 Coronavirus has meant many stories which would have been headline news fooled by the wayside in terms of public consciousness. This certainly applies to the ongoing controversy surrounding the government's housing secretary, Robert Jenrick. Jenrick, as housing secretary, has the power to overall planning decisions made by local authorities and the government's own planning inspectors. In January this year, he used this power to grant permission for Richard Desmond, a pornographer and former owner of the Express newspaper, to build a £1 billion luxury development on London's Isle of Dogs. Desmond needed Jenrick's backing as the government's planning inspector had advised against the scheme on the basis that it delivered an inadequate amount of affordable housing and that the height of the tower would be detrimental to the character of the area. You can see Richard Desmond there now. So why did Jenrick overall the government's planning inspector? Well, we can't read his mind, but it seems relevant that Richard Desmond, the property magnate in question, is a Tory party donor. His company donated to the Conservatives in 2017 and get this, he personally donated to the Conservative party two weeks after Jenrick's decision was made. That does not seem like fair play to me. It still gets worse. God, there are so many elements to this story. So weeks before Jenrick made the decision that just happened to be of great financial benefit to Richard Desmond and then to the Conservative party, the two had sat next to one another at a Tory fundraising dinner. Desmond showed Jenrick a promotional video on his phone for the proposed £1 billion development. This is hardly subtle, is it? I'll go to Dahlia in one moment for her thoughts, but first there is one more bit of information you need to understand the true cost of this cozy establishment free for all. That's because the day the scheme was approved, the 14th of January, was not any other day in the calendar of developers wishing to make a buck in London's most income deprived borough. On the 15th of January, the following day, Tower Hamlets were due to introduce an infrastructure levy on new developments to fund local schools and health services. It would have cost Desmond £40 million. But because his application was approved the day before the scheme came in, he didn't have to pay a penny. This really rings very similar to the system that they have in the US where you have sort of major companies that have entire departments whose exclusive purpose is to network with and sort of make strategic donations to candidates and parties that ensure their interests are secured. So whether it's like a fossil fuel company wanting to build a pipeline through a particular area or whether it's contractors wanting to win contracts for particular infrastructure projects, we see kind of like this is very institutionalised in somewhere like the US and here that the sort of donation system isn't quite as dramatic and isn't quite as big as it is in the US. But there is that worry again that as we are moving towards a more US style politics that this will become more and more common. And when these kind of transactions are done under the cover of donations, which in the US because of the Citizens United bill giving donations to parties or to candidates counts as free speech. So it's protected under the First Amendment. Basically, these companies aren't stupid. They know that they factor these donations in and pay for that kind of proximity to politicians. So for example, we saw that in this instance where Richard Desmond and and Jenric were sitting next to each other like shortly before these these transactions took place at a really expensive dinner. So they'll hold these like really expensive fundraising dinners where it costs like 200 grand for a ticket in order to be with a particular politician. And they will only donate to particular candidates or particular parties, or sometimes they'll just donate to both sides of the ballot so that whoever wins they know they've got them in their pocket. They'll only do that if they're confident that they're going to have a return on their investment. So the amount that they pay in that donation compared to the amount of profit they make by, for example, being allowing it to pass before the infrastructure levy, or not having to abide by the fact that we mandate that big projects like this have 30% affordable housing is incomparable. So they save so much money by doing this. And like I said before, you know, the most egregious part of this for me is the is the fact that this was essentially used in order to circumvent the 30% affordable housing rule, which is if you think about it, the idea that new buildings, that new big developments that often take over from social housing that, you know, are done without collaboration or consent from the local community are only mandated to have 30% affordable housing. You know, that in itself is already a tiny, tiny concession from the state. So the idea that these backroom shenanigans that rarely get investigated, still that's not enough for them. It's not enough for them that they can that they only have to give 30% of the housing back into the local community. That is shaping how we live in our whether or not we can live in our neighborhoods. And we see other kind of ramifications of this. For example, in Grenfell, whilst it wasn't exactly this kind of scenario, we saw a situation whereby the council was so corrupted that no matter how many times Grenfell residents raised concerns about the cladding and the fire safety in their homes, they were repeatedly rebuffed because they were wider interest at play because the council was not there to respond to their needs. So this is sort of a part of our political DNA as it were right now. And it's very, very worrying that soon it will this will become as it did in the US by fighting for that Citizens United amendment. They were able to make a lot of these practices legal. So it would be harder to hold people to account to it. But especially as we see, you know, the NHS potentially going up the sale, I think we're going to be seeing a lot of healthcare companies and companies that are looking to get their part of the pie. And I know when Jeremy Hunt became healthcare secretary, there was that controversy about his connections to companies that wanted to privatize the NHS. There is this real worry that in these trade deals and in this kind of like, as we move away from the EU, that this will become increasingly part of our political DNA in a similar way to the US, which has been one of the single most destructive processes and parts of the democratic process in the US for a very, very long time. I am going to introduce those further developments today. They are, again, shocking under pressure from opposition parties documents relating to the decision were made public this afternoon. And they appear to confirm not dispel accusations of impropriety. So an email from a civil servant referring to the development read, let's take a look at this on timing. My understanding is that Secretary of State is was insistent that decision issued this week, i.e. tomorrow, as next week, the viability of the scheme is impacted by a change in the London CIL regime. So that's very explicit. It was not a coincidence that this project was approved on the 14th of January. It was approved on the 14th of January, and the Secretary of State explicitly said it needed to be approved on the 14th of January so that Richard Desmond didn't have to pay 40 million pounds to local schools and hospitals. And you can see the wording there. They say, oh, it will affect the viability of the scheme. Now, this is a billion pound development on prime real estate. These people are making millions from this. And it doesn't become unviable if they have to invest in the community, if they have to invest in schools, if they have to invest in health service, or heaven forbid if they have to let some working class people live in the building by having some of the housing as affordable. It doesn't affect the viability of it. It just affects how much cash goes into people's pockets when all they've done is have some money to invest in building it. You know, Richard Desmond did not design the house, right? He did not build the house. He had enough money to buy that plot of land. And now he wants to make a 20% return, even though he hasn't done very much apart from sit next to a Tory government minister. And if he has to let a little bit of that money trickle down into health services and schools, in what is the borough in London with the highest levels of income deprivation, he just doesn't want to. It's got nothing to do with viability. Let's look at what else emerged from these documents. This is straight from the Guardian copy on the report because it was quite a recent story. So the documents also show that Desmond, the former media owner and pornographer, lobbied Generic about the deal in writing and arranged a site visit for him. Desmond urged Generic to rush through the deal before the levy was introduced writing, we don't want to give the Marxists loads of dough for nothing. Generic replied, I think it's best if we don't meet until the matter is decided. Now, the disdain, the disdain from this property developer, and let's just make you know, this is not some person who's lived an incredibly virtuous life. This is not Mother Teresa, this is a pornographer who used to own the express and now uses his money to gentrify working class parts of London and begrudges giving any of his vast profits to services for local people. Also, Tower Hamlet's government are not Marxists. They're very moderate social democrats, democratically elected by the people of that borough, which this guy is now introducing this huge imposing building purely to line his pockets. And this from Generic, I think it's best if we don't meet until the matter is decided. What should you reply as a government, as a person in the country responsible for housing with the power to sign off whether a building gets constructed or not? You don't say, oh, I think it's best if we don't meet in person. You say it's completely inappropriate for us to be having a conversation like this, given the position of authority I am in and given the conflict of interest, this introduces to this situation, right? You say, now that you've said this, I'm actually going to have to pass this case on to a different person because I am compromised here. That is what someone with integrity, with honesty, who cared about housing in this country would have done. What did Robert Generic say? Oh, I think it's best we don't meet. You know, maybe maybe it's going to be awkward when I do this huge favour for you if we're pictured together. It's pathetic.