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

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

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)

Green Party Leaflet for Kensal Green in Wake of UKBA Raid

On 31 July, a day after the raid tactics of UKBA officers at Kensal Green station, Martin Francis and Shahrar Ali of Brent Green Party were out in force in the early morning rush hour. We distributed several hundred public information leaflets, straight into the hands of the Kensal commuters. Many had witnessed the "threatening" and "intimidating" actions of the officers the day before and were gratified to find us both remonstrating about it and providing them with a mini briefing on their rights when stopped by the UKBA under such circumstances. A mobile coffee shop vendor confirmed how sustained the officers' exercise had been the morning before. An employee of the station also expressed her alarm at the suddenness of it all, "without forewarning even them". Our leaflet is available to view below or download here. More news here.

Green Party condemn plans to sell of Royal Mail

11 July 2013

Responding to the announcement yesterday by Liberal Democrat Business Secretary Vince Cable that a majority stake in the Royal Mail would be sold off by the government, Green Party leader Natalie Bennett said:

"The privatisation of Royal Mail is the latest ideologically driven, disastrous step by this government which is doing nothing to start the essential reshaping of the British economy, but is determined to hand over the last bits of the family silver to multinational companies.

"The approach of privatisation has proved disastrous for our water system, disastrous for our electricity and gas supplies, and particularly disastrous for our railways. Yet still the push towards it, from Margaret Thatcher through Tony Blair to David Cameron continues.”

Bennett added: "Green MP Caroline Lucas, with her private members' bill to bring the railways back into public ownership is leading the way to reverse this trend. What we need is for the Labour Party to show that it has broken with its New Labour past and back it. That would add a sense of verisimilitude to Labour’s criticisms in parliament today of the Royal Mail move."

Bennett offered congratulations to the CWU and the Royal Mail workers, who are resisting the government's attempts to buy them off with a share handout to staff.

"They understand that privatisation is a devil's pact that inevitably results in damage to staff pay and conditions, cuts to services, and profits stuffed into shareholder's pockets, all too often through the conduit of tax havens.”

acknowledgements to

http://greenparty.org.uk/news/2013/07/11/green-party-condemn-plans-to-sell-of-royal-mail/ & http://www.wembleymatters.blogspot.co.uk/2013/07/green-party-condemns-royal-mail-sell-off.html