Save Clapton Tram Depot
Anyone familiar with property development in Hackney will know that ‘progress’ generally means sweeping existing residents out of an area, and replacing them with richer ones. Perhaps the most depressing instance of ‘get what you’re given’ officialdom is focused on the centre of Dalston - OPEN Dalston has the whole story.
Anyway, the latest rash of unimaginative flats is likely to be built on top of the old Tram Depot on Upper Clapton Road. The Depot is home to lots of small and successful businesses, including an accident repair centre (above), and a thriving bunch of artists.
Upper Clapton is the area of London I first lived in, when I stayed at my cousin’s old flat back in 1998. It has its problems, and much of it could do with sprucing up. But I really don’t think destroying one of the most beneficial amenities in the immediate community is the way to do it.
If you agree, I’d recommend signing the petition here. Quickly.
If you don’t, ask yourself whether you’d really like to see yet another development that looks like this:
And push businesses like these out:
I know what I’d prefer. If you agree, visit this page to sign the petition and find out how you can help.
Published on 4th October, 2008
Hackney Today Self Realisation Shocker
Most of you will have no doubt about my views on Hackney Today, our local council propaganda sheet. However, this week, its headline writer appears to have broken loose with this shaft of wit/ cocked up massively [delete as appropriate].
I just glanced at my copy, which I found as I left my flat 30 minutes ago. Writ large on the front page is a succinct and massive headline:
JUST BIN IT
Such sound advice. World class, even. It’ll be even funnier if it turns out to be a piece on recycling. I’ll show you a copy when I get back to my desk.
UPDATE: I’m back at my desk. Here’s the front page. On closer inspection, the proximity of “Just Bin It” next to the story about the Olympics (which won’t benefit locals) is rather prescient too.
Published on 10th September, 2008
Race is to the miffed
For all the praise or flak it gets for being a multicultural London borough, some folk seem unable to talk about Hackney’s racial make-up without reaching for a dog whistle and giving it a good, hard blow.
You’ll see what I mean if you take a look at this post of Luke Akehurst’s, which I picked up on over at Dave Hill’s Clapton Pond Blog. In it, Luke is taking a pop at this Spectator article by Anthony Browne, formerly of the Policy Exchange and now Boris Johnson’s Policy Director.
I recommend you read Browne’s article. I fully agree that he talks a lot of bollocks, including nonsense like:
Many on the Left hope so because they believe that the only way to end racism is to end races; the only way to conquer Nazism, they argue, is mass miscegenation — interracial love rather than war.
It’s a cheap shot, and it certainly doesn’t - in my opinion - reflect the views of most people on the Left. You could certainly argue that Browne is puffing on the dog whistle himself, but for a different audience. But, insofar as I can see, the rest of his argument boils down to:
1) The modern trend towards diversity is a Western phenomenon.
2) People tend to gravitate towards others who have the same language, culture and values.
3) As poorer economies prosper, fewer people leave for richer countries in search of prosperity; and, indeed, many people start to return to their homelands.
4) The decline of diversity within countries preserves the diversity between them.
I agree with the first three points (Poland and migrant Poles would be a good, up-to-date example of them), even if I have major reservations about the fourth. I also think Browne has a rather distorted idea about what Hackney is actually like, but I’ll come back to that in a bit.
Up to this point, I suspect Cllr Akehurst and I are mostly in agreement. As he says:
One of the things that is right about my borough though, and really works, is that it functions pretty well as a model of a multifaith and multiethnic community. People live along side [sic] each other in relative peace and harmony and on the whole they appreciate and enjoy this diversity.
He’s right. We do live alongside each other in relative peace and harmony (though it’s far from perfect), and - on the whole - people are pretty tolerant of each other. However, I don’t think Hackney really works well as “a model of a multifaith and multiethnic community” - what it does do, though, is show that a fairly large number of communities can co-exist in the same administrative area, live mostly separate lives, and rub along well where they have to or want to. But to imply, as Luke does, that Hackney is a single, multicultural community does not reflect the reality.
I’d be happy to disagree, and leave it at that. But Luke made my jaw drop by failing to actually address Browne’s argument, instead listing these quotes from the latter’s article:
“Many on the Left … believe that the only way to end racism is to end races; the only way to conquer Nazism, they argue, is mass miscegenation” (I’ve never heard anyone on the left say this!
“The champions of diversity ultimately believe that our future is not as a species with many races, but with one race — a quarter Chinese, a quarter Indian, a quarter African and a quarter European.”
“The eternal human urge for self-segregation — surrounding yourself with people like you — is likely to triumph over the more ephemeral economic and political incentives to leave what you know.”
“It is not Hackney that is the future of the world, but Japan.”
“Sharing the same language, culture and values as the people you come into daily contact with may not be excitingly multicultural, but it means you end up with deeper relationships, a sense of community, belonging and security.”
“The white flight — or white self-segregation — which is such a feature of US cities is now endemic in the UK, with hundreds of thousands of white Briton’s (sic) fleeing the effects of the government’s open border policy on London each year.”
“The slowing of mass migration is good for those who appreciate real diversity. The decline of diversity within countries preserves the diversity between them.”
All of which, selected with the true skill of the dog-whistler, are designed to spark fear and worry amongst minority groups - and others - who might not have read some of the following from the same article:
“…I have been convinced that mixed-race people, by a blessing of nature, combine the best of all their parts.”
“And as our minorities keep telling us, it is not easy being a minority, since in democracies it is the majority that sets the rules.”
“Self-segregation is apparent all around us, but there is a reluctance to accept it because it mocks multiculturalism”.
In a tour de force of doublethink, though, Luke does accept the self-segregation that’s all around us. Why else would he go on to say this?
Do Hackney’s Tory Councillors, eight out of nine of whom are from minority faith and ethnic communities, know about the views of their London Mayor’s Policy Director about the model of community harmony represented by our borough?
What? Does Cllr Akehurst really believe that all those Orthodox Jewish councillors (for that, at root is what he’s talking about) are going to get upset that someone has said this in print?
“Sharing the same language, culture and values as the people you come into daily contact with may not be excitingly multicultural, but it means you end up with deeper relationships, a sense of community, belonging and security.”
It’s all these things that have made the Chareidi so strong a community in Hackney. You could say the same, to a greater or lesser degree, of other faith and ethnic groups in Hackney: the Turks and Kurds who live in the north of Dalston and south of Stoke Newington; the Vietnamese in Shoreditch; the Africans and Caribbeans in Dalston. You could even make the same point about the enclaves of the (mostly white) middle-class people who are centred on Stoke Newington Church Street or in the leafy, spacious streets and squares of De Beauvoir.
And this brings me back to the point on which I disagree with both Anthony Browne and Luke Akehurst. Browne concluded his article by saying:
The slowing of mass migration is good for those who appreciate real diversity. The decline of diversity within countries preserves the diversity between them. Not all the world will look like Hackney, just those countries that opened their borders when push-migration was at its peak.
As Alexander Solzhenitsyn said in his Nobel Prize acceptance speech attacking multiculturalism, ‘the disappearance of nations would have impoverished us no less than if all men had become alike, with one personality and one face. Nations are the wealth of mankind, its collective personalities.’
What Browne doesn’t realise he is saying is that, if there’s a worldwide trend towards less diversity within nations, the global picture will look more like Hackney: a place in which people band together mostly with those who have the same “language, culture and values“, but still have to find ways of getting along together with others as groups and as individuals.
That’s Hackney’s strength. And I like it: except when people on both left and right exploit the weaker relationships between those communities for political gain.
Published on 3rd August, 2008
25 years of the “urban jungle”
It’s a rare article about Hackney that makes me want to stand up and give the writer a standing ovation, but that’s pretty much what I did when I read this:
Hackney needs activists, not socialist revolutionaries (whom Mr Harrison rightly says adore picking at sores) and theorists, not just the very necessary agencies to make claimants more efficient at their sad profession. It needs busybodies, preferably among the deprived themselves.
It reminded me of something I wrote on my old blog in December last year, when I was making a faltering, contorted case for localism in the face of a indifferent, one-size-fits-all council:
If we can’t get our representatives to listen, we need to get angry on other people’s behalf as well as our own. Because if we don’t, we’re not just going to get rancid public toilets, we’re not going to get respite care for the people who need it, or make sure that members of our community don’t have to sleep rough because the council has failed them. And if we can’t do any of those things, how do we really imagine we’re going to improve life on those gang-ridden estates?
But whilst I was blogging towards the end of 2007, the first writer was making his case in The Times as long ago as 7th December 1983. The journalist was Richard North and you can find his article in the newspaper’s archive. It must have caused a stir because, as many as twelve years later, he mentioned the same article in an Independent piece:
I can remember, even in palmier days, I was excoriated by liberal types for writing in the Times that Hackney’s public spaces were in need of busybodies - middle class or not - who could assert that swiping little Jewish children wasn’t on.
Few would disagree with that; although I suspect that what he originally said would cause a stir, particularly now:
…the burly little goys in Clissold Park need to be cuffed and talked to when they insult the pale Hasidic families who go there on Sundays.
I don’t advocate cuffing anyone, but I certainly advocate putting the fear of damnation up any child who does that. Certainly, these days, it’s relatively rare to see a Orthodox Jewish family walking in that park, even though a large number of them live on or near its north eastern edge. It’s not the only depressing vision conjured up by North’s article. Indeed, a heavy sense of plus ça change weighs you down further with each paragraph. Any Hackney resident of today will soon spot these 25-year-old remarks are at least as relevant now as they were then.
Hackney is a place in which the vast majority of adults dare not speak to children, even when the children are inarticulately crying out to talk. The adult seems not to dare speak to the teenager, even though I have always found the glue sniffers, and even the illicit parker, glad to be spoken to.
And:
…beyond cruel petty officials and being broke, what most assails the hopeless minority in Hackney is our modern society in which only competence makes life manageable.
I am, of course, being highly selective. Some of North’s suggestions, and particularly his solutions, betray a tendency to wish his own pet ideas on other people’s difficulties. This one’s a gem:
The unemployed… need to boycott the canned drinks makers and the pubs and start brewing their own wine.
Home brewed wine? He clearly hasn’t tasted the stuff, even if it is a cut above Carlsberg Special Brew. Or how about this tour de force?
For many hopeless people… Permissiveness has broken their immediate family. Increasingly mobility has broken their wider world, robbing them of relatives. Planners have broken their communities. Teachers and welfare workers have robbed them of responsibility. The liberal creed has broken their will to self discipline.
So, on the one hand it’s not their fault but, on the other:
I have to accept that Hackney’s misery is in part the fault of its inhabitants, and in part of people like me who won’t do more about chivvying and informing them.
People like him? Yes, the middle class, or rather more gobsmackingly:
What a double pity that those who have always been good at poverty - the drop-out middle class, who go hippy at the drop of a hat - never taught the working class how to do it.
It’s the same old flaw: a middle class person comes to the conclusion that, despite the terrible state society is in, the poor could do more to help themselves and each other; but then can’t accept it could be done without middle-class involvement and - preferably - leadership. All whilst pointing out that (middle class) liberals knackered society in the first place.
It’s hardly any surprise, therefore, that liberals tend dismiss all elements of the argument as bollocks. Take a look over at Dave Hill’s London blog: it’s still going on today. Well-off liberal Dave has got rather froth-flecked by new City Hall Policy Director Anthony Browne in general, and about this Daily Mail article in particular. Fair play. Especially when confronted by this bit of circular logic:
If people don’t learn the difference between right and wrong, it is not just that they become anti-social. They don’t learn the fundamental lesson that there is only one person responsible for what they do — and that is themselves. Nothing is wrong, and nothing is anyone’s fault; it is always someone else’s. Don’t blame me for what I do; it’s society’s fault.
The logic as I read it is:
1) Some people haven’t been taught the difference between right and wrong.
2) They therefore have no idea that they are responsible for their own actions.
3) Even though they don’t know they are responsible for their own actions, it is wrong of them to blame other people. Including those people in society who didn’t teach them the difference between right and wrong.
And the people responsible for this moral vacuum? Yep, middle-class liberals:
This Left-wing moral neutrality comes from the best of intentions — wanting to sympathise with victims and other vulnerable people. If they do something anti-social, it is because anti-social things have been done to them — they are not at fault. And if you can’t judge someone for their actions, there can’t really be a right or wrong thing to do.
As I said earlier: plus ça bloody change. Theorists are theorists, whether they’re socialist or patrician Tory. And as Richard North rightly pointed out, Hackney needs fewer of them - even if he was, to a degree, one himself.
Sadly, in amongst all the moralistic finger pointing, the fact remains that - after 25 years - Hackney residents (and many other) are even more terrified of speaking to children, teenagers or - often - other adults. Which is a shame because, whoever you blame, it’s not government, or theorists, or socialist revolutionaries who have the power to solve the problem - it’s us.
If we dare.
Published on 29th July, 2008
Luke Akehurst’s Sick Mind
I first met councillor Luke Akehurst the other week. We met for coffee in Leather Lane, and we spent a very pleasant hour talking about Hackney, its people and its politics. I enjoyed it. He seemed a nice guy.
I was astonished, then, to read this disgusting, sick, vile and idiotic statement on his blog:
Maybe instead of Labour fielding a candidate in Haltemprice & Howden we should find a Martin Bell type candidate - preferably a recently retired senior police officer, or a survivor or relative of a victim of a terrorist attack, to run under the following 5 word candidate description: “Independent - for detaining terrorism suspects”.
I can’t believe how repulsive and politically stupid Luke’s suggestion is. Nor am I alone. Nation of Shopkeepers sums up my feelings perfectly:
Did he really mean that? Did he really mean that they should dig out a mother of someone blown to bits by terrorists and plaster her face all over an obnoxious ‘dog whistle’, knuckle dragging authoritarian campaign? The answer, unfortunately for his children, is yes, he did.
So does Rachel, who survived the terrorist bombings in London.
I expect terrorists to attack our freedoms and our democracy by using fear and terror to hurt us. I was right there, seven feet away from a 19 year old suicide bomber in my carriage on 7/7 and lucky to escape with my life when he killed 26 fellow passengers.
I object vehemently to your assumption that victims of terrorism can be waved about to us as a bloodied figleaf to cover up a naked desire to be seen to be tough on terror for entirely politcal purposes, I object to being used as a political football, and if ‘for the victims’ is going to be invoked for this kind of liberty-trashing fearmongering, then this ‘victim’ (hate that word)is going to shout right back that those who would sacrifice liberty for security deserve neither.
Akehurst, your opinions are disgraceful. You do not deserve to win the parliamentary seat you crave, and I hope the voters in Chatham Ward give you a good kicking when they next go to the polls. I am personally going to canvass against you and make sure every single voter knows what appalling views you hold.
Published on 15th June, 2008
A waste of time and money?
I know it’s an incredibly old-fashioned way of looking at things, but I reckon the best way to find out what people think is to discover where they are, then go and ask them.
Not everyone agrees of course. Whoever conducted this survey, which aimed to find out what young people in Hackney think about crime, preferred to ask their questions regardless of whether anyone was listening.
I’m the first to admit that I’m way out of touch with what kids in Hackney read, what they listen to, where they hang out, and what websites are popular. But I can bet you anything you like that not many of them are going to spend acres of time doing the following things:
- reading the Council’s propaganda mag, Hackney Today. (”Hey, Nish, you seen this campaign to save our local post offices? How cool is that?”)
- trawling through the Hackney’s Consultation Finder. (”Jase! Jase! Look at this! It says here that “Hackney Local Authority are currently preparing a series of planning policy documents which will form part of the Local Development Framework (LDF). The LDF sets out the future direction of land use, development and regeneration in the Borough.” And they want to know what we think about it!”)
- reading the Hackney Young People Empowered (HYPE) website. I’m willing to be proved wrong, and to hear that this very worthy and useful site is straining under excessive server load. But if I learned one thing when I worked with kids, they prefer to create their own spaces on the web.
Sadly, the mastermind behind the “Young people’s attitude towards crime” survey thought differently, and that’s exactly where they tried to drum up custom:
It was decided to design an electronic survey consisting of a variety of open and closed questions. The survey was posted on the internet, with the link being publicised through Hackney Today, Consultation Finder (Council’s website) and the HYPE website (a dedicated website for young people).
Surprise, surprise, the Council wasn’t exactly inundated with responses. In a period when crime is one of the most pressing issues facing young people in the borough; and in which several teenagers have been murdered; guess how many took part in this ill-conceived survey?
Twenty-three.
Nor did all of the twenty-three manage to answer every question. That was more like eleven.
So what did this triumphant bit of research find? I’ll cut through the crap and summarise it for you:
- Most kids are worried about crime;
- Five kids said they’d been victims of crime;
- Peer pressure is seen as a problem;
- Families are thought to be the best people to help keep kids on the straight and narrow.
I could go on, but it would be pointless. As the report points out:
In using this data, a note of caution is suggested by Consultation Team based on the low level of response received. The results therefore may not be truly representative of the views of young people in Hackney.
Of course they aren’t representative of the views of young people in Hackney. Apart from the fact hardly anyone filled in the questionnaire, there’s another tasty morsel tucked at the back of the report…
Only eleven young people said they lived in Hackney.
So, in return for a month-long consultation, we’ve got a report crammed with things we knew already, based on the views of eleven confirmed Hackney residents. And I bet it didn’t come cheap.
I might just find out how much it costs. After all, I know the right person to ask.
Published on 8th May, 2008
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