Class war target hipsters?

The protest at Cereal Killers has got people talking about gentrification so in a sense I suppose it has already done it's job.

My first reaction when I saw the shop that charges about four quid for a bowl of cereal being trashed was good riddance. Then my second reaction when I saw a piece beyond parody  in the Guardian from the hipster brothers who own the shop explaining that they didn't just sell cereal for but also provided an  experience that restored people's childhood memories was again, good riddance.

Initially the story  touched a nerve I guess because my own area is starting a process of gentrification - and hipsters are providing the advance party of the bourgeois. 

But really, men with silly beards are not the problem: Property developers who are speculating in properties in working class communities are the problem. Local councils (many of them Labour) who are selling off social housing and collaborating with austerity and socially-cleansing inner city city areas are the problem.

Poor areas have always attracted the bohemian elements of the middle class. I imagine the Victorian workers  were bemused and irritated by artists with silly beards slumming it in the East End drinking absinthe and smoking opium. But they weren't the class enemy - slum landlords charging rack rents for some of the worst living conditions in Europe were. 

The modern day equivalents of all these groups are still with us. Let's not get distracted. 

Green moral fig leaves

Whilst I was off on holiday the Post Office left one of those little red cards to say that they were holding a parcel for me to collect. Not remembering that I had ordered anything recently I felt a rush of excitement . Knowing that it was too big to deliver I thought I'd better take the car rather than my bike. With the one-way system and the perpetual roadworks it's a twenty minute drive to the Post Office.

When I signed for the (rather small) parcel it certainly was a surprise: A FUCKING PACK OF FOUR ENERGY SAVING LIGHT BULBS FROM THE GAS BOARD !

I don't know what the environmental impact of taking out my old bulbs and replacing them is - but I am pretty sure that driving to collect them negates any gain. Now multiply that by all the British Gas customers up and down the country.

Such is big business' approach to these issues. It's not even proper philanthropy. There's a piece of management speak for it - 'ethical capital'. Token bullshit that makes zero impact. Ill-conceived and sometimes even contradictory, the objective is nothing more than a PR win. Take Carbon Offsetting - continue to fuck up the environment but pay into a scheme (which is also a commercial business) to make good the damage, and everybody feels better.

At least hard-nosed Victorian factory owners built elegant public buildings to salve their consciences. I suspect that in relative terms, such gestures represented a bigger sacrifice than a packet of light bulbs.

Heathrow protests

Air travel is too cheap.

It is not an inalienable human right to travel to a sunny destination overseas for half the cost of a train ticket to the other end of this country.

And Easyjet and RyanAir are not philanthropic organisations set up with a charter to bring low cost transport to the masses thereby broadening our minds and making us a more civilised society.

In fact they are money grabbing bastards who treat their passengers like cattle and don’t give a flying fuck about the environmental impact of their operations.

And all this is facilitated by the government who, by not taxing aviation fuel allow an absurdly low price of 26p per litre. Lobbying by the aviation industry internationally has ensured that this is protected by Chicago Treaty, which we are told makes it sacrosanct. Strange how the same logic doesn't extend to the Kyoto Agreement isn't it ?

Having myself grown up in the shadow of Heathrow I can clearly remember how lessons in school would be constantly interrupted whilst we waited for planes to pass over and how my mum couldn’t put out washing in the garden without it being blackened by pollution. And that was thirty years ago – I pity the poor sods who have to live at the end of the runaway nowadays.

Which is why I fully support the protesters at Heathrow.

And yes - I do use air travel; in fact I will do so this week. But I expect to pay a reasonable price for it, and for it to be punitively taxed both as a deterrent and to help repair some of the damage it will cause.