Fascism In Europe Again

Personally I wasn’t offended when the queen wasn’t invited to the D-Day anniversary functions in Normandy. Why a hereditary tax-dodger should carry any more gravitas than a elected representative escapes me. Even if the elected representative is Gordon-fucking-Brown. And I wasn’t overly offended by Sarkosy’s silly comment that the anniversary was ‘largely a Franco-American’ affair. Politicians are notoriously ignorant and/or manipulative of history. Like Obama’s comment that his uncle was one of the liberators of Auschwitz – highly unlikely unless his uncle was serving in the Red Army at the time.

But I am offended that the anniversary of the start of the liberation of Europe from Fascism should be marked by a 6.6% vote for the BNP and the election for the first time of two MEP’s. Including Andrew Bronn who started his career with the National Socialist Movement (maybe a clue in the name there). And more significantly a 17.5% for UKIP – a Little Englander party with a clear anti-immigration platform.

I know that not all those votes represents a move towards fascism. I know that they are symptomatic of a political and economic crisis, and of a vacuum on the Left. But all that sober reflection and analysis is for another time. Right now I’m just angry with that 6.6%.

Grasshoper

Next to Bruce Lee, he was responsible for bringing Eastern martial arts to a Western audience: And as a kid in the 70’s, watching David Carradine as Kwai Chang Caine in “Kung Fu”, may well have subliminally started off my own journey in the martial arts.

Kids in those days kids were used to their TV action heroes being blue-eyed cowboys and cops, so creating the character of a Buddhist monk who played the flute and tried to avoid violence (but always spectacularly kicked ass) was a breakthrough.

Ironically Bruce Lee was considered and rejected for the part, and a Westerner with no background in the martial arts was cast. Only after the series was made did David Carradine develop a genuine interest in kung fu, although as the owner of one of his laughable instructional tapes I am not sure that he attained any great standard. After Death Race 2000, I then lost track of his career for many years, but he was fantastic when he reappeared in Tarantino's Kill Bill films.

It’s a sad footnote that he should have been found dead in bizarre circumstances ‘a la Michael Hutchence’. Each to their own of course, but I never could understand that particular taste for ‘auto-erotic asphyxiation'. Apart from anything else does it not occur that if it goes wrong you’re going to be stuck with a pretty embarrassing obituary for your grandchildren to read?

And whatever would Master Po have said ?

Election Day

I love elections. I realize that a sober Marxist analysis shows that they are not the be all and end all of democracy. Not even close. But I can’t help myself pouring over polls, looking at little coloured maps, and staying up late for the results with Jon Snow and the swing-ometer.

As a kid I remember being taken by my parents to the polling station at the community centre and waiting whilst they did something incredibly important and grown up. And the thrill of voting for the first time in the disastrous 1983 ‘Falklands’ election. When there was still a proper Labour Party I was an assistant agent for some local council elections and got involved with the archaic business of tellers taking polling numbers, crossing off names on ‘Mikado pads’, knocking up voters and going to the count. And of course canvassing – strangely I enjoyed canvassing. Particularly campaigns when the candidate actually stood for something. Johnny Bryan in Bermondsey – Lesley Mahmood in Liverpool Walton. Dave Nellist in Coventry South East. I got around a bit.

In the (New) Labour stronghold where I now live there is precious little evidence of an election. at the moment. Despite the recession and the current political crisis there has been no canvassing or even leafleting – except for my own rather pathetic contribution to the No2EU campaign. In fact depressingly the most visible evidence of the election is the number of prominent posters for the “Christian Party’.

I voted early today; and at 7.15am the polling station was pretty busy – hopefully that’s a sign of something.

There are no prizes for predicting that there will be a significant protest vote today. Scanning the ridiculously long scroll of a ballot paper I couldn’t help reflecting, again, that No2EU is not a good name. Given that research shows that a disturbing number of protest voters will make their decision on the spot in the voting booth, I worry that a lot of genuine people will end up wasting their votes on the Socialist Labour Party (Scargill egoist-fan club) or the Socialist Party of Great Britain (simply bonkers). So if anyone is reading this and is still in any doubt, go and have a look at No2EU now …

Goodbye to ER

After 15 years, watching the last episode of ER was a must last night. I’m sure I don’t have much to add to the volumes that will doubtlessly be written about the series, but I can’t let its passing go unmentioned.

In the pre-Sopranos era it shocked the complacency of us Brits who felt that our TV was inherently better than anything that came out of the US. Of course since the flood of HBO imports the superiority of these US shows is pretty much undeniable: The Brits may still excel when it comes to comfort viewing – talking bonnets in yet another Jane Austin adaptation - or soporific Middle England coziness like Heartbeat, but just compare ER with the interminable Casualty or Holby City.

ER gave us proper grown-up drama that managed to make something that was intelligent and moving, without being sentimental, out of that most tired of formulas the medical drama. I’m not by nature given to emotional outpourings, but the portrayal of Dr Greene’s drawn out death was one of the most genuinely poignant things I’ve seen on TV and I’m not ashamed to confess to being a little choked even when seeing it again in the retrospective last night.

The Corner

Just finished reading ‘The Corner’. The 600-odd page documentary of a year in the life of a neighborhood in West Baltimore that was the inspiration for ‘The Wire’ is not a light read.

But it should be compulsory reading for anyone who has a say in public policy on drugs. Including the new generation of “I didn’t inhale’ politicians. It paints a picture of a broken society. Not the kind that Cameron and the Tories talk about when they mean the decline of rural post offices, the vandalisation of bus stops or a general lack of respect for our elders and betters. This is really broken – as in completely fucking grim and (almost) entirely hopeless with the whole social and economic structure collapsed.

There’s no equivalent to it here in the UK – even where I live in the inner city. There maybe the odd street (in fact there is - just a couple of blocks from my house) that at certain times of night has aspects of it. In other places there may be certain estates that come close. But despite having one of the highest rates of unemployment – and crime - in the country, in general we are not there. Yet.

But there are some familiar echoes:

In particular, The Corner identifies the plight of the working poor – those people who desperately manage to keep from drowning in West Baltimore - a small and fragile minority who uneasily co-exist with the dope-fiends, the slingers, the dealers and the stick-up artists.

The other day I went to the local health centre for a blood test and witnessed a small taste of this phenomenon:

Needless to say the health centre is over-subscribed and under-resourced. At 8:30am, before it opens there are over 60 people in the waiting area – we take tickets from a machine to give us a number. There's a fair cross section of every social (and medical) problem imaginable gathered together in one room. In the background, staff are continually yelling at patients. And patients yelling at staff: The records have been lost. They have brought the wrong form. The nurse is not in today. They need to go back to another clinic to get a referral. They don’t have proof of residence. And always the same outcome – come back another day – make another appointment – or wait here but we can’t tell you when you’ll be seen.

In response, the anger is ritualized. Most people protest then stoically accept what they are told and settle down to wait. They seem used to it – it may not be fair or logical but they know that's just how it works - and time takes on a different meaning when you're up tp your neck in the system. But the ones who suffer most are those that are not in the system.

Like the bloke waiting next to me; He was there for tests, but there was some mix up and then they couldn’t tell him when he would be seen. From the phone-calls that I overheard, he was some sort of maintenance man for a small firm. His boss was calling him every ten minutes to check up on him – when could he get back to work ? – why wasn’t he able to say? – how was he going to make up his lost time ? what was really the matter with him ? was he going to be signed-off sick ? By the time it was my turn it was pretty clear that the guy was well down the road to being sacked.

A small undramatic episode but it shows the fragility of the narrow gap between being in work and being another welfare statistic, with everything that goes with it.

No need to be polite - child abuse in the church

Yet another shocking – but tellingly not surprising story about child abuse in the Catholic church; this time in Irish children’s homes. Not the behavior of individual wayward priests, but systematic institutional abuses covered up for generations.

These scandals seem to be approached as if they were management issues; as happened when Cardinal Murphy-O’Connor was criticized for covering up abusive priests in his former diocese. As if they are on a par with the directors sweeping a misappropriation of funds under the carpet. Or when a government department hushes up negligence and incompetence. As a result, simply saying sorry and then doing a bit of an organizational review and maybe some remedial PR is seen as making it good.

But what we are talking about in the Catholic church is something much worse than either of those examples; and not just in the nature of the scandals, or in their scale. The uncomfortable truth is that there is causal link between the abuses and the underlying belief system itself. This is not often said, because of the ‘politeness’ that apparently surrounds religious belief. As an ex-catholic Atheist I have no such squeamishness – so here goes:

1.Original sin and guilt:
The idea that everyone, even the unborn child bears an inherited burden of guilt because they are the product of sexual intercourse, itself emblematic of man’s fall from God’s grace in the garden of Eden. That’s going to give you some pretty distorted views about sex, and about the upbringing of children. In any other circumstances, a psychiatrist would have a field day with anyone holding such views.

2. The notion of a priesthood:
The idea that there is a body of people who have been chosen by God and consequently have some sort of special authority. That’s a pretty special kind of power; in other circumstances - the theocracies of Ancient Egypt or the Aztecs, or in the modern-day, the Taliban of Afghanistan or the Branch-Davidians of Waco - we would talk smugly about wacky cults beyond the comprehension of civilized rational minds.

3. The concept of noble suffering:
The idea that bearing earthy suffering is a source of God’s grace that will somehow earn credit in an afterlife. Apart from many other types of weirdness, this gives us some pretty disturbing sado-masochistic imagery: like a lot of medieval art or Mel Gibson’s Passion Of The Christ. If secular equivalents of these had been found in the basement of a suspected serial killer they would doubtless be used as evidence of a deeply disturbed mind.

4. Priestly celibacy:
Perhaps not a fundamental belief but a practice shaped by the above beliefs. Throw in vows of obedience and again we are back to the psychiatrist’s chair again – a whole special kind of submission /repression/ power complex that flies in the face of the most basic biological imperatives.

This is not supposed to be an anti-Catholic rant – so I should qualify it by saying that growing up I knew many decent, sincere and well-intentioned Catholics (blah blah blah). My point however is that child abuse in the church is not an aberration, it is intrinsically linked with Catholic belief, and politeness should not inhibit is from telling it how it is:

To paraphrase Philip Larkin:
They fuck you up; your God and church
They may not mean to, but they do.

The Levellers & corrupt MP's

The MP’s expenses scandal takes a new turn as it focuses on the difficultly of removing the Speaker Of The House of Commons. It seems we now have something of a mini-constitutional crisis along with a general loss of confidence in parliament. In such circumstances I always find that the 17th Century is a good starting point for guidance.

Curiously despite being usually painted as a tyrant and villain, Oliver Cromwell has recently been rehabilitated in the media. Although the context has largely been forgotten, his words on forcibly dissolving the Rump Parliament have lately been much quoted; “You are no longer a parliament …you have sat too long for any good you have done lately … In the name of God - Go !”

By 1653 the moderates who dominated the Rump parliament were badly out of touch with the country as a whole and especially the radicalized New Model Army. Some of the members had even been there since before the civil war when Charles 1st had summoned the ‘Long Parliament’ in 1640. Since then the world had been turned upside down. Supporters of the Presbyterian party had been expelled in Pride’s Purge of 1648 as potential (and indeed actual) royalist sympathizers. The MP's left to form the Rump Parliament were largely those who had been willing to countenance the execution of the king and the establishment of a republic but were also being overtaken by the radicalised sections of the army and the lower classes . Significantly it was these people that Cromwell and the army leaders lent on for their power-base, although ultimately they would abandon them.

Interestingly what made the MPs of The Rump most unpopular was that fact that many of them had not taken an active taken part in the fighting but were now getting rich on the confiscated assets of royalists. Also a great many MP's were also lawyers and their self-interest propelled them to resist legal reforms that would have given common people access to the system. It was this general disaffection with the parliament that gave a popular basis for Cromwell’s forcible dissolution – the now famous dismissal of the mace of office as “a fool’s bauble” and the resonant spectacle of Colonel Harrison dragging the speaker from his chair.

But with regard to the present crisis of confidence in the parliamentary system – we would do better to draw inspiration not from Cromwell but from the Levellers:

Just two of the demands from their ‘Agreement Of The People’ – annual parliaments and the right to recall members for re-election – would go quite a long way to restoring credibility. Add on a thorough-going modernization of the legislature, including an end to late night sittings and the ridiculously long summer recess, along of course with MP’s being paid only the national average wage – and we might get something like a representative parliament.

Just a footnote to all this; I see that in yesterday’s Mail On Sunday it is reported that the queen is appalled at the greedy behavior of MPs. From someone who has lived all their lives at the public expense along with her extended family and hangers on, is exempt from most forms of taxation, and has immunity from public scrutiny or criminal prosecution, that’s pretty ironic.

The journey not the destination.

By rights I should be massively pissed off:

I had a meeting with a client this morning - followed by lunch - who is about fifty miles away. Unfortunately that's fifty miles the other side of London which means either riding around the M25 or battling my way across the capital in the rush hour. Either way it's a pig of a journey. I left early to avoid the traffic - made good time and pulled over for a leisurely coffee once I was almost there. Only then did I turn on my Blackberry - I always turn it off when I'm riding.

So I got the message from work that the client had cancelled - apparently she was 'too busy'. She hadn't even tried to phone me on the mobile - or bothered to reply to the email I sent yesterday trying to get her to confirm. Instead she'd phoned work my work at 8am that morning because obviously she thinks I actually live at the studio. Stupid bitch. And typical of a week of similar petty frustrations with arrogant corporate knobs who think that because you are a supplier they have a license to treat you like shit.

I want to be pissed off about this. But the trouble is that riding back into work in the not-quite-sunny weather I can't keep myself from grinning stupidly . The thing is, riding a bike for a few hours , even in the most pointless of circumstances, is still just about a million times better than anything else I could be doing in working hours ...

MP's money

Difficult to believe in the current climate, but the idea that MP's should be paid a wage was once a progressive one. It enabled ordinary working people, like Keir Hardie, to enter parliament and so broke the monopoly of the political class, landowners and business men, whose 'private incomes' freed them for the need to earn a living.

Although under the current Tory set up, the toffs in the form of Cameron and Boris, are making something of a comeback, the new version of the political class is nowadays that of careerist apparatchiks - as equally divorced from the vast majority of the people they represent as their nineteenth century predecessors.

Whereas there used to be talk of a class that was 'born to govern' (and it wasn't said in a sense of irony) there is now talk of having to attract 'the best and most talented'. This reasoning is behind the argument that MP's must not be underpaid - with the implication that if they are then potential politicians will be tempted away to other fields, or at the very least tempted to top up their salaries by making dodgy expenses claims.

The concept of 'underpaid' is very odd - and one that I have not heard seriously challenged. Underpaid in relation to who ? Certainly not the majority of the electorate, not the average elector and not even public sector middle managers. The benchmark appears to be the most senior professionals in private practice and top management in large corporations. Implicit in this is a naive assumption that the job market is some sort of meritocracy where the most talented are the best paid.

A quick look at the real world would disprove this: At my workplace the highest paid group are not skilled craftsman, nor senior mangers with responsibilities, but salesmen whose skill set is primarily schmoozing, brown-nosing and bullshitting. I am sure that anybody could find similar examples in their own lives - and I haven't even mentioned teachers or nurses.

So why do so many people accept that MP's should be amongst the highly paid ? In all the talk of MP's salaries and their abuse of expenses hardly anyone seems to be arguing that it is a privilege to be a representative of the people and - dare I say it - an element of sacrifice is to be expected. And even fewer have made the glaringly obvious suggestion that MP's should take only the average wage of the people they represent so as to stay in touch with them and so prevent the growth of that new 'political class'.

And finally - back to those salesmen at work: it is 'within the rules' for them to put in expenses claims for pencil sharpeners and erasers. But at the same time it is generally accepted that for a highly paid individual to make such petty claims is a bit demeaning and marks them out as a bit of an arsehole - so they don't do it. It comes to something when salespeople have more sense of shame than our elected representatives.

Life's A Riot (still)

On a whim I've just stuck on Billy Bragg's "Life's A Riot" on the i-tunes at work.

Great lyrics - crap voice. So crap it's actually good. If I ever sang in the bath it would sound just about identical.

Those lyrics are filled with 80's references. Just listening to it is a nostalgia rush - until his aberrational flirting with the Kinnock-ite Red Wedge movement - Billy Bragg was the epitome of the young radical of the era. Down to his Doc Martin shoes, black 501s with turn ups and flat-top. (I was never one of those people by the way - too much of a headbanger back then - but I loved the lyrics and the fact that someone could sing like that and get away with it - proper modern folk music)

I don't think anyone who was involved at that time can now hear 'Whose Side Are You On?' ; 'Between The Wars'; 'It Says Here' or 'World Turned Upside' without the hairs on the back of their neck standing up. The sad thing is 25 years on and in these times it all seems so relevant again...

The end at Visteon ?

It's no longer news that the former Visteon / Ford workers at Enfield and Basildon have voted to accept an offer that goes most of the way to matching the Ford contracts they had been promised all along (with reservations about pensions and shift allowances). In other words; a victory. Like the Lindsey Oil Refinery strikers they have proved that in spite of the recession, in spite of anti-union laws and in spite of docile union leaderships, victories are possible if you're prepared to fight for them.

Having been involved on the sidelines of many disputes over the years - from the big ones like the miners strike and the Wapping dispute, to the small ones like the Addenbrookes cleaners or JJ Fast Foods - I know that we need victories more than we need noble defeats. So I'm not one of those (and there will inevitably be some on the Left) who will deny ourselves a moment of celebration.But having gone up to visit the pickets on Saturday it came home to me that the celebration is tempered by the sadness that goes with any factory closure.

Sitting outside the gates in Enfield , it is striking that the factory there is surrounded by derelict and empty sites that once were a thriving industrial belt in North London along the A10 corridor. Now it is becoming an industrial graveyard.

Because the Visteon plant was highly unionised, it was also unusual nowadays in maintaining the kinds of pay and conditions that generations of workers in the manufacturing sector once took for granted. And in its sense of community: Many of the workers have spent twenty years or more there, there are families working alongside each other - I even met several retired workers who came back to join the picket line. That has all gone now.

Although the workers will continue their pickets until the redundancy payments have actually been paid, there is also a sense of sadness as the ex-Visteon workers disperse. Inevitably the solidarity and camaraderie that has grown out of the dispute will also disperse with them .

However like in so many other disputes before, one thing that repeatedly comes up when talking with the workers is how much they have changed: In their views of the world , of politics and of activists of all hues who they previously regarded as an alien species. I've also heard the workers say a number of times how shocked they are that people they don't know have gone out of their way to support them. And how in spite of what is said, people aren't just out for themselves but are prepared to stick up for each other.

It's a simple message but a pretty fucking inspiring one - and one that will outlast the closure of the factory.

Visteon. Struggle. Solidarity.

Socialist Party. Socialist Workers' Party. Socialist Labour Party. Socialist Alliance. "Why can't you all just work together and have one 'proper' party?". I've heard it from my daughter, thinking about politics for the first time, and I've heard it on the picket line at Visteon. It's a very familiar question to anybody on the Left ... and still a very fair one.

If ever there was an instance when different groups could and should suspend their differences and rivalries it is their support for workers in struggle. But still inevitably there are points of departure between the various groups that actually speak volumes about their differences. And these are important, far more so than sterile debates about whose forebears had the 'correct' position over Mussolini's invasion of Abyssinia in 1936. Or something.

This has certainly been what I have seen in the Visteon dispute at Enfield.

Take the SWP: At the start of the dispute they turned up in very large numbers - now, from what I've seen on the picket line, they seem to have evaporated. Why? I suspect because they thought there were no quick wins for them to make. On the other hand now that the conveners at Visteon in both Enfield and Basildon have joined the Socialist Party and are standing as N2EU candidates in the Euro elections they are condemning the platform as chauvinistic and nationalist. Just as they did with the Lindsey Oil Refinery dispute, they have put themselves outside one of the most significant developments in the labour movement. N2EU is not ideologically 'pure' and is quite possibly not the best tag for a new Left movement - but it is happening right now and it is real. Strange that the SWP were a lot less fussy about far more 'incorrect' Islamo-nuts in the Stop War The Movement. But then again of course that was their own 'thing' that they could pretty much control.

Or take the anarchists. Actually I have a lot more time for them. They don't parachute in and out of the picket line, in fact they work pretty tirelessly in their support. Occasionally they can seem like they inhabit a different planet from ordinary workers with cars, mortgages and the other conventional trappings of modern life. But more seriously, they are so suspicious of anything 'official' or that smacks of the organised Left that whenever there is talk of spreading the dispute - of approaching other union branches or stewards, or lobbying this or that union official, they have very little to say. Tellingly their main focus has been on being support from the general public rather than within the labour movement.

Supporting a struggle is not about simply cheer-leading. If you genuinely think that you or your organisation has something to offer to help build success then you have not only a right but also a duty to share it. Not in a sectarian way and not by lecturing or maneuvering. And if you believe that there is also a bigger picture, that disputes should be linked up and movements built it is perfectly legitimate again to try and get people to join your organisation. And most importantly if you don't convince them you go ahead with the practical support work anyway and don't sulk in the corner. I'd like to think that this approach is why a number of the Visteon workers, including two of the conveners have agreed to join the Socialist Party.

All of which is a preamble to talking about Rob Williams. He is the Unite convener at Linmar in Swansea, formerly a part of Visteon before it was re-badged in previously shenanigans to outsource the manufacture of auto components. It is Rob who has played a major role in taking the cause of the Visteon dispute to various parts of the Ford empire and around the movement generally. I have no doubt that he is the major reason that Visteon workers have turned to the Socialist Party.

Yesterday Rob was dismissed from his job at the Linmar plant. In support the other workers there walked off the line and joined him in an occupation of the union office on the site whilst the police were called to try and evict them. To give Rob your support - send messages to robbo@redwills.freeserve.co.uk

Feelgood weekend

It's come a bit late this year but it was the first Spring-like weekend of the year. (Or at least the first one when I had a bike on the road which is the only sort that really counts).

Each year the first feel good factor of a bit of sun in your face is a reminder of our primeval and pagan instincts. And this weekend just about every aspect of my usual pastimes was improved by the sun:

Saturday morning - I visited the Visteon picket line. The mood of the workers was good and optimistic with progress made in involving other Ford sites, and the various supporters actually seem to be working (more or less) together for once.

Saturday afternoon - I picked up my 883R/1200 from the workshop after its chain conversion and took it for a run up to the High Beach tea hut. It was about closing time but I got into chewing the fat for half an hour with a couple of guys from the Rider's club who were up there.

Sunday morning - I got to messing about in the garden doing some forms for the benefit of my kids. I did the long pole form (Luk Dim Boon Gwan) for once - I don't often get to do that during weekday training as it takes up too much space so I was happy to find that I could still do it.

Sunday afternoon - into town to the Globe Theatre for a performance of Romeo & Juliet. First we got in a tour of the nearby excavation of the Rose Theatre. I love the idea of that part of Southwark as the sleaze centre of Elizabethan London. Bear-baiting, brothels, violent ale houses and the stench of open sewers running through the street - it's a nice contrast to the sensibilities of today's' 'theatre-going public'. And walking over the Millennium foot bridge to St Paul's for the tube home - the same route that Christopher Wren would have taken every day in a ferry boat possibly steered by one of my ancestors - there is a sense of continuity (both good and bad) with what it has always meant to be a Londoner.

Laptops. Kuniyoshi. Graphic craftsmanship.

My laptop died at work. Pathetically I felt completely impotent for a day, not sure what could be salvaged or whether to restart on-going projects.

So whilst the IT boys here worked their magic to rebuild the laptop, I sneaked off for a couple of hours to the Kuniyoshi exhibition at the Royal Academy.

The demographics of the visitors were a pretty good guide to the appeal of the exhibition. It was a quiet mid-morning but there was a mixture of the usual chattering classes - 'friends of the RA' types - Japanese tourists (unsurprisingly) - students - and some tattoo 'alternative' types. The latter because of course both the style and subject matter are very similar to the Japanese school of tattooing.

I was struck mainly by how very modern the prints looked. The craft of making the prints from wood-cuts makes them look like tattoos - or comic books - like both these processes a black outline is filled with colour. And the colours:the reds ,blues and greens are much more vivid than you would find in western prints of the same era.

There was one glass case explaining the print-making purpose I was struck by the interplay between the art and the craft.This is a subject close to my heart - at work we occupy the space where in graphic terms art and craft meet, and it's a pet subject of mine that the creative disciplines can only be as good as their less glamorous artisan poor relations. It's why I struggle with 'conceptual art'.

I've just read a book - Colour by Victoria Finlay - which pretty much says the same thing: We only view art through the lens of the practical crafts that execute it. So for example; our modern view of Turner is defined by the fact that he didn't seem to give a toss about the quality of the paint he used. Consequently the crappy colours have degraded over the years and given a much softer and subdued effect than he ever intended.

... Meanwhile my laptop has now been restored to its former glory. Nothing 'business critical' has gone but I'm extremely pissed off to have lost five years worth of my i-tunes library.

Another bullying bastard in uniform

Picture taken just before the footage everyone has seen on the BBC: Tiny woman armed with orange juice carton threatens giant angry cop who responds with 'proportionate force' by swatting her with a back-hander and then bringing her to the ground with a steel baton to the legs.

There's a sweet irony that the all-invasive use of CCTV and cameras that has turned us into a surveillance state is now being used to expose police brutality.Which is no doubt why this cunt has obviously tried to hide the numbers on his epaulets to escape identification. Happily it didn't work and he's now been suspended.

Anything less than a conviction for GBH would be a whitewash - let's hope for a custodial sentence I imagine he'd be in for an interesting time inside.

Older brother for Sportster

I have been getting increasingly pissed off whilst my bike has been off the road waiting for parts to do a chain conversion. Matters came to a head last week and so I did the obvious thing - I brought a spare Sportster.

I've often thought that it would be handy to have two bikes so that I always had one on the road. Common sense would say that the second bike should be some cheap reliable hack - like a Japanese 250. But then again I've also often thought that it would be cool to have a project bike to fuck around with - this would just have to be a Harley. So I put the two ideas together - and brought a second Sportster.

It was an impulsive buy but not as extravagant as it may sound - this was a very low mileage 1989 XLH1200 model that had been stored for some time. It is distinctly tatty and needs a bit of tidying up. It also is festooned in "Live to ride. Ride to live" crap that will have to go. Along with the hideous buck-horn bars and pannier supports.

On the positive side it is of an age when chain drive was standard - so my recent experiences of belts snapping won't be repeated. On the negative side it is of an age when the four speed gearbox was still to be updated. These are agricultural at the best of times, but I suspect that the clutch on mine is shagged anyway. There seem to be any number of false neutrals but I can never actually engage the real neutral !

This makes riding in town 'interesting' to say the least. But on the open road it rides very nicely - and differently from my 2003 XL883R/1200 conversion. It certainly made the bank holiday Southend run without any problems - and even got a few admiringly looks for its old school / lived-in 'vintage' charm alongside the gleaming weekend-only bikes of some of the HOG-types

Despite having all sorts of plans - apart from sorting the transmission - I'm resisting all temptations to mess about it without it too much until I get the other one back on the road. Watch this space ...

Kettling & Ian Tomlinson

I was going to post the link to the Guardian's video footage showing the attack on Ian Tomlinson by the police that led to his death at the G20 protest. But I didn't - because I can't really think that there is anyone who still hasn't see it - and I now see that the ICC have got the Guardian to take it down in case it 'jeopardizes their inquiry'.

Instead have a look at this online debate - taken from the UK Police forum.

Imagine just for a moment that it was one of their own who had died in similar circumstances. And then think about the arguments being advanced by the coppers to explain/justify/defend the police role at the G20: 'Provocation', 'reasonable force', 'shouldn't have been there' 'brought upon by his own actions', even simply 'blame shared by all' or 'tragic accident'.

Blah-fucking-blah - if a copper had died on a demo after being pushed to the floor by protesters there would be a national witch-hunt as there was after the killing of PC Blakelock at Broadwater Farm.

I'm not calling for the framing of some random policemen to satisfy the public outrage - although of course that is precisely what happened after Broadwater Farm. But at the very least this must immediately lead to the end of the police practice of 'kettling' protests - it is an affront to civil liberties and tragically it was only a matter of time before someone died.

(By the way have a look at the picture again - see what's on the back of the jacket of the copper with his arm raised... maybe he's just trying to revive someone vigorously ...)

Visteon - occupation at Enfield site

I wrote about leafleting a local factory a few months ago. At the time I was fairly downbeat about the situation there and sank into reminiscence. Turns out I was wrong and that the redundant workers at Visteon Enfield are now in a roof top occupation of the plant. I was there again this Saturday for a rally to support them.

What has happened at Visteon is pretty much a tale of what has happened to British manufacturing industry in general. Ten years ago this was a Ford plant but a decision was made to 'outsource' component manufacturing and so the former Ford staff were transferred to Visteon under their previous terms of employment.

More recently production at the Visteon site has been progressively run down as suppliers with cheaper labour costs have been used - there are rumours of production moving to South Africa . In what can only be seen as a cynical use of a good day for bad news - the week of the G20 was used to announce the closure of the plant. The workforce were told that the company had gone into administration and that they were to quit the building more or less immediately. Contrary to the promises made by Ford, the redundancy payments from Visteon do not honour the old contracts.

Regardless of the legality or morality of the situation - unless the dispute now spreads to Ford itself it is difficult to see a way forward. But this is a real possibility, and the way in which the occupation has snowballed from Visteon's Belfast factory to the Basildon and Enfield sites is an indication of how these situations can be escalated.

I don't know how this is going to play out, but I am sure though that this dispute, and others like it, are are of far more significance than breaking a few windows at a bank.

Messages of support to:
supportvisteonworkers@hotmail.com

They predict a riot

And despite all the hype it didn't happen. Even with the smashing of a bank's windows, the death of a protester and the heaviest police presence in London that I can remember.

The much-touted images of some isolated violence were counter-balanced with those of a carnival of ridicule: The massed crowd in Trafalgar Square sang happy birthday to Tony Benn, a bloke dressed as Jesus holding a placard reading 'drive out the moneylenders' hilariously interviewed by the BBC, and a vintage armoured car decorated as a police riot vehicle with the occupants nicked for being (very unconvincingly) dressed as coppers.

But the riot-hype did go somewhere to achieving it's goal of demonising protest and promoting the idea that protesters are something other than ordinary people. Talking at work, I can see that this lie has taken some hold and I needed to do some convincing that the same people who go on demonstrations have jobs, families and watch Eastenders.

Yesterday showed not only that, to paraphrase Lenin, the state depends upon truckloads of tooled-up coppers, but also, to paraphrase Gramsci, that it needs to win hearts and minds too. The very fact that this is necessary in itself shows a fear of an emerging consensus that capitalism is possibly not such a great idea.

All of which eclipses the G20 summit itself:

The fact that it is at the Excel conference centre makes me think that it is probably as meaningless as business events that I have attended at the same venue. The comparison holds up because ultimately the G20 produces no votes and no decisions - just a 'consensus statement'. Very much like a business conference - verbose key note speeches that don't really say anything other than bland platitudes. And endless 'networking' opportunities so that inanities can be exchanged such as 'did you have to come far?'; "how was the traffic?'; and 'did you enjoy Jamie Oliver's dinner last night?' Meanwhile the real deals and decisions are made over a mobile phone in the car park.

Hail to the chief

I'll scream if I see another cut-away drawing of 'Air Force One' or the presidential car 'the beast' . Or hear any more stories of the medical team that is accommodated on the president's jet, or the electronic counter-weapons on board, or the sealed panic room inside his car that can withstand a chemical attack.

Don't think for a moment that it's simply about practical security - it's a carefully constructed image that is supposed to impress upon us a sense of awe at the power of the US state.

But just like the dark glasses and the mormon suits on the secret service guys - it all just seems a bit silly and over-blown.

It also seems ironic that what is supposedly the world's most powerful democracy is so concerned about the safety of one man - and that he is treated with the reverence accorded a medieval monarch or pope.

But flaunting all this in a foreign country seems particularly insensitive and arrogant. Let's face it - the president faces a far greater risk of assassination from some homegrown white-supremacist redneck than he does from an islamo-mentalist or a European anarchist.

Put People First

A guilty confession - I ended up missing the G20 "Put People First" demo on Saturday as I had fixed up to have my latest tattoo, started three weeks ago, finished off. I'll have to make up for my self-indulgence later in the course of the week. (See - I just can't shake off that ex-Catholic guilt thing even when it comes to political activity)

So, for once from the position of an observer rather than a participant here are a few random thoughts:

The broad nature of the movement from church groups to anarchists confirms that there an opposition consensus is forming that something is not right in how our world is ordered. Herein lies both a strength and weakness - it can easily amount simply to a cry of 'why can't we be nicer to each other ?'

If this is left unanswered then the movement will easily become a moment that is assimilated into the status quo much like "Make Poverty History' was. Signs of the assimilation are already evident. The Sunday papers were hilariously occupied with 'how not to dress like a banker' and patronising profiles on previously demonised anarchist Ian Bone.

Of course the qualitative difference this time round is a looming Depression that is transforming our daily lives in a way that just wasn't the case at the time of the 2005 G8.

Interesting times ...

Bike withdrawal

My bike is off the road and I am thoroughly pissed-off.

I woke up in a good mood last weekend - it was a sunny Saturday and an early start for a two day martial arts seminar I was helping to organise. Jumped on the bike - went to pull away - and then nothing except a familiar sinking feeling. Familiar because it has happened to me twice in 30,000 miles - my drive belt had snapped. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck.

Reading the reams of online debate about the subject it seems that the Harley world both here and in the US is divided over whether belt drive is the best thing since sliced bread or a royal pain in the arse.

I'm contemplating going over to a chain drive conversion - seemingly a retrograde step since Harley abandoned it in the late 90's. They're dirtier and require a bit more maintenance than a belt - but at least they don't mysteriously break without warning. All the custom boys seem to favour chains - there's more flexibility when it comes to tyre sizes; and in my case I'm probably overdue changing the gearing since my re-bore to 1200cc. And they do appear to be considerably cheaper.

But for the moment my bike is stuck in the shop waiting for parts and I'm just thoroughly pissed off. So sick of public transport that I am even contemplating buying a push bike.

And I so desperately need some motorcycle inspiration that I am surfing the brilliant custom Sportster site that supplied the logo above - and catching up online with US TV biker-soap Sons Of Anarchy. AAAARGH !!!!

The new 'national question'.

The whole ‘British Jobs For British Workers’ controversy has come close to home this week: My Mum and Dad, both in their eighties, after many years as activists and local councillors have finally resigned from the Labour Party.

They showed me their letter of resignation. In probably unconscious imitation of Woodrow Wilson – it gave their reasons for leaving in 14 points:

13 of these were very good (albeit almost twenty years too late); the illegal war in Iraq, failure to tackle increasing social inequality, failure to defend education and the health service, failure to reverse Thatcher’s privatisation and anti trade union laws, lack of party democracy and the courting of the City rather than ordinary people. Not exactly a programme for radical change but heart-felt and I can imagine quite an emotional rift for them after years of involvement with the party.

But then there was the shock – one of their points cited Labour’s failure to ‘tackle’ immigration. Basically they took the position of John Crudas.

They live in an area that has not been affected by immigration in recent years, there is a pretty well-integrated community up the road with a significant Sikh population. Despite the occasional verbal clumsiness of their generation (talking about ‘coloured people’) they are not racists.

But I was wrong-footed and my clumsy attempts to put forward a ‘no borders’ counter position didn’t get very far and in fact only provoked some fairly nationalist criticisms of the EU. So it came home to me quite how difficult it is to take these questions up – and also how wrong it is to simply label all those who express these confused views as reactionary bigots.

The controversy over the Lindsey Oil Refinery strike was an example of exactly how this can be skilfully navigated and also something of a litmus test for the Left – with those who prefer to live in sectarian ivory towers (usually in a middle class district) lining up on one side, and socialists who are capable of dealing with the real world on the other.

And so to the news that RMT has put its weight behind a campaign to stand anti-EU Left candidates in the European elections.

Predictably, some have hailed it as a significant step in the breaking away of the trade union movement from the Labour Party, and will intervene in it to build support for a socialist alternative. But others will stand on the sidelines and denounce it as ideologically impure and politically incorrect.

I hope I can intervene similarly in my own family’s split with Labour. I've started by sending my Dad this link.

John Lambert & The Instrument Of Government

Another significant anniversary – on this day in 1653 the monarchy was formally abolished.

This lead to the adoption of the world’s first (and England’s only) written constitution – The Instrument Of Government. This was essentially a patrician republican, not a democratic constitution, but it did establish:

• A president for life – under the title of Lord Protector – as an elected rather than a hereditary position.

• The executive (the Lord Protector) answerable to an elected Council Of State

• Parliament to be the supreme legislature, with the Lord Protector having the right to delay but not veto legislation

• Joint control of the armed forces by parliament and the Lord Protector

• A parliament consisting of a single elected house

• A guaranteed term for parliaments of three years with sessions of a minimum of five months

• Electoral boundaries that reflected the shifting population and the growth of urban areas

• Freedom of worship and assembly for all except Roman Catholics

It wasn’t the system envisioned by the Levellers or the other radicals and it wasn’t even the system that lasted for any period of time – the instability of continuing civil wars led to the proto-military rule of the Major Generals, the inherited Protectorate of Richard Cromwell and ultimately to the restoration of the monarchy.

The Instrument was the work of General John Lambert – one of the ‘army grandees’ who represented the narrow but powerful social base of the radicalised upper middle classes – prepared to break with the old order but wanting strong and stable government and above all reluctant to allow the masses onto the political stage. Tellingly the reforms to the electoral boundaries were geared to enfranchise the growing urban middle class and end the domination of the gentry. But with the property qualification set at £200 it certainly did not include the ‘honest freeborn artisans’ that the radicals drew on for their support.

Nonetheless it does represent a milestone in the struggle for democracy and like so many of the achievements of the English Revolution, is still in some respects to be equaled.

Lambert is an ambiguous character: Having been the architect of Cromwell’s Protectorate he later fell out with him. He plotted at various times in a confusing succession of twists and turns with just about all the parliamentary factions. To some extent this reflected the narrow base on which his power rested. However he did lead the opposition that ended the Protectorate of Richard Cromwell and helped replace it with a short-lived revival of the Republic. And he did try to prevent the Restoration of the monarchy at the very last minute by staging a military uprising , symbolically raising his standard at Edgehill, the site of the first battle of the civil war.

Isolated from many of his former allies, he was easily defeated and arrested. Under the restored monarchy he escaped execution, partly because he had been campaigning in the North at the time of the king’s trial, and partly because many of the parliamentarian turncoats who stage-managed the Restoration had been implicated themselves at some point in Lambert’s various machinations.

He spent the remaining twenty four years of his life in various prisons and in the process went insane. A sad footnote to a largely forgotten episode in the history of our struggle for democracy.

Alan Moore and a sense of honour

Marx predicted that under capitalism all social relations would become reduced to the 'cash nexus'.

But it still grates to see talentless wannabees desperate for their fifteen minutes of fame and a cheque from Hello magazine losing any semblance of dignity on 'reality' TV. Or incompetent banking executives pocketing fat bonuses and pensions failing to see the problem when their customers are losing homes and savings.

The idea of honour has always been a movable feast and specific to time and place but it seems that our age is possibly the first where it seems to have no place at all.

There have always been contradictions and hypocrisies when it comes to honour - but even the very fact that there was hypocrisy at all is an indication that there was some sort of universal ethic. Individual behaviours may slip but honour gave legitimacy, particularly to societies' leaders: So decadent Roman emperors stabbed each back whilst citing the civic principles of the long dead Republic, Henry II arranged for Thomas A Beckett to be assassinated and then had himself flogged as public penance. More recently Victorians stuck kids up chimneys and built a brutal empire whilst talking about philantrophy, civilisation and progress.

But the naked attitude of 'greed is good' and 'fuck the rest of you' has only really gained the upper hand in our own time of late capitalism.

What brought on this rant ?

Actually the comforting news that genius graphic novelist Alan Moore has signed over the earnings from the film adaptation of 'Watchmen' to the illustrator. He has disowned the film which he feels does not justice to his original concept - exactly as he did with From Hell - The League Of Extraordinary Gentlemen and V For Vendetta. Sometimes honour is found in the unlikeliest of places.

Comic Relief

The target for Comic Relief this year is £40million. A conservative estimation of the UK working population is 28 million. The cost of a new nuclear submarine is about £50 million.

So; we could fore go some useless life-threatening hardware or everyone in work could pay an annual levy of £1.50.

Either way we would save ourselves an evening of crap TV as celebrities attempt to revive their failing careers, or a day of attention seeking office jokers making tits of themselves.

I've just dodged a guy in the street dressed as a giant ladybird using his comedy-antennae to block innocent passers and saying 'you can't get passed me without giving to comic relief'. Now there's a challenge.

Saracens' demise ?

I stopped playing rugby at university where I was put off by the whole rugby club scene that was synonymous with just about everything that I found repulsive during my time in the belly of the elitist beast.

But I do love the game, so a few years on I (briefly) started playing again. I also became a regular supporter at my local North London club, Saracens. That was at the end of the amateur era when Sarries were regular giant-killers beating the likes of the then dominant Bath and Leicester. We were always the poor relations in National League One (pre Guinness Premiership of course), playing on a municipal park that had to be cleared of dog shit before a match.

Amateur status may have been the refuge of the Colonel Blimps of the game, but it did give it all a rather wonderful homely nature. In the club house the half time food was prepared by the players’ partners, and after a game you could find yourself in the bar next to an international player you’d seen on the telly the week before. There were teams going doing to the level of 4ths and 5ths, along with juniors and vets, all of whom could claim to be part of the same club family as the occasional capped superstar.

That all went with the professional era. Along came a ground share with the local football club – Enfield Town. For a few glorious seasons the games were played in front of packed crowds – there was an influx of international big name players and the feeling that the club had entered the top flight. But the whole inclusive family thing was gone – insidiously the club experience switched from participation to spectacle.

A few years later there was the move to Watford FC. Initially there was some long overdue silverware won, but ground sharing with a Premiership football club meant that there was huge over-capacity and invariably soul-less empty stands at most games. The initial success of the early professional era waned and Sarries have since become long-term mid-table underachievers in the Premiership. At the same time, my own support also waned - once a regular at every home game I now maybe make one or two games a season.

Then came the news last week: The coach has departed and 15 players will go at the end of the season. Saracens will be bailed out by South African Investors Limited who want to turn the club into a rugby home for exile South Africans. Now there’s rumours of moving the ground to South London – Fulham’s Craven Cottage - and even of changing the shirt colours to green and gold.

It’s not a unique story - it’s happened before at many clubs, in all sports, and I suppose it is inevitable when sport becomes a business - but it still fucking depressing.

Lessons for the next generation

A few weeks ago my daughter went to a ‘silent rave’ –a flash mob event in Trafalgar Square - a pretty daft concept maybe but an essentially harmless one. She tried to go to another one but was prevented by a heavy police presence who stopped anyone looking young-ish who looked they might be in the pursuit of some innocuous fun.

Understandably she was pissed off – she asked me what gave the police the right to prevent a peaceful public gathering – and anyway didn’t the public spaces of central London belong to us all anyway ?

Aptly given that this week is the 25th anniversary of the start of the miners’ strike: I found myself reminiscing about the time in the Summer of 1984 when I found myself in a mini-bus from the Miners’ Support Group being stopped on the motorway and turned around as we crossed the Nottinghamshire county line.

It’s an odd feeling when events that you personally took part in enter in history. At the time for anyone who was involved, in any capacity, it was clear that this was an all-out class war. What was less apparent was that the results would have such enormous consequences and that the progressive erosion of our civil liberties can be dated back to that struggle.

So to answer her questions – I said that the police had the right to stop her because our governments are scared of people gathering together and we have not challenged unjust laws because we have been bullied and scared. And no - ‘we’ don’t own the public spaces of central London – that’s down to the Duke Of Westminster and various others.

It’s all part of her education I am afraid.

Blitz tube deaths anniversary

The anniversary today of the Bethnal Green tube disaster. The worst incident of civilian casualties in the Second World War when 173 people were killed during an air raid in 1943. Fearing for public morale the affair was effectively hushed up and it is only recently that local residents have taken up a campaign to commemorate the victims.

It wasn't actually enemy action that caused the deaths but panic amongst the crowd going down the steps into the station after the warning sirens had sounded - ironically a panic induced by the unfamiliar sound of a new anti-aircraft weapon being fired in a nearby park. But the whole story of the use of underground shelters (and Bethnal Green was not the only disaster) belies the mythology of the 'spirit of the blitz' and cheerful cockneys.

The truth is that at the start of the war the government had made little provision for public air raid shelters. In fact some thought that they would be bad for morale and would discourage people from continuing their normal business in the face of bombing ( the same logic that said parachutes would be bad for pilot morale in the First World War). In the early raids the police actually locked the gates at tube stations to prevent people from taking shelter there.

This was perceived as a class issue - many better-off Londoners had private shelters built in their gardens. Notoriously lavish shelters were built in some of the West End hotels and gentlemen's clubs. Communist MP for Stepney Phil Piratin led an occupation of the Savoy Hotel shelter to expose these double standards. In fact the campaign for public shelters that led to the opening of the tube stations was largely led by the Communist Party. More so than most, Communists would have had memories of the horror of aerial bombardment of cities in the Spanish Civil War.

Equally they would have been aware of the double standards of the wartime patriotic rhetoric. Far from the mythology that has since arisen, Churchill and the royal family were jeered and booed when they visited the East End in the early days of the Blitz. And the Queen Mother's famous comment about being able to look the East End in the eye after Buckingham Palace was bombed (whilst the royals were secure in their shelters) was literally all too true.

NABD at The Ace

To the Ace Café at the weekend for the NABD day (National Association Of Bikers with a Disability).

For obvious reasons, trikes predominated. Ratty matt black post-apocalyptic trikes based on Reliant engines, kit-trikes based on VW Beatles, bonkers track-ready trikes based on Suzuki-Hayabussas or, my own favourite a V-12 Dodge engined trike.

All had some sort of adaptation to suit the personal needs of the rider – hand operated gears – multiple levers on one side of the handlebars – carrying racks for wheel-chairs. I saw guys without the use of the their legs literally crawl on to their machines and tie themselves on to the seat with ratchet straps.

Every now and then there’s some debate in the bike magazines about who is a real biker – is it the one-piece leathers plastic rocket brigade - or the hardcore build your own chopper in the garden shed faction - or the old boys who ride the same BSA Bantam in all weathers for 40 years?

These NABD guys get my vote – the unique mixture of independence, mutual support, ingenuity and sheer bloody-mindedness in never accepting any sort of limitation is surely what being a biker is all about.