Filed under: Local News
The Independent's Dave Brown makes a poignant reference to the past
Lets be absolutely clear from the outset, getting law and order back on the streets of London is the first priority. So getting 10,000 extra police appears to have done this immediately. And as post mortems begin on the possible route causes of why this scale of lawlessness has erupted, there is and can never be any justification for one human being threatening, stealing and ultimately destroying the lives of others with whom they live side by side, particularly amongst London’s varied communities.
The catalyst appeared to be the peaceful protest, which began on Saturday evening by friends and family in response to the fatal shooting by police of Mark Duggan a few days earlier. This event may have created the conditions for what started, for example a gathering of people outside a police station in one of London’s most deprived areas. However the stand off by Mark Duggan’s family did not incite what was to follow. It simply set a scene, which enabled a section of society to claw their way through its cracks and vent a much deeper and wider frustration with their lot in life.
What started out as a disturbance in a small section of North London soon snowballed into a Londonwide phenomenon as the following evening, news about pockets of disturbances in areas completely detached from the original location began to emerge. This before it spread nation wide just when in London we had additional police forces. Many commentators have looked to the enhanced communication tools such as Blackberry messaging and twitter to explain how rioters were capable to coordinate and congregate quickly and easily in targeted areas. This is just silly, as blaming new technology for the riots is like blaming previous riots in London like in 1981 on the push-button landline. Indeed twitter and such ilk, are as powerful in the service of peace as well, helping to launch post-riot clean-up efforts, for example in London. Furthermore, the use of technology will, on the contrary, probably aid the authorities who can track down the source of messages.
So what has London to be ashamed of? Well, while our young people are seemingly trashing London’s streets and looting to gain HD ready plasma screens and the latest mobile phones, we have seen young people in the Middle East protest to achieve democracy and basic freedoms our young take for granted. No doubt the thread of deprivation and poverty runs through almost all of the areas in which disturbances have taken place, however, deprivation is relative, so a starving orphan in Somalia would not feel deprived even in the worst estates inLondon, where they would at least have food, water and warmth.
The tectonic plate change in world economic power is seeing a shift away from the western debt based economy towards the east, which is largely credit based. Britain is inevitably caught up in this shifting balance of power. With the British government’s unforgiving agenda of cuts underpinned by declining world markets, these are all no doubt factors. Riots and unrest tend not to happen during times of growth, employment and prosperity. Equally, though, we do not see unrest, at least not on this scale, every time things get bad.
In my mind, the real catalyst for the riots has been the incessant growth of aspiration among young people to be at the top of the consumer tree. Fast changing technology, and our some what voyeuristic obsession with how the superrich live and play, means that young people who have little to inspire them within their own personal lives are bombarded with images and tales of how the superrich live. This is a pull for young minds that have yet to understand that, actually, most people in the world will never have the means to live such lives and yet this bar of aspiration has become entrenched. So although western youths do not suffer absolute poverty, they feel relative poverty in a city where some parts, like central London have become a playground for the super rich and where they feel excluded from the game of consumerism. The scale of inequality which exists in our society is undoubtedly an underlying factor, however, it is tragic that young people seem to believe that the only way to fix this, is by clenching onto to the electrical goods which they have snatched from buildings they have destroyed in order to get them, as though somehow, this will balance the scales of injustice which they feel in their lives.
So as we look ahead to the London 2012 Olympics next year, we must believe that time, the world’s greatest healer will mean that memories of these tragic scenes over the last few days begin to fade. It has undoubtedly damaged London’s image and visitors may be deterred. Much of the security planned is not public disorder but intelligence led terrorist threats, so in light of events we also must cover public disorder as well. Whatever happens we must remain resolute in our commitment to ensuring that police resources are not cut at a time when they are most needed but even more profoundly, that governments begin to think about how in a world engulfed by the values of consumerism and a desire to have more now, we can begin to instil in our children the value of true happiness and aspiration which does not come wrapped in a Sony box.
August 12, 2011
A Boeing 747-400 passes close to houses shortly before landing at London Heathrow Airport
Imagine living close to Heathrow. It is a fair point that people who buy a home in that part of town should know what they are signing up to and we must not of course forget the significant numbers who live nearby because they work at Heathrow. This part of London is dominated by Heathrow economics. Nonetheless, there is a balance to be struck and local residents should not be subjected to relentless noise day after day without respite. Yet, this practice is something which the government will be trialing this Autumn and next summer.
Last week, the Department for Transport announced proposals to allow more “flexibility” to BAA to decide when they can relax existing practices so that both runways at Heathrow can be used for takeoff and landing simultaneously (otherwise known as mixed mode). Normally, one runway is used for landings and the other for takeoffs switching halfway through the day.
So at the moment BAA are permitted under limited circumstances, for example, during busy periods or during poor weather conditions to use both runways simultaneously. These proposals effectively give airlines the green light to implement these special measure procedures much more often. Mixed mode expansion is what residents have feared the most. The government pledged there would be no expansion at Heathrow, yet this is exactly what they are now proposing. In the meantime The Department for Transport are playing the whole thing down using semantics, claiming that the proposals are different to mixed mode because they are not “planned”. And they think this is somehow better? Now residents are not only expected to endure noise throughout the day, but they will also be subjected to it at hoc, at the discretion of the airline companies without effective stringent policing. I think it’s time to bolt the back door!
July 19, 2011
One of the inherent structural problems of the UK economy is its growing reliance on imported energy. North Sea oil has provided a great comfort blanket for the country since it has been pumped ashore from the mid-1970s. It helped plug the gap in the balance of payments created by the relative decline of manufacturing, while paying for tax cuts by Tory governments and spending increases by Labour governments. Unfortunately we did not have the good sense and foresight to put away the North Sea oil revenues into a sovereign fund, as Norway did, which could have been used to re-tool and rebalance the economy in a way many have been advocating for a long while. Instead this money was spent some time ago and more recently since 2005, the UK has imported more energy than it has exported.
This dependency could not have come at a more difficult time, as the era of readily available cheap crude has passed with the recent hiked oil prices holding strong. The reasons for this continued price rise are a combination of factors including stronger demand from the fast-growing emerging economies, the long anticipated arrival of peak oil (the phrase often used to describe the situation when global oil supplies reach a peak) and no doubt, speculation from hedge funds. All these factors are set against a backdrop in which it is becoming more difficult to extract oil from even more dangerous deepwater fields for example, along places like the Blackpool coast, (which allegedly caused an earthquake in the seaside resort recently) using increasingly difficult technology such as “fracking” (the procedure of creating fractures in rocks and rock formations by injecting fluid into cracks to force them further open. In the long run countries will have to find ways of making fossil fuels cleaner, going nuclear, or investing heavily in renewables. All are expensive and potentially controversial, as Germany is discovering following its decision to abandon nuclear totally. However, at least they’ve been preparing to face up to issues which the UK has ducked.
So what about the implications for London? The London Assembly Environment Committee recently investigated the growing energy gap asking the question whether we are losing the energy game. This is given the Mayor’s own assertion that we risk having a gap of some 576,000 MWh by 2020. It is suggested that with energy demand reduction programmes like energy efficiency programmes for Londoners homes & work places; energy supply programmes including decentralised energy and waste to energy schemes like anaerobic digestion, then we may have the potential to reduce London’s energy gap. We also have the bonus of the worlds largest coastal wind farm in the Thames Estuary known as London Array kicking in and making a difference.
But will this all go far enough? Well this year alone we had an energy price hike of just under 7% at the start of the year by energy companies, and very recently, Scottish Power announced a an increase of up to 19% for its tariffs with expectations of a similar announcement by the country’s biggest energy supplier, British Gas. There is also mounting speculation that the cluster of timely announcements made by the big energy suppliers is “cartel” like behaviour, leaving consumers little choice about where to go for their energy and forcing them to pay the higher prices, thus maintaining profits for the energy companies. This is happening at a time when average annual incomes have dropped in real terms by about £700 resulting in creeping but stubborn fuel poverty in London with the strong likelihood of an ever widening energy gap as a result of even further price hikes before 2020.
Are there other lessons to be learnt from other parts of Europe? Copenhagen comes to mind and the journey from Copenhagen to London takes you from one end of the energy use spectrum to the other. Copenhagen is a city that heats itself by burning its own waste whereas London unfortunately makes a business of wastefulness on this front. For example Copenhagen boasts one of the most advanced waste-to-energy plants in the world, having the capacity to convert hundreds of tons of garbage a year to heat. The city aims to free itself from fossil fuels with wind, biomass and waste incineration playing a major role by 2025. Not surprisingly, therefore, the fastest growing Danish exports are in the clean-tech sector with new technologies that improve the energy efficiency of buildings, reduce loss in energy transportation and turn waste into an energy source. The UK, on the other hand has yet to exploit the huge global business opportunity resulting from the clean-tech sector.
In short, if global cities like London are going to shield themselves from further price hikes, a widening energy gap and achieve energy security, then plugging the gap with renewables and demand reduction measures will require immediate attention and investment into low carbon energy sources. The Office of Gas & Electricity Markets in the UK (OFGEM) estimates that up to £200 billion of investment is needed over the next ten years to replace the UK’s ageing infrastructure to meet energy needs and to move to a low carbon energy supply system. That’s more then twice the amount invested in the last ten years. It is still unclear how such large-scale financing will be generated and where it will come from. What we do know is schemes like London Array are being funded by companies all of which have their headquarters outside of the UK (Dong Energy in Denmark, E’ON in Germany and Masdar in Abu Dhabi) probably a sign of things to come, or else we risk playing and losing the even more dangerous game of energy complacency.
July 6, 2011
King of transport costs
How do you square the fact that with record increases in tube fares at the beginning of the year and the Mayor still not getting to grips with the upgrading of the tube notoriously the Jubilee line, we have record levels of patronage on the tube?
Well, behind the price increases and the flagging quality of the service lies another important determinant factor of travelling – the cost of tanking up ones car. Increased use of the tube is the response by many to the even higher costs of travelling by car particularly from the outer suburbs into central London. Spiralling petrol prices have tipped the price balance in favour of public transport. Although, It is a balance which is so fragile that unreasonable spikes in the price of either mode of travel can easily tip the balance in favour of the less unreasonable hike.
So as long we have these crazy global prices resulting from a combination of the Arab Spring cutting off some supply like Libya and the emerging economies demanding more energy, the Mayor of London will continue to get away with murder sustaining high price levels and a poor service.
June 28, 2011
I keenly registered with the Barclays Cycle Hire Scheme and have on previous blogs made known my first impressions of the scheme. Please see attached link of previous blog. But what’s beginning to cloud my experience of this scheme, is how l’ve been hit with additional costs of up to £87 since the 30th of July when l first registered. The cost of registration itself was £48 for the whole year including the key, so to then be expected to fork out nearly double that, is a complete disincentive for the scheme.
It’s inconceivable that l could have incurred my first financial hit of £52, within just two weeks of the scheme launch, as all my trips have been less then half an hour long and quite frankly, I just haven’t done enough mileage. I have of course been back to TFL, and was told that l would get a refund, but these have yet to materialise on my credit card. Also, just to add insult to injury, whilst chasing up my refund, l was swiftly informed that l’d be charged a further £35! Something is clearly amiss with the administration of the charges for the bike hire scheme.
So although it’s very handy having the bike option in my local area, it’s turning out to be a very expensive way of travelling around the neighbourhood, something most Londoners can do without in the present climate.
September 3, 2010
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