Crystal Palace; nothing happening very slowly

By the time something is done with the north terrace of Crystal Palace Park - the site of Joseph Paxton's masterpiece and now little more than waste ground - I would not at all be surprised if the construction of HS2 to Manchester had long been completed and we were all used to travelling on Crossrail 2. Such is the complexity of the site, coupled with the various interested parties, it is very tricky to make any progress. And so it comes as no great surprise to learn that the exclusivity deal signed between Bromley Council and the Chinese ZhongRong group - who want to spend £500million rebuilding a version of the palace - has come to an end with little evidence of progress being made.

A quick recap of the original timetable:

Early 2014 - Shortlist of architects selected. This was achieved and the six firms - the usual suspects for such a high profile project - can be found here

Autumn 2014 - Architect selected and a planning application submitted

Winter 2015 - Building work begins

The last two have got utterly nowhere. The hoped-for schedule was always wildly optimistic and so it has proved. The notion that a planning application of such magnitude would be passed so swiftly, especially considering widespread opposition from local groups, was absurd. I should add that the scheme does, or perhaps did, have support from some residents and local businesses, impressed by the scale and potential of the project. They have, however, become increasingly hard to track down.

The main sticking point seems to be that the Chinese firm want to take over large swathes of the public park and Bromley Council have not received sufficient assurances over access to the land or, indeed, what on earth they would put in a new palace once it was built.

Bromley Council are very keen to stress that just because the exclusivity deal is over, does not mean talks with ZhongRong have ended. They continue. In a statement, dated Monday February 2, council leader Stephen Carr says the following:

'These have been and remain complex proposals. The potential to completely restore and improve the park as well as regeneration for the surrounding area is something we cannot ignore. Equally, the Council is not going to agree to something without being confident about the proposals as we are custodians of this fantastic park.'

He adds:

'Whilst we are no longer bound by an exclusivity agreement, the confidential discussions have not concluded and these continue with ZhongRong. Local people and other interested parties should know that when there is something to say, we will keep them informed as we have sought to do all the way along this process and I thank them for their continued patience.'

From Bromley's perspective, it is easy to see their point. Someone is offering a huge amount of money to regenerate a pitifully neglected spot and while it is a huge pity Heritage Lottery Fund money has been lost, AGAIN, it is a pittance in comparison to the quantity being talked about by this Chinese firm. But one must question whether a project on this scale was ever vaguely realistic.

The Greens were first out of the traps this morning (Friday January 30) calling for the scheme to be scrapped. Tom Chance, the party's candidate for Lewisham West and Penge, said:

'The idea of building a huge hotel and conference centre on our park was wrong, the consultation process was hopeless, and the consequences have included community groups blocked from improving our park, the loss of millions of pounds of lottery funding, and a huge amount of anger and resentment among local people.

'Bromley and the GLA need to stop messing around with fantasy projects and send the ZhongRong group packing.'

And he has his own ideas as to what should happen now:

'If they set-up a Community Land Trust to govern the park's future this could find viable ways to implement the adopted masterplan incrementally without losing large areas of the park to private ownership and commercial buildings. 

'The council could also work with local environmental groups to turn the scrub and woodland on the hill top into a popular local nature reserve within the next six months, instead of denigrating it as a waste of space and trying to concrete it over.'

Personally, I'm sure Bromley will persist for a while longer but I expect ZhongRong to eventually slink away and the council will be forced to return to the masterplan. The gleaming building, below, which dazzled the easily-bedazzled Boris Johnson so looks increasingly unlikely ever to emerge. I doubt even Joanna Lumley's smile would be enough to rescue this.

A story that Beggar's Belief!

Above is the front page of the latest Ayrshire Post (January 9). It claims to be an 'expose' of the beggars in Ayr but the language is so extraordinarily inflammatory and unpleasant the editor, and the writer, should feel thoroughly ashamed.

It reads:

Brazen beggars are coining in up to £200 a day on the streets of Ayr.
Roving East European gangs and lone-wolf Scottish scroungers are plaguing Ayr for rich pickings.
Now we can reveal new get-tough moves aimed at unsettling them are to sweep into action.
And there is vast backing to BANISH them from the town centre for good.
Our expose this week captures the panhandling pests on camera as they beg for cash help, typically waving worn polystyrene coffee cups.
Tourists and residents loathe them sitting on the public pavements.
But in recent weeks dozens of shameless beggars have preyed on people's consciences and targeted the High Street area during the Christmas spree.
It is thought that ALL the Eastern Europeans involved are transported from immigrant enclaves in the central belt.
And one woman beggar has a warm and cosy council tenancy ..... [bile turns to page 5.]

And this was just on the front page.

Looking at the use of language more closely, let's pursue it a little more:

Brazen beggars - these people have the temerity to be outside;

Roving East European gangs - run for your lives, there are hordes of foreigners on the lose;

new get-tough moves aimed at unsettling them are to sweep into action... to BANISH them...for good - these people will be swept away like litter from the gutter. Or Jews from Poland.

Tourists and residents loathe them sitting on the public pavements - because they're litter and shouldn't be on public benches. Only the gutter for them;

dozens of shameless beggars have preyed on people's consciences... during the Christmas spree - not only do these guttersnipes have the temerity to be outside, they also open their mouths and hunt down innocent Christmas shoppers in packs. And why, of all times, do they do this at Christmas? Christmas is a time for giving presents, not giving to scroungers (check Bible to be sure this is right Ed.)

one woman beggar has a warm and cosy council tenancy - look, she's not even bloody homeless. She's conning you.

Now, begging of any sort is not pleasant for either the beggar or the, erm, beggee. For those who are asked for money it can be embarrassing, uncomfortable and genuinely intimidating.

And people who find themselves on the streets, begging, frequently include the most vulnerable in society; those with mental health problems, the unemployed, the lonely, the abandoned, people who simply find the process of coping day by day impossibly difficult. And people begging on the streets does also include organised criminal gangs, sometimes forcing trafficked people into prostitution and to ask for money on the streets.

But, for the Ayrshire Post, there seems to be only two sorts of 'beggars': 'roving East European gangs' and 'lone-wolf Scottish scroungers' and no one else.

The Ayrshire Post's report comes just two days after Shelter Scotland - who have declined to comment on the Ayrshire Post's story - published a report that, on the one hand, finds that homeless applications in Scotland have thankfully decreased by 34 per cent in the last five years; but also identifies an 38% rise in applications from the private rented sector. The report can be found here.

Part of me wonders if there has been a dreadful editorial mistake. Surely no sane reporter, sub-editor or editor could have allowed such copy to be published. Perhaps there was a system error and a 'jokey' draft 'story' was accidentally sent to the printers, Maybe we will hear a heartfelt apology before too long. I genuinely hope that will prove to be the case, otherwise what has been published is simply vile.

But, for now, people seem to be getting pretty outraged by the paper's stance offering plenty of comments like these:

@ayrshirepost this is a disgraceful headline story pic.twitter.com/5JFkDQfOPu
— Ayrshire Greens (@AyrshireGreens) January 8, 2015

As someone who is proud to be born & raised in Ayrshire, this headline from @ayrshirepost is embarrassing. pic.twitter.com/dJCIJEf3iU
— Gavin Corbett (@gavincorbett) January 8, 2015

(thanks/apologies to contributing tweets & pics from @Ayrshire Greens, @gavincorbett and @MartynMcL)

Nous Sommes Charlie

PARIS

LONDON

MARSEILLE

BERLIN (via @tquitoioBismuth)

MADRID (via @LPJ_Espagne)

ET MOI

90 Syrian refugees from 3.2million; are we doing enough?

Listening to the reasonable-sounding James Brokenshire, it is clear the government is very keen we should all be immensely proud of our contribution towards alleviating the plight of the millions of Syrian refugees, forced to flee their homes by the wretched, increasingly fractured conflict in the country.

And we must not for a second think its problems over net migration have in any way impacted upon the United Kingdom only accepting 90 refugees in the last year.

The immigration minister was speaking as an Urgent Question had been asked in the House of Commons about the government’s failure to accept appeals from the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) to increase the numbers of refugees allowed into the country.

Overall, Western countries have agreed they will resettle up to 100,000 Syrian refugees over the next few months. This is not a tiny number but only a dent in the 3.2million people who have fled the country and meagre in comparison to the almost 1.2million in Lebanon, 1.1million in Turkey and 630,000 in Jordan. And the UK and the United States have refused to commit to any increase whatsoever. Nevertheless, the country should be very proud of our efforts, as James Brokenshire said on ten separate occasions, variations along the lines of this:

‘This government and this country can be proud of what we are doing through this assistance and our political focus – and, yes, through the vulnerable persons relocation scheme in providing asylum.’

It is certainly true that the UK is donating more aid to the Syrian crisis than all other countries bar the US. This is the biggest refugee crisis of our generation by a considerable margin. As well as the 3.2m who have escaped the violence by leaving the country, 6.5million Syrians are displaced within the country. The United Kingdom has committed £700million towards humanitarian relief. The focus of this money is to alleviate the suffering of refugees being hosted in neighbouring countries, providing water for up to 11.5million people, supporting 600,000 medical consultations and funding 5.2million monthly food rations. This is all hugely valuable work for which the government should rightly be applauded.

But to continually claim a decent number of refugees are being offered asylum here stretches credulity. Moreover, it bears no historical comparison either with previous crises of a similar scale. For example, Britain accepted 25,000 Ugandan Asians after Idi Amin expelled them in 1972; 4,455 Kosovan refugees were airlifted here between April 25 and June 25, 1999 and by the end of 2002, there were 1,575 Rwandan refugees still in the UK.

Time after time, Brokenshire repeated the line that the vulnerable persons relocation scheme was working effectively, liasing ‘closely with the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees to identify the most vulnerable cases displaced by the conflict in Syria and to relocate them to the UK’. The criteria of this scheme must awfully strict for only 90 possible cases to have so far been identified. Either that, or those carrying out the work are being staggeringly inefficient.

After Yvette Cooper suggested the government’s reluctance to take in more refugees might ‘cloud their conscience over helping refugees’. Brokenshire rather got on his high horse, saying such a claim ‘was not worthy of our proceedings’. But it’s hard not to come to that conclusion.

James Brokenshire

Yesterday, Radio Five Live hosted an emotive call-in show on the issue, with a succession of callers shouting down the phone offering comments such as ‘we should be looking after our own first’, ‘we should be rebuilding towns for them’ so ‘these people’ don’t have to come to this country. Another lady said that ‘if we hadn’t opened our borders to 560million in the EU, we would be in a better place to take these refugees’. Britain was a ‘small island totally at breaking point’ before adding that, if Germany took 30,000 refugees, one day in the future they might get EU citizenship and ‘eventually become our problem’. A lovely sentiment, of which the lady speaking felt immediately ashamed.

The government’s net migration target lies in tatters, and it is attitudes like those above, fostered by Nigel Farage and UKIP, which are currently driving the government’s spluttering policy.

Nigel Farage, it should be noted, has backed Syrian refugees coming to the UK, though he has shied away from providing a specific number. In December last year, the UKIP leader said:

‘I think refugees are a very different thing to economic migration and I think this country should honour the 1951 declaration on refugee status that was agreed…. the original ideas of defining what a refugee is were good ones and I think, actually, there is a responsibility on all of us in the free West to try and help some of those people fleeing Syria, literally in fear of their lives’.

Neither Brokenshire nor the Home Secretary has met with the Refugee Council to discuss the current crisis; as experts in their field they could at least offer sage advice. And they have, with other leading aid charities such as Oxfam, Save the Children and Amnesty International, called for the government to offer up to 10,000 resettlement places to Syrian refugees.

Refugee Council Advocacy Manager Anna Musgrave, said:

‘Britain should be offering safety to thousands, not hundreds of refugees from Syria, in this case, numbers speak louder than words. Failure to act swiftly will leave more refugees struggling to survive in the region and a permanent stain on Britain’s reputation for offering safety to people in their hour of greatest need.’

James Brokenshire and the government can be as proud as they like of their resettlement programme. But, as with their repeated failureto stand-by the Afghan translators who served alongside our soldiers so bravely, to continue to ignore the pleas of the international community, the United Nations, the Church of England, charities and a loud public voice, will do lasting damage to Britain’s long-standing reputation as a country which offers refuge to the desperate.

The day after the night before

I expect there have been a lot of sore heads in the pub industry today. Campaigners, who have spent years trying to challenge the power of the major pub companies (pubcos), might have woken with headaches after celebrating defeating the government over pub rents and the beer tie; pints were eagerly consumed first in Whitehall before the party continued at a south London pub.

Meanwhile, in the board rooms of pubcos, executives are likely to have been rubbing their foreheads in anguish, watching as their share prices plummeted; at one point Enterprise Inns' shares dropped 17 per cent and Punch Tavern's slumped 11 per cent. It must be worrying times for both companies, especially as each is laden with more than £2billion of debt.

The reaction to the vote, which will mean pub tenants tied to pubcos will be able to demand a market rent option (MRO) and buy alcohol from providers other than their pubcos, who often charge a far higher rate (up to 70%) than the open market, has been predictably split.

The campaigners are joyous; the pubcos and their supporters, on the other hand, are despairing. They have spent much of the day predicting apocalyptic levels of pub closures and a vast numbers of redundancies. It is certainly true to say that these are uncertain times and it is hard to be sure of what will ultimately happen.

For the campaigners, yesterday’s vote is an enormous success. These are not professional political lobbyists or campaigners but publicans, or former publicans, trying to challenge a system they see as grossly unfair. Along the way they have been supported by organisations such as Camra, who believe the vote ‘will help keep pubs open and ensure the cost of a pint to consumers remains affordable’ and the Federation of Small Businesses who claimed today the result would be a ‘boost to local economies while giving consumers greater choice’. Greg Mulholland MP, who has spearheaded the campaign in parliament, was understandably in an effervescent mood after the vote and received plaudits from his colleagues – such as Tim Farron – for his not insignificant efforts.

The British Beer and Pub Association, on the other hand, has been predicting doom in the industry as a consequence of the vote. There is barely a news programme on which its chief executive, Brigid Simmonds, hasn’t appeared today. In each appearance she has repeated the claim that the government’s own research shows ‘1,400 more pubs closing, with 7,000 job losses’. The piece of research she is referring to is this by London Economics, commissioned by the Department of Business, and she is certainly quoting it selectively. It actually predicts the closure of between 700 and 1,400 pubs, with the consequent jobs losses of between 3,700 and 7,000. Ms Simmonds has only referred to the top figure.

The London Economics study only consulted pubcos to make its predictions, each providing a sample of between '300-400 anonymised pubs'. It is fair to say that pubcos have a vested interest in this debate and there appears to have been little effort to gauge the opinion from any other side in the exchange.

The report also finds one more reason why pubs might close that hasn't been much mentioned by the BBPA; that several of the stakeholders it interviewed believe the UK is 'still operating excess pub supply of approximately 6,000 pubs'. Definitely a gloomy prospect, but not one that can pinned on Tuesday's vote.

And finally, Ms Simmonds fails to take into account that pubcos have already declared their intentions to dispose of huge numbers of pubs. For example, in their 2013 annual report, Punch Taverns, owners of more than 4,000 pubs, say they want to focus on their core business of 2,990 pubs. Their plans for the non-core division - compromising of 1,106 pubs - is to dispose of them 'over the next four years'.

Enterprise Inns, meanwhile, wanted to dispose of £70million worth of pubs by the end of September this year. It may well turn out that both firms use yesterday's vote as cover for their already declared intentions. Of course, 'disposing' of pubs doesn't necessarily mean they are going to close; but supermarket chains must be rubbing their hands with glee at the prospect.

Contrastingly, according to a survey published in 2013 by the Federation of Small Businesses, 88 per cent of tied pubs said they would be better off if they operated under a ‘fair rent’; 74 per cent said they would spend more promoting their business; 74 per cent said they would hire more staff and 65 per cent said they would cut the price of beer.

Another frequently repeated claim from Ms Simmonds is that the beer tie has been a success in this country for almost 400 years. This doesn't stand up to much scrutiny. Fifty-seven per cent of tied publicans struggle on less than £10,000 a year. Of Enterprise Inns pubs - they have more than 5,000 - they had 579 'business failures' in one year according to their 2013 Annual Report; down on previous years but nothing to boast about. These are not symptoms of a system working well.

And I have lost count of the numbers of tenant publicans who have contacted me personally to tell me about their suffering; struggling under unimaginable amounts of debt caused, seemingly, by the unreasonable demands of pubcos, themselves trying to shift their own debt mountain. Many of these tenants - all, without exception, hugely hard-working people desperate to run good pubs - have now lost their pubs, their homes, their livelihoods, their health. Pubcos have consistently failed to respond adequately to their concerns; it is their lack of action that has led to this turn of events. 

They won't give up of course. The lobbying campaign by the pubcos and the BBPA against these changes has been huge and they have well placed - and immensely senior - allies to almost the top of the Conservative Party. They will hope the government finds a way to drop this amendment. But,  if these changes lead to the demise of the pubco, they need only look in the mirror to find the founders of their own downfall.

Will MPs finally vote to challenge pubcos?

Parliament has been treading water for some months now; MPs spending more time grinding teeth, impatient for the next General Election, than actually participating in worthwhile debates.

But tomorrow, MPs have an opportunity to vote for something which might actually make a difference to the lives of thousands of publicans across the country, who claim to have been suffering greatly under the pubco ownership model (for background on this fiendishly complicated issue, see here).

For finally, after years of campaigning, scores of MPs from all parties are set to back an amendment to the Small Business Bill, which will put a 'market rent option' for tenants of large pubcos on to the statute books. This means that landlords who lease their pubs from the biggest pub companies – those which own more than 500 establishments – will be able to have their rents independently reviewed to ensure they are fair.

And the amendment, tabled by the campaign's parliamentary champion Greg Mulholland, Tory Brian Binley and Labour's Adrian Bailey, could also see tenants able to buy their beer from any supplier, rather than be compelled to buy exclusively from their owners at a marked up price.

The issue's complexity has been its worst enemy for it deserves more headlines than it has garnered. The closure of a local pub is frequently a local tragedy; a community loses its heart, a neighbourhood is deprived of a meeting and sharing place. The mass closure of pubs which Britain has witnessed in the last couple of decades is a huge national shame; a vital cultural seam that threads through our whole national consciousness has been neglected and allowed to decay by governments of all colours. In the ten years after 2002, more than 10,000 pubs have closed, a huge number of which were tied pubs.

If passed, the changes might mean some relief for tenants struggling to live on barely £3,000 a year, and those battling not to end up like Stoke Newington's Kirsty Valentine, forced out of The Alma after a rent dispute. It could curb the practice of churn, which sees tenant landlords forced out of their pub, only to be replaced within a couple of weeks.

Getting to this stage has been a slow old process and, for a time, it seemed the coalition might run out of sufficient parliamentary time to pass any legislation. And even now, despite the recommendations from endless committee reports and reams of evidence, the government has resisted these measures when it eventually outlined their proposals to tackle the pubco issues. While Vince Cable proposed a statutory code for pub companies, campaigners have argued it would remain toothless regulation without this ‘market rent option’. 

While, this option has big support amongst publicans and tenants, the pubcos themselves have lobbied hard against the such changes, with eager support from the British Beer and Pub Association. The latter, quoting widely a widely discredited report, claim the measures could lead to more than 1,400 pubs closing and the loss of 7,000 jobs. It's worth remembering that even if this were true - and for such a dire outcome to emerge it would require the wilful and self-destructive connivance of the pub owning companies - this is actually at slower rate than the current rate of 31 pubs closing every week, according to CAMRA. I do wonder who the BBPA imagine they represent; pubs or pubcos?

Support for the amendment is strong on the Labour benches and has wide backing among the Conservative benches - curiously not including Burton MP Andrew Griffiths, who has been something of an ally of the pubcos - and the Liberal Democrats. Victory for the campaigners must feel unnervingly, worryingly close. But, the government could still defeat the rebels and it has to make its way through the House of Lords; so this long-running saga has some way to go yet.

Politics should rise above playground abuse

Eric Pickles is not a slim man, you may have noticed, and he has long been subjected to the familiar jeers of the ‘who ate all the pies?’ sort - in this, he is a successor to John Prescott. Ed Balls is afflicted by a stammer – it is, for example, ‘impossible’ for him to start a sentence with an H. It is largely kept under control but it has emerged at a few moments, ruining high profile appearances in the House of Commons and prompting mockery.

Ed Miliband can appear socially awkward and seems unable to eat a bacon sandwich in public without pulling a face which looks as though he has swallowed a particularly energetic wasp, much to the amusement of many. Gordon Brown is Scottish and blind in one eye, justifying the charmless Jeremy Clarkson’s description of him as a ‘one-eyed Scottish idiot’.

Picking on such characteristics, over which people have little control, reflects the standard pattern of primary school bullying. In such circumstances it may provoke guffaws amongst a bully’s peers, laughter amongst a gaggle of skinny teenagers on a chilly, windswept sports pitch; but by the time most of us reach the sixth-form and the junior common room, it is those slinging such abuse who look like the idiot. But in politics, pitifully, this bullying remains a daily feature of the soap opera.

For all the high profile and worthy campaigns against bullying, it sadly seems increasingly to invade public life and appear as a form of entertainment. A couple of weeks ago The Apprentice returned to our television, expanded to include 20 candidates, all - probably deliberately - selected for their ability to behave with competing ghastliness. The seam running through the show seems to be bullying, the wannabes competing viciously between each other while Alan Sugar barks nastily from above. Perhaps the absence of this mean streak made The Great British Bake-Off such a success.

There is, of course, a rich history of clever, acid – and frequently rude – barbs being flung across the chamber of the House of Commons but it is too easy to look back with rose-tinted spectacles and paint politicians of the past as master orators, always ready with a cleverly constructed aside. Few will forget the hitherto mild-mannered, 'dead sheep', Geoffrey Howe bringing out his rapier and sticking it into his colleague and boss with such vigour.  For every perfectly judged quip, such as when Michael Foot said of Norman Tebbit, ‘It is not necessary that every time he rises he should give his famous imitation of a semi-house-trained polecat’, there was a Tony Banks. The late, former Sports Minister, once dismissed Margaret Thatcher as a ‘half-mad old bag lady’ and said, when Hague became Conservative leader, they had ‘elected a foetus as the party leader’, adding ‘I bet a lot of them wish they had not voted against abortion now’. 

We can look much further back into our political record. Lord Kenneth Baker, who held several cabinet posts under Margaret Thatcher, is a great enthusiast of political caricature, which has a long, venerable, and excoriating, history. He is a trustee of The Cartoon Museum and collects 18th century cartoons, recognising the importance of works by the likes of James Gillray and Thomas Rowlandson. These artists could be particularly vicious, never shy of focusing on a public figure's physical defects if it suited them. Gillray reserved special scorn for the Whig politician Charles James Fox, who often appeared, gruesomely, in his works:

Charles James Fox sharing a chamber pot with Lord North (a modern twist of this can be found here)

Baker himself, wasn't spared. Inspired, perhaps, by his oleaginous image, he was transmogrified into a slug by the Spitting Image team, though it was his decision to douse himself liberally with hair oil.

At what point does a clever - if deadly - political putdown become school-boy nastiness? Footballers are constantly reminded that they are role models and what they do on the football pitch is replicated up and down the country. Spit excessively, and children playing footie in the school yard will spit; swear and they will swear.

Politicians also bear this responsibility. The jibes above have little or nothing to do with the achievements - or otherwise - of our politicians, they focus on aspects the individual is powerless to alter. Mockery becomes cruelty when the victim is powerless to resist. When politicians descend to such cheap ridicule so casually, it is no wonder that public forums - such as social media - can become dominated with equally facile abuse. Politicians will not always succeed but they should try, if only for the sake of healthy debate in public life, to aspire to something better.