Total: 19 posts
Posts in: Features
A selection of my featured articles.
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
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
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 …
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 …
Investigations
Local Democracy
Community
Features
Research
Exposes
What Happened to Southall?
A substantial new report on Ealing Council’s record in Southall landed this week, and it deserves your attention.
What Happened to Southall? is published by Community Powered Reporting, a volunteer resident-led research group, and it covers waste, housing, asset disposal, health, democratic accountability and pension fund investments — with extensive sourcing from council documents, FOI responses, and public data.
I haven’t read every page yet, but what I have read is rigorous, …
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
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. …
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 …
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 …
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
Gasworks
Ealing Labour
Berkeley Group
Features
Health
Personal
Corruption
Trigger Vote for Sharma
In July 2019, I attended a public meeting with Public Health England to discuss air pollution problems created by the development of the old gasworks site.
At this meeting, I asked Public Health England if it is true that people with Asian and African heritage are genetically more at risk from poisoning from naphthalene – one of the main causes of the stink coming from the gasworks site.
Do you know what they said?
Yes.
Yes, Asian and African people are genetically more at risk from poisoning …
Campaigns
Local Democracy
Environment
Gasworks
Ealing Labour
Berkeley Group
Features
Health
Personal
Corruption
Pollution
Exposes
Southall under Siege: the Neighbours from Hell
‘A lack of scrutiny,’ says John Freeman, Regulatory Services Officer at Ealing Council.
He’s talking about lessons to be learned from the council’s response to the new asphalt plant built in neighbouring Hillingdon borough in 2014.
‘We didn’t expect there to be so much odour from a new building, or so many complaints.’
Moving swiftly on.
Oppressive odour
The highly contaminated old gasworks site in Southall has been kicking up a stink, too.
Carcinogenic benzene and naphthalene, among a cocktail …