"Who owns London's golf courses?"

[Beckenham Place Park, a former golf course turned into a public park by its owner, Lewisham Council.]

"Half the golf courses in Greater London are owned by councils or the Crown Estate, a new investigation by Who Owns England can reveal. 

The findings add further impetus to growing calls for golf courses and other private green spaces to be opened up to the public during the coronavirus crisis, so that there is more space to safely exercise in...

              [Golf courses (red) vs existing public parks & gardens (green) in Greater London.]

The lockdown has highlighted how access to nature is a fundamental human need – there’s mountains of evidence on the physical and mental health benefits of getting outdoors – and the fact that this is a matter of social justice: people in deprived areas have smaller gardens and less access to green space.

In the context of this emerging debate, let’s take a look at who owns London’s golf courses, and whether they could be readily persuaded to open up to a wider public.

THE OWNERS OF LONDON’S GOLF COURSES: FROM HARROW TO IMPERIAL TOBACCO

To uncover who owns London’s golf courses, I took Ordnance Survey’s Greenspace dataset, extracted just golf courses, clipped this with the GLA boundary, cleaned up a couple of errors in the dataset where polygons overlapped, and measured the area of each course. I then cross-checked the resulting 131 golf courses against Land Registry’s Corporate & Commercial dataset to uncover the owners. The full results are in this Google Spreadsheet.

Here’s the headline findings:

Golf course owners in Greater London	Acres	Percent
Corporate / private	5,122	45%
Councils	4,702	42%
Crown Estate	853	8%
Split 50/50 council & private owner	363	3%
Unknown ownership:	270	2%
Total	11,310 acres	100%

Whilst most of the corporate owners are simply fee-paying golf clubs, there are also some intriguing names, including:

• Harrow School;
• Dulwich College, who have commendably already opened up their sports fields for the public;
• Imperial Tobacco’s pension fund, owners of Selsdon Park golf course (who knew Big Tobacco cared about outdoor exercise?);
• and Du Parcq (Jersey) Ltd, owners of Brockley Hill Golf Park, registered in the offshore tax haven of Jersey.

The Crown Estate own golf courses at Hampton Court, Richmond Park, and Eltham, amongst others.

But to me the most interesting owners are the councils. Hillingdon, Enfield and Barnet are the top three London councils who own the most acres of golf course. And Bexley, Brent, Bromley, the City of London Corporation, Croydon, Ealing, Harrow, Havering, Hounslow, Kingston, Lee Valley, Lewisham, Redbridge, Richmond, Sutton, Waltham Forest – together they own thousands of acres of golf courses. They could all be opening this up immediately, if they chose to, to create more space for safer exercise. So why don’t they?

If you’d like to see this change, please sign and share my petition!"

Source here.

Video: "ADULTS IN THE ROOM" (Trailer of Costa-Gavras' film of Yanis Varoufakis' book)

"Behind closed doors, a human tragedy plays out.

A universal theme: a story of people trapped in an inhuman network of power.

The brutal circle of the Eurogroup meetings, who impose on Greece the dictatorship of austerity, where humanity and compassion are utterly disregarded.

A claustrophobic trap with no way out, exerting pressures on the protagonists which finally divide them. A tragedy in the Ancient Greek sense: the characters are not good or evil, but driven by the consequences of their own conception of what it is right to do.

A tragedy for our very modern time."

WATCH the trailer here.

"Remembering Pau Casals" -- My latest article for Catalonia Today magazine

The first Catalan name I ever (knowingly) heard was that of Pau Casals. I was around eight years old and listening to a Monty Python comedy record.

An English mock-commentator’s voice introduced “The Sonatino in E sharp by Antonio Vivaldi to be played by Pablo Casals during his 400 foot plunge into a bucket of boiling fat.” Next was the sound of a violin soloist playing a few bars, then a long scream followed by the sound you’d expect of someone falling through the air into a container of liquid.

This was very funny as a kid but, in fact, Casals was mainly a cello player and so much of this man’s life, his beliefs and practices, make Monty Python’s comedy sketches seem tame and dull in comparison.

Pau Casal’s mother Pilar (who was originally from Puerto Rico) had brought him up to treat everyone as an equal. He claims she openly breastfed his baby brother in front of the Spanish infanta (the sister of the king) on their first day at the royal palace in Madrid. The young cellist had gone there to audition for a scholarship from the queen but it turned out to be barely enough for the family of four to live on.

Fluent in seven languages, Casals became a public friend to many well-known figures in the arts, including Colonel George Picart, a hero of the infamous, anti-semitic Dreyfus case in Paris at the turn of the century.

Casals was full of contradictions, too. Adventurous by nature, he was also a creature of habit. He started more than 80 years of his life every day playing two preludes and fugues by Bach but somehow found new vitality in himself and the music every time he did so.

Rightly though, it is his musical genius that he is still remembered for.

His belief that intuition or instinct is the most important factor in the creation and performance of music was not then a popular opinion. He was also controversial in his development of radical methods of using his main instrument but understood the fundamental importance of “playing songs in the language of everyone.”

Listening to his interpretation of the old Catalan folk song (Casals says it is actually a Christmas carol) ‘El Cant del Ocells’, or Song of the Birds, brought tears flooding into my eyes and tugged at my heart strings in the first handful of notes he played. He seems to have the ability to drag you under the waves for a few wrenching seconds then within a few beats, thrust you up, blinking hard into the warmth of the sun.

My only criticism of this extraordinary man (who was also an accomplished orchestra conductor) is his mental and emotional blindspot towards the monarchy. Casals called himself a life-long Republican but his continually fawning attitude towards them was at odds with his stated attitude.

While he understandably felt indebted to the Spanish royals for early opportunities in his career, it seems to me that in his autobiography ‘Joys & Sorrows’ he exaggerated the “friendship” he had with King Alfonso XIII and Queen Maria Cristina who, as his supposed “second mother”, gave him decorative honours and jewels. Casals failed to state that their riches and position came at the expense of ordinary people such as his own family.

Just like his name Pau, Casals was essentially an international man of peace. Surely, this is partly because three major wars straddled his life, the same way he straddled the cello. He once said: “The love of one’s country is a splendid thing. But why should love stop at the border?” These are still important sentiments today, almost half a century after his death.

[THIS ARTICLE WAS FIRST PUBLISHED IN CATALONIA TODAY MAGAZINE,MARCH 2020.]

"How a wave of municipalisations in Europe is challenging privatisation"

  
"A wave of privatisations made its way from the coast of Britain towards the Continent in the 1980s; gaining momentum after the fall of the Berlin Wall, privatisations became a tsounami hitting the shores of Europe in the 1990s, east and west. 

Former state monopolies in “strategic sectors”  were privatised for all sorts of reasons: to encourage innovation, promote economies of scale, reduce public debt, attract foreign direct investment and improve productivity. Privatisation was now conventional wisdom.

Goods formerly considered public – water, transport, housing, energy, electricity, telecommunications, waste treatment, health, education – were treated as commodities. Under the guise of consumer protection, often, privatisation eroded the quality and accessibility of public goods and services.

Be that as it may state-owned companies and institutions in Europe have largely become passé, although they are very much the norm in China, India, Russia, and other emerging markets. However, in Europe too,  there is movement in the opposite direction, that is, towards public ownership.

A recent study published by the Amsterdam-based Transnational Institute (TNI) reveals a pattern of return to public ownership...

Read more from source here.