In Kensington Town Hall last Wednesday night, a Labour councillor’s motion, “Assistance to Children in Poverty,” was slapped down by the permanent Conservative majority that dominates the council. A perfect allegory for the hopelessly dysfunctional politics of Kensington & Chelsea.
(the Labour councillors’ original motion)
Councillor Mohammed Bakhtiar’s motion was modest; he acknowledged the appalling rates of child poverty in the borough and the additional challenges created by the Covid restrictions. He called on the council to establish systems and allocate additional funds to address a crisis in which food poverty and job insecurity have compounded the difficulties faced by thousands of families.
The Labour councillor’s motion noted that a quarter (4,500 according to the last census) of the borough’s children live in poverty, with most of them residing in working households. A report by WPU Economics for the Kensington & Chelsea Foundation in 2021 showed that almost half (45.3%) of the borough’s children attend independent schools, far higher than both the London (10.1%) and England (9.7%) averages. This means that, of the Kensington children not in private education, close to half are living in poverty. The WPU report also notes:
• Black students in the borough have a gap in average Attainment 8 scores (a measure of progression in attainment) that is four and a half times larger than in England overall.
• White British pupils eligible for Free School Meals in the borough are the largest educationally disadvantaged group in terms of GCSE performance and higher education.
WPU Economics identified a wide range of factors that contribute to the borough’s educational inequalities:
• RBKC had higher temporary and permanent exclusion rates in primary and secondary state schools than both London and England as a whole. (This has been worsened by the academisation process, including the unaccountable leadership installed at Holland Park School)
• Exclusions for Black and Mixed ethnicity students are twice as high as their White or Asian peers. For students with Special Education Needs provision, they are three times as high as those without.
• Inadequate housing impacts education and 13% of RBKC households are overcrowded; 29.8 out of every 1,000 households are in temporary accommodation in the borough, compared to 17 in London 4.1 in England overall.
• A combination of a lack of space to learn at home and language and cultural barriers has meant that many children struggled to access quality education during the period of Covid restrictions.[i]
If we break the statistics down geographically, they become even more stark. Census figures for Golborne ward in North Kensington revealed that 68% of children were living in overcrowded homes. On Henry Dickens Court in another northern ward, Notting Dale, child poverty was at 58% while in Queens Gate, South Kensington, it was 2.8%.
Before Covid, communities in the north of the borough already faced a deteriorating situation; men in Golborne’s life expectancy had dropped to 72, while in a southern ward, Hans Town, they live 22 years longer. With a higher number of people from Black and minority ethnic communities residing in North Kensington, the area was disproportionately impacted by Covid. Office for National Statistics data showed Black males being over 400% more likely to die from Covid than white males. Parents of children living in poverty and overcrowded accommodation were also more likely to have a job deemed key to the economy, so many had to continue going to work while the laptop class worked from home, saving money and extending economic inequality.
The obscene inequalities affect the south of the borough too, with cuts to services worsening the poverty already entrenched in Earls Court and Chelsea World’s End.
Demand for tuition
While the borough’s third sector has worked valiantly to provide opportunities for children to catch up with lost learning following the counter-productive school closures, the demand has been difficult to meet in a funding environment in which charitable donations are declining.
An education coordinator at local charity told us: “The cost-of-living has bitten down on families, and we’re still in the long shadow of Covid, so demand for our classes has sky rocketed. We’ve doubled our registrations for educational support in the last year.
“All children were negatively affected by Covid because most learning progress happens in the classroom. But children from economically disadvantaged families were hit the hardest, and it’s not because the children aren’t capable or they have the wrong attitude. Factors like a lack of financial resources in the family, unsettled home circumstances and having parents who don’t have a high level of UK education are decisive.
“Children from families with money have been negatively affected too, results are down across the board. But being able to afford private tuition and IT equipment stops them falling behind. Teachers at schools are now over-stretched so can’t give time and attention to those who need it most. So an attempt at equity in education is not unfair in any way. Investing in high-impact support will help all children because it would free up time in the classroom for all pupils.
“Education is the most important thing to invest in in any community. It lifts people out of poverty, breaks negative cycles in families and empowers individuals to improve their circumstances. There’s a net positive effect on every aspect of the local community, social and economic. Crime goes down, cohesion increases.”
It was in this dire economic and social milieu, and under the council’s giant crest with its motto ‘What a good thing it is to dwell together in unity’ that Labour councillors sought to make some inroads into addressing the educational inequality they see worsening every day in their wards.
The Conservatives’ response was moved by Cllr Will Pascall of Chelsea and Cllr David Lindsay, former Mayor of Kensington:
(Tories’ amended motion)
The Tory councillors deleted from the specific actions proposed by the Labour councillors, namely identifying children in particular need of educational support and allocating funds to help them. The urgency in the Labour motion was replaced with a reaffirmation of the status quo and a specific focus on celebrating children at “grant-maintained schools” – the children already least in need of support catching up after Covid because they aren’t hampered by overcrowding, over-worked parents, poverty, and stress.
Because of the rules of the game at the Town Hall, Labour, the minority party, could not oppose the majority party’s amendments; they could only voice their opposition in a debate, and policy remained unchanged. As it has since the 1960s when an in-depth study found that Kensington’s Tory councillors saw it as their duty to limit public spending strictly to the provision of statutory services and to encourage “self-help” among the poor.
This was a boilerplate move from the Tories. Nothing has changed in the 50 years of the borough’s existence. No event, even the “most serious crime committed on British soil this century”[ii] can shake the Conservatives’ complacency. Posh white people with property portfolios who pay other people to raise their children and clean their homes push “self-reliance” on impoverished young people while restoring the council’s bank reserves and keeping their voting base, who have no material problems, on high alert over Labour’s menacing attitude towards the Tories’ one local campaign issue: bin collections.
The specific councillors who submitted the Tories’ response are typical Kensington toffs. Cllr Lindsay is an old Etonian, while Cllr Pascall apparently sent his children there.
The council does not look like an administrative entity capable of responding to the needs of disparate groups in a time of widening inequality when senior councillors treat politics like a sport. The Labour councillors who spoke against the Conservatives’ amendments to the timely “Assistance to Children in Poverty” motion also have to reckon with Sir Keir Starmer’s determination to keep those same children in poverty as he appeases the donor base that he serves, many of whom live in Kensington.
What a good thing it is to dwell together in unity.
[i] All statistics in these bullet points are taken from Poverty and Prosperity in Kensington + Chelsea Understanding inequalities in a Borough of Extremes; A WPI Economics Report for The Kensington + Chelsea Foundation; November 2021
[ii] Peter Apps, quote from Show Me The Bodies: How We Let Grenfell Happen; Oneworld Publications
There are thousands more impressive and intimidating buildings in London than Wimbledon Magistrates Court, but last week I learned just how language can more than make up for that lack of grandeur to ram home power in our multi-tier persecution and revenue generation system. The southwest London Magistrates Court is a miserable, miserly microcosm of festering inequalities; arrogant power, the disadvantage of impoverishment and all the efforts that are made the maintain and uphold a system that rewards its servants, so long as they denigrate those born equal. Some observations from my day in court…
Arriving 30 minutes early as requested, I joined a queue for a security check to gain entry to the building proper. The queue was managed by harassed-looking staff, fussing and monitoring everybody’s position, creating an arbitrary arrangement of spacing between us. To pass the time you could talk to a neighbour in the queue or read the A4 laminated posters stuck on the front desk that boasted of the number of weapons seized from people attending magistrates courts in 2022. It took a minute in this queue to recognise that I’d stepped into a world in which I had no power and in which my prized independence counted for nought.
The lion and the unicorn over the entrance are presumably supposed to impress, intimidate or empower every visitor as a symbol of British national greatness. There are no lions in Britain and unicorns don’t exist.
Every single person in the queue succeeded in setting off the alarm when they walked through the scanner (feel the criminality.) This meant everyone, male or female, was then scanned at close quarters by a man with a hand-held metal detector. In every case, a belt had caused the beeping. Law professionals in black suits had the door opened for them and were not scanned, nor did they thank the staff who honoured them in this way.
I had mentally prepared myself for the micro-aggressions of an oppressive institution and was determined to be as unaffected as possible and embrace the experience as cheerfully as I could. I finally cleared the scanners, a bit demoralised and anxious but nothing too bad. On the other side, I found no information waiting. Every aspect of Wimbledon Magistrates Court’s setup, including its staffing, furniture, systems and its legal professionals would send my antipathy to the top of the scale.
I wandered around for a minute looking for a sign then asked a member of the court staff what I was supposed to do. He was taken aback by the question but pointed me in the direction of a board which listed who was due in which court at what time. I saw that every single person’s appearance before the magistrate was listed for 10 AM. I had been advised in a phone call the previous week that I should inform the court that I had to be at work later that day so I could be seen early.
There were around 25 people waiting. None looked happy or relaxed. Yet these were not people facing serious criminal charges. It seemed we were all there for trivial matters, the majority relating to Transport for London tickets. Confusion mixed with anxiety pervaded the waiting area. Most sat down, but two men were particularly agitated. One was wearing a Covid-era mask and I judged him to be attempting to present his innocence through his body language as he avoided eye contact or conversation with any of his fellow defendants yet was keen to ingratiate himself to the staff using textbook manners. The other agitated man I judged (we’re all judges) to be angry at having to be there in the first place, and as the seconds ticked by on the oversized, over-noised clock, his impatience grew. No acknowledgement or respect was offered to him or his time. As a restless soul, I related better to these two misfits than those sitting down passively, anxiously awaiting news of what they were supposed to do, when and where. Presuming they were all in a similar boat to me, this was a load of people on something of a judicial blind date. ‘You are summonsed to court, but we won’t tell you much more than that…’
I stood, leaned against the wall, refusing to slump into a chair and obediently wait for this inefficient system to allocate me a time. After half an hour I got tired and sat down.
The thing that triggered me into picking up my pen and making these notes was when a man entered the waiting room and barked out “Is there anyone who hasn’t been spoken to yet?” His use of the passive voice struck me. The people in the waiting room were not people to have a conversation or discussion with – we were to be spoken to.
The man then went round barking at various people one-to-one or in groups, he ignored me. Most had English as their second language, but he still barked out legalese at them, intolerant of anyone who did not understand the words he was saying, the legal implications or the tricky situations they had found themselves in. No information of any utility had been provided; the timetable lied that we would all enter court at 10 o’clock. Now barking man was getting in people’s faces telling them they had to plead guilty. If they said they were not guilty he snapped back with “there is no not guilty.”
When a very anxious – terrified – woman interrupted barking man to declare she was definitely not guilty, he shouted at her “I am speaking!”
After a while I realised I was the only white British person in the waiting room. There were other white people who I had thought were British but one-by-one interpreters had arrived to help them all master the word “guilty.” I think they could just as easily have said it in their own languages, very slowly while pointing to the thing they really wanted – the exit.
As well as barking man, other members of the court staff buzzed in and out with clipboards gathering names. The notes on their paper were insanely disorganised – no table, no spreadsheet, not even ruled feint with margin, just scribbles of names by staff who seemed overwhelmed even at 10:30 in the morning.
Another member of staff who appeared regularly throughout the morning was an overly cheerful lady with no clipboard who offered out unsolicited banalities such as “it’s busy in court eight today” and “hmm it is a bit warm in here” to the waiters. She was a good sort who had taken on the role of mindlessly reassuring people to try to provide a sense of boring normality and to humanise people in a setting, or a strange ecosystem (to use a word that Rock Feilding-Mellen uses, but in a more accurate way, and also to provide another link between this article and the last one) where dehumanising humans is the whole point.
We were told to arrive 30 minutes early, but hours go by without anybody entering the courtroom or any explanation being offered as to why the wait. The powerful can withhold words that, in any more equal setting, would be offered as a matter of convention, like on a customer service call, or a delayed train announcement by TFL. I settled into a seating area away from the main group and busied myself writing down intense observations and notes for other articles related to language, the passive voice and injustice.
As we reached high noon, I knew I was the only person in the waiting room who had obtained a drink of water. I had inquired to court staff about where I could find a drink; they pointed to a door; behind that door was another door; behind that door was a room; in the room was a large filing cabinet and behind that a water cooler. Nobody else drank anything meaning but by the time they saw the magistrate, they were thirsty, hungry, agitated, frustrated, anxious, and confused. I was just hungry, agitated, frustrated, anxious and confused.
My advanced mental preparation for Wimbledon Magistrates Court involved reminding myself that, to these people, I was about as significant as a fly is to me before I swat it away. This mental technique succeeded inasmuch as I was not surprised by the attitudes of those earning their living under the lion & unicorn. I also topped up my healthy disdain for people who treat others as lesser beings simply because of some quirk of circumstance. This disdain is particularly strong for posh people (most judges, magistrates and lawyers fall into this category).
My interest and my game was to try to observe whether I could maintain my alertness, increase my aloofness and act with no interest whatsoever towards the functionaries of the system, to show them that I could not care less about what they thought of me. However, my conclusion now is that, no matter how well prepared mentally and emotionally one might be, there are formidable problems to face down. Problem one in Wimbledon was that for a very petty single justice ‘offence’ dealt with by a magistrate there is precious little information or guidance provided to the criminal. This meant that, like everyone else, I didn’t really know why I was there, what the implications were, or how I would be dealt with once in the courtroom. Would I be able to speak freely?
The second problem was that despite being fairly well mentally prepared and also not having the disadvantage of being a non-white person in a Magistrates Court, every detail of the space is designed to make you feel grotty. The chairs the waiting room; the staff and their ignorance; the missing information; the lack of food; the setup is one big insult. The waiting produces hunger, thirst and irritation; the net result being that by the time you finally enter a courtroom, you have been somewhat reduced in stature and some primordial urge to get out as quickly as possible in order to feel comfortable and autonomous once again has taken over.
Eventually, I told the court staff I really had to be at work soon and they bumped me up the list. I was delighted when my name was called and I could go in in fairly good spirits having planned several articles and hydrated myself thoroughly. ‘I could yet emerge the winner here,’ I thought to myself. Entering the courtroom I was faced with six people one of whom was the magistrate; I didn’t know who the others were. There were also people shuffling papers next to me. One of those flanking the magistrate asked “Has Mr Charles had a chance to speak to TfL?”
Everybody then looked at me, at which point I became immediately exasperated. “What does that mean, talk to TfL?”
They told me that it was important I should speak to TFL, they didn’t say why. I asked, “Who is TfL?”
Barking man piped up, “I am.”
“Do I have to go out again?”
Victory had turned to defeat, and I went for my important meeting with barking man and told him that there was nothing about him that identified him as a TfL employee – “you’ve got no lanyard” – no announcement, he’d appeared to be a member of the court staff going round telling people to plead guilty and these people might well have thought he was offering legit legal advice.
“So, what do you want to know?” – barking man seemed excited on my behalf as if getting to ask him questions was a rare opportunity.
“What?”
Barking started to read the meagre details I had already been provided ahead of my day in court….I told Barking to stop because I knew these details, but he continued trying to read it until I insisted that he stop and asked to go back into the court.
However, another person had taken my place in the courtroom and I suspected that following the 2.5 hour wait when nothing much happened, we were now being rapidly processed so that the magistrate and the other five people of privilege could have their lunch. This perception was reinforced when I finally got back into the courtroom and the magistrate asked me if I had anything to say so I made a couple of points which I thought supplemented my written statement quite nicely. The magistrate smiled sweetly at me but neither she nor colleagues had actually read anything I’d written or had any interest in my circumstances, and they were now keen to progress at speed through their issuing of fines. In my relief at being in the courtroom, I had made the mistake of forgetting that I was a fly, about to be swatted.
I was not allowed to sit down so to add to the discomfort of hunger, fatigue, frustration and confusion, I was now standing up awkwardly, too tall to be able to lean on the table in front of me.
Defeated, fined, I left with one personal regret, that I didn’t challenge the court with the question, “What’s the point in all this?” (I would have pointed to the waiting room.) I also left with a sense of injustice, no doubt shared by the other victims that day, that a court was used to extort money from people in an unjustifiable and unaccountable way, and that power was abused to conceal and cloud the truth from people. One thing is for sure, nobody going through that experience comes out with increased respect for the British court system.
The lion and the unicorn at Wimbledon Magistrates Court guard the tyrannical words ‘Honi soit qui mal y pense’ – “Shame on anyone who thinks evil of it.”
The aristocratic politician who vanished from public view after the Grenfell Tower fire, Rock Feilding-Mellen, has re-emerged. Reinventing himself as a spiritual man working for the greater good, yet still a businessman; connected, dynamic and wealthy. Is that the reality? Or is he a man on the run? From justice, from North Kensington, from himself and the spectre of karma? Six years on from the atrocity, it is worth considering who Feilding-Mellen was, who he is, and what his transformed image means.
Image from Beckley Retreats
Who?
Rock Hugo Basil Feilding-Mellen is the son of Amanda Feilding, who also goes by the titles Countess of Wenyss & March and Lady Neidpath. The family are distant royals, a lineage tracing back to Charles II. Among the properties they own is Stanway House in Gloucestershire, which they promote as “an enclave of very English and almost magical harmony.”
As well as being steeped in aristocratic and feudalistic privilege, Amanda Feilding is also a drug reform campaigner, a sought-after “thought leader” in psychedelic drug research. The media has presented a bohemian, eccentric image of the family, but their radical credentials are limited to psychedelics and do not cross over into causes that challenge the status quo such as land reform or social justice. You can watch her drill a hole in her own head here.
Radical Politics
Rock Feilding-Mellen took a career in politics and in 2010 was given a safe Conservative council seat in Kensington, the most unequal local authority area in Britain. Just three years later, at the age of 34 and with no obvious expertise or qualification for either position, he was made Deputy Leader of Kensington & Chelsea Council (RBKC) and Cabinet Member for Housing, Property and Regeneration. This positioned him to become the most consequential politician in recent local history. Feilding-Mellen set about manifesting a vision of dramatically altered demographics and culture in North Kensington, stating that he wanted to “wean people off” the idea of being able to live in social housing in the borough.
Under the banner of ‘regeneration,’ Feilding-Mellen cut RBKC’s housing waiting list in half and imposed a decant policy which removed the right of return to their neighbourhoods for residents forced out. The deputy leader also set out on an aggressive campaign of asset stripping the north of the borough; his targets included the college, library, Westway Information Centre, Canalside House and whole housing estates, including Lancaster West, site of Grenfell Tower.
During this period, Feilding-Mellen was also a director of various small, possibly shell, companies including Socially Conscious Capital Ltd which deals in “strategic land promotion projects” and remains a going concern at Companies House.
The name Socially Conscious Capital jars, given that it was Rock Feilding-Mellen who oversaw and signed off on the 2016 refurbishment of Grenfell Tower, done on the cheap while RBKC sat on a third of a billion pounds of reserves. It appears that the deputy leader still planned to ‘regenerate’ Lancaster West, presiding over the local authority’s culture of cost-cutting and denigrating residents who raised their voices.
After the Fire
Feilding-Mellen was forced by the government to resign from his RBKC leadership roles in the wake of the Grenfell Tower fire. He retained a passive income from his councillor’s salary until the May 2018 election despite vanishing from public life.
Rock’s mother Amanda Feilding carried on seemingly without compunction. A month after the fire, Vice magazine showcased her pro-drugs health campaigning, with no mention of Grenfell Tower, and she gave further interviews and talks on psychedelics throughout 2017 as if nothing had happened in North Kensington.
Four years on from the fire, Rock Feilding-Mellen answered some questions at the Grenfell Inquiry. But the Inquiry Chairman, Sir Martin Moore-Bick, did the politicians, Tenant Management Organisation officers and corporates who played roles (prima facie) in the atrocity a huge favour by creating a gap of years before any criminal investigation would commence. Moore-Bick’s priority was to establish what happened, not who was to blame. Covid lengthened this lag and the precedent of people like Graham Mackrell (implicated in the Hillsborough disaster) show how the passage of time and expensive lawyers can provide a way out for those determined to avoid justice in cases where the British establishment has a vested interest in avoiding a reckoning.
Image from Grenfell Tower Inquiry
The tortoise pace and “merry-go-round of buck-passing” of the Inquiry has not served the victims, only the criminals and the establishment. And Rock Feilding-Mellen, by birth and through his deeds, is an establishment figure.
Psychedelics
In contrast to many in North Kensington who live in forced passivity, waiting for a sign of justice for Grenfell, Feilding-Mellen has been able to explore a wildly different lifestyle via the family business. His mother is Founder and Executive Director of the Beckley Foundation, a registered charity focused on drug policy reform and scientific research into psychoactive substances. The foundation is named after Beckley Park, an Oxfordshire country house owned by various Royals, Dukes and Lords. Used historically as a hunting lodge by Kings, and possessing three moats, it is one of Amanda Feilding’s properties.
Beckley has two for-profit offshoots; one is Beckley Psytech Limited, a drug research company overseen by Amanda’s other son, Cosmo. Despite reporting a loss of over £9 million in 2021, Beckley Psytech also reported retained total assets of over £67 million.
Rock Feilding-Mellen co-founded and directs the other offshoot, Beckley Retreats, a company that offers supervised, legal psilocybin retreats in Jamaica and The Netherlands. Beckley offers 11-week programmes for participants, including online preparation, five nights of immersive retreat and support afterwards. The retreats are not cheap, but bursaries are made available, and Feilding-Mellen has stated that he wants to expand the availability of bursaries to enable more people to benefit from the healing and awakening experiences accessible through psychedelics.
After the Grenfell Tower fire and his enforced resignation from his cabinet roles at Kensington Town Hall, Feilding-Mellen apparently went into hiding. For months, posters in North Kensington asked where he had disappeared to.
But the protracted progress of the Grenfell Inquiry sheltered Feilding-Mellen from public accountability for years, and the national media had lost interest in him by August 2017.
Numerous sources who knew him in both his politician and businessman days recall a man so arrogant and without regard for others that they assumed he took cocaine before every meeting. As a young man, Feilding-Mellen would apparently startle rooms of seasoned businessmen with his projection of absolute entitlement. Community leaders in North Kensington say that, while he liked to present himself as dynamic and entrepreneurial, he was transparently an old-school Conservative politician pursuing the interests of his class. It is not known to us whether or not Feilding-Mellen has a diagnosis of sociopathy or psychopathy, but his conduct in Kensington was consistent with somebody devoid of empathy and filled with a grandiose sense of self. These same traits are no barrier to somebody transitioning to an entirely new image by learning how to present certain emotions that elicit sympathy from empathic people.
Among the stable of right-wing Tory councillors that dominated the local authority, Feilding-Mellen was the youngest and most ambitious. Perhaps it was deference to his ancestry that inspired his colleagues to prematurely promote somebody with no obvious talent to a position of significant power. Or, with the unleashing of so-called austerity in 2010, the Kensington Conservatives knowingly used Feilding-Mellen as their attack dog against the working class communities of the borough, knowing that with every action taken against the population, a reaction would come in the form of resistance. Some Tory councillors from that era remain in cabinet roles including one who is now RBKC’s leader.
It is easy to argue that Rock Feilding-Mellen did more than any other individual to establish the conditions and normalise the attitudes that played out in the run-up to the Grenfell Tower fire. His personality and ambition, and the power he was gifted, added to his determination to lead a devastating demographic transformation of North Kensington created circumstances that reflected his destructive attitudes towards poorer communities.
Rock’s Recovery
Image from Instagram / Beckley Retreats
On the fourth anniversary of the fire, Forbes Magazine published a reverential piece on Amanda Feilding and her commitment to “cognitive liberty.” The impression is of Beckley being an enterprise aimed at some kind of common good but operating in a silo, and now being utilised to stage manage Rock Feilding-Mellen’s rehabilitation, possibly an important element in future court appearances. Beckley’s public relations output use the horror of Grenfell to portray Feilding-Mellen as a victim, with no hint at his true role.
Beckley’s copywriters use the passive voice around the Grenfell atrocity to re-position Rock as a man of vulnerability and virtue: “In his mid-thirties, a tragedy left him feeling purposeless and lost.”
Beckley’s website doesn’t identify Feilding-Mellen as a politician. He has moved on, “an entrepreneur and investor” who “seeks to create, cultivate and support start-ups that are poised to provide transformational benefits to individuals and our society at large through finding innovative solutions to the growing epidemic of mental illness or through finding new ways to boost creativity and connectedness.”
His political career in Kensington is brushed off as “rebelling against his upbringing” by his hippy parents. This rebellion ended with the devastation at Grenfell Tower, but this had a positive outcome for Rock that the reader is presumably supposed to be happy about: “It was only then that he found himself willing to explore that which his mother had long championed….finally seeing how transformative and regenerative the use of psychedelics could be.”
A section on the Beckley website titled “His Why” explains that psychedelics saved Feilding-Mellen from “a pit of cynicism” and inspired him to “help other skeptics and ‘realists’ discover the strength and joy that come from perceiving that we live in an enchanted universe.”
Rock states: “I am dedicated to helping others in the same way I was helped, to turn their lives around and see the wonder all around them.”
Does Feilding-Mellen need to package his story in such a sanitised, corporate-friendly way? Does he need to publicise his agonised spiritual awakening and personal development, only achieved on the back of his rapaciously abusive policies that targeted the most vulnerable in society? Perhaps he does, if he is to convince two audiences of his innocence: himself, and further down the line, possibly a judge.
Feilding-Mellen (right) with then-RBKC Leader Nicholas Paget-Brown (left) and leader of the now-disbanded KCTMO Robert Black inside Grenfell Tower during its refurbishment, 2016.
A supposedly transformed and regenerated human being, reset by psilocybin and meditation, yet in his appearance on the New Health Club podcast, Feiling-Mellen sounded very much the politician or businessman, focusing on the practical aspects of Beckley’s work, glossing over the absence of any personal spiritual insights by saying “I try very hard not to wang on too much about my connection to the divine” and “I try not to sound too woo-woo.”
Feilding-Mellen stated that he remains “mission driven,” focusing on the “core delivery side of the ecosystem” of the company and wants to “harness the best bits of capitalism” to expand the good work of Beckley.
Meanwhile, in Kensington
Suicides, trauma, depression, poverty, and no sign of justice. Such is the design of British society that somebody of the almost inconceivable privilege of Rock Feilding-Mellen can be confident that he will remain protected. He can believe that he is not guilty of an all-out attack on the poorer communities of North Kensington and all that brought; that he is in fact a victim.
Feilding-Mellen, with no apparent talent and without having contributed anything productive to our economy, can simultaneously reinvent himself as a spiritualist and enrich himself with a new venture that not only maintains high social status but also promises serious dividends as psychedelic treatments become a boom industry.
Privilege is sheltered from justice, then demands that it must feel and be accepted as virtuous, no matter how many people suffer for these brief releases of the feel-good chemicals in the brains of the least self-aware people in the country.
Like the crime at Hillsborough, most of the people affected by the atrocity at Grenfell Tower are stuck in a form of purgatory, unable to move on while justice is denied; unable to have faith in a system that is stacked against them; yet unable to give up hope for some kind of justice as that would be to dishonour those lost. In contrast, it’s a time of abundance for the spiritual-corporate complex, mainly because it has been co-opted as a means for the worst people in the world to feel good about themselves without the boredom of contemplation or the burden charitable giving found at the heart of the major religions.
Beckley Retreats and Rock Feilding-Mellen’s re-emergence without repentance are now intertwined. It is difficult to know what to make of Beckley as company, founded by Feilding-Mellen and presumably staffed by people who know his background yet proceed, “committed to diversity, equity, inclusion and belonging.” As Deputy Leader of Kensington & Chelsea, Feilding-Mellen would have known the council’s motto: ‘Quam Bonum In Unum Habitare’ – ‘What a good thing it is to dwell together in unity.’ Nobody would invoke RBKC’s motto as evidence of the council doing good work. Similarly, nobody should be fooled by the fine words of Beckley Retreats’ public relations when it comes to assessing whether Sinnerman Rock has changed.
He has landed in the perfect safe place for somebody desperately needing a rebrand ahead of at least one day of judgement.
Urban Dandy London 