A new cadre of agit-prop campaigners has been cleaning the London underground, but there is more to the political stunt than meets the eye
B
ritain, let’s face it, is crap. Crap, I mean, in quite a specific sense: we might not be teetering on the brink of civilisational destruction, as the post-Brexit right can often seem to think. But there nonetheless remains a vast, ambient sense of rubbishness. Everything is expensive but nothing works. Our streets are full of potholes; our houses are full of mould. All the shops are shut, except for a Tesco Express, where there are security tags on the eggs. It takes about a million years to build a railway line.
Up to now, the response to Britain’s enshittification has, by and large, seemed remarkably fatalistic: Keir Starmer spent the first year in government repeatedly insisting that there just wasn’t any money, and so really nothing could be done. Thank God then, one might think, for Looking for Growth, a new campaign group led by young (well, late 20s, early 30s) Londoners Lawrence Newport and Joe Reeve, who have reportedly been advised by Dominic Cummings, and who have taken it on themselves to rid the tube of the scourge of graffiti.
You might have seen the video: riding the Bakerloo line, wearing hi-vis jackets that proclaim they are “Doing What Sadiq Khant” and accompanied by the GB News presenter Tom Harwood, for some reason, Looking for Growth perform a task that looks so simple only a government might fail to achieve it – apply a bit of spray and a bit of elbow grease – to rid some rolling stock of a litany of ugly tags and scrawls (“It’s not even good graffiti!”, Harwood exclaims). “This is shameful. This is not OK. We’re done waiting for @MayorofLondon to pull his finger out,” a tweet by Reeve explained.
