Defragmenting our selves
It was the first truly warm day of spring and the fourteenth day since the beginning of the coronavirus lockdown. For my government-mandated exercise I had been exploring by bicycle the Quaggy River, after which my housing co-operative is named. There was no particular reason to do this except for the arbitrary name of the…
Renting a home in London can be a living nightmare. Renters feel little control over their own homes, are forbidden to hang pictures on a wall, or take up state support in hard times. Their happiness and mental health is held hostage to the whims of landlords who refuse to do essential repairs or enter…
We live in times of high political turbulence. Surveying flailing governments from Spain to the United States, it seems a good moment to face up to the evidence of system failures that face us. Millions going to food banks or unable to afford decent housing in the richest countries in the world reveals a systems failure. An…
Ana Maria owns the casa in which I’m staying. She is talkative, enthusiastic, and helpful. When we entered the room I was to stay in, I put down my bags. She promptly moved them to what she felt to be a more appropriate place. Her advice on restaurants and buses and places to go has…
Across the world the political centre ground is disappearing, and the new enemy of the people is globalism. Watching the rise of the nationalist right is particularly frustrating if, like me, you took part in protests in the late 1990s and early 2000s against globalisation. These protests for a few years united the radical left…
It appears that many people in the UK, some of them left-inclined, joined a right-driven rush to exit the EU, because they feel abandoned by the institutions that rule us. Leave voters have reacted to this with clear anti-establishment sentiment; it is even visible in claims that we simply need ‘a change’. Voters’ services had…
House prices in London, most people agree, are too high. Orthodoxy on left and right says that this is due either to the free market or constraints on the free market respectively. The two sides propose different solutions. The right demand that planning controls be minimized or simply scrapped, while the left demand that new…
Lewisham Council has finally unveiled its plan to re-develop a large empty plot of land at Besson Street, New Cross Gate, within what is sometimes known as the Kender Triangle. The plans are an interesting departure for the council, who instead of building new council housing, plans to build a Private Rented Sector (PRS) scheme of 250…
Few people these days would believe in a medicine that could cure all diseases, yet many people, it seems, believe in the mental cure-all of positive thinking. Thinking positively will make you happy, healthy, successful, a good parent, a good daughter, a good citizen, a good employee, a good business person; all the rewards of…
In August 2012 South African police shot dead 34 mine workers at Marikana in a massacre that horrified the world. As the post-mortems rolled in there was plenty of blame to go around for the mining company Lonmin, union leaders, and politicians. No blame however was attributed to the positive thinking industry. That is not…