Last Saturday l joined a demo of hundreds of house boaters organised by National Barge Travellers Association ( NBTA London branch ) in front of the Canal & Rivers Trust (CRT) offices in Little Venice.  

Those who live on houseboats along the canals of London, rightly feel the right to live in their boats as their homes, is under threat from CRT measures along the canals and rivers of London. These measures may well threaten in time those who live in houseboats in Little Venice as well along Maida Avenue and Blomfield Rd. 

The houseboat community, is one of the unique features of Little Venice ward. So we went along to show solidarity with house boaters keen to show their boats are homes as well and thats the way it should be seen. So when l spoke l indicated that those living on our waters should have the same rights as those on shore and the freedom to roam as we do also on land. 

So we – Murad Qureshi, Sara Hassan & Rosie Wrighting as Labour candidates – are commitment to defending the house boat community in Little Venice way of life, at the local election of the 5th of May in the City of Westminster Council. 

Blood-stained road sign in Bayswater illustrating what Ukrainian demonstrators outside Russian Embassy (around the corner on the Bayswater Rd) say its contributing to the attacks on their homeland – money laundering in Londongrad!

London is the global hub of money laundering, with 28 percent of it centred in the City of Westminster alone according to Transparency International UK. They found 2,189 companies registered in the UK and their offshore havens were used in 48 Russian money laundering and corruption cases, including bribery and embezzlement and involving over £82 billion. 

Huge amounts of this money are funnelled through Westminster property – nearly £430m by Russians accused of corruption or government links. In neighbourhoods like Bayswater, it’s having an impact on housing: the owners of one in ten homes in Westminster are unknown, making this the topic of discussion amongst local residents rather than right-to-buy as in other parts of London, as it clearly skews the local property market. 

Unsurprisingly l twice raised the issue when l was an Assembly Member at the London Assembly to then Mayor of London, Boris Johnson. 

He and his office were in denial, though he subsequently accepted “…there needs to be proper transparency in the Land Registry and elsewhere.” But now he’s at No 10, he can do something about it by creating a foreign property ownership register in the UK and seizing  the London properties of Putin’s cronies. 

These aren’t new ideas: at the last General Election there was a call for a oligarch levy (officially known as the Offshore Company Property Levy) and John McDonnell MP set out Labour’s plan to take on the Russian oligarchs. It would have introduced a charge on purchases of residential property by offshore trusts located in known tax havens, based on a blacklist of tax havens developed by HMRC. It is similar in principle and application to the 15 per cent levy recently introduced in Toronto on foreign property owners or that Singapore and Hong Kong have maintained for many years. It appears its time has come! 

Only last weekend, the French Interior Ministry seized property and assets of oligarchs in France. They have overridden legal attempts to stop them by invoking emergency powers. Anything is possible, you just need the will.

But in London, sanctions on Putin’s cronies were held up by their London law firms challenging such a move. Paris acted, and we used emergency powers during Covid to push through a lot more than this, so clearly the Conservatives lack the will to act- although what they lack in will, they make up for in donations, with nearly £120,000 donated by Russian government-linked oligarchs to the City of Westminster’s Conservatives alone.

It’s clear that corruption is on our doorstep. Westminster is a great place to live, but not only does this contribute to misery around the world by sustaining authoritarian regimes, it also has a direct impact here. The investment of enormous sums of dirty money in Westminster’s property market drives up house prices and property rents, taking them out of the reach of most local people.

It should not have taken the Russian invasion of the Ukraine to make money laundering the issue it has become globally. Now national and local politicians must finally deal with its implications in our global city.

This blog has been published in Westminster Extra in their edition for the week beginning the 4th of March 2022.

During my time at the London Assembly, one of the major issues was Heathrow Airport and its environmental impact. While some would emphasis its CO2 emissions and air pollution impact the emission that the vast majority of local residents in the Heathrow villages and Hounslow would emphasis most was air craft noise, that is is noise pollution.  And the residents of Westminster are no different at all, whether in Soho or Mayfair and along major red routes like the Edgware Rd & Maida Vale, its traffic noise coming from motorised vehicles like cars and motorcycles that causes residents the most grief. 

So hearing about the new technology that has been developed in Paris, where it records the noise levels and also the vehicles involved in one instrument, is where l think we need to go in Central London via boroughs like the City of Westminster. 

More so after TfL road safety efforts improvements in the City of Westminster, with 20 miles per hour speed limit now on red routes going through the borough.  As we have many residents who are victims of the road noise like along the Edgware Rd & Maida Vale red route, joint collaboration should be possible between the City of Westminster and TfL to deal with the twin problems of speeding and noise. 

It also helps that traffic noise is a function of speeding. That is the higher the speed, the noisier its gets with the car and motorcycles as well. 

So let us see if there is any change of priorities on 5th of May local elections in the City of Westminster concerning its environmental priorities. l for one will continue to push for its adoption as a priority with the adoption of new technology along with the cameras TfL are already putting on their red routes through the City. 

Well before #partygate, Cressida Dick was being considered the worst Police Commissioner of the metropolis in living memory – and for very good reasons as well.

This is not surprisingly really, as during her tenure, we have had the Met accused of institutionalised corruption by the Independent Report of Daniel Morgan’s murder investigation from the 1980s; misogyny in the handling of the Sarah Everard case; and conducting a homophobic police investigation into the four Barking lads killed before Christmas.

The Report of the 1987 murder of Daniel Morgan accused Dame Cressida Dick of obstructing the work of the inquiry into the Morgan case by denying access to documents which the panel thought vital. It blamed the force for it taking eight years to reach its conclusions. The Commissioner was forced to publicly deny the Report’s central conclusion that the Met was institutionally corrupt.

The Sarah Everard case is as clear a case of misogyny by a policeman as you are ever going to find, but let us not also forget the overreaction by the Met as officers were accused of “grabbing and mishandling” women as hundreds defied warnings to attend the vigil event in Clapham, South London. This sparked a ferocious backlash among women against the “disgraceful” advice issued after Sarah Everard murder.

As for the four boys – Gabriel Kovari, Daniel Whitworth, Jack Taylor and Anthony Walgate – murdered in Barking by Stephen Port after being drugged with GHB and then raped by him, they was a clear pattern which the murder investigation never picked up on till it was far too late. This failing has led to accusations that it was a homophobic police investigation.

All this institutionalised corruption, misogyny and homophobia were revealed in the course of last year alone.

What more can you add to the list? Let’s not forget Cressida Dick’s involvement in the killing of Jean Charles de Menezes, whose family issued a statement saying she could not “command public confidence” as Commissioner of the Metropolitan police. Dick was the gold commander in the control room during the operation which led to the death of de Menezes, wrongly identified as a potential suicide bomber. The 27-year-old Brazilian national was repeatedly shot in the head at Stockwell tube station in South London.

At a 2008 inquest into his killing, Dick said: “If you ask me whether I think anybody did anything wrong or unreasonable on the operation, I don’t think they did.” The inquest jury returned an open verdict, seen as demonstrating its members were unconvinced by the police account of events.

Meanwhile, levels of knife crime in London last year have never been higher. So, truth be told, she should never have been rehired last year for another two years, particularly after what has happened in the past year under her watch.

You can also add what the Independent Office of Police Conduct said about Charing Cross Police station. It is one of the few police stations left in the City of Westminster, after Johnson closed many of them while Mayor of London, where residents can still go to a front desk. So hearing from the Office that the canteen culture from the 1970s and 1980s has not changed at all explains a lot about the policing of our City and in particularly Central London.  

Local press reaction to Charing Cross Police station canteen culture in Westminster

And just recently Yasmin Chkaifi was a victim of domestic violence on the streets of Maida Vale after the Met had failed to arrest her assailant – even when a stalking protection order had been breached and she notified the police that she feared for her life at the very beginning of the New Year. The only decent thing to come out of this episode for the Met is that they eventually released the young man who attempted to run down her assailant with his car when she was being attacked. But the lack of response to the initial cries for assistance will just add to women’s concerns about the Met’s handling of such cases. 

Some have said it all takes us back to the days before the Macpherson Report into the killing of Stephen Lawrence on the streets of South East London. No wonder Harriet Harman MP, Baroness Doreen Lawrence, Diane Abbott MP – and now Stella Creasy MP – have all called on Cressida Dick to resign. Frankly, she should never have been given a two year extension on her contract last year. All that has happened since then has simply increased the number of her critics who feel she should go. 

An extended piece of this blog has been publicised in Labour Hub today. 

Bell Street in Church St Ward is the forgotten street between Edgware Rd and Marylebone station, where we could do with some of the shop fronts being sorted out through the regeneration efforts in Church Street via planning enforcement. 

Recently the reopening of Lisson St ( as a pedestrian walkway ) in the Green spine in Church St has opened up, exposing the empty shop unit at the corner of Bell St. Clearly the street closure of Lisson St has been a success if you count the numbers of residents using the walkway through to the Gardens and shops. Yet the corner is blighted by this empty shop front with a lot of graffiti. It has been like this for many years now and does need sorting out probably with some planning enforcement.  So watch this space for some action. 

Now it is always good to see new local businesses opening up in the neighbourhood particularly in these times on the previous derelict corner of Bell St and Corlett St.  But the shutters don’t help the street look open at all! Whilst they may well be good security grounds for them, it does not help advertise the business when closed up. So why are we not having these shutters being built behind the window frontage? Indeed they seems to be some inconsistencies along Bell St, with Jasons Fabrics on the corner of Edgware and other businesses at the top end of Bell having shutters behind their window frame working very well.  So again we need some consistent planning enforcement along the street, so as all known what businesses are behind the closed shutters! 

Road safety in the Central London borough of the City of Westminster will be improved vastly in 2022 with two initiatives. Firstly TfL’s 20 mile a hour limit on red routes and the changes in the Highway code making pedestrians and cyclists more of a  priority and thus making our streets safer.

 

After TfL held a six week consultation between 7 July and 18 August 2021 in which the proposed changes included: 

• A reduced 20mph speed limit on 13km of roads within the borough, including Marylebone Road, Vauxhall Bridge Road and Edgware Road between the A40 and St. John’s Wood Road ( please see map )
• Raised tables at six existing pedestrian crossing locations on roads with newly lowered speed limits
• New road signs throughout to ensure that all drivers are fully aware of the new speed limit 

Following careful consideration of the consultation responses, they have decided to proceed with the scheme as set out in the consultation.   

Is such extreme pollarding justified at all in W9? When you look at the skyline of Little Venice & Maida Vale it can be quite shocking to see our trees being cut down in this manner. 

It is clear that it has become pretty standard practise at Westminster Council to treat our ash, lime and Elm trees lining the streets of Little Venice and Maida Vale, in this manner. It certainly does not help the trees bloom again! Some say its primary aimed to stop the trees juicing over cars placed immediately under them. If so, l can’t find a worse excuse to do so! 

So l suggest that part of watching trees disappearing altogether we need also to keep an eye on how are trees are maintained via pollarding or not. 

As the fiasco of #MarbleArchMound closes today we should not forget @CityWestminster spent £6 million on this project with some 250,000 visitors. Thats is £24 per visitor paid via council tax by its residents! It would have better if it give its residents £24 vouchers to spend on Oxford St instead – what a waste! Heads should really roll for such poor project management. 

So while the UK government has wasted billions on test and tract, the Tory run council of Westminster has wasted millions on its pet project in Central London, Marble Arch Mound. 

If l had done this to the residents of Westminster, l would have resigned from the Council. But then has anyone in government done so with the waste of billions of pounds during the pandemic. So what a waste under our local council and national government, during some very difficult times for people. 

Fifty years ago, London played a key role in the formation of the state of Bangladesh and in a recent walking tour of three key London sites during the Liberation of Bangladesh 1971 this was highlighted well, as we moved between the main sites.




We started the walking tour of course from Trafalgar Square where many of the demonstrations fifty years ago ended with the demands of stopping the genocide; releasing Bangabandhu Sheikh Mujib and the recognition of the new state of Bangladesh. Here we heard the recollection of Habib Rahman, then a young student at UCL, enthralled by the mass demonstrations at Trafalgar Square and places around it where the campaigning had been organised. At times, it felt like the whole community had turned out to these demo’s when the community could not have been more than estimated 100,000 strong in the UK and mostly young men, and would have been subsumed within figures for Pakistani within the UK.

Now before Liberation many of the Indian restaurants run by Bengalis in Central West London were often the locations where Bengali nationalist met, ate & discussed the politics of “back home” during the 1960’s in establishments like the Ganges Restuarant along Gerrard St, W1. It was run by Tasadduq Ahmed, a secular progressive student political activist in Assam & Bengal from the 1940’s now in political exile in London. He had also served as a journalist in East Pakistan for the Observer and Sangbad and was involved in the underground left movement.

The Ganges restaurant became the meeting point of the left and cultural activists and frequented by left figures like Michael Foot, Peter Shore, journalists like Christopher Hitchens, Paul Foot from the Guardian, and Liberty. Tariq Ali was also a regular there during his student days and has fond memories not only of the talk but the food of the day. It was also from the Ganges that Tasadduq Ahmed published the Desher Dak newspaper. So not surprisingly it was also frequented by many from Bengali politics of the left passing through London, like Moulana Bashani; Shaheed Shawhyam and Bangabandhu Sheikh Mujibur Rahman and it is even said by Zulfikar Ali Bhutto during the 1960s.

During the Liberation War itself, 24 Pembridge Gardens in Notting Hill Gate became a major centre for the campaigns for the liberation of Bangladesh before becoming the first embassy of the new state of Bangladesh in the UK and abroad.

From here Justice Abu Syeed Chowdhury headed the campaigns in the UK. He was appointed as the vice-chancellor of the University of Dhaka in 1969. In 1971, while in Geneva he resigned from the post as a protest against the genocide in East Pakistan by the Pakistan army. From Geneva he went to London, UK and became the special envoy of the provisional Mujibnagar Government. An umbrella organisation, The Council for the People’s Republic of Bangladesh in the UK was formed on 24 April 1971 in Coventry, UK, by the expatriate Bengalis, and a five-member steering committee of the council was elected by them. He was to become the first High Commissioner for the People’s Republic of Bangladesh in London from 1 August 1971 to 8 January 1972 when the premises became the first embassy of Bangladesh from money raised by Bangladeshi’s in the UK. 24 Pembridge Gardens is currently known as the Bangladesh Centre and has just recently been completely refurbished and opened again on the 19th of December 2021.

And then there was of course immediately after the Liberation war ended on the 16th of December 2021 the visit of Sheikh Mujib to London before he returned to Dhaka, and the newly formed state of Bangladesh. He was put up by the British government at the Claridge’s Hotel in Mayfair between the 8th to 10th of January 1972 where he held a famous press conference before going back to Dhaka on an RAF plane. During those two days he met all those who he needed to establish a political relationship from the PM Edward Heath MP and the opposition leader of the day Harold Wilson. The mystery is what the Pakistani authorities did with him between their surrender in Dhaka on the 16th of December to the 7th of January 1972 when they released him to go back via London. One thing it certainly helped was the recognition of the People’s Republic of Bangladesh by the British government on the 4th of February 1972.

So whilst the Bangladeshi probashi ( otherwise known as Londoni’s in Bangladesh) in the UK were not killed or abused as many in Bangladesh were during the liberation war, they did assist in getting the new country recognised by the UK government and the release of Sheikh Mujib by lobbying successfully their MPs and other parliamentarians on the world stage. And while the genocidal claims are still outstanding, this campaign and argument is still being heard in the UK and beyond, the probashi in the UK played a small key role in the formation of Bangladesh at key moments from London.

A version of this blog has been published in Dhaka Tribune under a op-ed with the heading London Calling

In Little Venice,W9 we have a number of derelict red telephone boxes in the neighbourhood, that desperately need repairing – on the corner of Formosa St and Bristol Gardens, on Shirland Rd off the corner on Sutherland Avenue etc 

Now we know that with the use of mobile phones, the use of public phone boxes have declined considerable. But this has been happening for sometime and it appears British Telecommunications (BT) do not know what to do with them. We should keep the neighbourhood in good shape and not let the kiosks become centres of rubbish and graffiti! And even a growing health and safety risk in the area. 

So BT, let these red telephone kiosks have a lick of paint at least.