A Few Emails

I honestly can’t believe it hasn’t happened sooner, but Rupert Murdoch’s bully boys are trying to sue (and effectively close down) Media Lens.  They don’t really have a case to answer, and so I’m not too worried, but really:

the steps we have suggested are pitiful in their timidity. We have always seen media activism as a small, energising contribution intended to inspire much wider, much more profound, political organisation and activism.

What we have done to Iraq is not a video game; it is not a Hollywood invention. We really have destroyed an entire nation and brought misery to millions. About that, this whole country should not be writing a few emails; it should be in uproar.

Blood In The Water

Happy 60th Birthday to the state of Israel

Clearly Not Welcome

This march has been banned. Come out and call their bluff.

(Why not set one of these images as your profile picture on facebook?  Bit of virtual flyposting, if loads of us do it it really creates an atmosphere of something big happening)

Anti-Bush demonstration banned from Whitehall.

The Stop the War Coalition has been informed by the Metropolitan Police that a proposed march, co-organised with CND and the British Muslim Initiative, to protest George Bush’s visit will not be allowed. The Coalition has organised scores of marches on this route, including during Bush’s last visit in 2003.

It seems that when George W Bush visits this country traditional rights of assembly are to be removed from the people. This would be unacceptable for the visit of any foreign leader, but for George Bush, a man many regard as a war criminal, it is particularly deplorable.

We are calling on those who care for our democratic rights to come to Parliament Square at 5.0 pm on Sunday 15 June. Some of those who signed statements accusing Bush of war crimes will be leading this protest.

Maybe we can do a Monbiot, not only staring down the threat of arrest (again) but see about arresting a genuine threat to society. After the protests that have greeted Bush pretty much every time his set foot in Europe, we can hardly let him down for his last trip, can we? Plus there’s the surprise formal colonisation of Iraq afoot, the 100th British soldier killed in Afghanistan, a possible renewal of the threat to attack Iran, in short, plenty of reasons to go and protest the war on terror…

…in spite of which I, for one, thought I would be too busy and too skint this weekend - but I will sure as hell make the effort now they’ve tried to ban it. It really baffles me that they do things like this, y’know. They talk about the antiwar movement in the past tense, as if it had become completely irrelevant, and then go and prove its relevance once and for all with this kind of stunt. Anyway, we really had better show em what for.

“George Bush has been dictating British foreign policy for many years. Now it appears his security services are determining our rights of protest. This is a disgrace and we will challenge the ban” - Lindsey German, Convenor Stop the War Coalition

“The ban on the Stop The War Coalition march in protest at the visit of President Bush to this country is a totalitarian act. In what is supposed to be a free country the Coalition has every right to express its views peacefully and openly. This ban is outrageous and makes the term ‘democracy’ laughable”. - Harold Pinter

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
<!–
document.write( ‘</’ );
document.write( ’span>’ );
//–>

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.

Off to a good start 2 - No pasaran

Now that the dust has settled, we can get the BNP’s recent electoral successes into perspective. As the indispensable anti-fascist blog Lancaster Unity reminds us:

The results are not good - there’s no getting away from that fact - though the BNP’s net increase of ten councillors and the idiotic Richard Barnbrook’s election to the London Assembly are more as a result of the rocky position in which the current government finds itself rather than anything the BNP has done or said. That said, the result is very far short of the BNP’s expectation - they were hoping for forty new councillors and three Assembly members. And there is even more good news, as reported by Searchlight, which pointed out very clearly how the BNP’s vote in many of its heartlands has gone down, in some cases quite considerably. Nevertheless, with the Euro-elections coming up, we need to remain alert and to keep working hard and continually against the ever-present threat of the far-right.

That’s certainly not something I’d dispute. The BNP’s London breakthrough is not symptomatic of a sudden rightwards surge in public opinion.  Left unchallenged, however, Barnbrooke (once he sobers up after his slurred-but-scary victory speech) and co are sure to drag fascist ideas even more into the mainstream.  Already the BBC laments the plight of the forgotten whites and the respectable “liberal” media hypes up the Islamic threat, and it’s hard to see the rhetoric getting much worse without a significant escalation in racist violence.

That’s why Love Music Hate Racism has called a demonstration outside City Hall at 6pm on Tuesday; hopefully the momentum generated by the spectacularly successful carnival will carry accross to make this a big success; I’d urge anyone in or near London to get down to it.

The far-right have long enjoyed much less success in Britain than elsewhere in Europe, and this is in large part because anti-fascist movements have enjoyed much more success here.  In 1936 the lefties, Jews
and Irishmen of the East End united to stop Mosley’s fascists from marching down Cable Street, in what many saw as an extension of the Spanish Civil War.  The Blackshirts never recovered.  A broad anti-racist coalition - in which my very own SWP played a leading role - won a similar victory in Lewisham in 1977, galvanising an antifascist movement that smashed the NF for a generation.  In both cases, the police made themselves the vanguard of the fascist marchers.  Now I wouldn’t like to see the state banning fascist marches and organisations, given that they would ultimately end up applying those powers against us more than against anyone else, but it’s interesting to see how far they’ll go.  Compare the beating, arresting and, in at least one case, killing to defend the fascists’ “freedom of speech” with the attempted banning of the antiwar protest in October, the absurd restrictions placed upon anti-corporate campaigners, the arrest of the “lyrical terrorist” and other Muslims with questionable reading material, and tell me you don’t see a pattern of hypocrisy emerging.

But I digress.  It is because of the Anti Nazi league and its successors that the BNP have had to take the electoralist pretence of respectability so seriously.  In the continent, where the Neo-Nazis have not faced such vigorous and consistent challenges, they are in positions of much greater strength.  It’s a lesson they are now applying in Germany; in news every bit as encouraging, in its own way, as the spectacular antiwar dockers’ strike in America on the same day, 7000 antifascists thwarted a 1000-strong fascist march on the streets of Hamburg this Thursday.  Incidentally, while you could argue that the Hamburger partisans went a bit far, you have to remark at the BBC’s spectacularly biased reporting of the incident.

In this spirit, I’ve been listening to theexcellent Battle of Lewisham discussion from last year’s Marxism festival over at Resistance MP3s.  Whether such street fighting will become necessary this time around remains to be seen - and I for one sincerely hope it doesn’t - but we cannot afford to let the Nazis go unchallenged.  If there’s one thing that literally everyone should have learned from history, that should be it.  Wherever they pop up to spread their hatred, we must be there to stamp it out.

In the long run, we must accept that people turn to the BNP because they are desperate, because they feel abandoned by the system and its incumbent leaders, and we must be there to provide an alternative.  The token anticapitalist rhetoric common to acolytes of Mussolini, Hitler and Nick Griffin shows just how important it is that the Left puts its politics forward and guide that disillusioned dissent the right way (as opposed to the Right way).  This is why, for all the frustration and the setbacks, projects like Respect and the Left List remain so important.

At the same time, it is important to keep the antifascist movements as broad as possible, and resist the urge to tie them down to any particular political project.  For all the energy we may rightfully expend opposing Labour and the Tories, they are welcome allies in the fight against fascism (like when Buffy the vampire slayer accepts help from Spike the vampire to prevent Angel from destroying the world at the end of series two, ahem).  See Lenin’s post on antifascism and the left.  And I promise to talk about something else in my next post; isn’t it high time I commented on the goings on in Latin America?

Love Music, Hate Racism, and Fuck the Nazis

With a turnout comfortably above 100,000, the Love Music Hate Racism carnival was the biggest anti-fascist event in British history.  It was also a great musical day out, too, The Good The Bad and The Queen put on the closest thing I’ll ever see to a Clash gig, followed by an epic orchestral version of Ghost Town led by Jerry Dammers late of the Specials.  I was also pleased to take part in chants of “Fuck the BNP”.  With Stop The War, we rarely get to swear.

Hopefully, this will have boosted the anti-fash voter turnout enough to keep the Nazis from getting their seat on the Greater London Assembly, and the Left List had a big enough presence to win around a lot of those otherwise too disillusioned by Labour to bother voting.  A bit more news coverage would have been welcome; I’m getting used to the news blackouts of popular protest, but come on, throw us a bone…

See Lenin’s Tomb for more detail on the anti-fascist vote and the left.

Troops Out (of Manchester) Now!

On the one hand, five years of horrible and unpopular wars have made a lot of people not want to join the military.  On the other hand, ten years of horrible and unpopular economic policies (with the current crisis as the icing on the cake) has made a lot of people quite desperate.  Hence the intensified drive to recruit, especially targeting students, ethnic minorities and working class children.

And hence, after UCL and the NUT, it’s Manchester’s turn to kick them off campus.  Well, we’ll be voting on it at the next general meeting on Wednesday, and hopefully it will pass.  It’s already provoked some hysterical flak from the Manchester Evening News and the BBC (although that’s nothing compared to the rightwing counterattack that UCL students have had to face).

The text of the motion follows below the fold.  We’ll also be voting to commit the union to a fight for a free education - equally important given the fees review this year, and the right’s victory in the elections to the union executive.

Manchester University Reclaimed

Check us out on Channel M:

http://www.channelm.co.uk/video_4×3.html?bcpid=1213934526&bctid=1517402038

(I will replace the link with an embed when one becomes available).

This was really exciting, much bigger and more radical than I expected. We broke through police lines several times, and several times stopped them breaking ours. We even resisted the attempt to flush us out of the building when the forces of order “accidentally” activateda horrendous alarm and were “unable” to turn it off for about a million years of sonic hell. This has raised the bar for student radicalism - now who’s up for raising it further?

If the question on your mind is “why, after seizing, en masse, a building that symbolises the neoliberalisation of the university, did we then abandon it and go home after a couple of hours?”, then the following statement from the Socialist Worker Student Society is for you. The organisers of the event deserve a lot of credit for making it happen in the first place, but elements of them were more concerned with keeping things under their own control than in really making the most of the situation. As we run up to the anniversary of May 1968, I have to say I was reminded of someone. Anyway, let’s not lose sight of the amazingness of it all.

On Tuesday over 200 people faced down police and made a circuit of our campus before finishing with the occupation of the Arthur Lewis building. The event, organised by the Reclaim the Uni group, was designed to show the University just how we students feel about the direction Manchester is taking. In a University that is fast becoming a business, where students are being downgraded to distant customers and where lecturers are forced to do more and more research for the sake of profit, the demonstration and temporary occupation offered a different vision of education: one where students and lecturers can join together in a democratically controlled, socially useful institution that is open to all – one that benefits the whole of society.

Once inside, a mass meeting of students debated and decided on a set of demands to issue to the University (printed at the end of this report). The demands encompass a wide-range of concerns that students at Manchester have with regards to our University and the direction of education generally. They include demands for more face-to-face teaching and pastoral care, alongside a commitment to divesting from the Arms Trade and for a Free Education.

At the mass meeting, SWSS members and others argued that we should collectively stay in the building until we had a public commitment from the University to meet our demands – with so many students finally taking control of their education and their Uni, we could have acted as a beacon of resistance for the majority of students across the country who share our vision that Another Education Is Possible. An Occupation at Manchester should have been the spark for movements on campuses across the country that could challenge reactionary Vice-Chancellors like Gilbert and build the national movement that we need to force the government to change its education policies. An ongoing Occupation would have undoubtedly allowed many more students to get involved with the action over the following days, it would have made the national press, it could have been the catalyst for a French or Greek style student movement and it would certainly have forced the University to immediately take notice of our demands. Unfortunately, the disempowering and tightly controlled debate meant that many students drifted off home and a real occupation never materialised.

We have, however, put down a marker. On the 15^th October we occupied the Martin Harris centre during the University’s Foundation lecture and on the 22^nd April we gave Arthur Lewis the same treatment. The movement against the commercialisation of our Universities – demanding an Education for People not Profit – is going from strength to strength in Manchester: this is our chance to drive home our victories here and to build a movement in campuses across the country. Another Education Is Possible!

Counting Down To Fightback Thursday

Up to half a million public sector workers will be striking this Thursday, and even if it’s substantially less than that there’s no doubt that this will be the biggest strike in this country since I was born.

It’s the pay freeze that did it.  Gordon Brown is trying to make the working class pay for the economic crisis - imposing real wage cuts on the public sector (and, via the invisible hand, the private sector too) and increasing tax on low earners even as he cuts it for their employers.  I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: this will be his Iraq.

However, if it was the pay freeze that has finally pushed people from resignation to defiance, they’ve no shortage of things to be defiant about.  All the reports from a union rally I attended last week suggested that, now the fightback had begun, there was no stopping it: teachers in particular were tying their opposition to academies and internal competition and ten years of dripdripdrip marketisation.

So I’m well excited.  As a representative of both the SWP and the Manchester University students (and, tangentially, as a probable future high school maths teacher), I’ll be up at the crack of dawn visiting picket lines, but even for the slightly less motivated (who won’t be at work all day), there will be rallies and demonstrations going on all over the place:

• Barnsley: March from Barnsley College (Old Mill Lane) site, 9.30am, to rally at Barnsley Town Centre Cinema, Eldon Street, 9.45am.
• Birmingham: Rally between 12 noon and 3pm Victoria Square, to include a demonstration around the city centre.  Called by NUT, UCU and PCS. Unison has also committed to join the rally if council workers strike over single status.
• Bolton: Rally at Bolton Central Library, Le Mans Crescent, 10am.
• Bradford: Rally at Bradford City Football Club (Off Manningham Lane), 10.30am,
• Brighton & Hove: Assemble Pavilion Gardens, march to sea front, 11am, rally Old Ship Hotel Ballroom, 11.30am-12.30pm.
• Bristol: Rally around midday involving NUT from south Gloucester, North Somerset, Swindon and Wiltshire. Details of march and rally tbc.
• Calderdale: Rally at The Trades Club, Holme Street, Hebden Bridge, 10am-11am.
• Cambridge: Rally at Guildhall, Market Square, 12 noon-1pm
• Derby: Rally in Market Place, 11am, followed by rally in Darwin Suite of the Assembly Rooms, 12 noon
• Exeter: Rally at 12 noon, Exeter city football club, Coaches from Devon, Torbay, Plymouth.
• Hull: Rally at Royal Station Hotel, Ferensway, 10am.
• Ipswich: Ipswich Borough Council Social Club, Black Horse Lane, 12 noon
• Kirklees: Rally at St Patrick’s Catholic Centre, 2 Trinity Street, Huddersfield , 10.30am-11.30am
• Leeds: Assemble 10.30am for 11am start, Victoria Gardens, Headrow (outside the Art Gallery) for an open air rally.
• Leicester: Rally at Athena Conference Centre, Rutland Street, 11am-12 noon
• Lincoln: Rally at Turks Head, Newport, 11am,
• Liverpool: Assemble at Victoria Memorial, Lord Street/James Street (opposite end to Town Hall), 10.30am; March along Victoria St (past Education Office) to St Georges Hall, 11.15am; Open air meeting at St George’s Plateau; Rally at Liner Hotel, Lord Nelson Street, 12.30pm-1.30pm
• London: Assemble 11am Lincoln’s Inn Fields to march to Central Hall, Westminster for a rally.
• Manchester: Rally at Friends’ Meeting House, 6 Mount Street, 11am
• Medway: Rally at Command House, Gunwharf Dock Road, Chatham, 12.30pm-2pm.
• Newcastle: Regional rally, Grey’s Monument, City Centre, 2pm
• Northampton: Rally at Northampton Guildhall, 12.30pm to 1.30pm
• Nottingham: Assemble at the Forest, 10am; March to rally at Congregational Hall, Castle Street, 10.30am
• Oldham: Oldham Civic Centre Rochdale Road side, Outside on the steps, to proceed to Manchester rally, 9.30am.
• Oxford: Picket at Oxpens FE college with UCU and NUT from 7.30am to 12 noon. March at 12 noon to rally at 12.30pm at Oxford Town Hall, followed by a march through the city centre.
• Preston: Rally at Preston North End Football Club, Sir Tom Finney Way, 2pm-3pm
• Reading: Rally at Reading International Solidarity Centre (RISC), London Street, 10.30am & 1.30pm
• Sheffield: Regional rally at 12 noon in the city centre, involving Barnsley, Rotherham, Sheffield and Doncaster NUT and hopefully UCU. Details tbc.
• Somerset: Rally at Taunton Rugby Club, 11.30am.
• Southampton: Rally at Hoglands Park (across the road from Council offices), 1pm.
• West Sussex: Rally at The Pavilion, Worthing, 10am.
• Windsor and Maidenhead: Rally at The Thames Hotel, 9am-12 noon.

Come on down and show some support.

Off-topic, I’ve recently been pointed at the Salford Star, a free magazine that looks fantastic.  I say “looks”, because I’m not in Salford very often and I’m too cheap to pay the £3.50 to read it online, but it’s already getting a reputation for grassroots investigative journalism.  Go check it out.

the sound of one hand breaking up peaceful protest in a detention centre

Nearly missed this one, and small wonder: a google search for “harmondsworth” comes up with only three results, one from Socialist Worker…

On Saturday 5 April, between 5 and 6 in the morning, around 50 police in riot gear entered Harmondsworth immigration removal centre and took 30 detainees away.

The detainees have been involved in a mass food refusal from 1 April. The detainees also occupied the courtyard. Around 120 remained all night prior to the raid.

…and two from Indymedia, who I assume must have broken the story. And that’s it. On the whole of the internet.  You can also read some of the detainees’ testimony at the Indymedia site.

You’d have thought - or at least, you’d have sincerely hoped - that by the 21st century, we’d have learned to be very worried about people being put in camps for “processing”, and that the repression of protests against their systematic dehumanisation would really grab our attention.  Seemingly not; this stuff gets swept under the rug all the time.