LONDON LETTER EASTER 2013

This certainly feels like one of the longest winters I can remember in a very long time; it seems to stretch behind me like an icy wasteland from which I can barely perceive the balmy days of last September.[1] It is beginning to test everyone’s patience, and is certainly testing mine.

A year or so back Boris Johnson, our calculating buffoon of a mayor warned that changes to the welfare system threatened inner London with ‘economic cleansing Kosovo style.’ Leaving aside the rather tasteless reference to the Balkan wars this was not hyperbole, the Benefit cap which hits those forced to pay the astronomically high rents in London, the Bedroom Tax and other changes in the welfare system are driving the poor and the low paid out of central London.

I have just received a copy of the so called Discretionary Housing Payment Claim form. This is a new system of dealing with poverty and hardship, a finite pot of money to be allocated purely on a discretionary basis, i.e. it is no longer part of structured welfare provision. The first 3 Questions are:-

Why do you need to live at this address in this particular area? Why did you move to this address?

Are there any reasons preventing you moving to other accommodation or another area?

In my own case I have lived in Notting Hill for 30 years and in this particular flat since 1986. As it happens I have also worked in this borough, Kensington and Chelsea, working at times with difficult and sometimes violent offenders. I have also managed a drug rehabilitation project on Portobello Road. Presumably should I apply for such support all this would stand me in good stead? That is if you want to play the rich person’s game of divide and rule. The tone of the form is both threatening and sinister.  It smacks not only of charity, but of the worst kind of charity, of the deserving and undeserving poor and has about it the reek of the mentality of the workhouse and the poor law.

Went to see the Roy Lichtenstein Exhibition at the Tate Modern on Monday and what a soul draining experience it was. I have always been suspicious of Pop Art and this exhibition confirmed all my worst expectations.  Vapid and Vacuous and most curious of all lacking in irony, or so chock full of the ironic that it ceased to be irony; it also strangely reminded me of Socialist realism, in that it had the same dispiriting affect upon me. Perhaps it should be called Capitalist Realism since it seems to occupy a similar space in the capitalist narrative as Socialist Realism did in the USSR. The real giveaway was in the shop afterwards, when my friend remarked “wow they have a lot more merchandise than the last exhibition we visited;” precisely.

Am currently reading Masha Gessen’s ‘The man without A Face, The Unlikely Rise of Vladimir Putin.’ Coming after Boris Berezovsky was found ‘hanged’ in his £20million mansion in Ascot, Berks, on Saturday a very timely read. There was no suicide note, and in the current climate all such deaths raise suspicions. Berezovsky was one of the small clique around Boris Yeltsin who engineered the mass privatisation in The Russian Confederation and unmercifully ripped off the Russian people. He also ironically bears more responsibility than any one else for the highly resistible rise of Vladimir Putin. The grim reality is that as London became destination of choice for much of the alienated and imperilled Russian elite and this exile population has effectively imported aspects of Russia’s criminal state into London, most ominously in the shape of Putin’s hit squads.

I thought of putting the shortest poem ever on Dancing on thin Ice,

I’ll preview it here:-

        Whenever A Russian exile dies

        Vladimir Putin smiles.

It is now forty years since Pink Floyd released Dark Side Of the Moon, their most completely realised concept album. There are parts of Wish You Were Here that are better[2], and The Wall has moments of very great power, but it is Dark Side that truly endures, for it still feels as fresh and relevant as the day in which it emerged into the record shops in its distinctive cover.

After visiting the Tate my friend, whom I have know ever since she and I came to London in 1983, reflected upon the progressive and radical policies of some of the organisations that we worked for in the 1980’s and how much services have gone into retreat. Now it is a fight just to maintain basic standards.

One of the organisations we both worked for was Single Homeless Project, then a non hierarchical collective. Both the level of service delivery and terms and conditions of employment were state of the art then. The woman who played the most significant part in dismantling the non hierarchical structure now heads up the organisation paying her self an extremely fat salary. Service provision is now bog standard and terms and conditions of employment much worse. I am proud to say that I fought her all the way and resigned on the day the organisation became a hierarchy.[3] When I was young I thought, to coin a phrase, that things could only get better, the idea of progress hard wired into my psyche. The sad truth about human societies is that gains can just as easily be rolled back, that we have to constantly defend what we have gained, constantly fight battles afresh.

I spent a good deal of my working life in what used to be called the voluntary sector, labelled, the sexier sounding, Third Sector under New Labour. This area of provision has now become something of a golden goose for some. Christopher Hitchens once wrote that you could get away with anything if you tagged reverend onto you name, the same may be true of the term charity when tagged onto any organisation. I intend to write more about this burgeoning charity racket at some point soon.

Written on the Blog this February:-

‘I have often thought that real drama can be found in the fact that in 1940 Wodehouse was captured in France by the advancing German army. His later conduct in captivity, fooling around with his German captors and providing the Germans with some broadcast material, caused a furore in this country during the war. The best article about this I believe was written by George Orwell, ‘In Defence of P G Wodehouse.’ I have often thought this material well worth dramatising and only wish I had the talent.’

Now the BBC has produced just such a drama. Your correspondent enjoys more power than he realises.

If you are having one have a good Easter break.

A Talbot.

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[1] Indeed, did we have balmy days last September?  I can no longer remember.

[2] And I prefer Wish You Were Here as an Album, though it does contain the truly awful ‘Have A Cigar.’

[3] Though this latter point sounds more principled than it actually was at the time., in reality the day coincided with my being offered another job. 

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