POSTCARD FROM LONDON : MARCH 2021

I’m a rare beast nowadays – a Londoner born and brought up in London, from an indigenous London family. Chateau Aubrey is a mere three minutes’ walk from where I was christened, and ten minutes’ walk from where my father took his first breath.

Today it’s slap-bang in the middle of Sir Keir Starmer’s constituency, the safest of safe Labour seats with a voter split of white Beaujolais Bolsheviks and Bengali immigrant families. But I can remember when, long before the 1980’s and the malevolent rise of the influence of the City, this was a working-class area which still clearly showed the results of major ‘redevelopment’ efforts by Hermann Goering and his chums. And except for five years spent working in various countries in Europe and the Middle East I’ve been based here all my life. Unlike the sainted Sir Keir, who has never, ever been seen in the locality at any time since he became its MP. Or even beforehand, come to that.

But in 2021, just fifteen minutes walk from the boundaries of the City of London, it’s like a ghost town, thanks of course to the Dr Strangeloves of SAGE. 

The pubs and eateries, formerly full of City ‘Hooray Henrys’ drinking away the stress of another day at the financial coal-face are all shut. The 18^th-century local church where I was christened -latterly transformed into a ‘Happy Clappy’ Evangelical mess with a heavy American influence, lots of holding hands, hugging, and lesbians snogging in the pews- is dark and deserted. Only its associated church school, which I attended as a child and which now instead caters almost exclusively to infant devotees of the ‘Religion of Peace’, displays any sign of life.

And the looming, deserted canyons of the City of London just up the road remain eerily silent, like the aftermath of a nuclear conflict. And if the worker ants of the Financial Services industry continue to find that working from home is actually a rather more productive way of doing things, devoid as it is of the stress, perils, and eye-watering expense of commuting into London, then it looks like the boom days are over for this area. The designer shops, wine bars, restaurants, pubs and coffee shops which since the 1980’s have always been stuffed with the overspill from EC1 will remain empty even if lockdown ends, and vastly inflated local property prices will fall through the floor, driven by a mass selling-off of now redundant office space.

The only current public activities are the eternal roadworks, as central London is totally re-modelled by gangs of Polish workmen for the exclusive benefit of militant cyclists (who nevertheless still insist on riding on the pavements instead) and vast valleys are gouged out of the North London landscape so that commuters to and from Birmingham can arrive a breathtaking twenty minutes earlier than they presently do, courtesy of Boris’ HS2. Plus, of course, the major local complex of three hospitals which already annexes a little bit more of our living space each year, exactly like a predatory 19^th-century Empire; lord knows what fresh powers they will be awarded in the future, as the nation becomes increasingly run for the benefit of the InterNational Health Service.

Back in the first months of house-arrest, when Lockdown was still a novelty and a kind of ‘Blitz Spirit’ was in evidence, locals were treated to a regular street concert every Thursday evening. Laid-off singers and musicians from West-End shows enthusiastically formed choirs and regaled us with well-loved hits from the musicals, to an appreciative open-air audience. But in contrast, since Chris Whitty & Co cancelled our parole in November morale has plummeted, apathy reigns supreme, and locals now slink furtively about the streets looking suspiciously at anyone having the effrontery to perambulate without a mask.

My partner, however, lives in north London. And it is very noticeable that the further you travel northwards from my area, the more you see a steadily increasing amount of life in the streets. More people, more activity, more shops clandestinely half-open; people actually talking to each other, and getting on with their daily lives. And it strikes me the reason for this is that immigrants, which most of these north London people are, came from countries where people are accustomed as a matter of course to treating every utterance of any politician as so much hogwash. And are thus far more sceptical when a Westmonster clown tells them that something is good for them (rightly suspecting that what the clown actually means is that it’s good for him), than are the brainwashed upper-middle-class inhabitants of central London.

Anyway, the biggest news of the week for Londoners is that Home Secretary Priti Vacant and Met Police Wokeführer Cressida Dick aren’t quite seeing eye-to-eye. And that in consequence the fragrant Dame Dick will not be having her contract renewed by Priti, and will doubtless return to the shadowy Foreign Office gig from which she was parachuted into the Met leadership by Amber Rudd, back when the latter was another in the long list of useless Tory Home Secretaries.

A long-overdue departure, many Londoners might think. But the question now is - who or what is going to replace Cressida? And I fear that the most prominent candidate is the Assistant Commissioner for Anti-Terrorism, Anil Kanti ‘Neil’ Basu.  This Basu person, of course, is the politician-in-a-uniform who loves to lecture the rest of us that terrorism is actually all the fault of Britain’s ‘racist’ society, and therefore serves us right. 

Basu, Whose every single official statement contains the word ‘Racism’; and who informs us that ‘Right-Wing Terrorism’ is by far the greatest threat to Londoners – far greater, naturally, than the threat posed by the acts of devotees of a certain religion which have caused all of London’s bridges and landmarks to be defaced by huge networks of concrete barriers. And as both Patel and Basu share similar backgrounds it would not come as a complete surprise if the Home Secretary decided that she could get on rather better with him than she did with the Cressida item.

However, following the chaos of the Grenfell fire response and the swift exit of the official responsible, it appeared to dawn even on that other politician of sub-continent heritage, the intellectually challenged London Mayor Sadiq Khan, that it might be a novel wheeze to put someone in charge of the capital’s Fire Service who actually knew a bit about putting out fires. Rather than someone who merely ticked the requisite ‘Diversity, Equality & Inclusion’ boxes. 

So Londoners might dare to hope that just possibly a nominally ‘Conservative’ Home Secretary would at long last take a similar attitude towards appointing someone to a post that, at least in theory, is about suppressing crime and maintaining public order. As opposed to spending their time issuing virtue-signalling press releases.

With the Johnson government’s record, however, I won’t be holding my breath. Where I live and work, we’re all far too accustomed to the sight of colourful roadside shrines to the murdered that are now apermanent feature on so many local streets, and I’m not expecting their rate of increase to slow down any time soon. 

 

Because the one business that’s still expanding rapidly in central London is the very one that provides an ever-growing number of young males of afro-caribbean, sub-continent, and Levantine heritage with sufficient income to acquire the brand new high-powered Mercedes, Audis and BMWs with blacked-out windows which can be seen hurtling through London’s streets every night; totally ignored of course by the Boys In Blue who really don’t want to deal with all the paperwork that’d be involved, since it would be about exactly the sort of people that they’ve recently been enthusiastically ‘taking the knee’ for. And the more that particular business is allowed to grow without let or hindrance, the more London streets that will inevitably be decorated with flowers, candles, and photos of the deceased.

AUBREY

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