The Pitcairn Perspectives by Philip Spires - HTML preview

Public meeting

A public meeting took place on Tuesday, 14 May 2020 in Western Way Road Community Centre. It was called by Off Uking Palace (OUP), a loose alliance of environmental and political groups that has joined forces to oppose the Uking company’s construction project in Hackney. A list of attendees at the gathering can be supplied on request but is available from the OUP Campaign page on our website via a secure login. Please access this site only from hardware that has been specifically identified for access or a security breach will be recorded, which may result in disciplinary action.

Details of the project are obviously available on the website, but for the purposes of this report I will offer a brief summary of where we stood at the time of this meeting. Uking Terbuka, an Indonesian multinational, purchased a tranche of Hackney Marshes some years ago, stating initially that the company desired only to secure a land holding in London with a view, possibly, to developing it in the future. It was clear throughout that the company would eventually seek to develop the site, but there were no immediate plans and, indeed, details did not emerge for two years.

There followed several media reports and other rumours that the company was planning various projects, including private housing, a shopping centre, an entertainment complex and finally an events venue. Then, about two and a half years ago, Uking Terbuka lodged an application to build a student accommodation development. The proposal was originally for four twelve storey blocks with associated facilities, access and landscaping, with each block housing forty-four one-bedroom apartments. The ground floor of each block would be dedicated to shared study rooms and communal lounges. The blocks were to occupy half of the land area, with the other half devoted to a low-rise commerce park with car parking. A year after placing this application, the company modified its plans after announcing it had secured another adjoining tract of land, though no commercial purchase seemed to have been made. This particular plot was a disused sports facility, originally part of a municipal facility. The revised plans retained the retail park, but the number of blocks doubled to eight and the height of each was increased to sixteen storeys. This would result in there being over five hundred apartments on the site and some local opposition emerged. This opposition has both intensified and widened, with the Uking Palace development now threatening to become a national political issue.

The company’s plan was always to provide accommodation for overseas students studying primarily at the Hackney Metro University, though not exclusively. Their prime audience was not Indonesian students, as might have been expected, but Chinese. When details of the rents to be charged to occupants of the block were published, there was more disquiet in the community, since the development was judged to have taken on the character of a luxury facility aimed exclusively at students from rich Chinese families. It must be noted that Uking Terbuka is an Indonesian company, but the ownership is still concentrated within the wider Sarnu family, who were until relatively recently ethnically Chinese and Buddhist, having only adopted Islam and Bahasa Indonesia names just a generation ago. The family business emerged from a successful Javanese trading firm that the family had operated for several generations. After the purges of the sixties, a young, United States-educated sub-group of the family took control of the company and expanded the enterprise, both intensifying and broadening its interests. The company grew remarkably quickly, initially on the back of participation in state-sponsored projects, and then expanded beyond its national borders into South-East Asia. It entered the national top ten companies by turnover in the nineties and is now a multinational conglomerate, with interests throughout Asia, Europe and North America, specialising in property ownership and management, but also having interests in finance, hotels, leisure, shipping and food.

Ill feeling towards the Uking Palace project in Hackney grew when it was revealed that the second phase of the proposed development may have been facilitated by political, rather than commercial relationships. When it emerged that Uking executives had paid large sums to set up photo opportunities for publicity purposes outside of the United Kingdom, there was initially a newspaper investigation and then a short television programme produced by investigative journalists. These alleged that Uking Terbuka executives were buying commercial favours via political donations. Serious opinion dismissed the claims as ‘socialist propaganda’, a ministerial statement was made, and the issue went to court. The case was dropped when some culpability was accepted and a statement along the lines of “we must make sure to learn lessons to ensure such things do not happen again in the future” took the heat out of the issue. Planning for the project continued.

A second public exposé followed the release of information suggesting that the second land acquisition by Uking had been facilitated at the ministerial level and had come about as a result of several significant donations to a particular political party. In addition, it was suggested but never demonstrated, let alone proved, that bribes had been paid into the accounts of offshore companies based in the Caribbean, whose ownership has been linked to prominent public figures. The interests of the local authority appear not to have been considered and there was no record of consultation with the council, though when questioned council officers admitted they were aware of the project. They claimed to have no powers to intervene, a claim that was subsequently shown to be wrong.

Further briefings have suggested that the transfer was quite legal but was facilitated by an amendment to an otherwise unrelated act of parliament, which had been aimed primarily at increasing the general amount of land available for development by relaxing some planning rules. The technical mechanism for bringing this about had been to table an amendment aimed specifically at redefining the use of under-used sports facilities in areas where alternative facilities were available. The specific site in Hackney was not mentioned in the parliamentary proceedings, but the week after the bill was passed, Uking reported that the second land transfer had happened. The planning application was amended just a month later, with the revised project appearing to have been completed at the same time as the original plans, indicating to some that the company had considered these new proposals as a done deal from the project’s inception.

Community action against the project had begun soon after the announcement of the first planning application. An alliance of several groups was created, but the principal actors were GASSED, Green Areas Support Sustainable Environmental Development, and PAR, Proletariat Against Racism. The latter group, of course, we know well after many years of our interest in them. As ever, their interest in this project stemmed less from environmental concerns and more from PAR’s usual approach to ‘community’ involvement, which is recruiting members into their own networks and engaging generally in what used to be called ‘agitprop’. As we know, the ten per cent levy on gross earnings donated to the group by its members does not feature in their literature.

GASSED, on the other hand, was new to us. It seems to have emerged out of a recent alliance between the radical Green Action Group and newly formed AIR, Atmosphere Is Religion, which has launched several local campaigns around the issue of air quality in cities in different parts of the country. Many of the group’s local organisations, usually those based near older industrial cities, however, focus on air travel and road transport. The campaigns do not seem to be coordinated in any way and differ significantly from area to area, some of them radical, while others go no further than flyposting.

GASSED’s prime activist on the Uking Palace issue was soon identified as Elsie Harness (now known as Elsie Pitcairn), daughter of Gemma Harness (also now Pitcairn), an employee of Hackney Metro University in the Humanities and Social Studies Faculty. Again, Gemma Harness has been monitored for some time after her research on the possible illegality of the Iraq War and then for her high-profile campaigning around Brexit. Her daughter, Elsie, was just twenty-two when the opposition alliance was formed. She was then a newly graduated MA in Media Studies and, in the three years since then, Elsie Pitcairn has pursued a highly successful career in a television and film production company and so has access to significant media personalities. There is evidence that she has also expended considerable energy in recruiting media people into the campaign against Uking Palace. There exist significant links between Elsie Pitcairn and those responsible for the media exposé of the links to Caribbean-based shell companies mentioned earlier.

The following report from an officer who attended the meeting in question will set down the parameters for our decisions. The presence of an officer at this meeting is, of course, confidential and must not be revealed to anyone other than colleagues.

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I attended the meeting in Western Way Road last week. Date, time and location details are available on the audio recording of proceedings. It was not appropriate to use video at this meeting, but I did leave the mobile’s audio record and transmit facility open throughout. Since the verbatim record exists, I will include here only some of the more interesting contributions, alongside some contextual observations of my own. Elsie Pitcairn began the proceedings and she set the meeting’s tone with her opening.

EP - Welcome everybody to this Off Uking Palace meeting. Can we start with a few choruses?

There were cheers before a full minute of Off Uking Palace, Off Uking Palace... Elsie led the chant via her microphone, which was at heightened volume throughout. After she raised her hand to ask for the chanting to stop, the volume was decreased again by the sound controller.

EP - Tonight we have a few new faces from Brent (cheers), from Stratford (cheers), from Tottenham (boos, followed by laughter) and from Tower Hamlets (loud cheers). I am joined on the platform by three speakers tonight. Daisy Johnson (applause) is from the East London Against Racism campaign, a group assisting Windrush generation victims. Alex Taub (a single clap) is here to represent... well, himself, really. Alex is doing a study on migrating for education and is going to profile the target group who might become residents of Uking Palace. He will conclude that they do not represent a cross section of the education migration population, thus illustrating that Uking Palace is more about elite residence than student accommodation (some applause). And finally, there is our old friend, Farida Al Hashemy of GASSED who is going to give a general update of where the campaign has reached (applause). In fact, I am going to stand aside and ask Farida to start us off. (Elsie Pitcairn let the final word rise rather than fall, prompting the audience to follow her lead. There followed immediate shouts of “Off Uking Palace” following the use of the buzzword.)

Farida Al Hashemy took the microphone and began her update of recent developments. These will be listed in summary form only, since they are available elsewhere. It is worth our while to remind ourselves of where the speaker needs to be placed in the overall discussion. Farida Al Hashemy is Palestinian, a naturalized British citizen. She is sixty-three years old and was almost ten when her family fled the Middle East during the 1967 war. Her father, Marwan, had been a British Council employee and was granted special status to bring his family to settle in the UK after the area of the West Bank where they lived became a battleground. They fled into Jordan and were granted the right to travel to UK almost immediately. Marwan Al Hashemy was accompanied by his wife, Nour, and their two children, Farida (ten) and Latifa (six). Marwan died in 1987 and Nour survived him until 1998. They had both been active in Middle Eastern political groups in north London, Nour especially so, sharing speaking platforms with a number of people of interest to us. There are full details on our database.

But what is currently still contentious information is that Latifa’s son, Farida’s nephew, Jihad, has apparently lived up to his name. He is reported to have joined ISIS via the Turkey route in 2015. Then aged twenty, he certainly disappeared from his college course in Business and Marketing at Hackney Metro (2014 intake) and he certainly travelled to Istanbul in May 2015. The last information we have on him relates to his paying his hotel bill for a three-night stay using his own credit card. From that day, he seems to have adopted a completely new identity, accessing none of his previous identity-confirming devices or facilities. There are neither financial transactions in his name nor electronic device locators to indicate his whereabouts since May 17, 2015. We have a possible match, though the likelihood of exactness is low (less than ten percent) relating to a conversation recorded by the resident management systems of a taxi in eastern Turkey on 20 May 2015, just three days later. The conversation was being monitored in real time by the local security forces, because they were engaged in detailed monitoring of another of the taxi’s occupants, who was clearly the person sitting in the front seat next to the driver. Turkish Intelligence have not revealed the identity of their individual of interest, though our website indicates that we may know the person concerned. For details, please access the link located on Jihad Al Hashemy’s page. And, if anyone has evidence of prior links between this individual of interest and Jihad Al Hashemy, please notify your superior, and please do include details of any third-party passing contacts on whom you have information. There were eight passengers in the taxi. The monitored subject did most of the talking and two other passengers, both of whom, it has been established, were traveling to the Syrian border to join ISIS, also made significant contributions. Their identities, which may be of interest, can also be accessed via the above-mentioned link.

The layout of the taxi was as normal for this model of vehicle, with two passengers in the front next to the driver and then two rows of three seats behind, with the third seat at the end of the middle row folding into the gap above the space for accessing the rear block after the other occupants had taken their seats. Because the vehicle was standard issue, in other words this was a covert operation conducted in a production vehicle without special modifications, the only voice recording that was clear came from the front two rows of seats. Added to that was the problem that the folding seat squeaked loudly at every bump in the ride and roads in eastern Turkey are not known for the integrity of their surface. As a consequence, we only have a record of a few words spoken by our passenger of interest at the back and those were a shouted exclamation when the vehicle suffered a near miss while overtaking a truck. He was not silent during the journey, but the conversation at the rear of the taxi merely became uncleanable background noise on the recording. The voice match with Latifa’s son, Jihad, is less than ten per cent confident, but it remains a possible link. The taxi, of course, was an on-demand service. The passengers paid in cash, so the driver kept no records of who was traveling that day. There have been subsequent reports that an individual with a good match to Jihad’s features entered Afghanistan a few months ago, which would have meant he was at least five years in Syria, but the source of this recent information is not wholly trustworthy, and the identity match is at best circumstantial. This represents, however, the only lead we currently have relating to his whereabouts.

This is all quite circumstantial, of course, but the possibility remains that Farida Al Hashemy knows of her nephew’s actions and whereabouts, though there exists no communication data to verify this. She, herself, however, has regularly flirted with organizations that would suggest sympathy with ISIS and radical extremism in general, though there are no open declarations from her to confirm that support. Farida, herself, is unmarried and has no children. In her own words, she has devoted her life to the Palestinian cause, and she describes herself as ‘still fighting for her homeland’. GASSED and, via that organisation, Off Uking Palace would appear, therefore, to be side-lines, perhaps vehicles to allow her to access publicity opportunities or even attract possible recruits to her other affiliations.

Farida Al Hashemy speaks with a strong Arabic-English accent, with many of the guttural vowel sounds of her native Arabic preserved.

FAH Hello everyone. Off Uking Palace (several chants subside quickly). We have some indications that there are now four members of the Planning Committee who are willing to speak against the Uking Palace application. This is progress, because up to now we have had only general messages of support. These are statements of opposition which are currently not published, but I understand that the individuals concerned are willing to talk to the media. Of course, whether the planning issue will be re-opened to allow these individuals to express their opposition is still not known. At the moment, the Government is blocking the reopening of the matter, saying that all due processes have been completed and there can be no justification for backtracking. As far as they are concerned, the project is now ready for implementation, which means the building can start. (Murmuring and boos.) We understand, however, that Uking, itself, is seeking a delay in the project. It may be that rumours of restrictions on the entry of foreign students might have caused some second thoughts on their behalf. Brexit, of course, and the general air of xenophobia that it represents, are both anathema to Uking’s longer term aims, but I am sure any delay will be short, given that this company has bought their way to the top repeatedly in the past. This project, of course, relies on the ability of foreign students to come to the UK without restriction, especially in the case of Uking Palace because we are of the opinion that it is just a cover for building what will eventually become privately-owned second homes for immigrants from China. The size of the one-bedroom apartments and their layout suggest strongly that they are designed so they can be adapted to two-bed with minimal change. Personally, I think that these statements by Uking are opinion management, designed to quieten the opposition while the project gets seriously underway. Once started, it would soon reach a point where it would be difficult to stop it.

The speaker paused here to reassemble her notes. She seemed to reject three or four documents from her original running order. It could be merely an indication of lack of preparation or time, but only enhanced imaging from a video record to establish the content of those documents can shed light on this. As previously stated, video was not an appropriate tool for this gathering, so if these documents are deemed of interest, they will have to be accessed by other means.

FAH We have written more letters to MPs. We have printed the text we sent at the bottom of the meeting leaflet, and they are on our OUP website. We have had replies, but only at the level of acknowledgement. There seems to be a veil of silence over the issue. Nobody wants to speak out in public against this project, but equally nobody wants to be seen to support it either. Uking Palace seems to be progressing in spite of or perhaps because of everyone’s apparent disinterest.

FAH We still can count on the support of Shamila Shah from the local Gazette, but she is finding it harder and harder to get her articles published. She thinks the editor is trying to gag her. She needs your support. Please can as many people as possible write to the Gazette asking for the paper to publish her articles on Uking? All that is needed is a short letter to the editor saying that you are interested in the project and that you are keen to hear the latest. You do not need to express any opinion. Let’s make it a free speech issue, rather than a campaign. Of course, we know that not many people actually read the news coverage in the Gazette, but it is the existence of such an article in print that allowed us in the past to lever the subject into other media.

FAH Now I must raise the issue of coverage in the national press. Wendy Davis in The News has been taking an interest in the project ever since it became a campaign. Now I’m sure we all know where Wendy Davis is coming from. She is fiercely right-wing, rabidly pro-Brexit, libertarian and an ideological free trader, but of course she does not support a free market in labour, so opposes freedom of movement and indeed any aspect of labour rights legislation. Her support for Uking Palace is getting stronger and she has successfully raised the project’s status via her articles to the status of national political significance. She seems to be exceptionally well informed, to such an extent that she seems to have details of what the campaign is going to do before we have published anything ourselves! If anyone has anything on Wendy Davis, please share what you have with one of the participating groups via the email link on our website.

FAH And speaking of media, we had an interview with Radio Thames Flow just last week. The reporter contacted us having read one of Shamila’s previous articles that we had lodged on the website. The interview was conducted at Uking’s proposed site and was featured in the “About Town” programme at seven o’clock in the evening last Thursday. It was edited, of course, and the final article was only just over a minute, but it kept us on the map.

FAH That’s about it, I’m afraid it’s not much, but things will no doubt warm up if the construction work were to start. There would then be opportunities for direct action, which is always good for the media. Thanks.

There was applause, but it was muted. Elsie Pitcairn spoke again to introduce the next speaker, Alex Taub, the gist of whose presentation now follows. Alex Taub is a specialist in educational migration. He is a researcher and teacher at Hackney Metro, but spends most of his time doing field work, meaning that he is regularly away from his institution for more than half of the year. His specialism is Asia, hence his interest in Uking Palace, but he has done most of his work on Indian, Pakistani, Bangladeshi, Sri Lankan and Filipino students. His interest in Chinese students really grew out of Hackney Metro’s declared support of Uking Palace, so he has been researching the migration habits of Chinese students for only about two years. This is not mentioned here merely in passing. Taub’s relative inexperience in the area ought to make it easy to find a more experienced researcher in the field, one with a different political stance from Taub, to refute his findings, should the need arise.

Alex Taub is also a socialist, undoubtedly sympathetic towards Trotskyite tactics. He is very much of the old guard Left, having had little to do with the environmentally focused groups of more recent years. In the past, he has not usually been involved in anything with an environmental or community focus, so Uking Palace might be a first for him on all fronts. But neither has he shied away from such issues, so his stance remains ambiguous. Our opinion on his involvement with the OUP campaign is that it stems from his albeit loose association with PAR. Our assessment is that this organization is a mere front for the more usual one we encounter so often in relation to ‘direct action’ campaigns. It is staffed by the same individuals who occupy known positions in the sister organisation, and it also appears to have similar membership rules. Documents seem to be shared across the two groups, with only headings changed. Details of Taub’s past association with PAR’s bigger and older sister organization can be found in Taub’s file on the website. Search on ‘Taub Hackney Metro affiliations’ to locate the record.

Taub spoke for twenty minutes. Since his presentation was just a summary of a published paper and included no new material, I will not include any verbatim quote from his speech. The whole article is published in the Spring issue of the Educational Migration Research Journal, VolXXIII No2, pp347-372, and can be accessed freely via Jstor. In summary, Alex Taub began by listing the increasing numbers of Chinese students in UK higher education. He then gave details of the fees paid and the impact these sums were having on the funding basis of many institutions. He looked at the average ratio of tuition fees to accommodation costs for foreign students across the whole sector and for China-recruited students in particular. He then contrasted that figure with the data relating to the Uking development, where the ratio of accommodation to tuition was significantly higher, an argument that he interpreted as revealing the elite bias of the development. He also looked at the proportion of China-recruited higher education students who stayed on in the UK after graduation and concluded that this proportion increased with the increased wealth and social class of the students themselves. His final point was that, given the elite profile of the students and the preferred ownership scheme rumoured to be associated with the Uking development, the project as a whole was being established as a means to promote residency, not short-term student accommodation. The rumour that was being spread at this meeting, incidentally, was that Uking will offer its tenants the option of paying a higher rental rate during their studies in return for an option to buy an extended lease at a price set at the start of the tenancy, a lease that would transfer ownership for a fifteen-year period, longer for higher initial outlays. There has been no mention of such an arrangement from the company, incidentally. There was a high degree of interest in Alex Taub’s presentation, but the message it delivered did not seem to satisfy the slogan-hungry audience, despite the fact that the substance of his paper is both significant and hard to refute. Elsie Pitcairn then introduced Daisy Johnson, loud applause droning out her announced affiliation.

Daisy Johnson is a well-known campaigner. She has appeared in the media on numerous occasions over the last decade, usually speaking on race relations and equality issues, more recently on the rights of the Windrush generation and more recently still on Black Lives Matter. She was an organiser of the demonstration in Tower Hamlets in 2020 after the death of George Floyd, a demonstration which provoked a counterdemonstration by white supremacist groups. The occasion passed without incident, but remnants of both groups were still in the Commercial Road area on the night of the demonstration. There was a disturbance and riot police were in attendance. Eighteen arrests were made. The incident was not reported on national media. (Updated July 2020)

Daisy Johnson is now sixty-seven. She is ostensibly retired from political life, having been a long-standing councillor and having served one term as a London Assembly Member. She has spent the last five years promoting EAR, East London Against Racism which, ostensibly, is a membership organization based in Tower Hamlets, but has declared members from throughout the country. Daisy Johnson undoubtedly is sincere about her beliefs and is committed to the stated aims of the group. She does, however, use the organisation’s structures and profile to pursue her own political ends, the media invitations in particular allowing her to keep her public profile active. Colleagues may wish to open the personal file on Ms Johnson, where numerous links with both commercial and non-governmental organisations are listed. Her affiliations and interests are extensive. Again, cross-linking information, if you have any, would be welcome.

DJ (She began by raising her arms to acknowledge the rapturous applause and then to quell it. Her voice is stentorian, her presence vast and her charisma almost tangible. She speaks with a heavy, perhaps partially manufactured Jamaican patois accent.) Good evening everybody and thanks to you all for turning out tonight. We are here to address a single issue, the Uking Palace development, and I will say much about it. But I also want to widen the debate, especially in the light of what Dr. Taub has just said about this accommodation. Far from being mere student residence, the project is actually aimed at recruiting medium-term elite residents into our city. Extending Dr. Taub’s argument, we imagine that, in four- or five-year’s time, when all the Uking Palace units are occupied by leaseholders, the company Uking will buy more of the old industrial area and build more elite blocks. Surely that is the scenario we face! What would be the logic in not doing so if their business model on the first phase had already proved successful?

DJ (Waiting for the audience murmuring to subside) But this leads me to ask why it is that there is permission to build these blocks aimed at elite Chinese students when there is no construction of affordable housing for those of us who already live here? (Loud applause.) There are thousands of people in this area of London living in poor quality, old, damp or even rat-infested housing. They need help. They need affordable, good quality housing, possibly of the kind that councils used to build. Nowadays, even a Victorian terrace around here costs over half a million. How many families can get near the mortgage needed to buy that? (Shouts of nobody, not us, etc.)

DJ And, as always, ethnic minorities are at the bottom of the pile, economically and socially. They can’t afford elite flats, even if they are Chinese! Allowing projects like Uking Palace to go ahead will change the nature of this community. Eventually it will make affordable housing harder to build, harder to obtain and, if the project expands, prices in the area will put all but the worst, lowest standard accommodation out of the reach of the poor.

Daisy Johnson spoke for a further twenty minutes and covered more on housing, aspects of racism, the rights of Windrush survivors and finished with an all-out attack on the government, claiming that the planning acceptance had been effectively purchased by donations to the party’s national funds. She did not name individuals but did refer the audience to the newspaper and television coverage of the issue.

Daisy Johnson is potentially a powerful and influential voice within the Off Uking Palace campaign. She is respected and has a record of tactical success in pursuing issues that interest her. We will have to employ defensive tactics of our own to question her eligibility to comment on this development.

Now it has come to light from information I have supplied to my manager that Daisy Johnson, when she was a member of the London Assembly, endorsed a proposal that actually came from within Hackney Metro University to expand its offer in certain areas of its curriculum in order to attract more students from overseas, specifically wealthy Chinese students. At the time, Daisy Johnson declared her overall support for the plan, based on an assumption that funding for universities like Hackney Metro would come under pressure as a result of the austerity policies being followed at the time. I have secured a copy of the original document and have forwarded it to Wendy Davis for use in an article she is preparing for The News.

Elsie Pitcairn closed the meeting by announcing another public meeting in a month’s time and the possibility of a demonstration at the proposed site the following weekend. The meeting ended without further chanting at half past nine.