East End Lies

Rotten Borough or Banana Republic?

2011-07-10T02:19:00.000-07:00

If ever we wanted confirmation of deep intellectual dishonesty and flawed process, we have it in the form of the 'review' of East End Lies by its commander in chief Monsieur Takki Sulaiman.

No Mabel, turkeys don't vote for Christmas, do they? I regard the mayor as being complicit in this, since he could easily have chosen some more transparent review method or (better) just respected the previous and new (Pickles-style) council code of conduct for publicity. However LBTH have a pick-and-mix approach to statute, roughly summed up as 'what suits us/what gets us re-elected', no notion of general interest, you must be dreaming.

Finally, as a sufferer, this review of tort by stakeholder/instigator also extends to the formal complaint process. In fact, there is no actual complaint process in this borough, since the main aim to is bury complaints whilst wasting as much of the complainers time and energy as possible.

I think we're now waiting for our Egyptian or Tunisian (but preferably not Libyan) moment, there's just too much wrong to be righted 'gently'. Investigative journalism would be a 'good' start, too.

Mayoral Mandate: Imperceptible

2011-03-19T02:13:00.000-07:00

Can you count? If you live in Tower Hamlets, maybe not. We like to keep everything simple here, so that people will vote for the 'right' [I mean left or I mean something or other, oh, forget it!] thing. Literacy, higher education and emancipation would be the enemy of our current lords and rulers.

Meanwhile, only 25% voted at the mayoral election. Only half of those voted Luftur, so our powerful mayor has a 12.5% 'mandate'. Gaddafi probably has more genuine public approval, doesn't he?

East End Lies: The Review

2011-02-06T23:36:00.000-08:00

So Luftur and his mates are conducting a review of NuLab's precious darling 'East End Life' the multi-million pound propaganda vehicle designed to cause difficulty for independent publications by replicating [that's re-plic-at-ing, look it up council bois] their structure and stealing their advertising.

Fact: We have never had an honest and accurate figure for how much EEL costs, but it's in the region of £2Million per year, this in one of the most deprived boroughs. Each figure usually misses out some component of cost, still Brown had as much of a head for figures as boy George, our current 'chancellor'

Fact: Any money it 'makes' misuses officer's time [they are not ad salespeople, in as much as they are anything] to tout for advertising.

Fact: That advertising is at the expense of independent media in and around the borough, English language and other.

Fact: EEL contravenes the council code for publicity on several counts, in each issue. The contraventions are relevance, balance and use for personal messages.

Fact: The [bonjour Orwell, that's a wr-iter, council bois] 'harmony' section probably should face CRE sanctions because of its unbalanced composition.

Fact: There has never been a negative story about the council in EEL, see my remarks about balance.

Fact: No-one with over 8 year old english language literacy skills believes anything in it anyway. Oh, I've just looked at that sentence, so lots of people believe it then.

Facr: It is a mark of contempt, an affront to local democracy and huge waste of time and money.

Transparency Tower Hamlets

2010-10-16T00:17:00.000-07:00

With the mayoral 'election' coming, it's time to reflect on the poisonous, spin-filled, lying, divisive nature of the borough and the people that 'run' [in a very joking sense, if they were somewhere with some 'honest' corruption, they'd have gaudy uniforms and a chauffeur-driven Mercedes] the borough.

In the developing world, ongoing poverty, inequality, poor health and suffering is always associated with endemic corruption, an obsession with serving one's own interests at the expense of the common good. It's pretty much certain that this observation will apply everywhere, enough said.

The truth is, we need to be rid of the lot of them, their foul propaganda sheets, their high cunning but low intelligence and morals and a certain section of the council officers too, then we can start again. The word is transparency,too many syllables for most of them though.

Flattening the Unruly Borough

2010-07-28T08:21:00.000-07:00

Just ran around Shadwell basin where Bow Estates are busy removing all greenery including some good looking blackberries that I had my eye on. I asked why?

'Oh, they said the people in the flats asked for it all to be cut down. 'They' get behind there and do anything and make a lot of noise and shit and everything.' Great explanation.

But here we have the council's and some of the resident's response to youth difficulties, cut it down, remove the seats, lock it, put barbed wire around it, flatten it. I know, let's have an 8pm curfew too. Basically, because the police are too occupied with forms, newsletters and other distractions and the borough overbuild and don't wish to educate or render more prosperous [both would involve a move to the right and a less compliant, credulous population]. Admittedly if you look at 50 years of crime stats, the main home office and succeeding [that's not the word, is it?] administrations 'objective' has been decline followed by a hockey stick upwards for crime in the 1980s.

We now have THEOs, yet another bunch of hapless, ineffective, uncoordinated wanderers to go with the rest, SNT, CT, RR, Met proper, borough ASB, Environmental service etc. etc.

As for my blackberries, they're a symbol of a huge missed opportunity in the borough. Since the borough can't educate and Bangladesh is agrarian, we have all the skills for a nice green revolution and quite a lot of extra employment, healthy food, biodiversity and genuine community involvement [at the moment the main thrust is play-involvement, come to meetings but don't try and change anything, excepts growing lists of concerns and issues].

However that would require imagination and leadership, hey, I know let's just print another newsletter saying that everything is really peachy, that should do it, shouldn't it?

Welcome to Tower Hamlets

2010-07-03T23:55:00.000-07:00

You step down at Limehouse, feet immediately sinking in to an optimal mixture of pigeon shit, chewing gum and old fried chicken boxes. The pavements haven't had any attention for about ten years, let alone any kind of deep clean. The walls are dirty and dripping with water, happily a tree grows half-way up one of them, nature's contribution to the absent borough ecology agenda. Eco-what? Is that like fried chicken?

There are steel railings everywhere, creating ugly mugger-friendly corridors and carrying the council neo-Stalinist [via genetic engineering performed on NuLab] message to the subjects 'do what we say, go where we say', don't develop initiative or educate yourselves, you will always be poor and stupid [and vote for us, for the handouts!].

In the dim light [if you have arrived at night, brave soul] there is a litter of contradictory signage everywhere, do this, do that, the word comes down. Denizens of this distressed realm stare at you with suspicion, compare Hackney, this is not the cheery [but romanticised] East End of old. It is 'vibrant' [newspeak for poor, noisy and polluted] and 'diverse' [newspeak for the infantilising, divisive, censorious multiculturalism of the 1980s, abandoned elsewhere].

At least there is something to eat, if you like fried chicken. You will pay for it later, healthwise, so have a cigarette as well. Healthwise [and, of course, this is linked to education and literacy] this is one of the worst parts of the UK. The council is determined that it should remain so, too, they understand clientelism and tribalism and don't understand democracy.

Welcome to Tower Hamlets! Or 'frown, you are now entering Tower Hamlets'.