks to Ph.D. scholar Ahmad Saeed Iqbal, Assistant Professor Dr. Muhammad Asif and Visiting Lecturer Muhammad Asif Asghar for this article. It’s reassuring that  this work I undertook so many years ago continues to have resonance around the world.

To buy The Guantánamo Files as an e-book or paperback, please see the Pluto Press page here.

* * * * *

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 (click on the following for Amazon in the US and the UK) 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 seven 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.

Landlords: The Front Line of Coronavirus Greed

End rent now: a protestor in Los Angeles.


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.

 

As the coronavirus continues to cripple the economy, it is clear to anyone paying attention — a situation not encouraged by either our political leaders or the mainstream media — that its disastrous effects are extremely unevenly distributed.

While some people are working from home on 100% pay, others — the essential workers of the NHS, pharmacists, those in the food industry, postal workers and other delivery people, public transport workers, and many others — have continued to work, often at severe risk to their health, because of the government’s inability to provide proper PPE or a coherent testing system. Other workers, meanwhile, have been furloughed on 80% of pay (up to £2,500 a month), while another huge group of former workers have been summarily laid off, and have been required to apply for Universal Credit, a humiliating process that also involves the requirement to try to survive on less than £100 a week.

While those on Universal Credit receive support in paying their rent, and one of the government’s first moves, when the lockdown began, was to secure mortgage holidays for homeowners, no such support exists elsewhere in the economy for those who are renting. This is a disaster both for businesses and for those living in properties owned by landlords and not receiving housing benefit, as there has been no suggestion from the government, at any time over the last seven weeks, that landlords should share everyone else’s pain.

Sadly, this is typical of the way that governments behave, because, for the last 20-odd years, the ownership of property, whether of homes or commercial properties, has conferred on owners the right to participate in a feeding frenzy of greed, and, moreover, to see themselves as both superior and uniquely entitled to make as much money as they can get away with, with little or no thought given to those who are exploited as a result.

The result of this mentality, as the economy has crashed, and millions of people have lost their incomes or seen their incomes cut, and numerous businesses have been forced to shut their doors to the public, is that those struggling to pay for their landlords’ sense of self-entitlement are, in a domestic context, either paying most of their income in rent, or are likely to be made homeless, and, in a business context, are likely to go bust.

It’s possible that there will have to be reckoning when, after the worst of this crisis is over, the streets are full of homeless families, and shops, pubs, restaurants, theatres and offices are all shut and boarded up because no one can actually afford to run businesses any more, but it would be reassuring if there were efforts to prevent this total collapse by reining in the self-entitled greed of landowners, homeowners and landlords sooner rather than later.

Private renters’ woes

On the domestic front, to give you some idea of the extent to which those living in privately rented property are being affected by the combination of the coronavirus and their landlords’ undiminished greed, startling news has emerged via Ome, a company that is trying to rethink rental deposits, about the extent to which suffering workers are still being fleeced by their landlords. The company undertook research into how furloughed workers are coping, and discovered that, prior to the lockdown, the average tenant in the UK “was paying 47% of their monthly net income to cover the cost of renting”, an amount that has increased to 57%, an increase of 10%.

In London, meanwhile, the research revealed that, prior to the lockdown, “rent already accounted for 64% of the average monthly net income”, and that this has increased to 85%, an increase of 21%.

The research also indicated that the highest change in the percentage of income paid in rent was in Kensington and Chelsea, “where a furlough reduction in monthly income means renting now accounts for 152% of the average wage, a huge jump of 94%”. Other shocking increases were noted in “Westminster (+76%), Camden (+52%), Richmond (+43%), Hammersmith and Fulham (+40%) and Wandsworth (+39%)”, with rent “now accounting for upward of 93% of income for those on furlough.”

In order to try to protect renters to some extent, the government sought to prevent evictions for three months when the lockdown started, but that much-trumpeted ban seems, in reality, to have been toothless, as Amelia Gentleman of the Guardian recently exposed shocking stories of hospitality workers in London who were almost immediately made homeless after the lockdown began, because they lost their jobs overnight and then couldn’t pay their rent, and were evicted and are now living on the streets.

Beyond these stories, many evictions have indeed been put on hold, but only for a limited time. As Joe Beswick of the New Economics Foundation pointed out in a Guardian article on May 12, “The suspension is scheduled to end in mid-June, and has not been extended.” Beswick pointed out that “Citizens Advice found last week that 2.6 million private renters have already missed, or expect to miss, a rent payment due to the crisis”, and added:

For thousands of renters who’ve lost their income but are still required to pay rent, eviction could come quickly once the suspension is lifted. In the words of Ghazal, a member of the London Renters Union: “I’ve lost all my work because of the pandemic. My landlord won’t give me a rent reduction and I’m worried that this means I will be forced out.” London Councils, the representative body of the city’s local authorities, has warned of an “avalanche” of evictions coming down the line.

Beswick noted how, last weekend, the Labour party announced a “five-point plan” to protect renters, which “extends the eviction suspension by six months, gives renters two years to pay off any rent arrears built up during the crisis, and asks the government to consider a temporary increase to housing benefit”, but as he explains,  “even this is unlikely to be enough, and involves plunging tenants into debt to protect landlords’ income streams.”

As he proceeded to explain, “With the Bank of England contemplating the worst recession in 300 years, renters’ incomes are unlikely to bounce back once lockdown lifts, and the impact of the crisis on people’s ability to pay rent will be here to stay. If we are to protect renters, we need to solve the problem of rent.”

He added, “Under Labour’s plan, a renter who missed three payments of the average monthly rent in England (£867 a month) would find themselves paying £108 extra every month for the next two years”, an extra cost that many renters will be unable to afford. Instead, as NEF has recently proposed, the best answer — indeed, the only way to avoid a potential tsunami of homelessness — “is to temporarily suspend rents.”

For more on the housing rental crisis, see this Independent article about how students are taking on rapacious landlords, who are refusing to write off rents, even for students whose courses have been cancelled, by embarking on rent strikes, a course of action that other renters need to keep a close eye on.

Meltdown in the hospitality sector

In the business sector, meanwhile, the same problem — of landlords seeking to extract money from tenants that they simply don’t have — threatens to wipe out an extraordinary number of businesses unless some sort of enactment of shared pain takes place.

Restaurants have been making this clear since the lockdown began, with award-winning chef Yotam Ottolenghi warning in the Guardian on April 11 that the coronavirus will destroy the UK restaurant industry without assistance — particularly with regard to rents. As he noted:

Thanks to the government-funded furlough scheme, we are fortunate enough to be able to pay our staff while they are at home. There are, however, other serious issues, the most burning of which is rent. Though some landlords have made private arrangements with tenants to forgo rent payments for a certain period, most are demanding their quarterly transfers. For businesses with zero income, this is a kiss of death. Accumulating debt now, when we are not operating, will severely hamper our ability to re-establish businesses that pay salaries, taxes, bills and rents. For many, it will simply mean that they cannot renew trading — this would be a devastating and totally unnecessary outcome. For the lucky ones, it will mean that they hang on by the skin of their teeth, but will not have enough capital to expand and create more jobs, which will be so sorely needed when this crisis is over.

For more on the restaurant crisis, see Jay Rayner’s Observer article, ‘Will Britain’s restaurants survive coronavirus?’ and this article on the ‘Eater London’ website, detailing how a number of restaurant owners have “asked the government to consider a nine-month rent-free period” to save their businesses. Rayner, following up on Ottolenghi’s position, explained how Criterion Capital, “which owns large slabs of property around London’s Leicester Square”, had been threatening Caffe Concerto with a winding up order, because it had not paid rent on one of its sites, and noted that Andrew Sell of Criterion told the FT, “We are driven to take such action because we are a business that has an obligation to our lenders, to collect rent and meet their demands for interest payment to be made on time.” He added that, as he saw it, “The property industry is being treated as the nation’s bank”, which is a very un-generous position.

Kate Nicholls, the chief executive of the industry body UK Hospitality, said that she had “heard repeated stories of restaurant owners facing issues of this sort”, explaining, with some accuracy, “Too many landlords, banks and insurance companies are simply not sharing the pain of this.”

Elsewhere in the hospitality industry, pubs are also facing a bleak future. As the Guardian explained on May 10, “[w]ith only one of the big six landlords cancelling rents”, publicans are fearful about their future.

Already suffering from “ties”, an “ancient but controversial deal under which pubs buy their beer at inflated prices from the business that owns their property”, supposedly in exchange for lower rents, publicans are now finding that “nearly all of the major pub companies have refused to cancel rents, opting to defer their demands or offer a discounted rate instead.”

Edward Anderson, who runs three pubs in Cheltenham, told the Guardian, “It’s just debt that we can’t repay when we reopen.” His landlords had “offered to postpone the rent bill”, but that wasn’t enough. As the Guardian added, “rents are set based on a pub’s ‘fair, maintainable trade’, in other words the turnover it expects to make in a year. But while takings have fallen off a cliff overnight, rent reassessments take place only every five years, meaning that when those rent demands resume, there will be less in the till to honour them with.”

Dave Law, who runs the Eagle Ale House near London’s Clapham Common, told the Guardian, “We need rent to be cancelled during the period. We’re being forced to pay based on turnover that we can’t make because of government decree. Rents are already inflated and when we come out of this, we’re going to be in a recession.” As the Guardian added, “Like Anderson, he fears he won’t be able to recoup his lockdown losses unless pubcos step up and share more of the pain.”

So what does the future hold? Will landlords recognise the scale of the crisis facing their tenants, or will we have to wait until as I suggested above, “the streets are full of homeless families, and shops, pubs, restaurants, theatres and offices are all shut and boarded up because no one can actually afford to run businesses any more”?

I fervently hope not.

Note: For what’s happening in the US, see ‘Cancel the Rent’, a brand-new article in the New Yorker.

* * * * *

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 (click on the following for Amazon in the US and the UK) 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 seven 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.

Celebrating Eight Years of My Photo-Journalism Project, ‘The State of London’

Andy Worthington’s most recent photos of London under lockdown, as part of his photo-journalism project ‘The State of London.’


Please feel free to support ‘The State of London’ with a donation. If you can help, please click on the button below to donate via PayPal.

 

Check out all the photos here!

Exactly eight years ago, on May 11, 2012, I set out on my bike, from my home in Brockley, in the London Borough of Lewisham, in south east London, to begin a project of photographing the whole of London — the 120 postcodes that make up what is known as the London postal district or the London postal area (those beginning WC, EC, E, SE, SW, W, NW and W). These postcodes cover 241 square miles, although I’ve also made some forays into the outlying areas that make up Greater London’s larger total of 607 square miles.

I’ve been a cyclist since about the age of four, and I’d started taking photographs when I was teenager, but my cycling had become sporadic, and I hadn’t had a camera for several years until my wife bought me a little Canon — an Ixus 115 HS — for Christmas 2011. That had renewed my interest in photography, and tying that in with cycling seemed like a good idea because I’d been hospitalised in March 2011 after I developed a rare blood disease that manifested itself in two of my toes turning black, and after I’d had my toes saved by wonderful NHS doctors, I’d started piling on the pounds sitting at a computer all day long, continuing the relentless Guantánamo work I’d been undertaking for the previous five years, which, perhaps, had contributed to me getting ill in the first place.

As I started the project, I had no idea really what I was letting myself in for — how massive London is, for example, so that even visiting all 120 of its postcodes would take me over two years, or how completely I would become enthralled by the capital that has been my home since 1985, but that was unknown to me beyond familiar haunts (the West End, obviously, parts of the City, and areas like Notting Hill and Ladbroke Grove, which I’ve always been drawn to), and places I’d lived (primarily, Brixton, Hammersmith, briefly, Forest Hill, Peckham and, for the last 20 years, Brockley).

That first day involved just a short circuit, down through Deptford to the River Thames at Greenwich, but as the weeks passed, I began making longer journeys — to central London through Bermondsey, much of which was unknown to me, along the River Thames from Deptford through Rotherhithe to Tower Bridge and beyond, and through the Greenwich Foot Tunnel, which led to the Thames Path along the northern shore of the Thames, as well as east London’s two major canals — the Regent’s Canal, which loops up through Hackney, Islington and Camden, eventually joining the Grand Union Canal at Little Venice, near Paddington, and the Limehouse Cut, which heads out through Bow, joining the River Lea, and passing through Stratford on its way north via Clapton and Tottenham — all routes that have become staples of my cycling, as well as the south eastern river route, through Greenwich, on to Charlton and Woolwich, and, on occasion, to Thamesmead and beyond. I have also, of course, become very familiar with the entire network of main roads — although I do tend to cycle on back streets as much as possible.

In the first few months, I had to cycle everywhere, rather than hopping on a train with my bike and getting a head start, as I have often done over the years, because it was the run-up to the Olympics, when bikes were banned on trains at all times, and not just, as usual, at rush hour. That led to me getting to know my immediate neighbourhood extremely well, including a variety of routes into central London, but it took until August 2012 before I was able to start ranging across the capital more widely.

As the project developed, I got to know the capital almost as an extension of myself. I revelled in the now-ness of being out in it, in all types of weather, on a bike, enjoying the light, the shadows, the storm clouds, the rain, the changing seasons, and I got to know it in detail, becoming particularly drawn to its council estates, and finding myself wounded by the many forms of desecration visited on the capital — most cynically, in the post-Olympic boom, with Boris Johnson as Mayor, in which ‘luxury’ housing developments, often featuring inappropriate tall towers, were approved everywhere, and through the cynical destruction of council estates for replacement developments that priced out locals, and provided massive profits for private developers.

On the fifth anniversary of that first conscious decision I took, to start chronicling the capital with a camera on a bike, I began publishing a photo a day on a Facebook page, called, unsurprisingly, ‘The State of London’, following up soon after with a Twitter page.

In terms of technology, I have also adapted over the years. 15 months after starting the project, I upgraded to a Canon Powershot SX270 HS, and went through a few of those before finally making a crucial upgrade last February, and buying a Canon Powershot G7 X Mk II, which has changed my life. I now get stunningly sharp images, and a zoom that enables me to take excellent long shots of buildings and streets without any distortion of the parallels — the equivalent of an SLR that I can keep in my pocket!

And while the first 13 months with my G7 X were an adventure in increased self-confidence, as I finally began to feel that I was doing justice to the scope of my project, the last seven weeks have taken it to a new level, as I have been chronicling London under the coronavirus lockdown, which has been an extraordinary experience, revisiting the city I have got to know so well over the last eight years, but finding it — and the West End and the City, in particular — almost entirely deserted, as though some sort of apocalypse has taken place that has rid the capital of all its inhabitants, but has left all the buildings standing.

I’m delighted to note that all of this work was noticed by ‘My London’, a website representing a number of London regional newspapers, which published eight of my photos last week, and I hope very much — although I know I keep saying this — that some sort of book and exhibition will be forthcoming, as well as a website. If you can help with any of this in any way, 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 (click on the following for Amazon in the US and the UK) 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 seven 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.

Lockdown Listening: Radiolab’s Six-Part, Four-Hour Series About Guantánamo Prisoner Abdul Latif Nasser, Cleared for Release But Still Held

An image produced by Will Paybarah for Radiolab’s series “The Other Latif,” about Guantánamo prisoner Abdul Latif Nasser.


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.

As the coronavirus continues to impact massively on our lives, via lockdowns and a global death count that has now reached over 250,000, spare a thought for the prisoners at Guantánamo, who are more isolated than ever. Although it is profoundly reassuring that the virus has not reached the prison — despite a US sailor contracting it on the naval base in March — the 40 men still held have not had any contact with anyone other than their captors since the US lockdown began.

Their attorneys are no longer able to fly out to see them, and, last Saturday, Carol Rosenberg of the New York Times tweeted that the International Committee of the Red Cross had “canceled its quarterly visit because of the virus.”  As she proceeded to explain, ICRC delegations have been “meeting with the detainees and prison commander since Camp X-Ray opened in 2002,” and the visit on May 22 would have been the ICRC’s 135th visit to the prison.

As the lockdown continues — and so many of us have more time on our hands than previously — now seems like a good opportunity for those of you who are interested in Guantánamo to listen to “The Other Latif,” an unprecedented six-part, four-hour series about one particular prisoner, Abdul Latif Nasser, the last Moroccan national in the prison, whose case we have covered many times over the years — see, for example, Abandoned in Guantánamo: Abdul Latif Nasser, Cleared for Release Three Years Ago, But Still Held, from last August, and Trump’s Personal Prisoners at Guantánamo: The Five Men Cleared for Release But Still Held, from last November.

Of the 40 men still held at Guantánamo, Abdul Latif Nasser is one of the most unfortunate, having been unanimously approved for release in July 2016 by a high-level US government review process, the Periodic Review Boards (PRBs), which was established under President Obama, but not released.

By the time the Moroccan authorities finalized the necessary paperwork and got it back to the US government, President Obama had just 22 days left in office, whereas, for many years, Congress had demanded that 30 days’ notification be given to lawmakers before any prisoner could be released — meaning, as a result, that Nasser missed being released by just eight days.

Donald Trump, of course, has no interest in releasing anyone from Guantánamo under any circumstances, leaving Nasser trapped, along with four other men approved for release but still held when Obama left office, 26 other men appropriately identified by the mainstream media as “forever prisoners,” who were approved for ongoing imprisonment by their PRBs, and just nine men facing, or having faced trials.

“The Other Latif” is the first ever multi-part series produced for Radiolab, part of WNYC Studios, which, in turn, is part of the esteemed New York Public Radio, and the series was inspired by a single tweet seen by Radiolab’s Latif Nasser — a tweet by Reprieve, dated January 19, 2017, which stated, “Read our urgent letter to @POTUS seeking intervention for Abdul Latif Nasser, cleared yet stranded at Guantánamo Bay.”

As the Radiolab website explains, “Latif Nasser always believed his name was unique, singular, completely his own,” until he made “a bizarre and shocking discovery,” that “he shares his name with another man: Abdul Latif Nasser, detainee 244 at Guantánamo Bay.” As the website proceeded to explain, the US government painted “a terrifying picture of The Other Latif as Al-Qaeda’s top explosives expert, and one of the most important advisors to Osama bin Laden.” However, Nasser’s lawyer, Shelby Sullivan Bennis, told Radiolab’s Latif that “he was at the wrong place at the wrong time, and that he was never even in Al-Qaeda.”

In seeking to establish the truth about his namesake, Latif was led “into a years-long investigation, picking apart evidence, attempting to separate fact from fiction, and trying to uncover what this man actually did or didn’t do.”

Some have criticized the end result for its tone. Josephine Livingstone of the New Republic, for example, lamented that Radiolab’s “house podcast style holds back what is otherwise an extraordinary series.” She stated that the series “contains what I can only call some beautiful lines of inquiry,” adding that “Nasser chases the story through sunflower fields in Sudan, through his own uncertain youth, along the halls of Guantánamo Bay itself,” and that “[t]hese investigations throw an unexpected and rather poignant light across the subject matter,” but suggests that “the show is constrained by a few flaws that feel endemic to trends within the medium of podcasting itself, rather than to Nasser’s particular work.”

These flaws involve, primarily, a kind of forced levity that is obviously very much at odds with the seriousness of the subject matter. As Johnstone describes it, Radiolab’s house style, “in this context — a very serious story with tragic consequences — feels like a deliberate signature imposed without concession to the topic.”

That said, she concludes her article by stating, “You’d be hard-pressed to listen to The Other Latif and not learn something, and that seems like success to me” — and there is indeed an extraordinary depth to Latif’s investigation, regardless of how it is often presented. Guantánamo is so rarely covered in depth in the mainstream media, and yet here is a four-hour radio series about a single prisoner in Guantánamo, defying every expectation that, at an editorial meeting, it would have been confined to, at most, a single one-hour show.

Instead, in the first episode, Latif begins to explore who his namesake may be, discussing the alleged evidence with Shelby Sullivan Bennis, and hearing about how he should have been released until Donald Trump happened; in the second episode he travels to Morocco to meet Nasser’s family, who welcome him so thoroughly that he feels his “objectivity” being threatened; in the third episode, he investigates Nasser’s time working on a sunflower farm in Sudan; in the fourth episode, he investigates his time in Afghanistan; in the fifth episode he visits Guantánamo; and in the sixth episode he visits Washington, D.C. to talk to those with knowledge of how and why Nasser was approved for release, but was not actually freed, which the website describes as “a surprisingly riveting story of paperwork, where what’s at stake is not only the fate of one man, but also the soul of America.”

We hope you have time listen to “The Other Latif,” and will share it if you find it useful.

* * * * *

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 (click on the following for Amazon in the US and the UK) 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 seven 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.

Radio: I Discuss the Coronavirus Changing the World Irrevocably, Plus Guantánamo and WikiLeaks, with Chris Cook on Gorilla Radio

Andy Worthington calling for the closure of Guantánamo outside the White House on January 11, 2020, the 18th anniversary of the prison’s opening (Photo: Witness Against Torture).


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.

 

Last Tuesday, I was delighted to speak to Chris Cook, for his radio show Gorilla Radio, beaming out to the world from Vancouver Island, in western Canada. Our full interview — an hour in total — can be found on Chris’s website. It’s also available here as an MP3, and I hope you have time to listen to it. A shorter version — about 25 minutes in total — will be broadcast in a few weeks’ time.

Chris began by playing an excerpt from the new release by my band The Four Fathers, ‘This Time We Win’, an eco-anthem inspired by the campaigning work of Greta Thunberg and Extinction Rebellion.

We then discussed my most recent articles about Guantánamo, 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, both dealing with one of the many insignificant prisoners still held at Guantánamo, out of the 40 men still held — Asadullah Haroon Gul, whose lawyers are trying to secure his repatriation as part of the Afghan peace process.

13 minutes into the interview, Chris asked me to discuss my recent article, Nine Years Ago, Julian Assange and WikiLeaks Released the Guantánamo Files, Which Should Have Led to the Prison’s Closure, which I was happy to do, because I worked with WikiLeaks as a media partner for the release of classified military files relating to the Guantánamo prisoners in April 2011, and I’m appreciative of every opportunity to point out that the information contained in the files — about patently false, or otherwise unreliable statements made by the prisoners, about their fellow prisoners, often through the use of torture or other forms of abuse — destroys whatever shallow reasons the US government has cobbled together over the years to justify the prison’s ongoing existence.

19 minutes into our interview, we began discussing the coronavirus, with particular reference to my article, The Coronavirus Lockdown, Hidden Suffering, and Delusions of a Rosy Future. I castigated the Tory government, headed by Boris Johnson, for their failure to take the virus seriously back in February and March, noting a dreadful TV interview in which Johnson spoke about the government’s preferred “herd immunity” option, involving people, as he put it, “taking it on the chin”, and allowing the virus to pass through the population. It was, as I explained, actually “a recipe for maximum slaughter.”

I also spoke about how difficult it is, right now, to know what the future holds, given that so much “business as usual” has shut down, although I did note some positives: the revelation that key workers are actually the most important people in society, how many people are suddenly thinking about what life means, and are more relaxed now that the insane consumerist treadmill has, at least temporarily, come to an end, and how, for once, the sky in London — and other major cities — is clean.

Unfortunately, as I also noted, it’s also of great relevance that millions of people who were working — many in the entertainment and hospitality sectors — suddenly have no money, and are dependant for their survival on a lumbering and long-undermined welfare system. I also spoke about a particular problem that isn’t being discussed enough — involving rents, both in a domestic context, and also in relation to businesses, noting that the shutdown is a nightmare for the many independent businesses who had been clinging on by their fingernails before the virus hit, and are in no position to defer their rents, to be paid back later.

At this point, the interview that will be broadcast came to an end, but Chris and I continued talking for another 35 minutes, for the longer version linked to above, which took in all manner of other aspects of the coronavirus story: the British effort to frame it within a “plucky” wartime context, the role of Brexit, Britain’s ideological civil war, and fears of governments — not just the British — using the crisis as an opportunity for increased authoritarianism.

I also spoke about how important I think it is for us to think about and talk about the massive changes the coronavirus crisis has brought, which are not, in general, being covered in the mainstream media, and expressed my hope that what passed for our culture before the crisis — which seemed to be based on becoming “crazier, faster, angrier, more stupid, using up more and more of what we only have finite amounts of” — might finally be brought to to an end, as I discussed in my article, Health Not Wealth: The World-Changing Lessons of the Coronavirus — although it may be that this “opportunity to rein in our most suicidal stupidity”, as I put it, will be missed.

44 minutes in, Chris asked me about my photo-journalism project, ‘The State of London’, which gave me an opportunity to talk about my eight-year project of cycling around London’s 120 postcodes, taking photos, and how I have been responding to the coronavirus crisis, still cycling around taking photos, and being particularly drawn to the City and the West End (London’s banking centre and its main shopping and entertainment district), which have almost entirely shut down over the last six weeks, and are empty in a way that no one has ever seen before.

An empty Regent Street on April 17, 2020, photographed as part of Andy’s ongoing photo-journalism project, ‘The State of London.’

There is much more in the interview than I’ve managed to discuss above, so I hope that, if it sounds interesting, you’ll check it out, and will share it if you find it useful.

To reiterate: we need to think about and talk about this crisis, and what it means, and not leave that to our politicians and our mainstream media to resolve, because, for a variety of reasons, they are not necessarily trustworthy or reliable. “Business as usual” may be difficult to restore, but that isn’t going to stop the money people from trying to press the re-set button, and those of us who, in particular, realise that we were already accelerating towards extinction even before the virus hit need to be ready to argue for and agitate for a better world when we come out of this.

Thanks for listening!

* * * * *

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 (click on the following for Amazon in the US and the UK) 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 seven 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.

Change the World! A Life in Activism: I Discuss Stonehenge, the Beanfield, Guantánamo and Environmental Protest with Alan Dearling

Andy Worthington calling for the closure of the prison at Guantánamo Bay outside the White House, singing and playing guitar, and challenging the police and bailiffs on the day of the eviction of the Old Tidemill Wildlife Garden in Deptford.


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.

 

At the start of the year, I was delighted to be asked by an old friend and colleague, Alan Dearling, the publisher of my second book, The Battle of the Beanfield, if I’d like to be interviewed about my history of activism for two publications he’s involved with — the music and counter-culture magazine Gonzo Weekly and International Times, the online revival of the famous counter-cultural magazine of the ‘60s and ‘70s.

In February, after my time- and attention-consuming annual visit to the US to call for the closure of the prison at Guantánamo Bay on the anniversary of its opening, I found the time to give Alan’s questions the attention they deserved, and the interview was finally published on the International Times website on March 21, just two days before the coronavirus lockdown began, changing all our lives, possibly forever. Last week, it was also published in Gonzo Weekly (#387/8, pp. 73-84), and I’m pleased to now be making it available to readers here on my website.

In a wide-ranging interview, Alan asked me about my involvement with the British counter-culture in the ’80s and ‘90s, which eventually led to me writing my first two books, Stonehenge: Celebration & Subversion, and, as noted above, The Battle of the Beanfield. my work on behalf of the prisoners in Guantánamo Bay, which has dominated much of my life for the last 14 years, and my more recent work as a housing activist — with a brief mention also of my photo-journalism project, ‘The State of London’, and my music with The Four Fathers.

I hope you have time to read the interview, and, while I’m acutely conscious that it doesn’t address the massively changed post-coronavirus world, you can find my reflections on life right now in my articles, Imagining a Post-Coronavirus World: Ending Ravenous Capitalism and Our Consumer-Driven Promiscuity, Health Not Wealth: The World-Changing Lessons of the Coronavirus, The Coronavirus Lockdown, Hidden Suffering, and Delusions of a Rosy Future and In the Midst of the Coronavirus Lockdown, Environmental Lessons from Extinction Rebellion, One Year On

Change the World! A Life in Activism with Andy Worthington

Alan Dearling: Always good to share some time with you, Andy. Our paths have kept on criss-crossing since back in the 1990s, possibly the late ’80s. Firstly, it was around your research for your Stonehenge book. I’d been working with a number of new Travellers, especially Fiona Earle and folk involved with the School Bus – the Travellers’ School Charity. What do you remember from those times?

Andy Worthington: I’d first come across the traveller community via the Stonehenge Free Festival, which I visited in 1983 and ’84, when I was a student. At the end of 1985 I moved to London – to Brixton, to be exact – and while I retained my interest in free festivals and the travellers’ movement, I was more generally caught up in living in Brixton in the Thatcher era – lots of squats, great local bands.

However, in 1987/88, when I was living on the hard-to-let Loughborough Estate, the first move towards the privatisation of social housing took place, via Housing Action Trusts (HATs). At six locations across the UK, including the Loughborough Estate and the neighbouring Angell Town Estate, Thatcher proposed taking estates out of council control, handing them over to her cronies to do up, and then renting them back to tenants – presumably, of course, at hugely inflated prices. The struggle against HATs came to dominate my life at that time, but I’m pleased to report that the Brixton HAT was seen off, particularly via the largely black community of Angell Town, led by a formidable organiser, Dora Boatemah.

Alan Dearling: What about your life before your Stonehenge book? Had you been much involved with the squatting and protest scene, particularly the anti-roads movement?

Andy Worthington: Yes, there was a pretty big squatting scene in Brixton when I moved there, and protest was also a part of life under Thatcher – I’m thinking the anti-apartheid protests, when Thatcher massively mobilised the police to protect the South African Embassy in Trafalgar Square, and, of course, the Poll Tax Riot in 1990. In 1991, I became involved in the rave scene, and was at the Castlemorton Free Festival in May 1992, and I also got involved in Reclaim the Streets, when it started in Camden, and also at subsequent events, like the occupation of the M41. I also got involved in protests against the Criminal Justice Act, the clampdown on our freedoms that followed Castlemorton, just as there had been a clampdown on our freedoms in the Public Order Act of 1986 that followed the Battle of the Beanfield in June 1985, when 1,400 police from six counties and the MoD had violently decommissioned a convoy of travellers en route to Stonehenge to set up what would have been the 12th annual Stonehenge Free Festival.

An aerial view of the Stonehenge Free Festival in 1984, as photographed from a police helicopter, and ‘liberated’ from the police at the 1991 Beanfield trial.

Alan Dearling: Your Stonehenge book brought together many examples of the importance of Stonehenge in ‘celebrations and rituals’ right through to the anarchic festies and parties of the ’70s and ’80s. Can you describe some of the lasting highlights of that book?

Andy Worthington: I love the British counter-culture, Alan, which was much more a thing of the ’70s than the ’60s, as pranksters like Bill ‘Ubi’ Dwyer and Wally Hope, who set up the Windsor and Stonehenge Free Festivals, sought to undermine ‘straight’ materialistic society, and to create alternative lifestyles, and it was great to chronicle these developments, and the development of traveller culture, from the early ’70s to the Battle of the Beanfield. Then, of course, just when Thatcher thought she had won, the rave scene and the road protest movement came out of nowhere to undermine her, and it was also exhilarating to chronicle those more recent events. Sadly, though, I have to say that, although I was pleased to also write about the long legal struggle to secure access to Stonehenge, in terms of a sustained counter-culture, the 21st century is far too readily recognisable as a period in which dull materialism has been dominant.

Alan Dearling: Did the Stonehenge book directly lead you onto the ‘Battle of the Beanfield’ book, which I helped contribute to and published through Enabler Publications?

Andy Worthington: Yes, I had become friends with Neil Goodwin, who co-directed the Beanfield documentary ‘Operation Solstice‘, and in fact had launched my Stonehenge book in June 2004 at the 491 Gallery in Leytonstone, where he lived, which was the last surviving outpost of the concerted resistance to the expansion of the M11 Link Road in the ’90s.

In discussion with Neil, it transpired that there were videos of full-length interviews with a cross-section of people involved in the Beanfield, and also that the police log of the day’s events existed, which had been ‘liberated’ from the 1991 trial, and so I thought that a follow-up to Stonehenge: Celebration and Subversion, looking in detail at the Beanfield via transcripts of the interviews, reproducing the police log, and linking it all together with original essays (some of which we ended up working on together), would be a good idea – as indeed it has been, as the book continues to attract interest as a defining example of state oppression in modern British history.

The covers of Stonehenge: Celebration and Subversion and The Battle of the Beanfield.

Alan Dearling: Like me, you seem to relish working with, and fighting alongside, society’s underdogs, the dispossessed, the marginalised ‘targets’ of governmental purges. For me it began with the early ‘60s CND protests, the anti-Vietnam War movement, the anti-apartheid movement, the pro-legalisation of drugs crews … and for you?

Andy Worthington: I was always interested in underdogs, Alan – something to do with a working class, Methodist upbringing, and, presumably, it also involves something fundamental about who I am. I became a lifelong pacifist after watching ‘The World At War’ when I was 10, and I always liked the idea of those on the margins who didn’t want to play by society’s rules. The state’s violent suppression of travellers at the Beanfield, and subsequently, really struck a chord with me, and, of course, for the last 14 years, I’ve been devoting most of my energies to some of the most maligned people on earth – the men held at the US prison at Guantanamo Bay.

Alan Dearling: So, what are the lessons-learned from the tragic government and police action at Savernake Forest in the so-called ‘beanfield’?

Andy Worthington: Sadly, I think, that the kind of dissent that was so widespread in that period was absolutely hated and detested by those in power, who were – and still are – determined to eradicate it. The irony, of course, is that in the short term, although Thatcher did huge damage to the travelling community, she failed to kill the spirit of dissent generally, with the rave scene and the road protest movement representing a massive counter-cultural explosion of energy and dissent into the John Major years, when, I think, the government’s control was at its weakest.

Sadly, however, a major change occurred under Tony Blair and New Labour, when, I genuinely believe, wealth became the only indicator of value in society, a housing bubble started that has been artificially sustained ever since, and which is crippling for the less well-off in society, and a cynical ‘climate of fear’ was introduced after the 9/11 attacks, which involved both a direct curtailment of some aspects of civil liberties, and a more general notion that any kind of public unruliness could be regarded as terrorism.

Alan Dearling: In many of my books, I’ve very much pro-actively tried to let Travellers, festival goers, eco-warriors and more, tell their own, his and her-stories. Not played the historian or journalist. Is that part of your approach too, as an author?

Andy Worthington: I’d have to say that it’s not, Alan – which is not to say that I don’t have massive respect for verbatim accounts, but more an acknowledgment that, as a journalist and historian, I am compelled to create my own narratives that, of course, draw on eye-witness accounts, but that are, perhaps above all, driven by my own need to understand and explain the significance of historical events.

Alan Dearling: The Battle of the Beanfield and the aftermath changed the Traveller and festival scene for many years. What’s your take on that?

Andy Worthington: It was a grim period for those involved, Alan. So many lives were ruined, and no one should ever forget that, or ever forgive those responsible. However, the fallout would have unanimously been much bleaker had it not been for the completely unexpected arrival of the rave scene, which in some cases then overlapped with the travellers’ movement, and the road protest movement, which, it should be noted, was a direct response to the clampdown on travelling after the Beanfield in the 1986 Public Order Act. Prevented from travelling and gathering freely, environmentally-minded activists took the logical next step – rooting themselves to the landscape when particular places like Twyford Down were facing destruction, and embarking on a whole new approach to dissent, locking on to heavy industrial machinery, and occupying trees.

Alan Dearling: From my personal perspective, from the late 1990s, I found myself looking outside of the UK for new and old enclaves of festivals and what some of us call ‘free cultural spaces.’ I spent quite a lot of time in Australia, following the likes of Daevid Allen from Gong and the original Nimbin and Terrannia/Daintree Forest protestors – that led to contacting all sorts of alternative and mainstream folk around the world who wanted to ‘live differently’, especially in more sustainable ways. Your focus was different, methinks. How and why did your involvement with the Guantánamo  Bay detainees occur?

Andy Worthington: My interest in Guantánamo  came about primarily because of my sympathy for underdogs, Alan, but a particular trigger was the research I did for my Stonehenge book looking at how, in 1999, the Law Lords had brought the 15-year summer solstice exclusion zone around Stonehenge to an end, after the police had arrested peaceful protestors on the roadside by the monument, and the Lords had ruled that, if protestors believe there is no other way for their complaints to be heard, and are not violent, the authorities have no right to arrest them. From looking so closely at the law, I felt empowered to examine another situation in which a legal position had been taken that needed examining, which was Guantánamo , and via my Stonehenge work I also felt empowered to shift my focus from civil liberties to full-blown human rights issues.

So I began researching and writing about Guantánamo in 2006, coinciding with the release, for the first time, of the names and nationalities of the prisoners, and several thousand pages of supporting documentation, and I brought all this information together over the course of 14 months of pretty much non-stop research and writing, to create a book, The Guantánamo Files, in which I attempted, for the first time, to tell the stories of the men held. That undertaking essentially made me a custodian of the men’s stories, and, ever since, I have continued to write about the prisoners, and to call for the prison’s closure, via thousands of articles I’ve written (mostly on my own website, but also, on occasion, for the Guardian, the New York Times and Al-Jazeera), as well as working with various organisations including the United Nations, WikiLeaks, Reprieve and Cageprisoners, co-directing a documentary film, and co-founding two campaigning groups.

Alan Dearling: I guess ‘civil liberties’ are at the heart of much of your writings, talks and activities …

Andy Worthington: Civil liberties and human rights, yes. The thing is, only eternal vigilance and resistance by people who care stops our leaders from oppressing us, although far too many people seem to have forgotten this. People died over the course of hundreds of years to secure everything that we take for granted as rights, and yet our fellow citizens seem, for the most part, to be completely unaware or uninterested.

And yet, within our lifetime, we’ve not only seen the violent suppression of unauthorised gatherings of thousands of people, we’ve also had to endure governments imprisoning foreign nationals without charge or trial on the basis of secret evidence, and holding British citizens and foreign nationals under a form of house arrest (also on the basis of secret evidence), and in recent years we’ve been stuck with governments who claim that they can strip us of our citizenship if they regard us a threat to the common good. And let’s not even get started on Brexit, and the bonfire of our rights that our current leaders have in mind. To be honest, I can’t really imagine a life that doesn’t involve resistance and dissent, and I fear for our future unless more people wake up to that reality.

Alan Dearling: Guantánamo Bay detention centre – and its closing was a central plank in Obama’s campaign for the presidency in America. Now we have Trump, and it’s still there. Is it really stupid to ask ‘why’?

Andy Worthington: Not really, no. The simple answer, of course, is that it’s still there because Obama didn’t want to expend political capital closing it, which he could have done, even though it’s worth reflecting on the fact that he faced unprecedented opposition from Republicans, who, for most of his presidency, controlled both houses of Congress. Trump, obviously, is a nightmare, and there can’t be any movement towards the closure of Guantánamo until he’s gone – and I’d say, until the Republicans lose power – but we should never forget that there are dark forces in the US establishment, not just Trump, who like having a prison where they can hold people without having to justify why – no federal court trials, no Geneva Conventions – which is exactly why it needs to be closed, because, while it currently holds only Muslims, its existence provides a precedent for any other group of “unpeople” to be held there in future.

Alan Dearling: Your personal investment in this cause must have taken its toll on you and your family. I’ve always expected you to move into a media or academic career … thoughts?

Andy Worthington: To be honest, the opportunities never arose, Alan. I never managed to find a way into academia, and the mainstream media was already a shrinking world when I finished writing The Guantánamo Files. No one, outside of the Miami Herald, for whom Guantánamo was local, was interested in relentless reporting on Guantánamo, so I took a very modern journalist/activist route, publishing via my own website, and, eventually, asking my readers to support me financially, and that has enabled me to survive as a writer and activist.

Alan Dearling: You’ve been spending a lot of time in the United States speaking about the Guantánamo Bay issues …

Andy Worthington: I have supporters who get me out there every January, to mark the anniversary of the prison’s opening, which was on January 11, 2002. So every year I’m part of a rally outside the White House on the 11th, calling out the president for his inaction, along with representatives of other rights groups, including Amnesty International USA, and a particular group that is close to my heart, Witness Against Torture, who dress in orange jumpsuits with hoods, and stage actions at various locations in the capital in the run-up to the anniversary, all while fasting. I tend to stay in the US for about a week and a half, undertaking a number of other speaking events, and also doing TV and radio interviews.

Andy Worthington calling for the closure of the prison at Guantánamo Bay outside the White House on January 11, 2020 (Photo: Witness Against Torture).

Socially it’s always a wonderful experience, as I get to hang out with the people who should really be running the US, but politically it’s challenging, as the US is so vast, and nationalist mind control is so prevalent, but there’s no way that I can give up this struggle until Guantánamo is closed, as that would be accepting defeat, and that simply mustn’t happen. When it comes to ‘generational’ injustices, you have to be in it for the long haul. Those looking for quick fixes might not be temperamentally suited to the fight against institutional lawlessness.

Alan Dearling: Inevitably, climate change and Extinction Rebellion are in my mind a lot these days, and a future that should be determined by young people. After all, they are the ones who are inheriting the mess. How are you involved?

Andy Worthington: I’ve been aware of the environmental crisis for many years, Reading Bill McKibben’s The End of Nature, around 30 years ago, actually threw me into something of a depression at the time. And of course most of the protest movements of the last 30 years – the road protest movement, obviously, but also the anti-globalisation movement, and the Occupy movement – have involved environmental issues to some extent, although no one found a way to make the global environmental crisis the focal point of a massive protest movement until Greta Thunberg and Extinction Rebellion arrived on the scene in 2018. And the reason both have been so successful is because we’re so clearly running out of time, as is reflected in the bleak assessments of so many scientists and NGOs. That said, it’s also a testament to Greta Thunberg’s captivating seriousness and single-mindedness that the schoolchildren’s climate strikes have become so big, and it’s a testament to XR that their branding and their insistence on non-violence have also been so attractive to so many people.

I was intrigued by XR when they first occupied several bridges in central London in October 2018, but it wasn’t until the occupation of several central London sites last Easter – and especially Waterloo Bridge – that I thought it might work; not, primarily, because of the organisers’ aims of getting over a million people to be arrested for non-violent direct action, but because, by bringing so many of London’s roads to a standstill, we showed what an alternative would actually look like, and it was wonderful. Everyone could breathe, and those paying attention were able to realise that most of the traffic that chokes up our roads so incessantly and that is so polluting is unnecessary. While we had free food kitchens on Waterloo Bridge, much of the traffic we stopped consisted of nothing more than vehicles delivering billions of soft drinks and pre-prepared corporate sandwiches from logistics warehouses to retail outlets across the capital, all of which is enviromentally insane.

Another example of the transformational nature of the occupation involved bringing to a temporary end the absurd number of lorries servicing London’s deranged corporate building industry, with its huge enthusiasm for demolishing structurally sound buildings (office blocks, council estates) for profit. So during the occupation, another world not only seemed possible; it also briefly flickered to life, enabling people to glimpse an alternative future free of the corporate tyranny that is destroying us.

Alan Dearling: What’s your best guess at the ‘what happens next, globally and in the UK’, say, in the next five years? So many issues around the environment, nationalism, fascism, racism, war?

Andy Worthington: That’s very difficult to forecast. My big hope is with young people, because the generations above have been so greedy that the youth are realising that every aspect of their lives involves being ripped off, and when that happens, of course, our leaders have lost, because you have to give people something to hang on to or you lose them – and who knows what will happen when people believe they have nothing to lose?

And also, as we’ve been discussing, the unprecedented, man-made environmental crisis that is already upon us is only adding to young people’s mobilisation – although it’s not just the young who are responding to it. However, I think it’s significant that when you measure young people’s concerns against those of old people, there is almost no common ground anymore. The older people are, the more they voted for Brexit, while young people are almost overwhelmingly pro-EU, and when it comes to our current leaders, they – Donald Trump and Boris Johnson – have absolutely nothing to offer the young. So my hope is that the youth will rise up and we will follow, because otherwise I’m struggling to find hope in a climate change-denying, aging white western world that is shifting noticeably towards the far right.

Alan Dearling: ‘Think globally – Act locally’ was the old environmental rallying cry. You’ve been very involved in many actions in London to help sustain the good bits and oppose rampant and destructive developments. I think that environmentalism, and creative responses to the housing crisis, and support for the Grenfell survivors are three of your heartfelt ‘causes’. I only know a little about what you’ve been getting up to. Can you describe some of your activities? I believe that the fight to preserve the Old Tidemill Wildlife Garden in Deptford has been a major campaign for you …

Andy Worthington: Well, I live in social housing, Alan, so its survival has always been of major concern to me. I want more of it, and I want it to be available to as many people as possible – secure and genuinely affordable housing, fundmentally created and managed on a not-for-profit basis. So this cynical council estate demolition programme, introduced by Tony Blair and New Labour, championed by the Tories, and also enthusiastically embraced by far too many Labour councils, absolutely enrages me. It’s a land grab, and it’s social cleansing, dispossessing existing social tenants by demolishing their homes, and creating new developments that consist largely of homes for private sale, but also all kinds of allegedly “affordable” rented properties that are no such thing.

This war on social housing has been going on for two decades now, and while I had spent some time writing about it when I could, it wasn’t until the Grenfell Tower fire in June 2017 that I realised that the contempt in which social tenants are held by the entire bureaucracy of social housing meant that our very lives are at risk. That was a turning point for me. I then became acutely aware of housing issues in the Borough of Lewisham, where I live, and soon came across campaigners for the Old Tidemill Wildlife Garden in Deptford, which I knew about, but had not previously been involved with.

This was a magical green space, formerly the garden for a primary school that had been moved, which the council and developers wanted to destroy as part of a development that also involved turning the old Victorian school into homes for private sale, and knocking down a structurally sound block of council flats – to build “affordable” flats on the site of the council homes, and also on the ruins of the garden. We’d been given “meanwhile use” of the garden while the plans were finalised, and had been opening it up as much as possible to the local community as an autonomous space – for people to get away from urban pressures, and to hold events – and when, in August 2018, the council asked for the keys back, we occupied it instead, and attracted widespread support both locally, and London-wide, and internationally. We were violently evicted by bailiffs hired by the council two months later, but it was an extraordinary experience, and I believe it played a major part in highlighting how corrupt the entire ‘regeneration’ programme is.

The occupied Old Tidemill Wildlife Garden in September 2018 (Photo: Andy Worthington).

Alan Dearling: Does it ever feel like you keep on being on the ‘losing side’ in your campaigns? Particularly after the recent General Election?

Andy Worthington: Well, I was just 16 when Margaret Thatcher was elected, so I wasn’t even old enough to vote, and when, at the age of 34, the Tories were finally ousted, their New Labour replacements largely consisted of more of the same. So my entire life, since the age of 16, has been under the yoke of neo-liberalism, but obviously I can’t give up on fighting for a better and fairer world. It’s just a pity that such unmitigatedly horrible policies have been dominating political life for so long.

Alan Dearling: You and your family have also found yourselves becoming very active on the musical front. You with the band ‘The Four Fathers’, which I gather is pretty political, and your son, Tyler, with his mates in the BAC Beatbox Academy and their hugely successful hip-hop, rap take on the ‘Frankenstein’ story. Tell me more.

Andy Worthington: Well, I got together with some mates to fulfil our unfulfilled musical fantasies about six years ago, and then found myself inspired to write new songs, most of which, unsurprisingly, reflected my very political view of the world. Our recordings can be found on Bandcamp, and we’ll be releasing some great new songs very soon [Note: since the interview took place, we have released two new songs, the eco-anthem ’This Time We Win’, and the anti-regeneration punk song, ‘Affordable’].

The Four Fathers at the Fox & Firkin in Lewisham, November 9, 2019.

My son, meanwhile, is currently out in Adelaide with his colleagues in the BAC Beatbox Academy, based at Battersea Arts Centre [Note: he returned just before the coronavirus lockdown began]. He and five other young people, working with two directors, a choreographer, and great sound and lighting people, have created an extraordinary ‘gig performance’ piece derived from ‘Frankenstein’ — ‘Frankenstein: How to Make a Monster’ — updating its themes for the social media, smartphone generation, and mixing singing, rapping and beatboxing in a way that, genuinely, hasn’t ever been heard before. They were the top rated show at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe last summer, where they were also a featured British Council show, and so Adelaide Festival Fringe, where they’re performing for a month, is just the start of a global adventure for these talented performers. I’m very proud!

Alan Dearling: That’s been fun. Good to catch up. We need to do it more often. So, what’s next on your current, and future, itinerary?

Andy Worthington: I’m currently involved in trying to prevent WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange’s extradition to the US, and also, of course, still involved in Guantanamo activism and housing activism, and still cycling around London on a daily basis taking photos for my ongoing photo-journalism project ‘The State of London‘, which I started nearly eight years ago, and which I hope to turn into a book this year.

* * * * *

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 (click on the following for Amazon in the US and the UK) 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 seven 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.

Nine Years Ago, Julian Assange and WikiLeaks Released the Guantánamo Files, Which Should Have Led to the Prison’s Closure

The logo for Wikileaks’ release of the previously classified Guantánamo military files in 2011, on which I worked as a media partner.


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.

 

Just over ten years ago, Pfc. Bradley Manning, stationed in Iraq as an intelligence analyst, undertook the largest leak in US history of classified government documents. These documents included 482,832 Army reports from the Afghan and Iraq wars, 251,287 US diplomatic cables from around the world, and classified military files relating to Guantánamo, as well as the “Collateral Murder” video, which showed US military personnel killing civilians from helicopters and laughing about it.

Manning leaked the files to WikiLeaks, founded by Julian Assange, which published the documents in 2010 and 2011. The last releases were of the Guantánamo Files, on which I worked as media partner, along with the Washington Post, McClatchy, the Daily Telegraph, Der Spiegel, Le Monde, El Pais, Aftonbladet, La Repubblica and L’Espresso.

WikiLeaks began publishing these files nine years ago today, on April 25, 2011, introduced by an article I had written about their significance, “WikiLeaks Reveals Secret Files on All Guantánamo Prisoners,” posted on my own website that same day as WikiLeaks Reveals Secret Guantánamo Files, Exposes Detention Policy as a Construct of Lies.

As I explained when I published an article a year ago commemorating this anniversary, “The files primarily revealed the extent to which the supposed evidence at Guantánamo largely consisted of statements made by unreliable witnesses, who told lies about their fellow prisoners, either because they were tortured or otherwise abused, or bribed with the promise of better living conditions.”

As I also explained in my article a year ago, I had been working with WikiLeaks as a media partner for the release of the files for several weeks. I had been contacted by them as I was recovering from a grave illness, but we had to leap into action suddenly after the Guardian and the New York Times, which — oh, the irony — had been leaked the files, suddenly began publishing them. I still stand by my introductory article, which I wrote in what I described as “a few hours of turbo-charged activity” after midnight on April 25, 2011, when I suddenly received notification of the imminent pre-emptive publication of the files by the Guardian and New York Times.

Just one week after the files’ publication, the US government assassinated Osama bin Laden, a move that seems to have taken place in order to discredit the revelations in the Guantánamo Files, as a false narrative was propagated, originating from the CIA, claiming that it was torture — and the existence of Guantánamo — that had led to bin Laden being located.

Despite my best efforts to expose the significance of the revelations in the Guantánamo Files, via a million-word analysis of 422 prisoners’ files over 34 articles, no one in the US government has ever been held accountable for the crimes of torture and prisoner abuse after 9/11, including — as the files so shockingly revealed — at Guantánamo.

Instead, Bradley Manning — now Chelsea Manning — was charged, tried and convicted in a court martial, and given a 35-year prison sentence (commuted by President Obama as he left office), while Julian Assange, after being given asylum in the Ecuadorian Embassy in London for nearly seven years, was arrested by the British authorities just over a year ago, on April 11, 2019, and imprisoned in the maximum-security Belmarsh prison, where he remains to this day, as he tries to prevent the British government’s plans to extradite him to the US to face espionage charges relating to the publication of the files leaked by Manning.

As I have repeatedly explained over the last year, beginning with a Facebook post, and my article, Defend Julian Assange and WikiLeaks: Press Freedom Depends On It (and also see here, here and here), the proposal to try Julian Assange for being a publisher ought to strike fear into the heart of anyone who cares about press freedom and freedom of speech.

As I put it in my Facebook post, his arrest “ought to be of great concern to anyone who values the ability of the media, in Western countries that claim to respect the freedom of the press, to publish information about the wrongdoing of Western governments that they would rather keep hidden.”

I also explained, “Those who leak information, like Chelsea Manning” — who was subsequently imprisoned because of her refusal to testify in a Grand Jury case against WikiLeaks, and only released last month, owing $256,000 in outrageously imposed fines — “need protection, and so do those in the media who make it publicly available; Julian Assange and WikiLeaks as much as those who worked with them on the release of documents — the New York Times and the Guardian, for example.”

I concluded my Facebook post by stating, “If the US succeeds in taking down Julian Assange, no journalists, no newspapers, no broadcasters will be safe, and we could, genuinely, see the end of press freedom, with all the ramifications that would have for our ability, in the West, to challenge what, otherwise, might well be an alarming and overbearing authoritarianism on the part of our governments.”

Unfortunately, the British government has shown no willingness to listen to the many powerful critics calling for Assange’s extradition to be stopped. Instead, he remains imprisoned in Belmarsh, where his companions are convicted criminals regarded as dangerous, and where, like prisoners everywhere, sadly, — including, of course, at Guantánamo — he is at risk from the coronavirus that is tearing through all manner of detention facilities around the world.

In addition, the judge in his extradition case is determined to proceed with his extradition hearing next month, even though it is obvious that the entire system of court cases and witnesses is simply not feasible under the coronavirus lockdown. As WikiLeaks spokesperson Joseph Farrell explained, “Julian’s lawyers cannot prepare adequately, witnesses will not be able to travel, and journalists and the public will not have free, adequate and safe access to the proceedings. Justice will neither be done, nor seen to be done.” Lawyers for Assange will be challenging this outrageous decision on Monday, but for now please think of Julian Assange and Bradley Manning, and the prisoners at Guantánamo on this anniversary.

For more on Assange’s case, please check out this new video published by the Intercept, featuring Glenn Greenwald speaking to “the international human rights lawyer Jen Robinson, who has long represented Assange in this and other legal proceedings, and the Washington Post’s media reporter Margaret Sullivan, who is one of the few major media figures to have denounced the Assange indictment.”

* * * * *

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 (click on the following for Amazon in the US and the UK) 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 seven 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 Eco-Anthem, ‘This Time We Win’, Recorded with Charlie Hart

The cover for ‘This Time We Win‘, the new single by The Four Fathers. Designed by Brendan Horstead.

On Earth Day (April 22), The Four Fathers released ‘This Time We Win’, a new online single on Bandcamp, produced by Charlie Hart, who also plays Wurlitzer piano on it.

‘This Time We Win’ is an eco-anthem that I wrote last year in response to the unfolding, man-made, global environmental catastrophe that we all face, and the powerful efforts to highlight it that have been made by the Swedish teenager Greta Thunberg and her Fridays For Future movement of striking schoolchildren, and the campaigning group Extinction Rebellion, who occupied central London a year ago.

We were planning to release it this spring, to coincide with what we anticipated would be renewed environmental activism, but what we couldn’t have foreseen was the arrival of the highly infectious novel coronavirus, COVID-19, and the complete shutdown of all significant gatherings of people, including political protests, to try and stop its spread.

Nevertheless, we felt that its message was still acutely relevant, and when I realized that this year’s Earth Day was the 50th anniversary of the very first Earth Day, which I mention in the lyrics, we decided to release it. You can check it out below, for free – and, of course, if you like it you can buy it as download for just £1 — or more if you’d like to help support us in there difficult times.

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

On that first Earth Day (April 22, 1970), 20 million Americans took to the streets to call for urgent environmental reform. Since then, Earth Day has been marked every year, around the world, and environmental activism — to prevent unprecedented man-made environmental destruction — has mobilised millions of people worldwide. However, those in power have either failed to take the message on board, or have failed to implement the sweeping changes that are necessary to prevent a global disaster of our own making.

On Earth Day in 1996, over 120 countries, including the US and China, signed the ground-breaking Paris Agreement, in which they pledged to try to keep the increase in global average temperature to 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels, recognizing that, otherwise, we face catastrophic climate change.

However, despite the Paris Agreement, greenhouse gas emissions have continued to rise at an alarming rate, as the prevailing capitalist system worldwide has, environmentally, engaged in increasingly disastrous behaviour. In October 2018, as the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) issued a report warning that we had just 12 years left to keep to a 1.5°C temperature change, to prevent an unprecedented environmental catastrophe, the two movements mentioned above arose to reinforce this message on the streets — Greta Thunberg’s Fridays for Future, and Extinction Rebellion.

The momentum of both forced political change, to the extent that governments and local governments worldwide rushed to declare “climate emergencies”, but as Greta Thunberg has maintained all along, politicians are not to be trusted, because they utter fine words, but do nothing, and that is basically still the case — as I also note in the lyrics.

Now, of course, some of the key demands of scientists and environmental campaigners — for an end to our culture of runaway global consumerism and pollution — have, at least temporarily, come to pass, although not for reasons connected to environmental concerns. Instead, the emergence of the coronavirus has led to massive economic shutdowns, as people are urged to stay at home to prevent its spread, which, in turn, has lead to a huge reduction in horribly polluting traffic, on the seas, in the air, and on our roads, a similarly huge decline in polluting industries, and a correspondingly significant decrease in greenhouse gas emissions.

However, despite these wonderful developments, it’s obvious that those in charge are already planning how to resurrect their environmentally suicidal “business as usual” as soon as they think they can get away with it.

We hope that, as they make their desperate plans, ‘This Time We Win’ will have resonance as a reminder that we can no longer afford to continue with “business is usual”, not just because of its inability to prevent the spread of a pandemic, but also because it remains environmentally ruinous to a truly alarming extent, and its revival, in all its hectic, polluting, money-making folly, must be resisted with as much energy as we can muster.

We hope you’re with us!

* * * * *

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 (click on the following for Amazon in the US and the UK) 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 seven 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.

Asadullah Haroon Gul, a “No-Value Detainee,” and One of the Last Two Afghans in Guantánamo, Asks to Be Freed

A photo of Guantánamo prisoner Asadullah Haroon Gul, taken by representatives of the International Committee of the Red Cross at Guantánamo, and made available by 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.

 

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 the prisoners at Guantánamo currently cut off more than ever from the outside world, as the coronavirus threat has brought visits from their attorneys to an end for the foreseeable future, the only way we can hear anything from any of the 40 men still held is if they have written to their attorneys, or if their attorneys have notes from previous meetings with their clients that have been unclassified after being reviewed by the Pentagon’s censorship team.

If any attorneys have any words of their clients that they’d like to share with the world, we’ll be happy to publish them, but in the meantime we’re delighted to cross-post below an article by Asadullah Haroon Gul, one of the last two Afghan prisoners in Guantánamo, and one of the last prisoners to arrive at the prison, in 2007, whose previous missive about Guantánamo — about the threat the coronavirus poses to the men still held — was the subject of our last article, just a few weeks ago.

In this second article, published in Afghanistan Times, Gul specifically focuses on his status as one of the last two Afghan prisoners in Guantánamo (mistakenly describing himself as the last Afghan in the prison, and overlooking Muhammad Rahim, who was the last prisoner to arrive at the prison, in March 2008), and also ties this in with descriptions of some of the other Afghan prisoners held and freed. He also makes a useful distinction, regarding the 40 men still held, between those regarded as “high-value detainees” (HVDs) held in the secretive Camp 7, and the rest — himself included — who he describes as “no value detainees” (NVDs).

Afghan prisoners formerly comprised the largest group in Guantánamo by nationality, with 219 of the 779 men held by the US military throughout the prison’s long history having been Afghans — all now released except for Gul. And while it is not quite appropriate to conclude, as he does, that the 218 Afghan prisoners released were all NVDs, it is not far from the truth. None were Al-Qaeda, although a handful held senior positions within the Taliban, although they, of course, should have been held as prisoners of war, under the Geneva Conventions, rather than being held as “enemy combatants” without rights.

The same is true of all the prisoners held, of course, but especially so in the case of the Afghans whose country was invaded. Sadly, US intelligence was so poor that, of the 219 Afghans held, the overwhelming majority were nobodies — random Afghans obliged to fight with the Taliban, the wrong suspects swept up in a variety of largely ill-conceived raids, and, in perhaps dozens of cases, people who were working with the Americans, but had lies told about them by rivals, and who ended up being sent to Guantánamo because the US authorities, with total contempt for justice, had no interest in establishing the truth about those they were holding.

Gul mentions some of these men, the truth of whose stories I helped to expose from 2007, when my book The Guantánamo Files was published, until their eventual release, although he doesn’t mention a particularly outrageous example of this, which involved Abdul Razzaq Hekmati, a lorry driver who had helped a number of prominent anti-Taliban figures escape from a Taliban jail, but who had ended up in Guantánamo because rivals had lied about him. Despite persistently calling for the US authorities to call Afghan officials to find out who he was, Hekmati died of cancer at Guantánamo in December 2007, with the US still maintaining, after his death, the lies they had told about him while he was alive, a situation that I ended up exposing, with Carlotta Gall, in a front-page story for the New York Times in February 2008.

Another sad piece of information in Gul’s article is his revelation that he has “never been visited by an Afghan delegation,” a shameful state of affairs, but one that presumably reveals that his own government knew that he was a nobody, but wasn’t even prepared to advocate for his release. I hope Afghan government officials are finally paying attention to Gul’s cries for help from Guantánamo, and I hope you all have time to read his words, and will share them if you find them useful.

I Am A Serial Number

By Guantánamo ISN 3148 (aka Asadullah Haroon), Afghanistan Times, April 5, 2020

The Guantánamo military base is almost invisible to the world; the detainees held here have totally vanished from the world. We are nameless, faceless, referenced by an internment “serial number” – as if we are pieces of hardware, no longer human. A name makes a person individual and unique.  Serial numbers are for inanimate objects. I am No. 3148. It is easy to mistreat something called No. 3148. A number does not have dignity.

Importantly, then, I am also Asadullah Haroon, the Afghan citizen from Nangarhar. My wife waits year after year for news that her husband is coming home. My infant baby, Mariam, is now a teenager.

Twenty-three of us “nobody numbers” remain here in Guantánamo. None is Afghan but me, so there is nobody who speaks either Pashto or Dari and I am in danger of losing my language. At least No. 1094, No. 1460 and No. 1461 are Pakistani, and we can speak some Urdu. No. 1460 was so badly tortured, though, that he would rather live in another block essentially alone with his sad thoughts. [Note: No. 1094 is Saifullah Paracha, well-known to “Close Guantánamo” readers, No. 1461 is Ahmed Rabbani, who has also spoken regularly about his imprisonment, and No. 1460 is his brother Abdul Rahim].

Closing out the “no value detainees” (the NVDs) we have No. 27, No. 28, No. 38, No. 63, No. 242, No. 244, No. 309, No. 569, No. 682, No. 685, No. 694, No. 708, No. 841, No. 893, No. 1016, No. 1017, No. 1453, No. 1457, and No. 1463.

At its peak, there were some 760 “no value detainees” at Guantánamo — the largest group were Afghan, some 219 of us NVDs. Thus far, 218 Afghan NVDs have been released, and just one remains — me.

Some will think that because I am still here after 13 years, I must be guilty of some crime — even though I have been held without charges or a trial. But then prejudiced people thought that everyone here was a “terrorist.” We are prisoners of a war that has long since ended. And even those who take sides in a war, one in which their country is invaded and the invader kills children with drones, have done nothing wrong. The only way to commit crimes in a war is to do what the U.S. has done, and deliberately kill civilians and torture prisoners of war like me.

As the faceless and numbered men told their stories, the world began to understand what terrible mistakes had been made in sweeping up so many people and bringing them half way around the world to this Cuban prison.

There was No. 1154, Dr. Ali Shah Mousovi, a paediatrician from Gardez, who fled the Taliban and worked for the United Nations. His wife, an economist, and three small children, waited for years before he was released without charge.

There was No. 1009, Haji Nusrat Khan, an 80-year-old from Sarobi, who was brought to Guantánamo on a stretcher. A stroke had left him paralyzed and bedridden. “Look at my white beard. The Americans took me from my home and country with a white beard,” he said. “I have done nothing at all. I have not said a word against the Americans.” He, like, all the rest, was never charged. His old age didn’t safeguard him from “countless humiliations”: he was beaten, injured, stripped naked in front of female soldiers. On one occasion, soldiers tied him tightly to a wooden board and left him lying on the ground for some time. One of the soldiers finally glanced down and asked how he was doing. When the interpreter translated. Nusrat began to laugh. “You must be an idiot to ask me this,” he said. “I am a paralyzed old man, and you have tied me like a dog on the floor. Look at me. How do you think I am doing?” Soon after his release, Nusrat died in his Sarobi home.

There was No. 1001, Hafizullah Shabaz Khail, a University-educated pharmacist and a staunch supporter of Hamid Karzai’s ascendancy. There was No. 1021, Chaman Gul, who worried incessantly about his aging mother. And No. 560, Afghan Wali Mohammad, who used humour to mask his pain. There was No. 1002, Afghan school teacher Abdul Matin, accused of owning a Casio watch. The list goes on. After years of mistreatment, mental anguish and incalculable indignities, 218 of 219 have been released because they were no threat to anyone, although no doubt some suffer profound depression after their experience.

That means the U.S. has released 99.5% of the Afghan NVD’s. That leaves only me. I am No. 3148, Asad Haroon, and I have watched the others go home. I try to keep busy so I don’t go mad. Sometimes I wonder whether my government has totally forgotten me — I have never been visited by an Afghan delegation. I worry that my countrymen do not care about me. I am nobody — I admit it. I was taken from my home country of Afghanistan all those years ago, flown to this dreadful place, and forgotten. I see the others being released and, while I am happy for them and for their families, it deepens my gloom.

As prisoners are released every day as part of the peace agreement, or to let them go home to help their families during the crisis of this virus, I ask myself the same question every day: Will I ever see my wife and daughter again? Will my respected father and my dear mother still be alive even if I do come home?

* * * * *

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 (click on the following for Amazon in the US and the UK) 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 seven 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.