NEWS AND VIEWS FROM THE GREEN PARTY IN THE LONDON BOROUGH OF BRENT

24 Aug 2013

Lament for a library: WILLESDEN 20/8/2013

Got off the bus
Bad dust all around
And a tearing, cracking, crunching noise,
The sound of library being destroyed.
A pack of mechanical dinosaurs
Relentlessly rip it up
With their great iron jaws
And drill it down to dust
Like gigantic metal demented dentists
Until only rubble remains
Where learning was done
It’s been flattened and smashed
Down to a desolate plain
And so it can been be built on again
Which might apparently seem insane
If profits didn’t seep out
At every stage
To the demolition firm,
And the architects
Whose coffers will swell
To the builders of the new build
And the estate agents as well
Everyone will benefit the Council assures
And soon we won’t remember
What we liked the old library for
But extinction is forever
Rivers never run back
And sheep  always bleat
And predators eat

11 Aug 2013

Brent Times Letter of the Week: We must stand United against this affront to Civil Society

"We Must stand United against this Affront to Civil Society", Brent Times series, 8 Aug 2013. Image.

Text:
The Green Party shares the dismay of community and borough leaders and residents at the tactics deployed by UK Borders Agency teams in Kensal Green and Cricklewood. Home Office Minister Mark Harper subsequently sought to justify the tactics as both "intelligence-led" and based on "reasonable suspicion".

However, if the stopping and checking of individual commuters was based on specific intelligence then the arrest rate should have been far greater than it was. If instead people were being stopped randomly, saying there was reason to suspect them without convincingly explaining why does not make it so.

To the contrary, eye-witnesses consistently reported that individuals were stopped not randomly, but disproportionately on grounds of race. If true, then the exercise, far from being intelligence-led, enacted something far more sinister - an attempt to target people who looked foreign and to seek to justify this as both necessary and proportionate to the ends.

Since when did membership of a racial group itself constitute grounds for suspicion? The Home Office failure to recognise the inherent racism of its tactics is compounded only by their attempt to justify it.

The happenings of the last few days would have been alarming enough taken on their own. In the context of state-sponsored racist van slogans and anti-immigration rhetoric, they are a positive incitement to racial tension.

The people of Brent and beyond must stand united against this latest affront to civil society.

Shahrar Ali Spokesperson for Brent Green Party

1 Aug 2013

BIG show, small works! 6 - 27 August Willesden

P.Murry artworks in this show
BIG show, small works! PRIVATE VIEW  Tuesday 6 August 6-9PM 

BAR Gallery, Unit 5, Queens Parade, London, NW2 5HT (near Willesden Green tube)