Brixton news, rumours and general chat - June 2017

[CH1]

There are plenty of places in Brixton that sell brand new, very sharp knives at reasonable prices. I'm not sure how a local knife sharpening service makes the situation any more or less alarming... If people want sharp knives for nefarious purposes, they're trivially simple to find.

Exactly. Therefore places like Brixton Police Station and St John's Angel Town feel moved to provide safe disposal bins to try to take them out of circulation.

 

[wurlycurly]

While knife crime is both horrific and at present depressingly common, the presence of a tool sharpening trader in the area will have virtually zero effect on knife crime stats IMO. It's not as if would-be knifers have ever been much concerned by the sharpness of their blades, or the relative bluntness ever been an impediment to their actions.

It's like blaming the typewriter for the ransom note.

 

[GarveyLives]

New War Memorial in London Ends Historic Omission of Heroic Contributions

Refusing to be whitewashed out of history.​

 

[CH1]

It's like blaming the typewriter for the ransom note.

Do you want to introduce American style gun laws then?

Regarding knives - look at this pathetic case.
15-year-old stabbed to death in Brixton after 'flirting with a girl'

A 15 year old boy stabbed to death by his 14 year old girlfriend on the lawn outside Secker House Minet Road SW9. Only yards from a child's play centre people are campaigning to reopen.

I think some people on here have hearts of stone. Rather like Theresa May is alleged to have.

 

[CH1]

New War Memorial in London Ends Historic Omission of Heroic Contributions

Refusing to be whitewashed out of history.​

Thank you for posting this. I was sorry to have missed it.

 

[madolesance]

Do you want to introduce American style gun laws then?

Regarding knives - look at this pathetic case.
15-year-old stabbed to death in Brixton after 'flirting with a girl'

A 15 year old boy stabbed to death by his 14 year old girlfriend on the lawn outside Secker House Minet Road SW9. Only yards from a child's play centre people are campaigning to reopen.

I think some people on here have hearts of stone. Rather like Theresa May is alleged to have.

5 year old news. Give your self a big pat on your back for this

 

[wurlycurly]

Do you want to introduce American style gun laws then?

Regarding knives - look at this pathetic case.
15-year-old stabbed to death in Brixton after 'flirting with a girl'

A 15 year old boy stabbed to death by his 14 year old girlfriend on the lawn outside Secker House Minet Road SW9. Only yards from a child's play centre people are campaigning to reopen.

I think some people on here have hearts of stone. Rather like Theresa May is alleged to have.

I was merely pointing out the absurdity of linking a knife-sharpening service with knife crime. You're the one that made the (equally absurd) quantum leap to American-style gun laws.

 

[CH1]

I see the Lambeth Planning website is down (again) today.

And they can't be notified - as 0207 926 1000 is emergency calls only until 9.00 am Monday.

Wish I'd known this when I was being cross-examined by a nice young lady from The Campaign Company trying to get my views on Lambeth Council yesterday evening - took the whole of the Channel 4 News.

Heather Rabbatts repeatedly said when she took over as Lambeth's Chief Executive: "There was this attitude, well we know we're the worst so there's nothing we can do. If you pulled a lever, it wasn't connected to anything."

I should have quoted that back to the young lady from The Campaign Company - with the rider that "We may be the worst, but we will consult you to death doing it"

 

[Gramsci]

New War Memorial in London Ends Historic Omission of Heroic Contributions

Refusing to be whitewashed out of history.​

I have mixed feelings about this. Good to have a memorial. But this I'm not do happy about.

"Defence Secretary Sir Michael Fallon said the "recognition today is long overdue".

He added: "I hope this memorial will remind us of the ongoing contribution of our African and Caribbean communities to our country and to the defence of our country."

War memorial to African-Caribbean soldiers unveiled in London - BBC News

World War two ended up as a people's war. But that wasn't the idea at the start. Churchill certainly didn't want the British Empire to end after WW2. Africans and Afro Carribbeans were not going to be given independence after WW2. If the British establishment had there way we would still have a British Empire after WW2.

Take the Mau Mau Rebellion. Ex service men returned to the colonies. There experience of WW2 had given them new perspective. They challenged white rule of there land.

WWII Lives on Among African Veterans Who Returned Home as Freedom Fighters



GAICHANGIRU, Kenya — Fifty years ago, when World War II erupted in Europe, Bildad Kaggia left this peaceful African village to fight for the white man. He returned with inspiration to launch another war for freedom--the Mau Mau struggle against Kenya's British rulers.

Kaggia and millions of other Africans served in a war they did not understand, but unleashed a force which transformed Africa and hastened the demise of colonialism.

Now 67 and sporting a bushy gray beard, the former nationalist leader said World War II gave African soldiers a fresh perspective of the outside world.

"We were led to believe Europeans were superior," Kaggia told Reuters from a small storefront in Gaichangiru, 50 miles northeast of Nairobi, where he runs a milling business.

"But we (who served in the war) had evidence that the European is just like us. He was killed in the war, we saw him working in every job we did," said Kaggia, who had never been outside Kenya before he went to Cairo in 1940.

By the last year of the war, 400,000 African soldiers were serving the British alone. Millions of others were marching in French and Italian armies and boosting war-time production by laboring on plantations and public works.

But after the war, having risked their lives to help free Europe from fascism, African soldiers came home to countries where they needed passes to travel and were denied the right to vote.

Kaggia said that while serving abroad he got the same pay as whites of the same rank. He was shocked to return to postwar Kenya, where blacks still got less.

He quit the army and joined a radical nationalist faction which believed that only guerrilla war would persuade the British to hand over power to Africans.

"It was the courage we got from the war which made us go into the struggle," Kaggia said. "The people who were here, they couldn't think they could defeat the Europeans."

Kaggia served on the clandestine central committee of Mau Mau until 1952, when the authorities declared an emergency and detained him and other nationalists, including Jomo Kenyatta, who later became Kenya's first president.

At the same time, nationalism spread throughout the continent and European rulers faced uprisings in Madagascar, Algeria, Ivory Coast and Cameroon.

WWII Lives on Among African Veterans Who Returned Home as Freedom Fighters

The same goes for Africans who served with Free French forces.

I'm sure you know all this Garvey. But worth remembering that the WW2 was not simply good democracy Vs fascists.

It's worth remembering that Hitler's war in Eastern Europe was a colonial war. He thought he could treat the Slavic peoples in the same way that the Imperial countries like Britain had done in its Empire. In Africa, India and Carribbean. Take there land and treat them as inferior race to work for the Imperial race.

 

[CH1]

Gramsci There was a Michael Palin programme on in 2013 dealing with the British West African army (raised in what is now Ghana and Nigeria) and deployed to Burma and Ethiopia (including what is now Eritrea). BBC Two - Burma, My Father and the Forgotten Army
The programme description is there, but not the programme, which is out of date.

Michael Palin's programme dealt with the injustices suffered by returning troops in Ghana - although as Ghana was never settled by the British (i.e. land taken over for farming) Ghana was in fact the earliest African country to be granted independence (1957).

The situation in Kenya is more similar to Zimbabwe and South Africa - and still is. I had a friend did VSO there for 2 years. He said the slum areas were unsafe, even in a car (you could be stoned). He said Uganda was pleasant - strange he thought considering the equally bad modern history..

 

[GarveyLives]

All fascinating stuff.

If Britain can recognise "the contributions to those wars from dogs, donkeys, elephants, pigeons, glow worms and others animals", then it can remember the contribution of human beings from African and the Caribbean too.

Refusing to be whitewashed out of history.​

 

[snowy_again]

Park Heights fails post Grenfell checks:

Brixton tower cladding fails test, but evacuation not needed

That's Rosbart Street isn't it?

 

[CH1]

Park Heights fails post Grenfell checks:
Brixton tower cladding fails test, but evacuation not needed
That's Rosbart Street isn't it?

It is. By the way does anyone know if Park Heights is new-build or is it a "regenerated" Wayland House?

If it is Wayland House under another name this would be 2nd time round for a structural issue. Wayland had years of remedial work due to blue asbestos in the early 1990s FWICR.

 

[SpamMisery]

What's wrong with the Fallon quote?

 

[Pickman's model]

Gramsci There was a Michael Palin programme on in 2013 dealing with the British West African army (raised in what is now Ghana and Nigeria) and deployed to Burma and Ethiopia (including what is now Eritrea). BBC Two - Burma, My Father and the Forgotten Army
The programme description is there, but not the programme, which is out of date.

Michael Palin's programme dealt with the injustices suffered by returning troops in Ghana - although as Ghana was never settled by the British (i.e. land taken over for farming) Ghana was in fact the earliest African country to be granted independence (1957).

The situation in Kenya is more similar to Zimbabwe and South Africa - and still is. I had a friend did VSO there for 2 years. He said the slum areas were unsafe, even in a car (you could be stoned). He said Uganda was pleasant - strange he thought considering the equally bad modern history..

Thought south africa became independent some years earlier than ghana

 

[ricbake]

It is. By the way does anyone know if Park Heights is new-build or is it a "regenerated" Wayland House?

If it is Wayland House under another name this would be 2nd time round for a structural issue. Wayland had years of remedial work due to blue asbestos in the early 1990s FWICR.

Wayland House was knocked flat before they built Park Heights.

 

[classicdish]

If Britain can recognise "the contributions to those wars from dogs, donkeys, elephants, pigeons, glow worms and others animals", then it can remember the contribution of human beings from African and the Caribbean too.

Isn't there already a memorial to Commonwealth soldiers:

Memorial Gates | Commonwealth War Memorial, Hyde Park Corner, London

On 6 November 2002 HM The Queen officially inaugurated the Memorial Gates on Constitution Hill in London, UK.

These Gates have been erected as a lasting memorial to honour the five million men and women from Africa, the Caribbean and the Indian subcontinent who volunteered to serve with the Armed Forces during the First World War and Second World War.

They also celebrate the contribution that these men and women and their descendants, members of the Commonwealth family, continue to make to the rich diversity of British society.

 

[Gramsci]

Isn't there already a memorial to Commonwealth soldiers:

Memorial Gates | Commonwealth War Memorial, Hyde Park Corner, London

This includes the Indians as well.

The monument in Windrush square is for African and Afro Carribbeans. I had a look at it yesterday. It goes further than the two world wars to say that since Roman times people of African descent have defended Britain's borders. So it's going back further. In which case it should have had on the monument those Black people who fought alongside the British army against Washington army in the American war of independence. Who were promised there freedom if the American Revolution was defeated. After the defeat of Britain some managed to escape to this country. Living in poverty here was better then being slaves in the land of the free. But then that history is contentious and "anti American". So won't go there.

My problem with memorials is that they make selective use of history.

The Commonwealth Wealth one near Buckingham palace is ideological. Bigs up a view of the Commonwealth as a "family". This memorial includes the Indians who served in the world war. In recent Indian history a hero is Subhas Chandra Bose. An Indian nationalist who didn't follow Gandhi non violence. Who in WW2 decided my enemies enemy is my friend. Worked with Japanese and Germany to set up a Indian national army to take India off the British. In India still regarded as a hero. He doesn't fit the narrative of the family of the Commonwealth. People happily flocking to defend the "mother" country.

Memorials aren't neutral or above politics. Despite how they might be put to the public. The idea of a "family" of Commonwealth states with a benevolent Queen as mother is patronising.

 

[Gramsci]

What's wrong with the Fallon quote?

My post 159 explains why. What don't you understand about my view?

 

[SpamMisery]

Its a positive statement. I don't see the link between that quote and anything in the rest of the post.

 

[CH1]

Thought south africa became independent some years earlier than ghana

Independence in South Africa is surely a misnomer - like giving the keys to a burglar and asking them to get on with it.

 

[CH1]

Wayland House was knocked flat before they built Park Heights.

Are there any photos of this then? Seems a bit odd that a massive building like Wayland House could simply disappear and no-one even recorded the event.
It was incredibly ugly though - inside and out.

 

[Pickman's model]

Independence in South Africa is surely a misnomer - like giving the keys to a burglar and asking them to get on with it.

african country - check
given independence - check

 

[CH1]

african country - check
given independence - check

You know what I meant. When was Zimbabwe independent then - 1965 one assumes from your interest in settler self-determination.

 

[Pickman's model]

You know what I meant. When was Zimbabwe independent then - 1965 one assumes from your interest in settler self-determination.

i don't want to make a song and dance over this, but it's plain that south africa, whatever you think about it, was granted independence rather earlier than ghana was. btw there was no zimbabwe in 1965.

 

[CH1]

i don't want to make a song and dance over this, but it's plain that south africa, whatever you think about it, was granted independence rather earlier than ghana was. btw there was no zimbabwe in 1965.

Quite. It was called Rhodesia and was Harold Wilson's BREXIT in a manner of speaking.

 

[editor]

Free street party this Saturday
Leander Road 6th Annual Street Party kicks off at noon, Sat 1st July

 

[snowy_again]

Lambeth Bridge redevelopment plans / consultation:

Have your say on proposed changes to Lambeth Bridge north and south - Transport for London - Citizen Space

 

[northeast]

Lambeth Bridge redevelopment plans / consultation:

Have your say on proposed changes to Lambeth Bridge north and south - Transport for London - Citizen Space

Anything to help out the bike is good, maybe just save the £12 million and just ban the cars like they have at bank. Wish they would take a look at Brixton Road most of it is crap for cyclist, right outside the tube is especially bad

 

[editor]

Anything to help out the bike is good, maybe just save the £12 million and just ban the cars like they have at bank. Wish they would take a look at Brixton Road most of it is crap for cyclist, right outside the tube is especially bad

It's awful for pedestrians too.