DEFENDING the East End of London against Big Biz takeover aided and abetted by local Council's stooged "planning" "structures" and made worse by irrational, ignorant, irresponsible "local newspaper journalism" - UPDATER Tuesday 16 July 2013

DEFENDING the East End of London against Big Biz takeover aided and abetted by local Council's stooged "planning" "structures" and made worse by irrational, ignorant, irresponsible "local newspaper journalism" - UPDATER Tuesday 16 July 2013 © MUHAMMAD HAQUE Comment online in response to the following item on the East London Advertiser web site: http://www.eastlondonadvertiser.co.uk/news/new_report_says_londoners_are_migrating_east_to_stratford_bow_and_stepney_green_1_2281180 Your [www.eastlondonadvertiser.co.uk] online piece, dated today 16 July 2013, is a shorter copy word for word of the promoters’ own piece on the web published on 26 June 2013. I cite their web page here: “http://www.cebr.com/reports/ea... One of the astonishing things that they had said and which you repeat is this: “Other factors enhancing the desirability of E20 include the close proximity of the Westfield Stratford retail centre, as well as growing employment prospects in the wider Stratford area and the prospect of 15,000 jobs at the new International Quarter, adjacent to East Village, which is set to begin construction in 2013-14.” Both they and you are promoting irrationality in the context of the dire dearth of jobs and income security for local people in “Stepney Green” and in “E20”. Anyone actually walking down the Stratford High Street can see that it is a people-free zone, in the sense that ordinary people avoid the place because there is nothing going on there. So when you say that “construction” is set to begin in 2013-14 at the “New International Quarter” are you saying that people are MOVING in there ahead of that because the “construction” really is nothing like ordinary construction but more like a gold mine being opened up in the formerly derelict site that is now OTT-plugged as “east Village” and “E20”? If so, where did they get the money to afford this? And overall, where are the “east London” people going to? or [being] driven to? Any student of basic economics will know that demand is a function of capacity. Here that capacity is either ready cash or its de facto equivalent. Whichever it is, the “new movers and shakers” of your gold-mining imagery cannot be among Iain Duncan Smith’s targets for this week’s caps: the hundreds of thousands in London who face drastic further reduction in their lives’ standards and their access to income that they purely need. They may very well include some of the fancy foreign billionaires that are also in today’s [Tuesday 16 July 2013] news. You are betraying your basic duty to tell the ordinary people in the East London boroughs of Tower Hamlets, Newham and Hackney that they are being pushed out by this sort of “migration”. You should also apologise for having used [that term and concept of migration], as the title the “East London Advertiser” over the past 70 years to denote something negative. Here, for a rare occasion, you sue that term positively. Although once again, you get the context totally wrong. I had invited your newsroom to attend a Future of the Community in the East End of London which I had organised and conducted on Saturday 6 July 2013. You have not reported this hereby showing where your affiliation lies. I have sent the Tower Hamlets Council the key demands that arose from the Seminar. Lutfur Rahman is yet to reply to the demand. The key finding at the Acton Seminar was that ordinary East enders are being economically displaced and deported from their homes and their communities and from their home estates and neighbourhoods. This is starkly happening along the west of Tower Hamlets extending to Hackney. Huge demographic engineering and social, economic, cultural and communal displacement are afoot. And your glowing plug for the ones with the cash proves that they and you do not care about the huge impact and massive negative implications for individuals lives, families and for the whole of the East End of London. I notice that neither the original promoters [CEBR] on which you your piece is based nor you use the expression “East End of London”, preferring instead to use the materialistic “East” of London, devoid of all associations with communities, home, culture, history, tradition! You ape the “Cebr Fundamentals Index of key London postcodes” approach and thereby help to demolish what the East End of London represents to people who belong here within their neighbourhood estates and the wider East End Communities! It is quite possible that some of those East Enders may wake up to what you have been engaged in peddling for quite a while now. On the very date 26 June 2013, when CEBR published their piece I refer to above, I was addressing, in a very short formal Pubic Question, the Tower Hamlets Council about the serious absence of accountability to the community by the “social landlords” who had been handed huge Council hosing stock by Tower Hamlets Council 10 years earlier. As I was on my feet, John Wright, a housing and community rights activist from Shadwell began to fi,m the Council proceedings, telling me minutes later that he had been prompted to start the filming by my SUBJECT. John added, as you can see in the youtube post I published, accessible via the youtube link below, that Tower Hamlets Council had failed to protect the estates that they had handed over to the “social landlords”, in other words the housing associations. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v... He said that he had already spent 8 years fighting for the Council to uphold the promises that the Council had made at the time of the transfer of the housing stock! A week earlier, I filmed local historian and campaigner Tom Ridge telling me that the East End of London was already surrounded by the takeover operations. He highlighted the zone along the West of the Borough and including Aldgate, Aldgate east, Commercial Street, leman Street and the Games complexes in Stratford on the East and canary Wharf in the South of Tower Hamlets. You can view my report with Tom Ridge’s observations in the vie on youtube cited below: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v... Time for you to let these facts get included in your reporting. 2132 Hrs GMT London Tuesday 16 July 2013