Total: 53 posts
Posts in: Commentary
My own personal and political takes on issues affecting Southall.
Campaigns
Local Democracy
Community
Commentary
Ealing Labour
Features
Updates
Lift-Off! Ealing Elections Special
🐸 Going Green 🐸
Peter Mason celebrated another election victory yesterday morning by going green.
Solomon Cuthbertson, a Labour activist, posted a photograph at 6:08 a.m. captioned:
“Good morning from Ealing where @EalingLabour has just won an historic fifth term."
The photograph shows Mason at a podium against the Ealing Council branded green backdrop, in an olive-green suit.
Mason had spent much of the final week of the campaign amplifying national Labour’s attack line that …
Local Democracy
Commentary
Ealing Labour
Exposes
BREAKING NEWS
Who Does Peter Mason Really Represent?
Shots were fired early in this election campaign.
In late March, Ealing Labour issued a statement attacking the Ealing Community Independents (ECI).
Their candidates, Labour said, include people:
“expelled from the Labour Party, supporters of the far-left Socialist Workers Party, and have connections to the Communist Party of Great Britain.”
ECI, Labour concluded, are:
“hardly independent” and should “tell the truth about who they really represent.”
It is …
Local Democracy
Environment
Commentary
Gasworks
Ealing Labour
Berkeley Group
Housing
Ethics
Exposes
The Man in the Middle
Yes, yes, yes, he’s on the right in this picture!
On 6 November 2023, Berkeley Group’s Southall development — The Green Quarter, rising on the site of the former Southall gasworks — handed a £2,500 cheque to the Western Road Urban Garden Project.
The cheque was branded with Berkeley’s logo and The Green Quarter’s name.
It was presented in the garden and photographed for Berkeley’s website, where the story was published on 23 January 2024.
The image is striking …
Investigations
Local Democracy
Environment
Commentary
Health
Personal
Computer Says No
How many times have you asked yourself — or heard others ask the same question?
Why does the council never reply to my emails?!
When residents raised concerns about toxic odours from the Southall Gasworks site, they were told to keep reporting. Every call, every email, every logged complaint was encouraged.
“It’s good you’re making so many complaints,” they were told at a meeting with Peter Mason in March 2019.
Volume of reporting, the implication was, would produce …
Local Democracy
Commentary
Ealing Labour
Sixty-Four Years On Your Side
Polling day is Thursday 7 May 2026. Southall Green’s three sitting Labour councillors — between them representing the ward for sixty-four years — are once again asking for your vote.
Between them, they have drawn well over £1.5 million in councillor allowances — Cllr Anand alone has received at least three-quarters of a million pounds over her 28 years in office. The figure has accelerated since 2022, when the Labour-controlled council voted itself a substantial uplift in the same period …
Local Democracy
Community
Commentary
Gasworks
Ealing Labour
Features
The Meeting that Ended Local Democracy in Southall
On 10 July 2019, around 200 residents packed the Dominion Centre in Southall to confront their councillors, their MP, Public Health England, the Environment Agency, and the developer of the former Gasworks site about the toxic fumes — benzene and naphthalene — that had been making their families ill for years.
The meeting was filmed. It runs to ninety minutes.
Local Democracy
Commentary
Children's Centres
Ealing Labour
Ethics
Updates
It Takes Two to Tango
The campaign to save ten of Ealing’s children’s centres was lost in the High Court in April.
The approved judgment in R (JO) v London Borough of Ealing is on the record. The claim was dismissed. Ealing Council won.
But the judgment is worth reading carefully — because what Mr Justice Kimblin did not find is as instructive as what he did.
A reader picked me up on Facebook for writing in The Smell of Success that:
“Mason’s council took a toddler to the high court.” …
Investigations
Community
Commentary
Ealing Labour
Health
Ethics
The Drugs Don't Work
This is the story about how Ealing’s incredibly valuable and (very likely) hugely under-resourced drug and alcohol treatment service has been moved about, along with its vulnerable service users, for what appears to be — at least partly — political gain by Ealing Labour.
The scale of the borough’s substance misuse crisis is real.
According to the council’s own 2025 Substance Misuse Service report, Ealing has an estimated 2,103 opiate and crack users and 3,658 alcohol dependent drinkers. …
Local Democracy
Community
Commentary
Ealing Labour
Features
Research
Ethics
Cactuses Never Die
Yousef Qandeel was not born in al-Dawayima. He arrived five years too late for that. But he carries the keys.
Three iron keys on a ring, dark with age and heavy in the hand. They open nothing now — the house they belonged to no longer exists. The village it stood in no longer exists. In its place, since 1955, sits an Israeli settlement.
Where Palestinian families once marked the boundaries of their homes by planting prickly pear cactus — sabr in Arabic, the same word as patience — the land has …
Investigations
Local Democracy
Commentary
Ealing Labour
Exposes
BREAKING NEWS
The Smell of Success
Six days before local elections polling day, Southall Green councillor and Ealing Labour council leader Peter Mason has been named a semi-finalist for SME4Labour’s Labour Councillor of the Year 2026 award.
It seems only right to mark the occasion by celebrating Peter Mason’s achievements as a councillor.
The nomination form had a strict set of criteria to narrow down the list of possible winners from almost 6,000 Labour councillors nationwide. To make it to the last sixteen is an …
Community
Commentary
Ealing Labour
Research
AI
Back to the Future
Great Scott. Ealing Council’s welcome guide for new residents was written in 2010. The DeLorean is still parked on their website. And they haven’t changed a word.
If you moved to Ealing recently, you may have been directed to the council’s Welcome Guide for New Residents.
Well, no, you probably weren’t. Unless you’re Ukrainian.
The welcome for the rest of you is sixteen years out of date.
It’s still live on the Ealing Council website, cheerfully promising …
Investigations
Environment
Commentary
Ealing Labour
BREAKING NEWS
Updates
This Is Our Home. It's a Tip.
Update, 1 May 2026: A reader has correctly pointed out that the Defra 2024-25 fly-tipping statistics cover April 2024 to March 2025 — and therefore predate Ealing Council’s “This Is Our Home, Not a Tip” campaign and Peter Mason’s claimed 55% reduction in fly-tipping across Southall, both of which relate to 2025-26. The Defra figures establish the pre-campaign baseline, not the campaign’s results.
However, the contradiction at the heart of this piece does not depend …
Campaigns
Local Democracy
Community
Commentary
Features
When is a Hustings not a Hustings?
I attended the West London Citizens “Accountability Assembly” at St Anselm’s Church in Southall Green on Tuesday night. I left after an hour, before any of the candidates had answered any of the preset questions.
In that hour, I listened to Peter Mason talk — yet again — about his family upbringing in damp and mouldy temporary accommodation.
[Video courtesy of another audience member.]
Three months that made him a lifelong socialist, committed to ensuring others don’t …
Campaigns
Local Democracy
Community
Commentary
Features
BREAKING NEWS
"This Place Has Turned Into a Bloody Slum": Southall Wards Meeting with ECI candidates
I arrived late to the Ealing Community Independents' Southall Wards Engagement Evening at Parkside Yards — the usual traffic gridlock on The Green and South Road up to the station. Normally I would walk, but I’d walked all the way up to Oswald Road via the canal footpath the previous afternoon and my poor feet and body were telling me no. After a beautifully warm and sunny spring day, the heavens looked like they might open soon, too. As it turned out, I needn’t have worried.
I …
Campaigns
Local Democracy
Community
Commentary
Ealing Labour
Exposes
When "deport six million" becomes mainstream: what Ealing Labour won't tell you
Two weeks ago, and again today, Ealing Labour attacked Grace Hunter, a Conservative candidate for Pitshanger ward, after a TikTok clip surfaced in which she said:
“The solution to our housing problem isn’t building six million more houses… it’s deporting six million people.”
This is fascist propaganda reminiscent of the policies of the National Front in the 1970s and 1980s — and of our own present-day far right, which is leading the polls and looks set to reshape the …
Campaigns
Local Democracy
Commentary
Ealing Labour
Exposes
First They Came for the Socialists
This is a story about what happens when you speak out against Peter Mason — on opposing the closure of children’s centres, on backing a Gaza debate, on attending a public meeting with the wrong person in the audience. It is also a story about a pattern that began long before any of that.
This pattern did not begin with Padda, Crawford or Martin. In April 2021, as Mason stood for the Labour group leadership, more than fifty Ealing Labour members and activists signed an open letter to …
Local Democracy
Community
Commentary
Ealing Labour
Exposes
Canvassing with Minni Dogra: A Councillor in All But Name
Last week I spent a lunch hour with my friend and former Ealing Independent Network “running mate” Minni Dogra, as she canvassed a street near me in her effort to win enough votes to be elected as a councillor in Ealing Labour council leader Peter Mason’s own Southall Green ward.
In 2022, I did the same canvassing and amassed a whole 223 votes — 2,633 fewer than Peter Mason. It is a mammoth task. But four years ago, Mason lost the largest share of votes of any Labour …
Local Democracy
Commentary
Ealing Labour
Housing
"You Never Forget the Smell of Damp": Peter Mason's Housing Record in His Own Words
Peter Mason has spoken often and publicly about his childhood. Growing up in a pre-fabricated concrete panel council house. The smell of damp. Picking mould from window caulking. His family spending three months in temporary accommodation.
These are not details dragged out of private correspondence — they are things he chose to put on the public record, repeatedly, over several years, as the basis for his claim to understand what bad housing does to people.
They are also, now, the most direct …
Investigations
Local Democracy
Environment
Commentary
Research
On the Bins Again
This is a follow-up to Bangarang! Pirate Pete and the Lost Bin Collections of Southall and Boomerang! Ten Years Sorting Out Fly-Tipping, which documented how fly-tipping in Ealing doubled the year weekly black bag collections were scrapped in 2016 — and remained at that high level ever since.
After those two articles, a commenter on a separate Facebook post promoting the launch of the “What Happened to Southall?” report questioned the focus on bin collections, among other things.
MW …
Investigations
Environment
Community
Commentary
Ealing Labour
Research
Boomerang! Ten Years Sorting Out Fly-tipping
Two weeks ago, I reported on the results of my research into the fly-tipping epidemic that has hit Ealing, and Southall in particular.
In short, fly-tipping across the borough literally doubled from July 2016, immediately after Ealing Council reduced household waste collections from weekly to fortnightly.
It’s remained at that high level ever since, and residents report that it’s getting even worse in recent years.
The nature of these sudden and sustained increases strongly indicate …
Commentary
AI
Ealing's Burning
It’s getting heavy around here, so time for some light relief.
Ealing likes to call itself “the Home of Loud.”
It is a reference to Jim Marshall, valve amps, and the glorious feedback of British rock music history.
But after reading a few years’ worth of Leader’s Notes, another title suggests itself:
The Home of the Same Song.
Because every week, the column strikes the same chord:
Fighting inequality. Tackling the climate crisis. Creating good jobs.
Sometimes the intro changes.
One week: …
Investigations
Local Democracy
Commentary
Ealing Labour
Exposes
The Broken Manifesto Promises that show how Labour is Failing Ealing
You’ve got to hand it to Peter Mason.
Every four years he manages to regenerate, reinvent and transform himself and Ealing Labour into a new and improved version of reality.
He has a creative imagination. His ambition is unbridled. He is resilient and resourceful. Nothing, it seems, can stop him recycling ever more of the same old rubbish manifesto promises while simultaneously presenting them to the public as successful achievements we should want more of.
Of course, it would be unfair to …
Investigations
Local Democracy
Commentary
Ealing Labour
Research
Housing
Section 106 money: where did Southall’s “developer tax” go?
With council elections less than three months away, Ealing Council is busy using “Ealing Council’s magazine for residents” to promote news of Ealing Labour’s local “achievements” in an effort to persuade voters that, despite national Labour’s dismal regurgitation of failed and cruel Tory government austerity policies and shameless political scandals going right to the heart of the UK establishment, Peter Mason’s Ealing Labour are still “on your …
Environment
Community
Commentary
Ealing Labour
Research
Exposes
Bangarang! Pirate Pete and the Lost Bin Collections of Southall
This is the shocking story of how for sixteen years Ealing Labour councillors talked rubbish about having to make “difficult choices” to cut services to save money, ignoring thousands of residents' protests, and in doing so created a massive mess that a decade later still costs millions to clean up every year and leaves children’s and disabled people’s lives unnecessarily poorer.
It’s a story about an ambitious New Labour leader - politically aligned with Tony Blair …
Local Democracy
Environment
Community
Commentary
Health
Pollution
How to Report Nuisance and Pollution in Ealing
Reporting a Nuisance in Ealing
A short epic of civic persistence (and becoming the problem)
Please complete this form.
Invocation
Sing, website, sing.
Of forms and thresholds, boxes small,
of windows that open into darkness,
of daytime hotlines that take you to voicemail
by those who never lived the night.
Sing of a citizen with sleep in debt,
who brings a sound, a smell, a (non-epileptic) tremor
to the gates of order —
and finds, beyond the gate,
only more order.
I. The Omen
It starts with …
Investigations
Local Democracy
Environment
Community
Commentary
Pollution
Exposes
The Council Investigation That Found Nothing
They Did Check It Out. That’s What Makes It Worse.
A response to “Why didn’t the council investigate?"
Following publication of my article on the Johnson Street fire, a reader asked: “Why did no one from the council check it out?”
The answer is more disturbing than regulatory neglect.
They did check it out.
They conducted almost a year-long investigation.
They made site visits. They reviewed evidence.
And then they claimed to find nothing.
This isn’t a …
Local Democracy
Commentary
Ealing Labour
Features
Housing
Demolition Man: Peter Mason's Legacy of Half-Built Homes and Hollow Promises
This is the story about how a council leader failed to deliver the new homes he promised to build, and how he wasted hundreds of millions of pounds of taxpayers money in doing so.
It’s also about how he ended up demolishing half-built homes and with them the hopes of homeless families on the housing waiting list.
Building Bingo
Five years ago I began documenting Ealing Labour council chief Peter Mason’s construction counting conjuring tricks and bungled building bingo under …
Investigations
Local Democracy
Commentary
Ealing Labour
Berkeley Group
Features
Corruption
Exposes
Ealing For Sale
Peter Mason’s foreword to Ealing Council’s 2023-2027 Land and Property Strategy [pdf] promises to “retain assets for maximum resident benefit.” It’s a reassuring commitment from the council leader who styles himself as protector of public services.
But scroll through Mason’s 26 page document, and you’ll find the reality: 760+ community assets across Ealing marked for “strategic review” - the euphemism that precedes disposal. The strategy …
Campaigns
Commentary
Podcast
Children's Centres
AI
Save Ealing Children’s Centres Campaign Update
Save Ealing Children’s Centres campaign raised over £5,000 in just eight days to begin legal action against Ealing Council to prevent closure of ten and of the borough’s twenty-five children’s centres.
An audio summary of my satirical take on what it’s all about.
In English:
In Punjabi:
Local Democracy
Commentary
Children's Centres
Personal
Corruption
The Pied Piper of Ealing
A couple of weeks ago, big kid sang at the Royal Albert Hall in “Ealing Together: Harmony in Diversity,” performing lyrics by Jewish socialist and renowned children’s author Michael Rosen in a new song “Ada in Ealing”, a celebration of a former Ealing resident, and the world’s first computer programmer and a pioneer of mathematical logic, Ada Lovelace.
Tonight he performed in his school’s musical version of The Pied Piper of Hamelin, a story about …
Local Democracy
Commentary
Podcast
Children's Centres
Corruption
AI
So it Goes: AI on the Absurd Logic of Ealing Council
🎧 I fed my satirical piece about Ealing’s democratic innovations into Google’s NotebookLM.
Two AI hosts discovered how perfectly logical it is to close children’s centres while voting yourself a 70% pay rise. They marveled at the mathematical elegance of spending £1 million on councillor allowances to save £750,000 on community services. They found it remarkable that one person could tweet about “putting people before buildings” and then close the very buildings …
Campaigns
Local Democracy
Commentary
Children's Centres
Ealing Labour
Features
Corruption
Exposes
Perceval House W5: Where Local Democracy in Ealing Goes to Die
The Children’s Centres Crusade
Chapter 1: The Art of Political Contradiction
In the London Borough of Ealing, our elected representatives have perfected something remarkable: the ability to hold completely contradictory public positions without experiencing any apparent cognitive dissonance.
Take our Council Leader. On January 15, 2015, he tweeted: “Think its really important that we put people before buildings. Important we keep activities going & that can be done in a …
Local Democracy
Environment
Community
Commentary
Gasworks
Features
Personal
Pollution
Southall Odours
I step out of my house and immediately notice the artificial “cotton fresh” scent of odour suppressants wafting south from the old Gasworks site. How can this be? They finished remediating the contaminated earth in 2019, and people have been living there in the new homes they built since 2021.
Still, it’s better than the smell of petrol, which is what we had to put up with day and night for months on end in 2018. Bad enough to wake us up in the night during the long hot summer. …
Environment
Commentary
Gasworks
Research
Health
Personal
Pollution
COPD
Last week I received confirmation of a diagnosis of chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) based on results of spirometry tests back in August (it took that long for my GP surgery to get the results from the test centre, and only after my own intervention after their repeated failures).
My GP helpfully seemed very keen to blame my twenty-odd year history of smoking.
I first smoked at about age 20. My parents were smokers (wasn’t everyone back then?). I was never a heavy smoker. The …
Local Democracy
Community
Commentary
Ealing Labour
Features
The Cuckoo's Nest
Ealing Genocide Supporters Club (aka Ealing Labour Party) held their Southall Branch meeting yesterday at the Dominion Centre in Southall. Under the guise of a “Your Town, Your Voice” community get together, our local elected repellents gathered on masse in all their finery. I couldn’t help myself as they posed for a group photo all gurning inanely as the photographer encouraged them to “say cheese!”. “Say genocide!” I offered. “Genocide …
Environment
Community
Commentary
Features
Housing
Health
Developers, if you Really Want to Help
This was survey feedback given to developers proposing to build a massive data centre on the site of the industrial estate down the road from me, but it applies more broadly to all big developers, especially those with annual profits of half a billion pounds.
I’m concerned about noise from the site causing a nuisance and health problems in an area that is already susceptible to multiple environmental health stressors, and exacerbated by deep-rooted poverty, deprivation, low pay and …
Local Democracy
Commentary
Ealing Labour
Features
Personal
Corruption
ToryBoy
ToryBoy The Movie is the account of filmmaker John Walsh’s disillusionment with what he saw as the corruption, lies, hypocrisy and general incompetence of Blair’s Labour government, and his conversion to the Conservative (Tory) Party general election candidate for Middlesbrough in 2010.
Under his own steam and £15,000 of his own money, John found his opponent, Sir Stuart Bell, the serial incumbent Labour MP, invisible and unknown to his local constituents who nevertheless voted him …
Environment
Commentary
Gasworks
Ealing Labour
Health
Ethics
AI
Risks to Health from Remediating Southall Gasworks
AI is more ethical than Ealing Labour Party. No money was exchanged.
What are the risks to health from remediating Southall Gasworks on site in the open air? The land is highly contaminated with benzene, naphthalene and a while host of other VOCs, PAHs, heavy metals, “blue billy” and asbestos, and surrounded by residential streets. The local community is mostly of south Asian and African heritage, and it is known that people with this heritage can be genetically vulnerable to …
Local Democracy
Environment
Community
Commentary
Gasworks
Ealing Labour
Health
Ethics
AI
I am the Leader of Ealing Council
I asked Google Bard to advise me on a local matter.
I am the leader of Ealing Council. I have received more than 250 reports about a BAD odour nuisance and air pollution from the remediation of the highly contaminated Southall Gasworks land. We had a public meeting where 250 angry residents complained about health problems as a result of the air pollution, including eye, nose and throat irritation, respiratory problems and infections, and even cancer and death of loved ones. The developer has …
Investigations
Local Democracy
Environment
Commentary
Features
Health
Pollution
Response to Ealing's Air Quality Strategy and Action Plan
Ealing Council’s draft Air Quality Strategy is a 64 page document together with a 40 page Action Plan, and the consultation period runs until 30 January 2023. It’s taken me the best part of six weeks, all my spare time over Christmas and New Year, to get through it all, make notes and cross-reference to try to make sense of it all and offer some feedback.
Really, there must be a much longer consultation period if Ealing Council is genuinely interested in residents' views.
The …
Investigations
Local Democracy
Commentary
Ealing Labour
Features
Housing
Corruption
The Property Lobby: the Hidden Reality behind the Housing Crisis in Ealing
There will be 14,800 new homes in 23 new developments in Southall over the next few years. 14 units over 10 stories high, and 7 over 20 stories high. Up to 40,000 new residents (and their cars)!
One third of the total new developments in the whole of Ealing borough (only Acton is getting it worse).
So not happening so much in the ‘white’ or richer areas of the borough, for some reason.
None of these homes will be genuinely affordable to most people currently living in overcrowded …
Campaigns
Local Democracy
Environment
Commentary
Gasworks
Ealing Labour
Berkeley Group
Health
Corruption
Pollution
Weasel Words on Air Quality Monitoring
Weasel words from Ealing Labour Council, who for six years have shown utter contempt for the health and wellbeing of Southall’s schoolchildren forced to live in the toxic stink created by Berkeley Group’s unsafe development of the old Gasworks site. 1/11
aroundealing.com/news/240000-in…
Take Blair Peach Primary School, adjacent to the highly contaminated old Gasworks site in Southall.
In 2016, Ealing Labour Council removed a functioning air quality monitor from the school grounds. …
Investigations
Local Democracy
Commentary
Ealing Labour
Berkeley Group
Features
Corruption
Ealing Monopoly
Who wants to know more about how, twelve years ago, an exclusive group of rich, mostly white, middle aged men in suits planned to take advantage of the financial crash and austerity politics to sell Ealing's public land and buildings for profit like they were playing monopoly? 



A few familiar and influential names including, of course, the late Tony Pidgley of Berkeley Group and Southall Gasworks infamy.
A five year plan to sell off our public assets for £20m profit.
Not a single one …
Local Democracy
Commentary
Ealing Labour
Features
Corruption
Exposes
Ealing Labour Leaks
Is anyone interested in seeing a selection of leaked WhatsApp group messages from some Ealing Labour councillors?
An inside look at what they really think about Bell, Mason, Sharma?
The institutional bullying and corruption they kept quiet for years?
#EalingLabourLeaks
A couple things before I get started.
My source has obviously said that it's ok to publish these.
I've edited the screenshots to remove some names. I don't want to embarrass people unnecessarily, or make them feel …
Local Democracy
Environment
Community
Commentary
Ealing Labour
Housing
Health
Corruption
Pollution
From the Southall Big Plan AGM in 2017
Some perennial problems that our elected representatives seem to be unable - or unwilling - to do anything about.
Some things never change! 
Priority from nine years ago - clean streets! 
40% 'affordable homes' then. 30% 'genuinely affordable homes 'now.
Toilets?! 
'We care about Southall', they say.
That must be why they handed it over to the developers, and turned into a concrete jungle. 
Encouraging people to take more exercise by …
Investigations
Local Democracy
Commentary
Ealing Labour
Housing
Look at these Bricks!
Imported from the original Twitter thread (via Thread Reader App), where you will find a better and complete viewing experience.
Is 2500:
A) The year the new cinema in Ealing will finally be opened to the public?
B) The price of a return flight to Nice airport and five nights in Cannes?
C) The number of genuinely affordable homes to be built by Ealing Council in the four years 2018-22?
898: October 2019: (ealing.gov.uk/news/article/1…)
1355: May 2020: ( …
Campaigns
Environment
Commentary
Gasworks
Ealing Labour
Berkeley Group
Health
Personal
Corruption
Pollution
Exposes
Strawberries for Pigs?
Little did we know at the time, but these little strawberries were usually engulfed in a toxic plume of benzene, naphthalene, and god only knows what else.

Sensibly, the wife refused to eat them.
We later discovered that official planning documents for the nearby old gasworks, which was being dug up in the open air for new homes to be built on the contaminated land, stated that no vegetables should be grown on the land. Ever!
Ealing Council Leader Julian Bell publicly blamed 'the wrong kind of …
Environment
Community
Commentary
Gasworks
Health
Personal
Pollution
High Traffic Neighbourhood
Took me an hour (as opposed to 10 minutes) to drive my lad home from school this afternoon, thanks in part to the High Traffic Neighbourhood (‘Improving access for HGVs’) in Southall ‘Green’.
Like a rat, I tried the side streets and back roads option and found those to be jammed, too, and Scotts Road - although confusingly still two-way throughout - is now No Entry from the eastern end.
I would have abandoned my car and got out and walked/scooted home, but there was …
Environment
Community
Commentary
Gasworks
Berkeley Group
Health
Personal
Ethics
Pollution
The Gaslighting Zone
@Southall_Wside @theCALMzone @bonappetit #StopPoisoningSouthall @SouthallGaswork
You guys are really taking the piss now, aren't you?
@Southall_Wside @theCALMzone @bonappetit @SouthallGaswork .@PHE_London report on the health impact of @Southall_Wside @SouthallGaswork: 
@Southall_Wside @theCALMzone @bonappetit @SouthallGaswork @PHE_London Residents' own survey conducted a year ago:
Not sure how @theCALMzone think that #BerkeleyHomes and @Southall_Wside are in any way an …
Environment
Community
Commentary
Podcast
Gasworks
Ealing Labour
Berkeley Group
Health
Exposes
Pull the Other One, Julian
Conspiracy theory?
Our Great Leader, Julian ‘Two Jobs, Two Homes’ Bell, claimed on Desi Radio this morning that, “unfortunately”, none of the air quality monitoring data provided to him by Berkeley Group, the developers of the old gasworks site, provides any evidence of levels of chemicals harmful to health.
Well, would you believe it?
Bribery and corruption
The same developers who paid their former finance director £9.5m to keep quiet about years of Tony Pidgley, …
Environment
Commentary
Gasworks
Berkeley Group
Health
Pollution
Exposes
Lies, Damned Lies, and Statistics?
From my original Facebook note.
Berkeley Group founder and chair Tony Pidgley promised to share their onsite air quality monitoring data with us almost two months ago. We’re still waiting.
Today,I finally received a response to my email of 29 September, in which I asked Tony to confirmm what his trusty sidekick Karl Whiteman told us when we met with the both, that benzene levels were ‘averaging 3.25 parts per million (ppm) [sic], and never exceeding 5ppm.’
‘Dear David,
I …
Environment
Community
Commentary
Gasworks
Berkeley Group
Health
Pollution
Exposes
Countering the Southall Waterside Narrative
From my original Facebook note.
1.Look how great we are!
Berkeley will tell you about all the good work they do in the Southall community:
·Giving a tiny fraction of their £600m profits to the local homeless shelter
·Creating the ‘edible’ garden (and ad hoc public toilet) outside the college on Beaconsfield Road
·Partnering with the Let’s Go Southall project to get Southallians fit, healthy and active!
·Making the (acid) Rain Garden at Blair Peach Primary School for children to …
Commentary
Gasworks
Berkeley Group
Health
Pollution
Meeting Berkeley Group
Last Wednesday, I and two other #Southall residents met with @berkeleygroupuk's @damian_leydon, @rickwatler and @SangheraJags, and their PR company representative and note taker @chattycoley of @LocalDialogue, at their #SouthallWaterside HQ.
I have to say, I was mightily impressed by their palatial portacabin HQ. The reception area was bigger than my living room, and despite the lack of natural light and windows, the air conditioning was a great relief from the high 20s temperatures …




