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. More details on Indymedia and the Facebook event.

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.

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.

You can also hear my two previous appearances on the show on the site as well: Yodet’s interview with me and a recording of a talk on anarchism at the Bank of Ideas that I took part in.

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.

Alas, the embed won’t work on WordPress, but you can watch it by clicking on this link to the video.