Plus ca change ...

Last night my nearly-sixteen year old daughter came with me to the London Socialist Party 'How We Beat The Tories Last Time' public meeting. I feel some conflicting emotions at this.

Firstly,  pride: that she's definitely on the 'right' side; that she gives a toss about what's going on in the world;  and that she has sufficient energy to get up and do something about it. Something must have rubbed off.

Secondly, frustration: I was about the same age when I first got involved - and never would have dreamt that 25 years later we would again be facing another period of doom and gloom recession -  and with so many defeats from Tories and betrayals from Labour behind us.

But also lastly - a sense of getting old: The meeting started with an excellent  short film of news clips from the 80's and early 90's - featuring a fresh-faced Tommy Sheridan and a youthful Derek Hatton, surrounded by comrades sporting  the shell-suits and mullets of that era. And  I could vividly recall all the events featured - the meetings, the demos, the strikes, the lobbies ... and the headlines.

Fucking hell - I've become a part of history.

Police horses for the chop.

One unexpected upside of the ConDem's cuts is the possibility that several police force's may have to lose their mounted branch. 

Good. I can see no possible use of police horses in a modern urban context other than to intimidate people. 

From experiences at Wapping and Trafalgar Square, I can personally confirm that the experience of facing a full-tilt charge of police horses is terrifying. It's meant to be so -   not just to disperse a crowd but also to intimidate it from forming in the first place.

And  the threat is not just psychological - mounted police officers are equipped with those extra long batons precisely so that they can reach down and  do some actual damage as well.

At sports events and big concerts,  the horses may get petted by kids and other animal lovers, but their very presence for me  is still a veiled threat  - and one that brings back echoes over the centuries of  the Peterloo massacre.

In praise of rat-bikes

I was trying to explain to someone why I thought this - Steve McQueen's legendary Indian rat-bike - was one of the coolest bikes I'd ever seen. I'm afraid it was a classic case of 'if I have to explain you won't understand'.

I'm inclined to anthropomorphize my motorcycles. It's obviously daft - I know they are lumps of unfeeling metal, but since I've had two Sportsters I am conscious not to show any favouritism between them. I try to rotate riding them evenly. My orange 2002 model - which I have had  longest - is undeniably the superior model and I've certainly lavished the most money on it, whilst my grey 1989  - a more recent acquisition - is tattier and altogether rougher. I'm worried though that I might be developing a favouritism for what was always supposed to be my rat-bike.

Actually it's the roughness that's the very essence of its charm. It's why I get a buzz parking  it up next to a row of gleaming bling-machines. Which is  exactly what I did at the local HD dealership's open day this weekend: The plain paint job, the lack of any  graphics and with just-enough home-customizing/bodging ...  it all causes the casual weekend riders to stop just for a few moments and think what model it actually is - I suppose they can't recall seeing it in the catalogue.

Another so-called 'Apprentice'

 

I actually caught this show on late night cable - before I saw it reviewed over at the Needles and Sins tattoo blog. The review there of 'Jodie Marsh Tattoo Apprentice' is spot on - the programme  encapsulates  many things that piss me off but mostly I'm depressed by her lack of respect for the fellowship and tradition of the craft she's trying to enter. It's a depressingly and infuriating phenomenon that's not confined to the world of tattooing:

Jodie doesn't want to be an apprentice - she wants to be a tattooist  or perhaps more accurately she wants people to know that she's a tattooist - and above all to do so quickly.

I see that attitude all the time in martial arts with students who  question why they have to spend three months learning a form before they get to practice its application. I also see that attitude with graphic design graduates who come to us at work thinking that  they are god's gift and then get offended when they're told to make the tea.  And yes; I was a smartarse grad' once, full of my own cleverness who had to spend a couple of years making the teas, getting the breakfasts and being the butt of every practical joke - I also had some of the most fun I have ever had at work - because I had the right attitude.

But of course though Jodie is a celebrity - it's just I  can't remember what for.

I have a vague recollection of seeing her on various reality shows but she hasn't actually  shown a discernible  talent for anything in particular. Like the recently beatified Jade Goody, her burning ambition to be famous is  deemed sufficient in itself to be a passport to a world of D-list fame.

Their lack of talent - and of others like them - has  actually  been turned into a virtue  as  a celebration of 'ordinariness'. It's  a  fucking sad view of humanity that sees 'everyman' as a moron. I'd rather marvel in the incredible talents that are hidden in the most unlikely of places: And I'm not talking about the X-Factor wanabees I'm talking about genuine backstreet heroes - the amateur astronomers, the local historians, the musicians who tirelessly play on the pub circuit, the guys who engineer beautiful motorcycles in the garden sheds - who do what they love for the sheer hell of it and just go about their ordinary lives in the meantime.

And most relevantly there are plenty of talented young artists, passionate about tattooing, who would give their right arm to get a start as an apprentice in a tattoo studio, and if they do, will then endure several years of low pay and hard work.

Looking at our own history

After the reminiscing of the previous post - we had a Socialist Party branch meeting the other day. A new comrade who had just joined turned up for the first time - he told us he was born in 1983 which (depressingly) is the same year that I joined the then Militant. The discussion was on the anti-cuts movement and inevitably it veered towards the lessons of previous struggles - in particular Liverpool Council and the anti-poll tax movement. 

It's apparent that there is a need to re-visit our own history for a new generation of activists. And there's inspiration to be drawn from  the Poll Tax and Liverpool struggles as probably the two most significant victories for the Left in the Thatcher years. But there's also a danger in over-emphasising the parallels between them and the present situation with the ConDems.

The stance of Liverpool Council - the strategy of  a deficit / needs budget - not only defended public jobs and services under threat but actually secured additional funding from central government for the last significant council-housing programme this country has seen. Even suggesting such a tactic nowadays in council circles would seem to place you on the lunatic fringe - and yet back in the day Labour Councils were openly discussing the respective merits of a deficit budget versus a no-budget strategy. Amazingly to those that know him as a draconian Home Secretary, David Blunkett - at the time leader of Sheffield Council - was one of the leaders of this debate. With the arguably honourable exception of Ted Knight and Lambeth Council, this talk rapidly evaporated when it came to other councils having the balls to take a stand and the 47 Liverpool Councillors were left to face the penalty of an illegal stance. Nowadays, outside of a handful of SP and independent socialists in local councils,  there isn't even the talk of such a stance  must less evidence of it being taken. The lessons of Lansbury and 'Poplarism', once very much in the respectable mainstream of the Labour Party, has no place in New Labour. 

  

On the other hand, the victory of the Anti Poll Tax Movement, occurring after the New Labour rot had already started,  was that of a community based campaign of mass civil disobedience on an unprecedented scale. There are plenty of lessons in how these community-based organisations came together, but not so much in what they actually did: I can't see how a strategy of 'can't pay / won't pay' can translate to the recipients of public services. This time around there is no escaping the fact that the onus is going to be upon the providers of public services taking action against the cuts -  and that means the public sector unions. But incredibly, and only after pressure from the Left, the TUC are trying to put off their anti-cuts demonstration until March next year  - when it's fair to say that  there will probably be less public sector workers left to take any action at all.  

As an alternative, and looking to what's going on in Europe, maybe we should be delving a little further back and dusting off the history of the 1926 General Strike.

Alan Davies' & Teenage Revolution

I've been watching Alan Davies' Teenage Revolution - his autobiographical TV journey through 80's Lefty-hood, from minor public schoolboy to lovable Mockney everyman.

Apart from his truly appalling Jonathon Creek Sunday evening drama-thing, it's hard to really dislike Alan Davies as his heart seems to be more or less in the right place. The ground he covers in revisiting 80's activism is very close to home for me - Maggie Thatch, CND, the Miners' Strike, Wapping, the Poll Tax, Billy Bragg etc ....

But apart from his rather selfish view that the defeat of the Left  wasn't a complete disaster because at least we got alternative comedy, there was something else that really grated on me: The nauseating way he fawned on Kinnock and presented his notorious '85 Labour Conference speech  not as the day when the door was opened to New Labour but as the day Labour rid itself of the stranglehold of the  Left. 

Of course it's a well established point of view, and one that many on the 'Soft Left' did, and still do,hold. But what was truly sickening - and bemusing - was the ease with which Davies switched from fawning over Kinnock to fawning over (ardent SWP member at the time) Mark Steel.  

Anyone who was around in the 80s will recall how passionately the Swoppies disowned the Labour Party at a time when it actually did have a powerful Left-ward magnetic pull. Militant Supporters inside it were dismissed, at best, as confused 'centrists' with illusions in Labour reform-ism. But even at the time bizarrely enough, SWP-ers and non-Marxist Labour Lefts seemed to get along perfectly well on a social basis despite their diametrically opposed ideologies. On the other hand us Militants were generally treated as pariahs by both groups - and the most unlikely of bed-fellows would unite is spitting venom at us. Of course it's  very different now and the SWP's  old accusation that the Labour Party is no place for socialists is actually true - in the same way that even a broken watch will tell the right time twice a day. 

Even so - certainly in our local anti-cuts campaign - the chumminess between SWP-ers and the few remaining Labour Lefts is very noticeable. And this isn't just social - the SWP seem to make a political distinction between the ConDem's cuts programme and its reluctant implementation by   Labour Councils. Most importantly they don't seem to want to antagonise possibly sympathetic  Labour members by calling for councillors to either vote for an 'illegal' needs budget - the only really  viable position against  devastating imposed cuts - or to stand down to make way for representatives who are. I'm genuinely puzzled by this SWP / Labour Left axis -  just as I was in the 80's.

Bon anniversaire

Today is the anniversary of the adoption of the French Revolutionary calendar in 1792 - 1er Vendemiaire. Sweeping away the hodge-podge of old Roman emperor's names and pagan gods the revolutionaries kept to twelve months - each of thirty days - and a decimal ten day week. The names of the months and days were  innocuously based on nature and agriculture to mark the changing seasons. Nowadays only three seem to be remembered: 

Thermidor by foodies because it's a lobster dish

Germinal by literary types because it's a novel by Zola

and 

Brumaire by Marxists - because of Marx's classic study of Louis-Napoleon's seizure of power in 1852.

I'm not sure whether the idea of changing the calendar to mark a new order is  just bonkers or admirable.

It's easy to ridicule the Jacobin's cult of reason and their turning of old churches into 'temples of the supreme being'. But the significance of the break with every whiff  of the old regime went on to inspire later revolutionaries  when the republican calendar was re-adopted by the Communards of 1871. It's a whimsical idea nowadays - and probably has too many dodgy associations with the Khymer Rouge and their own 'year zero'  to ever be taken up seriously again. 

But in an age when medieval religions of various varieties  pose such  a threat to the world, the thought of a little bit less superstition and a little more enlightenment is still an attractive one.

The next generation of reaction

Buried away in the news last week there was a founding conference to set up some sort of UK equivalent to the Tea Party movement.  Drawing on home grown right-wing organizations such as the  sinister and contradictorily named Freedom Association and the Taxpayers' Alliance,  a  US think-tank called 'Freedom Works' is trying to export their brand  of reactionary populism.

So far it looks like they have mainly manged  to attract the young headbangers who are the un-reconstructed Thathcher-ite  heirs to the Federation of Conservative Students' tradition of obnoxious  posturing in '80s.

On the plus side, the very existence of these people gives the lie to Dave-bloody-good-bloke-Cam's 'we're all in it together' new version of  Tory one-nation-ism. Best of all though -  all is right with the world when the bright young things of your enemy look like this ...

Skin

When is a fascination for skin diseases, books bound in human skin, mummified tattoos, icky medical procedures and anatomical illustrations not puerile and voyeuristic ? Apparently when it's a 'multi-disciplinary, multi-media' exhibition for the chattering classes.

I'd been hooked by the posters of the tattoo man and knowing that the exhibition runs out in a week, I thought I should get myself down to the Wellcome Collection's 'Skin' exhibition.

Just looking at body-art alone - its aesthetics, history and anthropology  - would have done it for me, but there are plenty of other stories to tell about skin:  the development of medicine, changing concepts of beauty, ideas of race, attitudes to disability ... The exhibition hinted at some of these  - but didn't actually do any of them justice. Instead we got wax-molded anatomical figures showing disfigurements, pictures of pustules  and  wounds, and old medical teaching videos. All annotated with captions of pseud's corner pretentiousness.

As a fan of the slasher-genre and all things generally tacky and violent I'm not squeamish  or judgmental about this - let's just be honest about it: This is  the stuff of the freak-show at the end of the pier but the chattering classes  and hiptsers wouldn't feel comfortable with that - they prefer an art installation for their kicks.

Roll on the more honest pleasures of the London Tattoo Convention next week...

Pope not welcome

I was still at (Catholic) school when the previous Pope came here in 1982. By that age I was already a convinced atheist and managed to avoid the hysteria whipped up around me. Although at the time I found all that adulation heaped on one man extremely weird and ... well you could say, down-right idolatrous ... at least the whole event was a private Catholic affair. That's to say it was a 'pastoral' visit  - paid for largely by the church and Catholic community in this country. The Pope didn't even meet prime minister Thatcher because of sensitivities over the Falklands War.*

It's very different this time around though  - this is a state visit. 

The pretext of this is the existence of the mickey-mouse Vatican State - an entity of just over 100 acres and just under 1,000 people. It only exists at all because the Pope at the time did a deal in 1929 with the Fascist government of Italy to stay out of each others' affairs. The Holy See - which by some sophistry is not quite the same thing as the Vatican State - is a 'government' without any actual citizens at all,  but whose 'authority' over millions of followers globally supposedly trumps that of democratic nation states.

Because this time it is a state visit the government, the great and the good, will all be queuing up to fawn over the pontiff and press the flesh.  It also means that the £12million bill for the visit is being picked up by me and you. 

Most importantly though the fact that it is a state visit sends out a signal of endorsement by this government  - in our name.

Which is why this time we tax-paying atheist citizens don't have to sit back and let the Catholics get on with their fun. We are fully entitled  to say the Pope is not welcome. And fully entitled to have the 'bad manners' to  mention his opposition to condoms in Aids-stricken Africa; his denial of womens' right to control their own fertility, to his homophobia; his concealment of child abuse in his own organisation; or even his rehabilitation of the reactionary and Nazi-appeasing predecessor Pius XII.

(Not because the Pope saw the Falkland War as a cynical attempt to prop up an unpopular government on a wave of jingo-ism but because the latin-speaking world was largely behind the Argentinians and even Popes know better than to piss on their own doorsteps.)

Winstanley & The World Turned Upside Down

I was going to write something on the anniversary of Gerrard Winstanley's death in 1676 but I see that Dorian Cope has got in first on her excellent blog.

I grew up not that far away from the Digger settlements at Cobham and St George's Hill. In fact as a kid I did a bit of weekend caddying at the St George's Hill golf course. Sadly the site of Winstanley's most famous communal experiment is now a gated private estate and  the golf club is the playground of  reactionary and snobbish arseholes .

The history of the Diggers and their contribution to the English socialist tradition are well documented  - and for the moment I won't add anything more  - but Billy Bragg singing 'The World Turned Upside Down' should tell you enough for now ...

Book burning

In a country where apparently 18% of the people believe erroneously that their president is a Muslim, they would probably be better advised to  concentrate on  reading rather than  burning books.

In principle I much prefer the US's  First Amendment in contrast to our own archaic blasphemy laws in the UK - I see no reason at all why religion should be singled out for exception from ridicule or abuse.  

The notion of  a text being the product of some kind of divine dictation is ludicrous.  In fact  even the most hard-line headbanging fundamentalists of any persuasion at some point have to contextualize their  holy books on linguistic or historical grounds. And  as soon as they do so, they logically open the door to the subversive idea that their religion might just be 'man-made'.

But the problem with burning the Koran - or any other kind of book - is not so much fear that it offends its followers as the fact that it tends to identify the burners as ignorant fuck-wits who lack the ability to tackle it intellectually. Or just xenophobic bigots. Although I suspect though that it was not this that has now inhibited the Pastor Terry Jones from holding a Koran-burning at his Florida church to marked the 9/11 anniversary.

Personally I tend to think there is something in general sacred  about any book- which is why our house is groaning under the weight of a lifetime of never throwing any away. I certainly wouldn't burn anything - not even Mein Kampf .... or a Jeffrey Archer.

70th anniverasry of the London blitz

Looking at Docklands today, with its monstrous corporate buildings and yuppie residences it's hard to imagine it as a teaming industrial and commercial area with dense working class communities - and a battleground where 60,000 were killed.

Like many elderly people my parents are increasingly prone to reminiscing vividly about their childhood. We saw them this weekend - and my daughters' gripes about going back to school for the new term brought on some memories of them being at school during the blitz - and occasionally having  lessons in air raid shelters. 

It's often in the trivia - and humour -  of these reminiscences that the full and shocking gravity of the daily situation that so many  ordinary Londoners faced:

Living at that time in Brockley in South London, the family were right in the bombers' flight path to the  docks. Mum remembers how they found their Anderson shelter damp and claustrophobic so they tended to stay in their house during the raids. But as a river-policeman my granddad had observed that in bombed-out houses the stairs were often left standing -  so my mum was made to sleep in the relative security of the cupboard under the stairs. 

His job meant that, like my firefighter uncle, he would often be on duty in the docks and out in the middle of the bombing - during one raid he would jokingly tell how he  found himself, along with a couple of other burly coppers  taking  instinctive but purely psychological cover when he dived under a flimsy table-tennis table at an aid post.  

Strangely though on the other hand  no family stories have been passed down of the horrors they must have witnessed on a nightly basis...this was the stiff-upper lip generation.

Meat is murder but racism is worse.

I've always been of the view that Morrissey was a tosser.

Frankly the nauseating spectacle of a grown man ridden with adolescent - I'm so sensitive the world doesn't understand me - angst, is enough to earn my distaste. 

But his continuing flirtation with racism takes him beyond merely irritating to positively odious. Already on the record as a Little England-er, his latest outburst described 'the Chinese' as a 'sub-species'  -on the basis of a lack of animal human rights legislation, and  culinary tastes that are less squeamish than in the West when it comes to discriminating between different  animal products.

Let's face it  - there's no shortage of horrors  to hold against the Chinese regime  - but  frankly lack of animal rights would be a long way down the  list - certainly behind  the record on human rights, democracy, capital punishment, or environmental damage (just for starters).

I'm not prejudiced - some of my best friends are vegetarians - but my antenae twitches when I hear animal libbers spouting right wing bollocks.  Just as super-sensitive Morrissey  apparently once cancelled a gig because he could smell meat cooking yet has no trouble describing the largest ethnic group on the planet as sub-human, so Hitler would lecture dinner guests on the disgusting nature of meat-eating whilst planning the holocaust over coffee.

If there is a circle of hell reserved for Morrissey and his like  surely it should involve being chained for eternity to Tony Bourdain.

Troubled Tory boy

It's probably an indication of how un-'liberal' and unreconstructed the Con-Dem coalition really is that William Hague's reaction to being possibly outed was to retort that he is happily married and that his wife has suffered a number of mis-carriages.  It seems that he feels the need to defend the fact that, unlike  that lovely David and Samantha couple, his is not the head of a nuclear-family as prescribed by Tory Central Office. 

Hague has quite possibly had a whole number of  suppressed personal troubles over the years and I wouldn't want to belittle them or play into the hands of the bigoted mob-press... 

... but remembering the nauseating and precocious Thacherite 16 year old, the original Tory Boy with a picture of Maggie on his bedroom wall (by his own admission), I'd say that if anyone deserved to be relentlessly bullied at school it was Hague.

View from a self-loathing (ex) Catholic

Back to blogging after the family holiday:

Catching up on the news in the Sunday papers there seems to be some talk along the lines of 'we're an oppressed minority too' by English Catholics in anticipation of the Pope's visit this month. This not only doesn't wash - it also strikes me as pretty offensive to draw comparisons with Islamo-phobia or antisemitism. A distasteful sort of  me-too-ism when there are real problems facing genuine minority groups.

Catholics in England - and I make the distinction here between England and Scotland or Northern Ireland where ascendant Presbyterian sectarianism has created a very different situation - haven't faced oppression for probably over a hundred years. To be a Catholic in England is now no more than a minor eccentricity with the added bonus of an education system that perpetuates your faith and is subsidised by the state. Any restrictions on marrying into the royal family and succession to the crown are archaic anomalies of our ludicrous pseudo constitution rather than a serious affront to any one's human rights. (In a historic context actually they are fairly understandable given the Church's uncanny  knack of being on the wrong side of most political disputes in this country ever since Pope  Innocent III excommunicated the rebel barons who forced King John to sign the Magna Carta and then declared the charter 'null and void').

As an ex-Catholic Atheist I can say all this without bitterness - I am not unduly damaged by my religious upbringing - it left me only with a possibly over developed since of 'duty' and guilt and gave me an education that was undeniably better than the equivalent non-faith state school up the road. I'd even argue that it is unfair that the first association in most people's minds with the Catholic Church is paedophilia - statistically I believe priests are no more likely to be abusers than many other groups: The real problem is a more fundamental and universal one that Catholicism simply propagates nonsense that is both dangerous and damaging to society and mankind as a whole.

A sober pause

I'm not big on the rituals of baptisms, weddings and funerals. But on Sunday I attended such an event that stirred some genuine emotion for once:

Some people are so ever-present that they become part of the scenery and  Jamie (Panster) was one of these.

I wouldn't presume to say that I knew him, but he was a familiar face on the local bike scene from before I got into Harleys - at the tea hut, on toy runs, and just generally out and about on his beautiful old machines. And later, once I'd got my first Sportster, we would take a few minutes to chat whenever we bumped into each other - and he patiently helped me out with some sage technical advice.

Inevitably perhaps you take it for  granted that such people will always be around  - so I was more shocked than I could have imagined to hear that Jamie had been killed in an accident on his way to a rally last weekend.

He had requested that his ashes be scattered at the tea hut at High Beech - and this was what happened on Sunday. I can't think of a better resting place - now he will truly be a part of the scenery he loved. 

In all honesty I don't believe in an after-life, and I have no idea what 'RIP' means. But he certainly deserved a few respectful moments to mark his life - and  my thoughts are with all those who knew Panster better than I did.

What's in a name ?

I live in the London Borough of Haringey - it is not a place name that has any great sentimental pull on most of its inhabitants. Most people who live there would probably identify themselves as residents of a more specific and recognisable district - in my case Tottenham.

I would probably go as far as to say that the more artificially contrived  the name of the local government body of an area the less likely people are to identify with it. For example my home town of Staines is now officially the Borough Of Spelthorne - an even more  anodyne and bland name choice.

The rationale behind these place names is not really historic or geographic but political. They both revive some fairly obscure historic connections  - Haering  was a Saxon chief who gave his name to the district of Harringay which confusingly is just a very small part of Haringey and Spelthorne was a hundred recorded in the Doomsday book. In other words these names may mean  bugger-all to the inhabitants for generations but they don't actually offend anyone or stir up any local rivalries.

Strangely, although  the  suburb where I grew up feels  a world away from the inner city borough I now live in , both are part of the same historic  county of Middlesex. So purely by coincidence  and in a theoretical sense only, I've spent almost all of my life there - despite the fact that the county hasn't existed as a local government entity since 1964 - just before I was born. But it did  live on  as an optional postal address -  however the final nail in Middlesex's coffin has been driven  in now that  it has just been announced that the Post Office is going to remove counties from postal addresses.

Over the years my 'homeland' has been messed about with quite a bit as far as local government goes - at various times it has  been:

• The land of the Trinovantes (the pre-Roman tribal area)

• Camulodunum / Londinium (under the Romans)

• Maxima Caesariensis (the Late Roman province)

• Middlesex (land of the Middle Saxons)

• Essex  (transferred following Saxon internecine wars)

• Mercia (transferred again to avoid being taken into the Danelaw)

• Then back to Middlesex for  nine centuries or so ...

• Until in  1889 when  the metropolitan bit was hived off to become  the County of London ...which in 1964 was re-branded as Greater London, with the remaining bits  of Midldlesex parceled out to neighbouring Surrey and Hertfordshire.

In these days when local government is the main deliverer and consequently now the main cutter of public services there are unquestionably far more important issues to get worked up about than place names.

But in fact the two things are not unconnected - it comes down to  entitlement, accountability and democracy - and people feeling that an area belongs to them. Names are political and can be manipulated to change how people feel about them. Just think of the ever changing names for our main welfare state body in recent years - the DHSS, the DSS, the DWP  -  all bureaucratic nonsense perhaps -  but also an effective  and cynical tactic to make these bodies appear more obscure and less readily defended by the people that need them.

Right on Tony

A working class hero is something to be - and unfortunately Tony Benn isn't. But without a doubt, outside of  small introspective activist circles, he's the most universally respected and authentic voice on the Left.

The statement he has issued today  offers nothing  that hasn't already been said before -  but it still puts everyone else in the Labour Party to shame. So much so, it's worth repeating in full here:

'It is time to organise a broad movement of active resistance to the Con-Dem government's budget intentions. They plan the most savage spending cuts since the 1930s, which will wreck the lives of millions by devastating our jobs, pay, pensions, NHS, education, transport, postal and other services.
The government claims the cuts are unavoidable because the welfare state has been too generous. This is nonsense. Ordinary people are being forced to pay for the bankers' profligacy. The £11bn welfare cuts, rise in VAT to 20%, and 25% reductions across government departments target the most vulnerable – disabled people, single parents, those on housing benefit, black and other ethnic minority communities, students, migrant workers, LGBT people and pensioners.
Women are expected to bear 75% of the burden. The poorest will be hit six times harder than the richest. Internal Treasury documents estimate 1.3 million job losses in public and private sectors.
We reject this malicious vandalism and resolve to campaign for a radical alternative, with the level of determination shown by trade unionists and social movements in Greece and other European countries.
This government of millionaires says "we're all in it together" and "there is no alternative". But, for the wealthy, corporation tax is being cut, the bank levy is a pittance, and top salaries and bonuses have already been restored to pre-crash levels.
An alternative budget would place the banks under democratic control, and raise revenue by increasing tax for the rich, plugging tax loopholes, withdrawing troops from Afghanistan, abolishing the nuclear "deterrent" by cancelling the Trident replacement.
An alternative strategy could use these resources to: support welfare; develop homes, schools, and hospitals; and foster a green approach to public spending – investing in renewable energy and public transport, thereby creating a million jobs.
We commit ourselves to:
• Oppose cuts and privatisation in our workplaces, community and welfare services.
• Fight rising unemployment and support organisations of unemployed people.
• Develop and support an alternative programme for economic and social recovery.
• Oppose all proposals to "solve" the crisis through racism and other forms of scapegoating.
• Liaise closely with similar opposition movements in other countries.
• Organise information, meetings, conferences, marches and demonstrations.
• Support the development of a national co-ordinating coalition of resistance.
We urge those who support this statement to attend the Organising Conference on 27 November 2010 (10am-5pm), at Camden Centre, Town Hall, London, WC1H 9JE.

Signed:
Tony Benn
 

Relaxing not killing

I've got a lot of time for Benjamin Zephaniah - but I have to say that in  one of the captions for his  photo-story in The Guardian today illustrating a recent trip to China, he reinforces a cliche about the martial arts:   

'I checked myself into a kung fu/t’ai chi school for two weeks. People in the west perceive t’ai chi to be a gentle form of exercise – what they don’t realise is it’s a deadly martial art. This girl is 15 and a t’ai chi master – she could kill someone within a moment if she wanted to...'

It's all been said before... technique triumphs over force, what appears gentle actually kicks ass, blah blah blah. We all know the potential for maximizing the effectiveness of physical violence so how about a different take ? :

'These guys are the best of friends and they're really just having fun together. One is a scholar and the other a successful businessman much-respected in his community.  Their training helps  maintain their mental health when coping with the stresses of daily life. They don't want to kill anybody':