protest

‘Shop your neighbour’ immigration ploy a diversion from bigger issues: war, NHS & mass protest as Occupy London gears up

The government’s new crackdown on immigration, announced today, is a clever attempt to divert attention from other, more important, issues. The cunning “new approach with tough limits” is launched just two days after the big anti-war demo in Trafalgar Square and just one day after the protests and “die-in” on Westminster Bridge over the threat to privatise the NHS.

The government doesn’t like that sort of thing. It made that clear at the weekend when it sent the police to arrest six Catholic peace campaigners for blocking the road outside Downing Street. A friend of mine was watching and said he was surprised by the “aggressive” attitude of the police, who circled the small group in question and closed in on them in a “menacing” fashion. “They could have simply asked them to move out of the road and they would have done – there was no need to get aggressive about it,” he said. He theorised that the cops were practising this new circling routine to add it to their kettling skills for next weekend (October 15), when the Occupy London protest begins. Occupy London is the young cousin of the American Occupy Wall Street protest, which has now been going for several weeks. London will be the latest city to join the worldwide Occupy movement, which has now spread to hundreds of major cities. The protestors are angry at the influence of big business in government and the wrecking of our economy by the banking system, tax dodgers and corporate greed. Details: www.facebook.com/occupylondon, or Twitter @occupylsx

The threat of a protest movement that’s increasingly mainstream in its appeal and its participation is scaring our government something rotten: hence the neat diversionary tactic in the shape of the new immigration policy. No doubt the hope is that the ploy will find adherents among the half-witted who think, by a curious logic, that our economic woes and their joblessness have been caused by immigration.

The new scheme includes revising the citizenship test to include questions on British history. It’s ironic that our recent history – one of aggressive invasions and violent “intervention” in pursuit of oil revenues – has helped create much of the destruction and displacement of populations that causes immigration. I’d hazard a guess there won’t be any Qs on that in the new test though.

I’d love to see a random selection of home-grown Brits having to take the citizenship test. I know I’d have to think twice about how to answer these questions, and I’ve lived here all my life.

What are the powers of the devolved administrations? What ceremonial duties does the Queen have? Where is proportional representation used? What is a credit union? What responsibilities do self-employed people have? What are the limits on working hours and times for children?

But it’s not all about fun quizzes: there’s a nastier side to the new immigration policy. Cameron has announced a new “grass up your neighbour” strategy. “I want everyone to help by reporting suspected illegal immigrants to the UK via Crime Stoppers,” he Tweeted today. “We’ve got to be so much better at finding illegal immigrants and getting them out of our country”.

This policy of kicking the weakest when they’re down is about finding a minority to pick on, to divert attention away from that other minority that have been getting a richly-deserved kicking – the government’s chums in big business and finance.

Cameron opined: “We need the right people for our economy here and those who will help make our country, stronger, richer and more secure.”

Quite right. But don’t pick on immigrants: focus on the tax-dodgers, war-mongers and greedy financial institutions. Let’s get them out of the country first.

Pic credit: Stop the War Coalition, www.stopwar.org

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

Could Troy Davis’s execution be the start of the American Spring?

Last night’s execution of Troy Davis seems to have been a horribly misjudged action on the part of the American authorities, and not purely from a moral point of view. Whether justice is served by the killing of a man over whose conviction and imprisonment  there was such doubt and controversy, will continue to be debated. But his death looks set to become a symbol of the injustice and oppression that are already making many Americans increasingly angry.

As I write, #RIPtroydavis is “trending” at number 2 on Twitter in both the US and UK. It’s an indication of how big this news is and how much it has evoked a bad taste in the mouths of people around the world.

I think Troy David could become a martyr, a symbol not just for anti-death-penalty protestors and those who object to the brutality of the American criminal “justice” system, but also for any other protest movement angered by the behaviour of their government in some other capacity.

Because protest in the US is gathering apace. It’s not widely reported – apparently there was a deliberate news blackout of the nationwide protests for Saturday’s “Day of Rage”, while the continuing occupation of Wall Street in protest at the destructive greed of banks and corporations has not even been mentioned in the New York Times! (www.occupywallstreet.org)

But ignoring the anger of ordinary people will not make it go away. We found that in the UK, to our cost, with the recent riots – which, incidentally, were sparked by the death of a black man who was widely believed to be innocent, at the hands of the authorities. Any parallels with Troy Davis there?

I’ll be very surprised if the execution doesn’t spark off something similar. Already there is talk of an “American Spring” – along the lines of the Arab Spring, with ordinary Americans – they’re calling themselves the 99 per centers – rising up against perceived unfairness.

And in two weeks the volume of dissent in the US will swell further as yet more protestors take to the streets on October 8 to call for an end to the occupation of Afghanistan.  That one will be international, of course – our own version here in the UK will be @antiwar8oct and http://www.antiwarassembly.org/

For more on dissent in the US, see on Twitter #takewallstreet, #occupywallstreet, @USRevolution_v2, @americanspring, @usdayofrage, #AfghanistanTuesday, #Tuesdayista, #OwnTheStreets and many more.

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