Andy Worthington's Blog, page 34

Grenfell and the Social Housing Crisis: How Kensington and Chelsea Council Behaved Like “A Property Developer Masquerading as a Local Authority”

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In a meeting of the Housing, Communities and Local Government Committee on June 20 to discuss ‘Local Authority Support for Grenfell Tower Survivors’, Ed Daffarn, one of the survivors of last June’s entirely preventable tower block fire, in which 72 people died, reported an exchange with Kensington and Chelsea Council’s Chief Executive, Barry Quirk, who took on that role a week after the fire, which cuts to the heart of the problems facing those living in social housing in Britain today.

Daffarn told MPs that, at a meeting wth survivors’ organisation Grenfell United, Barry Quirk “said that RBKC [the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea] were a property developer masquerading as a local authority.”

Daffarn added, “Think about that. They were property developers masquerading as a local authority. They failed to keep us safe because they had higher priorities – getting their hands on the land, this massive goldmine they had.”

The confession by Quirk, who was formerly the Chief Executive of Lewisham Council, is significant because, when every aspect of social housing is made subservient to the money-making opportunities offered by housing development, residents of social housing are no longer actually safe in their homes.

In many cases, as can be seen across London, and up and down the country, residents become an inconvenience, to be swept aside as their estates are cynically judged to be in need of demolition, instead of the much less costly refurbishment, so that they can be moved out and the land on which their homes once stood can be sold to developers who then replace their homes with generally unaffordable replacement housing — and which, in another cynical twist, all those involved in approving it, marketing it and selling it pretend is actually “affordable.”

In the worst case scenario, as at Grenfell, it becomes apparent that the disposability of social housing tenants even extends as far as their lives. Grenfell Tower was not immediately scheduled for destruction, unlike many dozens of estates across London, which then tend to have their maintenance budgets cut as part of a deliberate programme of “managed decline”, and which is then used to justify the intended demolition; but the Grenfell residents were victims of institutional cost-cutting and a lack of concern for tenants’ safety above all other concerns throughout the entire housing sector, from central government to local government to management companies to whom councils’ social housing had been transferred, and to the array of contractors involved in the maintenance and refurbishment of properties.

Writing about the Committee meeting in the Guardian, Robert Booth noted that Kensington and Chelsea Council “said it accepted Daffarn’s remarks and agreed”, adding that the council “indicated its strategy has changed since the fire, which sparked the resignations of the leader and deputy leader, Nick Paget-Brown and Rock Feilding-Mellen, the latter of whom works as a property developer.”

Kim Taylor-Smith, the council’s current deputy leader, said, “We know we have to change, to listen to our residents and to act on their wishes. We respect Ed Daffarn’s views.”

Taylor-Smith also said, “The new council has pledged to build new social homes in the borough and have also taken on private developers like Capco, who are building high-end flats in Earl’s Court, and have made them include more social homes in their developments.” Those views, however, require serious scrutiny rather than being taken at face value.

Daffarn’s statement came early in the meeting, in response to a question from Matt Western, the Labour MP for Warwick and Leamington, who was elected last June, in the General Election that took place just four days before the Grenfell fire. Western said, “I had been here just four days when this terrible tragedy happened, and it seemed to have very strong echoes of Hurricane Katrina and the magnitude of that event”, and asked, “Given the scale of the tragedy and its consequences, do you think that the Government should have put the council into special measures almost immediately, recognising how complex the consequences of this would be, whether for mental health, housing, immediate needs and so on?”

This is Daffarn’s full statement running up to his report of what he was told by Barry Quirk, and I think the entire section is worth repeating, to add to Daffarn’s previous assessments of the Grenfell situation — his repeated warnings, before the fire, as one of the authors of the Grenfell Action Group’s posts, and his recent appearance on Channel 4 News, which I posted and reported about here.

Daffarn said:

Within the first couple of weeks we went to visit Secretary Javid, and we told him explicitly that what he needed to do at that time was put the council into special measures. He chose not to take our advice, and the decision to do that is evident now. The local authority does not have any authority. If you see the meetings it holds in public, you will understand what I am saying.

It has lost trust and it has lost its legitimacy. The only way that could have been re-established was for the council to have been placed under special measures, but that didn’t take place. There is now this vast chasm of distrust between the community and the council that, at best, will take many, many, many years to rebuild.

Do you want me to say a few words about that at the moment? The opening gambit at the public inquiry, which we will not go into too much, was that the council was dreadfully sorry about what happened, and it was determined to get to the truth. Then the opening statement doesn’t get to the truth and is not honest about what was going on at RBKC.

It is not honest about the little cabal of senior councillors and council officers from housing, from corporate property and from planning who had decided to asset-strip the whole of our community, sweat our public buildings, disregard the people who live there, and force us from the land that people were living on because it was a goldmine—they just didn’t have to mine it; they just had to marginalise the people living there.

That was what was going on at RBKC. That is why Grenfell happened. If they had been concentrating on keeping us safe in our building—if they had had their eye on the ball—Grenfell could have been avoided. If they had treated us with the respect that we deserved, Grenfell could have been avoided. There is this mass chasm. For trust to be rebuilt, RBKC need to start telling the truth. They need to be honest about what was going on. They need to admit what was going on. They have not done that, and that is so offensive and so upsetting, because it goes back to what happened at Hillsborough, and goes back to that feeling that we are not going to get justice and we are not going to get truth.

We deserve truth and justice after what happened. RBKC need to speak with their lawyers and come out with a different way of dealing with this problem. They need to be honest. They all know what was going on there.

This was the point at which Daffarn spoke about Barry Quirk admitting that RBKC were “a property developer masquerading as a local authority”, and it was followed by further criticism on Daffarn’s part, when he stated that, despite all that has happened in the last year, “we have those same senior officers at RBKC in position. We have the same senior councillors who chaired the scrutiny committee that, as residents, we went to and begged for help. We were ignored. Not only were we ignored, we were pushed to one side—marginalised completely, on two different occasions. The last occasion was when we went and spoke to them about the appalling refurbishment works at Grenfell.”

This criticism touches on an issue that keeps surfacing in discussions amongst housing activists — in Lewisham, where I live, and where I set up the ‘No Social Cleansing in Lewisham’ campaign, but is also part of discussions everywhere else that estate demolitions are planned, and social housing is being undermined: the crucial role played by the unelected officials who actually make most of the decisions behind the scenes, shielded by the councillors who actually engage with the public, and who, in turn, rely for their own opinions on what these same officials tell them.

While one of the legacies of Grenfell has to be a resolute refusal to allow central government, Kensington and Chelsea Council, Kensington and Chelsea Tenant Management Organisation and contractors to evade their responsibility for what happened last June, and another needs to be a perpetual call for existing social housing to be respected, and for new social housing to be built, it seems to me that we also need to work out ways to start shining a spotlight on the decision makers behind the scenes, who wield vast power without any accountability whatsoever.

Note: If you haven’t already seen it, do check out the video of my song ‘Grenfell’, performed with The Four Fathers and beatboxer The Wiz-RD, and recorded by a German TV crew last autumn. We’re making a studio recording of the song in three weeks’ time, so please get in touch if you’d like to be informed about its release.

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.

Basketcase Britain: Two Years After the EU Referendum, the Tories Are Still Clueless and Racism Is Still Rampant

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Exactly two years ago, Britain went to the polls for what turned out to be one of the most depressing days, politically, in my entire life, as a small majority (51.89%) of the 72.21% of the population who could be bothered to vote expressed their desire to leave the EU.

The referendum was merely advisory; in other words, it was not legally binding, but the government never acknowledged this. In fact, referendums involving major constitutional change generally require at least a two-thirds majority, but the Tories ignored that as well.

David Cameron, who had called the referendum to placate UKIP and the far right of his own party, and had mistakenly thought it would be an easy win, walked off unscathed into the sunset, and after a short bloodbath the hapless Theresa May — who had spent six years as a horribly racist Home Secretary — was apparently the only senior minister left standing who could take over.

And because “the will of the people” apparently had to be respected, May has, ever since, been at the head of a cabinet that, essentially, represents the success of the kind of isolationist lunatics that even Margaret Thatcher recognized as needing to be kept firmly locked in a box throughout her premiership.

Out of his depth, David Davis heads the government’s Brexiteers, along with the vile Liam Fox, and the totally unprincipled Boris Johnson, whose cheerleading for leaving the EU played a major part in the Leave campaign’s success, even though Boris didn’t mean it, and was only going along with it as he jockeyed for position.

Weirdo Michael Gove is back too, and bizarrely even medieval throwbacks like arch-Leaver Jacob Rees-Mogg are getting serious media coverage the days — as part of the mainstream media’s extraordinary failure to question the Brexit narrative properly. Back in 2015-16, they behaved as though Nigel Farage was the King of England, or the Prime Minister, when he was the head of a party with, at most, one MP, and now the media fawn over the ridiculous figure of Rees-Mogg.

After the result, like so many liberal Remainers, I was actually quite depressed, as my articles from the time show; from the day after, UK Votes to Leave the EU: A Triumph of Racism and Massively Counter-Productive Political Vandalism, and, from June 26, 2016, Life in the UK After the EU Referendum: Waking Up Repeatedly at a Funeral That Never Ends.

I then followed the twists and turns as Parliament, generally in a depressingly feeble manner, made noises about needing the right to meaningfully participate in the Brexit process — which Brexiteers hated, even though the whole point of Brexit was to wrest back the illusory control that the EU had to restore British sovereignty, which, in the UK, resides with Parliament, and not with whichever clown is installed in 10 Downing Street.

But this is all just part of the Brexit madness that has existed for the last two years. When a legal challenge was mounted, the pro-Brexit tabloids — in particular, the Daily Mail under the execrable Paul Dacre, and the Sun under non-Brit Rupert Murdoch — accused High Court and Supreme Court judges of being traitors, and they continue to do the same every time MPs or the House of Lords do anything to rock their ludicrous fantasies about Brexit.

Leaving the EU, contrary to the Brexiteers’ blunt obsession with pretending that it’s as simple as shutting a door, is to undo 45 years of laws and treaties that have created an incredibly complex system tying us to our European neighbours — facilitating the seamless trade with the EU that constitutes 60% of our business, a fact that ought to provide a compelling reason for not allowing Brexit to proceed.

My analogy is that Brexit is like chopping a body in half, but then having only a few minutes for the surgery required to prevent the body from dying — an impossible task, but in our new fantasy Britain, the Brexiteers will be denying that we’re bleeding to death until they draw their final breath.

Brexiteers, meanwhile, have no answers to Remainers’ thoroughly valid sense of alarm, relying on simple-minded platitudes that fail to bear up under even the most minimal scrutiny. To be honest, I have found the whole topic so depressing that I have largely given up on it over the last year, although I always keep an eye out for the crucial analysis of Ian Dunt of politics.co.uk, whose book Brexit: What the Hell Happens Now? is required reading — and also includes some serious analysis of the elephant in the room that the Tories simply don’t want to properly acknowledge: that there is an intractable Irish border problem that can’t be wished away, and that may either cause a resurgence of war in Ireland (generally referred to quaintly as ‘the Troubles’) or the break-up of the Union (which is supposed to be absolutely central to the Tories’ political philosophy), with, no doubt, Scotland following if Brexit goes ahead. Such is the Brexit madness, however, that last week, when polled on this, a majority of die-hard Brexiteers said they’d be happy to lose Northern Ireland to preserve their Brexit fantasy.

Another baleful effect of the Brexit vote, which I must note, before I reflect on where we are now and what the future might bring, is that racism is noticeably on the rise in Brexit Britain. Whenever I have met an EU national in the last two years, I have apologised for the change in their treatment over the last two years, asking about, and always receiving confirmation that, since the referendum, they have been subjected to abuse, and being told to “go home”, that simply didn’t happen before. The cat is out of the bag, and what vicious, mangy creature it is.

So where are we now? Today, I’m glad to note, an estimated 100,000 people marched in central London to demand a second referendum. I wasn’t able to make it, as I had an important housing campaign meeting in Lewisham, but I also couldn’t quite face yet another incredibly polite pro-EU march, as I’ve been on many in the last two years, and I don’t think politeness is really working. I was, however, pleased to note that the Observer reported the following:

With more businesses poised to issue dire Brexit warnings this week and senior Tories already drawing up plans to soften Theresa May’s exit proposals, organisers of the march on Sunday said it showed Britain’s departure from the European Union was not a “done deal”.

A former aide to Margaret Thatcher, several Labour MPs and pro-EU campaigners from across Britain took part in the demonstration, marking two years since the Brexit vote. Organisers said that people from every region and walk of life were among those who took part in the march down Whitehall.

Conservative supporters marched alongside Labour voters and Liberal Democrats during the protest, which saw angry denunciations of the chaos that has ensued inside government since the Brexit vote. Labour’s leadership also came under pressure at the march for refusing to back a second public vote. There were chants of “Where’s Jeremy Corbyn” from the crowd. The Labour leader was on a visit to a Palestinian refugee camp.

The Observer added:

Anger on the streets at the prime minister’s handling of the Brexit negotiations is being accompanied by a renewed push from industry to ensure that trade with Europe is not disrupted as a result of leaving.

More prominent manufacturing firms are set to issue warnings about Britain’s Brexit negotiations within days, after Airbus and BMW broke cover to say they could reconsider their UK investment plans unless a Brexit deal was reached keeping Britain closely aligned with Europe.

The only real way for that to happen, of course, is for Brexit to be scrapped, but despite today’s protest, it remains unclear how that can happen. Personally, I’m not sure I trust the electorate to deliver a second referendum result different from the first, given that the country is still, on balance, or for less balanced between Leave and Remain, with, still, millions of people who refuse to make any kind of commitment one way or another.

I actually think MPs should derail it, but I don’t hold out much hope for that either, as they have generally been so craven when it comes to rocking the Brexit boat. Resistance by the Lords has been more robust, but they lack the power to genuinely stop the government in an meaningful manner.

Do we really have to crash out of the EU, and destroy our economy, before we wake up, kick out the Tories, and ask the EU to forgive our episode of madness and let us back in?

I fear that the answer is yes, as I remember why it is that I’ve been so studiously avoiding engaging with Brexit for most of the last year. It’s simply too depressing …

Note: Anyone who’s seen my band The Four Fathers recently will know that we perform a storming song I wrote about Brexit, ‘I Want My Country Back (From The People Who Wanted Their Country Back)’, which we’ll be recording in about three weeks’ time, and then intend to release. make a donation.

Thoughts on Stonehenge and the Summer Solstice 2018: Has the Dominant Materialism Killed Some Magic in the World?

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So the sun shone this morning, and it looked like a lovely sunrise at Stonehenge on the summer solstice. According to the BBC, however, the number of attendees was just 9,500, considerably less than in some years since Managed Open Access to the great temple on Salisbury Plain was reintroduced in 2000, after 16 years in which access to Stonehenge on the summer solstice was prevented through the existence of a military-style exclusion zone.

In part, this was due to the solstice dawn taking place on a Thursday morning. Attendee numbers are highest when it falls on a weekend, but other factors may also have been involved. It now costs £15 to park a vehicle for the solstice — “£15 per car, live-in vehicle and non-commercial minibus (up to 19 seats)”, as English Heritage describe it — and security has been ramped up in the last two years, primarily, it seems, because of the government’s delight in keeping us in a perpetual state of fear — and racist fear, to boot — by pretending that every aspect of our lives is subject to a potential terrorist threat, even the summer solstice at Stonehenge.

“As with last year’s event”, the BBC explained, “Wiltshire Police confirmed it had stepped up security with armed police on patrol.” Yes, that’s right. Armed police at Stonehenge. What a horrible and unnecessary policy. Supt. Dave Minty, Wiltshire Police’s overnight commander, conceding that there had been no trouble at all, and that “behaviour at the stones was ‘brilliant’, with no arrests made”, nevertheless said of the security situation, “People seem to have adapted really well to the heightened level of security and they’ve been really patient with it.”

I have to say that personally I would have found it hard to be so patient, but that’s perhaps one of the reasons that I wasn’t at Stonehenge this year. I attended Managed Open Access every year from 2001 to 2005, and enjoyed the odd sunny solstice like this morning, an experience that does genuinely provide some sort of connection to the temple’s long-lost makers, as well as having some good times with various travelling companions, selling my books Stonehenge: Celebration & Subversion and The Battle of the Beanfield, and on occasion consuming quite alarming amounts of brandy coffee.

Overall, however, it was difficult to reconcile the Managed Open Access experience with memories of where it had come from. Back in my youth, Stonehenge — or, more particularly, the fields opposite Stonehenge — were the site of an extraordinary manifestation of British counter-cultural impulses — the Stonehenge Free Festival.

The festival, which began with the vision of a young man who took the name Wally Hope, and occupied land by Stonehenge in the summer of 1974, with friends who all called themselves Wallies, grew year on year, and by the time of my visits as a student in 1983 and 1984 was a month-long settlement that was the size of a small town.

The festival was many things — an open-ended acid rock extravaganza, and a place of hash and hot knives and magic mushrooms — but primarily it was an anarchic gathering of the tribes, featuring an extraordinary collection of old coaches and commercial vehicles, transformed into mobile homes, which were the core of a travelling community that, from May to September, held free festivals at numerous locations in England and Wales.

Under Margaret Thatcher, who took office in 1979, unemployment increased massively, and life on the road was seen by many young people as the only way out of dead-end nothingness in the many towns her economic policies were destroying, as she set about decimating British industry, empowering the banking sector and encouraging individual greed. Through a combination of the dole and grass-roots entrepreneurship, the festival scene provide some sort of viable alternative, but it was, of course, seen as a threat by Thatcher and the British establishment.

As well as providing an escape route from dead-end towns for spirited young people (a process that had a tendency to create new recruits wherever the travelling convoys went), those on the road also included veteran social agitators, largely informed by the 60s counter-culture, but also seizing potently on land rights issues going back, for example to the Diggers and the Levellers of the English Civil War. On the road, the agitators were joined by anarchists, and by a particularly potent sub-group — former military personnel who had seen through the lies the state had told to recruit them, and who were, with good reason, regarded as genuinely dangerous — and there were also environmental activists, opposed to Britain’s embrace of US nuclear weapons, opposed to the existence of nuclear power stations, and committed to an environmentally aware future that was at odds with the oil-guzzling dinosaur of late 20th century capitalism.

One traveller group, the Peace Convoy, had spent some time at Greenham Common in Berkshire, where a group of extraordinary women set up a renowned Peace Camp to resist plans to base US cruise missiles on an RAF site, and some of them later became involved in another peace camp outside the proposed second base for cruise missiles, Molesworth in Cambridgeshire. This camp was actually evicted in February 1985 in the largest peacetime mobilisation of troops in modern British history, and from then until the Beanfield the evicted convoy was harried from place to place before meeting their destruction at the Beanfield — very clearly revealing that, while a narrative of protecting Stonehenge from so-called “dirty hippies” might work with the public, it was the convoy’s political and environmental impulses that had the war-mongering polluter Margaret Thatcher most rattled.

While Thatcher’s brutal assault on travellers brought the festival to an end, and was enormously destructive of the travelling community that was set upon at the Battle of the Beanfield, dissent as a whole was gleefully undiminished. From out of nowhere, an Ecstasy-fuelled rave scene developed, and was followed by a road protest movement that saw the land as sacred, and, prohibited from travelling freely, instead took root in the landscape, resisting road expansion plans with extraordinary passion and bravery, involving dining tunnels, living in tree houses, and locking themselves onto heavy plant machinery.

Looking back on those days, I find myself now thinking that they are like some sort of ancient history, too far off to touch, like events viewed through the wrong end of a telescope, and largely brushed away by the turbo-charged neo-liberalism of the last 20 years, the cannibalistic exploitation of western countries’ populations by their own governments, in cahoots with property speculators, and the triumph of a smug landlord culture, in which the exploitation of tenants by astonishingly greedy and self-centred landlords is portrayed as some sort of marker of success — as of course, it would, when money is the only arbiter of any value, and the lack of any kind coherent and communal belief in the future has led to society degenerating into nothing more than a bunch of well-dressed, braying jackals preying on those less fortunate than themselves in a competition to establish whose sense of self-entitlement is the most dominant.

Of course, resistance still exists, as the anti-fracking campaigns show, and as numerous examples of dissent show, from the protests against the DSEI arms fair in Docklands, for example, to the weekly vigils against US spying at Menwith Hill in Yorkshire, to the regular Grenfell protests, and ongoing opposition to austerity, to Brexit, and, imminently, in support of the NHS on its 70th birthday.

However, over the last 20 years, some crucial aspects of life have, I fear, been lost. I often hear, for example, that festival culture is thriving more than ever before, but while this is demonstrably true in some ways — there are more festivals than ever before, demonstrating that the hippies’ dream of people escaping the cities to enjoy themselves in the countryside with music and freedom has, on one level, had an enormous resonance — on other ways a strangling, suffocating materialism — and a culture of surveillance and self-obsession — runs through almost everything we experience these days, including much of our supposed leisure time.

Take Stonehenge, for example. The irony, of course, is that in the festival years only a few hundred committed people made their way to the stones from the field across the A344 for druidic rites and nakedness and worship of the stones and the solstice, whereas, since the Law Lords ruled in 1999 that the exclusion zone around Stonehenge was illegal, and English Heritage was required to open it up via Managed Open Access, the temple itself has now become a one-night party site that, in many ways, is an open-air rave, albeit without music, for the youth of Wiltshire and the surrounding counties. Or, looked at another way, the solstice at Stonehenge has become just another spectacle in our “100 things you must see before you die” culture, in which empty spectacles masquerading as something deep and essential — and which also generally involve endlessly forking out money for tickets, for merchandise, for parking, for catering — define so much of what passes for an actual culture.

It also disappoints me that the pagan year that so many of us seized upon in our youth — in which the solstice, the equinoxes and the quarter days (at the start of February, May, August and November) seemed to provide a genuine alternative to the commercial corporate year — has also become debased by the commodifying culture that monetises everything, and tries to infantilise people into being mere consumers.

I also can’t help wondering if, in general, most of the types of paganism taking place today are anything more than than a form of Cosplay, sadly reflecting, yet again, how almost everything in modern society had been commodified and de-politicised. More darkly, I also worry whether, as the kind of class consciousness that very much existed in the free festival years has been hunted down, and replaced with something troublingly selfish and atomised, the very notion of a pagan Englishness, originally conceived as an effort to be in touch with the land beneath our feet and the changing seasons, and a counter-cultural statement, is now more likely to be infected with nationalism, racism, xenophobia and the malignancy of Brexit isolationism.

I don’t know the answers to all my questions and musings above, but I do genuinely fear that we are being deliberately debilitated by a crushing corporate culture that wants us only to be endlessly diverted by empty spectacles, and to spend, spend, spend with our every breath — and although I know I have, and always have had a tendency to over-think things, and to constant question everything, I am regularly assailed by the sense that our current society has, at its heart, a complacent vacuousness that both bores me and depresses me.

It doesn’t help that I was at the O2 on Greenwich peninsula last night for a gig — by the New Zealand musical comedy duo Flight of the Conchords, my son’s favourite band — which was a very good gig, but only after we’d first endured the fake streets and fake palm trees of the O2’s corporate mall, and had then made our way through layers of airport-style security to get into the O2 arena, where, having arrived implausibly early, we had discovered that there was literally nothing to do — if you didn’t want to buy overpriced burgers or overpriced alcohol sold by prominent multi-national brands, whose advertising was also plastered everywhere — because the entire infrastructure of the O2 is like being stuck in the world’s most boring airport.

Moreover, despite the evident creativity on display on the stage, I found it impossible not to mentally calculate how much money was being made from the 10,000 or so people in attendance, each of whom had paid £65 plus £9.50 in booking fees per ticket, and to end up feeling like I had basically spent an evening being milked by an endless swarm of corporate predators.

Of course, Managed Open Access at Stonehenge doesn’t have corporate sponsors to go wth its heightened security, and, as I note above, not all festivals have taken conspicuous security and the wall-to-wall fleecing as consumers as the model for a positive and memorable experience, but too many have, because the security apparatus of modern life, and the requirement to extract the maximum amount of cash from consumers at every possible moment defines us here and now.

I not only don’t want this, I actively want to resist it, in as many ways as possible, and I want others to do so too, because, after all, all those things that we were fighting against in the 70s, the 80s, the 90s — structural inequality, systemic unemployment, the establishment’s complete contempt for the environment, and, let’s face it, the dullness of the prevailing culture — are even more prevalent and corrosive now than they were then.

Note: For my previous reflections on Stonehenge and the summer solstice, see Stonehenge and the summer solstice: past and present, It’s 25 Years Since The Last Stonehenge Free Festival, Stonehenge Summer Solstice 2010: Remembering the Battle of the Beanfield, RIP Sid Rawle, Land Reformer, Free Festival Pioneer, Stonehenge Stalwart, Happy Summer Solstice to the Revellers at Stonehenge — Is it Really 27 Years Since the Last Free Festival?, Stonehenge and the Summer Solstice: On the 28th Anniversary of the Last Free Festival, Check Out “Festivals Britannia”, Memories of Youth and the Need for Dissent on the 29th Anniversary of the last Stonehenge Free Festival, 30 Years On from the Last Stonehenge Free Festival, Where is the Spirit of Dissent?, Stonehenge and the Summer Solstice, 30 Years After the Battle of the Beanfield and Summer Solstice 2017: Reflections on Free Festivals and the Pagan Year 33 Years After the Last Stonehenge Festival.

For more on the Beanfield, see my 2009 article for the Guardian, Remember the Battle of the Beanfield, and my accompanying article, In the Guardian: Remembering the Battle of the Beanfield, which provides excerpts from The Battle of the Beanfield. Also see The Battle of the Beanfield 25th Anniversary: An Interview with Phil Shakesby, aka Phil the Beer, a prominent traveller who died six years ago, Remember the Battle of the Beanfield: It’s the 27th Anniversary Today of Thatcher’s Brutal Suppression of Traveller Society, Radio: On Eve of Summer Solstice at Stonehenge, Andy Worthington Discusses the Battle of the Beanfield and Dissent in the UK, It’s 28 Years Since Margaret Thatcher Crushed Travellers at the Battle of the Beanfield, Back in Print: The Battle of the Beanfield, Marking Margaret Thatcher’s Destruction of Britain’s Travellers, It’s 29 Years Since the Battle of the Beanfield, and the World Has Changed Immeasurably, It’s 30 Years Since Margaret Thatcher Trashed the Travellers’ Movement at the Battle of the Beanfield, It’s Now 31 Years Since the Battle of the Beanfield: Where is the Spirit of Dissent in the UK Today? Never Trust the Tories: It’s 32 Years Today Since the Intolerable Brutality of the Battle of the Beanfield, and, most recently, It’s 33 Years Since the Battle of the Beanfield: Is It Now Ancient History, in a UK Obsessed with Housing Exploitation and Nationalist Isolation?

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.

Celebrating 400 Days of My Photo Project ‘The State of London’

Please support my work as a reader-funded investigative journalist, photographer, commentator and activist. Check out all the photos to date here.

 

Back in March 2011, my life changed when I was hospitalised after a blood clot had turned two of my toes black. Doctors at St. Thomas’s Hospital, opposite the Houses of Parliament, saved my toes — a mercy for which I am eternally grateful to the NHS — but after I recovered, my life changed again when I began cycling across London on a daily basis — and taking photos everywhere I went — in May 2012.

When I got ill, I had managed to give up smoking, which would otherwise have killed me, but I then started piling on the pounds instead, on a steady diet of biscuits and cakes, and so getting back on my bike on a daily basis seemed like the perfect way to get fit.

I’d been a cyclist since I was about four years old, but like many useful habits, it had become sidelined as I smoked too much, and also as a result of my obsessive sedentary lifestyle as a writer, researcher and commentator and activist on Guantánamo, which had consumed my life since 2006.

Getting out onto London’s streets was transformative not only because it got me fit, but also because it gave me a huge new exciting project — getting to know the city I’ve lived in since 1985, but much of which was unknown to me beyond key haunts and places I’d lived in over the years. I soon came up with a name for my photo-journalism project — ‘The State of London’ — but although I posted some photos on Flickr in 2012-13, and got a skeletal website established, I couldn’t find the time get it up and running. 

Instead, I built up a huge archive of photos that no one saw, as I visited every single one of London’s 120 postcodes (those with the prefixes SE, SW, W, NW, N, E EC and WC), as well as some the outer boroughs, until, last May, on the fifth anniversary of when ‘The State of London’ started, I set up a Facebook page, and began posting a photo a day — plus accompanying text — drawn from the  archive, so that the photo I chose might be from 2012, 2013, 2014, 2015, 2016 or even that day. Some months later, I added a Twitter account, and posting a photo a day is now a key part of my work.

Last Thursday marked 400 days since I began posting photos on Facebook, but I couldn’t mark it at the time because I was too busy with two other projects —  marking, on Thursday and Saturday, the first anniversary of the terrible and entirely preventable Grenfell Tower fire, which has regularly featured in ‘The State of London’ over the last year, and, on Friday, marking the 6,000th day of Guantánamo’s existence. So here, five days late, is my commemoration of this latest milestone for my project — and an opportunity for me to try and reach out to people who might be interested in it. After over a year of posting photos, I’m reassured from the feedback I receive that people like it, and I’d now like to do more with it — to have some exhibition, for example, and, ideally, to publish a book. If you can help, please do get in touch!

I hope one day to get the website up and running (and would be interested in any help curating it), but I still can’t find the time to do so, because of all the other work I do — on Guantanamo, on social housing, and on my music with my band The Four Fathers — and because I still insist on going out every day on my bike and taking more photos!

I feel incredibly privileged to be able to do, because I’m a freelance writer, supported by my readers, and a few benefactors, and can work in the mornings and evenings, but I’ve also become a passionate advocate for the outdoors life. I go out on my bike every day, whatever the weather, which is a very visceral way of getting to appreciate the climate and the changing seasons, but it has also taught me that we aren’t meant to be indoors all the time, and that we should all be outside much more. 

Cycling every day has also sharpened my dismay at how the city is so dominated by traffic — cars and lorries — which are not only horrific polluters, but also contribute immensely to the selfish and atomised culture that is, so sadly, such a big part of contemporary life.

If you haven’t yet discovered ‘The State of London’, I hope you have time to check it out now — and to ‘like’ it and share it if you do. It is, of course, in large part a political project, in which I cast a consistent eye on, for example, the shameful building of high-rise tower blocks for foreign investors in almost every part of the city, and the cynical destruction of council estates to build more unaffordable housing for those profiting from a seemingly endless housing bubble maintained by politicians and the banks, but it also has aesthetic qualities of its own, as well as reflecting seasonal change, changes in the weather, and geographical elements of the city that consistently fascinate me — the River Thames, of curse, running through the city like a pulse, other rivers and canals, hills, trees, and whatever hidden corners of the city I manage to stumble upon on my often random and erratic journeys (I never have a map, or, generally, much of a plan). 

Cycling remains the best way of being both relentlessly inquisitive and quietly anarchic in the city. It’s much quicker than walking, and you can dip in and out of anywhere swiftly — and, I’m sure, regularly evade surveillance, especially, if, as I do, you travel without a mobile phone to tell the authorities where you are at all times.

Perhaps one day you might like to come and join 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 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.

Photos: Grenfell 1st Anniversary – The Silent Walk and the Solidarity March

Please check out my photo sets on Flickr – of the Silent Walk in Kensington on June 14, 2018 and of the Solidarity March in central London on June 16, 2018.
Please also feel free to support my work as a reader-funded investigative journalist, commentator and activist.

 

It’s just over a year since the defining event in the UK last year — the Grenfell Tower fire, an entirely preventable disaster in west London, in which 72 people died when an inferno engulfed a 24-storey tower block in North Kensington in west London, and I’m pleased to be posting photos from two recent Grenfell-related events as my contribution to trying to make sure that there is no let-up in the pressure for justice and accountability following the first anniversary of the disaster last June. 

The first photo set is of the Silent Walk for Grenfell on the actual anniversary. Silent Walks have taken place on the 14th of every month since the fire, in the vicinity of the tower, and on the anniversary, on Thursday June 14, thousands of people turned up, from across London as well as from other places in the UK, to show solidarity with the survivors and the local community. The Silent Walks are extremely moving experiences, and the 1st anniversary walk was, of course, no exception.

The second photo set is from the Grenfell Solidarity March in central London, starting and ending outside 10 Downing Street, and including a visit to the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government on Marsham Street, organised by the survivors’ group Justice4Grenfell and the Fire Brigades Union.

At each of the locations, there were powerful speeches about the need for accountability, and the need for everyone affected by the fire — everyone in social housing, for example, and everyone who understands the dangers of the prevailing neo-liberalism that preys on everyone except the rich — to keep on working together, to build on the extraordinary solidarity created in the Grenfell community in the last year, and to always remember those whose lives were so needlessly lost.

The disaster last June should never have happened, of course, because the tower was built of concrete that is largely resistant to fire, and because of the policy of ‘compartmentalisation’, which is meant to ensure that any fire will be contained within the individual apartment in which it breaks out for an hour, giving the fire services time to arrive on the scene. However, Grenfell’s structural integrity had been fatally compromised during recent refurbishment, which was designed to make it look better, but which involved the application of highly flammable cladding.

The truth about Grenfell, which is slowly coming to light in the government’s official inquiry, but which was known to anyone paying attention at the time of the fire, is that those responsible for the safety of the residents of social housing in tower blocks — central government, local government, management companies and contractors — were all part of a world of housing de-regulation in which red tape had deliberately been cut to enable greater profits to be made, and it was somehow considered acceptable for dangerously inflammable material to be used as cladding.

Shockingly, one year on, not all the survivors of the Grenfell fire have been re-housed, and, moreover, hundreds of tower blocks across the country — both council blocks and private blocks — are still shrouded in potentially lethal cladding. After sustained pressure, Theresa May recently promised £400m to remove cladding, but was shockingly vague about the basis of that funding. Moreover, it is not only social tenants who are being kept in a unacceptable state of fear by the government, which really should have written a blank cheque to remove the cladding the day after the Grenfell fire; private tenants are also caught in situations in which their cladding should be removed, but no on wants to take responsibility for it. 

Today, for example, the Guardian reported that “[a] family who have seen the value of their London flat slashed from £600,000 to just £90,000 because of Grenfell-style cladding could sue a government agency that helped them buy their home.” 

The article added, “They are the second homeowners in the New Capital Quay development in Greenwich to have their flat valued at rock-bottom prices. Nerisa Ahmed and her husband bought the flat under the help to buy scheme when it was built three years ago and have had two offers fall through in the past six months because of the cladding. In their report for Ahmed, Taylor Chartered Surveyors said the collapse in value of her flat was because the cost of replacing the cladding was unknown and that it was unclear when the cladding would be replaced due to ongoing legal discussions between developer Galliard and the insurer of the building. The company said some flats had been valued at £0. They were unsellable, unrentable and unmortgageable.”

Ahmed told the Guardian, “My flat is dangerous. I panic every night as I put my son to bed. I’m on the top floor – the 10th – and having a fire here is not something I’d like to experience.”

With the Grenfell inquiry behind us, the shocking truth that the disaster highlighted — that those in social housing are regarded by the establishment as second-class citizens, whose lives can even be discarded in the quest for easier profiteering — must not be allowed to fade away. The official inquiry continues, but no one should expect that it will really deliver justice. Instead, those of us who care about social housing must continue to make the case that the ongoing greed-based housing bubble must be punctured, that providing homes for rent at genuinely affordable levels is the best way forward for society as a whole, and that this requires a massive social homebuilding programme, on a scale that no one has considered since the 1970s, and with a sense of societal inclusivity that we also haven’t seen since that time, when Margaret Thatcher first took a hatchet to the notion of society.

Also see the albums 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.

Today Marks 6,000 Days of Guantánamo: Rights Groups, Concerned Citizens and Former Prisoner Shaker Aamer Urge Donald Trump to Close It

Please support my work as a reader-funded journalist! I’m currently .

Grenfell One Year On: How Can We Feel Safe in a Country That Regards Everyone in Social Housing as Inferior?

Exactly one year, ago, an inferno engulfed Grenfell Tower, a 24-storey tower block in north Kensington, in west London, with such speed and ferocity that 71 people died, and a 72nd person died this January as a result of injuries sustained that night.

It was a disaster that should never have happened, and the fact that it did cuts to the heart of how Britain operates in the 21st century.

The tower block was built of essentially incombustible concrete, and the process known as compartmentalisation was meant to ensure that any fire that broke out would be contained within the flat in which it broke out, with every other flat supposed to be able to resist the spread of fire for an hour, giving the fire services time to arrive on the scene.

In fact, fire leapt up the tower like nothing anyone had seen before, clearly indicating that every safety measure that was supposed to prevent an inferno had drastically failed. At the heart of the disaster were measures taken that had fatally corrupted the structural integrity of the tower. In order to make the tower appear more attractive, new cladding had been applied to it, but the cladding was flammable, and had created the inferno that took so many lives.

Faced with this unprecedented disaster, the Fire Brigade Union was out of its depth. In a building without fatally compromised structural integrity, and with compartmentalisation intact, telling residents to stay put is sensible; in the case of Grenfell, it was the opposite, and by the time the FBU realised, it was too late.

However, it was not the FBU that had created the death trap in the first place. That was the cumulative effect of decisions taken by successive governments, to reduce red tape and increase profits for those making money off social tenants, and the council (Kensington and Chelsea), which had farmed out all its social housing to a management organisation (Kensington and Chelsea Tenant Management Organisation) that was clearly unconcerned about those in its care.

In a searingly devastating blog post in November 2016, Edward Daffarn and Francis O’Connor of the Grenfell Action Group were particularly appalled by the incompetence of the KCTMO. In an article entitled, ‘KCTMO – Playing with fire!’, which I came across on the day of the fire, they wrote, with chilling prescience, that “only an incident that results in serious loss of life of KCTMO residents will allow the external scrutiny to occur that will shine a light on the practices that characterise the malign governance of this non-functioning organisation”, adding, “It is our conviction that a serious fire in a tower block or similar high density residential property is the most likely reason that those who wield power at the KCTMO will be found out and brought to justice!”

Adding to the disaster were those in the building industry who were part of an increasingly deregulated world in which self-certification had become widespread (rather than work being objectively assessed), and flammable materials were routinely used in circumstances where, as at Grenfell, that could prove to be fatal.

Death trap

All of this was easily discerned at the time, but it took nearly a year for the official inquiry to begin, although last week, as the Guardian reported, Danny Friedman QC, “speaking on behalf of law firms representing survivors and the bereaved, said his clients were watching the inquiry with ‘calm rage.’”

Friedman explained how Grenfell Tower “was turned into a ‘death trap’ by a dangerous and reprehensible refurbishment carried out by Kensington and Chelsea council and the local tenant management organisation”, and his accusations came, as the Guardian noted, “as commercial firms responsible for the work came under pressure to end their effective silence and participate more actively in the investigation.”

Friedman proceeded to explain that the cladding on Grenfell Tower was “lethal”, adding, “In the second decade of 21st-century London, governed by a regulatory framework designed to ensure fire safety, a local authority instigated and oversaw the refurbishment of a social housing, high-rise tower block in such a way as to render it a death trap.”

He also said, “The royal borough of Kensington and Chelsea and the tenant management organisation did this using public funds paid to an array of contractors and subcontractors – none of whom have yet taken any responsibility for what happened”, even though the building works were “obviously dangerous, reprehensible and contrary” to regulations.

“Residents and many people told them that this would happen but they were fobbed off and certainly not treated as equals. Seventy-two people died. Those who escaped owed their survival to chance rather than as a result of assessments or contingency planning by the fire brigade”, which “failed to realise quickly enough that this was a ‘fire that could not be fought and required evacuation that could not be delayed.’”

There was equally robust criticism of the building industry from Stephanie Barwise, counsel for the same law firms, who, as the Guardian put it, “focused on the flammability of the material used in the cladding and refurbishment.” As she said, in a line that has stayed with me since I read it last week, “Our understanding is that the ignition of the polyethylene within the cladding panels produces a flaming reaction more quickly than dropping a match into a barrel of petrol.”

So Grenfell Tower — and hundreds of other tower blocks in the UK — were clad in material that catches fire “more quickly than dropping a match into a barrel of petrol.”

How that is possible in modern Britain is because greed and indifference to others has become part and parcel of modern life, in which all notions of the common good appear to have been abandoned by those with power and authority.

June 14, 2017

On June 14 last year, after I had woken to the shocking images of Grenfell Tower aflame, I was drawn to see it for myself, to realise the enormity of what had happened. I took the train from my home in Lewisham to Clapham Junction, and then cycled across Wandsworth Bridge and though Fulham. It was a beautiful summer’s day, and people were sunbathing on Parsons Green. It was hard to believe that, just a few miles away, a disaster was still unfolding.

From Fulham, I then made my way east on the Kings Road, turning north near World’s End, and enduring traffic-choked roads through Earls Court and the wealthier parts of Kensington until I finally saw the smoke and the charred skeleton of the tower. I immediately felt the enormity of what had happened, and also felt rather ghoulish, and so, as I made my way to the places of refuge that had established themselves on Latimer Road, I threw what money I had in a bucket, marvelled at how quickly the community had rallied, providing huge amounts of food, water and clothing for the survivors, took note that there was no official presence whatsoever, and also noted a group of Muslim teenagers applying themselves with great dedication to making sure that the survivors were being looked after.

I then left, cycling home, and taking photos along the way, as I always do, but it was obvious to me that something had changed irrevocably, that something had happened that could not be forgotten; that should not be forgotten. Although the sun still shone, and people were going about their everyday lives, it felt to me that this normal life was no longer acceptable, that the lives of all those who died deserved more, and that a spotlight needed to be relentlessly shone on those who were responsible, to hold them accountable, to make sure nothing like this would ever happen again, to make sure they looked after the survivors, and to learn from what the disaster said about the perceived value of people in Britain today.

One year on

Unfortunately, one year on, it would be hard to say that much of the above has been achieved. Not all the survivors have been rehoused, even though it is impossible to imagine this happening if, for some reason, hundreds of the wealthier inhabitants of Kensington had suddenly lost their homes in a devastating incident. As the Independent explained today:

More than 200 homes bought by Kensington and Chelsea council (RBKC) to rehouse Grenfell survivors are empty a year on as scores of households remain in hotels because the properties are deemed unsuitable.

Charities and lawyers have condemned the “very poor” quality of housing offers made to displaced households, with survivors offered “rabbit hutch” flats which lack basic facilities such as living rooms, while other properties purchased by the council are still in need of renovation and that will not be ready until 2019.

With already long waiting lists for social housing in the borough, the council spent £235m on buying 307 properties intended for Grenfell residents in the immediate aftermath of the fire in a bid to get all of the survivors rehoused within a year.

But 12 months on, just 81 of these have been moved into. A total of 129 Grenfell households – more than half of those that escaped the blaze – are yet to be permanently housed, with 72 of these stuck in emergency accommodation, many of them families with young children.

Just as shockingly, to my mind, very little has been done to remove the flammable cladding from the other tower blocks — 323, of which 138 are privately owned, according to an Inside Housing article two days ago  — that were subjected to similar refurbishment, or were built from new with flammable cladding. This is a national disgrace, and as such the government should have been dealing with it with some urgency, but in fact it took almost a year for Theresa May to promise £400m to remove unsafe cladding from tower blocks around the country, an even then, as I noted at the time, “questions remain — about where the money is coming from, under what circumstances it will be provided, and what will happen if it is not enough.”

The establishment’s contempt for those of us in social housing

Essentially, both failures — the rehousing and the national cladding problem — reveal a government and, to be blunt, almost an entire political establishment that cannot actually see beyond its own blinkered perspective about what is important. Almost entirely composed of owner-occupiers, the political class as a whole and its business associates no longer has a view of society as a whole.

Instead, as the twin viruses of Thatcherism and Blairism have eaten away at the nation’s soul, those who don’t have mortgages are regarded as second-class citizens, whatever supposedly placatory words our politicians — from across the political spectrum — may occasionally utter. Grenfell was the defining example of property owners’ contempt for those of us in social housing, but variations on the theme are being played out across London on a permanent basis, as councils of all political persuasions queue up to knock down council estates, removing social tenants and eradicating social tenancies in their united quest to screw everyone out of as much of their incomes as possible to feather their own nests.

Private renters in the UK are already amongst the most shafted and least protected people in the western world, and our politicians — Labour as well as the Tories — continue to pursue policies of estate demolition, and eradicating the provision of genuinely affordable social housing, with an enthusiasm that shows nothing less than contempt for those of us who rent.

As we remember the victims of Grenfell, and continue to call for justice and accountability, let us also call for a political sea change, one that seeks to puncture the housing bubble that has dominated our economic life for the last 20 years, endlessly increasingly inequality along the way, and that is dedicated to a massive social homebuilding programme, to provide genuinely affordable rents to everyone who doesn’t want to or is unable to join the owner-occupiers.

Secure and genuinely affordable housing is, essentially, a human right. In Grenfell Britain, however, that right was destroyed by the self-interest and callousness of the establishment to such an extent that people lost their lives because those responsible for their safety saw life only in terms of endless profiteering and class contempt. It’s time for revolutionary political change. I’m up for it. Are you?

Please see below the video of ‘Grenfell’ which I wrote last summer, remembering those whose lives were so needlessly lost, and calling for those responsible to be held accountable, as performed by my band The Four Fathers with beatboxer The Wiz-RD:

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.

Quarterly Fundraiser Day 3: Still Seeking $2,000 (£1,600) to Support My Guantánamo Work Over the Next Three Months

Please click on the ‘Donate’ button below to make a donation towards the $2,500 (£2,000) I’m trying to raise to support my work on Guantánamo over the next three months of the Trump administration.

 

Dear friends and supporters,

Since I started working independently on Guantánamo, over 12 years ago, I have largely been reliant on the support that you, my readers, have given and continue to give to me via donations that enable me to carry on researching and writing about Guantánamo, and calling for the prison to be closed, a vocation — some might say an obsession — that has, to date, led to me writing and publishing over 2,200 articles about Guantánamo.

I never meant to embark on this path as an independent journalist and activist, but it seemed to be the only appropriate response to my compulsion to tell the truth about Guantánamo on an essentially relentless basis — the truth being that it must be closed, because it is a lawless place of brutality and vengeance, full of alleged intelligence that, to a shockingly large degree, does not relate to any kind of truth, but consists of lies made by prisoners about their fellow prisoners, after they were tortured or otherwise abused, or even bribed with better living conditions.

My independence has allowed me to cover Guantánamo more assiduously than most of the mainstream media, which generally doesn’t maintain a relentless focus on issues of chronic injustice, even though it should, and has also enabled me to use my research and journalism to push more into campaigning, as I did in 2014-15 with We Stand With Shaker, the campaign to free Shaker Aamer, the last British resident in Guantánamo, and as I continue to do via my website here, and also via the Close Guantánamo campaign that I set up with the US attorney Tom Wilner in 2012 — where, to provide a current example of my campaigning, I am asking people to mark a terrible milestone — 6,000 days of Guantánamo’s existence — on Friday by taking a photo with a poster marking this sad occasion and sending it to us.

If you can help out at all with a donation to support my work, please click on the “Donate” button above to make a payment via PayPal. Any amount will be gratefully received — whether it’s $500, $100, $25 or even $10 — or the equivalent in any other currency.

You can also make a recurring payment on a monthly basis by ticking the box marked, “Make this a monthly donation,” and if you are able to do so, it would be very much appreciated.

The donation page is set to dollars, because the majority of my readers are based in the US, but PayPal will convert any amount you wish to pay from any other currency — and you don’t have to have a PayPal account to make a donation.

Readers can pay via PayPal from anywhere in the world, but if you’re in the UK and want to help without using PayPal, you can send me a cheque (address here — scroll down to the bottom of the page), and if you’re not a PayPal user and want to send cash from anywhere else in the world, that’s also an option. Please note, however, that foreign checks are no longer accepted at UK banks — only electronic transfers. Do, however, contact me if you’d like to support me by paying directly into my account.

As well as continuing to work towards the closure of Guantánamo — and holding accountable those who set it up, and who were also responsible for the post-9/11 torture program — i have, at various times over the last few years, branched out into other work — writing about and campaigning to save social housing (not-for-profit housing) in the UK, for example, where genuinely affordable housing is being cynically destroyed to enable greater profiteering by the already rich, which I am currently doing via my writing, via my role as the narrator of ‘Concrete Soldiers UK’, a documentary film about residents’ resistance to the destruction of their council estate homes, which I’m touring with the director, Nikita Woolfe, and a campaign I set up where I live, called No Social Cleansing in Lewisham.

I also use whatever money I receive to support my photography, and specifically ‘The State of London’, a photo-journalism project I started six years ago, but only began publishing a year ago, which involves me chronicling London’s changing landscapes via bike, covering every one of the city’s 120 postcodes, and also my music — protest music via my band The Four Fathers, with, increasingly, gigs that involve political protest, and ongoing efforts to resist the corporate world’s often successful efforts to persuade people that politics and music don’t mix. feel free to check out my song ‘Grenfell’, about the entirely preventable fire in a tower block in west London last June, in which over 70 people died.

If you’re with me on any of these journeys and can help to support me, I’ll be delighted to receive whatever donation you can make. As ever, I genuinely can’t do what i do without you.

Andy Worthington

London

June 13, 2018

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.

It’s Ten Years Since the Supreme Court Granted Habeas Corpus Rights to the Guantánamo Prisoners, a Legal Triumph Until a Lower Court Took Them Away

Please support my work as a reader-funded journalist! I’m currently .

Quarterly Fundraiser Day 1: Seeking $2,500 (£2,000) to Support My Work on Guantánamo and Social Justice Over the Next Three Months

Please click on the ‘Donate’ button below if you can make a donation towards the $2,500 (£2,000) I’m trying to raise to support my work on Guantánamo over the next three months of the Trump administration.

 

Dear friends and supporters,

It’s that time of the year when I ask you, as I do every three months, to make a donation if you can to support my work as an independent researcher, writer, commentator and activist (and also as a photographer and musician) — primarily on Guantánamo, but also in relation to social justice issues in the UK.

If you can help out at all, please click on the “Donate” button above to make a payment via PayPal. Any amount will be gratefully received — whether it’s $500, $100, $25 or even $10 — or the equivalent in any other currency. 

You can also make a recurring payment on a monthly basis by ticking the box marked, “Make this a monthly donation,” and if you are able to do so, it would be very much appreciated.

The donation page is set to dollars, because the majority of my readers are based in the US, but PayPal will convert any amount you wish to pay from any other currency — and you don’t have to have a PayPal account to make a donation.

Readers can pay via PayPal from anywhere in the world, but if you’re in the UK and want to help without using PayPal, you can send me a cheque (address here — scroll down to the bottom of the page), and if you’re not a PayPal user and want to send cash from anywhere else in the world, that’s also an option. Please note, however, that foreign checks are no longer accepted at UK banks — only electronic transfers. Do, however, contact me if you’d like to support me by paying directly into my account.

For over 12 years now I’ve been working as a very modern writer and activist, working occasionally with the mainstream media, but generally operating via my own websites and social media — in part because of a decline in traditional paid work in the mainstream media, but also because of what I regard as the importance of mixing journalism and activism. In 2008, when I wrote a front-page story for the New York Times, with Carlotta Gall, about Abdul Razzaq Hekmati, a Guantánamo prisoner who had died of cancer, and who had never managed to persuade the US authorities to make a single phone call to Afghanistan to confirm that he had actually helped a number of significant anti-Taliban figures escape from a Taliban jail, the Bush administration, within hours, called on the Times to apologize for giving me a byline because I had “a point of view.” 

Absurdly, while the right-wing lies brazenly in its reporting, and openly pumps out black propaganda, the liberal media is meant to bind itself to a notion of “balance” and “objectivity” that has a tendency to defuse outrage, and to prevent people like me from having a mainstream platform, because of my “point of view.” Shamefully ignored in all of this was the fact that I had a “point of view” on Guantánamo because I had spent 14 months researching it on a full-time basis, for my book The Guantánamo Files, and had concluded, as a result of that research, that there was not a single thing about the existence of the prison at Guantánamo Bay that was acceptable, a position I still maintain today. 

In a world in which the options for making a living out of creative work are becoming more and more endangered — primarily because the masters of the modern world, the tech giants, take almost all the money that is available through creative work for themselves — I rely on you, my readers and supporters, not only to enable me to keep writing about and advocating for the closure of Guantánamo, and calling for those responsible to be held accountable, but also to support all the other work I do.

That includes my work defending social housing (not-for-profit housing) in the UK, trying to prevent the cynical destruction of council estates and efforts to eradicate genuinely affordable rents for ordinary working people, which has recently involved me narrating ‘Concrete Solders UK’, a grass-roots documentary about residents’ resistance to the proposed destruction of their homes, and two other projects — my photo-journalism project ‘The State of London’, in which, with a political eye, I have been photographing the whole of London on bike rides over the last six years, and my protest music with my band The Four Fathers, another outlet for my activism, which, again, runs up against a powerful institutional notion, carefully cultivated over the last 30 years, that music and politics don’t mix.

I’m hoping you can help me to keep working on the many fronts of my journalistic and creative work on human rights and social justice. As ever, it’s true to say that I really can’t do what I do with you.

Andy Worthington

London

June 11, 2018

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 marking 6,000 days of Guantánamo this Friday, June 15.