Shit you can't make up

Seen this morning on my ride in to work - graffiti-ed very neatly on a newly painted shop-front in Camden:

Peasants beware
Abolish banal thinking
Embrace only radical thoughts and oppose capitalist pigs.

I'm not sure if this a quote from Mao - or a made-up piece of ironic genius - or maybe just that term is about to begin and the students are back in town.

Random Summer Remembrance

As I often do, I had my lunch today in the graveyard of Soho’s parish church – St Anne's.

That’s not as eccentric as it sounds – the graveyard has long been a favourite lunchtime spot with locals and there are even picnic tables there. If it’s not much of a traditional graveyard – it’s not much of a traditional church either. Most of the old building burned down in 1940 during the Blitz and although the new building still operates as a church it is just as much a community centre.

I found my gaze wandering to the small war memorial and my eyes rested on a group of three identical surnames, presumably relatives. It’s not the first time by any means that I’ve seen this on a war memorial; but perhaps subliminally with the news of the death at the weekend of the death Henry Allingham - the oldest surviving Great War veteran – it seemed particularly poignant.

Back at work, using the Commonwealth War graves Commission website I was able to look up within minutes the three sons of Samuel Garraway, printer, and his wife Katherine:

Killed 03.08.1916 Private Wilfed Garraway of the Royal Fusiliers.
Killed 12.02.1917 Private Sydney Garraway of the Queens' West Surreys.
Killed 18.08.1917 Rifleman Gilbert Garraway of the Rifle Brigade.

A random discovery. Unimaginable. Commonplace.

Stereotypical arsehole toffs

Boris Johnson is a fast writer. This is a handy talent because it allows him, as he puts it in his own words, to ‘knock off’ a couple of newspaper articles on a Sunday morning before he does the chores – all without impinging on the time he dedicates to his day job of being the Mayor Of London. (£140,000 pa) The moonlighting gig with the Telegraph pays him an extra £250,000 a year - a figure Boris dismisses as 'chicken-feed'.

Of course it’s reassuring that Boris can tell us that this sideline doesn’t mean that the London electorate is being short-changed in anyway. Although it does seem a little mean-spirited that he should at the same time begrudge tube drivers wanting more than £38,000pa for anti-social shift work. Or that he opposed tube cleaners getting the London Living Wage of £7.45 an hour. Of course he derided these workers as ‘dinosaurs’ living in the past and making ‘ludicrous’ claims.

But it's most reassuring of all that old Etonian Tories like Boris turn out not to be lovable buffoons masking an erudite intelligence with populist appeal but are actually just over-privileged and arrogant arseholes with nothing but contempt for the working class.

Tower Blocks

It may be legal but it isn't right: Lakanal House, the tower block in Camberwell where six people died in a fire this weekend was built in the 1950's before the current building regulations came in. Apparently having a single stairwell was legal at the time, and these things are not retro-active. Ironically if the block had been a five star hotel rather than social housing then a different set of more stringent fire regulations would have applied.

It's not just about the architecture either. Some of the developers who led the campaign in the 1950's, 60's and 70's to rehouse the inner city poor in tower blocks may have genuinely brought into the vision of 'streets in the sky'. Whether they were misguided or cynical doesn't really matter to the residents of Lakanal House or thousands of other tower blocks on our cities.

Whatever the intention of the architects, tower blocks are pretty crappy places to live. The cheap, low-rise inner city housing they replaced may have been labelled 'slums' but they had streets for kids to play in, pubs, shops and places of employment all mixed together . When their residents were re-housed in tower blocks all that went, along with the communities that went with it.

As industries and businesses closed down in the city and the middle classes started to move in along with their retail-driven urban 'renewal' the people they displaced didn't evaporate they just became less visible. In every part of London now , amidst the yuppified terraced streets and the post-industrial retail developments, there are run-down tower blocks. Often there is a kind of social apartheid - the residents of the blocks, frequently not car owners, don't use the same retail parks, megastores and shopping malls - and they certainly don't socialise in the bars and coffee shops that now dominate the high street.

Of course inequality is nothing new. But in the old low-rise housing the different layers of working class people were pretty much mixed up together. Even Mayhew's street by street-map index of poverty in Victorian London shows 'artisans' living in streets adjacent to the so-called 'criminal underclass'. So, amazingly our own society is not only more polarised in terms of overall wealth than ever before, but within the working class we are actually more segmented than previous generations.

Urban planning has a lot to do with that. And so of course did Thatcher's war on social housing in the 1980's. The flip-side of the 'property owning democracy' was that generally only the very poorest and most disadvantaged were left in social housing. And a new and ugly description came into being - 'the sink estate'.

Support the tube workers

By the reporting of the tube strike you would get the impression that London is a city under siege by the RMT union. Guardian journalists are twittering on their journeys to work , with minute-by-minute accounts as if they were war correspondents on the frontline. This hysteria has certainly had an effect judging by the comments at work today.

But where we work in central London is no more than thirty minutes walk from any of the main London over-ground terminus stations. This, and the over-crowding at the bus-stops means that most people will have had to start their journey to work a bit earlier. In other words, it's an inconvenience not a disaster.

And if anyone thinks it’s all too easy for me who commutes on a motorcycle each day to say this, I was inconvenienced too this morning – I had to get up at the crack of dawn to go down to the local RMT picket line at 7am to offer my support.

The media demonizing of the tube workers has undoubtedly taken an effect. Many Londoners seem to see the strike as a personal affront. Quite part from the negative press campaigns, there is an economic basis to this. There’s a huge gulf now between unionized workers in the public sector – and places like my own – with largely un-unionized workers in the private sector. Particularly in small to medium manufacturing businesses. Annual negotiated agreements are unheard of – most of the time we are just pleased to keep going for another month.

Sadly this breeds a very peculiar kind of jealousy. A jealousy that resents a station supervisor earning £38k pa and a driver £40k pa, with decent conditions and overtime – the kind of packages that were once fairly universal for skilled and responsible workers. But strangely this jealousy doesn’t extend to the senior underground management who make in excess of £100k pa along with hefty (and often dubious) ‘performance bonuses’. And this jealousy completely ignores the situation of many more low paid workers on the tube – like the cleaners who only now get £7.45 an hour after winning a dispute for a living wage last year.

It’s a twisted take on the ‘race to the bottom’ with a bizarre sense of pride in leading a race where there are no prizes for the winners.

Significantly in the present recession the seminal socialist classic ‘The Ragged Trousered Philanthrophists' has re-entered the best selling lists. With the massive knocks that the labour movement has taken we are almost back to a similar era in which the novel is set, when the basic ideas of class solidarity have to be patiently explained. To get to a point where, when one group - be it tube workers, oil refinery workers or car workers - does manage to secure a better deal than most they are not resented but actually applauded and aspired to.

Blitz tube deaths anniversary

The anniversary today of the Bethnal Green tube disaster. The worst incident of civilian casualties in the Second World War when 173 people were killed during an air raid in 1943. Fearing for public morale the affair was effectively hushed up and it is only recently that local residents have taken up a campaign to commemorate the victims.

It wasn't actually enemy action that caused the deaths but panic amongst the crowd going down the steps into the station after the warning sirens had sounded - ironically a panic induced by the unfamiliar sound of a new anti-aircraft weapon being fired in a nearby park. But the whole story of the use of underground shelters (and Bethnal Green was not the only disaster) belies the mythology of the 'spirit of the blitz' and cheerful cockneys.

The truth is that at the start of the war the government had made little provision for public air raid shelters. In fact some thought that they would be bad for morale and would discourage people from continuing their normal business in the face of bombing ( the same logic that said parachutes would be bad for pilot morale in the First World War). In the early raids the police actually locked the gates at tube stations to prevent people from taking shelter there.

This was perceived as a class issue - many better-off Londoners had private shelters built in their gardens. Notoriously lavish shelters were built in some of the West End hotels and gentlemen's clubs. Communist MP for Stepney Phil Piratin led an occupation of the Savoy Hotel shelter to expose these double standards. In fact the campaign for public shelters that led to the opening of the tube stations was largely led by the Communist Party. More so than most, Communists would have had memories of the horror of aerial bombardment of cities in the Spanish Civil War.

Equally they would have been aware of the double standards of the wartime patriotic rhetoric. Far from the mythology that has since arisen, Churchill and the royal family were jeered and booed when they visited the East End in the early days of the Blitz. And the Queen Mother's famous comment about being able to look the East End in the eye after Buckingham Palace was bombed (whilst the royals were secure in their shelters) was literally all too true.

Local Anarchist Anniversary

‘In the Lenin Barracks in Barcelona, the day before I joined the militia, I saw an Italian militiaman standing in front of the officers' table... Something in his face deeply moved me. It was the face of a man who would commit murder and throw away his life for a friend - the kind of face you would expect in an Anarchist,though as likely as not he was a Communist…’

The opening paragraph from Orwell’s Homage To Catalonia pretty much sums up how I feel about anarchism. Although I’ve been a Marxist all my adult life, I have a gut inclination of emotional sympathy with anarchism. Trouble is though anarchists seem so often in the flesh to turn out to be … wankers.

Jan 23rd is the centenary of the ‘Tottenham Outrage’. Anarchists locally and nationwide are getting ready to celebrate an event that happened in my own backyard.The story pretty much sums up anarchism then and now:

In 1909 Tottenham, as it still is, was a working class district with a large immigrant population. It was home to two Jewish-Russian anarchists who decided to rob the payroll of a local rubber factory.

From the start the operation was a cock-up. They chose a factory practically next door to the local police station. They failed to make a clean getaway and consequently were chased by a posse of armed police and locals whilst they made their escape to Walthamstow. Eventually in Chingford they were cornered and shot themselves.

Along the way they shot off an estimated 400 rounds, killing one policeman and wounding seven others. They tried to hi-jack a tram with passengers aboard but were given short shrift by the driver, and then continuing in the farcical theme, tried to escape on a delivery cart that overturned because they left the brake on. Less comically they also managed to kill a ten-year-old baker’s boy who got in their way, and also wounded seventeen other assorted civilians.

Their only achievements were to unite the local working class community behind the police, and to stir up a general wave of xenophobia and anti-Semitism. And of course to enter permanently into anarchist folklore. Wankers.

Remember Remember

Remembrance Day and Fireworks night are always linked in my mind. Not just because they occur at the same time of year.

We didn't have fireworks at home because they brought back memories of my mum's East End childhood in the Blitz. Even now she still has the same flashbacks.

With good reason; her house was twice damaged by incendiary bombs. Her dad was in the River Police out on duty in the docks during the air raids and her uncle was a firefighter. At the same time the family waited for news of other uncles - one at sea on the Atlantic convoys and the other in the army in the Far East.

Now days we would call it post-traumatic stress and demand counseling - back then it was just a fact of life. So she remembers just the little things; like taking shelter under her school desk during one raid, being sent home for forgetting her gas mask and taking her exams in a shelter.

Evidence of quite how close the war came to home is still all around us: At work there is a gap in the terrace opposite still propped up by wooden supports sixty years after a bomb took out the building. At home, in the park at the end of our street, there is a memorial to 20 people killed in a single direct hit on an air raid shelter.

In the winter of 1940-41 there were eleven continuous weeks of nightly attacks on London by the Luftwaffe - 20,000 civilians in London were killed in those attacks alone and 60,000 in the whole of the war. A quarter of a million Londoners were made homeless and a third of all the city's housing stock was damaged. That's worth a moments reflection at this time of year.

It also makes you wonder who ever thought it would be a good idea to call our local American football team "London Blitz".

Fascists just up the road

Last night something I never imagined I’d see in North London – a protest meeting against the BNP standing in a council ward by-election.

Like Caesar’s Gaul, the London Borough of Haringey is divided into three parts. Those of us in the east of the borough, in Tottenham and Wood Green,live in officially the most ethnically diverse part of the country. And also one of the most impoverished. On the other hand, at the western tip of the borough, Highgate is one of the most affluent parts of London. In between the two, the areas of Hornsey, Crouch End and Muswell Hill have been gentrified to varying degrees, with bohemian liberal types.

Which makes Muswell Hill one of the least likely areas for the BNP to target. But apparently they have a policy of contesting as many council seats as they possibly can before the European elections. And with a single by-election they can bring in their resources from far and wide to concentrate in a small area and get some publicity even when they have no hope of winning. (I am confident that with or without a campaign they will get no more than a handful of votes).

The last time I went to a similar meeting was in an asian community centre on the Isle of Dogs in the early 90’s. The organisers had received death threats and hate mail from the BNP and asked us to provide security. So I found myself on the door with a baseball bat stashed out of site but on hand. Fortunately in the end we were not needed, but the atmosphere from the local community was a combination of very real fear and intense anger.

In contrast, at the meeting last night the mood was of offended outrage – the middle class shocked that these odious fascist types had the cheek to turn up on their respectable doorsteps. There was an element of farce too as one elderly speaker carefully explained to us the scientific fallacy of racism in terms of the ‘out of Africa’ evolution of homo-sapiens. You wouldn’t have got that on the Isle of Dogs.

But there was something touching about the meeting though – here was a genuinely united community, albeit a pretty smug and complacent one, standing together against the Fascists. Still I couldn’t help thinking how the fuck had it ever got this far that we were sat in a church hall in Muswell Hill discussing the BNP ?

Nooooo !

I love London. Dirty and impoverished though it may be (at least the bit where I live is) - I don't think anywhere else has the same diversity, history and vibrancy.

SO WHAT THE FUCK HAPPENED?

How did this city get a racist, elitist, over-privilidged Tory buffon as its mayor?

I'm still pondering it - so far I can think of three things:

Like The Sun in 1992 - it was The Evening Standard 'wot won it' - the voice of Middle England inside the capital has been running a vendetta against Ken since the 1980's and it has finally paid off.

The 10p tax fuck-up - the fiasco of a Labour government tinkering with the tax system to ease the burden on the middle classes by shifting it to the lowest paid. Whether it was a policy decision or whether someone hit the wrong button on their calculator it is unforgivable and try as he might Brown can't take it back.

Morons with short memories who didn't think of the horror of bringing the Tories back in. Make a protest vote against Ken by all means but the whole point of the transferable vote system is that in doing so, you don't have to cut your nose off to spite your face. Any Lib Dem, Green or Left List first preference voters who didn't transfer to Ken frankly need their heads examined.

Possibly there's a silver lining and people need to experience again an ascendent Tory party, particularly one run by Old Etonians, to re-discover what politics is all about and get radicalised. But I fear that it doesn't work like that and that the shameful turning point of the fascists winning their first seat in the London Assembly may be a taste of things to come ....

Keep Boris Out !

I have fond memories of going to anti-racist gigs in the 80’s in the Jubilee Gardens with my mates from school ( – did Aswad really play every one of those benefits?).

It may give my age away but I can remember the days before we had a Mayor’s Office in London – those glory days of the old GLC. When Ken Livingston was the council leader. In those dark Thatcher years, the GLC was a local beacon of defiance, and naturally the Tory press demonised them and him in particular as the loony left.

Admittedly with hindsight some of the community groups and campaigns the GLC supported were pretty daft, and undeniably played in to the hands of their opponents. And probably laid the basis for the cronyism and corruption allegations that are haunting Ken to this day. But I firmly believe that the GLC was a GOOD THING – and this of course is why a vindictive Tory government went on to abolish it.

Ken has come a long way since his antecedents as a fellow-traveller of the obscure Trotskyist entrist Socialist Action sect. These days he doesn’t even talk about socialism – he’s an unashamed radical-populist. Which is why he's just about tolerated by the party leadership as New Labour’s prodigal son.

But he has one vital thing going for him. He’s not ludicrous racist Tory toff Boris Johnson. And no amount of stupid bendy buses, lies about the cost of the Olympics, or dodgy dealings with Lee Jasper can outweigh this.

So, in the absence of a proper socialist candidate (sorry but the front organisations of the Socialist Workers Party, or of the Communist Party of Britain, or Galloway's Islamo-apologists just don’t cut it) - I will be holding my nose and voting Ken for mayor tomorrow.

Tory wants US-style policing for London

The attention-seeking Boris Johnson has received quite enough coverage, both in the real world and on this blog. But what about the other possible Tory candidates for London’s mayor ? So I had a look at Victoria Borwick’s website.

She’s awfully keen on law and order - presumably some dusky hoodie oiks from other parts of London must be getting into her Kennsington and Chelsea constituency and causing trouble.Her policies for London can pretty much be summarised as:

• American-style police patrols (not sure what that means – I like The Shield but I don’t think that’s really what she has in mind)

• Zero-tolerance policing – because our prisons are not clogged up enough with petty criminals already.

• A senior police officer to be recruited from the US as an advisor – because they have such low crime rates over there. (Actually Iceland has the lowest murder rate in the world but maybe they can’t spare anyone).

• The appointment of a crime ‘tsar’ as a supremo on all policy matters.

And it’s the last point that really gets to me; why do we keep hearing talk of tsars for drugs, transport, health etc. Why has this ridiculous expression re-entered the language ?

All the tsars I know of were deluded, out of touch, unelected, unaccountable and tried to hold back the advancement of their people.

You might recall that as a result they were rejected and executed.

Boris.

He rides a bike. He jogs. He believes higher education is a good thing. He's a serial shagger but appears to be disarmingly honest about his indiscretions. He displays occasional glimpses of genuine erudition. He's very funny on 'Have I Got News..' He has the tolerant cosmopolitan outlook of the international elite. His mop-haired scruffiness is a refreshing change from all those well-groomed, well-spun Stepford politicians.

BUT BORIS JOHNSON IS STILL A FUCKING TORY TOFF !

Which is why I will NOT be voting for him as mayor.