Latest news with #graffiti
The Guardian
a day ago
- 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
a day ago
- 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
a day ago
- 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
Fox News
2 days ago
- Politics
- Fox News
LA Mayor Bass Wants You to Clean up Graffiti
LA Mayor Karen Bass is calling on city residents to clean up the graffiti and litter left behind by her mostly peaceful arsonists and vandals. I'm Tomi Lahren, more next. LA Mayor Karen Bass was seen last week in a viral, yet totally staged video, supposedly cleaning up graffiti left in downtown LA by her 'mostly peaceful' anti-ICE rioters. But that photo opp didn't last long so this weekend she's asking you, Angelenos, to pick up the slack. You cannot make this stuff up. Bass' office really sent out an email blast call to action to the community to volunteer to go clean up the vandalism, litter and graffiti left behind by her anti-ICE mostly peaceful arsonists and vandals. The event is dubbed 'Shine LA!' How inspirational! Though her rioters did cause a lot of damage and destruction, given how bad downtown LA is, just on the daily, you can't even really tell the difference. Isn't that sad? I hate to spoil it for her but her Angelenos don't assemble to clean graffiti, they only assemble to create it and burn cars while waving foreign flags! But again, time to SHINE LA! I'm Tomi Lahren and you watch my show 'Tomi Lahren is Fearless' at Learn more about your ad choices. Visit
Telegraph
2 days ago
- Politics
- Telegraph
Sadiq Khan ‘avoids cleaning Tube graffiti' in push for extra funding
The graffiti epidemic on the Tube is 'helpful' for Sir Sadiq Khan, Transport for London (TfL) insiders have admitted. Sources said the declining condition of the Bakerloo line was benefiting the Mayor of London's campaign for a multi-million-pound Government handout to fund new trains. But the remarks prompted accusations that Sir Sadiq had chosen not to completely eradicate the vandalism because it boosted his political ambitions. A group of Londoners earlier this month cleaned graffiti from the interior of Bakerloo trains themselves after a proliferation of vandalism on the line. Vandals have defaced the interiors of the line's trains with tens of thousands of 'tags', a form of signature which gives them kudos among fellow graffiti artists. Sources at TfL, which Sir Sadiq leads, said it welcomed 'anything that helps make the case for new trains' – including the graffiti. An insider said: 'In terms of the graffiti, 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 we need money from the Government to do it.' Sir Sadiq is lobbying the Government to fund new trains for the Bakerloo line to replace its existing 1970s-era rolling stock. He has also called for the line to be extended to Lewisham, in south-east London, but has said TfL could not afford either without receiving additional taxpayer cash from central Government. Keith Prince, transport spokesman for the City Hall Conservatives, said Sir Sadiq could 'solve this blight' of graffiti if he wanted to. He said: 'The idea that graffiti on the Tube is this shockingly bad purely because Starmer won't give Khan money for the Bakerloo line is just nonsense, and nonsense that Londoners will see right through. 'Pull the other one Sadiq, and actually use your powers as TfL chair to solve this blight.' Former police officers believe the Bakerloo and Central lines are particularly targeted by graffiti vandals because they do not have any CCTV cameras in their carriages. Graham Wettone, a retired Metropolitan Police officer, said: 'The 'tag' is the type and style of initials or icon left by the so-called artist and has become in some places an accepted form of 'modern art'. 'The absence of CCTV is likely to be one significant factor because there is less of a deterrent to the offenders.' Andrew Trotter, former chief constable of the British Transport Police, added that not having CCTV made it difficult to even identify the culprit, let alone prosecute them. He said: 'You always want CCTV. I think one of the great things about trains these days is that just about every train, every carriage, every platform is covered. 'Any time there is an investigation, you know your officers are very good at getting the CCTV and tracking people through the system. So it is a real shame.' Rory Geoghegan, a former police officer and founder of the Public Safety Foundation, said the graffiti epidemic would not end unless CCTV was retrofitted to the Bakerloo and Central lines. He added: 'The mayor and TfL urgently need to get a grip. Secure the depots, clean the trains, retrofit CCTV, and make clear that public space will be protected. Anything less is a failure of leadership.' TfL has no plans to install CCTV, however, because it believes this would be 'prohibitively expensive'. 'We're already talking to the Government – and we've already said several times – about wanting to replace the trains,' an insider said. 'So it wouldn't make a great deal of sense to retrofit CCTV on the Bakerloo Line, just from a financial perspective.' Graffiti is also widespread on the Bakerloo line because TfL no longer has enough of the half-a-century-old rolling stock to take vandalised trains out of service to be cleaned, which is the policy on other lines. That means transport chiefs are forced to continue using vandalised trains to maintain a regular service on the line. TfL said its 'accelerated cleaning programme' was removing 3,000 'tags' a week from Bakerloo and Central line trains. A spokesman said: 'We previously withdrew trains from service as soon as they had been vandalised, but with reduced availability due to ageing trains, this isn't always possible without impacting services. 'This is why we are working to secure investment in the Tube network, to replace and upgrade trains and ensure we can deliver the world-class transport network that Londoners and visitors deserve and expect.' The spokesman added: 'We are removing graffiti from the Tube network absolutely as fast as possible. It is completely untrue to suggest that any graffiti is left for longer than necessary for any reason. 'We have deployed an accelerated cleaning programme in response to the specific increase in graffiti on the Central and Bakerloo lines. Teams are removing graffiti 24/7, and are currently removing more than 1,000 tags per week on the Bakerloo line and more than 2,000 on the Central line.'
