Author: Cyrus Bozorgmehr

Desperately sad to see culture sacrificed once more on the altar of profit.

Gentrification – that lucrative cancer metastasizing across London has now claimed fabriclondon – as close to a dance music institution as the city has ever had. Despite the obscene logic of prohibition being held up as a fig leaf of warped social responsibility, it’s difficult not to see the subtext of the decision to close Fabric as the triumph of sanitized corporatism.

And of course, by proving the futility of trying to ‘play the game’ and working with the authorities, Islington council have disenfranchised hundreds of thousands of people who might otherwise be contributing to the economic, social and cultural life of the city.

It remains a mystery why developers and planners recognize the value of underground culture in raising the profile of an area to the point at which it becomes financially interesting – and yet fuck those core attractors off within months of acquiring a foothold. Another Pret, another Starbucks, another chloroform soaked rag across the dying gasps of a city.

And they wonder why people break into warehouses to create autonomous spaces in celebration of the human spirit. We – as a culture – tried playing the game.

The message back is pretty clear.

Photo credit Sarah Ginn

Deeply alarmed to see righteous anger about the state of our society misdirected (in my view) into a desire to leave the EU. In order to back what feels like a regressive, almost fantasist view of sovereignty and pseudo Churchillian British ‘pluck’, one would need to have extraordinary faith in what an unrestrained British government would look like.

We’d have to believe that all the obvious economic damage wrought by Brexit – from macroeconomic trade deals to phone roaming charges to the flexible labour force enshrined in the free movement of people – is worth sacrificing to concentrate power in the hands of Mr B Johnson, Mr M Gove and the rest of the swivel eyed populists whipping up a very British form of nationalism in a very Thatcherite teacup.

The EU has done more to temper the tendencies of respective British governments in their attitudes to human rights, war, and the worst excesses of capitalism than the British voter has seemingly managed. Which is a dangerously undemocratic dynamic in itself, but I’ll take sense where I find it. Just because major corporations support the Remain camp doesn’t make it inherently wrong. Just because we can stick it to one bureaucratic power structure doesn’t mean we’ve picked the right battle.On so many levels, leaving feels like a short sighted move born of shaky facts and a refusal to pragmatically engage with globalisation.

The status quo is far from perfect – but fuck me – tear out all the economic benefits, grow more culturally introverted and leave the likes of Tony Blair and David Cameron answerable to no-one but a right wing, neo-liberal press and the opinions they shape? Seems like madness to me.