Notes From A Disgruntled Anarchist
Okay, so David Beckham’s proud that the Olympics
are going to be held in East London. He says that it will change
the lives of thousands of people in the area where he grew up.
No doubt of that, even if Leytonstone isn’t exactly in earshot
of Bow Bells. Nonetheless, just look at the compulsory purchases
of small businesses, the closure of arts and community centres,
the loss of long-established public spaces, and the rocketing house
prices and racketeering rentals. Things are already on the move,
and what about the East Londoner, the Mayor of London’s tabloid
style propaganda newssheet, the one with Beck’s mugshot on
the front cover? No wonder he’s smiling, his life has changed
already, and what’s more, I’ll bet that out there at
Bling Mansions he and Posh won’t be too affected by the development
nightmares and the inevitable social fatigues that await us all
beneath this jingoistic Olympic claptrap. In a touching personal
letter to ‘the occupier’ (that’s me) which was
accompanied by a copy of the East Londoner, our ever-solicitous
Lord Mayor, Uncle Ken, informs me that new transport improvements
together with the Olympics will radically transform my local area,
bringing more jobs, better housing and rising prosperity. What he
omits to tell me is for whom. Seems to me that he and Dave might
have been sharing the same bed together.
Now, how is it that whenever we, the general public, are about
to be shat on from a great height, we are sold the bogwash of more
jobs and greater prosperity? What jobs and what prosperity? Brickies,
plumbers and building labourers who for minimum wages and for not
a moment longer than they’re needed will slave away on the
construction of the Olympic Edifice before returning to Eastern
Europe? Or service workers who for less than minimum wages will
dish out the burgers and popcorn to the Olympic hungry before being
sacked for making union enquiries, or before returning to university
to finish their degree course in advanced physics? The jobs will
be short-term, low-waged and will profit no one but the same coterie
of corporate moguls, lawyers and financiers who currently are reaping
the harvest of Iraq’s ‘reconstruction’. Remember
Basra? That was once the Garden of Eden. Remember The Dome? That
was, and still is, a bad joke. It’s basically the same story
wherever it happens; ignore established communities, eradicate local
cultures, give McDonalds and Coca Cola the franchise and run (and
guess who’s sponsoring the Olympics?). Meanwhile, what little
of local interest is left intact crumbles beneath the weight of
social despondency. Remember Docklands, Heseltine’s gift to
the nation? Against all the odds, the rich eventually moved in,
built their walls and waited for the poor to relocate to deprived
areas, preferably as far away as possible. And now that they’ve
established their wealthy ghetto, what happens? They find they need
a workforce to fulfil their Olympian fantasies.
Enter the Thames Gateway Bridge. The East Londoner informs us that
‘leading economists’ (who or whatever they are) have
warned that there is an ‘urgent need of a new bridge’
for without it ‘many of the area’s most deprived areas
could fail to reap the benefits all these improvements will bring’.
They then curtly pronounce that it is ‘vital for east London’,
which, of course, they consider to be one of those deprived areas.
But why? Because, having forced the poor to relocate to other deprived
areas, the wealthy fear that there won’t be sufficient local
cheap labour to ensure the transformation of east London from deprived
area to Olympic City.  So
ship them back across the river (day-returns compulsory). Remember
the Berlin Wall? Ironically, that’s how our ‘leading
economists’ describe the Thames: a physical barrier between
wealth and poverty. But remember German reunification? Cheap labour
shipped in from the east, growing prosperity for the corporate multi-nationals
in the west: workers are consumers are workers. The perfect circle.
It wasn’t dissident communists who pulled down the Wall, it
was capitalist interests in the west. Some gateway.
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