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Times
05-07-2025
- Politics
- Times
Big Bureaucracy knows the real enemies: volunteer graffiti cleaners
What if I told you that there are gangs of young men roaming around London spraying graffiti on Tube carriages, and then immediately cleaning that graffiti up again? You would surely assume that I was mad. And yet on Thursday Andy Lord, commissioner of Transport for London, made that very claim while he was being questioned by members of the London Assembly. I am grateful to Lord. I think, in his words last week, he gave us a perfect parable for modern reason Lord found himself being asked about this issue is that a campaign group called Looking for Growth (which I wrote about a couple of weeks ago) has been cleaning up graffiti on the Tube. Sometimes its members post videos of themselves doing this online to put pressure on TfL to get its act together. 'I, firstly, would ask anybody not to take this matter into their own hands,' Lord told the assembled politicians. 'We also have evidence of people creating graffiti and then removing it, so that is being investigated by the relevant authorities.' • Jenni Russell: Passive entitled citizens are breaking Britain The more I think about this reply, the angrier it makes me. It strikes me as indicative of everything that is wrong with our country, in particular with the way that our bureaucracies shirk responsibility and value rule-following above getting things done. It reminded me of a story last year in the St Albans Times, where a group of locals had decided to clean up a bit of disused council land. They planted wild flowers, installed an arch on which to grow roses and created a vegetable patch. 'These vegetables are shared among residents as well as with a local nursery to teach children about growing your own food,' one of them, Will Wright, told the paper. How lovely, you'd think, surely. Not the council. It told the residents that this could be considered fly-tipping, and gave them a week to return the land to its former state. • Charlotte Ivers: These angry young men aren't giving up — they're cleaning graffiti These stories pop up frequently: people who are trying to make things better, stymied in their efforts because they didn't follow the rules. It would be fine, if a bit sad, if such things were restricted to community gardens. But this attitude bleeds into every element of our public life. I will forever be haunted by the story I was told a few years ago by a man who had been a criminal barrister. He had been representing a client in custody: 19, non-violent, first-time offender. The young man was being held in a police station opposite the court in which he was due to appear. The only problem was, the contractor that was meant to drive him across the road hadn't turned up, and so he was stuck. 'Please,' the lawyer begged. 'It's a 30-second walk. Couldn't some officers accompany him? It's Friday. If he doesn't appear today, he will be in custody until Monday. He will miss two shifts at work. He might lose his job.' Nope. No joy. Only the contractor was allowed to transfer prisoners. The young man stayed in custody. The lawyer quit and became a chef. Why had he become a criminal lawyer in the first place? Not for the money or the glamour, that's for sure. He wanted to do some good. But, no, the inflexibility of the Byzantine British bureaucracy made that impossible for him. Why would anyone bother to try to improve their community, when the system always seems to frustrate them? In the case of the Tube cleaners, the system has gone further still. Lord's response to these people who were trying to make things better was to criticise them. No, actually, not criticise them. Accuse them of a crime. Can I rule out the possibility that a single mad vigilante has cleaned up their own graffiti? No. But it's a wild claim to make without showing some evidence. If Lord would like to present some, I'd love to see it. But his comments seemed merely designed to undermine the people banging the drum on this issue. Those people are right, by the way. The graffiti is really bad. In a way it doesn't matter. Nobody has died. The trains still run on time, usually. But it does something to a person if every time they get on the train they think, 'This is a bit bleak,' or, 'God, there will be people visiting from other countries who see this. That's embarrassing.' And then they think, 'I can't believe I've let my expectations slip so low that I don't even care what I and my fellow Englishmen have to put up with. I just worry about how we look to the neighbours.' It is part of a long, slow decline in our public realm in Britain, which just makes everyone feel slowly, crushingly worse every day. There will be an example of this near you: a dying high street, or a once-green park that looks like a nuclear wasteland. It makes me so angry, because all these things are eminently fixable. What stops them getting fixed is the hulking inefficiency of our bureaucracies. It's just so hard to get anything done, even with the best will in the world. I feel for Andy Lord, I really do. You go into public life to make the buses run on time, and then you find yourself sitting in front of a committee, telling everyone you think madmen are running round London cleaning up their own graffiti. It could never have been any other way. That's what our bureaucracy does to people who try to make things better. Wes Streeting told LBC radio this week that 'weight loss jabs are the talk of the House of Commons; half my colleagues are on them'. He's not wrong. I've been to two Westminster parties recently, and it's remarkable how popular the jabs are in SW1. At one drinks do last week, every time I looked round, an acquaintance would emerge, half the size they were when I last saw them earlier in the year. None of the other circles I move in seem to have grasped these drugs with the same enthusiasm. You don't get the same experience in rooms full of journalists, or lawyers, or (thankfully) chefs. I suppose it's the fact politicians are so often in the public gaze. They can't all be taking weight loss drugs for entirely pure medical purposes, otherwise other social groups would likely look the same. It must also be down to the fact that peer pressure is a big feature among Westminster types. If one person looks to be developing an advantage, everyone soon wants in on it. There is one unfortunate side effect. Halfway through the night, a friend wandered over. He's recently lost a bit of weight the hard way: slogging it out at the gym and righteously rejecting all offers of dessert. 'It's terrible!' he wailed. 'Everyone keeps asking me if I'm on Ozempic. What was the point in all that work!'
The Guardian
27-06-2025
- Politics
- The Guardian
If Britain is broken, what is to blame – big money and big tech, or graffiti on your train?
Britain, let's face it, is crap. Crap, I mean, in quite a specific sense: we might not be teetering on the brink of civilisational destruction, as the post-Brexit right can often seem to think. But there nonetheless remains a vast, ambient sense of rubbishness. Everything is expensive but nothing works. Our streets are full of potholes; our houses are full of mould. All the shops are shut, except for a Tesco Express, where there are security tags on the eggs. It takes about a million years to build a railway line. Up to now, the response to Britain's enshittification has, by and large, seemed remarkably fatalistic: Keir Starmer spent the first year in government repeatedly insisting that there just wasn't any money, and so really nothing could be done. Thank God then, one might think, for Looking for Growth, a new campaign group led by young (well, late 20s, early 30s) Londoners Lawrence Newport and Joe Reeve, who have reportedly been advised by Dominic Cummings, and who have taken it on themselves to rid the tube of the scourge of graffiti. You might have seen the video: riding the Bakerloo line, wearing hi-vis jackets that proclaim they are 'Doing What Sadiq Khant' and accompanied by the GB News presenter Tom Harwood, for some reason, Looking for Growth perform a task that looks so simple only a government might fail to achieve it – apply a bit of spray and a bit of elbow grease – to rid some rolling stock of a litany of ugly tags and scrawls ('It's not even good graffiti!', Harwood exclaims). 'This is shameful. This is not OK. We're done waiting for @MayorofLondon to pull his finger out,' a tweet by Reeve explained. It's certainly proved an effective publicity stunt, but what exactly are Looking for Growth, and its backers, attempting to drum up publicity for? The campaigners would like to be known as a 'pro-growth' and 'anti-crime'group who defy the traditional left-right political spectrum. However, as a London Centric piece about the group claims, they often reference the French political meme 'Nicolas, 30 ans' that depicts a young professional struggling as he pays taxes toward an older bourgeois couple and a younger is quoted as saying, 'That probably does describe quite a lot of our members.' Looking for Growth members appear to balance their pessimism about the present state of things with an optimism about what we might broadly call 'tech-driven' solutions: the video displayed on the front page of their website features an image of Michelangelo's God from The Creation of Adam, touching a robot arm. Londoncentric describes many of Looking for Growth's members as 'tech sector-adjacent'; predictably perhaps, their tube clean-up video was retweeted by Elon Musk. What might we say about all this? Certainly there is a powerful vision here. Britain is crap – and people know it. Mainstream politicians really don't seem to be able to do anything about it: hence why there is clearly so much electoral space for parties not called 'Labour' or 'the Conservatives' to exploit. But the likes of Looking for Growth seem to be entirely mistaken about the nature of Britain's enshittification. Take graffiti, for instance. TfL has claimed that it's unable to hold back carriages for cleaning and replace them with backups due to government budget cuts, but even if graffiti really were some sort of permanent, intractable problem on the tube – would the mere existence of graffiti be what's making Britain crap? Granted: part of how we know Britain is crap is because it looks crap. Still more profound, surely, is what we might call our sense of institutional crappiness manifested in the fact that all of our transactions are mediated through apps, but then if anything goes wrong you're only able to 'talk to' an AI, never an actual human being. It's expensive and shoddy housing. Crappiness is an elevated utilities bill; crappiness is shrinkflation. In short, the more we think about how Britain is actually crap, the more we can think about who is actually responsible for its decline. This is stuff being done to us by the venture capitalists who seem to own all our strategic assets; the private landlords we decided to sell all our social housing stock to. It is stuff being done to us by big tech. If anyone actually wants to make anything better, it's those much grander forces we're going to need to find a way of scrubbing off our metaphorical walls. Tom Whyman is an academic philosopher and a writer
Daily Mail
27-06-2025
- Politics
- Daily Mail
Sadiq Khan isn't clearing up London Underground graffiti because it will help him get more money from central Government, Tories say
Sir Sadiq Khan is avoiding cleaning up graffiti on the London Underground as it will help him get more money from central Government, TfL insiders have alleged. Sources at Transport for London (TfL), have claimed that the graffiti-covered carriages on London's Bakerloo line are assisting the London Mayor with his goal of receiving a multi-million pound Government handout for new trains. Speaking of Sir Sadiq's alleged deliberate avoidance of the vandalism, an insider is said to have told The Daily Telegraph: 'Anything that helps make the case for new trains is going to be helpful. 'We would rather the graffiti wasn't happening, obviously. But if this is going to help, we want to replace them and need we need money from the Government to do it'. It comes after shocking video footage posted online showed fed-up commuters taking matters in their own hands and cleaning up the graffiti. Joe Reeve, 28, founder of policy group Looking for Growth, led the clean up effort, insisted he was 'doing what Sadiq Khant' after TfL reported a 'significant increase' in the number of graffiti incidents on its trains. Now, it has been alleged that Sir Sadiq is avoiding the removal of the vandalism in a bid to boost his political goals. The London Mayor is currently lobbying the Government to fund a replacement of the Bakerloo Line's 1970s rolling stock with new trains. Sir Sadiq, chair of TfL, has also called for an extension of the line to Lewisham, south-east London. However, concerns have been raised about a lack of funds for the historic line - with its extension and reconstruction previously estimated at a cost of between £5million and £8million. Speaking of the London Mayor's (pictured) alleged deliberate avoidance of the vandalism, an insider is said to have told The Daily Telegraph: 'Anything that helps make the case for new trains is going to be helpful' Keith Prince, transport spokesperson for the City Hall Conservatives, described the assertion that the graffiti has not yet been removed due to a lack of Government funding as 'nonsense'. Calling on Sir Sadiq to solve the growing issue, he told The Daily Telegraph: 'Pull the other one, Sadiq, and actually use your powers as TFL chair to solve this blight'. Susan Hall, leader of the City Hall Conservative Group, previously told MailOnline that Mr Reeve and his team of 'activists' had 'put Khan and TfL to shame by showing how easy it is to clean up our Tube'. She added: 'It's disappointing that the Mayor constantly has to be humiliated into acting, but we look forward to legions of TfL staff being put to good use wiping down the remaining graffiti which has adorned Tube carriages for disgracefully too long.' Meanwhile, Mr Reeve, who lives in Lambeth, South London, described feeling 'pretty frustrated' with Sir Sadiq given the extent of graffiti seen across the line. Speaking to the The Standard, he added that three train drivers have thanked the group for their efforts, with one telling them: 'At least someone's doing something'. He said: 'I take the Bakerloo line every morning and I see someone push past the barrier. 'Then when I get down to the Tube, every single carriage is full of graffiti. It feels like no one is doing anything to make the city better. I'm pretty patriotic. 'I love London, and I think it should be the best city in the world. I had the option to move to the US for work, but I want to stay in the UK and see it get better.' The viral footage of the activists came after Neil O'Brien, Conservative MP for Harborough, Oadby and Wigston, tweeted last month: 'Mad what Khan has allowed to happen to the Bakerloo Line — looks like 70s New York.' While trains were previously taken out of daily service by TfL to remove graffiti, they are now cleaned overnight when the network is not running. TfL claims that it works to remove graffiti as quickly as possible - but where it cannot be removed easily, it is covered if possible and cleaned during engineering hours. The aim is to keep trains out on the network and minimise passenger delays. In 2021, Sir Sadiq released a set of throwback images showing the sorry state of the tube network in previous decades, warning that without urgent Government investment the transport network could see significant cuts. In 2021, Sir Sadiq released a set of throwback images showing the sorry state of the tube network in previous decades (pictured), warning that without urgent Government investment the transport network could see significant cuts Calling on the UK Government to invest in London's public transport, the London Mayor added: 'Unless the Government provides the long-term funding needed to maintain our public transport network, there will be no choice but to make significant cuts to services just as demand is growing again. 'This would mean fewer, less frequent and more run-down bus and tube services for Londoners, making it more difficult to travel around the city'. A TFL spokesperson said that it was 'completely untrue to suggest that any graffiti is left for longer than necessary for any reason'. Adding that the body are 'removing graffiti from the Tube network as fast as possible', they said: 'We have deployed an accelerated cleaning programme in response to the specific increase in graffiti on the Central and Bakerloo lines.
The Guardian
27-06-2025
- Politics
- The Guardian
If Britain is broken, what is to blame – big money and big tech, or graffiti on your train?
Britain, let's face it, is crap. Crap, I mean, in quite a specific sense: we might not be teetering on the brink of civilisational destruction, as the post-Brexit right can often seem to think. But there nonetheless remains a vast, ambient sense of rubbishness. Everything is expensive but nothing works. Our streets are full of potholes; our houses are full of mould. All the shops are shut, except for a Tesco Express, where there are security tags on the eggs. It takes about a million years to build a railway line. Up to now, the response to Britain's enshittification has, by and large, seemed remarkably fatalistic: Keir Starmer spent the first year in government repeatedly insisting that there just wasn't any money, and so really nothing could be done. Thank God then, one might think, for Looking for Growth, a new campaign group led by young (well, late 20s, early 30s) Londoners Lawrence Newport and Joe Reeve, who have reportedly been advised by Dominic Cummings, and who have taken it on themselves to rid the tube of the scourge of graffiti. You might have seen the video: riding the Bakerloo line, wearing hi-vis jackets that proclaim they are 'Doing What Sadiq Khant' and accompanied by the GB News presenter Tom Harwood, for some reason, Looking for Growth perform a task that looks so simple only a government might fail to achieve it – apply a bit of spray and a bit of elbow grease – to rid some rolling stock of a litany of ugly tags and scrawls ('It's not even good graffiti!', Harwood exclaims). 'This is shameful. This is not OK. We're done waiting for @MayorofLondon to pull his finger out,' a tweet by Reeve explained. It's certainly proved an effective publicity stunt, but what exactly are Looking for Growth, and its backers, attempting to drum up publicity for? The campaigners would like to be known as a 'pro-growth' and 'anti-crime'group who defy the traditional left-right political spectrum. However, as a London Centric piece about the group claims, they often reference the French political meme 'Nicolas, 30 ans' that depicts a young professional struggling as he pays taxes toward an older bourgeois couple and a younger is quoted as saying, 'That probably does describe quite a lot of our members.' Looking for Growth members appear to balance their pessimism about the present state of things with an optimism about what we might broadly call 'tech-driven' solutions: the video displayed on the front page of their website features an image of Michelangelo's God from The Creation of Adam, touching a robot arm. Londoncentric describes many of Looking for Growth's members as 'tech sector-adjacent'; predictably perhaps, their tube clean-up video was retweeted by Elon Musk. What might we say about all this? Certainly there is a powerful vision here. Britain is crap – and people know it. Mainstream politicians really don't seem to be able to do anything about it: hence why there is clearly so much electoral space for parties not called 'Labour' or 'the Conservatives' to exploit. But the likes of Looking for Growth seem to be entirely mistaken about the nature of Britain's enshittification. Take graffiti, for instance. TfL has claimed that it's unable to hold back carriages for cleaning and replace them with backups due to government budget cuts, but even if graffiti really were some sort of permanent, intractable problem on the tube – would the mere existence of graffiti be what's making Britain crap? Granted: part of how we know Britain is crap is because it looks crap. Still more profound, surely, is what we might call our sense of institutional crappiness manifested in the fact that all of our transactions are mediated through apps, but then if anything goes wrong you're only able to 'talk to' an AI, never an actual human being. It's expensive and shoddy housing. Crappiness is an elevated utilities bill; crappiness is shrinkflation. In short, the more we think about how Britain is actually crap, the more we can think about who is actually responsible for its decline. This is stuff being done to us by the venture capitalists who seem to own all our strategic assets; the private landlords we decided to sell all our social housing stock to. It is stuff being done to us by big tech. If anyone actually wants to make anything better, it's those much grander forces we're going to need to find a way of scrubbing off our metaphorical walls. Tom Whyman is an academic philosopher and a writer
The Sun
14-06-2025
- Politics
- The Sun
Majority of Brits say UK ‘is in decline' and fear civil unrest as bombshell poll reveals people feel poor and hopeless
THE UK is 'in decline' and could erupt in political violence, most Brits think according to a bombshell poll. The findings paint a grim picture of modern Britain - revealing that people feel poor, do not trust politicians and have little hope for the future. 1 Some 68 per cent of Brits say the country is 'in decline' while 65 per cent say it is 'already broken'. And 76 per cent are worried about the potential for political violence, according to the survey by pollsters Merlin Strategy for the political movement Looking for Growth (LFG). Dr Lawrence Newport, co-founder of LFG, said: 'Voters are not just feeling crushed economically, they are now fearful that political violence could ensue if the Government does not reverse the country's decline. 'When a system stops delivering and people stop believing, things break. That's where we are now.' The worrying results come as Ballymena in Northern Ireland has been engulfed in days of violent riots which have left dozens of police injured. They were sparked by protests against two boys of Romanian descent accused of raping a local girl turned violent. Last year, Southport erupted into riots after cops refused to give details of the teenage boy who stabbed girls at a Taylor Swift themed dance class. Reform UK voters are most gloomy about their country, with 81 per cent saying Britain is 'broken'. But half of all Labour voters also think this. The cost of living crisis is fuelling the fire, with four in 10 adults saying they feel poorer since Covid. Pollster and Founder of Merlin Strategy Scarlett Maguire said: 'The public are in despair at the state of the country. 'These findings underline the bleak mood amongst the British public and the lack of trust in politicians to turn things around.'
