The title of this blog (and yes, as ever, I've been trying to write a blog for months) is the title of the show I've just closed at the Gallery@Oxo (why they couldn't call it the Oxo Gallery which is how everyone refers to it, is beyond me, but that's what they insist on calling it, even though using the "at" symbol screws it up across all social media) on Sunday.
https://www.oxotower.co.uk/events/paul-athertons-greatest-londoners/
The event, as usual, was to me a simple thing, a logical thing and an easy thing.
Of course what happened was the very organistaion (Coin Street) we'd approached to assist us, turned it into something extremely complicated, totally illogical and fantastically difficult and ironically, guaranteed its failure. It epitomised perfectly, why I, and others like me, find trying to do anything to either improve our lot or to resolve our issues nigh on impossible to do in this city at the moment (it wasn't always this way).
The story, as it always does, started with an idea.
It had been brought to my attention that the Mayor of London Seed Funding Project may be a revenue source to support my Homelessness community campaigning, it was a piddling £5,000 but it would be nice to pay some of the people who'd offered their time free of charge so often over the years and so I was keen to apply.
https://www.theculturediary.com/stories/mayor-london-culture-seeds-applications-and-roadshows
Initial investigations proved this to be the usual ploy of a funder who is only interested in how you apply not what you deliver. Emails were exchanged to see if the idea of a photorgaphic exhibition to change the media narrative on homelessness was a potential. No! Came the response. It's not got any community involvement. I countered explaining the Homeless Community is a Community but it doesn't act or behave, as say a local Gardening Club does. Slight movement, well maybe, but show us how you'd involve the community? The London public would visit, we'd talk, beliefs would be altered, perception of homelessness in the media would change,then, the end of London Homelessness.
Oh yes we might be interested in that. Do please apply.
People asked me why Wales (my home country) voted to leave the EU because they were one of the places to get the most of EU money. For me, this very problem is why. Bid writing is an art so only large bureaucracies can afford to pay someone to do it for them. The rest of us throw something together quickly, hoping the grants officer can see past the typos, the incorrect gramma and pull out the idea. That's not how grant offices think. They want it in their language, their style and under their authority. This is the quickest way to kill good ideas. In the main, Grant officers are such, because they don't have a creative bent in their entire bodies and certainly no "go getting" attitudes Which means grants go to crappy ideas with excellently written bids and the excellent ideas with poorly written bids get lost in the weeds.
In Wales one of the most stupid and expensive EU funded "White Elephant" ideas was the Ebw Vale Garden Festival, the area needed a hospital, a school, a community centre, but what they got was some pretty daffodils (It took five years of laying idle after the festival, another ten as an out of town shopping centre before some bright spark using local money finally got what they should have).
Good creatives don't have time or the inclination to be wasting time with nonsense bureaiucracies that exist purely for process and never for outcome. Good creatives get things done. It was going to take the Mayor's Fund six weeks to make a decision, I needed the show, from idea, photographed, hung in a gallery and completed, in under four.
I have a play taster coming (
Fifty Years Of Trying) up I wanted to promote and my exhibiton Displaced, later in the year that I neeeded public support with (a Citywide Art Project using the luxury items stuck in my storage unit for the past decade of my ongoing homelessness, displayed in museum cases on the streets of London in the form of a treasure hunt, again to dispel many the myths of homelessness - I tried last year but the City of London - City Arts Initiative, inertia, even after saying they loved the idea, created pointless blocks which made it stumble).
So, I need a big media spalsh, something to encourage sponsors, audience members, venues etc. to get involved. Believe me, nothing gets done in the 21st Century until some major media publication prints about it.
Just weeks earlier Guardian Journallist Aditya Chakrabortty (It's his Birthday today - so Happy Birthday).had saved my project Displaced from complete devasation by assisting me, playing his role as a journalist, to secure a deal with
Access Storage, keeping my possessions there for another seven month, and my last chance of doing something with them not to waste the £24,000 that had been spent keeping them there.
Many people offer to help, in fact around twenty people at the
RSA (where I'm a Fellow) offered to help with the project after my talk (
What Does It Mean to be Homeless in the 21st Century) there, but not one followed through. Aditya (whom I met on the pannel of Dr. Frances Ryan's London book Launch
Crippled: Asuterity and the Demonisation of Disabled People, as I'm the homeless case-study in the Housing Chapter) is one of the few who said he would help and when asked, actually did.
It's the biggest problem in the 21st Century, I think some people call it virture signalling, wanting to be seen to be doing good, without actually doing any good at all.
Many people don't understand the battles Homeless people have with Councils, MPs and the dreaded DWP, and indeed some of the visitors to the Gallery At Oxo were keen to reflect the classic stereotypes back to me and were desperate for me to acknowledge that foreigners jump the queue in housing, that people cheat benefits and that homeless people are alcoholic and drug addicts.
It was these beliefs that the media had perpetuated that of course the show was designed explicitly to challenge. It's not that these things don't happen, but that they happen in such small percentages as to not warrant the media attention they garner.
But these comments, are always made as if having criminals amongst a community is unique to the welfare system. The irony of course, is that the percentage of criminals making fraudulent claims or perpetraiting criminal activity against the department is so low the DWP had to combine the fraud figure with their own errors figure to increase it and even then could only bring it up to 1.3% of the total claimed (between 2006 - 2012 when only Fraud was measured it never peaked higher than 0.8%).
https://fullfact.org/news/benefit-fraud-record-high/
And when you consider that 7% (seven times that of what's lost in fraud) of the total sum rightfully owed by the DWP goes unclaimed you do wonder why the Government is spending more than they would ever save on Fraud investigations. Especially when there's 3,750 Fraud investgators in the DWP to try and prevernt the loss of £1.3 Billion yet only 700 in the HMRC's Wealth team to protect £4.4 Billion of tax-payers money.
https://www.moneysavingexpert.com/news/2018/11/over-p10-billion-of-benefits-left-unclaimed/
https://fullfact.org/economy/do-benefit-fraud-investigators-outnumber-tax-inspectors-ten-one/
That cry of saving your hard earned "Tax Payers" money with draconian measures the DWP have brought in against Disability Claimants, also doesn't hold water for one second when you realise how much money the department has lost in defending the indefensible, with appeal after appeal being over turned. My case, simply to get the DWP to email me, took two years, a Royal Courts of Justice, Judgement and near £100,000 of DWP defence team legal fees. If they'd paid me that money instead, I would have never needed to have claimed again. But still I'm costing the Department as I've already beaten them at two benefit appeals and about to go into a third since then, costing tens of thousands of pound whilst only dealing with £100s of money owed to me (though invariably as each case takes over a year to be heard and all benefits stopped in the meantime, the back-payment of funds amout to £1,000s in the end, one assumes the DWP just hope you die before you win).
https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2018/feb/12/disability-benefit-appeals-department-for-work-and-pensions-figures
If of course you believe this ridiculous conceit in the first place.
The Tax Payer against Welfare Claimant argument is as ludicrous as two Green Flag customers arguing about who paid for the receovery of the others car. Both paid into the insurance scheme only one claimed. Thus the one who didn't break down is complaining about the one who did, for the very reason of insuring himself against it. It's embarrasing that anyone in Britian would not see the words National Insurance and see it as meaning just that, an insurance scheme.eveyone pays into, but only some claim. If everyone claimed, the entire Insurance industry would collapse over night.
And why doesn't this "us and them" argument extend to the middle-class thefts from supermarkets which amounts to £3.2 Billion a year but seems totally acceptable (three times that of DWP fraud). Especially when it comes to self-service checkout till fraud with hipsters claiming avocados are carrots to avoid paying for the product. This is shoplifting and is way more damaging.to the economy, the environment & social cohesion, but we don't see strip searches of every customer leaving Waitrose believing everyone to be a criminal so why do we do it when it comes to benefits?
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/avocados-carrots-self-service-scam-supermarkets-checkout-stealing-a8370621.html
And of course the biggest part of fraudulent benefit claiming is Housing Benefit and that doesn't even go to the claimant, that goes to the Landlord. So these £1m pound benefit cheat stories are ridiculous, as the money that's paid out in the main has made someone rich, richer, Yet, when convicted and the money's claimed back, it's from the claimant and not the Landlord.
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/landlords-making-millions-from-fraud-1346840.html
The reason is of course is how the meida present things about the DWP claimants to the public, it's their narrative that enshirine what people think about a subject and that too is true of the homeless.
Nearly without excpetion any media news story about homelessness will run with the classic tropes of drug addicition, alcoholism, cardboard boxes and a begging bowl. My favourite media organisation, Tortoise Media, where I'm a member, only did it a week ago to my huge disappointment. Esepcially as that image was attached to a story written by Peter Hoskin, whom I was developing a story about the impacts of Artificial Intelligence on DWP claimants with and had discussed this very perception problem with him.
https://members.tortoisemedia.com/2020/01/29/homelessness-taking-action/content.html
And this is why I approach Sarah Witt (events manager at Coin Street for Gallery At Oxo) with an email pitch with the idea of running a Quick & Dirty (the name of my production company abbrevaited to Q&D Productions, to avoid porn associations) of the Mayors Funding idea should she have space in the gallery and could donate to the project in late Ferbuary as it looked from the schedule on the website that they had.
This was Monday 20th January, when I'd received no response by the 23rd I chased again and was given the surprising response that the gallery was free from the 4th - 11th February if we could get the exhibition together in time.. It was less than ten days away but after discussion with my collaborator & friend paparaazzi photogrpaher Chris Harvey, we decided if we could cut the scale of the project down to just ten subjects shot over two half days, we could indeed put everything in place in time.
On Friday 24th January we'd submitted all our proposals and confirmed that Sarah herself will be doing our PR and liaising with JC Decaux for access to their Billboard on Waterloo Bridge (though she later refers to a comms teams in later communications, though it's never actually established what, who or if they actually exist) and requested that she send all other documents required, so I can get them sorted over the weeked, which sadly she doesn't do.
However, over the weekend I draft a press release which with just over a week to go clearly needs to go out that day, reach out to Tabish Khan the Art Critic at the Londonist. I still had it in my head that Gallery@Oxo was an art gallery, rather than a venue space.
I'd concluded it had its own staff member to man it (not the case, I did the entire run on my own in the end at huge detriment to my health and my MECFS), had good relations with the press and listings (nope, nothing there either) and as they had their non-descript advertisitng running on the JC Decaux Billboard that it would be merely a change of image (which also didn't happen).
Monday, I was all set we'd got our ten subjects, I'd scheduled four to be photographed that afternoon, all the documentation that I'd had been provided had been filled in and the draft press release had been sent to all involved by 08:20 Monday morning. I had a meeting with Sarah at 10am.
At that meeting I was somewhat floored when she informed she had yet to get the final sign off from her board. This didn't happen until the next morning Tuesday, but suddenly the focus, rather than being on the promotion of the event (ensuring listings etc.which could always be retracted later) the focus began to go on the nonsensical. They were concerned about Risk Assessment Forms (a useless device for anybody with the smallest iota of common sense).
The ONLY objective of this event was press and I'm now being embroiled with them getting upset about Public Liability Insurance document addresses (secured through as I obvioulsy didn't have one and was using a C/O deposit payments as they refused to take cash my only means of payment and suddenly my days rather than talking to journalsists and writing the copy for the show was being spent correcting ludicrous contracts and teaching people law.
Then on Wednesday having broken our necks to get this all organised, I get an email saying they were cancelling as they couldn't give it the focus they flet the exhibition needed. As you can imagine, I went ballastic, crashed with an MECFS relapse caused by the stress and lost an entire day from our already rapidly ticking down clock. I managed to shoot across their bow that I'd consider pursuing legal action against them,
Thursday we were all back on with another afternoon of shoots and the same Friday. Requiring us to run from one side of London to the other encompasing Abbey Road Studios, the Museum of London archives, Lock & Co Hatters and Fortnum and Masons before conlcluding in the RSA the CEO Matthew Taylor.
Chirs is a working paparazzi and was fitting this around his own work schedule and would often be shooting until 4am in the morning with celebrities like Madonna before grabbing a few hours sleep and out with me again. The delays meant an ever important break inside with friends would have to go out the window as now I'd be writing all weekend before the show opening two days later.
Friday I'm alerted that the so called "comms" team don't even have a press distribution list (a database of journalists to whom you can distribute press releases).
We managed to secure photographic printers on Monday, Majestics in Covent Garden rallied to the rescue with a booze delivery (the gallery forcing us to pay £144 for a licencee who didn't even wash the drink glasses) and on Tuesday with 20 minutes to spare we get the text up on all the walls.
The foot fall past the gallery ensured we had over 300 visitors without promotion, press, advertising or listings. But the sole point of the exhibition, getting the press there to talk about the issue, nowhere to be seen.
So for the entire run, I'm now stuck in the gallery, desperately trying to pull in favours from all and sundry. Tabish can't make it, but gives the show a retweet, Toby Young's twitter post citing "My Friend Paul Atherton (@LondonersLondon) has been homeless for ten years..." gets a good upsurge but not a single journalist even finds that mildly interesting.
https://twitter.com/toadmeister/status/1225168912221986817
And so we breakdown the show on Sunday. I immediately and predicably have an MECFS crash on Monday.
Laid up the following day I discover through my social media, the independent Mayorial candidate Rory Stewart is running a campiagn entitled #ComeKipWithMe asking Londoners to offer a place for him to sleep and explain their London to him. I reach out immediately. It taps straight into the message I was trying to portray with the exhibition so an invitation to bed down with me at Heathrow Airport for the night is offered.
Social media algorithms are not being my friend when I do anything social campaigning. An inconsequential post about Valentines nearly 40 engagements anything to do with the show 2 or 3.
So as one last ditch attemtpt to achieve my aim of changing the media narrative on Homelessness, I set up a 38 Degrees Petition to persaude Rory to select me for his campaign, at least this wouldn't have been an entire waste of time then.
https://you.38degrees.org.uk/petitions/rory-stewart-should-kip-with-homeless-paul-atherton
We'll just have to see if it will get some momentum... as ever fingers crossed.
