Hackney Council politically censor author Iain Sinclair for his views on the Olympics "legacy"

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London Tonight local TV news had a story concerning the famous London based author Iain Sinclair, who lives in Hackney, and who writes extensively about London.

The Labour run Hackney Council have now rescinded an invitation to him, to give a reading of his forthcoming book, at a local Library in Stoke Newington, citing his criticisms of the Olympic Games as the reason.

The book, called Hackney, That Rose-Red Empire: A Confidential Report is set in Hackney, but does not, apparently, even mention the Olympic Games.

Hackney Council are reported in The Times:

The person who invited me was told they were no longer allowed to have me because I had been critical of the London Olympics," the author says.

Iain Sinclair's piece in the London Review of Books, The Olympics Scam, about the damage to the area and the propaganda extolling the Olympics and its alleged "legacy", may well have contributed to this blatant political censorship, and is well worth reading.

This sort of Chinese Communist style political censorship in the run up to the Olympic Games must not be tolerated, and the miscreant politicians or bureaucrats who try this on, should be ridiculed and punished.

3 Comments

Iain SInclair explains a bit more about this in The Guardian

Banned in Hackney - for going off-message about the Olympics

I read the movingly eloquent essay, "The Olympics Scam" by Ian Sinclair, thanks to the Mayor's Blog. I could cry at the wicked waste of it all. I had in my own small way been trying to voice on message boards sentiments such as those written by Mr. Sinclair re the displacement of people, homes and small businesses for - what? Posh flats and offices. I am not surprised that he was banned by the higher echelons of the Council from Hackney Library, though - the truth hurts them so and must be stamped out! There was an Internet petition against the bid I came across in the last weeks of the run-up to the result but I fear it had too few signatories. If only those opposing the bid had enjoyed the same access to the public purse. I wrote to the Olympics Committee in Switzerland pleading that London ought not to get the Olympics because there was not as much support for our bid as the Livingstone bandwagon was making out. There must have been a huge number of such letters. I did not even get an acknowledgement.
The "regeneration" has driven yet another stake into London's heart. As for the proposed shopping centre, that is more bad news to me. Another Temple of Mammon which, based on current predictions of a decade or more of debt for the UK, will be surplus to requirements.

What do you expect? Snide, commie wannabe control freaks are in control. Yeah of course they can't stand the truth. That is why they hide in the dark just like the rats they are.

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