Time for change
Can London learn from Black history or are we doomed to repeat it?
October is of course Black History Month, and because the most useful thing we can do from history is learn from it (and because the theme for Black History Month 2022 is ‘Time for Change: Action Not Words’), today’s issue is a look at just two of the issues that have disproportionately affected Black people in London in recent years… and which don’t seem to be getting any better.
London is more polluted if you’re Black
It’s been a contentious week for London air quality news. First, Sadiq Khan was accused of ‘disproportionately excluding’ negative responses from the results of his consultation on widening the Ulez. Then the mayor’s mysterious and deleted tweet claiming that London was the 18th most polluted city in the world was either gleefully picked apart by the usual suspects or lazily repeated by publications that should know better. It’s a depressing state of affairs, especially as it undermines the conversation about one of biggest challenges facing London right now. Thankfully, we do have some more reliable data to turn to. Unfortunately, that data tells a pretty miserable story.
First, let’s go back in time to exactly six years ago, because on Monday 10 October 2016 The Guardian ran an article with the headline London’s black communities disproportionately exposed to air pollution. The source for that story was a consultancy called Aether who had undertaken the study for Mayor Khan (who had been in the job less than six months at that point). They had found that although “black, African and Caribbean people” accounted for just 13.3% of the city’s population, they accounted for “15.3% of all Londoners exposed to nitrogen dioxide (NO2) levels that breach EU limits.”
Now jump forward to December 2020. The Deputy Coroner has ruled that nine year-old Ella Adoo-Kissi-Debrah (who lived 25m from the South Circular) died as a direct result of air pollution. Several months later, the Coroner issues a Prevention of Future Deaths (‘PFD’) report which expresses his “concern about the lack of legally binding air quality targets, lack of public information and appropriate doctor training”.
Cut to Wednesday 13 October, 2021, and the Independent is running the headline Black and ethnic minorities more likely to live in areas of London with toxic air, study says. Again, the data comes from a City Hall study and again the conclusion is that “deprived areas or areas with higher proportions of people from non-white backgrounds also have higher levels of air pollution.”
Jump forward again to very recent history: August 23rd of this year. Runnymede Trust and Greenpeace put out a report which says that “even in cities like London and New York, people of colour are disproportionately impacted by the environmental emergency.” The report looked at boroughs like Newham where “an estimated 96 residents die every year due to poor air quality” and Lambeth, where residents “have reported having ‘dangerously high’ levels of nitrogen dioxide recorded that are almost double that of the WHO’s recommended standard.”
The report calls these ‘sacrifice areas’ because they are places where “the most deprived areas and communities are sacrificed to make room for roads, for airports, for polluting industries, and for profit.”
Which brings us bang up to date, or to last week at least, when Friends of the Earth released research which shows that “People of colour are far more likely to suffer the worst of air pollution in Britain compared with white communities,” with London being called out as a particularly poor example.
An accompanying map of the ‘very high pollution neighbourhoods’ identified by the report, shows “where average air pollution levels are double World Health Organisation guidelines”. Here’s a screenshot:
Of the 1,737 schools in these high pollution neighbourhoods, there are 924 where levels of both Nitrogen Dioxide (NO2) and particulate matter (PM2.5) are twice the recommended levels. All of those 924 schools are in London.
When the Friends of the Earth study was published, Ella Adoo-Kissi-Debrah’s mother, Rosamund issued a statement on behalf of the Ella Roberta Foundation :
“This latest data is shocking, but unsurprising. It re-emphasises the urgency with which our country, and London particularly, needs action on air pollution. Everyone deserves a right to breathe clean air, particularly children, who are worst impacted because their lungs are still developing. Liz Truss, the new PM, needs to tackle this as a matter of urgency. This is something we need to see by the end of October, when the new targets must be set - and currently, the government’s ambitions fall well short of the latest WHO guidelines.”
Coming up on Wednesday 🪠
In the latest instalment of our Electric Theatre column looking at London on film, writer, composer and producer Steve Kilpatrick travels to the London of 2150 to battle Robomen and paddling Daleks.
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Black Londoners are more likely to be targeted by the police
In August last year we ran an issue which looked back at the riots of 2011 and asked if it could happen today:
As part of that we looked at a recent bit of research which said that “while stop and search numbers have declined overall, Black people are still far more likely to be targeted by police than white people.”
Then in February of this year we ran an issue about surveillance in London, part of which looked at the Gangs Violence Matrix, the ‘predictive policing’ tool set up by the Met in the wake of the riots. The matrix was supposed to identify “those at risk of committing gang-related violence” by taking variables such as previous offences, social media activity and friendship networks and calculating a “risk score”.
That month Liberty were planning on taking the Met to court over claims that the database discriminates “against BAME people, in particular Black people, who are disproportionately represented on the Matrix.” In May the group was given permission by the High Court to go ahead with that legal challenge.
Also in May, Priti Patel permanently lifted restrictions on police stop-and-search powers. As ITV reported at the time, “The wider use of stop and search is controversial because of concerns that it disproportionately affects black and minority ethnic communities, with campaign groups previously warning that relaxing the restrictions could compound discrimination in the UK.”
On September 5, Chris Kaba was killed by a single shot to the head fired by a Met officer. Kaba was “not a suspect and was being followed by a police car without lights or sirens before he was shot dead”.
Just last week, two new bit of data came to light. One showed that the mayor’s “pioneering GPS tagging pilot programme,” which had been extended in July, was “being used to racially target and sentence young black men for knife crime offences in a way that ‘may reflect unconscious bias’ among Metropolitan police officers.”
The other was a new paper called Economic Inequality and the Spatial Distribution of Stop and Search: Evidence from London, which was thankfully summarised in this article on the LSE website under the headline ‘Does economic inequality fuel stop and search by the police? Evidence from London suggests the answer is ‘Yes’.
The paper looks at previous research which seems to show that “stop/search is not solely about crime-fighting, rather it is also about social order maintenance – i.e. it is a tool used by police officers to assert power and control in a situation or locale.” This hypothesis is supported by data which shows “that police officers tend to discriminate against black and minority ethnic (BAME) groups in comparison with white citizens.”
What the new study does is take data for “housing value inequality for London in 2019” and combine it with stop and search data from all London neighbourhoods in the same year. Here’s the results in map form.
The conclusion in a nutshell: The greater the level of economic inequality of a neighbourhood, the higher the number of stops, “suggesting that stop/search powers are indeed employed as a tool of social control, protecting and asserting power over some segments of society”.
A coda to all this: A few weeks ago, Samuel Kasumu put himself forward as the Conservative candidate for Mayor of London. Kasumu was once Boris Johnson’s race adviser, but he resigned right in the middle of the row over the report which concluded “that the UK does not have a systemic problem with racism”. He later said there were too many people in government ready to “pick a fight on the culture war and to exploit division”. That should make for an interesting campaign running up to May next year.
5 little bits
Battersea Power Station opens to the public this week, but there’ll be no representatives from Wandsworth Council there when it does. They are staying away “because of the project's low level of social housing.” For a good summary of the argument here’s Oliver Wainwright’s article from last week which describes the new Power Station as “a playground for the super rich”.
Following on from our recent issue on the fight to protect London’s grassroots music venues, City AM reports on the most recent threat to pubs and clubs: “the exponential increase in noise complaints” from neighbours who have become “accustomed to quieter nights after lockdown”.
The independent investigation into exactly what happened at Croydon Council a few years ago has yet to be officially published, but the report has just been leaked and it doesn’t pull many punches, describing how “major risks within the council’s revenue budgets and in its investment portfolio appear to have been downplayed in the face of what seemed to have been unbridled optimism and seemingly an almost reckless disregard of the potential adverse consequences of these risks.”
The Guardian has been north of the river to see if the ‘Islington cliche’ (most recently trotted out by Liz Truss in her reference to people who “take taxis from north London townhouses to the BBC studios”) still holds true, or whether there are more hedge fund managers than journalists in N1 these days.
While we’re talking about the super rich, hedge fund managers and late night venues… Here’s Square Meal’s article on Oceandiva, the three-deck, 86 metre long ‘mega boat’ venue that’s set to become the largest floating venue on the Thames when it opens later this year.