Outrage at eviction company advert calling tenants ‘household pests’ | Society. Housing rights campaigners have called for the removal of adverts on Facebook for an eviction company that has been accused of likening tenants to vermin. The ads – which feature a piece of cheese and describe tenants as “pests” – are for a Midlands-based company called Remove a Tenant, which will evict people from properties across England and Wales and specialises in domestic repossessions. Offering packages costing from £50, the adverts ask: “Are your tenants household pests?
If so we are sure we can help.” Seb Klier, campaigns manager at Generation Rent, the operating name of the National Private Tenants Organisation, said comparing tenants to vermin provided a shocking insight into the way renters are viewed by some landlords and agents. “We’re amazed this advert was posted in the first place, and it should be taken down immediately.
The company’s website states: “It is often said that the law regarding tenant eviction is always on the side of the tenant. Rats, roaches and overcrowding: the battle against slum landlords | Society. Mohammad Ayaz’s sunken, red-ringed eyes tell a desperate story of night shifts, low pay and poor housing. He hovers nervously outside the room he shares with his wife as police and housing officers check how many others are living in the small terraced house in east London. “You’ve done nothing wrong,” says Paul Oatt, a housing officer with Newham council. “Landlords who rent a house here have to have a licence, like you have to have a driving licence.” Ayaz earns £8 an hour working at a takeaway pizza shop. “We pay £100 a week for our room,” he says timidly. “I didn’t think London would be like this.” It soon becomes clear why he has not followed the officers into the kitchen when a rat the size of a pint glass bursts from a pile of boxes and darts into a food cupboard.
This rodent-infested, overcrowded house in deprived Little Ilford on Newham’s eastern border earns Ayaz’s landlord between £1,500 and £2,500 a month. But the scheme’s future is hanging in the balance. The Elvises of Porthcawl – Elvis impersonators in pictures | Music. At last men are joining our conversation about toxic masculinity | Rhiannon Lucy Cosslett | Opinion. Chris Hemmings used to be a lad. He was, all in all, the sort of lad that I – and no doubt many other young women – would have avoided at university. We know the type well. Part of a rugby club that rejoiced in the objectification and humiliation of women, these lads would throw full pints in their female classmates’ faces, or choose them as victims for their game of “hot leg” (where you piss down a girl’s leg as she is dancing with you, holding on to her so she cannot move away, as your friends leer and hers, presumably, stand horrified and powerless).
Hemmings never did “hot leg” himself but he did, he says, egg on others. Hemmings was on the frontline of what the media called “lad culture”. Because feminists, contrary to what the ignorant and paranoid might think, don’t hate men. In his book, Hemmings talks to psychologists, men who lost their friends to suicide, and to others who self-harm. Still, it sticks in the craw a bit too – of course it does.
William Giraldi on life as a bookish bodybuilder: 'It's a poisoned way to be a man' | Books. As a teenage bodybuilder, William Giraldi would hide a battered old Keats paperback between the pages of Muscle & Fitness magazine to read during his evening cardio, a move he calls “a reversal of the classic Playboy mag inside a textbook”. His new memoir, The Hero’s Body, is littered with anecdotes like this: tales of the insecurities and absurdities of masculinity, which document the lengths men go to in order to feel a sense of self-worth in their manhood.
Literature, art, music – almost anything that would be of no use on a battlefield – were condemned as effeminate by Giraldi’s family and gym buddies, forcing him to pursue these interests in secret. “That’s the perfect illustration of the kind of bifurcated life I was leading at the time,” Giraldi says, likening his furtive Keats reading to that of a gay person in the closet. “You’ve got this part of yourself that’s central to yourself, that’s at the hub of you.
“I really do hope to win this,” he says. Seaside towns among most deprived communities in UK | Inequality. Coastal communities are lagging behind inland areas, with some of the worst levels of economic and social deprivation in the UK, a report shows. Comparison of earnings, employment, health and education data in local authority areas identified “pockets of significant deprivation” in seaside towns and a widening gap between coastal communities and the rest of the country. The government has pledged to give £40m to coastal areas in an attempt to boost employment and encourage tourism. However, researchers said some communities were being overlooked by policymakers, who were preoccupied with more affluent centres. Analysis by the Social Market Foundation (SMF) thinktank found that in 85% of Britain’s 98 coastal local authorities, people earned below the national average for 2016, with employees in seaside communities paid about £3,600 less.
The report commissioned by BBC Breakfast also found: How Not to Be a Boy by Robert Webb review – the gender conditioning of men | Books. The actor and comedian Robert Webb is seven years old when the penny drops about boys and their feelings. He is in his final year at infant school and is known for being quiet. “I wish they were all like you, Robert,” say the mums at birthday parties as the boys run noisily amok, while his mother tells his teachers, “He’s just a bit shy.” At the local golf club where his granddad works as a kitchen steward, Webb finds a bee on the gravel courtyard and, observing its laboured attempts at crawling, realises it is close to death. Rain is on its way so he builds a small circle of tiny stones around it for protection and, with tears in his eyes, leaves it to its fate.
“I’m not going to tell anyone about this, not even Nan or [Aunty] Tru or Mum,” he decides. In this coming-of-age memoir, Webb, who was born in 1972, tells the story of his upbringing as the youngest son of a working-class woodcutter in the village of Woodhall Spa in Lincolnshire. Homeless man jailed for Hyde Park murder | UK news. A homeless man has been jailed for at least 26 years for murdering a “kind and peace-loving” carer in London’s Hyde Park after slipping through the hands of authorities at least six times in two years. Hani Khalaf, 22, survived on the streets of Britain by stealing food and clothes after arriving in the back of a lorry posing as a Syrian asylum seeker, the Old Bailey heard. The Egyptian national was bailed for shoplifting hours before he kicked, punched and stamped 62-year-old Jairo Medina to death near Speakers’ Corner on the evening of 11 August last year.
He pocketed Medina’s cash and stole his mobile phone, which he tried to sell on hours later. Following a retrial, Khalaf was found guilty of murder and jailed for life with a minimum of 26 years. The judge Wendy Joseph QC said Khalaf had been sent back into the community time and again because of a failure to deport him and Medina had paid for it “with his life”. Show Me a Hero review – a symphonic mini-series from David Simon | Television & radio. What is it? Based on a true story about 1980s social housing in a New York suburb, this was David Simon’s next co-writing gig after Treme. Why you’ll love it: I missed this mini-series, based on Lisa Belkin’s non-fiction book, when it came out in 2015, despite loving Simon’s work on The Wire. (Treme also languishes on the “to be viewed” pile.) Saturated as I am in a daily torrent of era-defining television, Simon’s six-parter about political ambition and the poverty gap, set in late-80s Yonkers, slipped past me into the digisphere, marked for future attention.
Oscar Isaac plays Nick Wasicsko, a young, fiercely ambitious local politician with his sights set on the mayor’s office. When we join him, Wasicsko is a self-styled voice of the (white) people, campaigning against the allocation of social housing in an affluent area of Yonkers. His super power is his feeling for the disadvantaged in any situation. Where: NOW TV/Sky Box Sets.
Length: Six 60-minute episodes, available to stream now. 'We're past the tipping point': Boltonians respond to the market city's decline | Cities. This week Guardian Cities published an article by former Bolton resident Andy Walton – a deeply personal piece on the once-mighty northern city’s decline, and the gutting of its historical centre. Almost one in four shops in the once-thriving market hub now stand vacant, with the decline of industry and the deterioration of the inner city blamed on poor decision-making and missed opportunities by local authorities. The article struck a chord with many of the city’s residents, and prompted a defiant response from local authorities, who took umbrage at Walton’s reporting that Bolton had been hollowed out to become a “nothing of a town”. On Wednesday, The Bolton News reported on town leaders’ frustrated response to the story, with Margaret Asquith, the chief executive of the city council, expressing concern about the “disheartening” effect it could have on the city’s young people.
“It’s disappointing,” added council leader Cliff Morris. One woman told him his piece had moved her to tears. Humankind by Timothy Morton review – no more leftist defeatism, everything is connected | Books. In 2015, Cecil the lion was shot with an arrow by a big-game hunting American called Walter Palmer. Facebook and Twitter erupted in outrage against the insouciant dentist, UN resolutions were passed, Palmer was stalked and his extradition to face charges in Zimbabwe demanded. Timothy Morton takes Palmer’s flash-mob shaming as a hopeful sign. We may be living in dark times – the epoch he and other radical thinkers call the Anthropocene, in which our species has committed ecological devastation, presided over the sixth mass extinction event (animal populations across the planet have decreased by as much as 80% since 1900) and got our degraded kicks by offing lovely lions.
But, in a dialectical twist, humans are becoming so aware of what we’ve done that we are now capable of bringing about change. We have airbrushed out the historical disaster Morton calls “the Severing”, a name that gives his argument a voguish Game of Thrones-like vibe. How might we do that? That’s right – excrement. Thousands of Trump-shaped ecstasy tablets seized in Germany | World news. Day of moaning declared in north of England over train woes | UK news. A day of moaning has been declared across the north of England, with public transport users encouraged to let rip about their terrible journeys. Commuters are urged to write to their MPs and flood radio and TV phone-ins on Monday to express their frustration with the region’s poor transport provision.
The event was called after the transport secretary, Chris Grayling, indicated his support for Crossrail 2, a £30bn train line across London, days after cancelling electrification projects to northern rail lines. It was a Conservative manifesto promise to electrify the lines, with Grayling’s predecessor, Patrick McLoughlin, saying in 2015 that “the electrification programme is central to our ambitious plans to transform the rail network across the country”. Grayling argues electrification is unnecessary because new “bi-modal” trains are capable of switching between electric and diesel operation.
“The reality is that the government promised to fully electrify these lines. 'Northern powerhouse' £556m boost described as missed opportunity | Politics. Theresa May’s announcement of a £556m boost for the “northern powerhouse” has been described as a missed opportunity by business leaders amid warnings of an “increasing east-west divide” of government investment. The prime minister announced a cash injection for a raft of projects, including a manufacturing park near the Nissan plant in Sunderland, aimed at creating thousands of jobs as part of the government’s post-Brexit industrial strategy.
In her first regional cabinet meeting in the north-west of England, May singled out projects including the Goole intermodal terminal, aimed at linking the east Yorkshire town’s existing rail, sea, motorway and waterway hubs. The announcement of £556m spread across 11 local enterprise partnerships marks May’s first financial commitment to George Osborne’s scheme since she became prime minister last July. “In fact, Greater Manchester gets much more per head of population than anywhere else in [the] north. Safe by Ryan Gattis review – a Ghost story with a difference | Books. Ryan Gattis’s 2015 novel, All Involved, featured 17 first-person narratives over a period of 144 hours during the 1992 LA riots. His new book, Safe, again set among the drug ganglands of Los Angeles, similarly features a compressed timeline – 48 hours – but here Gattis pares the voices to just two narrators.
Ricky “Ghost” Mendoza is a former addict and now safe-cracker for the DEA: “Ricky Mendoza, Junior, wasn’t my real name, just one I took as my legal back when it seemed smart to. Like, the real me died back when I changed it and what’s left of me just floats.” Meanwhile Rudy “Glasses” Reyes is a drug-runner for one of LA’s most notorious gangsters, Rooster: “When you work for him, you got to be invisible. Safe opens with Ghost cracking a drug baron’s safe for the DEA and declaring that “if I get into this safe and they leave me alone while I’m doing it, I’m taking the money. What transpires is no ordinary gangster cat-and-mouse chase. The Preston Model. Inheriting a legacy of deindustrialization and faced with mounting socio-economic challenges, municipal officials in Preston in the UK – one of the birthplaces of the Industrial Revolution – have been exploring new ways to create a more inclusive and democratic local economy as the foundation for systemic transformation.
They have been able to draw upon long-standing regional traditions dating back to the founding of the modern cooperative movement in nearby Rochdale in 1844, but have also looked to promising examples overseas – including the ‘Cleveland Model’ in Ohio – for inspiration. We are pleased to publish this article on their progress and ambitions. –The Next System Project When Labour took control of Preston City Council from a Conservative-Liberal Democrat alliance in May 2011, it appeared a bittersweet victory. Traditional city growth models, based on attracting inward investment for big infrastructure projects, could no longer be relied upon. Getting started Anchors engaged.
Bournville again: can a new Birmingham hospital recreate the Cadbury effect? | Cities. Imagine a large employer moving its operations to a city and developing a plan – not just for the growth of the business, but also the long-term stewardship of its new neighbourhood. The history of the late 1800s is full of such employers, but the Cadbury family and their model village of Bournville, to the south of Birmingham, stands out. Visit Bournville today and remarkably little has changed since George and Richard Cadbury created the world’s first planned community. The arts-and-crafts housing with large gardens and a mix of social rental and owner-occupier tenures are preserved, the wide open spaces and sports facilities remain – and there is still no pub.
It’s a chocolate-box village stewarded since 1900 by the Bournville Village Trust, and still offering lessons to the large and increasingly complex city region in which it is based. Plans are afoot, however, to revive this neighbourhood along the lines of the philanthropists of the past. The north remembers: how once-proud Bolton became 'a nothing of a town' | Cities.