Although this website archives texts and books published by Architects for Social Housing between 2015 and 2021, this is no longer the website for the work of ASH. To keep abreast of ASH’s ongoing design and community work, in both London and Hong Kong, please click on the following link: Architects for Social Housing, the website for which we set up in 2021.
Since March 2020, the current website has published the writings and books of Simon Elmer, ASH’s co-founder, co-director and Head of Research, on subjects other than those directly related to the work of ASH, and which I have grouped under the heading of ‘Biopolitics’. This has been occasioned by the unprecedented and illegal changes to UK society enforced without a democratic mandate not only by our Government but also by unelected and unaccountable transnational technocracies, at a time when access to online platforms and journals willing to publish such research continue to be limited.
These writings have been read by several hundred thousand people across the world, and have received an overwhelmingly positive response. In addition, many hundreds of people have sent written expressions of their thanks for how these articles and books have helped them to understand better and respond to the ongoing infringements on our rights and freedoms illegally imposed since March 2020. In this sense, they have been of community interest and service to a large number of people both in the UK and abroad.
Not surprisingly, some of these writings have addressed the devastating impact of lockdown on housing conditions in the UK; the consequences of introducing systems of surveillance and digital identity restricting access and movement within the UK biosecurity state constructed over the past four years; the threat to our human rights presented by new urban interventions such as 15-Minute Cities and London’s Ultra Low Emission Zone; and other topics of interest and concern to a socialist architecture, even if they have been uncritically embraced by the UK’s unfailingly compliant architectural profession.
We have been forced to make this entirely artificial differentiation between the different aspects of our community work by the ongoing attempts of the Office of the Regulator of Community Interest Companies and the Architects Registration Board to censor my writings on the Great Reset and to try and stop Architects for Social Housing from practising professionally in the UK. We are happy to report that neither institution has been successful in their illegal interference with our freedom of expression and right to work, and that just as I will continue to publish my writings on this website, ASH will continue to report on its work on the ASH website.
Please note: if you wish to make a donation to help the community work of Architects for Social Housing, you may do so on its website. Payments made on this website — renamed after the working title of my next book — for the purchase of the ebooks of my publications, including The Road to Fascism, Virtue and Terror, The New Normal and The Great Reset, are made to their author.
If you would like to contact me about the research published here, please write to: simonelmer@hotmail.com. If you would like to contact us about the work of ASH, please write to: info@architectsforsocialhousing.co.uk.
Simon Elmer
‘Communism for us is not a state of affairs that is to be established, an ideal to which reality will have to adjust itself. We call communism the real movement that abolishes the present state of things. The conditions of this movement result from the premises now in existence.’
— Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels
‘In a higher phase of communist society, after the enslaving subordination of the individual to the division of labour has disappeared, and with it the opposition between mental and physical labour; after labour has become not merely a means of living but the primary need of life; after the productive forces have increased together with the all-around development of the individual, and all the springs of co-operative wealth flow more abundantly — only then can the narrow horizon of bourgeois right be surpassed in its entirety and society inscribe on its banners: From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs!’
— Karl Marx
A Communist in Hong Kong 
Wonderful blog post! I hope to view a great deal more by you.
LikeLike
Good article. Shared
LikeLike
You might have missed it, but if you read the appendix to The New Normal: What is the UK Biosecurity State? (Part 2. Normalising Fear), titled ‘Acts of Resistance’, you’ll find exactly that. I introduce it as follows: ‘It’s too late for pessimism. As Peter Ustinov once said, the pessimist is the man who wakes up every day to rediscover the world is run by bad people, while the optimist knows exactly how bad the world can be and does everything he can to make it better. As a contribution to which, I offer these acts of resistance. This is the hard bit, where words turn into actions or fade into silence.’
LikeLike
Thank you
LikeLike
It seems to me that this entire covid phenomenon amounts to an unprecedentedly audacious protection racket whereby a bunch of disguised gangsters hold a society to ransom by promising them protection against a scourge which the gangsters themselves surreptitiously create and of course, for this to work, the scourge must be constantly maintained.
And in anticipation of being accused of misattributing effects of capitalism to a “conspiracy theory”, I’d just like to say that I think there is no tension between the two views i.e. this is how capitalism works.
LikeLike
Dear Simon, I can’t find any other way of contacting you! I so liked the interview you did with James Delingpole, I would love for you to come and talk to my ‘awake’ group in London. We have talks every month, fantastic speakers like Dr. Tess Lawrie. I hope this finds you! Very best, Candice (email w@pobox.com)
LikeLike