Neil Arnaud Obituary, Death – Following a long and courageous battle with cancer, one of our members, Neil Arnaud, passed away last week. We were devastated to learn this news last week. Many people at the Golf Club will be saddened by his departure. The funeral will be held on Thursday, July 20, and the family requests that friends and relatives who were particularly close to the deceased person be invited to attend.
Neil Jameson, the founder of the activist organisation Citizens UK and the age of 76 when he passed away, was able to harness the power of community organizing to achieve social and political change. Most notably, he was the driving force behind the campaign to increase the minimum wage to a level that is considered a living wage. Citizens UK was founded in 1996 as a collective of east London churches, mosques, and other community organizations under the name Telco (the East London Citizens Organisation).
Its members were dedicated to working toward the goal of alleviating some of the social evils that were being experienced by their congregations. One of Jameson’s early victories, of which he was particularly proud, was convincing a local lard plant in Canning Town to install a filter. This helped to lessen the odor that was making life difficult for the people of the area. The movement for a living wage, on the other hand, didn’t get off the ground until after a community-wide exercise pinpointed low pay as the most important problem the community was facing.
Launched in 2001, it began meant publicly attacking individual institutions that were employing employees from the East End, typically through outsourced contracts, on wages that were legal but impossible to live on. This was done in an effort to bring awareness to the issue. Jameson invited local individuals living and working at the front lines of London’s economy to become the driving force behind the campaign.
