Author: urbanramblings19687496

Retired teacher. Lives in North West London. Grew up in Thurrock in the 1950's and 60's and consequently spent the first 18 years of his life breathing air that was 60% cement. Active member of the National Education Union (formerly NUT) and Labour Party.

The shameless manipulation of Remembrance

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Remembering the dead of former wars should motivate us to march to save the victims of the war in Gaza. That is particularly the case if you reflect that the intensity of the casualties there in the last four weeks have been five times as great on a per population basis as the total losses through aerial bombing in the UK throughout the Second World War, in a less than a seventieth of the time*.

This is the UN summary of casualties just for the last 24 hours in Gaza.

  • Between 8 November (14:00) and 9 November (14:00), 243 Palestinians were killed in Gaza, according to the Ministry of Health (MoH) in Gaza. According to initial information, on 8 November at about 15:30, an airstrike hit a residential building in Gaza city, killing 19 people and injuring 45; another strike at 18:00 hit a house in Jabalia Refugee Camp, reportedly killing 15 Palestinians; on 9 November after midnight, a building in eastern of Khan Yunis was hit, reportedly killing six and injuring several others.
  • The fatality toll reported by MoH in Gaza since the start of the hostilities stands at 10,818, of whom 68 per cent are said to be children and women. About 2,650 others, including some 1,400 children, have been reported missing and may be trapped or dead under the rubble, awaiting rescue or recovery.
  • The reported fatalities since 7 October include at least 192 medical staff, according to the MoH Gaza. Of them, at least 16 were on duty when killed, according to WHO. The fatalities further include 99 UNRWA staff, and 18 Palestinian Civil Defense personnel.

And on displacement

  • On 9 November, for the sixth consecutive day, the Israeli military – which has called upon residents of the north to leave southwards – opened a “corridor” along the main traffic artery, Salah Ad Deen Road between 9:00 and 16:00. It is estimated that, over the course of these seven hours, more than 50,000 people fled.
  • Internally Displaced Persons (IDPs) reached the main junction next to Wadi Gaza on foot or donkey carts, as vehicles were reportedly stopped by the Israel military at about 4-5 kilometres away from that point. Most were able to carry only few personal belongings. UN monitors and NGOs distributed water and biscuits next to the junction. IDPs interviewed by OCHA monitors indicated that they did not know where they would stay overnight.
  • Over 1.5 million people in Gaza are estimated to be internally displaced. To cope with the increased flow of IDPs, UNRWA opened two additional shelters in the Middle area, bringing the agency’s total number of shelters in the south to 92, sheltering 582,000 IDPs.
  • Overcrowding remains a major concern. On average, 160 people sheltering in UNRWA schools facilities share a single toilet and there is one shower unit for every 700 people. The worsening sanitary conditions, along with the lack of privacy and space, generate health and safety hazards.

They have other sections dealing with Humanitarian access, Electricity, Hospitals and Health Care (including attacks), Water and sanitation, in which the statistics are similarly numbing. Right wing attack dogs like Jacob Grease Smug and Julia Fartly Brewer, who have tried to dismiss the human scale of these deaths this week by claiming that the numbers are “Hamas propaganda” should note that these are UN endorsed figures.

What they say about the West Bank, which is not run by Hamas, shows that this is a war between the Israeli state in all Palestinians.

  • Israeli forces shot and killed 18 Palestinians, including one child, between the afternoon of 8 November and noontime on 9 November. The deadliest incident, which lasted for over 12 hours, took place in Jenin Refugee Camp and resulted in 13 Palestinians, including one child, killed. The operation involved armed clashes with Palestinians, and airstrikes, resulting in extensive infrastructure damage. Another five fatalities were recorded during confrontations in the course of search-and-arrest operations in Anin (Jenin), Bethlehem city, Balata Refugee Camp (Nablus), Al Am’ari Refugee Camp (Ramallah), and At Tabaqa (Hebron)
  • Since 7 October, 167 Palestinians, including 45 children, have been killed by Israeli forces; and an additional eight, including one child, have been killed by Israeli settlers. Three Israelis have been killed in attacks by Palestinians.
  • The number of Palestinians killed in the West Bank since 7 October accounts for 42 per cent of all Palestinian fatalities in the West Bank in 2023 (415). About 59 per cent of the fatalities since 7 October occurred during confrontations that followed Israeli search-and-arrest operations, primarily in Jenin and Tulkarm governorates. Some 27 per cent were in the context of demonstrations in solidarity with Gaza; seven per cent were killed in settler attacks against Palestinians, and the remaining seven per cent were killed while attacking or allegedly attacking Israeli forces or settlers.
  • Since 7 October, Israeli forces have injured 2,492 Palestinians, including at least 253 children, over half of them in the context of demonstrations. Sixty-six Palestinians have been injured by settlers. Some 32 per cent of those injuries have been caused by live ammunition.
  • In the past 24 hours, six settler attacks resulting in damage or injuries were reported. These included raids in the villages of At Taybe (Hebron), Qusra (Nablus), Bruqin (Salfit), Khirbet Tana (Nablus), Al Mughayyir and Sinjil (the latter two in Ramallah) where settlers vandalized agricultural structures and crops. In two of these attacks, Israeli settlers physically assaulted and injured two Palestinians who were harvesting olives.
  • Since 7 October, OCHA has recorded 230 settler attacks against Palestinians, resulting in Palestinian casualties (28 incidents), damage to Palestinian-owned property (167 incidents), or both casualties and damage to property (35 incidents). This reflects a daily average of seven incidents, compared with three since the beginning of the year. Over one-third of these incidents included threats with firearms, including shootings. In nearly half of all incidents, Israeli forces were either accompanying or actively supporting the attackers.
  • Since 7 October, at least 111 Palestinian households comprising 905 people, including 356 children, have been displaced amid settler violence and access restrictions. The displaced households are from 15 herding/Bedouin communities.
  • An additional 135 Palestinians, including 66 children, have been displaced since 7 October following demolitions in Area C and East Jerusalem, due to lack of permits, and another 27, including 15 children, following punitive demolitions.

The note that since Oct 7th there have been 7 daily attacks by settlers, but that before Oct 7th there were 3 a day, should bring home the reality of daily life for Palestinians in the West Bank. What its like when this is out of sight and out of mind of the news bulletins. Just as bad. But a bit slower.

Remembering the dead of past wars is used in this country as a way to ceremonially bind the present population to the institutions and power structures that fought those wars in the first place. People will remember in different ways.

As the years have gone by in early November, as the leaves fall from the trees and blood red paper poppies appear on the lapels of politicians and newsreaders, I have thought more and more about my grandfather, as a boy soldier at the Somme at 17, then a quarter of a century later as a veteran in the Home Guard, fire watching from the roof of the factory he worked in, my other grandfather, as a sergeant in the Royal Engineers “Dock lot” at Anzio in 1944; both of whom survived: and my Mum’s uncle, killed in Tunisia on the last day of the North Africa campaign in 1943 when he drove his lorry over a landmine at the age of 20, and my Dad’s cousin, not much older, killed when his co-pilot in the radar mosquito they were flying to track V1s in 1944 tried to take off in the wrong direction and ploughed into the side of a hangar… who didn’t. And my parents, both evacuated. And my grandmother, who worked for the Coop and was secretary of the local rationalisation committee, that divvied up delivery rounds for grocery companies so they didn’t duplicate and waste petrol.

Suella Braverman and Rishi Sunak have tried to argue that demonstrating against this present war is some sort of dishonour to them. But, remembering what they and so many others went through should make us even more motivated to march to stop a military genocide happening now in front of our eyes.

The Home Secretary and Prime Minister are opposed to a ceasefire, so of course they want a pause in the pressure on them to call for one. They have given a nod and a wink to the sort of far right rabble – political descendants of the Nazis – who were standing by the Cenotaph last week “defending” it from people who have no intention of damaging it, one of them commenting that England was wonderful in the 1950s and we could get back there if we just “get rid of the riff raff”– to come out in greater numbers and cause disturbances that would allow them to ban future marches. And desperately mischaracterise them within their own communalist framework, in which conflicts cannot be conceived as anything other than one ethnic or religious community against another. The vibrant Jewish contingents deliberately erased from their account, and those in the right wing newspapers.

There is no doubt that the sheer scale of these marches, their cross community character and intense moral and human purpose, is shifting the terrain of politics across the board, not just here but internationally. Every bomb that Israel drops is blowing away the hegemony of the US “rules based order” for more and more people as the scales drop from their eyes. It is a terrible price to be paid for political clarity. A pause this week would make that price even higher.

See you on the march.

*UK population during WW2 around 50 million.

Gaza population: 2.3 million. So Gaza population is less than a twenty fifth of that number.

Total UK deaths from aerial bombing in WW2, after 292 weeks: 52,000.

Total Gaza deaths after 4 weeks: 10,000 (this is a conservative estimate that does not include people missing under rubble, assumed to be an additional 2,500).

So, as a proportion of the population the deaths in Gaza have been more than five times as heavy as those in the UK through the whole of WW2 after just a seventy eighth of the time.

An Attenborough out take – and other stories of managed decline.

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Now that we are back on Greenwich Meantime, and the nights start in the afternoon, I’m reminded of one of my grandmother’s phrases “Don’t half get late early doesn’t it?”

At the corner of the park there is an area of once ornamental plants that is now decidedly unkempt and casually rubbish strewn. It abuts an area with a few trees that provide cover to ground level and a dark and rather menacing glade alongside the path that everyone hurries past. This has become something of a haven for rats in the last few months.

They are definitely becoming a bit bolder. On Sunday morning last week several of them were frolicking in the sunlight a little away from a flock of pigeons. One of the pigeons, possibly curious (I don’t know how curious pigeons get) waddled over and got into one of the rat’s personal space, so it jumped up and snapped at its breast before getting back to moseying around on the grass with a mouth full of feather, as the pigeon, armed with no more than a corn pecking beak and an injured sense of dignity, backed off in a huff. Not quite the Serengeti, but could fit into the latest Attenborough series about urban wildness, given the right camera angle and magnification.

It doesn’t help that some people feed the pigeons, sometimes in a big way, which also feeds the rats; and others dump half eaten fast food near the bins instead of in them. Every night is take out night.

At the other end of the park near the Shisha lounge, another rather plump rat makes one of those bum bouncing runs they do when they are in a bit of a panic, heading for cover, as a fox, magnificently red in the early morning light, stands stock still and watches it with lordly indifference.

Where are the raptors when you need them?

A bit of guerilla gardening might be a good move if the council would agree to it. Put live plants into the scuzzy ornamental patch, having cleared it, and for volunteers to keep them up, along with clearing away the rubbish and undergrowth that gives the rats the cover they need.

The following Sunday morning, another sunny day in which colours in the park seemed to have been reimagined as a painting by David Hockney, there was no sign of the rats on their main territory. Perhaps they were having a lie in.

Most of the park is fine, busy, full of dog walkers, exercise classes, little parliaments of elderly men putting the world to rights, but these sad rodent ridden corners need sorting out.

Someone had vandalised and abandoned an electric hire bike near the shops. It could be a metaphor for what Rishi Sunak is doing to the government’s climate targets.

A bright green double decker arrives with a paint job on the side announcing it as the 1,000th London electric bus, which is good to know. Only 7,000 to go. In Shenzen they converted all 16,000 of their buses to electric in one year, but TFL is doing well by Western standards. The millionth Morris Minor was painted Lilac, which was quite daring for the time.

At the Health Centre in Alperton for my Covid jab and its a real industrial process. The waiting room packed out, the queue half way up the corridor to the entrance. All elderly. All looking for a seat and not always finding it. The space, excitement and bonhomie of the first wave replaced by a kind of unsettled grumpiness as everyone is jumbled too close together cheek by jowl. The bloke in charge of feeding in the queue has an air of can do enthusiasm that shall not be moved, and moves everyone through as quickly as possible. Overhead, possibly covering a camera, someone has placed a nitrite glove that looks like a shrunken blue udder, or an AI plasticated version of “The Beast with Five Fingers”. “Its the horrible hand, its operating again!”

After the rains, a dead slug lies on the pavement like a tiny beached whale.

The houses in Roe Green Village, built originally to house the workers for Airco, look as though they were purpose built for Xmas card scenes. All red brick and high pitched roofs with dense green hedges, just waiting for a thick snowfall, to be scattered with glitter and festooned with, tasteful, lights. Of course, the people who first lived in them built military aircraft in the First World War.

On the way back home, a group of ten middle aged adults, some with lanyards, walk along Roe Green in pairs like an extremely well behaved school crocodile.

On the way up the hill, I pass a man walking down who has some sort of palsy, has his head down a bit concentrating on walking and is shaking his arms like he’s having a bop. So I wish him a good morning as I pass, and he nods. Only connect.

Endless war – a reply to the chair of Labour Friends of Israel

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Writing on Labour List, Labour Friends of Israel chair, Steve McCabe, argues against a ceasefire because of the scale of the Hamas attack on Israel on Oct 7th and that unless Hamas is utterly destroyed this is a “recipe for endless war”.

He asks us rhetorically We should consider whether we as a country would be willing to accept the continuing existence of a terrorist entity on our borders which had just massacred 10,000 Britons – the equivalent per population figure – after 30 years of ever-increasing attacks? Would we not demand, as the Israeli people are understandably doing, that our government protect us and our children by removing that danger?

“Removing that danger”. What anodyne, surgical framing. McCabe would be more honest, with himself let alone the rest of us, if he were explicit about what this has already meant and will lead to.

He does not make the comparable extrapolation that up to Thursday this week the IDF bombing of Gaza so far killed just over 7,000 people. The equivalent per population figure for the UK is 210,000. If he thinks a desire to retaliate is understandable from Israel, what on earth does he think the desire is going to be in Gaza and beyond with a death rate like that?

You can do the Maths if you like. The UK population is 30 times bigger than that of Gaza, so multiply the latest confirmed casualty figures – an underestimate because so many people are buried under the rubble – which will be bigger than the 7,000 confirmed by last Thursday – by 30 and you get the comparable impact of a bombing campaign on the UK.

To get a perspective on this, the equivalent of 210,000 people killed in just under three weeks is four times the intensity of all the casualties killed by Luftwaffe bombing in the UK between 1939 and 1945 by total in an eightieth of the time.

Nor does he reflect that the overall death rate since 2000 has been twenty Palestinians killed for every Israeli.

If Israeli violence is justified in his view by “acts of terror”, how much more terrorised by the IDF are the Palestinian population?

Even leaving aside the systematic discrimination built into the Israeli state (50 racially discriminatory laws) the casually lethal state backed illegal settlements, evictions and arrests and torture, if death through lethal force is justification for more of it, perhaps he should reflect on the dragons teeth the army he supports is sowing.

He argues that a ceasefire now will not disarm Hamas. Nor will it disarm the IDF, which kills far more people. But it will stop a massacre.

A wholesale ground attack now, under cover of a media blackout – with so many journalists killed and mobile networks cut off – has a genocidal logic that means the war will indeed be endless. The “ever increasing attacks” on Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank do not lead to peace. On the contrary, a ceasefire now is the essential first step to all children in the region being able to sleep safely in their beds in peace and equality.

Gaza in the Chemists and other Street Scenes.

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At the chemists, where I am a regular, the news from Gaza broadcasts silently from the screen above the counter; out of sight of the pharmacists who work away oblivious of the horror above their heads, chatting amiably to the customers who are not looking up either.

On the screen, the woman from UNWRA is talking about how they will run out of fuel today and will have to shut down, even though their facilities are hosting 700,000 people, triple their capacity. The trickle of aid getting in is barely a fig leaf to cover the ongoing attack. She is very smartly turned out, but her face betrays a fortnight of sleeplessness and she seems hollowed out, just about holding it together.

Reading an article by Ahdaf Soueif in the FT in the library, after glancing at the usual headlines screaming vengeance in the Mail and such, and her observation that “dehumanising the Palestinians absolves one from trying to understand them” could have been written with them in mind.

This comes after listening to Jeremy Bowen’s interview with some Israeli settlers in the West Bank, who were saying that the weapons they carried, a big machete and gun, were currently to defend themselves; but they hoped to go onto the offensive against their Palestinian neighbours soon and drive them out, as one of them said, “from the river to the sea.” If you’re looking for a genocidal movement…

The young woman in a hijab working in Boots wishes me a “good day”; and I bite back a comment on how difficult that is knowing what’s happening in Gaza, and realise how close to tears I am.

A bright red spatter of paan spit on the pavement looks like blood.

Manufacturing consent for a massacre…

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This is an expanded version of my complaint to Radio 4. You can’t say everything you need to in 2000 characters.

The way that I feel about your coverage this evening is summarised in a letter I wrote to the Observer last week,

In the last two decades the casualty rate from the conflict in Israel Palestine has been twenty Palestinians killed for every Israeli. Given that the suffering on the Palestinian side is so much higher, it is therefore strange that your editorial finds calls for violence  from Israel “understandable”, while considering that violent actions from Palestinians “defy comprehension”. 

Perhaps you should write another editorial explaining the asymmetry of your empathy. 

They didn’t publish it.

Like them, your bias comes out in two main ways.

The tone in which you say things and the presumption you have about who can be trusted. As if Rishi Sunak, the US administration and MI6 don’t have gigantic axes to grind and have never knowingly misled anyone for political purposes.

What you cover.

  • This evening you relegated Palestinian suffering to its customary background level of attention and concern – something to be taken for granted, like wallpaper, like all Global South deaths.
  • You broadcast an item that argued for the Police to suppress people on a small Hizb ut Tahrir demo on Saturday shouting “jihad” on the basis that this could be interpreted as threatening, while managing to falsely imply that this was the character of the main, massive and diverse PSC ceasefire demonstration on the same day – which actually included Jewish people and organisations – and without reflecting for a moment that taking the flag of a country that is imposing collective punishment on 2.3 million people, and has killed over 5,000 of them in the past week, and flying it on public buildings might also be offensive and threatening to many people in this country, and is opposed by most of us.
  • you followed up with a report on the IDF press conference on Hamas atrocities on October 7th,
  • then followed that up with an individual story of what happened to one family on Oct 7th.
  • Then you repeated the Prime Minster’s endorsement of the Israeli claim that the attack on the hospital last week was from a misfired rocket from Islamic Jihad (rockets that have never managed to kill even a handful of people when they have got through to Israel but in this case managed to kill over 400 somehow) without reflecting either the serious debunking the Israeli claims have had, nor noting the other 5 hospitals the IDF have hit, nor the Church that runs the hospital stating that the IDF have warned them twice, nor the Israeli- US rejection of calls for an independent investigation (which is always a bit of a give away).
  • mentioned that 20 lorries have been allowed into Gaza with humanitarian aid, without noting that this is 480 short of the normal daily total after two weeks of a total siege
  • then repeated the rocket claim from our ever trustworthy intelligence agencies (who have never been known to be economical with the truth) just in case anyone missed it the first time.

All of this is designed to build up empathy for one side over the other in a way that reflects the agenda of the IDF, which is to generate compliance for its current and future operations in Gaza.

These have already killed three times as many as died on Oct 7th and will kill many many more if there isn’t a ceasefire; something the overwhelming majority of people in this country support (76% according to a YouGov poll last week).

When you cover an individual story it generates an emotional bond with the people being covered. If you primarily cover one side in this way, it indicates that this is deliberate.

Here’s a suggestion. To be properly balanced and properly to match the current ratio of death and suffering, for every individual story you cover from the Israeli side, you should cover three from the Palestinian side, and keep adding to the ratio as the death toll goes up. As it will. A process that coverage like yours is now enabling.

1,000 eyes for an eye?

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“Also, I guess its permissible for a gentleman to kill children and women, as long as they are peasants”. Jason Lee Burke. Flags on the Bayou.

When Rishi Sunak says “There are not two sides to these events. There is no question of balance. I stand with Israel” he is stating his position in reverse order.

He stands with Israel, therefore there is no question of balance, and therefore there can be no acknowledgement that other side to the conflict can have anything legitimate to say.

Nor can he acknowledge that the ultimate cause of that conflict is the racially oppressive nature of the Israeli state; nor that the balance of power and therefore the balance of death and damage is overwhelmingly in Israel’s favour; with five Palestinians killed for every Israeli.

This year alone 49 Palestinian children have been killed by the IDF and settlers; something that stokes no moral outrage in our media, from our Prime Minister or leader of the opposition, let alone the despatch of two aircraft carrier task forces to the Eastern Med by the United States.

Because Palestinian children being killed is normal, expected, nothing to remark on. The natural order of things. Just as the inexorable dispossession of Palestinians from their land and the entrenchment of racist laws (over 50 of them) in Israel carries on with barely a comment, as though it were a force of nature.

Nothing anyone can do about it. Its just where the power lies.

And so it does. The “West” supports Israel because Israel’s relationship with the Palestinians is like that of the West to the rest of the world in microcosm, and the fault line between the Global North and the Global South runs through the territory controlled by Israel. Israel itself is generally seen as being part of the Global North. The Palestinian territories are definitely not.

Rishi Sunak stands with Israel because it is defending Western wealth and power, and capacity to discriminate and deny wealth and power to others, with force in the same way that the UK and USA do. They are doing it within territory they control, rather than in a series of expeditionary forces far from home, but its the same relation of power that is being “defended”, or enforced, depending on what side of the process you are on.

Power, wealth, dominance. Being seen as human comes from having it. Those who do not have it, the dispossessed, are not, and cannot be, counted as fully human. “Human animals” as the Israeli defence Minister put it. Who deserve their punishment. Kay Burley might not say that “Gaza has it coming” but its the unspoken presumption behind every broadcast and the framing of every report.

Because Apartheid was, and is, not an aberration. It is the normative racial expression of colonial power. And that is shown most starkly in whose lives matter, and whose don’t.

That’s why its possible for Sir Keir Starmer to say that it is legitimate for Israel to “defend itself” by cutting off food, water, power and medicine to all of the two and half million people who are trying to survive in the Gaza strip.

Just think about that for a moment. Imagine it the other way around. Would it be legitimate for the Palestinians to cut Israel off from food, water, medicines and power, if they could, as an act of self defence from the regular bombing and shelling it gets from the IDF? Or is it only acceptable for those that have the power to do so. The strong have the right to defend themselves against the weak, because they can? Might makes right?

This is also normative. It is how the “West”, that embodiment of enlightenment values, “defends” itself against any regime, of whatever sort, that challenges it, from the half million children starved to death in Iraq in the 1990s through sanctions to the 40,000 who died in Venezuela in the last decade.

The humanity of those who die cannot be allowed to come into it. Some lives matter more than others and therefore the deaths of those that do can be pressed into service to create a great tsunami of moral outrage that can justify horror on a far grander scale to restore the natural order of things. The most lurid stories about this – widespread rapes, the beheading of 40 babies on a Kibbutz – are now being quietly withdrawn for lack of evidence. But they have served their purpose on the front pages and social media feeds to prepare the ground for the retaliation; which will be on a terrible scale.

All the more terrible because Israel has suffered the humiliation of having one of its army bases overrun. “Facts on the ground” will have to be reasserted so they can carry on trying to keep themselves safe, not by seeking peace and equal rights for everyone in the territory they control, but by doubling down on the exclusion and repression that has generated this reaction in the first place. The human losses in the immediate term will be appalling. In the longer term, a state that will have to become ever more violent and repressive, simply postpones the point at which this breaks and makes the eventual reckoning apocalyptic.

This is the pattern as we saw with 9/11. Three thousand five hundred people died on that day in 2001. Their stories were told, their loved ones interviewed, their last messages played back, the rubble was sifted through for traces of DNA that could be buried. There was no doubt that these people’s lives mattered. The “war on terror” that the USA unleashed in response killed four and a half million people. Their lives did not matter. The ratio of deaths is over 1,000 to one.

And that is the scale of the barbarism of the “enlightened West”. They kill on such a large scale, with such sophisticated weaponry, in so many places, so often, even at home sometimes against the “lesser breeds without the law” that live among them, partly because they are terrified of the consequences of what they know they have done.

The atavistic fear of the slave rebellion subconsciously acknowledges the terrible injustices done to the enslaved, in terror at their vengeful uprising; and tries to assuage itself by redoubling the injustice, building walls and bombing harder. Impossible to live with that unless you deny the humanity of the people you are doing it to.

And so it is with flags. Showing a Palestinian flag in the UK can now be a matter for the police -as it can be seen as a form of threatening behaviour. Flying the Israeli flag on public buildings at a time they are bombing Gaza more intensely than at any point in the last 16 years, smashing six neighbourhoods, hitting 18 health facilities, killing 1,200 people so far, is considered a fine gesture of solidarity.

In the second wave of the wars for the New American Century, dissent will increasingly be defined as treason, extending humanity to the oppressed considered inhumane.

On one level, its possible simply to turn questions like that of Richard Littlejohn on the front page of the Daily Mail on Tuesday on its head. “How can the British Left make excuses for a terrorist group that murders women and children?” And that would be valid as far as it goes. “How can the British Right make excuses for a terrorist state that murders women and children?” But the deeper question is what the answer is and where the solution lies.

For the Right the conflict in Israel-Palestine is posed as between two ethnic groups. Power relations are ignored, or taken as the natural order of things. So, the motivation for resistance becomes a flaw in character. Evil terrorism from people who can’t accept their place. “The Palestinians have to accept that they are a defeated people” as US neocon Daniel Pipes put it. There is therefore no solution but endless repression to keep those who currently have the upper hand, one of “our allies” and therefore the good guys, in power forever. And, if that looks like a boot stamping on a child’s face over and over again until the end of time, so be it. Not “our” children after all. “Little snakes” according to former Israeli Justice Minister Ayelet Shaked.

For the Left, the conflict is about power and equal rights and the solution is everyone having them. The slogan “No justice, no peace” is not a threat, it is a description.

1963: Between Eternity and Congress House

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Squadrons of Mods in sharp suits on Italian motor scooters

Lambrettas and Vespas,

With little Union Jacks and floppy plastic tails hanging limply from their aerials

Disrespectfully patriotic RAF roundels on the backs of their parkas

Parked in a pack between the War Memorial and the Wimpy Bar

That little slice of American Modernity

– formica table tops

-frothy coffee

-table ketchup in real plastic tomatoes

wedged in between the dusty deserted grandeur of the Queens Hotel to the Right

and the Coop Department store on the Left.

September 2014

Bit of a false memory when I wrote this. I couldn’t recall what the Wimpy Bar looked like above ground floor level. Looking at the space I imagined it was in was even more puzzling, as there didn’t seem to be room for it. Scouring the internet turned up a photo that showed it was wedged between the Coop and the Queens Hotel, it was wedged into the Queens at the corner of its northern most end.

“Congress House” was the name of the Coop Department store. The Selfridges of South East Essex. It looked like the future in 1963. Sold everything from furniture to clothes to electrical equipment and hyperreal pottery shrunken heads of exotic types of person you might encounter on a holiday from a farther away place than Westcliffe on Sea. A great place to play hide and seek in after school. It even had lifts. There was a competition for the name. They chose the same one as the TUC HQ, which showed what a Labour sort of place this was.

1957 – Brand New Tile

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This is actually 1959, but it gets us all in. Dad, Me, Mum and Chris. Photo from Edie Clark collection.

When my parents became the second tenants

of one of the first homes fit for heroes to live in

some time in 1957,

they had to take it as they found it

aged beyond its years

1 cracked, stone floored scullery

1 indoor coal cupboard

1 outside toilet

a pantry under the stairs

bare floorboards, splintery and grey

round, brown bakelite switches, hard, chunky, glowing like dulled conkers

black iron fire places

and, here and there, rusty nails driven into bare walls to hang up pots, pans, hats or coats.

My Dad set to work, digging up weeds, planting potatoes and runner beans – bright scarlet flowers amid leaves waving like wings

building cupboards

planing, sawing, sanding, plastering, painting, papering

smells of blowtorch burning acrid, sweet paint and hot sawdust, damp earth and cut grass, squelchy paste and crisp, dry paper.

My Mum cranked the mangle handle in the steaming scullery

pulling boiled sheets from fat iron pans with wooden tongs

smelling of lavender and soap

washing, scrubbing, polishing grimy surfaces

putting out washed milk bottles that gleamed like a Grenadier Guardsman’s boots

and fresh, fresh laundry flying high on lines stretched between old ship’s masts, newly painted burgundian Green.

I was 3.

My part in this spring offensive

rejuvenating the prematurely decrepit

was to polish a tile

singular and special for being deep crimson red

cracked and broken, but with a leathery glow as though it was made of melted down cricket balls, red boot toe caps, the heart of a winter hearth

just inside the front door, alone as a relic of happiness

that I could make gleam and smile

if I polished it hard enough on my hands and knees

just like Mum.

When the time came too soon

to neatly nail hardboard over the grooved wooden doors and paint them slickly over with easily cleaned pastel gloss

replace the bakelite relics with neat, flat squares of snappy grey plastic – switched on with a whispering click, not an emphatic clunk

and entomb my tile under clean, new lino

it felt like burying an emotion under a wipe clean surface

and the spirit of Barry Bucknell bestrode the world like a collosus.

August 2005

Any old iron? Any old iron?

Any, any, any old iron?

You look sweet

Talk about a treat

You look dapper from your napper to your feet

Dressed in style

In your brand new tile

And your father’s old green tie on…

Well I wouldn’t give you tuppence for your old watch chain

Old iron, old iron…

Popular song of the time.

“Capitalism won’t solve the energy transition fast enough”

Posted on by urbanramblings19687496

These are the notes for a recent speech at my local Constituency Labour Party. The title and the quote at the beginning is from Jason Hickel, who is the Energy editor at the Financial Times; so has something of a horses mouth quality to it.

“There’s too much to do and, given the urgency and the need to get the solutions right, this isn’t a task for your favourite ESG focussed portfolio manager, or the tech bros. The sheer scale of the physical infrastructure that must be revamped, demolished or replaced is almost beyond comprehension. Governments, not Blackrock, will have to lead this new Marshall Plan. And keep doing it. The Western nations that did so much of the damage will have to finance the transition in the developing world – it is astonishing that this is still debated. Massive deficit funding will be necessary.(my emphasis)

For all the clean tech advances and renewable deployment in recent decades, fossil fuels share of global energy use was 86% in 2000, and 82% last year.”

The scale of the challenge

According to Adam Tooze we need to be investing $4 Trillion per year in energy transition. 

Others have argued as much as $6.5 Trillion per year

As the world economy is roughly $100 Trillion a year, between 4 and 6% of it needs to be invested in the transition.

A large sum, but to put it in context, last year (2022) subsidies for fossil fuels amounted to $7 Trillion and Fossil fuel profits were $4Trillion.

This is an opportunity – because there’s your magic money tree…but also a problem, because fossil fuels are so entrenched in everyday life and political power.

Fossil fuel companies have known about the effect of greenhouse gases for 60 years, and have reacted in the same way as the tobacco and asbestos companies did over the links between their products and cancer.

Even now, Shell is arguing that – to be compatible with their interests – Net Zero will only be achievable some time in the 22nd century (so between 50 and 100 years too late).

This entrenchment in political power is seen in Sunak’s latest announcements and more structurally in the high level of climate denial in the US Congress – where Senators and Congresspeople are bought up by FF companies. Showing once again that the USA is the best democracy money can buy.

This leads to a mind boggling level of cognitive dissonance. In 2019 the US military produced a report which stated that the impact of climate breakdown would lead not only to states collapsing around the world, but also that extreme weather events in the US itself would lead to infrastructure and civil society collapsing to a degree that they would expect to be called in to fulfil para state roles, before collapsing themselves from the overstretch that would impose. At the same time, they projected a need to be ready to intervene as the Arctic ice melts, to make sure that the US gets its customary lion’s share of the fossil fuel resources revealed under the ice; thereby helping fuel the collapse that they predict.

Which brings us to a related problem. The ratio of military to green transition spending. In the US, for every $1 allocated to green transition via the Inflation Reduction Act, they are currently spending $18 on their military. And this will get worse as the US and its allies, already responsible for two thirds of global military spending, are sharply increasing it.

The figures on this for China might surprise you. For every $1 they spend on their military, they spend $2 on green transition.

This means two things

  1. A shift from military to green transition spending is an urgent task for the climate and labour movement globally – and therefore the Atlanticist foreign policy framework of the current Labour leadership is as wrong as it can be – and will be thrown into complete crisis should Donald Trump be re-elected next year (which is highly possible).
  2. Countries that see themselves as Socialist are more part of the solution than they are given credit for. The one relatively developed country that the UN considers operates on sustainable lines is… Cuba.

Going back to Tooze to underline this point.

$4Trillion per year needed for energy transition.

Last year, $1.7 Trillion invested in renewable energy, but $1 Trillion was invested in fossil fuels. So, the net gain of 700 billion amounts to about 20% of what we need to be doing. Another way of looking at this is that we need to be doing five times as much as we are at the moment.

According to Tooze, China is the only country investing at anything like the scale and pace we need.

This is underlined by the International Energy Agency that reports that last year China invested 70% more in the transition than the USA and EU put together. And next year the projections are that their investment will be double that of the US and EU combined.

Specifically, in 2024, China is projected to account for 

50% of global solar installations

60% of new onshore wind

70% of new offshore wind.

Labour’s projected £28 billion a year would get us up to US or EU levels; so about half of where we need to be.

This week the IEA put out an updated road map to Net Zero and keeping under a 1.%C increase.

Their essential point is that this is still possible, but only if advance (rich) countries in particular up their targets and ambitions – the opposite of what Sunak has done this week – with an enhanced target of 2045 for Net Zero. No new oil and gas is a bottom line.

To have any chance of getting to that £28 billion, what we need is Just transition bodies with union and community involvement at every level in every sector – so plans for investment – and community mobilisation around them – can be made. This transition can’t happen as a “trickle down” process. It has to be forced up, and the unions in particular will need to take the lead on this, not react defensively.

A Place to Live….

Posted on by urbanramblings19687496

A look at two housing developments in Thurrock from the last 100 years, and one for the next 100, which show how the places that get built for us to live in reflect and reproduce the dominant ideas, and the relationship of class forces, in society at the time they are developed.

1920s: “Homes fit for for Heroes“

In the immediate aftermath of World War 1, and with the Russian Revolution haunting their imaginations like a nightmare, the powers that be in Britain embarked on a period of mass affordable social housing for rent run through local authorities to maintain decent standards and accountability. Council houses. Until widely denigrated in the 1970s in the run up to “Right to Buy” a solid, affordable and secure place to live, generating an income from the council that paid off the initial loan taken out to build them, pay for maintenance and improvements, and provide a steady income once the loans were paid off.

The Grays estate of over 1,000 homes pictured above was built in the mid 1920s and was one of those. I have to declare an interest at this point. I grew up on this estate. One of my great uncles knocked in the posts that laid out the road plan. My Dad was born on it in 1930, my mum moved to it as a toddler; and they still live there now at the age of 93.

These were standard designed “family homes” with three bedrooms – a big one, a middle sized one and a little one, a bit like the Three Bears. There was an outside toilet for each house – not shared like they would have been in a tenement, a small front garden and a more substantial allotment out the back for people to grow vegetables, like nearly everyone did at first, and, in some cases, keep chickens, as some still did as late as the 1960s. Early on, nearly every one had substantial posts for washing lines, many acquired one way or another via the docks; many of them, like ours, former ships masts. Nearly everyone did washing on a Monday and there was almost a competition to get the washing up on the lines first; almost like flying a flag.

My Mum as a child shelling peas in the back garden of her parents house, circa 1936 or 7.

Smack in the middle of the estate was a recreation field with a small set of children’s play equipment in the North Eastern corner. Until after WW2 the influence of Sabbatarianism meant that every Sunday a Council employee would clank through the field wreathed in chains “like Marley’s ghost”, as my dad put it, and chain up the swings and merry go round; so the Sabbath would not be defiled by the satanic influence of children having fun. And, although there was one off licence in a small parade of shops, grocers, chippie, Co-op, post office, there was no pub. This may have been because the Old High Street down by the river – and easily in staggering distance -was full of them, but it gave the place a sober character; no one reeling home singing after closing time.

Built long before mass car ownership, the streets gave access to van or horse and cart delivery for the coal merchants – as heating was from coal fires – and groceries. Each road was bordered by a grass verge planted with trees at regular intervals, with every other tree a flowering variety like Horse Chestnut. This arrangement is still intact in places, as in the picture above. In the picture below more than half of the trees have been cut down, and the grass verges have been paved over in the last 30 or 40 years to provide parking bays for cars; which makes the streets feel more bare, less nurturing. This goes along with privet hedges being grubbed out and either replaced with fences or left open so paved over front gardens can provide space to park even more cars.

This coincided with the impact of Right to Buy. In 1979, the Council had upgraded the whole estate, remodelling both floors in each house to build in (two) inside toilets, open up the kitchens and take out the pantry storage spaces that had been superseded by most people having fridges by then. This was done by decanting tenants into other, similar houses while the work took place, block by block, on a standard model using economies of scale. It was a triumph of social provision. Paradoxically, this made the upgraded houses a very desirable purchase when the Thatcher government went on its “Property Owning Democracy” drive in the early 80s. As houses were sold off, with no right for the Council to use the proceeds to replace the stock, little marks of difference started to appear. Different front doors or windows. The occasional column. Some stone cladding. A little lion on a gatepost.

This did not have the desired political effect. The ward this estate is in has always – always– returned Labour councillors; and still does, by some margin. Not that it was ever politically homogenous. Even in the sixties, when the whole area was industrial working class and the Labour vote was weighed as much as counted, there were clearly identifiable Tories here and there – having the Daily Express delivered, wearing blazers with silver buttons, putting Pirate Radio Station stickers in their car rear windows (while looking like the sort of people who wouldn’t listen to them in a million years). During the 2017 election, when Thurrock was a three way marginal between Labour, Conservative and UKIP, a walk through this estate turned up so many Labour posters and garden stakes that it looked like a shoo in for Polly Billington. In the end, she came second, 500 votes behind the Conservative and a little ahead of the Kipper. Close run thing, but indicative the widely polarised political character of different localities in the same Constituency.

This estate was, and is, also buttressed by allotments that are still well used. This is a view from Hogg Lane, with Chafford Hundred, the alternative universe viewed below, behind and out of sight on the other side.

A final point to note is that a substantial minority of the houses have been enveloped with insulation and look oddly fatter and, being painted white, almost continental. Its not clear how many of these are remaining social housing and how many are those that have been bought. But it is clear here as well as in most other streets you can walk down in the UK that most people with limited wealth at the lower end of the “home owning democracy” can’t afford to make the changes that are socially necessary as individuals; meaning they have higher carbon emissions than they need have, and the higher bills to go with it. An eloquent demonstration of the limits of the market, and transition by piecemeal consumer choice. A wholesale retrofit doing all the houses in one go, with all the benefits of economies of scale on the same model as the 1979 refurb, would be more effective; and is another example of what neo-liberalism has cost us.

1980s: Chafford Hundred, by contrast, is almost an embodiment of what might be called Late Thatcherism. This is a huge development of 5,600 houses built on the land above the old worked out chalk pits on a derelict farm, between Hogg Lane in Grays and Lakeside by the Dartford Crossing; and is a classic piece of late 1980s urban redevelopment, named after an ancient Anglo Saxon County division that once extended from Brentwood to the river, Ongar to Childerditch. It sounds reassuringly retro with undertones of chaffinches and chaff from wheat fields. Almost rural and bucolic. An Essex echo of dreamy little towns in the Chilterns.

But, what’s in a name?

The architecture is box pastiche – standard boxes with historic local style flourishes to give “character” and instant “heritage” – all jammed together a bit too closely for privacy and ease, but too separate for community – snaking around curving roads that lead nowhere but to each other. There is no real centre to it. It feels like an American suburb shrunk to meaner English dimensions.

Little boxes on the hillside, Little boxes made of ticky-tacky, Little boxes, Little boxes, Little boxes all the same…

A few little shops and a doctors surgery with everything retail sucked into the enormous commercial gravitational field of the Lakeside Shopping Centre, on the far side of a foot bridge over the railway line.

There’s only one tiny park for the kids, unless they want to trek off down the pits, which have been remodelled as nature reserves, so the developer – a consortium of Blue Circle, Tunnel Holdings (the old cement firms that worked out the pits) and West Thurrock Estates – could cram on as many units as possible for sale.

Its saving grace is that is has a railway station that connects it to London (Fenchurch Street) and Southend, and everywhere en route. As a result many of the people who live there commute in to work in the City. More a place to be stored in when not working than a place to live. In the property crash of the early 90’s house prices halved and more than half the homes were repossessed; which must have been a shattering experience at the time.

Politically, Chafford was represented solidly by Tories, with Conservative councillors winning every election from 2004 to 2021, displacing the Lib Dems, who won in 2002. In May this year – after the Council’s Conservative leadership had managed to bankrupt Thurrock with unwise commercial investments – Labour won a seat there for the first time.

2020’s New Town Centre?

In the 1970s there was an attempt to boost the High Street, which at that time still had a Woolworths and Marks and Spencer, by building a small shopping mall with attached multi story car park to the rear of it. At a time when the car was still considered the future and places like Leeds were carving themselves up with urban motorways, the idea was that people would drive in, have a place to park in the multi story, and load up.

This was never fully realised even early on, the multi storey being decidedly underused, but when the Lakeside shopping centre opened 5 miles up the road by the Dartford crossing at the end of the eighties, everything shrivelled. Lakeside had big flagship stores, a wider range of everything and was not much harder to get to. Everything in the town centre moved downmarket. The vibe in the centre now, if you walk through it, is decidedly sparse. Even the Wilko has now gone.

This was the future once…

So the owners, like the owners of retail space elsewhere, are looking to realise capital and build in a customer base by building high above the shop. The ongoing income from retail however, is dwarfed by the enhanced value of the real estate. Similar schemes in North West London include the Edgware Road Sainsbury development at the Hyde – that is proceeding apace -and the Broadwalk Centre in Edgware, which is generating some opposition from people used to living in a sleepy greenish suburb, suddenly about to be overshadowed by 20 storey towers.

The Grays Plan is not quite so gargantuan, but envisages, modern high rise blocks around a square. You can see an idealised version in their video here, complete with weird holograms of oddly shaped people doing strange things.

Their description of their plan has the same slightly corporate unreality as the holograms in their video.

Key features of our proposals:

  • Enhance and revitalise the town centre and public square 
  • Re-invigorate the retail and leisure offer
  • Boost the night-time and leisure economy within the town
  • Create space for community use and independent-focused retail
  • Create a vibrant and safe public realm with open spaces and increase biodiversity in the heart of town
  • Bring forward new homes in an accessible and sustainable central location
  • Improve pedestrian connectivity across the town
  • Introduce design-led, landscaped spaces for the whole community 
  • Facilitate pedestrian linkages with the Thameside neighbourhood 
  • Support the creation of new jobs and opportunities

All this is currently being discussed and I think the apposite questions are these. So, I have sent them in, and await a reply.

  1. How many people, roughly, do you envisage will be living in the development?
  2. What proportion of the development will be social housing for affordable rent? If there are any, will these be of the same quality as the rest of the development and integrated into it?
  3. Related to that, what proportion of the apartments will be for sale at what sort of prices?
  4. Will there be a residence requirement to avoid people buying higher end flats as an investment and leaving them empty (as is far too common in London).
  5. What does the proposed “space for community use” consist of? Will the public square be public or will it be privately owned?
  6. How will the development increase the biodiversity of the town centre?
  7. Will the apartments be zero emission ?
  8. I note that you say that, given the proximity to good public transport links, many people will have no need of a car but, if enough of the flats are high end, most of the people who live in them would probably want one, especially for leisure use. Would you consider building a car share club into the development to minimise the amount of space needed for car parking – and help pull the residents together into a community?

The developers will probably want as many expensive flats as they can get, which will build in a well heeled consumer base above the remaining retail space on the ground floor and maximise their revenues from sales. But this will be in a tension with the pressing housing need in a fast growing borough, with people spilling into it from London in a very steady stream* looking for somewhere more affordable to buy or rent. How this tension works out will determine what this development becomes.

*The ONS used to produce a migration flow maps for local authorities – sadly discontinued after 2020, which showed that when people leave Thurrock they go all over the place, but nearly everyone who moves into it does so from London.