Here’s a video of the interview I did with Euan from Indymedia during the London Anarchist Bookfair 2011, after the session I organised on Reclaiming the Media.
As WordPress won’t allow me to embed it, you’ll have to check it out on the London Indymedia site.
Also worth checking out is the interview with Becky Hogge, who spoke at the same session.
A video of a public meeting on the Reclaim the Media campaign following the Murdoch “Hackgate” scandal – with Becky Branford, NUJ Mother of Chapel at the BBC, Gary McFarlane, NUJ activist and part of the Tottenham Defence Campaign, and the “star” of the show John Pilger, Investigate journalist and film-maker.
My contribution as NUJ President starts at 08:49.
On the day WikiLeaks announced they were suspending operations due to blockade on donations, I was interviewed by RT.
Alas, the embed won’t work on WordPress, but you can watch it by clicking on this link to the video.
Update: Following these two successful meetings – and also raising the issue at tonight’s NUJ Claudia Jones lecture, I’ve set up a new mailing list and will discuss setting up a follow-up discussion and planning meeting with NUJ colleagues. Stay tuned for further details.
I’m going to be speaking at two meetings on the same topic in the next couple of weeks, in the aftermath of Hackgate and Murdoch’s closure of the News of the World. First up is a session called Reclaiming the Media I’ve organised at the London Anarchist Bookfair at Queen Mary, University of London, on Sunday 22 October. It’s in the Mason lecture theatre – also known as the big venue – at 12pm and will feature investigative journalist, Heather Brooke (author of The Revolution Will Be Digitised and Silent State) and digital rights activist Becky Hogge (author of Barefoot into Cyberspace) with another name or two to be confirmed.
This promises to be a lively session looking at the aftermath of Hackgate, independent journalism and the needs to create new models of media ownership and take the media, online and offline, back from the multinational corporations. The venue seats 300 and it’s completely free, so the more the merrier – bring your friends. You don’t have to be an anarchist to attend and you might find some interesting books at some of the stalls after the meeting.
Then just a few days later, on Wednesday 26 October, I’ll be on the panel at the similarly named Reclaim the Media meeting at Bloomsbury Central Baptist Church, 235 Shaftesbury Avenue. This meeting, organised by NUJ activists, will also feature John Pilger, the world renowned investigate journalist and film-maker, Becky Branford, NUJ rep at the BBC, and Gary McFarlane, NUJ activist and part of the Tottenham Defence Campaign. This meeting is designed to bring people together to discuss and analyse the key problems within the industry that led to the hacking scandal of July.
It’s also hoped to act as a launch pad to get organised build a campaign to reclaim the media and stand up to the assault facing media workers under the recession. This meeting is £3 a ticket (£2 unwaged).
As cuts destroy editorial capacity in newspapers, with cuts coming to the BBC, it’s time to build a new kind of media in the UK & Ireland – media that focuses on empowering the public through information and creates a two-way conversation with the people formerly known as the audience. The giant corporations who currently control the media have shown themselves incapable of doing that, so it’s time to reclaim the media and do it ourselves.
Following the 75th anniversary of the Battle of Cable Street, it is important to remember not just the day itself, but where it came from. The most important thing about what happened on that day was how the other major East End community – the largely Irish dockers – came out in solidarity with the Jewish community in Whitechapel. The roots of this solidarity lie in the strikes of the Great Unrest period more than 20 years before.
In 1912, the radical wave of strikes that had begun in the Welsh mines two years before came to London as workers rediscovered the radicalism of the 1880s. One group of workers that took action were the Jewish tailors and textile workers of the East End. More than 10,000 textile workers went on strike over four weeks and won, all but ending the sweatshop system in the area.
At the centre of that strike was the anarchist organiser, Rudolf Rocker, who, in his autobiography (partly published as The London Years) described how the victorious Jewish came to the aid of the strikers on the London docks. As the dockers strike ran on without resolution and conditions worsened, more than 300 children from the docks were taken in by Jewish families. As Rocker wrote, “[i]t did a great deal to strengthen the friendship between Jewish and non-Jewish workers.” Despite this, the dockers were unsuccessful, but a new relationship was forged ending years of hostility between the two immigrant communities.
Twenty-four years later, this relationship was at the core of the anti-fascist mobilisation in Cable Street that prevented the British Union of Fascists marching through the still predominantly Jewish area. Historian Prof Bill Fishman, who witnessed the events of 1936, said “It was moving to me to see bearded Jews and Irish dockers side by side as comrades.”
This history has largely been ignored by those who seek to claim credit for what happened in Cable Street. The truth is no party mobilised the defenders of Cable Street, even if they were involved. Instead, the solidarity of the day is rooted in a period of syndicalist and anarchist politics when workers rejected political parties of all types and instead recognised their own power.
As the UK re-enters a period of industrial conflict that the Labour Party refuses to support, we should draw inspiration from 100 years ago and build a new syndicalist era where workers find their own power. Organising to commemorate the centenary of the strike next May should be part of that. If you’re interested in getting involved, there’s a group on Facebook.
Readers of a certain blog on a certain newspaper site might have gotten the false impression that I was against the post-riot clean-up operations in London. On the contrary, I promoted plans for Tottenham on Twitter, started early collecting abandoned shopping trollies on Wednesday morning en route and then, alas, found that it wasn’t possible due to the police cordon still being in place on Tottenham High Road. By Thursday, the area had pretty much already been cleaned up by the Council.
The clean-up operations were, in my view, a great example of what people can do when they self-organise to achieve a positive and constructive goal. However, by Thursday, stories were starting to circulate about a more negative aspect to some of the clean-up operations. Some people I know were calling them elitist and exclusive, arguing that some of the rhetoric surrounding them was divisive rather than constructive.
I thought this was an unfair generalisation, the young people I met on Tottenham High Road who had wanted to join in and help out were just that, there was no negativity involved. The same spirit that inspired the huge donations to the families made homeless in the riots was obvious – a willingness to bring the community together and help those who need help. This is something of which London needs a lot more.
My intervention in a thread on Facebook was in this spirit, trying to end the generalisations and argue that the clean-up operations had drawn in a wide range of people, including anarchists like me. When I used the word scum, I was referring directly to the allegations of reactionary and classist elements hijacking the actions. I was not, in any way, referring to the people of Clapham Junction in particular and definitely was not referring to the “broom army” of middle-class volunteers who cleaned up Clapham Junction. As I said on Facebook, “… it’s just important to recognise that they’re not all reactionary scum.”
A certain journalist rang me on Thursday evening and asked me about this. I was taken aback that anyone could have assumed that I was referring to all the people involved in the clean-up in Clapham Junction as scum when I said the exact opposite. I spoke to this same journalist for over three minutes and explained exactly what I meant.
Then, on Friday night/Saturday morning I got a google notification that my name had been mentioned on the web. I was appalled at what I saw – first and foremost a big picture of me that belongs to me used without permission (that’s been replaced). Then four paragraphs attacking me for doing the very thing I’d explained I wasn’t doing, quoting part of the Facebook conversation (not that part about me trying to take part in the Tottenham clean-up) which, in no way, backs up the assertion that I “described the ‘broom army’ of middle-class volunteers who cleaned up Clapham Junction as ‘scum’.” In fact, the point of my comment and what it says is that I’m challenging just that form of generalisation. It was as if I’d never spoken to him.
I’m not going to get into a personal slagging match with this individual, he seems to like that. But anyone who regularly reads his blog will know what he’s like and what his views are. I think it’s safe to say that we don’t agree on many things. However, I am very annoyed at the fact that an assertion has been made about my views that is not correct or accurate and the journalist knows this, because I told him directly on the phone that this was the case.
There has been enough division and loose talk in relation to the whole situation of the riots, looting and aftermath. The only way to stop this kind of thing happening again is to shut our mouths and open our ears. I did a lot of that on Saturday, when I joined the North London Unity March. I sincerely hope we see more of this kind of unity in the future.
Commentator after commentator, from politicians to journalists, is blaming the recent chaos in London and beyond on “criminality”. What does that even mean? Crime is a product of social conditions, not a thing in and of itself. Recognising that people smashing, looting and burning are committing crimes is not an explanation – of course they’re criminals, what they’re doing is against the law.
What people aren’t recognising is that this kind of criminality is a direct product of consumerism. These kids have been told, all their lives, that what they own is more important than who they are or what they do. Having the right trainers, having the latest iPhone, eating the right chocolate bar – these are the things that are supposed to make you happy.
All through the ‘90s and into the new millennium, people were able to fund their consumerism with debt. Credit cards were handed out like sweets at a children’s party. Can’t afford it? Borrow. You need a new car, remortgage your house – the value of your two-bedroom ex-council flat is up 20%!
Then came the 2008 crash and the credit dried up. Ads for credit cards were replaced with ads for extortionate legal money lenders like wonga.com. The poor suddenly got poorer. Going into debt wasn’t the breeze it was before. But the consumerism didn’t adjust – on the contrary, politicians and economists looked to the consumers to boost the economy to help the poor banks out as bonuses for those at the top of the industry returned to their original level – and higher.
Areas like Tottenham are areas of high unemployment and social dislocation. Gang culture has grown across the UK for years, as Labour’s “tough on crime, tough on the causes of crime” became ASBOs, stop and search and other repressive measures.
And then the Tories were elected – benefits cut, EMA cuts directly targeting the pockets of these young consumers. After the first student protest that attacked Milbank, every subsequent demonstration had large numbers of kids from the very same areas now in chaos. How were their legitimate concerns addressed? With kettles, riot police and political indifference.
Tottenham was hit very hard by the cuts, particularly youth services, which had their budget cut by 75% across the borough of Haringey. Eight of 13 youth centres were closed, bringing warnings that riots would ensue. An area so hugely dependent on state support was always going to suffer badly from cuts.
To make matters worse, when teachers, lecturers and public service workers went on strike on 30 June, the Prime Minister condemned the strikers as “irresponsible“. What message did he think he was sending to school-kids slagging off the very people who should be their role models?
Then came the News of the World scandal and the revelations of police corruption. What many suspected was shown to be true, the police, politicians and the corporate media were working together and breaking the law. This is all cognitive dissonance on a major scale, a society supposedly based on respect for authority and the rule of law is revealed to be nothing of the kind. The situation was like a tinder-box doused in petrol.
And then the police shot a man dead in Tottenham and left the community without answers. The shooting of Mark Duggan lit a show burning fuse that exploded in Tottenham on Saturday night. The events in communities elsewhere saw what happened there and took advantage. Stretching the police by popping up all over the city meant they could loot with impunity.
What is looting but the collapse of the agreement in society that a building full of desirable items can sit on the high street and you need to pay to take things from it? Suddenly people found that this wasn’t true any more, you could just break the window and take what you wanted and, as was discovered in Tottenham Hale Retail Park early Sunday morning, no-one could stop you. CCTV cameras, ubiquitous in our surveillance society, were either forgotten or ignored.
A dangerous sense of power and fearlessness overtook a considerable part of the youth of this country. Worse, all respect for other people was gone and firebugs started burning things, with no apparent concern for the people who lived above the buildings they burned. Muggings, stabbings and shootings ensued.
Mass waves of criminality like this are not simple; they are a sign of a complete collapse in social relations for a large sizeable of the population. What makes it so tragic is that they were absolutely predictable, not just by those in the communities where the trouble is. In April last year, they were predicted by the leader of Liberal Democrats – now Deputy Prime Minister – Nick Clegg, if the Tories won with a narrow majority. Instead, the government has less legitimacy than that and the riots are far worse than anyone could have predicted.
Event: Busting the Myths – learn the truth about anarchism, 7pm, Thursday 11 August, University of London Union, Malet Street, London.
Speakers: Donnacha DeLong (chair), Chetna Yuvraj, student occupier, Andy Littlechild, RMT activist,Zoe Stavri, activist with UK Uncut and Andy Meinke, activist in the Legal Defence and Monitoring Group and Freedom Press worker.
It’s been an interesting week. Last Sunday, it emerged that the police appeared to be trying to start an “anarchist scare”. Activists on Twitter started pointing to this week’s edition of the Griffin weekly briefing sheet by the Met (Project Griffin is the police’s community anti-terrorism initiative) which, on page 3, contained a small side box stating:
“Anarchism is a political philosophy which considers the state undesirable, unnecessary, and harmful, and instead promotes a stateless society, or anarchy. Any information relating to anarchists should be reported to your local Police.”
The first sentence is reasonably OK in terms of a reductionist dictionary definition of anarchism. The second sentence, on the other hand, was a bit scary, but opened up all sorts of possibilities for fun and mayhem. The word “Any” was the key one – organising started on Twitter, Facebook and email lists – should everyone start phoning the police to inform them about what anarchists were having for dinner? Should we all start emailing PDFs of anarchist literature to the police? Should we organise a mass “turn ourselves in” session with hundreds of us turning ourselves in at police stations.
By Monday evening, the Guardian received an embarrassing statement from the police in which they disassociated themselves from the briefing, saying it “could have been worded better”. They further said that, “[t]he Metropolitan police service does not seek to stigmatise those people with legitimate political views.” Nice to know our views count as legitimate now, I wonder if this means the police will stop briefing the media with scare stories about anarchists in advance of large events? Like presumably they did recently in relation to the Olympics in a recent edition of the Independent on Sunday.
The whole mess has opened up a space for anarchists to put their views across. Hat tip to Solidarity Federation and ALARM for getting statements to the press.
And then the rioting and looting started, starting in Tottenham on Saturday and spreading to Enfield and as far as Brixton. The Daily Mail predictably blames “anarchists” and the deputy mayor of London tries to implicate us.
Recent events have turned more and more people to anarchism – the Lib Dems’ betrayal of students and other parts of their electoral base, the violent and disproportionate police response to student demonstrators at the end of the year, the excessive sentencing of protesters and the politicised arrests of the UK Uncut activists in Fortnam & Mason. And, to top it all, the ongoing revelations of an unvirtuous circle of corruption between News International, politicians of both main parties and the police.
If you’re not sure, given all that, if you are an anarchist or not, read David Graeber’s test – “Are You An Anarchist? The Answer May Suprise You!” or try Space Hijackers’ useful quiz.
Anarchism, at its purest, comes down to the idea that humans have the potential to live together peacefully and without exploiting each other, in a society based on free association and mutual aid, if we get rid of all the things that force us to be otherwise – the hierarchical institutions none of us voted for, but we still have to follow. This is why anarchists tend to oppose not just the state, but also capitalism, the police and all forms of prejudice based on what people are – race, nationality, gender, sexual preference, disability.
If you want to learn more about anarchism, the first thing you can do is start informing yourself. There is a wealth of information about anarchism available online, including much of the classic literature. Try the Anarchy Archives. Or try your local library or bookshop, they’re sure to have something.
Then get involved in things that anarchists are involved in – your trade union, your local anti-cuts group, anti-poverty initiatives. In fact, if there’s a grassroots movement of any kind near you, you’re likely to find anarchists involved – and it might surprise you who the anarchists are. The one thing I can fairly confidently say is that nearly every anarchist you’ll find will be more than happy to talk to you about politics!
I wrote the last week and sent it to the Independent as a right to reply piece. I got no answer. Of course, since I wrote it, the Project Griffin “report anarchists to the police” stuff has come out – more on that later.
They’re starting early, last Sunday saw the first scare piece about anarchists and the Olympics in the Independent on Sunday. Apparently, we’re planning to disrupt it. I say we, but actually, the piece named only one group of “anarchists” and it was UK Uncut – which isn’t actually an anarchist organisation. UK Uncut may be organised on a radical decentralised voluntary co-operation model, which sounds fairly anarchic, but its aims are simply to use direct action to highlight the hypocrisy in the system, particularly the tax evasion and avoidance of large companies while cuts are made to services. UK Uncut attracts a wide spectrum of people, some anarchists, but also people from a range of other perspectives.
The article correctly identifies reasons that anarchists, and anyone with any sense of social justice, might be unhappy with the way the Olympics have been organised. The orgy of private capital involved in these games is obscene – yet the article fails to mention two of the most egregious – McDonalds and Coke: “Faster, higher, stronger – do you want fries with that?”
Then, of course, there’s the links to blacklisting and the sweatshop conditions endured by sportswear workers. Lots of reasons to protest about the way the Olympics are being staged in London – but that does not equate to any kind of wish to disrupt the games themselves. Anyway, it looks like London’s transport system will do that anyway – Boris’ confidence everything will be perfect is somewhat less than reassuring.
Much like the royal wedding and the non-existent plans to disrupt that, most anarchists will regard the Olympics as a sideshow. The problem with society is not too many people involved in elite sports and the target is not sports-persons or fans. However, scare stories like the Independent on Sunday piece have a role in providing advance justification for the police to violate people’s rights – as they did for the royal wedding.
There is an even more important reason why anarchists won’t be bothering with the Olympics. From April to July 2012, around the same time as the games are happening, we’ve got a hugely important part of our own history to remember. One hundred years ago, anarchism played a part in something that changed British history.
1912 was probably the high-point of anarchist influence in London and it was the middle of the Great Unrest period of radical syndicalist trade unionism. In East London, there had been a lot of tensions between two communities – the Eastern European Jewish immigrants in the textile sweatshops of Whitechapel and the community on the docks, of whom Irish immigrants or the children of immigrants made up a large proportion. Anti-Semitism and religious sectarianism was a common element of life in East London.
However, that changed in 1912. After years of trade union organising, initiated by the German anarcho-syndicalist Rudolf Rocker and others, the tailors went out on strike in April. Other textile workers went out as well, men and women, 13,000 in all were on strike. Within three weeks, they’d won and they all but ended the sweatshop system in England.
London’s dock workers went out on strike around the same time. They weren’t as successful and faced a long drawn out strike that ultimately ended in defeat. However, what changed the East End was the solidarity the Jewish strikers showed. When the two strikes were on, joint meetings were organised, and once the tailors strike was won, Jewish families took the children of the starving dockers’ families into their care until the strike was over.
Rudolf Rocker, in his autobiography The London Years, describes how “[i]t did a great deal to strengthen the friendship between Jewish and non-Jewish workers.” Twenty-four years later, this relationship was at the core of the anti-fascist mobilisation in Cable Street that prevented the British Union of Fascists marching through the predominantly Jewish area. Historian Prof Bill Fishman, who was there, said “It was moving to me to see bearded Jews and Irish dockers side by side as comrades.”
In the summer of 2012, when the great and the good are watching the sport, I hope to be working with trade unionists, fellow anarchists and representatives of the communities of the East End – past and present – to organise a series of events to commemorate the 1912 strikes. For me, it will be a chance to remind people that anarchism is not about broken windows or fighting with the police, but is a movement dedicated to bringing people together to fight for a world based on liberty, equality and real justice.
I thought this would be a little bit easier, to be honest. Having taken redundancy last year and returning to university to do a Masters, I didn’t think I’d still be sitting here, nearly August a year later, without work.
Obviously, the economic situation in the country is a big negative and it’s even worse in the media. Even before the Murdoch crisis hit, media group after media group was making cut after cut after cut. This continues and, unless something radical happens to change the ownership structure of the media (I’m looking at you Leveson), it’s not going to get any better.
But, even given all that, I thought my skills and experience would be enough. I’ve been an online journalist/editor for more than 13 years. In that time, I’ve worked on a national news website, RTÉ, and spent more than six years in senior editorial positions on the websites of the world’s largest human rights organisation. I’ve been a major part of two major CMS and website builds in my time, the www.rte.ie relaunch in 2001/2002 and the www.amnesty.org relaunch in 2007, working closely with developers and designers.
I can lead teams of people, plan strategically and am pretty skilled in matching content to audience. And it that wasn’t enough, I do public speaking – in the last few months, I’ve spoken about the history of social media and its impact on journalism at a Social Media Academy conference. I’ve spoken about the problems of nationally-based internet regulation at Nominet‘s policy forum and spoken about the impact of cuts in the media on health and science journalism at the European Conference on Health Journalism in Coventry.
I have also chaired large meetings, starting with parts of the National Union of Journalists Delegate Meeting in April, in front of a few hundred delegates. Since then, I’ve chaired an event on social media and human rights organised by Article 19 to present work done for the Council of Europe to the Commissioner for Human Rights and I chaired the NUJ’s first public meeting on the situation in the News of the World and News International in July.
And then there’s my writing. What I’d love to be able to do is combine my work as President of the NUJ with doing something that would make me money. I’ve had two pieces published on the Guardian’s Comment is Free site – The NUJ could have saved the News of the World and Strikers at the BBC won’t crumble both written after activity as President in relation to both workplaces. Unfortunately, I’m in a key position to write about things that the media isn’t very interested in reporting – trade unions and radical movements.
I’ve been feeling a little like Kevin Bacon recently – not in any real sense, but in the Six Degrees sense. I’m working on the Rebellious Media Conference organising group and I helped out with the second NUJ public meeting on Murdoch and I realised how many contacts I have. Name a radical political or activist group in London and I probably know someone or at least know someone who does – the same goes for pretty much all of the unions.
Alas, it appears most of the media is only interested in printing ill-informed scare stories about evil anarchists or one-sided anti-union rhetoric and few are interested in an insiders view of what’s going on. This is incredibly short-sighted as there is no sign that the activism we’ve seen since last November is going to die off, on the contrary, 30 June was only start. People are regrouping over the summer, it’s all going to get very interesting from September onwards.
In short, I am available for work. If you know anyone who needs an expert in online communications, please direct them to my business site: Autonomy Consulting. I can write, sub, edit, work with multimedia and quite a bit more. As it says in the title – I will work for a reasonable sum based on my skills and experience (and sometimes even less than that!)
