If there is one thing that all of us can agree on, all that is except the grubby landlord class and their Old Etonian mates in Westminster, is that London is in urgent need of social housing. Not just social housing, but full social provision like local hospitals without chronic waiting lists, local schools that have enough places for London’s kids and are fit for purpose. And modern leisure and sports facilities, so London’s kids have somewhere safe to play and something constructive to do. Oh, and least I forget, an affordable public transport system that doesn’t treat Londoners like cattle.

I suspect all London residents, bar the international corporate elite that have ensconced themselves at the high end of the elite property market, would agree on the need for this sort of basic provision in a global interchange that London claims to be. Well we don’t get any of the above in sufficient quantities, but what we do get in ever increasing numbers and in ever increasing dimensions, are skyscrapers – those monuments to finance capital that are both socially useless and a criminal diversion of human resources. The Shard, due to open any day now, is the daddy of all socially useless constructions, being nothing but a vanity project for the Qatari mafia and their London pimps and two-bit hangers-on.

Don’t get me wrong, unlike a certain pampered prince who would be king, I am not against modern architecture mingling entertainingly with the old and the ancient. To take a stroll or a boat ride along the Thames marvelling at the juxtaposition of the old and the new is a great visual and intellectual feast, and gives London a certain uniqueness amongst world cities. But the Shard is not in tune with London’s skyline, it simply dominates it. And that is precisely what it is intended to do. The tallest building in Europe, at least for the moment, The Shard is an arrogant, bombastic symbol of the power of the oil rich sheikdom of Qatar, itself a wholly artificial construct based purely on the black stuff and the poorly paid immigrant labour that services that industry. Awash with dirty oil money, the Qatari sheiks are scouring the planet looking for property investments and London has proved to be one of their favourite destinations, a relatively safe if temporary haven in an increasingly turbulent world.

Fair play to them you might say. They are doing nothing that the other international elites have not been up to for decades. They are simply the latest incarnation of a globally mobile capitalist class. And besides, parking their mega bucks in our backyard brings considerable benefits to us locals. Someone has to clean their penthouse suites, drive their limousines, and generally tend to their every conceivable need, so be thankful that it is us Londoners. That, at least, is the story line that Boris Johnson has been peddling for years. London as a global city needs global money and global investment. A few towering skyscrapers is a small price to pay for lubricating the creaking wheels of our aging city infrastructure. It’s a good story but it has one central flaw – it’s a load of Old Etonian twaddle. The Qatari investments in London bring no discernable benefits to our city, on the contrary they provide a facade of activity behind which governments of all persuasions can hide behind while singularly failing to deliver on real social infrastructure, of which affordable housing is probably the most pressing.

The very least that our esteemed politicians should be doing is a bit of horse-trading. They need, as a minimum, to be saying to the Qatari’s and the rest of the sheiks and oligarchs; you provide the cost of the local infrastructure and we just might just give you permission to build your vanity towers. Even Ken Livingston in the end didn’t have the wherewithal to stand up to them, and he is about as progressive as elected politicians come in this battered and bruised, corporately bled island .

Of course the Qatari portfolio goes well beyond The Shard. They already own Harrods, The American Embassy building, One Hyde Park, Chelsea Barracks, The Olympic Village, over a quarter of Sainsbury’s, over a quarter of Canary Wharf and large chunks of Barclays and the London Stock Exchange. The point however is not to crudely bash the Qataris, but rather to highlight yet again how little control we now have over the real estate and surrounding infrastructure of our major cities. It matters little which particular capitalist grouping owns what chunk of London, home grown or foreign, Middle Eastern, Asian, East or West European or North or South American.

What is at contention here is that those who are charged with updating the social infrastructure of London are so snuggled up in bed with investment banks and sovereign wealth funds that they have lost any connection or empathy with the pressing and interconnected needs of the local communities that surround these corporate towers. Rather than being an integral part of London life, these towers and harbours and hotels are increasingly becoming corporate oases in a vast and increasing sea of deprivation and impoverishment. London’s only connection to them is to provide the army of cleaners, caterers and rubbish removers who preferably carry out this menial dirty work at night and out of sight.

Occupy The Shard may well become a future rallying call for London’s dispossessed and alienated youth. Only in that way could I imagine this grotesque monument to personal and corporate greed becoming a genuine part of London’s vibrant social life. As for the Qatari Sheiks, if they had a shred of social morality, which they clearly don’t, they would be using the massive oil revenues from their region to finance desperately needed social infrastructure throughout the Middle East and the impoverished nations of North Africa. And pigs might fly. As for Boris Johnson and Co, if they want the revenues to finance the renewal of London’s ageing and inadequate social infrastructure, they need look no further than the countless billions of unpaid corporation tax just lying around in Britain’s criminal network of off shore tax havens. And the place to start? Obviously, at the door of the biggest money laundering operation in the world the City of London itself.