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 country 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.