The fact that the story was picked up by the Associate Press meant the story was auto-syndicated around the world (e.g. the Washington Post), but, apart from those, there’s been little else in the mainstream media. No BBC London, no Channel 4 News, no Mirror – let alone any of the conservative newspapers.

Since when is the deliberate targeting of a bookshop not news? Imagine if it had been a branch of Waterstones (there are still a few around). I have no doubt crews would have been all over it and it would have made news bulletins and every newspaper. The only explanation for the lack of coverage of the attack on Freedom is blatant politics.

It would seem that because Freedom is an anarchist bookshop, it doesn’t count. No, most of the mainstream media is only interested in anarchists when they can print groundless allegations that we’re planning to wreck royal weddings or the Olympics.

I went down to the shop on Saturday and saw real anarchism in action – around 100 people turned up to wipe down soot-covered books, clean floors and scrub walls. Not just anarchists, but friends and fellow travellers all ready to help out to get the shop up and running again. Not for pay, not because someone told us to, no – because we wanted to, because solidarity is important and Freedom needs to exist.

Freedom Press, founded in 1886, is one of the last reminders of a different time in London’s East End, a time when people like Peter Kropotkin, Errico Malatesta and Rudolf Rocker walked the streets of the East End. A time when Jewish trade unions rose up and struck to end the sweat shop system that blighted their lives. A time when revolution was in the air and people were willing to fight for a better world.

As the Tories and their sell-out Lib Dem colleagues strip workers of their rights and condemn the less well off in society to food banks and poverty, it’s a time we should all remember. It’s also a time we should start emulating.

Unfortunately, Freedom’s recent financial woes meant the shop was uninsured at the time of the attack, so they need funds to continue. Lots of fund-raising efforts are underway, check out the Freedom website for details.

LNM 17
This DM congratulates Channel 4 for its brilliant coverage of the Paralympics (29 Aug – 9 Sept), in particular how presenters and journalists with disabilities were at the forefront of their coverage.

DM hopes that Channel 4 will continue this practice, which has helped bring disabled people into the spotlight and show that many are capable of doing these jobs.

However, DM condemns the government’s attempts to use the success of paralympians to attack disabled people who depend on benefits and condemns the cuts being imposed on these benefits that are absolutely essential to their ability to live. DM further condemns the closure of the Remploy factories that gave so many disabled people a chance to work in an accessible environment as gross hypocrisy from a government that claims to be trying to help bring disabled people into the workplace. DM furthermore condemns the role of the private company ATOS in these political machinations.

DM instructs the NEC to support organisations fighting cuts to disability benefits, in particular Disabled People Against Cuts (DPAC).

LNM 18
DM congratulates the Youth Media Agency (YMA) on the launch of their Youth Media Directory on 24 July and their successful meeting on getting age entered into the replacement
of the editor’s code as a topic of discrimination on 27 September.

DM supports the work of the YMA to improve coverage of young people in the mainstream media and in supporting independent media by young journalists.

DM urges all branches to look at the Directory on the YMA website (http://www.youthmediaagency.org.uk/) and to recruit the young journalists involved in the projects to the NUJ.

DM instructs the NEC to work with the YMA to develop guidelines on how to improve the coverage of young people.

The Branch will be holding a Recruitment and Organising session this Saturday (3 November) from 11am to 4pm.

Starting at 11am, the plan is to have two hours of training – then lunch paid for by the Branch – and then back at 2pm for two more hours of strategy – defining targets and plans to approach workers in workplaces where we’re not yet organised.

If you’re a member of the Branch or work in Independent Broadcasting (ie. anywhere but the BBC) or New Media (websites, mobile phone content, bloggers, tweeters) and want to get involved, come along.

The session will be held in NUJ HQ, Headland House, 308-312 Gray’s Inn Road, London, WC1X 8DP.

Some personal biography is probably necessary at this point to explain my surprise. The Irish revolutionary Harry Boland was my great-granduncle; I grew up with stories about him and the rest of the Boland family. I even chose to write about Harry for my Leaving Certificate history essay. I knew Harry had travelled in the US fund-raising for the IRA during the Irish War of Independence and there was the strange tale of the Russian jewels, but a connection to Emma Goldman was unheard of and a complete surprise.

However, only a few pages later, she writes about the 1916 Rising and how Padraic Colum wrote an account of the events for Mother Earth. Which means the Philadelphia meeting happened earlier in 1916, most likely before the Easter Rising. The Harry Boland I knew about was in Dublin at the time, he fought in the rising and was imprisoned until 1917. He didn’t go to New York until May 1919, at which time Emma Goldman was in prison. Their paths might have crossed in the short time between Goldman’s release in September and her deportation in December that year, but he clearly wasn’t the Harry Boland to whom she referred in the book.

A bit more research and I found that a Harry Weir Boland had written a poem for Mother Earth himself marking the death of King Edward VII in less than respectful terms. “Bury him, then, face downward in the dust,” it begins, a sentiment I’m sure would have been shared by his namesake in Ireland.

Over the years, I’ve found out more about the American Harry Boland. He was born in Pennsylvania in 1873 of Irish immigrant parents, Michael A. Boland and Ellen Carolan. He lived in Philadelphia most of his life and across the Delaware River died in Camden, New Jersey, in 1926. Like Goldman’s other Philadelphia friend, Horace Traubel, he was an admirer of Walt Whitman. However, what I’ve never been able to find out is whether he knew of or even met his namesake.

There were numerous other possible connections between them. Emma Goldman writes of a meeting in June 1917 that the widowed Hanna Sheehy-Skeffington was in attendance. Hanna was a member of the Republican women’s organisation Cumann na mBan alongside the Irish Harry Boland’s sister, Kathleen. After his death in 1922, Kathleen and Hanna travelled to the US to raise funds for the anti-Treaty side of the Irish Civil War.

Harry himself gave a speech in Philadelphia in 1921 when acting as Sinn Féin envoy to the United States. After his death in 1922, Joseph McGarrity of the Philadelphia Clan na Gael organised a mock funeral procession in the city which was attended by up to 10,000 people (see Harry Boland’s Irish Revolution by David Fitzpatrick).

It’s hard to believe the American Harry was unaware of the Irish Harry. Did they meet in 1921? Was Harry Weir Boland still living in Philadelphia when thousands marked the death of his namesake? If there’s anyone out there who knows more about Harry Weir Boland, the old devotee of Emma Goldman’s, I’d love to hear about it.

More on the event:
Hugh Grant: Leveson inquiry has shone ‘disinfectant sunlight’ into ‘infected corners’
News: Rally for Media Reform – democracy in Britain corrupted by illegal and unethical press practices: Natalie Peck

and my subsequent piece for the LSE Media Policy Project:
Media Reform Now: We Need to Re-Unionise the Industry

I’ll be speaking at a public meeting organised by the Jewish Socialists’ Group at 7pm on Wednesday, 23 May, in the Library of the Bishopsgate Institute with Ben Gidley. A recording of the meeting is now available from the Circled A show website.

A couple of days later, on Sunday 27 May at 6pm, David Rosenberg of the Jewish Socialists’ Group will lead a walk through the radical history of the East End, focussing on the 1912 strike. Join us at Freedom Books in Whitechapel – details on Indymedia.

Media Reform Now: We Need to Re-Unionise the Industry (25 May 2012)

Union-News: Jewish tailors – the East End’s forgotten sweatshop strikers (22 May 2012)

Union-News: Missiles in London are no match for trade unionists (15 May 2012)

Left Foot Forward: The criminal war on journalism in Mexico (7 May 2012)

Ceasefire: Comment | Rupert Murdoch and his amazing dog-whistle (5 May 2012)

I chaired the public launch of London’s newest NUJ branch – the London Independent Broadcasting and New Media Branch (check us out on Facebook) on Thursday 19 April. Organised with BIMA – the British Interactive Media Association – the event started out with a workshop organised by VisiononTV.

That was followed by two speakers, the Guardian’s Paul Lewis who spoke about Twitter and the London riots of 2011 and social media expert Tiffany St James who spoke about the business use of Twitter.

Alas, the full video plug-in isn’t working properly on WordPress, but you can see the videos at the link below.

Latest media news via visionOntv
http://visionon.tv/widget/web/plugandplay/embed/-/56_INSTANCE_kO3r

It’s just over a month from May Day – 1st May, International Workers’ Day. The Occupy movement is already calling for a worldwide general strike. We might not be able to go that far here in the UK, but, at the very least, we can build demonstrations that can bring cities to a halt for the day (and maybe longer).

Every group with a grievance, DPAC, NCAFC, SolFed, IWW, Right to Work, Coalition of Resistance, LRC, trade unions, community groups, angry individuals, everyone should join their local May Day demonstration. If some of the unions came out on strike (maybe the PCS could skip April and go straight for May Day), all the better.

May Day marches in recent years, particularly in London, have been more than a bit naff. Largely ignored by most organisations, they’ve had a rag-tag mix of trade unionists, every strange Marxist-Leninist sect there is (who can miss the CPGB-ML’s giant Stalin banner), fairly military styled groups from other lands and, in recent years, a clutch of anarchists, including yours truly, trying to bring a bit of diversity.

This isn’t what May Day should be about. The origins of May Day lie in workers’ fight for shorter work hours – the 8-hour day. In 1886 in Chicago, police opened fire on strikers on 3 May. A bomb from a still unknown source exploded amongst the police at a demonstration the next day – the police retaliated immediate.

Eight people were convicted of conspiracy to commit murder in a kangaroo court – one, Louis Lingg, committed suicide in prison, three were pardoned in 1893, but it was the hanging of four of them – Albert Parsons, August Spies, Adolf Fischer, and George Engel – on November 11, 1887 that laid the roots of May Day. Parsons and Spies, in particular, were two of the most important trade union activists of the time who helped build the mass movement of the time. Both were also anarchists who laid the foundations for the anarcho-syndicalist movement.

The battle for the 8-hour day was adopted by the First International in 1866, six years before it split with anarchists and Marxists going their own way. Despite what happened afterwards, with the Second International and then the USSR trying to make it their day, the roots and meaning of May Day are for all workers and should be a symbol of how the rights and conditions we have as workers today were not given to us by capitalism, but dragged from the bosses by radical workers.

So, let’s occupy May Day and make it a day for everyone – and build a linked up, converged movement that can take on the government. And maybe not everyone will go home after the day and we can keep the fight going.

Could we please have some bloody perspective? Secularism is about respecting the views of all. It has a strong and important history of opposing persecution by arguing that, regardless of your religious views or lack thereof, you should have an equal right to participate in the political life of your country.

There is nothing militant about the idea that one religious group should not dominate in the civil and political sphere. It’s an egalitarian impulse. The (not so) good baroness presumably thinks that because she’s not a Christian, she can spout off on these issues without the verbal battering the bleating Christians have received over the years. However, the reality is that she’s a conservative and an Anglophile (as anyone who saw her recent appearance on Question Time will know) and is promoting the conservative idea of Britain as a Christian country.

It’s always worth looking back at the history of what this means. It is true that Britain was a Christian country – or, at least, it was a country controlled by a particular strand of Christianity. England, in particular, has been an Anglican country since that brand of Christianity was invented under Queen Elizabeth I in the 16^th Century. Catholics and other non-Anglican sects faced serious persecution in Britain from that point onwards – particularly in Scotland and Ireland. Of course, this had very little to do with religion and everything to do with political control of religion by the monarch.

Anyone who complains now that Christianity is under attack should wake up and look around the world. Religious persecution is a nasty and horrible thing that people do face around the world. Of course, it’s rarely simple and straight-forward as religion is tied to identity and often is part of struggles between different populations, e.g. Muslims in Kashmir in India, Hindu Tamils in Sri Lanka or animists in South Sudan.

Politely asking someone not to engage in prayer in mixed company or trying to develop historically religious holidays into more secular and inclusive festivals is not persecution. They’re positive signs of a diverse and multi-cultural society that asks for respect for all views and faiths.

What this country needs is more inclusiveness and more respect. There are social problems related to religion, but, more often than not, they’re based on real exclusion and persecution of religious minorities – Irish Catholics from the 1840s, Jews in the 1880s onwards, Muslims in recent times. Baroness Warsi, if she’s really interested in promoting religious fairness, should be saying a lot more about the Islamophobia that continues in parts of the UK media and less about a non-existent problem.

The myth of Christianity under attack is about a loss of power by the Anglican church that went hand in hand with the decline of the power of the monarchy in Britain. It’s not persecution to tell a former controlling power that they’re not in control any more and that society has moved on. I grew up in Ireland, a country that still needs a lot more secularism to end the domination of a church that proved to be as abusive as it was controlling. Secularism and inclusiveness are things that, in many areas, Britain is good at and this is what people should be proud of rather than seeking a return to a false golden age where religious discrimination was far more common.

I can’t say much about how the money is spent – I’m sure improvements can always be made. However,  it’s worth pointing out to those who don’t know their own country’s history that there’s an historic parallel from around 170 years ago.

Back in the 1840s, all of Ireland was part of the UK. Britain was the richest country in the world at the time. Ireland, taken separately, was also incredibly rich, producing massive amounts of crops and livestock. However, those riches were in the hand of rich landlords, many not living in Ireland, and few were left for the native population to enjoy.

The Irish peasants lived almost exclusively on potatoes and, when the blight attacked the potatoes, people starved – an estimated 1.5 million died between 1845 and 1850. Despite the mass starvation, exporting of other food continued unabated.

Relief from the government and crown was slow and measly. As a result, aid was sent by the Ottoman sultan – originally five times more than Queen Victoria, but that amount was reduced by the Queen, presumably to spare her blushes rather than save lives. But it wasn’t just the rich sultan who gave money, the impoverished Choctaw nation collected money and sent $170 in aid.

Whatever the Indian government spends its money on – space ships, fighter planes – doesn’t change the fact that 25% of the world’s hungry poor are in India. Thousands starve to death every week.

To argue that the UK, a rich country, should stop trying to help some of the poorest people in the world because they happen to live in another country is a disgrace. In many cases it’s pure racism. The people who are dying are not to blame for the inaction of their government any more than the Irish were to blame for the greed of the then UK government.

There are many things the current government could do to prevent the cuts it’s currently making. Collecting some of the evaded and avoided tax from the likes of Boots, Google and Philip Green would be a good start. Stealing from the mouths of people who are starving is just wrong.