London

Weekend of protest in London as anti-war demo is followed by bridge-block protest over NHS cuts

Anti-war protest in Trafalgar Square two years ago - the message remains the same

London will be a hive of activity this weekend, with the huge anti-war demo in Trafalgar Square on Saturday, followed by a march to Downing Street, and the UK Uncut occupation of Westminster Bridge on Sunday, in protest at the government’s attempts to privatise the NHS.

Saturday: Trafalgar Square, 12-4pm

There’ll be a heap of big names in Trafalgar Square, including Wikileaks founder Julian Assange, who will be giving a speech. Musicians Billy Bragg and Brian Eno and campaigners Jemima Khan and Peter Tatchell will also be there, as will numerous MPs, actors and musicians – and families of military personnel.

The event will mark the 10^th anniversary of the invasion of Afghanistan – and be part of building political pressure on our government to withdraw from that country and from the other wars it has helped to start.

It’s a sad fact that the Afghanistan conflict has seen 10 years of the richest countries in the world fighting what is possibly the single poorest in the world – yet they still haven’t won. The mammoth waste of money that has been spent on this pointless conflict has led to huge cuts in public services here in the UK as the government struggles to balance the books. As billions of pounds continue to drain out of this country’s coffers to pay for the fighting in Afghanistan and Libya, and the continuing occupation of Iraq, the cuts here can only get more savage.

Meanwhile, the myth that ordinary Americans are bovinely supportive of their government in the matter of its wars is being rapidly dismantled. There is a large and active anti-war movement in the US and protests about the Afghanistan war will be taking place across the US on Saturday.

Meanwhile, the Occupy movement, which has seen recent major occupations of New York, Chicago and numerous other cities in protest at corporate greed, is growing by the day – yet it has received little mainstream media coverage. More on the American movement in a later post.

Here in London, the Trafalgar Square assembly starts at noon and ends about 4pm, when the protesters will march to Downing Street, led by ex-soldiers and relatives from military families, with the demand that the government bring the troops home now.

Sunday, Westminster Bridge

The Health and Social Care bill has caused outrage among the many people who believe it is a major part of a planned destruction of the NHS. Writer George Monbiot has said: “The government’s assault on the NHS has just one purpose: to grant corporations greater access to public funds. To this end, it is prepared to destroy the greatest achievement in universal provision in the history of the United Kingdom, and one of the greatest worldwide. The US system, in which the rich are over-treated while the poor are left to rot, should serve as a grisly warning of where we could end up if these “reforms” go ahead. We must stop this vandalism through a massive and sustained public mobilisation.”

More than 2,500 people have pledged to attend, making the event “possibly the largest single act of civil disobedience in the UK for years”, according to UK Uncut.

It argues that the cuts to public services are unnecessary – either the tax avoided and evaded in a single year or the taxpayer subsidy to the banking industry could pay for all of the £81bn, four-year cuts programme.

The organisation also points out that the £7 billion due to be paid out in bank bonuses this year is more than the first wave of public spending cuts.

Unlike the organisers of the Trafalgar Square assembly, UK Uncut doesn’t make a direct connection between the cuts and expenditure on war, but doubtless there will be many who attend both events.

I’ll probably have to miss both as I’ll be among more than 1,000 journalists, film-makers, publishers and activists attending the Rebellious Media Conference, being held throughout the weekend to challenge the deference of the mainstream media to corporate interests and government lies, and to develop alternatives that have real integrity. More on that here next week.
More details:

http://www.antiwarassembly.org/

http://www.ukuncut.org.uk

Pic credit: S Fenton

Arms trade hoax outed as organisers admit it was “elaborate stunt” to embarrass weapons dealers

A wonderful hoax highlighting the hypocrisy of the arms trade and the UK government’s willingness to sell weapons to oppressive regimes was “outed” today on the World Service.

The BBC had invited an organisation called Life Neutral for an interview to discuss a new scheme to “offset” deaths caused by the arms industry’s weapons, by funding families to have more children. Funds would be made available by weapons manufacturers, Life Neutral claimed, to help people have children to make up for the countless children killed by the arms trade. It claimed to be exhibiting at this week’s Defence and Security Equipment International arms fair in London. “For every life lost as a result of the use of products from our member organisations,” Life Neutral explains on its website, http://www.lifeneutralsolutions.com/, “we make sure that a new life flourishes”.

In the interview, which you can listen to here, http://spacehijackers.org/html/projects/dsei11/lifeneutralinterview.mp3, the interviewer voices suspicions that Life Neutral is not what it claims to be, pointing out that there’s no record of any exhibitor by that name at the DSEI event.

The interviewee then came clean, confessing that the whole thing was a stunt designed to embarrass the arms dealers – “some of the nastiest people on the planet” – who have flooded into our capital city this week.

As hoaxes go, it was fab. There was a flurry of Tweeting earlier this week as news of Life Neutral came out, with many, including me, unsure whether the scheme was a clever spoof or a horrible, sick, perverse reality. Could these deeply unpleasant warmongers stoop so low as to think every death they were responsible for could be “offset” by a new life? The very fact that so many people thought it could be true shows the low esteem in which the arms trade is held – a level of esteem which can only get lower following Amnesty International’s revelations yesterday that exhibitors at DSEI were selling instruments of torture that are supposedly illegal in this country. http://www.amnesty.org.uk/news_details.asp?NewsID=19687

The organisation behind Life Neutral is a group of “anarchitects” called the Space Hijackers, who oppose the “constant oppressive encroachment onto public spaces of institutions, corporations and urban planners. We oppose the way that public space is being eroded and replaced by corporate profit making space.”

More info: http://spacehijackers.org/, http://lifeneutralsolutions.com

Pic credit: Simon Howden, http://www.freedigitalphotos.net/images/view_photog.php?photogid=404

Manifestations of anger when peaceful protest doesn’t work

There are some very angry people out there. I’m not talking about those involved in the disturbances of the past few days – I’ll come to those later.

I’m talking about ordinary, common-or-garden, white, middle-class, middle-aged people, the sort you wouldn’t think of as trouble-makers.

They’re angry because of massive and unnecessary cuts to things they hold dear – the health service, the welfare state, education, social services.

They see their pensions becoming worthless, they see their kids about to take on £27,000 of debt in order to gain degrees that have no guarantee of ever getting them a job, they see their own parents’ future uncertain as care homes are closed and social services budgets cruelly slashed. They see their local libraries closing, spending in youth services and care for the elderly, mentally ill and vulnerable pruned back savagely. They see a future in which, at a time they should be relaxing in relative comfort, they will more than likely have to share their homes with – and support financially – their jobless children and their enfeebled parents.

It’s a slow-burning anger. The government and the mass media tells them the cuts are necessary and for a while they believe it. But gradually they start to question this: why should they shoulder the financial burden while the rich get richer and the greedy corporations slyly avoid their tax burdens? Why are we as a nation continuing to wage fantastically expensive wars that appear to be for no real purpose, to achieve nothing, to put our troops and our citizens into needless danger? How, they ask, can we afford to keep waging war when we are hugely overdrawn as a country, in hock to foreign investors to the tune of billions, and as a result cannot afford to pay for essential, day-to-day services for our own people?

And they get more and more angry.

If you can understand this anger, you must understand how that anger is multiplied in communities hardest hit by the cuts. I’m not going to bandy figures around – the figures for the cuts to public services in the areas affected are freely available from local councils on the internet – but they’re scary. People who have little already are being deprived of much of what they do have.

No-one is able to explain why violent disturbances on the streets of Tunisia, Egypt and Libya are described as “anti-government protests” and those involved described as “rebels”, when similar events here are described as “riots” and those involved are vilified as “yobboes and criminals”. There have even been frighteningly fascist-overtoned threats of evicting protesters from their homes and depriving them of their benefits. As one Tweeter put it tonight, “people calling for authoritarian measures never think it applies to them or anyone that they know”.

Another reminds those “baying for water cannons and  rubber bullets” that those instruments could be turned on them in other circumstances. And a Tweet from the US points out that, in a parallel with what’s happening here, “the United States spends more than $780 billion on war each year and less than $10 billion on improving housing in the ghettos”.

The sad fact is that peaceful protest doesn’t work, as millions of people have found when they’ve taken to the streets to protest against the wars that are bankrupting our country and against the cuts that are being forced through in order to keep paying for these wars. Time and time again, the media has ignored the tens of thousands of “normal” people who attend each rally, most with great good humour and many with their children, and focused on the minority trouble-makers, in order to perpetuate the myth that dissent is somehow a minority sport.

What happens when polite protest doesn’t work? People get angry. And we’re seeing, to our cost, how such anger can manifest itself and how quickly it can spread.

“This sense of anger has been brewing for years,” commented a young black man on Twitter tonight. “We are all stereotyped as thugs hoodies criminals mobs gangs crews… It’s funny how [the] media portrayed it [the riot] as a minority of poor black youths when we now see other ages, classes, races in court facing justice.”

You can’t quell anger, or any other disease, by attacking its symptoms, you have to treat its root causes. That’s not condoning violence or justifying it – it’s common sense if you don’t want it to keep erupting. This week it’s the inner cities – what happens when the increasingly angry middle classes finally lose their temper?

Pic credit: HalaLoCa, http://twitpic.com/626h3a