This is London: Life and Death in the World City

Product Information

That didn’t surprise me. In another life, as another Romanian, Polish, Ukrainian person, I know I would have longed to be one who just goes.

It’s when Judah sits down with someone and listens that the book really takes off. He is brilliant at getting people to speak: the London Underground cleaner; the Polish builder; the Egyptian heiress; the Filipina housemaid; the imam who washes the bodies of the dead; the teacher; the carer; the gang leader. Among the mass of migrant stories are recurring tales of the glamour of London as seen from afar, and the grime, fear, poverty and violence seen close up. We learn a lot about the work that migrants do and how they see the British. Mean, ugly, lazy, cruel, secretive and snobbish are among the words used about us, though there is respect for our constitution and amusement at how we’re always saying sorry. Vallée, Shahin; Judah, Ben (2 September 2021). "International Corporate Tax Reform". DGAP: German Council on Foreign Relations . Retrieved 25 June 2022. It is hard to overstate the value of what Judah has done . . . This is London is an important and impressive book * Sunday Telegraph *

His first book, Fragile Empire (2013), a study of Vladimir Putin's Russia, was published by Yale University Press. [21] [22] His second book, This Is London, was published by Picador in 2016. The book was longlisted for the Baillie Gifford Prize for Non-fiction 2016 and shortlisted for the Ryszard [23] Kapuscinski Award for Literary Reportage 2019. [24] This is a book written in a flowing/poetic journalistic style, it's intention is to inform us about the real life situation in London.The mainstream media plays an important role in how the public understands issues, such as immigration.In the UK a liberal/progressive political ideology dominates and affects the framing, meaning we tend not to hear the opposing anti-immigration argument,we mostly hear that immigration and diversity is a very positive thing that greatly benefits both the immigrant and the country they move to.This author gives us the other side of the story. The worst-off migrants often spend their first nights like this – on the street. Today the majority of London’s 7,500 street sleepers are migrants, and a third of them are eastern European. Squats and doorsteps tend to divide into “English” and “Polish” zones. There are frequent fights.

How common is this? In 2015, the ONS estimated that there were 209,000 jobs in the country paying less than minimum wage. Yet the government has prosecuted only three firms for paying less than minimum wage since 2014. Little surprise the touting spots thrive. Judah has written for The New York Times and The Sunday Times. He has been a guest on CNN, BBC News and Channel 4 News and is a contributing writer for Politico Europe. [25] Whites will not be stopping the progressive agenda because they have been subjected to social engineering,due to that engineering, they themselves agree that it is perfectly acceptable to shame white people for expressing any pride in their racial identity or empathy for their own group - inevitably this leads to a despairing kind of learned helplessness:the only way they can gain approval or self esteem is to be totally self-sacrificing of their own best interests.Indigenous Londoners feel they don't have much control of the current situation,if they speak out they risk vilification and censure so they try to accommodate and do what is expected of them.They try to rationalize the situation repressing their real feelings because they fear the social sanctions of behaving otherwise. Proponents of cosmopolitan collectivism strongly disapprove of nationalism. Neo marxist progressives think nationalism is synonymous with hatred towards foreigners.These pathologizers feel more comfortable assigning blanket blame to the indigenous population than to any other racial group. Judah does an excellent job of humanising the dispossessed, in a book that every Daily Mail aficionado / racist Brexiteer should read to get over themselves. He goes to extreme measures to capture the voices of these people, posing as an itinerant worker and sleeping rough with his subjects to get them to open up to him. There was one final thing, which is that everybody in the book is a storyteller. They all want to tell their stories and they all think that their stories say something profound and important about Europe today. And all of the stories add up to a question. All of the great political philosophies—liberalism, socialism, conservatism—they’re all about how we should live. What is a good life? And all of the people in the book are asking themselves, and they’re also asking you, is this the way we want to live now? You spoke earlier about how those within and beyond the continent perceive Europe. How do you think This Is Europe will challenge, or enhance, those perceptions?Judah, Ben (2 April 2017). "Exclusive interview: Emmanuel Macron on Brexit, le Pen and the teacher who became his wife". The Sunday Times. It makes for an epic story of a city that’s changing, of neighbourhoods which have become unrecognisable in a generation. It opened my mind to a massive part of London I was largely unaware of.

I became a journalist because I love the experience of traveling around cities and continents and listening to people with very, very different points of view one after the other. So I wanted to write a book that had the closest possible feel to that—where you could read the book and you would meet, like me, one person after another from all over Europe telling their own stories in their own way and in their own voices. I don’t think there’s anything particularly special or interesting about the sort of “great white male wandering around” anymore. I think that’s a really outdated way of writing about things. How did you decide which people to include in the book? Tismaneanu, Vladimir (May 2014). "Reviewed Work: Fragile Empire: How Russia Fell In and Out of Love with Vladimir Putin by Ben Judah". International Affairs. 90 (3): 725–727.In a series of vivid but always empathetic portraits of other people’s lives, journalist Ben Judah invites us to meet them. Drawn from hours of painstaking interviews, these vital stories reveal a vibrant continent which has been transformed by diversity, migration, the internet, climate change, Covid, war and the quest for freedom. Snatched uncaptioned photographs punctuate Judah’s impressions, lending the whole a slightly unmoored, surreal quality, as if this London, perhaps intentionally, is happening inside his head. In among this sometimes alienating drift, there are real moments of insight, well worth clinging on to: the story of the tube cleaner, the Ghanaian Akwese, for example, is full of lived truths about the invisible labour force that keeps the city functioning overnight; the imam Hajji washing dead bodies in the mosque’s mortuary by day, driving a minicab after hours, offers another kind of reality. Journalism at its best is an exercise in empathy not discrimination; London, this book reminds you, will always demand that too. Judah’s journalistic talent has been used well to give an in-depth account of the city, and on this premise alone the book is a worthwhile read. While the under-developed politics of This is London limit the broader social commentary on why the city is changing, it is nonetheless valuable as a candid and necessarily alarming depiction of London’s extremes.