Showing posts with label capital. Show all posts
Showing posts with label capital. Show all posts

Friday 17 May 2019

Quintain secures a further £172.5m of development financing to support the continuing expansion of Wembley Park

Site E05 proposals (from Quintain website)

 Press release from Quintain Ltd


Quintain has successfully completed a £172.5m financing package with Cheyne Capital to support the development of the next phase of its development programme at Wembley Park. The funding will support the development of the latest block in its Eastern Lands quarter, consisting of 458 homes and includes a multi-storey coach and car park that is being part funded by Homes England.

Angus Dodd, Chief Executive at Quintain said:

Cheyne is an existing funder of the business on other phases under construction and we are delighted that it is continuing its support through co-funding the next development in the pipeline. The funding structure is bespoke for Build to Rent (BtR) and was executed in a highly efficient manner, demonstrating Cheyne’s expertise in this area. The funding will take the aggregate number of residential units under construction at Wembley Park back to over 3,000. These homes are on track to be delivered in phases over the next two years and will all be managed by Tipi.
Arron Taggart at Cheyne Capital said:
The Quintain loan demonstrates Cheyne’s continued ability to provide large development loan solutions to high quality projects such as Wembley Park and support borrowers of the calibre of Quintain. The Wembley Park project is a complex and innovative example of how the London landscape continues to improve and change from large scale redevelopment such as this, and we are delighted to be able to play a part in that journey.
The latest plot on the Eastern Lands is called E05 and comprises 458 homes across three blocks, ranging in height from 10-21 storeys. The homes are being delivered entirely for rent, including discount market rent and London living rent, all of which will be managed by Tipi, Quintain’s lifestyle-focused rental brand. Also at E05 is 83,000 sq ft of innovative amenity space in the form of podium-level private landscaped gardens, roof terraces and a resident’s lounge. The contractor for this project will be John Sisk & Son.

The news comes as Quintain also announces the appointment of Richard MacDowel to the role of Group Treasurer. Richard joined from the real estate lending team at Lloyds Bank, where he was Head of Major Private Groups. Working alongside Cath Webster, Executive Director of Strategy & Investment, he will have responsibility, among other things, for the group’s relationship with external debt funders. Richard said: “I join at an important time for the business, as it further develops the Wembley Park project. The Build to Rent funding market in the UK is still nascent, and it is exciting to be a part of the team that is at the sector’s vanguard and looking to establish new funding templates.

This image refers to Philip Grant's comment below:


Thursday 26 July 2018

Brent Council to approve 'biggest financial transaction for a generation'



The Brent Audit and Standards Committee LINK will tonight consider a paper going to Cabinet in September LINK which would give the go ahead for the Council to borrow c£230,000,000 to fully meet its commitments on its already approved£800m capital investment programme.

The paper sets out detailed  borrowing options that balance risk and cost of borrowing. The amount required in 2019-20 is £62.4m and 2020/21 £166.6m.

As indicated in the diagram above the Council can only meet day to day costs from its Revenue account so the investment programme is aimed at 'invest to save' by for example buying housing and using revenue from rents to meet day to day costs of providing services.

Saturday 13 February 2016

Can Red and Green work as a team?


People on the left are sometimes perplexed when I say I am a socialist and ask why then I am not in the Labour Party. This was easier to answer under the pro-austerity pro-neoliberalism previous Labour leadership but Corbyn's victory does raise the possibility of joint work and campaigning.

However, as an ecosocialist and member of Green Left I will still have differences even with Corbyn Labour. Some of the issues are covered in this Guest Blog by Mike Shaughnessy which was first published on the Green Left blog LINK

 
This is a write up of a talk I gave earlier this week to my local Green Party meeting in Haringey, north London, on ecosocialism.

Ecosocialism is a green political philosophy - it is an ecocentric and democratic socialism.

It is not like twentieth century socialisms, is more like nineteenth century socialisms and owes a fair amount to anarchist theory. Twentieth century socialisms had, if anything, an even more dismal record than capitalism on ecology.

Ecosocialism is anti-capitalist, and sees the capitalist system as the effective cause of the ecological crisis.

Capitalism commodifies everything, puts a price on it, which is exchange value, and uses the earth as a resource for production and sink for the dumping of toxic waste from the production process, usually free of cost. Climate change is the most spectacular aspect of the ecological crisis, but not the only one. Capitalism releases toxic pollution, into the air, land and sea.

Capitalism is unable to solve the ecological crisis it has set going, because the logic of the system is to ‘grow or die’. Growth that is exponential and the planet is now close to its limit of being able to buffer the damage caused by this required infinite growth, on a finite planet.

I’m going to say something about the historical lineage of the philosophy, threads of which can be traced back for as long as human beings have formed communities, where some elements of ecosocialism can be found in the way people have lived in balance with nature. And today, many indigenous peoples around the world still practice some of these forms of social and economic management.

In South America ecosocialism has found its way into government. Venezuela, until the recent right wing election victory, had a department of ecosocialism. Bolivia still runs forms of ecosocialism in government and has fought off many capitalist corporations plunder of the country’s natural resources, in mining and gas extraction on common land.

There is an English line too. The first stories to be told about Robin Hood, were of a man fighting against crown enclosures of common land. He has become famous for ‘robbing from the rich to give to the poor’, but in fact what he was doing, was fighting to stop the rich robbing from the poor.

Then there were the Diggers during the English civil war, who set up communes on common land and called for a ‘common treasury of the land’.

And William Morris, the nineteenth century socialist and craft movement champion. If you read his novel News from Nowhere, it describes an ecosocialist utopia.

In the modern age, ecosocialism emerged in the mid 1980s, in the west, in the United States, although you can argue quite convincingly that in the US in goes back to Murray Bookchin’s social ecology movement in the mid 1960s. And in the east, in India, where to a lesser extent ecosocialism emerged but more so in the philosophy of ecofeminism, which is a similar philosophy to ecosocialism. For example, ecosocialists agree with ecofeminists that the oppression of women in our society is part and parcel of the system's domination of nature, reproduction in particular. This is done by the capitalist system co-opting the prevailing patriarchal practices, to extract extra surplus value from the workers, in terms of unpaid domestic labour, without which the system could not function. 

And all for free to the system.

Examples of modern day ecosocialism can found be found in the Kurdish area of northern Syria called Rojava and the Zapatistas in Chiapas the most southern state in Mexico.

So, what are the component parts of ecosocialism? There are many, but I’ve selected four of the main ones:

Metabolic Rift    

Nature contains billions of ecosystems, all connected in a finely balanced way, to form what we might call the ‘ecosphere’. Capitalism, disrupts and eventually completely ruptures this balance, setting off chain reactions which cannot be cured easily. Human beings are ecosystems too, and the way the system forces us to live, causes a rupture between us and nature and leads to illnesses like stress, depression and obesity.

And to those who say the ways of capitalism are ‘human nature’, then if this is true, why have we only been living this way for a couple of hundred years? The only thing natural about capitalism, is that it was invented by creatures of nature, us. And we can just as easily un-invent it – and we should.

Ecosocialist writer James Bellamy Foster has managed to link this to Karl Marx’s notion of an ‘irreparable rift’ between humans and nature, in volume three of Capital.

The Commons

Historically, in Britain and other western nations, people were forcibly removed from common land as it was enclosed, with violence employed, to drive the people off the land and into the capitalist factories in the towns and cities. And today the same thing is happening in developing countries. By taking away peoples alternative way of providing for themselves, they are left with no choice but to move into cities and work often 16 hours a day for meagre pay in factories, where health and safety is non-existent, and female workers are routinely harassed and molested.

When I visited Senegal in west Africa a few years ago, one day I spoke with some fishermen who complained about the factory ships from the European Union, Russia and Japan that were hoovering up all of the fish, so much so, that the local fisherman couldn’t catch enough fish anymore to earn a decent living. Here was a system of managed commons which had fed local people for thousands of years and provided a livelihood for the fishermen, destroyed by the capitalist factory boats. Robbing from the poor - to give to the rich.

You have probably heard of the ‘global commons’ on the internet, peer to peer sharing and free software, which ecosocialists welcome, with the possibilities it provides for living outside of the capitalist system, to some extent anyway.

Ecocentric Production

This is a quote from my favourite ecosocialist writer Jovel Kovel describing our vision of ecosocialism: ‘a society in which production is carried out by freely associated labour, and by consciously ecocentric means and ends’.

I think this sentence covers the production process under ecosocialism neatly. The ‘freely associated labour’ bit refers to the absence of surplus value, profit for capital.

Production would be for ‘use-value’, not ‘exchange value'. It will require useful work only, doctors, nurses, teachers etc. and there will be no need for work such as pushing numbers around on a computer in a bank in the City of London, which is useless to humanity - and indeed harmful.

What is produced will be of the highest quality, and beauty, and made to last and be repairable. My laptop packed up last week and I put it in for repair. But they couldn’t fix it because they couldn’t get the replacement part – this laptop is only a little over a year old, but it is obsolete. Throw it away, and get another was the advice.

In Green Party circles you hear a lot about sustainability, or sustainable production, but we ecosocialists prefer the word sufficiency, or sufficient production. Only as much as is needed will be produced, and no more. It should go without saying that the production process will be in balance with nature too.

Radical Democracy

Democracy in an ecosocialist society will devolve all decisions down to the lowest possible level. A series of assemblies, local, town, regional and at least at first, national. The assemblies will be freely elected and each assembly will be subject to recall from the level below, and assembly members should serve only one term. Eventually, the state will be dissolved.

All of this must seem like a million miles away – and it is. But now is not the same thing as the future. The ecological crisis will get worse, if we carry on like we are, and will present opportunities where radical solutions are sought. We must be ready to seize these opportunities.

And where does this all leave the Green Party? Well, interestingly The Guardian newspaper, during last year’s general election campaign, twice, once by one of its columnists and once in an editorial, described the Green Party as ecosocialist.

I think what was meant by this, was concern for the environment and advocating things like nationalising the railways and energy companies – all of which is to the good, but it is not really ecosocialism. 

The Green Party seems to have some hazy notions which are heading in the right direction, but for some reason, fails to follow through this thinking to its logical end – ecosocialism.

We in Green Left, try to push it along a bit, so that the Green Party fulfils its radical agenda, which logically means parting company with capitalism and championing ecosocialism.  

Monday 8 July 2013

Sacrificing childhood to capital


I explored Fryent Country Park with 28 eight and nine year olds today. They found their way out of a maze made of willow saplings and as they emerged from the woods marvelled at the sight of hay meadows stretching out in front of them. Reading their eager faces I could see that they were yearning to run through the long grasses and wild flowers and they were ecstatic when I let them go with meadow brown butterflies rising and fluttering above their heads as they  tumbled laughing into the sweet smelling hay.

Later they saw ponies and horses in a paddock  commenting on their stature and comparing the slender legs of a pony with the stocky legs of a carthorse, describing the feel of the donkey's  lips on their hands as they fed him, the colour of  the pony's teeth and loving being so close to an animal..

In the orchard they found toads, newts, millipedes, ladybirds, woodlouse, slugs, worms and snails and examined them through a magnifying glass. All the time the children chatted about their discoveries and pointed out their observations to each other. At the ponds they found tadpoles and tiny froglets and as with the mini-beasts eventually returned them gently and safely to their habitat.

In the afternoon in the cool of the Barn Hill oak woods the children worked together in self-chosen teams to build shelters for themselves. Small children managed to drag great tree trunks across the clearing and with their friends propped them up to make a tipi or tent shape, sometimes their structures collapsed, but they returned to the task with enthusiasm and perseverance.

After saying goodbye to the tired but happy class and their teachers at the bus stop I returned home just in time to hear Michael Gove on the Radio4 news speaking about the new national curriculum and the need to keep up with our international competitors and how this meant 'raising the bar' and children of 5 doing fractions and computer programming.

I could get into an argument about the accuracy of international comparisons and Gove's misuse of the PISA evidence (see LINK) but actually this isn't the point, The real issue is the Government's determination to make education serve the needs of the economy, and by that they mean global capitalism, and introducing its ethos and discipline  into schools both through the curriculum and through its rapidly privatising structures.

The child is no longer at the heart of education and education is no longer holistic, liberal and liberating.. Instead global capitalism and rampant consumerism is in charge and children and childhood are subjugated to its needs. With a fact based curriculum producing test and  examination results as a product, teachers subject to payment by results, and 'failing' schools that don't buy into the system forced to convert into academies, schools are being industrialised.

With university teacher training set to be replaced by 'sitting next to Nelly' work-based training, teachers will effectively be deskilled and no longer have the background in educational philosophy, history, cognitive psychology, learning theory  and subject knowledge possessed by past generations of teachers. Pearson and Amplify (the education arm of Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation) stand by with an i-Pad based individual curriculum for each child LINK, which rather than, as claimed, 'freeing up the teacher', could eventually replace him or her.

What is really incredible about Gove's 'vision' is that it probably won't actually serve the long-term needs of capitalism because it will produce narrow individuals, schooled into passing examinations and taught not to question, when what a society facing  the twin crises of dysfunctional capital and climate actually need is creativity, imagination and the ability to think and act  beyond self-interest.

I must return to the woods...

Has the Green Party got the capacity to take on this challenge?