Andy Worthington's Blog, page 32

16 Years Since John Yoo and Jay Bybee’s “Torture Memos” Were Issued, Abu Zubaydah Remains in Guantánamo, Silenced and Alone

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Year 2, Day 100 of My Photo Project, ‘The State of London’, Recording A City Gutted by Greed Since the Olympics

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Yesterday, August 18, marked one year and 100 days since I began posting a photo a day on ‘The State of London’, a Facebook page I established on May 11 last year, marking five years since I first began cycling around London on my bike, taking photos of whatever interested me. You can see all the photos to date here.

In the six years and three months since I began this photo-journalistic project, I have been out on my bike almost every day, cycling many thousands of miles across all of London’s 120 postcodes, and discovering that what interests me are the changing seasons, the changing weather, the River Thames and the capital’s other rivers, its canals, its parks, and my own idiosyncratic take on the built environment, in which I’m drawn to the old, the odd, the idiosyncratic, the run-down, the derelict and the abandoned, and also to social housing — the great post-war estates, currently facing an unprecedented threat from councils across the political spectrum, who, financially squeezed by central government, are entering into deals with property developers to demolish their estates and to build over-priced new developments from which almost all the existing tenants are priced out, an epidemic of social cleansing that is largely unnoticed by those who are not directly affected by it. 

When these homes are destroyed, social rents (generally set at around a third of market rents) are also conveniently wiped out, replaced by properties for private sale, for market rent, for “affordable” rents that aren’t affordable at all, being set at 80% of market rents, and for shared ownership, an alarming scam designed to fool renters into believing that they are property owners. To add to Londoners’ woes, housing associations, which have increasingly taken over councils’ housing role since the Thatcher years, have also been severely squeezed, and many have, in response, also joined the private property development gravy train.

Along with the destruction of social housing, the last six years have also seen an unprecedented land grab in general, with almost every empty building or undeveloped or abandoned piece of industrial land in the London area seized on by developers, and also subjected to a similar orgy of over-development.

The cumulative effect of all this is a capital that is now astronomically over-priced, with largely empty new tower blocks everywhere, their apartments bought by foreign investors but deliberately left empty, while ordinary Londoners struggle to pay exorbitant market rents in an unfettered market in which greed is dominant.

My entire photo-journalistic project has taken place under Tory rule, of course, as the Tories, taking advantage of the fallout from the global economic crash in 2008, returned to power after 13 years’ absence in May 2010, with the support of the hapless Liberal Democrats, and introduced a cynical “age of austerity”, bringing swingeing cuts to the state provision of services, and making life increasingly harsh for the poorer members of society.

Last June, the cumulative effects of cuts, profiteering and disdain for those in social housing manifested itself in the most horrific manner, when Grenfell Tower, a tower block in west London, was consumed in an inferno that killed 72 people, who died because safety cost-cutting and profiteering had been prioritised by those who should have been responsible for the residents’ safety, from central government, to local government, the management company appointed by them to manage their homes, and the various contractors, all of whom should have known that there was no excuse whatsoever for applying highly flammable cladding to a tower block, and, while doing so, fatally compromising the building’s structural integrity.

While the Grenfell disaster and the fallout from it has regularly featured in ‘The State of London’ over the last 14 months, the government has been dragging its heels coming up with money to remove insanely flammable cladding from other tower blocks (and, with Kensington and Chelsea council, actually re-housing the Grenfell survivors), although it’s worth noting that they can always find unprecedented amounts of money for huge vanity projects or infrastructure projects, like 2012’s Olympic Games or the colossal Crossrail project, currently nearing completion.

I was recently reminded of the pernicious effect of the Olympics, when Marian, a supporter of ‘The State of London’, wrote a comment on Facebook about how the “2012 [Olympics] and the build up to it was a sad time for London. The year rapacious greed got its way.”

In response, I wrote, “Yes, there’s a long history of the Olympics leading to massive social cleansing and insane land price inflation. It’s not an international sporting competition; it’s a massive establishment gangster racket.”

These are conclusions I reached at the time of the Olympics (see Our Olympic Hell: A Militarised, Corporate, Jingoistic Disgrace, in which I discussed how social cleansing and inflated property values are hallmarks of the Olympics’ legacy for host cities), but Marian’s comment powerfully reminded me of the significance of the Olympics, which has profoundly affected everything that has followed — “The year rapacious greed got its way”, indeed.

In a nutshell, the modern era of greed began under Margaret Thatcher, and the housing bubble that still plagues us began 20 years ago under New Labour, but the Olympics, with its colossal outpouring of nationalistic pride, provided an unprecedented boost to the Tories’ popularity, as well as cementing London’s status internationally as a super-cool city, and providing a perfect opportunity to maintain and even expand the capital’s fevered housing bubble.

Since then, the Brexit vote has dented London’s status, and if we actually leave the EU it surely cannot fail to inflict some serious damage on the housing market, but I can’t see anything on the horizon that can properly derail the Olympics’ effect of social cleansing and stratospheric housing greed, which, as I reflect on my photo project, has coloured the thousands of miles I have travelled over the last six years.

In conclusion, the last lines of my song ‘London’, written for my band The Four Fathers, seem particularly relevant:

London, you’re on a life support machine

In the basement of one of those hundreds of towers being built for a foreign elite

And oh my baby, I hope that you rise again

And throw off these rich parasites like you have every now and then

And I’ll keep fighting against the dying of the light

But without some kind of revolution the future doesn’t look too bright to me

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), and for his photo project ‘The State of London’ he publishes a photo a day from six 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 a new 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.

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.

Video: The Battle of the Beanfield, Free Festivals and Traveller History with Andy Worthington on Bristol Community Radio

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Last week I was in Bristol for a screening of ‘Concrete Soldiers UK’, the new documentary film about the cynical destruction of council estates, and residents’ brave resistance to the destruction of their homes, which I narrate. The screening was at the People’s Republic of Stoke Croft, a pioneering community space in a once-neglected area of Bristol that has now started to be devoured by the insatiable profiteers of the “regeneration” industry. My article about the screening is here, and a brief report about the screening is here, and while I was there I was also interviewed by Tony Gosling for Bristol Community Radio, which is based in the PRSC complex.

Tony and I have known each other for many years, through a shared interest in Britain’s counter-culture, and it was great to take part in his politics show for the station as the author of two very relevant books, Stonehenge: Celebration & Subversion and The Battle of the Beanfield. Although we discussed the film, that interview has not yet been broadcast, because Tony’s primary focus was on discussing the traveller community of the 1970s and 80s, the free festival scene, focused particularly on Stonehenge and Glastonbury, and the Battle of the Beanfield, on June 1, 1985, when, with Margaret Thatcher’s blessing, 1,400 police from six counties and the MoD violently decommissioned the convoy of vehicles — containing men, women and children — that was en route to Stonehenge to establish what would have been the 12th annual Stonehenge Free Festival.

To discuss the above, Tony had also contacted Sean, a veteran traveller, who still lives in a vehicle, and still upholds the DiY values of that time. We had a wonderful discussion over 40 minutes, which Tony has put on YouTube, illustrated with traveller photos by Alan Lodge, and which I’ve cross-posted below.

The discussion began with Sean, a sprightly and articulate 66-year old mechanic (whose skills very invaluable to the travelling community) talking about life on the road in the 70s and 80s (prior to the Beanfield), the reasons people took to the road (because of Margaret Thatcher’s destruction of the economy), and what life was like travelling in small convoys, and constantly being harried by the police.

I joined in to discuss specific aspects of this history, notably my recollections of the mass discontent that led to the traveller and free festival scenes exploding the the 1980s, and, with Sean, discussing the important chain of events that ultimately led to the Beanfield, beginning with the extreme police violence at Nostell Priory, a festival in Yorkshire in the summer of 1984, when, as Sean remembers, one particularly violent act involved a pregnant woman being assaulted. Crucially, Nostell Priory took place just after the police violence at Orgreave, as part of the Miner’s Strike, and while it remains apparent that a full investigation into Orgreave should take place, its remit should also include an investigations of what happened at Nostell Priory, and everything that followed, up to and including the Beanfield. For first-hand analysis, see this chapter from The Battle of the Beanfield, featuring an interview with Phil Shakesby, aka Phil the Beer, who, sadly, died in 2010.

After Nostell Priory, the police harried the convoy back to southern England. Some joined a peace camp outside RAF Molesworth, in Cambridgeshire, which was meant to be the second cruise missile base after Greenham Common. That camp, the Rainbow Village, was evicted in February 1985 in the largest peacetime mobilisation of troops in modern British history, symbolically led by defence secretary Michael Heseltine, and from then on those who were intending to set up the Stonehenge festival were constantly harassed, on the basis of an injunction preventing 84 named individuals from going anywhere near Stonehenge, leading, eventually, to the brutal events of the Beanfield.

Is the UK on the verge of a second traveller revolution?

It is always worthwhile to discuss this history, because it not only shines a light on serious crimes committed by the state, and on how the establishment has no patience whatsoever with upstarts asking questions about land ownership and land reform, but also reminds us how even comparatively recent history can seem ancient, as we continue to endure the hugely materialistic times we are currently living in, overlaid with a cynical “age of fear”, opportunistically introduced after the 9/11 attacks, that has done away with any notion that living in Britain involves any kind of meaningful “freedom.”

Of more contemporary relevance, revisiting the travellers’ movement of the 70s and 80s also led to a discussion of whether the time is ripe for a second traveller revolution, a valid question given that the circumstances that prompted the first — work problems and housing need, essentially — are as pressingly relevant now as they were then. We may not have 3m unemployed in quite the same stark manner as in the Thatcher years, but unemployment has been carefully hidden through decades of bureaucratic subterfuge, and for those who are in work the perilous reality for many is that they are part of the rise of the precariat — plagued by zero hours contracts, and a stunning absence of anything well-paid and protected.

On the housing front, the situation is far worse than it was in the 70s and 80s, as unfettered greed has been dominant for the last 20 years, sending house prices spiralling out of control, and also leading to a hideously overpriced rental market, a situation exacerbated by the savage decline in social housing over the same time period.

Nowadays, of course, it’s much harder than it was 30 or 40 years ago to simply buy an old vehicle and take to the road, but the impetus is certainly there. Figures are heard to come by, and the government likes it that way, but above and beyond the horrendous rough sleeping figures and the estimates of vast numbers of sofa surfers, stories emerge regularly of working people living in their cars and vans, and anyone who has paid attention while walking or cycling around cities will have found people living in every liminal space imaginable — homeless people in parks, and others living in tents, in underpasses, or in scraps of generally unmonitored woodland, for example, and in January this year rural homelessness also emerged as a topic crying out for further investigation.

In addition, although the Tories cynically and brutally outlawed domestic squatting in 2012, huge numbers of empty commercial premises are now squatted. Then there are people living in containers, and in caravans — a whole under-explored area in which, I strongly suspect, the traditional efforts to prevent people living in caravans all year round are falling away spectacularly, as are the supposed restrictions on people living in tents. During my West Country holiday that preceded my Bristol visit, it was common to find seasonal workers living for the whole summer season in tents.

I can’t see any immediate way that there could be a second traveller revolution, but I could certainly see some kind of situation in which the marginalised in modern society, who are more numerous than anyone in authority wants to acknowledge , could start to become more organised, and to cause the establishment the same kind of headaches that were widespread from the 70s to the 90s, and which were only stifled by the soporific New Labour project, and the excuse for the suppression of civil liberties that was provided by the 9/11 attacks.

The time is ripe for some kind of housing-based insurgency, given the establishment’s comprehensive failure to do anything to stem the chronic flow of wealth from the poor to the rich, which continues to make life harder, with every passing year, for those in society who aren’t wealthy. It is something of miracle that major civil unrest hasn’t already happened.

Note: Also see here for the show, which is also available as an MP3 here, and which, after the section on travellers, also featured an interview with the inspiring activists Grandparents for a Safe Earth.

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), and for his photo project ‘The State of London’ he publishes a photo a day from six 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 a new 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 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.

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.

Abdul Latif Nasser’s Story: Imagine Being Told You Were Leaving Guantánamo, But Then Donald Trump Became President

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Brexit: Inspiring New Polling Analysis Shows Majority of Constituencies Now Support Remaining in the EU

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There was some rare good news in the Observer on Sunday, when, two years and two months since 37.47% of the eligible electorate voted to leave the EU (17.4m people, compared to the 16.1m who voted to remain), the impossibility of this proposal, and the realisation that the government tasked with implementing it is spectacularly, almost inconceivably incompetent, has finally led to a situation in which support has swung back significantly for staying in the EU. 

Just to be clear before I proceed with explaining why this is good news, I’m no enthusiast for the EU’s neo-liberal tendencies, or for the way the Euro project was used to strangle Greece, but pragmatically we are tied to the EU through 43 years of laws and treaties, and our economic health depends on our involvement in the single market and the customs union, which allow the frictionless trade with the EU that makes up by far and away our biggest trading market. In addition, the free movement of people across the EU is, in general, a positive development, and not the righteous target of the misplaced fears of those with a tendency to insularity, racism and xenophobia. We are all nations of immigrants, and immigrants have an overwhelming tendency to assimilate.  

The Observer’s headline that encouraged a surge of optimism on my part, and on the part of so many other Remain voters, was “More than 100 seats that backed Brexit now want to remain in EU”, and its tagline explained, “Major new analysis shows most constituencies now have majority who want to Remain.” Further spelling out the change, the text of the article confirmed the study’s conclusion that “most seats in Britain now contain a majority of voters who want to stay in the EU.”

The research was undertaken by the Focaldata, a consumer analytics company, which “compiled the breakdown by modelling two YouGov polls of more than 15,000 people in total, conducted before and after Theresa May published her proposed Brexit deal on 6 July”, itself an unworkable “soft Brexit” proposal, which nevertheless enraged the evangelical Brexiteers on the right of the Tory Party, whose arrogance and capacity for self-delusion apparently knows no bounds.

As the Observer explained, the research “combined the polling with detailed census information and data from the Office for National Statistics”, and “was jointly commissioned by Best for Britain, which is campaigning against Brexit, and the anti-racist Hope Not Hate group.”

The Observer proceeded to explain that the analysis, which was “one of the most comprehensive assessments of Brexit sentiment since the referendum”, indicates a shift driven mainly “by doubts among Labour voters who backed Leave”, and that, as a result, “the trend is starkest in the north of England and Wales – Labour heartlands in which Brexit sentiment appears to be changing.” 

Pointedly, the article added that the analysis “will heap further pressure on Jeremy Corbyn to soften the party’s opposition to reconsidering Britain’s EU departure.” By any measure, Corbyn, an old left Labourite who shares the old left’s suspicions regarding the corporate aims of the EU project, has been a disappointment on the EU referendum, although by respecting the Labour Party’s democratic structure, and handing over leadership on Brexit to the very capable Keir Starmer, barrister and Remainer, who has set six tests that must be passed before we leave the EU, tests that require no damage to the economy and therefore seem to be unworkable, he appears to have ceded control over Brexit. 

In addition, on a pragmatic basis, the Labour Party has spent two years sitting on the fence, content to watch the Tories implode, without confronting the difficulty of challenging their own Leave voters, who made up about a third of their voters. 

As the results from Focaldata show, however, it now appears to be time for Labour to stop sitting on the fence and actively encourage its voters to oppose Brexit and either to support a second referendum, or to endorse the right of Parliament to refuse to support our departure from the EU. 

The former is better, in that it gives the people a right to change their mind, but I fear that the disgusting pro-Leave right-wing media would do all they can to encourage some of the estimated 12.9 million people who didn’t vote in the EU referendum, and have probably never voted, to repeat the 2016 result by voting for the first time ever, and voting Leave. In addition, as the EU referendum was a vote to return sovereignty to the UK, and sovereignty resides in Parliament, and not with the Prime Minister or the Queen, it would be fitting for MPs, who generally supported remaining in the EU by a 2:1 majority, to be responsible themselves for the final refusal to leave the EU.

The polling also provided details of some of the MPs at risk because of shifts in their constituencies, with the Observer noting that, “Among the constituencies to switch from Leave to Remain is that of Boris Johnson, the former foreign secretary and face of the Leave campaign. Support for Remain in his Uxbridge and South Ruislip constituency has risen from 43.6% to 51.4%, according to the new model.” 

The Observer added, “Surrey Heath, the constituency of the other Leave figurehead, Michael Gove, also emerged as having a pro-Remain majority. Support for Remain increased from 48% in 2016 to 50.2%.” The paper also noted, “The seats of three pro-Leave Labour MPs switched to Remain. Birkenhead, Frank Field’s constituency, now has a 58.4% majority in favour of Remain. Graham Stringer’s Blackley and Broughton constituency now has a 59% in favour of Remain. Kelvin Hopkins’s Luton North seat now has 53.1% backing Remain.”

From Leave to Remain in Swansea

In an accompanying article, the Observer travelled to Swansea to see how the shift assessed by Focaldata played out on the ground. Tom Wall interviewed John, a cleaner in Swansea’s celebrated indoor market, who “ponder[ed] his momentous decision to vote Leave in the EU referendum.” 

“If I had the chance, I’d change my vote,” he said. “There has been talk of a lot of job losses and I’m not happy with that. It’s just a mess. I don’t think they know what they are doing.”

Geraint Davies, the pro-EU Labour MP for Swansea West, told the Observer that the dramatic swing was because of “voters’ frustrations with the tortuous negotiations, and a growing realisation that the tempting promises about inward investment and jobs will come to little in the end.” As he said, “People voted to leave the EU on the promise of more money for the NHS from the membership fee, access to markets and more trading opportunities, and taking back control of our borders. People are now realising that a lot of those promises won’t be delivered.”

He also pointed to “a growing feeling that Swansea is losing out rather than benefiting from Brexit”, explaining, as the paper described it, that “[r]ecent plans for a £1.3bn tidal lagoon in Swansea Bay to generate renewable power and proposals to electrify the rail line between Cardiff and Swansea have both been dropped by the government.” As he said, “The overall amount of capital expenditure is being constrained because we have to pay a €40bn divorce bill for leaving the EU. People are beginning to see that some of the big promises about investment are evaporating, and that is feeding into this feeling that we are being left out in the cold again.”

Also in the market, Tom Wall spoke to Rachel Jones, a sweet-seller working at a family stall. She said, “I think it was a wasted vote, 110%. If I knew that it was going to be like this, I probably wouldn’t have turned up to vote. You understand it is going to take time, but it doesn’t seem to be going anywhere.” She added that she “wanted to register a protest vote by putting her cross in the Leave box”, explaining, “Swansea is having a really hard time at the moment. If you walk around you just see boarded-up businesses and charity shops.” But now, she said, “uncertainty around Brexit risks the very future of the market.” As she put it, “People are frightened to spend money. Things have gone up in price but wages haven’t gone up. None of us knows what is going to happen.”

At a food bank on Swansea’s post-industrial eastern fringe, Chris Lewis, a Swansea-born and bred Baptist minister who runs the food bank, told the Observer that Swansea had “never fully recovered from the decline of heavy industry in the 20th century.” As he put it, “It is a significantly deprived area. Regeneration hasn’t really replaced the industrial base that employed people in this area.” He added that “many Leave voters were angry about the state of their community, which had been further impoverished by benefit cuts and austerity.” As he stated, “Some of it was a protest vote. They felt alienated by sort of every elitist, privileged government. There was a degree of racism too – some people felt threatened by immigration.” However, “he believes Leavers are now switching sides as the reality of a Tory Brexit dawns on them”, in the Observer’s words. As he put it, “Some of the people who voted as a protest have flipped. They think these posh idiots are leading us to disaster in a charge of the light brigade.”

While this is all — finally — very positive, it remains to be seen how this polling can be turned into a strategic advantage, rather than just a morale booster, however welcome that may be after 26 months of existential torment. On a brighter note, it has been somehow apt — a sense of poetic justice comes to mind — to see the Tories destroying themselves over Brexit, led by the most incompetent leader ever, with chief Brexit cheerleader David Davis finally acknowledging the impossibility of his task, and with every pro-Brexit enthusiast revealing the extent of their mental deficiency every time they try to make out that Brexit will be anything other than a disaster for our economy, our standing in the world, and our necessary place as a country that relies on and welcomes immigrants in a world that only works because, across borders, immigrants are welcomed for the contributions they make to all our economies.

It may be that, come next March, when we are supposed to leave the EU, there will be some sort of fudge that prolongs the agony, perhaps for many years, but it may also be that it will signal the definitive implosion of, and self-willed destruction of the Tory Party. However, while very little in life would please me more, it remains even more important that, whatever it takes, the deranged business of leaving the EU is stopped, definitively.

Note: For the No Brexit badge, see 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), and for his photo project ‘The State of London’ he publishes a photo a day from six 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 a new 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 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.

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 World Has Forgotten Me” Says Ahmed Rabbani, 95-Pound Hunger Striker in Guantánamo

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Photos: The WOMAD World Music Festival 2018 – Global Joy and Creativity, Threatened by Brexit

See my photos on Flickr here!
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Since 2002, the end of July every year has been defined for me by my participation in WOMAD (World of Music, Art and Dance), the world music festival founded in 1982, which I attend with family and friends, working at the children’s workshops. These involve hundreds of children making all manner of wonderful creations, and they culminate in a childrens’ procession on Sunday evening through the whole of the festival site.

I’ve taken photos of the festival every year, and have made them available on Flickr since 2012 — see the photos from 2012 here and here, from 2014 here, from 2015 here, from 2016 here and from 2017 here.

This year everyone expected that the heatwave that began at the end of May would continue throughout the festival, but although Friday, the first day of the festival (and the two days before when we were setting up) were deliriously hot, the weather turned on the Saturday, although the festival-goers’ spirits were generally undimmed.

I had a wonderful time this year, thanks to the great company, in particular, as well as — of course — great music as always from around the world. I also particularly enjoyed helping to facilitate the children’s creativity during the workshops, and also enjoyed playing with Richard from The Four Fathers at the Open Mic at Molly’s Bar (where my son Tyler joined us beatboxing) and also watching Tyler perform with his friends Caleb and Haroun, and, on Sunday evening, taking part in a wonderfully successful workshop with two other members of the BAC Beatbox Academy, Conrad and Nate, who came from London to give a WOMAD audience an exhilarating masterclass in the art of beatboxing.

There was also a noticeable shift in focus this year towards more homegrown acts with a younger focus, which I attributed to a specific desire on the part of the festival’s organisers to attract a younger crowd to WOMAD. But while this was partly true, there was also a darker side to the changes, as was made apparent on July 31, when, as the Guardian reported in a front-page story entitled, ‘A Brexited flatland’, Peter Gabriel, WOMAD’s co-founder, “expressed ‘alarm’ over UK foreign policy” after a number of international artists were unable to perform at WOMAD because of visa issues.

WOMAD’s director, Chris Smith, told the Guardian that “[a]t least three acts scheduled to appear” at WOMAD “were unable to take part” — Sabry Mosbah from Tunisia, Wazimbo from Mozambique and members of Niger’s Tal National, who, Smith said, “were prevented from entering the UK.” Another act, Indian sisters Hashmat Sultana, “also experienced difficulties entering the country”, and “arrived 24 hours after their scheduled performance.”

Peter Gabriel told the Guardian, “The right to travel for work, for education and even for pleasure is increasingly being restricted and often along racial and religious lines. It is alarming that our UK festival would now have real problems bringing artists into this country … [many of whom] no longer want to come to the UK because of the difficulty, cost and delays with visas, along with the new fear that they will not be welcomed.”

Smith called it “the latest example of the government’s ‘hostile environment’ policy affecting international acts scheduled to perform in the UK”, explaining that this year marked the first time that some artists had “declined invitations to perform“ at WOMAD, “with many citing the difficulty of entering the country under the automated visa system that first created issues for the festival in 2017.”

“Whether their perceptions are real or inflamed, the reality is that artists are deciding that the hassle and cost of entering the UK are neither worth the return nor the exposure to rejection that the process might bring,” Smith said. “For now this is a trickle, but how do we prevent it becoming a flood?”

Smith also explained that WOMAD had been obliged to “ask Home Office and Foreign Office contacts to intervene in individual cases, which led to some visa cancellations being overturned.” However, Smith added, “Sometimes this works but not consistently.” He also described WOMAD’s “intention to embark on urgent discussions with our contacts at the Home Office and our partners in the cultural sector to find a way to welcome international artists and ask them to continue their contribution to making the UK a tolerant and forward-thinking focal point of the global cultural community.”

Peter Gabriel explained, “There have been, and continue to be, good people within the Foreign Office who try to help us every year, but the warnings are becoming clearer: if we want a country which is open to people with ideas, traditions, food and culture different from our own, we have to change the current visa processes and find ways to turn back the growing anti-foreigner tide. Musicians travel for a living, and almost everywhere I have travelled I have been met with kindness and generosity. Do we really want a white-breaded Brexited flatland? A country that is losing the will to welcome the world?”

As the Guardian proceeded to explain, “Freedom of movement for musicians has come under scrutiny since the EU referendum vote. Last week the House of Lords published a report recommending a ‘touring visa’ which would improve access to the EU for British performers post-Brexit and vice versa. Britain’s Incorporated Society of Musicians also called for freedom of movement to be protected for musicians. A report suggested that more than 40% of ISM members had noticed an impact on their work as a result of the Brexit vote, up from 26% in 2017 and 19% in 2016. More than a third of respondents said they had experienced visa difficulties while travelling outside the EU, and 15% claimed to have lost a job opportunity owing to visa issues.”

For further analysis, see this article by Ian Birrell, co-founder of Africa Express, a collaborative music project, who explained how WOMAD “had to cancel one act after British officials put the wrong date in their visas and shelled out £15,000 on emergency visas for another artist last year.” As he also explained, “One famous African group’s manager was shocked recently to find charges of almost £7,000 to obtain visas for his touring party – and these only last three months. ‘It is not really worth coming any more,’ he told me sadly. This was echoed by a leading booking agent, who said artists were being deterred by the complexity, the costs and the lack of humanity in an outsourced system. ‘Often the officers on the borders don’t know their own rules but it’s the artists who get punished,’ he added.”

As Birrell also explained, “It is bad enough that passports are handed over for weeks, preventing artists working, but then they must sit in hotels for days after flying across continents for biometric tests. These are, bear in mind, people from poorer parts of the planet trying to develop careers by visiting a nation that proclaims creative leadership and a desire to improve the world. Sadly, they are often frozen out by costs or confronted by condescending attitudes. I have heard also from Kenyan charity workers, Nigerian entrepreneurs and Ghanaian techies outraged at being treated like illegal immigrants when seeking visas to visit Britain for business from their fast-growing countries.”

He added, “Such issues pale beside bigger problems such as the soaring death rate of migrants crossing the Mediterranean amid the surge of fearful populism. But when artists from developing nations reject the platform to perform at one of our best-known festivals, this should be a warning sign. For it symbolises the hypocrisy of politicians who boast about global Britain, only to then tighten borders, rip off foreigners and treat visitors with contempt. Sadly, the message going out is that Britain is closed for business and culture – from some places at least.”

Also see the album 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), and for his photo project ‘The State of London’ he publishes a photo a day from six 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 a new 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 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.

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.

It’s Holiday Time: Off to WOMAD and the West Country, Back in August

Please support my work as a reader-funded investigative journalist, commentator and activist.

 

Dear friends,

Every year, at this time, I attend the WOMAD world music festival in Wiltshire with my family and friends. I’m slightly astonished to work out that this will be our 17th WOMAD, as we’ve been going since 2002, when we spent a boozy, hard-working time there between our wedding in Edinburgh, and a post-wedding party in London. The drinking has tailed off or come to an end since that time, but we still do children’s workshops, and WOMAD continues to be the perfect festival, with amazing music from around the world, and a very peaceful vibe. Every year, I discover music that I love, but that I had no knowledge of beforehand, like last year’s Thursday night entertainment (before the festival proper began) —Bixiga 70, enthusiastic and talented Afrobeat players from Brazil, whose music has moved me all year.

On Monday, we’re heading down to Cornwall, to stay for a few days with friends near Mevagissey, and then we’re heading back east, but only as far as Dorset where we’re staying for a few days in a very special place on Chesil Beach that we’ve visited before. We leave there on August 8, and travel to Bristol, where I have a radio interview that day, and a screening of ‘Concrete Soldiers UK’, the film abut resistance to the destruction of council estates, which I narrate, and which I posted an article about yesterday.

I intend to be back online briefly next week to post photos from WOMAD, and to post photos from my ongoing project ‘The State of London’, but my online presence will be sporadic for the next few weeks, so in the meantime please feel free to check out my Guantánamo archive, or my UK housing crisis archive — both covering most of my major journalistic and activist concerns these days — and please also feel free to check out my band The Four Fathers. Out studio recordings are on Bandcamp, and our YouTube channel is here. I’ve posted a couple of songs below that might be of interest.

See you soon!

Fighting Injustice EP (UK version) by The Four Fathers

How Much Is A Life Worth? by The Four Fathers

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), and for his photo project ‘The State of London’ he publishes a photo a day from six 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 a new 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 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.

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.

UK Torture: Ex-Guantánamo Prisoner’s Memories Provide A Reminder That We Need Accountability

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Resistance to Social Cleansing: Screening of ‘Concrete Soldiers UK’ in Bristol, August 9, 2018

Please support my work as a reader-funded investigative journalist, commentator and activist.

 

It’s over a year since the defining event of 2017 in the UK — the Grenfell Tower fire, in west London, in which 72 people died because everyone responsible for their safety — central government, local government, the management company that had taken over the management of their homes, and the various contractors involved in a refurbishment of the tower that ended up being lethal — put cost-cutting and profiteering before safety.

The Grenfell survivors, and the wider community in north Kensington, are still awaiting anything resembling justice. The official inquiry is crawling along at a snail’s pace, many of the survivors are still in temporary housing (even though the revealed, just yesterday, that over a hundred council homes in Kensington and Chelsea are lying empty), and up and down the country people are still living in tower blocks (470 at the latest count) that are enveloped in the same dangerously flammable cladding that turned Grenfell Tower into an inferno.

The Grenfell disaster showed, fundamentally, how in modern Britain those who live in social housing — even those who bought their council homes under Margaret Thatcher’s ‘Right to Buy’ policy — are perceived as second-class citizens, whose very lives are disposable. Those in power argue that this is not the case, but Grenfell reveals this to be the case, and elsewhere politicians’ and housing professionals’ actions reveal their fundamental dishonesty.

Across the country, under Labour, Tory and Liberal Democrat councils, those living on council estates are having they homes demolished, without their consent, so that property developers can make huge profits by building new housing that is generally unaffordable, and, to a large extent, is being bought up and left empty, or rented out at exorbitant rents, by foreign investors and the greedy homegrown ‘buy-to-let’ market. Those councils who pretend to have anything resembling a conscience, and a sense of responsibility for their tenants, make feeble noises about how this is all the fault of central government and the strangling cuts imposed since 2010 in a cynical “age of austerity”, but while there is certainly a considerable amount of truth in this, almost all local government officials have failed to complain loudly about it, or, in London, for example, where two-thirds of councils are Labour-controlled, to stand together and to demand an end to this climate of destruction.

Often this is because those very councillors fundamentally despise the poorer members of society, and are only interested in promoting aspirational notions of their boroughs, in which everyone miraculously earns the average income or above (£39,476 a year in London at the last count), forgetting that the average is skewed upwards by the incomes of those earning considerably more, and that the mean income — that which 50% of people earn more than, and 50% earn less than — is actually somewhere around £22,400 (the same amount, funnily enough, that the establishment thinks is an acceptable annual rent). In other cases, corruption is at work, with councillors moving on to lucrative jobs with developers in exchange for services rendered.

Shortly after the Grenfell disaster, I attended a public meeting, ‘The Truth About Grenfell Tower’, called by ASH (Architects for Social Housing), where I met Nikita Woolfe, who was filming that event, and who subsequently asked me to narrate ‘Concrete Soldiers UK’, her documentary about the destruction of council estates, and residents’ resistance to the proposed destruction of their homes, which focuses in particular on two estates facing destruction — the Aylesbury Estate in Southwark, and Central Hill in Lambeth, both Labour-controlled boroughs. The film also looks at the history of the Heygate Estate in Southwark, whose destruction set the unfortunate template for the current epidemic of social cleansing, and the struggle to save Cressingham Gardens, another estate in Lambeth.

‘Concrete Soldiers UK’ was released in December, launched at the Cinema Museum in Kennington, and since then Niki and I have been making it available to housing groups and other interested parties, attending post-screening Q&As from Hastings to Glasgow, and across London.

We are already making plans for screenings in autumn, and invite you to get in touch if you’d like to show the film — and also to check out our fundraising page, where we explain what we’re doing, and why we could do with your financial help — but for now the only screening over the summer is in Bristol on Thursday August 9, so if you’re in Bristol, do come down and watch the film. I’ll be attending the screening and the post-screening Q&A, and would love to meet whoever is around.

The Facebook page is here, and it’s showing at the People’s Republic of Stokes Croft (PRSC), at 17-35 Jamaica Street, Bristol BS2 8JP. The screening starts at 7pm, and it’s accompanied by an exhibition on the London housing crisis from photographer Lisa Furness. Entry is £4. The day before I’ll be recording a radio interview with Tony Gosling, and I’m looking forward to spending a few days in one of my favourite cities in the UK.

Below is the trailer for ‘Concrete Soldiers UK’:

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), and for his photo project ‘The State of London’ he publishes a photo a day from six 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 a new 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 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.

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.