Going to start with a quote from Rishi Sunak (notes) 2024 – 7 large format black and white prints, each A0
My political activism involves writing many notes in preparation for the public meetings I have been speaking at with anti-Special Economic Zones/Freeports campaigners across the UK over the last 2-3 years. The audiences are a wide ranging demographic, from socialist pensioners horrified at the right-wing policies of Keir Starmer’s changed Labour Party, to church groups, independent party representatives, investigative journalists, and concerned members of the public.
I write and publish much of this content on Twitter, Substack and BlueSky. My recent art work throws light on the political upheavals currently dismantling democracies around the world as neoliberal govts work hand in hand with corporations to subvert democracy via ‘zoning’.
SEZs, Freeports, and charter cities carve out feudal enclaves as corporate governed zones with separate laws and regulations to the host country, these are often referred to as ‘states within states’, they are attempts to privatise entire regions as the public sector is defunded often over decades, this also includes the bankrupting of local councils.
As social democratic norms collapse, so capitalism steps in to ‘rescue’ democracy from its failures. The City of London got its charter in 1075, ‘zones of exception’ continued throught to 1600 with the East India Company which was an English, and later British, joint-stock company founded in 1600, British colonialism cycled through to the 1850s with the colonization of Hong Kong and Singapore, which to be known as China’s ‘century of humiliation’. Zoning has been a key component of colonialism for centuries.