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According to Ken Livingstone, who visited it on 4 April this year, Brixton Base is a vibrant artistic hub providing top-quality training courses to young black people in the creative industries - more than justifying its £535,000 London Development Agency grant.
Creativity is certainly involved at Brixton Base, but not in quite the way the Mayor might hope. The project, in Offley Road, Kennington, has become a giant siphon of City Hall cash into questionable pockets, and an object of serious concern to its local community.
According to answers to the London Assembly, the Mayor's half-million pounds over the past two years appears to have bought just three training programmes, one lasting just six weeks and the other two, running together, six months.
And even those may not be all they seem. South London filmmaker Shango B'Song told the Standard Brixton Base used his project to get money out of the LDA under false pretences.
"I financed all the spending on my project out of my own pocket, which I reckon came to £133,000 in cash and equipment," says Mr B'Song. "But I saw almost none of the grant the LDA gave Brixton Base to pay for it. They pocketed it and told me they'd been refused a grant."
When he realised what had happened, Mr B'Song said Brixton Base's director, Errol Walters, gave him 24 hours to leave the building and kept all his valuable studio equipment. The LDA and Brixton Base repeatedly refused to deny Mr B'Song's claims.
The reality of Brixton Base is that it has become a gathering place not for young people wanting to enter the creative industries, but for two other slightly less deserving groups. First is the constellation of friends and business associates around the Mayor's race adviser, Lee Jasper, a very high number of whom seem to have places on Brixton Base's board, or to work for it, or both.
Their links with City Hall may explain the project's good fortune in winning public money - including a grant of £237,000 for "premises" when they occupy an LDA-owned building and paid no rent at all for the first year.
The second group, according to some locals, is the area's criminal fraternity. "This project is becoming of major concern to the community," said one. Another person described how a Brixton Base staffer boasted to a meeting of nine people, at which our informant was present, that he had threatened the LDA with gang violence if they did not continue the project.
The same informant told us that Mr Walters had welcomed and introduced a leading member of a south London street gang to callers to the Base. The LDA's refusal to act on repeated complaints by the users of the building about the "intimidating" atmosphere there may have been because of the project's City Hall connections.
Or it may have been that they themselves felt intimidated.
Reader views (3)
Campbell, You are very wrong. We are not targeted or criticised enough! Black people in Britain will perform better to the benefit of the whole Black race if they are held accountable for their own failures. Patronising men like Ken Livingstone are doing us no good at all! We need to be allowed to take responsibilities for our failures. We cannot blame anyone else for our failures. Think and tell me why there is no successful society of Black people anywhere on this planet, comparable with any average Asian society? Ask yourself why there are no Singapore or Taiwan or Malaysia in Black Africa or the Caribbean? It is because we refuse to take responsibility for our own failures. We fail in Africa and Caribbean to organise ourselves and we blame white people. We fail to rip the maximum benefit of the opportunities for self development and improvements that abound in Britain and we blame white people. Tell me how equal as human beings we are if we should never take responsibilities?
- John Iteshi, London, 07/12/2007 11:37
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Mr. Gilligan has made very serious allegations which ought to be openly investigated, but it seems that nothing will come out of it as very few men are courageous enough to accuse a "chosen" Black person of wrong doing! It is very disappointing, but you must not give up! Majority of genuine Black people would stand by you against the lazy idiots who rely on race mongering to survive.
- John Iteshi, London, 06/12/2007 21:53
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I wonder if Shango B'Song would have anything to say if he had not been told to leave. He seems to be very silly to have spent so much money after the first £500 I would have been very worried it seems he has more money than sense.
If they are tackling the hard core groups, I respect them because it is not easy work, trying to turn those lives around.
Black groups are always being held accountable for things that might be out of their control unlike other groups who seem to be untouchable.
- Campbell, Brixton, England, 06/12/2007 11:47
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