Dear Mr Hammond, a few questions on behalf of Wimbledon constituents before the election...

Dear Mr Hammond,

I know that I could email you directly, as I have done so in the past, and that you would be obliged to respond as I am one of your constituents, but I'd like my questions in regard to your campaign leaflet to be asked and answered publicly in the interests of transparency. I'm sure you have no objections to such openness during this election campaign. Feel free to post your answers in the comments section at the end as I am sure plenty of constituents will be interested in what you have to stay. Let's start, shall we?

Brexit

1. Why is the bit about Brexit in hard-to-read blue-on-blue at the bottom of the page and why is it not included in the top five priorities? Leaving the EU is the biggest political, economic and social upheaval of our lifetimes, and the constituency of Wimbledon voted overwhelmingly to remain in the EU, so surely it deserves more than this cursory effort? You claim to have "consistently opposed a hard Brexit" yet you helped Theresa May wave through Article 50. Given that today the story has broken about Theresa May's disastrous and embarrassing dinner with Claude Juncker, it is obvious she is not competent enough to lead such complex negotiations. Why should we trust Theresa May not to send us over a hard Brexit cliff or potentially leave us with no deal and therefore calamitous WTO rules?

St Helier Hospital and local health services

 

2. In 2012, you voted for the Health and Social Care Act. This act led to the creation of Clinical Commissioning Groups (CCGs) to make decisions at a local level. It is the CCGs who will decide the future of St Helier Hospital, not the hospital chief executive, so why have you not included any reassurances from Merton CCG? While holding a public meeting is a great way to create warm, fuzzy feelings of doing something, what have your public meetings achieved? How many CCG meetings have you personally attended? If you have attended any CCG meetings, did you ask any questions about the future of local health services? If so, what questions did you ask and what responses did you receive?

3. Why have you referred to the Nelson Health Centre as the Nelson Hospital? It has not been functioning as a hospital for quite some time now. It is not exactly a busy facility. Are you campaigning for the centre, or the Raynes Park health centre, to include a walk-in clinic to relieve pressure on local GPs and A&E departments? Our area has lost a walk-in clinic with the closure of the Wilson Health Centre in Mitcham. This means our nearest walk-in clinic is in Teddington, a six-mile drive or public transport nightmare from Wimbledon. Do you think this is acceptable?

Morden town centre (Disclaimer: I live in Morden)

 

4. Did you press the previous Mayor of London, one Boris Johnson (Conservative), on the planned regeneration of Morden town centre or are you just pressing Sadiq Khan, the new, Labour mayor? Boris Johnson's 2015 plan achieved nothing. Indeed, Boris wasn't even interested in Morden tube station being rezoned as Zone 3 rather than Zone 4, which would have saved commuters money. Is this something you're interested in campaigning for on behalf of cash-strapped constituents? 

You have been the MP for Wimbledon since 2005 - you have had 12 years to campaign on behalf of Morden, and in five years I've lived here, the town centre still looks much the same. Can you please furnish us with some details of your tireless campaigning for Morden and any achievements?

Wimbledon town centre

5. Again, you have had 12 years as MP to improve the Wimbledon town centre. What have you been doing during all that time in regard to improving the area? I lived in Wimbledon in 2011 and, like the Morden town centre, it still looks much the same now as it did then, save for the moving of a statue. What is taking you so long? Exactly what does your pro-Wimbledon town centre campaigning involve and what results have you achieved since 2005?

Transport: Tramlink

 

6. The Rail Accident Investigation Bureau has found that in last November's Croydon tram crash, in which seven people were killed, the tram was travelling at 46mph in a 13mph zone. Is it worth trumpeting about 50 per cent more services when there has been a fatal accident on a Tramlink tram? Where is your concern for the victims, or do they not matter because they all lived outside the constituency? Is the push for more frequent tram services compromising passenger safety along the entire Tramlink lines?

Transport: Raynes Park station

7. OK, it's nice that the litter has been cleaned up from the embankment but, again, Raynes Park station has not changed one iota since I moved to the area in 2011. It is still terrible for disabled people, the platform still makes the train really hard for people to get on and off safely, the toilets are still terrible, there is still nowhere to change a baby's nappy. And, again, you've been the MP for 12 years. So I ask you, what have you been doing all this time in regard to improving Raynes Park station?

Transport: Crossrail 2 and the tube

8. Crossrail 2 will benefit the area as it means we will have another form of transport. It is impossible for such a major project to be undertaken without any disruption. Indeed, if Crossrail 2 results in a complete rebuilding of the Wimbledon Centre Court shopping centre, that would be a good thing. Do you not agree it is currently cumbersomely laid out? Do you not agree that the food court is now just an embarrassment? It has been reduced to a McDonalds, a defunct yoghurt stand and a photo booth. Would an overhaul of the shopping centre not draw in new businesses to the town centre?

9. While Wimbledon is undergoing work in regard to Crossrail 2, whenever that may be, will you campaign for businesses to consider relocating to Morden temporarily? This could give Morden the shot in the arm it needs to regenerate and improve the diversity of businesses on the high street.

10. Do you have any costings on extending the Northern Line to St Helier or is this merely a belief? The Northern Line extension to Nine Elms and Battersea Power Station from Kennington will cost £1.2 billion so that might help you come to some sort of realistic figure. Where will this money come from?

Employment and local businesses

 

11. My questions are about to come full circle... 

As per one of my Crossrail 2 questions, will you be encouraging more businesses to set up shop in Morden town centre? This is not just about temporary shops during Crossrail 2 construction but also long-term businesses on a high street that has not changed on your watch in at least six years.

12. Are you confident that Theresa May will negotiate a Brexit deal with the EU that will not adversely affect local businesses? What evidence do you have for your answer?

Thank you for your time and consideration, Mr Hammond. I look forward to your responses to my questions as a concerned constituent.

Kind regards,

Georgia Lewis

(You have my address, I have written to you before and I am obviously not going to publish it here)

A postscript to the manufactured Merton mosque outrage

The response to my last blog post on a ridiculous Daily Mail story about the mosque in the London borough of Merton has been very heartening indeed. Multiple residents of Merton, the borough in which I have happily lived for the last two years, have told me how ridiculous they found the Mail's attempt to portray Merton as some sort of hotbed of racial tension. Nobody who communicated with me after my blog post recognised the Merton David Goodhart tried to sell us in an article cynically timed to coincide with news on immigration changes announced this week.

As well as an overwhelmingly generous response from people who attend the Baitul Futuh mosque, non-Muslims also shared with me their acceptance of the mosque and their complete rejection of the suggestions in the article that the mosque has somehow created what Goodhart appallingly called a "polite apartheid."

Goodhart wrote that the mosque - the largest in Europe so therefore an instant catalyst for ragefits by Daily Mail disciples - "replaced" a dairy that employed hundreds of local people. Except there was a seven-year gap between the dairy closing and the mosque building work commencing. Merton residents who have lived there for longer than I have told me that after the dairy closed, the abandoned site attracted drug-related crime. It was not a pleasant part of the borough and the mosque gave that end of Morden (for Morden is just one part of the borough - not that you'd know that from the article...) a new lease of life and a new and interesting community.

The worshippers of the Baitul Futuh mosque are from the Ahmadiyya Muslim Community and their slogan is "Love for all, hatred for none." The worshippers perform a wide variety of charity work in Merton. I have been visited by a mother and daughter from the mosque who were collecting for the Save The Children charity, a non-sectarian organisation. The mosque has also raised money for the Queen's Jubilee charities, they hold regular blood donation drives, hold clean-up days to remove rubbish from the streets and joined other community groups in 2005 in a campaign to save and sensitively redevelop a popular local park. This is not the work of a group that refuses to integrate with the wider community. Indeed, attempts to stir up anti-mosque feeling by the National Front in 2002 were rejected by local residents and it was peacefully inaugurated in 2003.

My blog post has been tweeted to David Goodhart and I welcome his response to my critique of his attempt at journalism. He has, at the time of writing, not responded. It could well be that the published article is the result of the original copy going through an extreme editing process, as happened to many people who have written for the Mail in good faith and not recognised the story that has been published. But even extreme editing with an obvious agenda does not excuse Goodhart describing Merton as a "polite apartheid."

It was also heartening to not get trolled by UKIP, EDL or BNP types as a result of my blog post. The closest I received to a negative response was a bizarre tweet with a link to a horrific "honour" killing that took place in a Muslim family in Mitcham. Yes, Mitcham is part of the borough of Merton and "honour" killings are completely inexcusable, but there is no evidence that the Baitul Futuh mosque supports such crimes or that the family involved even attended the mosque.

Since writing yesterday's blog post, I have met via Twitter some very friendly people from the mosque - it turns out that one of my new virtual friends uses the same butcher that I do. In a fine example of cross-cultural integration, this is the very friendly Muslim butcher who has joked with me about using wine with his meat - his lamb mince and my red wine-laden moussaka are a winning culinary combination.

Soon these Twitter friendships will move from the online world to the real world. On April 12, I have been invited to visit the mosque and I look forward to this opportunity.



Photo by Fin Fahey

The Merton mosque and the manufactured outrage

I try not to share links from the Daily Mail website because that is what they want - clicks galore to keep the advertisers happy, regardless of the nonsense the articles regularly peddle. But I am making an exception for a particularly bizarre article in Mail this week written by "leading liberal commentator" David Goodhart (although he identifies as "post-liberal" on his Twitter account). This is because it paints an absurd picture of the London borough of Merton, where I live, and the article needs serious analysis.

Just as Andrew Pierce, an openly gay man, regularly writes pieces for the Mail opposing such things as marriage equality, it would appear that Goodhart is a liberal whom the paper has decided is OK and therefore he can be used to further agendas. The pitiful "OMG, the Muslims are taking over and white people are becoming extinct!" agenda is the one Goodhart is helping push, whether he realises it or not. This becomes increasingly obvious as you read what Goodhart has to say about the Baitul Futuh mosque.

The Baitul Futuh mosque, the largest in Europe with a capacity to accommodate more than 10,000 people, is like a rage lighting rod for the average Daily Mail reader. As Goodhart tells us, the mosque "dominates the neighbourhood." Sure, it's a big building, but the edifice that truly dominates this neighbourhood is the unfeasibly ugly council building which looks like row upon row of broken, rotten teeth looming above the library. For those who are offended by the mosque, the very sight of it is blocked by repulsive council offices as you stand at the Morden tube station.

Goodhart then appeals to the Daily Mail reader's yearning for a bygone (read: whiter...) era when he tells us that mosque "replaced an Express Dairies bottling plant which provided a few hundred jobs for local people and lots of milk bottles - an icon of an earlier, more homogenised age."

In the mind of the Mail reader, this screams: "THE EVIL MUSLIMS CAME TO A NICE, BRITISH BOROUGH AND TOOK BRITISH JOBS AWAY!"

Except the dairy closed in 1992 and the mosque was inaugurated in 2003.

In an insult to anyone who suffered under apartheid in South Africa, Nazi Germany or segregated America, Goodhart says that in Merton "a polite apartheid reigns, an accommodation rather than an integration." He then goes on to tell us that "the white population has more or less reluctantly shuffled along the bench and allowed others to sit down." Honestly, he is making my innocuous middle-class neighbourhood sound like a place that requires the activism of a terrifying white equivalent of Rosa Parks.

The white rage continues as Goodhart tells us that Merton's minority population as risen from 10% in 1980 to more than 50% today and the primary schools "which were still majority white as recently as 2003 - are now 64% ethnic minority."

Except, according to the last census, this is crap. Of the 20 wards that make up Merton, all of them have white ethnic groups in the majority - ranging from 57.12% in Longthornton to 87.21% in Lower Morden. The overall average for all the wards is 75.23% of people in white ethnic groups.

There's no real explanation from Goodhart as to why a white majority (which exists even though he says it doesn't) is a good thing or how this awesome whiteness is defined. Ever the generous soul, Goodhart says that because there's no one dominant minority in Merton, this "helps to make the changes feel less threatening." Well, that's a relief then. We can't have the white people freaking out at all this multiculturalism.

And, like all good attempts to manufacture outrage, there is a paragraph to which any sane person would say: "So what?". Goodhart "reports" that at a park near the station, on a sunny day (not that we've had a sunny day for a while so God knows when he did this particular piece of stellar research...) "the place is usually full but divided along ethnic lines: large groups of Pakistani women picnicking with children, Polish guys drinking beer, young Indian men playing cricket, Africans playing basketball."

What would he prefer? If the Pakistani women and their kids had a beer with Poles before joining in a vigorous game of basketball with the Africans? Did he ask all these people how they felt about life in Merton? Is he certain all the cricket players were Indian, for cricket is very popular in Pakistan and Sri Lanka too? Hell, is he even sure all these people were born outside the UK?

Moving swiftly along, Goodhart inadvertently destroys one of the Daily Mail's favourite immigrant myths when he writes that "several of the more entrepreneurial communities, such as the Indians and Tamils and Iraqi Kurds, create jobs". So they create jobs, contribute tax revenue and aren't claiming benefits. Good to know!

But Goodhart concludes this line with the mournful "but they invariably go to members of their own community." Much like a lot of white people do, I would imagine.

Not content with passing off random observations in a park on a sunny day as fact, Goodhart plays another Daily Mail trump card - the fear of immigrant crime. He tells us that "some minorities import historic feuds." Instead of providing any real crime stats or interviewing anyone from the local police to back up this portrayal of Merton as a hotbed of racial tension, Goodhart tells us: "Orthodox Muslims in the area are suspicious of the Ahmadiyans [who worship at the Baitul Futuh mosque]; Tamil youths fight among themselves, as do Somalis; and the historic black (Caribbean and African) versus Asian antipathy is also played out on some streets."

Then Goodhart jumps off on another tangent and tells us that "economically, many minority Mertonites are doing pretty well in their enclaves." ("Enclaves  being Daily Mail-speak for "ghetto") He points out that it's the Indians and Chinese who are "doing best at school and in jobs, closely tracked by Koreans and Tamils" and, like the rest of the UK, "the white British are somewhere in the middle." I'm sorry if anyone is offended by people from ethnic minorities getting an education but this does not stop white kids from striving to do well at school. Are all white families failing to put a high value education for their kids? Surely that is a stupid stereotype on par with everything else Goodhart has spewed forth in this sad article.

Finally, Goodhart manages to quote someone, albeit anonymously, when a hairdresser tells him: "We don't like it, but we don't have much choice, do we?" of a "Muslim hair-cutter" who opened a shop two doors along. No, sweetheart, you don't have much choice - it's a free market economy. Offer your customers good service and good value and you'll probably stay in business. Would she say the same thing if a spate of Christian salons opened in Merton?

Then, after saying that the Ahmadiyans who worship at the big mosque are "model immigrants in many ways" and pointing out that they are grateful to live safely here and that they took out advertisements on London buses congratulating the Queen on her Diamond Jubilee, Goodhart goes on to quote another nameless resident. He describes him as "White Heritage Elder Male" and he was at a Merton council focus group when he said: "We've lost this place to other cultures. It's not English any more."

It is not clear what exactly parts of English life are now denied to White Heritage Elder Male as a result of all these immigrants. Goodhart didn't elaborate. Did he even bother to ask White Heritage Elder Male any hard questions after the focus group was over?

Is this gigantic mosque is causing the erosion of Christianity in Merton - that favourite measure of Britishness of the Mail? Probably not. Like the ethnicity question in the last census, the religion question revealed that a majority of residents in every ward identify as Christian. From a still-high low of 54.59% in Graveney to 74.36% in Lower Morden, it would appear that Merton is not on the verge of mass conversion to Islam.

Goodhart lectures us, saying that local political leaders "have no choice but to celebrate the new diversity." That'd be the diverse people who have has created jobs, opened businesses, paid taxes, not claimed nearly as much money in benefits as the Daily Mail would like us to believe and do such heinous things as have picnics, play cricket, drink a few beers and shoot hoops in the park on a sunny day.

The article then comes out with the usual argle-bargle about how we should be proud to be British. Goodhart, despite the earlier nonsense, even says that "very few British peoploe think you have to be white to be part of this." Good. Then why so much dishonest blather about white people being in a minority and losing their culture then?

Bizarrely, he concludes with the story of local Labour MP Siobhain McDonagh's father who arrived in Britain in the 1940s to work as a labourer. He married an Irish nurse, they had two daughters both did well with one becoming an MP and the other becoming General-Secretary of the Labour Party. Goodhart writes sentimentally as he tells of the father watching one of his daughters become a baroness and muttering under his breath: "Only in England... Only in England."

He says that he was "not technically correct - these things happen in other places, too - but they happen here far more than we admit and it's time our national story reflected them."

Right. So he concludes that our national story should reflect the achievements of immigrants? Or does he mean only white immigrants? It's hard to tell from such a flabby, directionless article what he is driving at with that conclusion. Is he trying to claw back some liberal credibility at the end? Is he trying to paint a completely false picture of the multicultural neighbourhood in which I love to live? Whatever the case, all this article has achieved is (at the time of writing) 571 reader comments, most of which indicate Goodhart succeeded in peddling more Daily Mail immigrant myths. Well played, sir.Well played...





Photo courtesy of sarflondondunc