30,000: Musical Awesomeaganza

I was going to post this on Monday night, to coincide with the post-exam festivities (Manc partyers take note: looks like I will be at the Love Music Hate Racism stalls at both Mad Ferret and Pangaea), but I see that my blog counter just passed the the 30k mark. This having been a pretty good day anyway, that seems to be a good enough reason for precipitating the celebration. Click through and enjoy!

More “Islamofascism”

I’ve always been dismissive of the argument that Islamophobia is not racism “because Islam is not a race”. Races are human concepts, not biological realities, and when someone has a go at some ill-defined ensemble of foreignness they call “Islam” it’s not fundamentally all that different from when they have a go at some ill-defined ensemble of foreignness they call “the Blacks”. But lately I’ve been becoming aware of just how interchangeable Islamophobia and brown-people-o-phobia can be.

Reports [in the Sun newspaper] that a British couple abandoned twin girls after IVF treatment in India because they were the wrong gender have been disputed by an NHS trust.

The babies were born by Caesarean section in Wolverhampton’s New Cross Hospital a fortnight ago after which – the newspaper reported – the parents, who have not been named, told medical staff that they were of “the wrong sex”.

The Sun said that the husband then asked medics how long it would be before his wife was fit enough to fly back to India for more IVF treatment in the hope of getting a boy to continue the family name.

But today NHS West Midlands, the strategic health authority involved, disputed the report. In a statement it confirmed the details of the twins’ birth and the fact that they had been transferred to a Birmingham hospital closer to their parents’ home.

“The parents are visiting their daughters whilst they are being cared for in hospital and are attentive to their needs,” the statement said.

It’s not clear whether the parents in question were Muslims, Hindus or whatever, but it hardly matters. It all fits into the idea of a menacing alien culture from the land of the brown people, deeply misogynistic – now that’s what you call projection, when the Sun cries sexism – so heartless that they leave their babies to die, and making serious progress towards violating the righteous traditions of the land of the white people. The Sun have made this their massive front page scoop, and their belated, half-hearted clarification will hardly set things right.

Granted, this is the paper whose headlines currently include Video ‘proves’ aliens do exist, and elsewhere the standard of journalism is slightly higher. Nevertheless, outright lies are not always necessary; do we remember the blatant distortion that justified a scary “Muslims all beat their wives!” cover srory in the Independent on Sunday a few months back? And today I saw this on the BBC news site:

France’s ruling UMP party has opposed a French court’s decision to annul a marriage between two Muslims because the wife lied about being a virgin. The Lille court’s decision has also angered feminists who say it amounts to a fatwa against women’s liberty.

The court granted the man’s request for an annulment after ruling that he had been tricked into a marriage. His partner’s virginity was a determining factor in his decision to wed her, it ruled. It is understood that the husband, an engineer in his thirties, married the trainee nurse in the summer of 2006, having been assured by her that she had never previously had a boyfriend.

The Conservative UMP party – which is calling on the Justice Minister to overturn the ruling – said the decision was totally unacceptable and was incompatible with France’s secular principles.

But a justice ministry spokesman insisted the court’s decision was not based on religion or morality but on the French civil code under which a marriage can be annulled if a spouse has lied about an “essential quality” of the relationship.

Feminist groups said they were ashamed to see the ruling adding it would allow men legally to reject women on the grounds they were not virgins.

“Allow men legally to reject women on the grounds that…” hold on, anyone can legally reject anyone else on any grounds whatsoever. Anulling a marriage that took happened under false pretences is a pretty standard aspect of common law. Do I think it’s okay to reject your non-virgin bride because she’s not a virgin? No, it’s an oppressive fetishisation of women’s bodies that, fortunately, is no longer particularly common in the West (although you don’t have go back in time all that far to find it). But do I think that this represents a “fatwa against women’s liberty”? No, it represents a perfectly routine ruling on a contract made under false pretences.

Okay, so the guy in question was a bit of a reactionary knobhead, but to talk of a “fatwa against women’s liberty” is to talk of an attempt by the Muslim establishment to clamp down on our freedom-loving Western way of life. It’s completely specious, but it goes down well in the current climate. Doesn’t it have a nice ring of “when the darkies go after our women…” to it as well?

And then there’s Hicham Yezza. I recently wrote about of the two Nottingham students arrested for possession of a book about al-Qaeda (downloaded from a public domain, US government website, and integral to research for the dissertation on the subject of Islamic terrorism) under the terror laws, locked up for six days and then released without charge. As a police officer reportedly admitted, this would never have happened if they’d been “blonde Swedish PhD students”. One of the two was immediately rearrested under immigration law, and threatened with immediate deportation without due process. This has been thwarted by a massive mobilisation in his defence, and hopefully the incident will give confidence to those questioning racist “terror” tropes and momentum to the broader campaign against deportations (starting now) and migration controls.

I only posted today because I came across these two bad stories and one good one within a single evening – really I should be revising – but this is hardly the first time I’ve raised concerns like this. At this rate we’re only a few short years from what’s happening in Italy, and that’s why I’d like to rescue the word “Islamofascism” from its racist friends. It’s not really useful in describing the ill-defined Oriental menace (any thesis that equates Hizbollah with fascism has got very badly lost), but it could denote a menace that’s growing in the Occident: a fascism whose main target is not the Jew, but his close relative by racialist quackery. It’s not quite come together yet, but if we don’t nip it in the bud…

See you on the 21st of June.

Shock Doctrine Comes to Manchester

This report was also posted on the new Manchester Left blog, of which I am to be a co-editor.

On Wednesday the 22nd of May, world famous activist and author Naomi Klein presented an audience of several hundred with a talk and a short film by director Alfonso Cuaron on the subject of her latest book Shock Doctrine: The Rise Of Disaster Capitalism.

Klein’s work examines the history of the radical capitalist movement that was called Thatcherism or Reaganomics in the ’80s, Globalisation in the ’90s, and Neoliberalism today.  In particular, it disputes the link between free markets and free people which, according to orthodox pundits and intellectuals, should go hand in hand.  Shock Doctrine takes examples from the past 35 years – Latin America in the 70s, China in the 80s, post-Soviet Eastern Europe in the 90s, and more recently Iraq, Sri Lanka and New Orleans – to show that privatisation and economic liberalisation has always relied on coercion; that far from being a corollary of democracy, it is a process carried out by predatory elites in open defiance of the democratic process.

Possession of Radical Material

The continuing police harrassment of Nottingham student activists.  See the comments thread for regular updates.

I’m writing to call your attention to a recent incident at the University of Nottingham, where a one of our Graduate Students at the School of Politics and International Relations and an administrative member of staff at the Department of Engineering were arrested by armed police under the Terrorism Act of 2000. Their alleged “crime” was that the graduate student had downloaded an Al-Qaeda training manual from a US government website for research purposes, as he’s writing his MA dissertation on Islamic extremism and international terrorist networks. He had then sent this to his friend in the Department of Engineering for printing. The printed material had been spotted by other staff and reported to the University authorities who passed on the information to the police. The two were then arrested by armed police on May 14 and held for six days without charge, before being released without charge on May 20. During the six days they were imprisoned, the men had their homes raided and their families harassed by the police. It is worth noticing that in talking to one of my colleagues, a police officer remarked that the incident would never have occurred if the persons involved had been “blonde, Swedish PhD students” (the two men were of British-Pakistani and Algerian backgrounds respectively).

Needless to say, this raises hugely important issues both about academic freedom and civil liberties. Obviously, there is the issue that for those of us involved in research on contentious issues we will by necessity have to consult primary materials of a controversial nature, and the fact that the material is controversial should not lead to it being deemed as illegitimate research material. Moreover, we should not under any circumstances have to fear for infringements upon our civil liberties as a consequence of doing our jobs. Moreover, it goes without saying that the university should guarantee the academic freedom, freedom of speech and expression, and civil liberties of all members of staff and students, irrespective of ethnic and religious background or political beliefs!

The student concerned was also a prominent local activist, and was rearrested almost immediately for something to do with immigration. This is being widely interpreted as a racist application of the Terror Laws to intimidate the student activist community in Nottingham. See also Indymedia, Times Higher Education review.

Result!

All the rightwing attacks on reproductive rights have been thwarted in the House Of Commons this week. I’ve been watching the abortion time limit voting live (and by gar isn’t our Parliament quaintly anachronistic?) and all the amendments tabled to curtail it – to 22, 20, 26 or 12 weeks – have been rejected. 24 weeks it is. The BBC notes that:

Data from the Office for National Statistics shows that just 1.5% of the 200,000 abortions in England and Wales occur after 20 weeks.

This is a figure which has remained faily stable in recent years with abortion providers saying many of these are women who do not realise they are pregnant because they were young teenagers or breastfeeding mothers who were not having regular periods.

… or because they are have been in denial, perhaps after being raped, because they have just escaped from an abusive relationship (or from Northern Ireland), or because their circumstances have just changed to the point where they are unable to raise a child. Late abortions are a source of relief to a very small number of women in particularly desperate circumstances and not – in the offensive words of Mark Pritchard, a Tory MP voting for a 16 week limit – “the latest manifestation of Britain’s throwaway society.“

The proposed reductions of the time limit were justified by the dazzling science of one Professor Campbell, who has used “4-D imaging” to make mashup videos of happy smiley baby foetuses. These pull on the heartstrings and confuse the columnists, but

The British Medical Association, British Association of Perinatal Medicine, Faculty of Sexual and Reproductive Healthcare, Royal College of Nursing and Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists have produced a joint statement pointing out there is no medical evidence suggesting the limit should be reduced.

A few of the Labour MPs who routinely vote for war and privatisation if their career paths demand it threatened to throw their toys out of the pram if not allowed to “vote with their consciences” on this one, so it could have gone either way. The vote on the use of embryos in science was less nailbiting; whatever one’s position on whether or not a woman can be trusted with her own womb, we can all agree on the important role of scientific research of boosting Britain’s competitivity within the global economy.

Today’s votes also removed the requirements for women seeking IVF treatment to guarantee that they could provide their child with a “father figure”. The Tories moved to block this change, instead proposing that the wording be changed to “male role model”, presumably under the impression that this sounded modern enough to beguile their opponents. Again, the number of women affected would be small – IVF being unavailable to a great many for far more prosaic reasons – but they represent the section of the population who, through unwanted pregnancy or infertility, are vulnerable to Tory interference.

You couldn’t, in this day in age, get away with casting a pox on single mothers and lesbians, any more than you could get away with banning abortions wholesale. But you could push for steps in that direction. Undermine those women whose pregnancies you are in a position to veto; tell them that you don’t think they can raise a child without male supervision and, when it becomes clear that no-one’s listening to you, tell them that you won’t let them raise a child without male supervision. The others will get the message… or they would, except even the House of Commons aren’t so craven as to let you get away with it. How do you like that my Tory friend? Hahaha ha ha ha ha ha. etc. I’m going to bed.

Free Derry 2008

1968 didn’t just happen in France. Inspired by the Black civil rights movement in the Southern US, residents of Derry’s Bogside chased out the unionist police forces and built barricades to keep them – and later the British army – out of Free Derry until 1972. I mention it now because nine Derry protestors are about to go on trial for another radical act of resistance, during Israel’s 2006 attack on Lebanon. Stop The War reports:

Support the Raytheon 9: Resisting war crimes is not a crime

Nine people in Derry in Northern Ireland have been charged under terrorism laws following an occupation of the local Raytheon plant during which, police claim, £350,000 damage was done to computer equipment.

The US company Raytheon is one of the largest arms manufacturers in the world, supplying guidance systems for many of the missiles and bombs used by US and Israeli forces in the Middle East. Raytheon systems guided the Qana bomb to the bunker where it blasted and crushed at least 51 people, including many children, to death.

Three of the arrested men, Colm Bryce, Kieran Gallagher and Eamonn McCann are members of the Derry branch of the Socialist Workers’ Party while another, Sean Heaton is a member of the Socialist Environmental Alliance. The five others, Eamonn O’Donnell, Gary Donnelly, Paddy McDaid, Jimmy Kelly and Micky Gallagher are Republicans, from the IRSP and the 32-Country Sovereignty Committee.

After hours of questioning, all nine were charged with Aggravated Burglary and Unlawful Assembly. These are “scheduled” offences, meaning they would be heard before a Diplock, non-jury court. These charges also meant that the men couldn’t be given bail by the Magistrates’ Court but had to be remanded to prison before a bail application in the High Court.

The only reason for the remand in prison and the severity of the charges is that the protestors live in Northern Ireland. This would not have happened in Britain or the South of Ireland. Despite the New Labour talk of a new NI, political dissent is still treated differently here.

At the bail hearing, the Crown tried to raise Eamonn McCann’s convictions on public order offences going back to the civil rights movement 1968/69/70. However, the judge said that the “vintage” of these charges made them irrelevant.

The arms merchants were brought to Derry in 1999 by SDLP and Ulster Unionist leaders John Hume and David Trimble: the announcement of the plant was made at the pair’s first joint public appearance following their receipt of the Nobel Peace Prize. It was part, they said, of “the peace dividend.”

The savage irony was immediately apparent. An argument over Raytheon has continued in Derry since. However, all the local mainstream parties—John Hume’s SDLP, Gerry Adams’s Sinn Fein and Ian Paisley’s DUP—have backed the company’s presence, arguing that the Derry plant isn’t directly involved in arms manufacture and that driving Raytheon out would deter other investors in an area of high unemployment.

Speaking from a window at the plant during the occupation, Eamonn McCann said: “We had to dramatise the argument so as to force the issue into the mainstream.”

Documents and computers were hurled from windows and the computer mainframe and other equipment put out of action.

The idea for the occupation emerged from a packed meeting of the Derry Anti War Coalition on August 2nd addressed by former Abu Ghraib interrogator Joshua Casteel of Iraqi Veterans Against War and Hani Lazim of Iraqi Democrates against the Occupation. Discussion from the floor focused on Raytheon, and the role it gave Derry in the arms trade. The activists knew that, despite the line of the main parties, there is real anger in the town at the idea of software developed in Derry helping to murder people in Lebanon and Gaza.

On August 9th at 8am, protestors arrived at the building Raytheon shares with a call centre. The police were already in position. At about 8.30, an employee about to go into work hesitated for an instant and the anti-war activists rushed the door. Police started grabbing people by the scruff of the necks and literally throwing them back out. The nine now charged are those who made it into Raytheon’s premises.

Once inside, the protestors erected barricades against the police and set about decommissioning the equipment. Many files thrown out the window gave the lie to the claims that the Derry plant had no connection with the arms trade.

Once local radio started to report the occupation, others started to arrive to join the protest. In the course of the day, between 80 and 100 people kept the solidarity picket going. Cars on the main road honked their horns in support.

Local residents brought coffee, sandwiches and cake. Armed police in riot gear stormed the buildinng after eight hours and carried the protestors out in handcuffs.

Almost all were battered and bruised in the process.

At the bail hearing, barrister Joe Brolly pointed out that Raytheon had had a turnover of $21.9 billion last year, and described them as “purveyors of death”.

Bail was granted but the restrictions are draconian. Conditions include an exclusion zone around Raytheon, and also ban the protestors from attending any public meeting or any private meeting of Derry Anti War Coalition or the Irish Anti War Movement. They were told that a “private meeting” means any meeting of three or more people.

A Raytheon 9 Defence Campaign is now being established across Ireland

Trial Update

The trial of Derry Anti War Coalition activists, the Raytheon 9, is set to start on Monday May 19th. It is to be held in Belfast. The trial was moved to Belfast after the Prosecution Service applied to have it moved; it argued that the Derry jury pool is likely to know too much about the campaign against Raytheon, including the non-violent direct action taken on 9th August 2006 and that any jury from Derry may be too sympathetic to the action and/or intimidated by the level of support for the Raytheon 9 because of all the protests held outside the court over the almost two years since the nine were arrested.

The Derry Anti War Coalition is confident that, wherever the trial is heard, there will be large demonstrations in support of the Nine and that any jury who hears the truth about what was happening in Lebanon when the action took place cannot but find that the Nine acted to stop war crimes and, therefore, committed no crime.

Anyone wishing to support the Raytheon 9 can do so in several ways: Send a message of support to resistderry@aol.com e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it
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Organise a fundraiser for the defence fund Spread the word about the role of the arms trade in fuelling war. If there is an arms company in your town, organise a protest at it.

Jet Pilot: “The sheer wanton destructiveness of it… dropping computers from an office window!”

Update: See this short documentary from Derry Stop The War.  RickB is posting updates on the trial as they come on his blog Ten Percent.

While I should have been revising…

… (or at least, getting an early night in the better to revise in the morning) I was writing a response to this article in the Times Higher Education supplement, in which Manchester University’s self-styled ‘President’ laments how wider participation (y’know, from working class kids whose parents would never have got near university) is ruining the higher education system. Even just based on articles like this, you can see why so many of our demonstrations involve chants of

Education is a right, is a right, is a right,
Education is a right, not a privelege!
Alan Gilbert is a right, is a right, is a right,
Alan Gilbert is a right right-wing bastard!

But this article wasn’t written from an ivory tower, as it were, abstracted from any concrete goings on. It was written by the person in charge of administrating the nation’s largest campus, against a backdrop of growing militant opposition to his policies. I felt it important, at stupid o’clock last night, to write a long comment putting Gilbert’s views into perspective. Since the Murdoch-owned wing of the establishment seems disinclined to give me a platform (ie. my comment has been moderated), I reproduce my intervention here:

I would like to provide a little context to this article.

If Dr Gilbert is calling for more funding to help university staff meet the demands placed upon them, then this is to be applauded. However, such a stance is hardly consistent with the spending policies he has enacted since coming to Manchester.

In the name of saving money, administrative staffing levels have been slashed, and departmental libraries have been losed down. At the same time, money has apparently been no object in throwing up expensive and unnecessary new buildings across the campus, or hiring celebrity lecturers – like the racist Martin Amis – who take a year’s salary for a few hours’ work.

It is less surprising that Dr Gilbert blames the university’s difficulties on wider participation in higher education. As one of the most prominent lobbyists for a dramatic increase in tuition fees come the government’s spending review, the formula of too high participation and too little funding serves him quite well. However, while increased participation does create certain difficulties, a shift in the priorities of both the university administration and the government nationally would easily be able to meet them.

The NUS, for example, estimates that just £2billion would be enough to put half the 18-year-olds in the country through university with substantial cost of living grants, and it would be unforgivable miserliness to sell them short when so much more is being spent on so much less.

Perhaps the most important context that needs to be added is the growing student radicalism on campus. In October, about a hundred students occupied a prestige banquet, and in April a significantly larger demonstration occupied the Arthur Lewis building – seen by many as a symbol for the university’s misplaced priorities – for several hours. Days later, at a conference entitled “education in a neoliberal world”, student activists and staff met to discuss united action in future.

Both demonstrations voiced widespread opposition to the cuts that Dr. Gilbert’s administration has implemented in Manchester – again, while forking out heavily on prestigious white elephants – and called for changes in the way higher education is funded. Namely, they called for a free education – something that was once the norm, which is economically feasible and socially necessary as it has ever been, and which is an anaethema to the likes of Alan Gilbert.

This report is not coming out in a vacuum, and I urge readers not to imagine otherwise.

Dark Days

There’s a lot of catastrophe happening in faraway places this week, but please don’t fail to notice what’s going down much closer to home, in Italy:

Police in Italy have arrested hundreds of suspected illegal immigrants in raids across the country.

Expulsion orders were issued for several dozen of those detained. More than 100 Italians were also arrested.

One raid was on a makeshift camp housing Roma (Gypsies), on the edge of Rome. Italian concern about immigrant crime has tended to focus on the Roma.

Earlier this week, Roma families in Naples fled after angry locals set fire to their squatter homes.

The police crackdown was part of a week-long operation in Rome, Naples and northern Italy.

It is an apparent sign of the change of policy promised by the new right-wing government of Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi [and] Interior Minister, Roberto Maroni, who belongs to the anti-immigrant Northern League.

(Update: read more about the Italian pogroms at Lenin’s Tomb)

The Roma haven’t traditionally been the target of such pathological hatred in Britain as they have been elsewhere, but when they tire of the usual suspects the cops and the tabloids can still work up a respectable two minutes hate: witness the Fagin incident earlier this year. Anti-immigrant racism generally is certainly quite pervasive around here, and in both Italy and Britain a certain paranoia around “Islamofascism” has blinded people to the potential for fascism in the growing Islamophobia.

When, as is the case for the Roma, the same people find themselves in the crosshairs now as then, it is a little harder to shrug off the new fascism. Often, however, we do seem to completely miss the point. The horror of the Nazis’ treatment of the Jewish people was such that we think of anti-Semitism as central to fascism, but for all that the BNP hate the Jews (Nick Griffin doesn’t believe in the Holocaust, remember), they’re hardly about to kick up a fuss against them now. Instead, they employ exactly the same brand of nastiness against the Muslims (and even try to pick up the Jewish vote in the process), and get away with it Scot free.

That’s because hard-core Islamophobia – unlike hardcore antisemitism – is not restricted to the BNP and their coterie of crazies; it’s socially acceptable wherever you go these days. Look, I know you probably already heard about what Martin Amis said, but just read it aloud and see if rings any bells.

There’s a definite urge – don’t you have it? – to say, ‘The Muslim community will have to suffer until it gets its house in order.’ What sort of suff­­er­­­ing? Not letting them travel. Deportation – further down the road. Curtailing of freedoms. Strip-searching people who look like they’re from the Middle East or from Pakistan… Discriminatory stuff, until it hurts the whole community and they start getting tough with their children.

If it still doesn’t shock you, try replacing “Muslim” and “from the Middle East or from Pakistan” with “Jewish” and have another go. Then in the same interview, he brings out the old “if women don’t know their place then how are we going to outbreed the oriental menace?” question

They’re also gaining on us demographically at a huge rate. A quarter of humanity now and by 2025 they’ll be a third. Italy’s down to 1.1 child per woman. We’re just going to be outnumbered. [on another occasion:] The reason that America is the only First World country with a non-declining birth rate is because of all those things we hate about it, you know – [it's] patriarchal, church-going. I’m going to take this up because I think it’s such an enormous question – has feminism cost us Europe? …You only have to look at these demographic figures to know what you’re going to get, and you’ve got it in Iraq. I mean, it’s a gangplank to theocracy.

The point isn’t that Amis is a crazy old fascist. It’s that Amis wasn’t seriously challenged on this for about a year afterwards, and even then, far from being ostracised, he remained a celebrated intellectual, getting a cushy teaching job at Manchester University and having half the editorialists in the country proclaim him not even a racist, really. Effectively, the guardians of mainstream culture have said that this kind of thing is okay – and that’s not starting on the BBC’s frankly terrifying “White Season”.

Then what? Oh yes, then we have a significant rise in immigration just in time for an economic crisis for which – thanks to several decades spent systematically dismantling and selling off the welfare state – the working class are ill-equipped to cope with. Can you say perfect scapegoats? So we have had the Housing Minister Caroline Flint blaming the lack of social housing on the immigrants (rather than, say, on the Housing Minister), and the Prime Minister bringing back an old National Front slogan “British jobs for British workers” (in fact, does anyone say the word “British” quite as often as Gordon Brown?)

I know a lot of people are rightly shocked by such rhetoric, and that hopefully most of those reading this blog will fall into this category. But we have to be clear that society on the whole has not been shocked. The opposite has happened, these things have started to sound normal. At a time like this, that’s especially terrible. There’s a lot of people out there feeling angry, exploited, betrayed, and they generally have good reason for feeling that way. But they have a lot of contradictory ideas (certainly this was my impression when canvassing for the Left List; people were quick to agree on everything except our lack of opposition to immigrants “stealing their jobs”), and that anger could express itself in a very positive way or – if those ideas aren’t challenged – in a terrifyingly negative way.

A Week In Blackandtanchester

The cover of today’s Manchester Evening News exhorted us to be greatful for £25 million the “Tartan Army” is to pump into the city’s economy: wealth is generated, according to the mythology of consumerism, not by those who put in the work, but by those who consume it in the form of beer or ice-cream. For the record, though, this army wasn’t clad in Tartan so much as Union Jacks, with and without various Ulster loyalist frills.

In any event, they weren’t quite up to their knees in fenian blood, but singing about it isn’t exactly harmless fun in my book. That legion of flag-draped stomping chanters creates an atmosphere, a positively noxious atmosphere, more than a little scary, and I say that as a white Englishman with no particularly visible Irish Catholic heritage. My darker-hued friends have mainly avoided town today, and I daresay Canal Street saw a lot of its regulars stay at home too.

Last week, apparently, there was even an Orange march, and what with Richard Barnbrooke and all it’s not surprising that the local Nazis have been coming out of the woodwork lately. It won’t last – not if we don’t let it, which we won’t – but it’s not exactly pleasant.

And then there’s the police, who violently broke up a street party late on Saturday night with all their usual subtlety and, well, racism. At least one partygoer got his arm broken by the jaws of a police dog, and “bear” people ended up in hospital. No doubt they’ve been holding a grudge against the student population ever since the occupation of the Arthur Lewis building; fortunately, their chance for revenge came when I was away in London (‘cos otherwise, y’know, I’m totally the party type, whenever there’s a shindig goin down I’m there, life and soul thereof more often than not, ask anyone, etc). Anyway, the sousveillance footage of the event has been taken offline lest it jeapordize any future prosecution of the coppers responsible, but the Channel M report is probably kosher:

Good times.

On the upside, we just held one of our biggest meetings of the whole year, and a really good discussion about May 1968 and the whole ‘55-’75 global period of radicalism. After two decades of historically low levels of class struggle, especially in this country, things have been on the up again since 1999 – the anticapitalist movement, the antiwar movement, and now the building strike wave (depending how the Unison ballots go, we could soon be looking at the biggest strike since the ’20s), as well as the rise of the Latin American left and other developments around the world – and I really have found May 2008 (well, mostly April to be honest) to embody more hope than fear, more hope than I have felt for a long time.

This week, we’ve been reminded that the forces of reaction never really went away. Now let’s remind them about us. Oh, and Rangers lost by the way.

From The River To The Sea…

… Palestine sends a tree!

As long-term readers of this blog will know, the University of Manchester Students Union is twinned with An-Najah in the West Bank, and last autumn a rightwing attempt to undermine this historic show of solidarity was thwarted.  A motion was put forward at a general meeting that would have constrained the union of An-Najah to sign a statement “renouncing terror”, to be written by the motion’s sponsors, or have the twinning annulled.  A massive (four figure) turnout rejected the motion, amending it to one that celebrated the twinning and accepted in advance the gift of an olive tree, to symbolise peace and solidarity, from our Palestinian comrades.

Six months later (and sixty years after the naqba that made all this necessary), here it is:

I hope it will survive in these chilly Northern climes and turbulent political climate (my friend who brought it from the airport was recently harrassed by the police for, in the words of their incident report, ”wearing a Palestinian t-shirt”).  Marches like the one today are important, now more than ever, but this little tree will bring me hopw in between times.