Recently in London life Category

George Monbiot, in the Guardian last Tuesday, on the link between religious belief and the anti-intellectualisation of US politics:

Ignorant politicians are elected by ignorant people. US education, like the US health system, is notorious for its failures. In the most powerful nation on earth, one adult in five believes the sun revolves around the earth; only 26% accept that evolution takes place by means of natural selection; two-thirds of young adults are unable to find Iraq on a map; two-thirds of US voters cannot name the three branches of government; the maths skills of 15 year-olds in the US are ranked 24th out of the 29 countries of the OECD(3).

He notes that, in the early days of Darwinism, it was bound up in the USA with social Darwinism, in which the rich were supposed to be at the top of an evolutionary ladder. However, another reason was the religious involvement in slavery and subsequent racism. He assigns a large part of the blame to the Southern Baptist Convention:

Over the Summer and early Autumn (i.e. Ramadan), I had a lot of work delivering electrical supplies to shopfitters working in the new Westfield centre, and spent many an hour sitting on the ramps leading off the West Cross Route in Shepherds Bush waiting to be allowed in to deliver truckloads of goods, or on the ramps waiting for forklifts to arrive or to get out of the way, or negotiating with the guys on the loading bay when my boss had mixed up goods going to different shop units because they were going to the same client, so when the centre opened yesterday, I decided I wanted to know what all the fuss had been about. The centre took five years to build, and at the time I was delivering, it seemed unbelievable that it was only a couple of months from completion. So, I went along yesterday with my Canon digital SLR. You can see all of my pictures here.

Last week, Ian Blair, the London Police commissioner, finally resigned. I must say I am glad to see him go, and I was disgusted that the killing of Jean-Charles de Menezes did not result in anyone losing his or her job. (Hat tip: Fareena Alam.)

What I am less pleased about is the way it came about - simply because the new mayor, Boris Johnson, publically announced that the police force needed "new leadership", i.e. that he had no confidence in him. What sealed his fate had nothing to do with the Stockwell killing, the Forest Gate affair or anything else to do with terrorism, but the fact that Johnson, and his buddies in the right-wing media, wanted a so-called "copper's copper" who will "get things done" without worrying about treading on people's (i.e. dark-skinned people's) toes. These people have been harping on about "political correctness" ever since the Macpherson report, which called the Metropolitan Police "institutionally racist" after they failed to nail the five racist thugs who murdered a young black teenager, Stephen Lawrence, in south-east London in 1993, preferring to harass his friend. The identities of those responsible are well-known.

This is a dangerous move towards an American-style politicised police, in which the forces are run by political operators who fear for their jobs, and need to placate scared suburban middle-class whites and do so by "getting tough" on, well, things and people they do not like. There is a reason why our police do not run for office - because the job is too important to be dictated by populism and politics. This is a particular danger in a city like London, where the only daily city paper is on the right.

Yesterday, with the water off in my part of town because of a burst water main in Wimbledon (which flooded not only the street but also South Wimbledon tube station), I headed up London to spend the afternoon. On the way down Oxford Street to my favourite hang-out -- Foyle's bookshop -- I saw a mock auction going on in one of the shop units. A mock auction, for anyone not aware of these things, is a scam auction in which various plants in the audience get all the good stuff. The public, meanwhile, bid for what looks like bargains but get garbage, and tend to only discover this when they open the packaging later, by which time the scammers will have gone.

Anyway, I saw a police car go past, and tried to wave at the cops inside but was too late. After hanging around for a while, trying to interest the security guards in the Curry's Digital shop opposite, who told me it was not their problem, I went down to Charing Cross Road, and there I did find a police car. After failing to stop it once, it went round the block, and when it passed me, I told the cops inside that there was a mock auction going on down Oxford Street. Before I'd finished my sentence, they just said, "we're busy".

I said, "oh, you know about it?" and they just said, "no, we're busy". They had a Chinese-looking woman in the back, but they were not driving fast and did not have their blue lights or sirens on, so they did not look that busy to even let me finish telling them about an ongoing crime so that they could pass the details on. Mock auctions stand out a mile - they are "auctions" going on in places where they never normally do, namely vacant shop units, and there is always a crowd around them which usually spills out into the street. It would only have taken a few cops to go in there and bust the lot of them, and there was no big event on, no football match, no riot. If such a thing were to happen it could dissuade the scammers from trying to pull this trick so obviously again. Perhaps they were just enjoying the warm weather.

As you can see, I have not blogged much this week, mainly out of being tired after getting up in the morning to do various driving jobs. However, it's Sunday and I'm well and truly recovered, so I've decided to come back (actually, I did Friday and yesterday as well, but could not write well when I was tired).

As I am sure most of you know by now, London now has a new mayor, Boris Johnson. Johnson won on second preference votes, a circumstance one would have expected would have favoured Livingstone as he would have received many second preferences from people voting for left-wing and Green candidates, but no. (In fact, the results table shows that the other broadly left-wing candidates received huge numbers of second-preference votes, mostly from people who voted for Livingstone, or even Johnson. However, they were not counted as only people who are not eliminated in the first count benefit from second preference votes - and even then, where people vote for the top two in both their preferences, their second preference does not count.) I am somewhat worried by the prospect of Johnson being mayor, not only because of his Islamophobic record, which I do not need to reprise here, but because he is clearly a career politician; Livingstone never set his sights wider than London.

Been wondering recently why you can't get The Ecologist in the Whole Foods shops in London? (These include the former Fresh & Wild stores.)

The reason is apparently that the magazine printed a feature a few issues back which was not entirely laudatory, stating among other things that the chain does not recognise unions. (In the UK, they have to recognise if there is enough support from the staff for the union.) There were a couple of letters in the current issue, one of them from an un-named current employee, who said that the "offending" issue had been removed from the stores, as was any member of staff who had to take time off for family reasons or who "exercised their freedom of speech". It also notes that the store throws out a huge quantity of food (perhaps inevitable with their huge buffets) and that a third of marriages between staff fail.

Be very afraid: Zoe Williams on the possibility of Boris Johnson as mayor of London | Politics | The Guardian

I know it's a bit late as the polling stations are about to close as I write, but I found this article in today's Guardian as I enjoyed my coffee and it's hilarious. It also gives the actual context for Boris Johnson's "piccaninnies" remark and it really doesn't mitigate against the charges of racism:

His views on Liverpool were remarkable only because they led to his sacking; I'll wager he feels the same about anywhere that isn't Mayfair or the Highlands, pretty much. His line on Africa he gave out in 2002, when Blair visited Congo: "No doubt," he said, "the AK47s will fall silent and the pangas will stop their hacking of human flesh, and the tribal warriors will all break out in watermelon smiles to see the big white chief touch down in his big white British taxpayer-funded bird." It ought to beggar belief, oughtn't it? Not that this self-satisfied creature of privilege should hold such views, but that he should be able to spout them and then have us all instantly forget about it. What are we, idiots?

Williams reckons that his "speaking his mind" about Scousers, or Africans, or anyone else, doesn't mean that "the fire of truth burns so brightly within him that he can't snuff it out", but that he really does despise them. There are four pages of anti-"Boris" opinions (I use the quotes because I'm really not familiar enough with him to be on first-name terms, thankfully), and some choice quotes. Notably, they go to town on his aversion to gay marriage while including three lines on Muslims, despite the fact that his magazine printed pages and pages of bile against Muslims in 2005, including several pages of Johnson's own. Insha Allah they should be getting a letter from me shortly.

The recent issue of Red Pepper contains an editorial, written by Oscar Reyes, about the upcoming mayoral elections in London. Reyes notes that Boris Johnson, the Tory challenger for the position against Labour's Ken Livingstone, has hired the Australian strategist Lynton Crosby, who is known for running divisive "dog whistle" campaigns for the "Liberals" in his home country, winning them several elections, and trying the same for the Tories in the UK in 2005, when they lost handily. Johnson has also been much assisted by the London Evening Standard, which has run one front-page after another about what they presume readers will think his nasty friends, which last week were the Muslim Brotherhood and today the Sikh Federation UK.

Well, it doesn't snow that often in England anyway, but snow in April is really unusual (though I've witnessed snow in Spring in the past, in the early 1990s when I was at boarding school in Suffolk) particularly when it's been warm during the past week. Waking up this morning, I heard it on the news that there was a jam on the M4 (the motorway from London to south Wales) and they said it started out at Hungerford, which made me think "oh, there's snow out in the downs in west Berkshire" - but then they said "to junction 1 at Chiswick", and I thought, "what, that means there really is snow here", and I looked out of my bedroom window and there it was. It's not Canadian weather, and it was all gone by early afternoon so there wasn't much to take pictures of when I was finally able to get out, but I got a couple of pictures of it anyway. (One of them is private, as it shows the view from my bedroom window, so you will only see it if you are my friend.)

Also, you can see on my Flickr page a couple of pictures of my new car, or rather, the new family car which I have the most use of. It's a little Daewoo Matiz with a 1-litre engine, so it's no speed demon but it will get me to work quicker than the train will (although I will probably continue to use the bus or train within town because it saves having to park). I went out to Boxhill last Thursday so I could take some shots of it somewhere other than outside the house, as I don't want the whole world and his wife knowing where I live, but my initial idea of parking in the car park and taking a walk around was thwarted when I discovered that Boxhill has a flat-rate £3 parking charge. So I had to park on the Zig Zag, and I had forgotten what the views along that road are like, which sort of made the frustration worth it.

So, here are the pictures. (More: iMuslim.)

London buses headed in the same direction as Helsinki's high-tech transport system - The Guardian

The Guardian today had a feature, on the front of its technology supplement, on the recent introduction in London of announcements on buses, telling us where the next stop is and where the bus is going. The announcements have appeared on the buses near where I live, particularly the Transdev (London United) buses. This is all done with the aid of a GPS unit and a Windows-based computer unit in a £117million upgrade.

The last three working days in a row, there has been a man convicted for acts of violence against women. Last Thursday, it was Steve (or was his actual name Steven?) Wright, the man who murdered five prostitutes in Ipswich in late 2006 (more: Outlines). On Friday it was Mark Dixie, who murdered an 18-year-old aspiring model, Sally-Ann Bowman, in Croydon in September 2005. Today, it was Levi Bellfield, who was convicted of the murder of two women and the attempted murder of another, in the Hampton-Twickenham area of west London and is suspected of several other attacks, most notably the murder of the 13-year-old Amanda "Milly" Dowler, from Walton on Thames, in 2002. Wright and Bellfield were given whole-life sentences; Dixie got 34 years to life. The response from one section of the tabloid press has been to demand the reinstatement of the death penalty.

Technorati Tags: ken livingstone, dispatches, martin bright, nick cohen, shiraz maher, socialist action, gla, mayor of london

Tomorrow, a Channel 4 Dispatches documentary hosted and researched by Martin Bright (of "The Great Koran Con Trick" fame) is to be aired, and it reveals Ken's loyalty to a small far-left sect called Socialist Action, and that he has given well-paid jobs in the Greater London Authority and its spin-off organisations to various members of it; its members have also worked for various other left organisations over the years, according to one of them, Atma Singh, in today's Sunday Times ([1], [2]). In the run-up to this programme, articles have appeared in the New Statesman (by Bright himself), in the Observer (by Nick Cohen, predictably) and in the Sunday Times alongside Singh's piece. Accompanying it, there have been two articles at Harry's Place, which generally supports attitudes like Cohen's ([1] in response to Martin Bright in the Statesman, [2] supporting Cohen).

This week it's appeared that serious consideration has been given to building a third runway, and a sixth terminal, at Heathrow Airport. The project will require the destruction of an entire suburban village, blight another tract of London with flight noise, and put a whole lot more traffic on the roads around Heathrow.

This afternoon I had the opportunity to take a look at the new, redeveloped St Pancras station, which is now used for the Eurostar trains to Paris and Brussels (and a few other places, like Euro Disney and, curiously, Avignon). The station had previously been used only for trains to the East Midlands and Sheffield (back in the day, it was also used for trains to Luton and Bedford, which now go through Thameslink to the south coast, and you could get to Manchester too). I never found the station all that impressive; it had a really grand Victorian facade but inside, it was just like a big, empty train shed. (Believe it or not, you could get to the East Midlands from two London terminals, the other being Marylebone, from which trains ran via Aylesbury and Rugby. Marylebone is still there, but most of the line up to the Midlands was ripped up in the 1960s.)

When I got there today I expected the station to be complete. Well, St Pancras itself is, but the outside is still a building site. They are still building the luxury (natch) apartments above the station, called St Pancras Chambers, and so access to the station from the front is only through a narrow passageway past the wooden walls of the building site. Inside, the station still has the empty shed ambience that it had before. They've painted the metalwork light blue, and added an extension further up track, in a completely different style to the original. The station for the East Midlands, reduced to four platforms, has been shoved further up to the back of the station, so anyone who wants to use the trains has to walk quite a bit further than they did before.

There are two new statues in the station - a huge one, of a couple kissing each other goodbye, and a small one, of John Betjeman, the poet who campaigned to save St Pancras from being knocked down. I saw the champagne bar (imaginatively titled The Champagne Bar), which is supposedly the longest such bar in the world or something, but unless there is another such bar on the premises, it was really nothing special - I expected it to be platform length or something like that. It wasn't that big and the length didn't look remarkable. There were two separate musical performances going on on the upper floor, and anyone entering through the former main entrance and needing to get to the trains had to fight their way through the audiences. Well planned, eh?

I think Betjeman was wrong. St Pancras is an ugly building - not 1960s brutalist ugly I admit, but ugly all the same, and if it had been knocked down, it would have been no great loss.

Technorati Tags: crossrail, superlink

This afternoon they are announcing on the radio that Ken Livingstone has announced that fares for public transport in London will rise to finance the construction of the Crossrail scheme. Apparently this wasn't part of the original plan, but has come to be necessary - a week after the government decided to support the scheme - because they hadn't taken into account the interest which would have to be paid on the loans. This is starting to look familiar with this government - one minute a scheme costs one amount, the next, another and naturally much larger amount (as with the Olympics, or with this hospital in Coventry). The fact is that travel costs have been rising, above inflation, year after year in London for several years. Now, we will all have to pay extra for a scheme which will benefit only those living due east and due west of town!

Has anyone been watching the programme Meet the Foxes, about London's urban foxes? The film showed a "family" of urban foxes in north London, and their various neighbours, including some who fed them and kept videos of them, and others who disliked them because of the noise they make - and the fact that they like chicken. Including their chickens.

One of the people on the film said he rather approved of the foxes who went for the chickens, because they'd be dealing with a major cause of noise pollution. For me, I'm more concerned about disease. It's well-known that flu pandemics tend to emerge out of east Asia because in that part of the world, people tend to keep farm animals close to their dwellings. Given that, by most accounts, mankind is overdue for another big flu pandemic, surely people should not be keeping chickens in their back gardens in cities?

SocietyGuardian.co.uk | Society Guardian | Laura Holland: Taken for a ride by a train link that we don't need

Found in today's Guardian Society supplement: how the authorities are apparently set on forcing a change to the rail service in east London which residents don't want or need in the interests of the "East London Gentrification Games" of 2012:

I have spent 13 months trying to discover why it is so desirable to swap a two-mile section of railway from one operator to another, and why it needs £185m of public money for a scheme designed to meet a small proportion of the demand for travel to the venues for the 2012 Olympic games.

Few people can believe that the quality of life, environment and future of residents such as myself can be destroyed so easily. More infuriating is that the only proof the scheme will have any benefit for the area or the public has come from expert witnesses in the employ of DLR or its contractors. These PR-conscious people assure us that impact will be minimal, and that, as a community transport provider, DLR's commitment is to provide short-distance travel for local people.

Yet the operator's own environmental statement reveals a different story: it admits significant noise impacts close to homes and schools; loss of playing fields and public space; and the destruction of the unique archaeology at the site of the abbey of St Mary Stratford Langthorne. There will also be major disruption to roads during the four-year construction period. This will all be caused by the creation of three new stations, which are unnecessary in an area that already enjoys excellent public transport.

... There was a public inquiry into the scheme, and the inspector will rule soon, but in retrospect my advice to anyone in my position is not to speak. Even if you are lucky enough to get answers or information, this is followed by professional legal teams working for the promoters who aim to make you look stupid and unreasonable. In my opinion, appearing is pointless unless you can afford an equal number and quality of expert witnesses as the promoter. Worse still, the inspector will not discuss any matter concerning government policy - which covers just about everything.

In this week's New Stateman, Darcus Howe responds to the persistent talk of "segregation" by presenting the situation in his home suburb of Norbury, south London, widely perceived (at least locally) as some sort of ethnic ghetto:

This community, I warned the attentive audience, was not sleepwalking. The evidence indicates the opposite: a dynamic section of the population which has painstakingly reconstituted a high street on its last legs into a vibrant, multicultural place. To describe us as segregated borders on abuse. All are free to come and go. There is always a coming and a going as communities change to accommodate the new.

I have travelled through the Deep South in America and I know what segregation is. Its defining characteristic is that it is always organised and perpetuated by a racist state power. So, too, in South Africa.

I joined the passengers who cram the trains to Victoria, cheek by jowl. Whites are huddled next to blacks. Asians are crushed up against Africans. And when they arrive at work Muslims and Christians are set in motion beside each other; they join trade unions together and discuss the latest fashions together.

My community and those like it have built these areas from the bottom up. We will not allow them to be rent asunder by some minister for social cohesion and her cohorts from the bemused bureaucracy.

There's been quite a bit of activity on the issue of the filming of Brick Lane, a film based on Monica Ali's novel of the same name. Monica Ali belongs to a certain set of middle-class, Anglicised, secularised Asian novelists of Muslim ancestry and has pretty much the same standing in the community as Hanif Kureishi and one just about higher than Salman Rushdie, who has jumped in with a letter in today's Guardian attacking Germaine Greer, who accused Ms Ali of presenting a stereotype of Brick Lane and then trying to film her stereotyped Brick Lane in the real Brick Lane.

(I think Rushdie has his Latin mixed up by using the expression ad-feminam? The Latin for woman is mulier, as in the Papal encyclical Mulieris Dignitatem (Women's Dignity), surviving in the Portuguese mulher; femina means a suckling woman and only later came to refer to women in general.)

Guardian news coverage of the Rushdie-Greer spat here; Greer's original article here.

Neurocentric has blogged about this also.