Tag Archives: Society

Eddie Izzard locks horns with landlords over Chelsea social housing estate

March 6, 2015MusingsArticle, Cities, Communities, Culture, Ed Miliband, Eddie Izzard, General election 2015, Housing, London, Main section, News, Politics, Robert Booth, Russell Brand, Social housing, Society, The Guardian, UK newsdiana Stone

London is possibly already past saving.

This article titled “Eddie Izzard locks horns with landlords over Chelsea social housing estate” was written by Robert Booth, for The Guardian on Thursday 5th March 2015 12.36 UTC

First came Russell Brand with his messianic locks and born-again radicalism, crusading for families on an east London estate facing eviction by US investors.

Now it is the turn of Eddie Izzard, sporting a pink manicure and Cuban heels, to set down his comedian’s microphone for a tilt at politics.

Like Brand, the 53-year old stand-up has decided to take on Britain’s affordable housing crisis. With trademark whimsy and a steely conviction that he hopes will see him enter parliament or become London mayor by 2020, he has broken off from a world tour to confront a landlord over its plans to rebuild the William Sutton Estate social housing estate in Chelsea with 144 fewer low-rent homes. Affinity Sutton wants to replace some of them with more than 100 luxury apartments expected to sell for millions.

Izzard has thrown his weight behind the opponents of the plans which have divided residents amid claims of “social cleansing”. When the Guardian joined him to meet tenants, some of whom face eviction, he showed little patience with the landlord’s representatives.

“Just on the vibe everything you are saying is wrong,” he told Lisa Louis, a spokeswoman for Affinity Sutton. “All your responses are wrong. You’re doing a PR frontage, you’re going on and on. It doesn’t make any sense.”

Louis tried to explain: “One of the things we are really struggling with is there is no government funding for social housing. We are working on providing the minimum private housing that we absolutely have to, to be able to re-provide the social housing. Otherwise it could not happen at all.”

Izzard, was having none of it: “That’s not fact. That’s your facts. That’s how you feel it is.”

The transformation of the estate in one of the richest areas of London is part of what Izzard describes as a new “moneyocracy” dividing society. As an Ed Miliband loyalist who has cleared his diary to campaign in next month’s general election campaign, he believes the plans highlight growing division in society – a key theme as he steps up his bid for a career in British politics.

“The separation of the rich and the poor … does feel like it is happening here and it can be stopped with the right legislation and encouragement for people to keep social housing and not squeeze people out on low incomes,” he told the Guardian. “We will lose our vibrancy. The city is going to be emptying out and lots of houses will be empty.”

Affinity Sutton strongly denies allegations of profiteering and social cleansing and has attacked “celebrities that are passing comment, [who] appear to have spoken only to opponents of the scheme”. But Izzard is undeterred.

A lot of what he thinks is going wrong with inequality in cities like London is summed up for him in the stonework of the Sutton estate mansion blocks. They were built in 1913 according to the last will and testament of William Sutton who set up a trust to provide “model dwellings and houses for use and occupation by the poor”. The word “trust” has at some point been hacked off the stonework leaving a blank between “Sutton” and “dwellings”. It is a metaphor for a wider pattern that worries Izzard.

“If you look at the super-rich in America, in the UK and around the world, that is a dangerous thing: the separation of people who have learned to make a tonne of money and everyone else struggling around,” he said. “If people don’t have parents who can help you’ve got no chance. Social housing is the lifeblood of London, London will be losing its lifeblood. Social cleansing should not be happening in 2015 and it looks like Affinity Sutton are trying to do social cleansing.”

Again, Affinity Sutton, has hit back. This week it posted a rebuttal of the opposition’s campaign’s claims.

“The main objectors are in fact not our tenants and we are concerned that they are causing distress through a campaign of deliberate misinformation and speculation,” a spokesman said. “We reject outright the allegation that redevelopment of the scheme is motivated by creating large profits.”

Izzard plans to run as London mayor or for parliament in 2020, putting “into hibernation” a comedy career that he loves. While Brand’s iconoclastic politics, urging people not to vote and to abandon conventional party politics, emerge naturally from his subversive comedy, the spirit of Izzard’s surreal improvisations are harder to find in his pursuit of a conventional political career.

Asked what matters most to him in the coming election, he replies with Labour’s core message: “I suppose it is that the financial recovery is for the few and not the many and we need to get it working for the many.”

Asked for another, he sighs and produces another core message: the National Health Service.

He describes himself as a “radical centrist”. Miliband is “doing fine” and polls showing some people consider him weird are “just nonsense” and “Tory spinning”. Brand’s anti-voting position is plain wrong, he said.

“We have to make decisions,” he said. “Politicians are needed and we want to get it as open as possible … We need voting otherwise you have one person running the country and you get into kings and dictators saying ‘I’ll just be here for ever’. I don’t think Russell is saying that, but I don’t see how anything gets done without voting. Russell is coming from a positive heart point of view but I disagree on how he’s going about getting it done.”

Izzard reckons more comedians are poised to make the leap to political leadership. He references Al Franken, the former Saturday Night Live performer, who became a US senator in 2009, and Beppe Grillo, the Italian comedian whose Five Star movement became the largest party in Italy’s chamber of deputies in 2013.

“It’s weird that comedians haven’t gone in [to politics] before,” he said. “But comedy is an attack weapon. If your upfront message is attack all you are doing is tearing things down. I am quite positive on humanity, politics, people, life, building things. If you use comedy straight in there it doesn’t work. If you look at Senator Al Franken, he came from a comedy background. It can be done. I think more people will come in from that world in the future. Talking is our job. Comedians at least have articulation.”

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Can you give a child too much praise?

February 27, 2015MusingsArticle, Children, Family, Family features, Features, Life and style, Parents and parenting, Society, The Guardian, Tim Lott, Tim Lott's Family columndiana Stone

Interesting. My father was fairly scathing of anything I attempted to do. Certainly at no point can I recall him ever giving me any encouragement in anything: I do wonder if thats the reason why I tend not to be ever satisfied with anything that I do. I tend to look for faults. A bit of a pat on the back occasionally might have helped.

This article titled “Can you give a child too much praise?” was written by Tim Lott, for The Guardian on Friday 27th February 2015 13.30 UTC

My children are perfect. All four of them. Perfect and beautiful and clever. I bet yours are, too. Except, of course, they are not. In reality, my children and yours are likely to be reasonably average in terms of looks, behaviour, intelligence and charm. That’s why it is called average. Your belief in your child being special is more probably a biological imperative than an empirical fact.

A loved one, particularly a loved child, is edited as we observe them. Other people’s children are bratty; ours are spirited. Theirs are precocious; ours confident and self-assertive.

This is all natural and even touching when not taken too far. However, it is one thing feeding this propaganda to ourselves but feeding it to our children may be a little less desirable. We have the idea that – unlike my parents’ generation – we should build our children’s self-esteem as high as we can. Therefore, their random scribble is up there with Picasso, their C-minus is an unfortunate oversight on the part of the teacher, the fact that no one wants to be friends with them is because they are particularly clever or sensitive, the wart on their nose is a beauty spot.

Children see through this kind of thing very quickly and discount their parents’ compliments as a matter of course. As they grow up, they sense that the wider world judges them differently. This leads to a – hopefully gentle – cynicism about anything their parents tell them about their achievements. Perhaps that is OK – but I’m not sure it is good for them to have the currency of parental praise so devalued.

If parents were a little harsher sometimes, this could have two positive effects – first, when a compliment came, it would be more likely to be believed and, second, it would fit in rather more accurately with the picture of reality that the child is forming in their heads.

A lot of pressure is put on children who are told they are beautiful, special and perfect. Because then, where is there to go? Only downwards. They become hyperaware of their status in your eyes, and a danger must be that they fear failing you. To be overpraised by your parents is the counter side of being criticised all the time. Both can have negative consequences.

It is important to give your children the liberty to be flawed – to know that it’s OK to be imperfect, and that, in fact, we often love people for their flaws – perfect people (whom we can only imagine, as they do not exist) are easy to respect, but hard to love.

Now I am nearly 60, my main insight is that I am much less special than I once believed. This knowledge has actually been helpful in leading a more well-balanced life. I’d call it humility, if it weren’t very un-humble to attribute myself with the quality.

I certainly wouldn’t like to go back to attitudes that my parents, particularly my father, held, that to praise the child was to “spoil them” or make them bigheaded. However, the history of families is like the history of everything else – the story of overreactions. We praise our children to the skies, partly because we think it makes them feel good, but also because it makes us feel good. And perhaps it is more the latter than the former.

Having said all this, I am a terrible overpraiser, because I adore my children. I’m sure they have learned to take everything with a pinch of salt, but excessive love can be as big a burden as a shortage of it. My advice, at least to myself, is to ration not splurge. Then every compliment will count, rather than amounting to little more than a vaguely pleasing – but finally inauthentic – background Muzak, so persistent it isn’t even noticed.

• @timlottwriter

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The Guardian view on zero-hours: the number that keeps getting bigger

February 26, 2015MusingsArticle, Comment, Editorial, Editorials, Editorials & reply, Employment law, Law, Main section, Opinion, Society, The Guardian, UK news, Zero-hours contractsdiana Stone

Well for me in my particular circumstances I can see that some zero hours contracts might work. However for most folk they are not a good thing and should not be used to replace more secure working arrangements.

This article titled “The Guardian view on zero-hours: the number that keeps getting bigger” was written by Editorial, for The Guardian on Wednesday 25th February 2015 20.07 UTC

Let’s not be sour. The bounceback in jobs during the current recovery has been staggering – exceeding all predictions. During the depths of the slump too, although things were dreadful, the UK shed far fewer posts than any of the macroeconomic models suggested. Whereas in the past there had been something close to a one-for-one proportional relation between lost jobs and lost output, for every three percentage points of GDP that disappeared after 2008, only 1% of jobs went up in smoke.

But let’s not be blinkered either. If there is reason to be cheerful in the quantity of jobs in a famously flexible labour market, there is reason to be fearful when it comes to the quality. Underemployment, perma-temping and the recasting of low-grade staffers as “self-employed” hires shorn of all rights were striking features of working life in the recession, and all trends that have been stubbornly slow to reverse in the recovery. That much is reaffirmed every month when the official labour market statistics appear. Nothing, however, sums up the pall of insecurity that has befallen so much of the workforce like zero-hours contracts. We can’t map the numbers over long years in this case, because – until recently – the arrangement was still so exotic that no proper figures were collated. Slowly but surely, however, the information gap is being filled and, in every new droplet of data, zero emerges as the number that keeps getting bigger.

At the dawn of the slump it was estimated that there were fewer than 200,000 “jobs” without guaranteed hours. Since then much has changed – the term “zero hours” has gained currency, definitions have changed, and new data sources have been tapped to tally up the individual workers affected, recognising that some will rely on multiple jobs. But through all the refinements and seasonal blips that might colour the figures, there has been only one trend. The Office for National Statistics reported on Wednesday that there were 1.8m zero-hour contracts, and 697,000 zero-hours workers, both numbers that have been climbing fast.

Not every no-strings contract represents exploitation, it’s true, but too many do. While there are a few professionals happy to put in a well-paid hour on an as-and-when-needed basis, the ONS confirmed that the real zero-hours boom is in pubs, hotels and restaurants, sectors where low pay is rampant. While some big zero-hours groups, such as students, may be content to avoid fixed weekly commitments, it is dismaying to learn that it is mostly women who are working with zero security. A sharp rise in zero-hours workers of two to five years’ standing confirms that this way of doing business is becoming not only more widespread but also more entrenched.

After much delay, the coalition talks about banning the most abusive contracts, which actually bar staff from seeking employment with anyone else while they hang around waiting for shifts that may not come their way. It may be a start, but it’s not enough. At the very least, zero-hours workers must be given – as Labour proposes – a right to demand steady hours after six months.

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