Archives – November, 2009
Today when scanning the front-page headlines in my local newsagent one in particular caught my eye, and it did not surprise me to see it on the front of the Sun: “We Must Be Rental”. The story was of a jobless Somali family of nine supposedly being handed a luxury £1.8 million West End home at taxpayers’ expense. Turning to the full report on page 9, I immediately recognised the block of flats that had drawn the attention of the Sun.
Firstly, such commentary by the Sun and the other papers that took up the story is highly inflammatory. You have only to look at the email responses on the Sun message board to see what I mean, with hate-filled rants about asylum seekers and praise for the BNP. You can only imagine what the telephone messages left on the SunTalk number must be like!
As for expecting some accurate journalism, you can forget that. For example, the block of flats is neither in nor even near the West End. It has an NW1 post code. Nor is any property in the neighbourhood worth £1.8 million – the actor Sienna Miller is having enough difficulty trying to sell her propertyoff the Edgware Road a few blocks away, after dropping the price to under a million. Nor can the block of flats be described as a particularly desirable property, given that it directly backs onto the Marylebone flyover.
The block was built during the peak of the property boom in Central London, and when the developer was unable to sell any of the units it was taken over by receivers. As a result it has been lying empty for a number years. I have argued that such developments should be picked up by social landlords and rented out as social housing in a neighbourhood like this with acute housing need. I should know, having been one of the local councillors for eight years between 1998 to 2006, undertaking surgeries on Church Street where overcrowding and rehousing was the major issue. The Shirley Porter legacy had left every little council and social housing in this neighbourhood available for families in desperate need.
The real lesson to be drawn from the Sun story is that a means should be found to get this block into social ownership rather paying extortionate rents to the receiver – or anyone else taking the rent!
November 30, 2009
This is the text of the chapter I contributed to the Labour Friends of Palestine pamphlet, Stop Building Hatred.
THE occupation of the West Bank is rightly seen as central to the campaign for Palestinian rights and has been the main focus for media coverage of Israel’s construction of illegal settlements. But this has led to relatively little attention being paid to Israeli settlements in the Golan Heights, although these are equally in violation of international law and the continued occupation of the Golan stands as a major obstacle to a regional peace agreement.
Like the West Bank, the Golan Heights were seized by Israel in 1967 during the Six Day War, in this case from Syria. Most of the population was expelled (or fled voluntarily, if you believe the Israeli version of events) and Israel systematically destroyed 244 of the 249 Arab villages in the Golan so that the former inhabitants could never return to their homes. The displaced Golan Arabs and their families are now said to number about half a million.
In 1981 Israel passed the Golan Heights Law which annexed the region, declaring it to be subject to the Israeli state’s “laws, jurisdiction and administration”. Syria continues to insist that the Golan is part of its own territory, under foreign occupation, while Lebanon lays claim to a small area known as the Shebaa Farms.
The 1981 annexation was condemned by UN Security Council Resolution 497, adopted unanimously, which stated that “the Israeli decision to impose its laws, jurisdiction and administration in the occupied Syrian Golan Heights is null and void and without international legal effect”. The UN has consistently upheld this position and last year the General Assembly voted 161-1 in favour of a motion reaffirming support for Resolution 497 on the “occupied Syrian Golan”.
The issue of Israeli annexation of the Golan Heights hit the news recently when a pro-Israeli website bearing the misleading name of Honest Reporting launched a campaign under the slogan “Golan residents live in Israel not Syria” in protest against Israeli settlers being required to register Syria as their country of origin on Facebook. Regrettably, Facebook appears to have backed down in the face of this campaign, which was plainly aimed at legitimising Israel’s illegal occupation, and Golan residents are now allowed to register their country as either Israel or Syria.
In the years immediately following the Six Day War, Israeli civilian settlement of the Golan Heights proceeded slowly, as the area was seen as a potential future battleground and in 1972 there were still only 77 settlers there. After the end of the 1973 Arab-Israeli War numbers began to increase sharply and by 1989 the figure had reached 10,000. Today there are some 20,000 Israeli settlers occupying the territory in over 30 settlements.
The figures for Golan settlers may seem small compared with the 300,000 settlers in the West Bank or the 200,000 in Israeli-annexed East Jerusalem. But the growth of settlements has now reached the point where Israelis constitute over half the population of the Golan Heights – the remainder being members of the Druze community who remained there after the Israeli invasion in 1967. The Israeli-occupied areas include farms, cattle ranches, orchards and vineyards and even a ski resort, in addition to a number of military bases.
The objective of expanding Israeli settlement in the Golan Heights is of course the same as in the West Bank – to establish a permanent Israeli presence as one of the “facts on the ground” that will serve as an obstacle to any re-drawing of borders.
Three years ago settler leaders launched a $250,000 advertising campaign to attract young Israelis to the Golan with the promise of free land, the declared aim of the campaign being to double the Jewish population to 40,000 over the course of the following decade. In 1999, when the settler population stood at 17,000, Israeli treasury officials estimated that, in the event of a pull-out from the Golan, compensation to the settlers for losing their homes would amount to $10 billion. Obviously, existing Golan settlers calculate that the more Israelis they can persuade to join them there, the greater the financial obstacle to withdrawal.
The Syrians have repeatedly stated that if Israel will agree to end its occupation of the Golan Heights they are prepared to join Egypt and Jordan in signing a peace agreement with Israel. But Syria insists on a complete Israeli withdrawal to the pre-1967 border, which would return the eastern shore of the Sea ofGalilee to Damascus, whereas Israel wants to retain its control of the whole ofGalilee.
Talks between Israel and Syria over the future of the Golan heights have continued on and off over the years but without ever reaching a conclusion. Danny Yatom, who was head ofMossad during Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu’s first term of office in 1996-99, recently stated that Netanyahu had at that time indicated that Israel was willing to withdraw from the entire Golan heights in exchange for a peace deal with Syria and the normalisation of relations between the two countries.
However, since forming his new administration in March this year Netanyahu has adopted an intransigent position over the Golan heights. Syria’s President Bashar al-Assad points out that it is futile trying to pursue negotiations over the Golan when there is no partner for talks on the Israeli side.
Obama has stated that the resumption of talks between Israel and Syria is one of his main foreign policy goals. Certainly, given Israel’s political, economic and military reliance on the US, the Obama administration is in a position to exercise serious pressure on Netanyahu if the political will exists. The future of the Golan Heights therefore hinges on the question of whether Obama, unlike his predecessors in the US presidency, will defy the powerful pro-Israel lobby and confront the Israeli government. Adopting a carrot and stick approach, an Israeli hand-over of the Golan could perhaps be sweetened by the promise of a financial contribution from the US to help underwrite the cost of withdrawal. It’s President Obama’s call.
November 30, 2009
Oops – another environment report fails to appear on time
Last week my office was informed that the Mayor’s draft Waste Management Strategy will not now be available for consultation till the 18th of December, when we had been expecting it to be released at the beginning of the week and it had originally been scheduled for publication back in the Summer. In this instance I’m told it’s the lawyers who have stopped the release of the document, suggesting something must have gone badly wrong for them to get involved so late in the day.
Unfortunately, this delay is par for the course with the Mayor’s environmental strategies and consultations. Boris’s Environment Direction of Travel statement was due in the Spring but was not published till July, while his draft Water Strategy which was also due in the Spring was not published till August. Boris’s draft Climate Change Adaptation Strategy was another publication due in the Spring but it has yet to see the light of day. His draft Air Quality Strategy was due in the Summer but was not published till October, while his Climate Change Mitigation and Energy Strategy was due in the Autumn but has still not been published.
What does this say about the ability of the Mayor’s office to progress environmental concerns? Not much at all is the short answer, but this is perhaps to be expected from an administration that has cut its environment team from 41 posts to 24 and now relies on outside consultants to do most of the work.
As I have remarked before on this blog, no amount of charm, bluster and hot air from Boris on green issues can substitute for making an impact and a real difference to the environment. The Mayor’s credibility has already been seriously undermined here. So much for voting blue and going green.
Summary table of delays
November 23, 2009
As an Assembly Member I am accustomed to a close-up view of Boris at Mayor’s Question Time at City Hall, but I quite literally had a ringside seat for his appearance at the Mayor’s Cup boxing tournament at Porchester Hall this past Friday night, which I attended in support of the All Stars Boxing Club who hosted the event.
While Boris is happy to turn up to such events in search of a photo-opportunity, it is not at all clear what practical support he’s offering to the club, despite the pledges of financial assistance he made during his election campaign. Indeed, when I questioned the Mayor about it last month, I got a distinctly non-committal response. While the Mayor is evidently reluctant to offer the club financial assistance, the three local councillors certainly have done so by giving £5000 from their ward budget.
Truth be told, the City of Westminster Council could also help by CPOing the premises in Harrow Road where the All Stars Boxing Club is based, but that would mean admitting their folly in selling it off in the first place a few years back.
In the meantime Friday’s event rather died a death after Boris’s brief appearance, which does not bode well for the long term future of the Mayor’s Cup. The least Boris could do is assist with the marketing, brand the event with the mayoral logo and do his hosts the courtesy of staying for the whole evening.
The most telling point was that there was no show from the new heavyweight champion of the world, Londoner David Haye, who had attended last year. Clearly he’s a bigger figure in the boxing world than the Mayor of London, and what was more embarrassing was that the Mayor’s office made out Haye was coming when he was actually in Cyprus taking a well-earned break with his family. I certainly know who the punters came to see but I am not sure Boris did.
November 22, 2009
Over the past few years Maida Vale residents have suffered a spate of flooding in the W9 area. At the last Maida Vale Area Forum held in Paddington Academy on the evening of the 11th of November, residents were told by Thames Water representatives that the water industry regulator OFWAT will determine whether TW can make the long term investment necessary to sort this issue out once and for all. (For the background and subsequent developments see coverage in the West End Extra.)
Now I was very surprised to hear that OFWAT micro-managed Thames Water’s investment programmes so tightly, given that OFWAT’s role is to protect consumers. Yes, major projects like investment in the Thames Tideway Tunnel would require OFWAT consent, I thought, but surely not some localised investment. However, I was later told that 90 per cent of Thames Water’s investment programme had indeed been approved by OFWAT. So the question now is: why wasn’t the investment required in Maida Vale included in TW’s approved investment programme? I have written to David Owen, the CEO of Thames Water, to that effect and await his response
November 22, 2009
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