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Spectator
7 days ago
- Politics
- Spectator
The migrant hotel protests are all about class
'It's got nothing to do with racism. My daughter is black. She's half-Ghanian,' says one Isle of Dogs resident, watching the stand-off outside the Britannia Hotel in Canary Wharf. She's come with a friend who's worried for her young child. 'I've got a seven-year-old and I don't want her to play downstairs. You're scared for them, really scared.' Since Lutfur Rahman's Tower Hamlets council announced that the hotel would be used to house asylum seekers, protesters gather daily. Steel fencing has been erected to guard the entrance. Police officers line up on the edge of the pavement. Protesters attend regularly, sometimes daily. They wear British flags, Nike Tech tracksuits, with many in face masks and balaclavas to hide their identities. Some protestors are very glamorous, knowing they might be on TV. Others are in sliders. On Friday, counter-protesters affiliated with Stand Up to Racism arrive. They line up on the other side of the road, holding yellow and pink placards, shipped in by the organisers. Many are young women. Some have colourful hair and septum piercings, others wear Birkenstocks and keffiyehs. Even local resident Gary Stevenson, trader turned left-wing YouTuber, turns up to gawk at the protesters. I ask him what he thinks of the protest, he says I'll have to speak to his agent. The police presence is heavy. Class, not race, is the driving force of division here. Working-class rage is boiling up in the UK. Canary Wharf is in the borough of Tower Hamlets, which has the highest rate of child poverty in the UK. The overall poverty rate is nearly double the average for London. Research shows that social cohesion breaks down in deprived areas. Here, it's not just breaking down; it's shattering. The protesters aren't angry about ethnicity, but economics. Locals resent the government funding full-board accommodation for asylum seekers while they struggle. As an asylum seeker in Britain, the government covers your basic needs: accommodation, financial support that can add up to nearly £50 a week, healthcare and education. Councils such as Wandsworth have even launched a scheme where asylum seekers can get a 50 per cent discount on Lime and Forest bikes. To add insult to injury, the protestors hear a prime minister repeatedly telling them that things will get worse before they get better. One cleaner who spoke to the Sun said staff at the hotel had been given redundancy letters when it became asylum accommodation. 'There's people here that work hard, day in and day out,' one woman outside the hotel tells me: 'They can't afford a place like this. Why are they [asylum seekers] getting it?' Opportunities for the protester's children are bleak. The Education Secretary Bridget Phillipson has admitted that white working-class children are being 'written off' by society, calling it a 'national disgrace.' Nationally, fewer than half of all pupils on free school meals achieve a pass in English or Maths GCSE – compared with 68 per cent of their better-off peers. Among them, white children are among the lowest achieving groups in the country: not even 20 per cent reach that benchmark, and they are the least likely of any major ethnic group to go to university. White kids have it worst of all – thanks to successive governments prioritising skin colour over deprivation. A problem rooted in class has become exacerbated by race. It's no wonder then that tensions have flared up across the country. Protests have occurred in Epping outside the Bell Hotel, where Hadush Kebatu was staying along with 140 other men. He has appeared in court after allegedly trying to kiss a 14-year- old girl and a woman in the town (he denies the allegations). Pollsters at More in Common found that core to the Epping residents' opposition was a sense that the views of local people have been overlooked. The majority of the public oppose the asylum hotel policy, their polling found, and locals are angry the government can't stop the small boat crossings. Other polling finds that social cohesion is breaking down in the most deprived areas, just like in Canary Wharf. The resentment among work-class protesters towards the counter-demonstrators, the main political parties and the country's senior politicians is on display. 'My grandad fought for this country and then you've got people like that – Daddy's money,' one man says, gesturing towards the counter protestors. Research from Public First finds that a third of working-class voters hold an unfavourable view of the Conservatives and Labour, compared with just a quarter of professional-class voters. Nearly half say Sir Keir Starmer doesn't represent them 'at all', versus 35 per cent of professionals. Successive governments, they feel, have prioritised race over class, leaving poor people economically squeezed and politically ignored. The left fear racialising the issue of class, and the right's promise of 'Levelling Up' has given way to the politics of triage. The people at the bottom of the list are now making themselves heard. Ministers plan to empty the hotels through 'Operation Scatter', moving asylum seekers into houses of multiple occupancy (HMOs) across the country. The strain will fall first, and hardest, on poorer communities. The protesters argue it is their neighbourhoods that bear the brunt, while the effects of immigration are never properly addressed by politicians. One told me, 'these people haven't even lived their lives. They've had money from their mums and dads – they don't know what immigration is.' At the Britannia protests, there's a rare political unity: the shared hatred of Keir Starmer. He's variously called a 'traitor' and an 'enemy' who will cause civil war. Nigel Farage's Reform UK gets cautious approval from the protesters – though one notes: 'He doesn't have a magic wand. He's not going to wave it and return the UK to its former glory that we all fell in love with.' At about 9 p.m., both sides begin to head home. Tomorrow, the original protesters will be back. One woman tells me she's been attending every single day since they began. She won't leave until the council shuts the hotel asylum scheme down.
Otago Daily Times
17-06-2025
- Politics
- Otago Daily Times
Minnows, pike and parliamentary sovereignty
"In a lake stocked with minnows and minnow-eating pike, freedom for the pike means death to the minnows." So said 20th century philosopher Isaiah Berlin. He was warning us to be wary of occasions when the rich and powerful argue for greater freedom. They already have a great deal of freedom, usually a lot more than the rest of us. Act New Zealand's proposed Regulatory Standards Bill appears to be one of these occasions. The Bill states that any proposed legislation will have to be held up to certain principles. However, they are a very limited number of principles, mostly based on individual rights and property. Why just the principles important to Act? Why not hold legislation accountable to how it will affect child poverty? How it will impact on rights to education and health? Whether it will lead to increases in crime or unemployment? There are any number of principles they could align legislation to, and yet individual and property rights is where they are focused. Why have principles that primarily benefit the rich and powerful? Why not have principles that benefit the majority, especially those in these unending crises we have had since the Global Financial Crash in 2008? One of the main objections to the Regulations Standards Bill is that it puts limitations on Parliament's sovereignty and it is beyond ironic that one of Act's objections to the way that the Treaty of Waitangi was being applied was that it encroached on Parliament's sovereignty. We have a system that has created a lot of wealth for certain individuals, and some of those who have accumulated that wealth want to ensure that they keep it and are also able to accumulate it at an even faster rate. This month the NBR announced that the total valuation of New Zealand's rich list had risen from $95.55 billion last year to $102.1b this year. Their wealth has gone up by 6.8% and is not an outlier. In 2023 the valuation of the rich list was $72.79b, meaning that their combined wealth had gone up 50% in the two years that included a recession and a cost of living crisis. The annual inflation rate is currently 2.5%. The New Zealand cash rate is 3.25%, Kiwi Bonds are around 3.5%, and one-year term deposits are less than 4%. So the very wealthy are accumulating wealth at a much faster pace than the rest of society. Some of the money the very rich make is ploughed back into their businesses to make them more efficient and productive, and some is used to look for further business opportunities. Sometimes these are very risky opportunities, and sometimes that riskiness is a surprise such as earthquakes, cyclones and their close cousin, presidentially declared tariffs. However, a lot of their wealth appears to go into buying assets. United Kingdom economist Gary Stevenson claims that the super wealthy live in an economic black hole that sucks in wealth. If you have $100million and your wealth conservatively goes up 6% that is $6m a year. That is a lot of money to try to spend on holidays, food and clothes. They can't spend that much and so what they do, according to Stephenson, is buy assets. They are always ahead of inflation so their money just grows and the value of the assets they have, and the assets they buy, goes up. It is his explanation as to why it is so much tougher to buy a house than 20 years ago and why real estate, gold and the stock market continually trend upwards. Structurally, if it is true that our current system is tailor-made to shift wealth from one part of society to a very small minority of society, it is no wonder they want to lock it all in place before the rest of us find out. At the same time as our small population of very wealthy are growing wealthier, the number of homeless people is skyrocketing. Statistics New Zealand claimed at the 2023 census over 112,000 New Zealanders were "severely housing deprived", including 61% living in "uninhabitable housing". This did not include any of the 396,000 people they had no information on. Change needs to come, but not in legislation that locks in the gains of the top 5% and locks in the losses of the majority. We don't have to worry about the rich, they will be OK. Even if they lose their fortunes, they have the skills and networks to bounce back up again. We need an economy that rewards risk and innovation but at the same time provides affordable housing and health, education and social services. Parliament is perfectly able to do all this without passing the Regulatory Standards Bill. Submissions on the Regulatory Standards Bill close on June 23. • Dr Anaru Eketone is an associate professor in the University of Otago's social and community work programme.
Times
16-05-2025
- Business
- Times
Want to help the poor? Don't chase out the rich
Have you come across Gary Stevenson yet? He's a former financial trader, author and wealth tax advocate whose angry eloquence is perfect for our TikTok age. His videos, viewed almost 150 million times, warn of a rigged economic system where the rich exploit and hoard, leaving the poor assetless and adrift. It's time to tax the assets and not just income of the wealthy, he says, to restore fairness to society. Many Labour MPs agree. His message is urgent, compelling, energising — and completely wrong. First, he's being unfair to Rachel Reeves. She's doing her level best to go after the rich: taxing private schools, hitting non-doms and pursuing radical inheritance tax reform. We can see the results already, albeit not quite the ones she
Times
03-05-2025
- Business
- Times
Six rounds with Gary Stevenson, the new economic hero of the left
The hottest new YouTube sensation in British politics looks like he's about to punch me in the face. Gary Stevenson, star City trader turned left-wing firebrand, has been describing his 'surreal' and meteoric propulsion to fame since I first met him a little over a year ago when he released his memoir. But when I ask him about newspaper reports that he has oversold his trading CV, his usual bonhomie fades, fast. 'I would have expected better from you,' he says, icily. 'I'm frankly surprised a journalist like you who's read my book can't see what's happened here.' That book, The Trading Game, is a riproaring account of Stevenson's time as a poor kid from the East End becoming Citibank's most profitable global trader
Arab News
04-04-2025
- Business
- Arab News
What We Are Reading Today: The Trading Game
Author: Gary Stevenson Gary Stevenson's thinly veiled vehicle for launching a political career is an undeniable rags-to-riches story which has captured the attention of 'Broken Britain' at a time when living costs are spiraling, public services are in disarray and politicians seem unable to provide solutions. A math prodigy from a working-class background, Stevenson paints a vivid picture of a career that took him from playing football on the streets of Ilford to becoming Citibank's 'most profitable trader' in the years after the 2008 financial crisis. (A claim, incidentally, credibly rebuked by his former colleagues in a Financial Times report.) The pugnacious self-starter won a scholarship to the London School of Economics and was hired by Citibank after winning the eponymous trading game designed to jumpstart the careers of graduates based on their potential merit as traders. He describes the characters he encounters along the way with a mix of bemusement and admiration, and overall his insider's look at the world of banking has a vicarious pull. The central thrust unfolds as Stevenson comes to the realization he is making his millions betting against the chances of the world economy recovering. As his bonuses grow larger, his mental health declines and he decides to commit himself to the cause of fighting inequality— something that has garnered him a large online following and which is starting to look like an entry into politics. While the book suffers from some of the conceit that puts any autobiographical work at risk, and some jarring editing (the first-person narration, for some reason, switches to using more slang about halfway through), it is still a strong piece of storytelling and the emotional rawness of Stevenson's style makes a real impression. While his political takeaways might raise the eyebrows of more conservative readers, his voice still cuts through the noise of British politics and speaks directly to ordinary people from the unique viewpoint of someone who has escaped poverty, lived the life of the ultra-rich, and decided to turn around in an apparent effort to help those less fortunate.
