There is something rotten in the London Borough of Barnet

My latest Trews Report is on a situation at West Hendon in the London Borough of Barnet that is so scandalous it is difficult to comprehend. There appears to be a confiscation of public assets that are then gifted to private companies on such a scale that it felt like the train I’d taken from Farringdon had transported me to Pinochet’s Chile rather than North-west London.

The Council estate on the edge of the Welsh Harp Reservoir is being demolished to make way for a series of private apartment blocks currently being punted to investors as buy-to-let opportunities. The Council residents are being shunted off to a purpose built block away from the Waterside to the carpark. Leaseholders who purchased their homes under Right-To-Buy are being given less than half their value and offered a 50% stake in one of the new homes. And non-secure tenants are either being moved to another regeneration estate or discharged into the private sector. The SSSI rating of the Reservoir is being removed to allow for more construction around the lakeside.

It is a theft of public assets on an epic scale that would even make Berlusconi blush.

There is clearly something rotten in the Borough of Barnet – where the Mayor is a private landlord who receives large amounts of housing benefit from his own authority

Where at least half the councilors are private landlords.

Where the Tory Councillor responsible for housing, Tom Davey, refers to “benefit claiming scum”

Sign the petition to help Save West Hendon

Communists finally storm City Hall

After the false dawn of socialism that was Ken Livingstone’s eight years in charge of London as Mayor, a bone fide Marxist has made her way into the government of our great city. The Evening Standard made great play of the fact that several members of Livingstone’s team had alleged links to far left groups – despite the fact that, gesture politics aside, this manifested itself in a decidely pro-capitalist regime.
I read with interest today in the Standard that Munira Mirza has been appointed as Boris Johnson’s Arts and Culture spokesperson. Ms Mirza is part of a clique that emerged from the Revolutionary Communist Party now based around the website Spiked Online and the Chianti quafing cabal known as the Manifesto Club.
The Revolutionary Communist Party are best known for their publication of Living Marxism magazine that was closed down after being sued for libel by ITN. They were also notorious in my student days for what was termed ‘horizontal recruitment’ – a flatmate of mine experienced this first-hand after a ‘Troops Out’ meeting above a pub in Islington. Their wrath was mainly aimed at others on the Left and they were so divisive that many believed that the RCP was in fact a CIA/MI5 front organisation. Maybe Munira Mirza’s elevation to the ranks of Boris Johnson’s Junta confirms our paranoid suspicions as it’s not clear what qualifies Munira Mirza in the realms of Arts and Culture beyond editing a couple of dodgy corporate-sponsored reports.
Could it be that the famously fruity Boris Johnson couldn’t resist the tales of ‘horizontal recruitment’ in his attempt to recreate the spirit of the knocking shop that was the Spectator under his editorship.

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The Crook, The Toff, The Cop and The Fascist


An anarchist perspective on the London Mayoral Elections: ” We all know politicians are lying, corrupt, self-serving parasites – its time we let them know. This is our London, not their, their party’s or their paymasters’.
– noticeable that the Greens still get left out.
I stopped to chat to the Left List canvassers outside Leytonstone Station the other day greeting them with the line, “I thought you lot didn’t believe in bourgeois democracy”, which seemed to catch them slightly unawares. The SWP must have changed a bit since I was a lad when all SWSS members were thoroughly indoctrinated with the line on the futility of elections. I perused their stall, being a sucker for political paraphernalia, and looked at the latest edition of Socialist Studies that included an article on ‘Reality TV: the Big Brother phenomenon’. “What’s Big Brother got to do with socialism”, I scoffed, before noticing that the lady I was talking to, and at this point looking slightly sheepish, was former Big Brother contestant (and local celebrity) Carole Vincent.

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Note to all London Mayoral Candidates


“The London County Council is probably the most remarkable attempt of modern democracy to build a local governing machine which will produce a highly expert staff of bureaucratic specialists controlled by a general council elected by practically every class of the community. The achievements of the London County Council are the results of this great experiment in scientific democracy; whereby we often put in an illiterate slum elector at one end of the machine and turn out an expert administrator at the other.
So complicated has the art and science of government become since men ceased to be wandering hunters.”
G.R. Stirling Taylor, The London County Council (published in ‘Wonderful London Vol 3circa 1920))

the photo shows the Council Chamber at County Hall (before it was turned into an amusement arcade with a McDonalds

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If Voting Changed Anything….

So the official Mayoral Campaign has begun. What you’ll read about in the newspapers and see on the telly is the cartoon contest between ‘Not So Red’ Ken Livingstone and ‘Barmy Bouncy Bonkers’ Boris Johnson with a cardboard cameo appearance from ‘Stoner Gay Copper’ Brian Paddick.
This isn’t the real election.
Ken launched his campaign with a warning that this wasn’t Celebrity Big Brother. He’s quite right because Celebrity Big Brother presents voters with a reasonable choice of candidates representing a diversity of race, gender and neuroses. This is possibly why more people vote in Big Brother evictions than in local elections.
This week saw the pitiful sight of Boris and Ken squabbling over how many ‘unaffordable homes’ they wouldn’t build – between the ineffective 50% minimum introduced by home-owner Livingstone and the scrapping of that by multiple home-owner Johnson (Canonbury and Henley at that – two of the most sought after locations in the South East) who merely wants 50,000 “cheaper” homes. What both targets miss is whether these mythical dwellings are “affordable” or “cheaper” they are both still far too expensive for the vast majority of Londoners.
I shall try to track the election on this blog and although I jest a bit I’m saddened by the lack of any kind of viable candidate who aims to speak for Londoners rather than the City, the developers, and the two main parties. This election is being transformed into a phoney war between the Tories and Labour in the tussle for the bigger prize of national power – London as a third world client state over which the super-powers fight.
Where’s Rainbow George when you need him.

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