Two important protests tomorrow

Protest against London Police
Time and Place, Saturday, April 18th 2009,
11:00am – 2:00pm
Location: City Police HQ, 37 Wood Street, EC2, City of London

There is a march heading from Threadneedle street at the place where Tomlingson died meeting at 10 – 10:30 and marching the short distance to Wood Street police HQ.

FORD VISTEON SOLIDARITY GATHERING/RALLY
SATURDAY 18th APRIL – 11am

At the Enfield Factory
Morson Rd (Gate 5), EN3 4NQ – nr Ponders End train station, Enfield
[The plant is 5mins walk across the footbridge, southwards down the main road and turn left into Morson Rd]

Following the insulting and unacceptable offer from Visteon this week the sacked workers are stepping up their 24/7 picket of the Enfield factory. The Belfast and Basildon Visteon workers have also rejected the offer. Now more than ever they need support and solidarity for their decision to continue their struggle for justice.

Come along to find out what is happening at the factory and what people can do to help step up the campaign.

The Fight Goes On!

G20 death: wasn’t heart attack!!!!!

If it hadn’t been for that video footageI am imagine Ian Tomlinson’s death would have been filed away as a ’heart attack’, the IPCC would have been relieved, the cops vindicated, the protesters vilified.

Along comes some video footage which portrays the cops, in all their violent and brutal thuggery, indulging in an unprovoked vicious attack….

A second post-mortem examination is held… and the conclusion:

A subsequent post-mortem examination was conducted by another consultant forensic pathologist, Dr Nat Cary, instructed by the IPCC and by solicitors acting for the family of the late Mr Tomlinson.

Dr Cary’s opinion is that the cause of death was abdominal haemorrhage. The cause of the haemorrhage remains to be ascertained.

IPCC response:Following the initial results of the second post mortem, a Metropolitan police officer has been interviewed under caution for the offence of manslaughter as part of an ongoing inquiry into the death of Ian Tomlinson.

The solicitor of the family’s response: The video footage of the unprovoked and vicious assault on Ian by the police officer would easily justify charges of assault being brought against the officer.

The findings of Dr Nat Cary significantly increase the likelihood that the officer will now face the more serious charge of manslaughter.

Whether more video footage is unearthed remains to be seen. Whether this suspended cop or any other cop gets charged with manslaughter remains to be seen and to be honest, I won’t hold my breath as some excuse will be found. And that also depends on the political pressure as well….

Justice for Ian Tomlinson!

NB: According to C4 News (17/4/09) only one cop has been interviewed by the IPCC so far under caution ….  

And they waited well over a week to do this. To say the IPCC is reluctant to take on the police is an understatement. Independent..?!? You have gotta be kidding…

Just what is the responsible thing, mister Purnell..??

If he is not lecturing, penalising and moralising people then he is sending cruddy emails to your inbox. That’s one of the many punishments you get for being a LP member….

—————–

Hi,
I have spent today meeting with people on the Dewsbury Moor estate. 

 

You can see a video of my visit here.

This is the estate where Karen Matthews lived but it is also an estate where hundreds of local people pulled together to help look for a little girl that was missing.  It is also a community that David Cameron attacked, without ever stepping foot here and without ever talking to people here. He promised he would come and visit but he still hasn’t because he has nothing positive to say. He only wanted to point the finger, not to offer a helping hand.
 
I listened to lots of people today who have told me how they see their community. Some were getting by or doing well. Some are finding things really tough because they or someone in their family has lost their job in this downturn. Some were struggling long before this downturn arrived. But everyone I met wanted to do the right thing.
 
That is the big divide between Labour and the Tories on changing the welfare state. The Tories look at communiti es like this one up and down the country and only see the bad.  I see communities with problems but I also see people with ambitions for their families who are struggling to do good. And I see a new welfare state as the way to help people unlock their future.
 
That is why we are changing the benefits system to reward people who do the responsible thing with more support.  In the last recession the Tories wrote off millions of people to a life on benefits, scarring our communities. With Labour the legacy of this recession can be a welfare state that gets Britain back to work, lifts families out of poverty and spends less on the costs of unemployment and more on getting individuals the help they need to live their lives to the full.

Yours sincerely,

James Purnell MP

G20 protests: lies, damn lies and police spin….

Well, the Biased Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) has made me extremely angry. The news tonight was appalling. They presented the footage of the TSG cop whacking and hitting the woman with a baton but still they had to distract us from the casual violence by remarking that the woman was ‘taunting’ the cops. Was she? I don’t think she was.

It reminds me of the first reports from the G20 protests that accused protesters of ‘goading’ the cops. Really? Where is the evidence…? I saw people on both days remonstrating with the cops, not causing any threat..yet that is construed by the media as ‘goading’. So how do they define whacking demonstrators? A gentle tap..?

On the 2nd April, the atmosphere at the Bank was peaceful. And the cops decided for some reason to attack. This TSG cop appeared, grabbed people, before he attacked this woman I witnessed him grabbing another woman, his arm pulled back with his fist clenched ready to punch her but he let go and pushed her away. I tried to get a pic of that incident but my camera was too slow, the pic I did get was him raising his arm to attack. This cop should have been arrested for the criminal offences he was indulging in by the other cops!!

Oh, and the other distraction by the BBC was the emphasis that the woman had brought in Max Clifford. Er, so what?

The report also wheeled in a former riot trainer  who said we had to appreciate what was going on around the cops. When you look at the footage, and make that appreciation of the situation you will find that there was NO justification in the level of thuggery and violence from this cop or any other cop. 

Many of the protesters and most of the police are just standing around. There is a bit of shouting. There are no missiles harmless or harmful being thrown. Neither had there been, the ground around the copper is clear of any debris such as bottles or broken bits of placard.

Just after that specific incident the copper slinks away to join another police line facing in another direction. These are not the actions of someone desparately afraid for the safety of his fellow officers.

Yet the damage has been done, the reporter didn’t challenge the former trainer. Most people watching the BBC report will go with the suggestion that there must have been something going on that justified the cop assaulting the woman.

See the video footage at Indymedia

Liz Davies in the Morning Star – Cops must face law

Another G20 cop suspended

I recognised this cop (got a pic of him – see above) from this footage who has now been suspended by all accounts. The footage is from the protest on the Thursday 2nd April where we were demonstrating against police brutality and the G20 death at the Bank of England. It was an utterly peaceful protest and then the police got aggressive for no reason, which resulted in them attacking us.

I was standing quite close to where the cops decided to attack and this particular cop was grabbing and assaulting people. I saw him (I knew he had to be TSG) grab this woman where he held his arm back like he was about to punch her in the face, I don’t know whether it was the same woman in the video but he seemed intent on attacking anyone, it was sickening. Tried to take a pic of this as I was up close (and admittedly kinda scared as he was lashing out) but my camera was too slow. I had to get out of the way as two cops on horses appeared and started to clear the road, one of the horses reared up, which was bloody frightening. You had violent cops with batons and on horseback coming at you at all sides!

Thankfully there is footage showing this particular cop’s violence. But there are plenty of others who indulged in casual brutal violence over the two day period and especially the viciousness shown towards peaceful protesters at the Climate Camp.

Whether this TSG cop will be held accountable, disciplined or prosecuted for his violence remains to be seen. But like most of these ‘investigations’ I don’t hold my breath!

Oh, and …Shock! Horror!! The IPCC got it wrong regarding lack of CCTV footage…..Now there’s a revelation..

NB: Review of police tactics

Fear and anxiety in modern society

According to new research from the Mental Health Foundation people in the UK are being more fearful.

A survey of 2,250 adults for the charity found 37% were more frightened or anxious than they used to be, compared with 28% who were not, while 77% thought the world had become more frightening in the past 10 years.

The foundation linked the result to government figures showing an increase from 13.3% to 15% in the proportion of people suffering from anxiety disorders in England from 1993-2007.

Furthermore

The report cited a number of causes for increasing levels of fear:-

• A ‘culture of fear’ evident in the way news coverage gives prominence to worst-case scenarios, such as predictions that the “Millennium Bug” would paralyse computer systems on 1 January 2000.
• The breakdown of social bonds, weakening people’s ability to deal with problems. Four times as many people live alone compared with 50 years ago.

Also, I would guess that alienation and atomisation would figure high in the causes anxiety and fear. And now with a recession, unemployment, redundancy, evictions, poverty and so on this will increase distress. But also a sense of powerlessness will increase as well.

People also perceive that the world around them is a more dangerous place, a risk obsessed society. And the emphasis on surveillance, ironically, increases those fears.

On the issue of the crime, along with the media’s sensationalist and dramatic reportage, fear and anxieties become overwhelming. The whole process of understanding crime creates a mystification as people tend to see crime and criminals through what is presented to us through the media. Though contradictorily these fears, crime for example, could actually provide reassurance.

In late-modern world of uncertainty, ambivalence, chaos even; of risks that are omnipresent but invisible, fear of crime might provide some rather modern reassurances. (Hollway and Jefferson – The risk society in an age of anxiety)

Welfare reform: it’s about putting families first…apparently…

James Purnell now wants to help claimants with alcohol problems back into work. First it was people with drug addictions and now Purnell wants to provide:

…real help for people looking for work and support for all those who need it to get off benefits – whatever the barriers preventing them. We need to look through the eyes of the person defeated by an addiction that keeps them out of work and on the outside of the community and give them the help they need.

We have introduced a new policy that will mean heroin and crack addicts get treatment in return for benefits. We will actually help them rather than simply handing them money which ends up in pockets of drug dealers.

But we can’t abandon anyone to long periods on benefits without help to overcome problems. So that’s why we are going to look at the arrangements for alcoholics on benefits, just as we did for problem drug users, so that people get the help they need to get sober, to get their life back and get back to work.

The appalling Clause 9 of the Welfare Reform Bill reminds me of what Harry Fletcher from NAPO said at the PCS lobby of Parliament on the Welfare Reform Bill in early March of this year, drug users can lose their benefits if they don’t comply with drug treatment programmes. And what attacks the core of civil liberties  is the potential sharing of information between the DWP and the criminal justice system. This utterly undermines and erodes the right to privacy especially having to declare whether you are a user (subject, as well, to invasive urine testing). This further stigmatises people who are already marginalised, it is about coercion and control by the state; ‘do what we say or you’ll your benefits’…. And people will fall off the benefits radar (which NL won’t give a damn about).

And you can bet something similar in the  coercive stakes will be put forward for claimants with alcohol problems.

Purnell feels your pain, he does you know, as he has spoken to, you know, some people regarding recession, relationship breakdowns and unemployment. He may not experience it but doggone it he feels it….

James Purnell also talked to people about their experiences of the recession and the pressure unemployment can put on the family, saying:

I have listened to lots of people here today who have told me how they see their community. Some were getting by or doing well. Some are finding things really tough because they or someone in their family has lost their job in this downturn. Some were struggling long before this downturn arrived. But everyone I met wanted to do the right thing.

Just what is the right thing, Purnell?

Drone warfare

This is part of an interesting but rather scary article about killer drones. No this isn’t the science fiction/double feature at the local multiplex it is what the Pentagon scientists are creating in the labs…for real. Ye Gods…

Whether these drones will be chomping on a cigar while programmed to say in a wooden Austrian accent, ‘Hasta la vista…baby’ as they blow you away remains to be seen.

Welcome to the drone wars of the future. Be afraid be very afraid….

In 1984, Skynet, the supercomputer that rules a future Earth, sent a cyborg assassin, a “terminator,” back to our time. His job was to liquidate the woman who would give birth to John Connor, the leader of the underground human resistance of Skynet’s time. You with me so far? That, of course, was the plot of the first Terminator movie and for the multi-millions who saw it, the images of future machine war — of hunter-killer drones flying above a wasted landscape — are unforgettable.

Since then, as Hollywood’s special effects took off, there were two sequels during which the original terminator somehow morphed into a friendlier figure on screen, and even more miraculously, off-screen, into the humanoid governor of California. Now, the fourth film in the series, Terminator Salvation, is about to descend on us. It will hit our multiplexes this May.

Oh, sorry, I don’t mean hit hit. I mean, arrive in.

Meanwhile, hunter-killer drones haven’t waited for Hollywood. As you sit in that movie theater in May, actual unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), pilotless surveillance and assassination drones armed with Hellfire missiles, will be patrolling our expanding global battlefields, hunting down human beings. And in the Pentagon and the labs of defense contractors, UAV supporters are already talking about and working on next-generation machines. Post-2020, according to these dreamers, drones will be able to fly and fight, discern enemies and incinerate them without human decision-making. They’re even wondering about just how to program human ethics, maybe even American ethics, into them.

Okay, it may never happen, but it should still make you blink that out there in America are people eager to bring the fifth iteration of Terminator not to local multiplexes, but to the skies of our perfectly real world — and that the Pentagon is already funding them to do so.

Fight for equal access to learning…

One of the first jobs I ever had was collecting and returning books to the library on behalf of elderly women resident in a care home. I would walk up this hill in Hove to pick-up the books and their lists. I enjoyed it as I found the women interesting to speak to and they were a friendly bunch. One would give her book list with the proviso that I find a ‘good juicy murder’ in large print . This was difficult as she had read all the crime fiction going. And she never got nightmares…

It was a good idea what the local library did, it gave the women access to book collections and it certainly helped me. The library, thankfully, is still there but the library I frequented as a kid, where I spent a lot of my time reading where I was able to lose myself in the written word, conjure up fantasises and develop my own imagination. It was my place to be creative and feel safe from the world outside. I have good memories of those times. It was a place where I started to understand the importance of knowledge, and  learning. I certainly gained more visiting the local library then my formative years at primary school. Libraries are an important function in this society, they are a collective means of reading and learning, and that access should be equal. To me they are a basic Socialist demand.

I have worked in many libraries during the past 20-odd years, mainly academic ones. The problem workers encounter is cuts to library budgets. And the number of times as a trade union activist I have been involved in fighting cuts.

It seems in many academic institutions library facilities are unimportant and usually first for the chop. Cuts also meant deskilling the workforce, and therefore changes in pay and conditions.

And public libraries are not immune to these cuts:

Meanwhile other libraries – small, much-loved local libraries – are closing. Wirral’s Labour/Liberal Democrat council has voted to close 11 of its 24 libraries, a process that will be complete by early July. Swindon’s Tory council has voted to close four libraries, a decision that it hopes will save it just £100,000 – though this process is now on hold for three months following complaints over the period of consultation (best-practice guidelines suggest a period of 12 weeks; Swindon consulted for four, if that). Other councils are likely to follow suit: Warwick, Somerset, Walsall and Richmond are in the frame to make cuts thus far. Since 2003, 82 libraries have closed nationwide, a figure that has not grown half so rapidly as some people – including me – predicted it might two years ago, but which we can only expect to rise pretty drastically now the financial weather has changed.

As Cooke maintains glitzy trendy library buildings are being built but what about the book stock? Indeed there have been a  number of local public libraries I have visited where the book stock is old and depleted. Lack of magazines, newspapers, CD collections and so on. Though in saying that one of the most well stocked reference and lending libraries I have ever been to was based in…. Kensington and Chelsea…in other words the richest borough in the country.

Again, libraries are a way to collectivise learning, finding out about the world, access to books, in an equal way. And when you look at how much of a budget is spent on libraries, well it is a drop in the financial ocean!

Expenditure on books in our libraries is below 8% of the total public library funds, and in inner London that figure is just 5.7% (across the country, councils spend just 1.6% of their funding on children’s books; several councils, Hackney and Doncaster among them, spend less than 1%).

Poet laureate, Andrew Motion, correctly describes closures of libraries as, extremely short-sighted and counter-productive.

Furthermore, At a time of recession, all these benefits are of greater importance. Good local libraries become more relevant to people’s needs, not less.

But never fear, Culture Secretary Andy Burnham is on the case:

Culture Secretary Andy Burnham has today (Friday 3 April) intervened in the public dispute about proposed library closures in the Wirral, calling a local inquiry to test whether the Council’s plans are consistent with their statutory duty to provide all residents with a comprehensive public library service.

Why isn’t he intervening in all the areas where cuts have been made or will be made?

The cuts will have an immeasurable impact on learning. Libraries give equal access to education but the erosion due to cuts will create a society where the poor will not have the same access as people with money.

Police cover-ups: No justice, No peace…

It is coming up to the 20th anniversary regarding Hillsborough. A disaster  that could have and should have been avoided and the ensuing police cover-up where families and friends of the dead, the survivors, still want to know the truth about why this disaster happened. They want justice.

Police cover-up, spin and lies backed by the media. Sound familiar?

The Truth: some fans picked pockets of victims; some fans urinated on the brave cops; some fans beat up PC giving kiss of life (front page of The Sun, 19th April 1989)

POLICE were battered with beer bottles and cans as they desperately tried to save a dying man at the height of the G20 riots in London last night. (The Sun, 2nd April 2009)

In regards to the Sun’s headline in 1989, the quotes came from anonymous sources in the police or Police Fed.

And now Maria Eagle, junior justice minister, has said that South Yorkshire police should ‘come clean’ about what she described as a “conspiracy to cover up” the force’s culpability for the Hillsborough disaster, in which 96 Liverpool supporters died at an FA Cup semi-final, 20 years ago this week.

Margaret Aspinall, of the Hillsborough Family Support Group, said this was still “a big issue” for the families. “It is quite obvious the police wanted to cover up and accuse everybody else. If they gave us the whole truth now, and are accountable for what they did, it might alleviate some of the pain and hurt we have gone through for 20 years.”

One practice that should be stopped is cops being allowed to confer together when making their statement as this is collusion. Even though the IPCC  called for the practice of  firearms officers comparing notes when writing statements should be ‘stamped out’  in wake of the shooting of Jean Charles de Menezes.

Another being the collusion between the cops and the media. And importantly, an actual independent police complaints commission that is totally separate from the police and the Home Office that doesn’t indulge in collusion and cover-ups. Simply, mea culpa.

I think the quote from Phil Scraton below in the introduction to his excellent book, Hillsborough, can equally be applied to any death(s) at the hands of the state:

It is a story of those in authority seek to cover their tracks to avoid blame and responsibility. It is a story of how the ‘law’ fails to provide appropriate means of discovery and redress for those who suffer through institutionalised neglect and personal negligence. It is a story of how ordinary people can be subjected to the insensitivity and hostility of agencies which place their professional priorities ahead of the personal needs and collective rights of the bereaved and survivors. (Hillsborough – Phil Scraton, 1999)