Back to comment on my increasingly grotty home town as promised.  The local paper has reported that 50 roads are being closed on July 8th for five hours (probably longer in practice) to allow the Tour de France to pass through the town.  Residents will not be able to move in or out by car.  We will be trapped.  This is not house arrest but local community arrest.  One wonders what the Human Rights Act might have to say on the matter.  This is the sort of action that you might generally employ only in a case of natural disaster or terrorist incident - but perhaps these big commercially sponsored events have become, for local people, forms of terror perpetrated on the people.   It gets worse - the Tunbridge Wells Courier also reported that the Tour de France will see the largest mobilisation of Kent Police in its 150-year history.  The question has to be asked whether the fact that the local police station was closed when my wife's bag was snatched a few weeks ago had anything to do with the need to store up overtime within an extremely constrained police budget - or is the Tour de France footing the bill completely?  One hopes so.  Perhaps it is just coincidence.  The newspaper seems to have nothing to say on this.  Our supine print media generally seems increasingly incapable of asking the right questions so I have no expectations.  Perhaps new media are going to be required to do the job for them ... I shall think on this further.  I feel a major project coming on.

Tags: tunbridge wells
Current Location: Tunbridge Wells
Current Mood: annoyed

Lobster 53 is now out and contains my quick dissection of State panic at the global security situation [Fifth Column: The Brittle Society].  This has already been well received based on contact from friends who are investigative journalists.  Lobster is a small circulation, twice-yearly but longstanding review of parapolitics.  It is edited by Robin Ramsay, who wrote the small Pocket Essentials Guides to Conspiracy Theory and to the rise of New Labour, but has written much else besides.  Lobster eschews nonsense better suited to the X-Files, and looks openly at how political events, past and future, might be looked at afresh in terms of motivation and personal connection.  It has some investigative scalps to its credit, including the original exposure of the scandals known as the Colin Wallace/'Wilson plots' story.  This may be arcane stuff to today's youngsters but is important in reminding us that the price of liberty is eternal vigilance.  Lobster is £3.00 and can be obtained from Robin at 214 Westbourne Avenue, Hull HU5 3JB - robin@lobster.karoo.co.uk - www.lobster-magazine.co.uk 

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The Compass Conference on Saturday was worthy enough but not enlightening.  The Left said what the Left says to itself.  One gets the sense, still, of a community living in a world of ends and values but with no real will or strategy to effect the means ... meanwhile, conferences like this are good for meeting old friends and keeping in touch.  The best value of the day was a friendly beer between Mark Seddon (Al-Jazeera, formerly Editor of Tribune), Ken Penton (Political Officer of Community), Peter Kenyon (Labour Commission) and myself and, earlier, meeting up with the Chartist crowd - Martin Cook, Duncan Bowie, Trevor Fisher et al - old comrades in the forlorn struggle for sensible democracy within both Party and State.  I feel a sort of long, slow letting go of the past.  The only really bright spark of the day was to see so many bright, lively and 'together' youngsters around the Conference.  Chartist itself, a bi-monthly magazine, is just left-wing decency and commonsense writ large - www.chartist.org.uk  It is the hidden jewel of centre-left political discussion (and that is not just because, once in a blue moon, it takes a grumpy middle-aged article from me).

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A new thread in this Journal is going to have to be my home town Tunbridge Wells.  Oh, where to begin!  A glossy magazine ['Issue One It's Full of Surprises'] has appeared through our door this week with an editorial telling us all how wonderful it is to live in Tunbridge Wells.  Well, it may be so if you live in one of the nice suburban areas or one of the cute little Wealden villages within the Borough and come into town for the shopping, but if you live in the town itself, it is a decaying sink pit of urban degradation, disorder, environmental neglect and noise - pretty well like every other small town centre turned over to retail therapy and without a proper community to sustain it.  We may return to this theme.  The latest wheeze is to get us all excited about the Tour de France coming through the town - a day of may-hem for local residents so that the big retailers can send the extra profits back up to head office and the 'newsagent vote' can stay solid for the local Tories whose hold over the Borough is only one notch down from that of Nazarbeyev in Kazakhstan.  

OK, so I sound churlish, but there is a bigger issue here.  Events derived from real community enterprise are being displaced across the country by increasingly massive sponsored profit-making extravaganzas. This is becoming the reality of private/public partnership - not the employment of private will, enterprise and technique by a strong, intelligent and public spirited government but the delegation of wealth creation to 'circuses'.  I am a strong supporter of the right sort of employment of the private sector in meeting social needs - housing, healthcare add-ons, specialist training and education or whatever will improve the lot of the people.  But handing over our streets and communities to disruptive commercial sports and entertainment events!  What good is that!

Communities are expected, indeed are assumed, because of the Press coverage, to be excited and supportive.  Opponents are made to feel anti-social for 'spoiling other people's fun' by talking these events down.  But this is from the official Tunbridge Wells Borough Council magazine:  "The publicity caravan is expected to arrive ... just before 11.30am ... a large procession of sponsors' vehicles with people throwing goodies and souvenirs into the crowds and generally creating excitement for the spectators."  Would you be surprised to know that this is a Council that has shifted to fortnightly rubbish collection and which claims to be environmentally conscious?  Yet here is a Council officially getting excited about give-away consumer tat being thrown into the crowds artificially to generate excitement.  This is a culture of Roman Circuses without the Bread.

Tags: general news, politics, tunbridge wells
Current Location: London & Tunbridge Wells
Current Mood: cynical