Yeah sure I know it’s moving away a bit from my set brief of writing about ‘activism’ but i think it’s only fair to give a heads up to a great political punk band and their new record and tour.

For me, and I’m sure countless others growing up at a similar time and just getting into the punk scene, Propagandhi were massively influential in opening my eyes to this crummy world we inhabit and sparking a fire of political awareness in my young belly.

I was fourteen when I first picked up the second Propagandhi record, Less Talk More Rock, and far more interested in skateboards and smoking dope than smashing the state and all that jazz. There was a vague inkling of an ‘anarchy = punk = cool’ type equation going on for sure, but this album was my first exposure to intelligent and thoughtful yet militant anti-capitalism, and it was infectious.

Propagandhi has always been more about the music as the medium for the message, rather than just your average thrash punk band. Alongside playing benefits and most of the profit for their releases (and those of other bands on their G7 Welcoming Committee record label) going to charitable organisations Propagandhi have always been active in keeping their audience informed, distributing in-depth articles (and even feature length documentaries on some later releases) on a variety of issues for free with their albums.

Supporting Caste, the bands fifth album, was released last month and shows the band on top form, heading deeper into the heavier and more thrashy direction they’ve been moving in since John K Samson was replaced by ex-Swallowing Shit & I-Spy bassist Todd Kowalski for the Today’s Empires Tomorrow’s Ashes album in 2001. As always the lyrics are spot on, combining the personal and political with a smart sense of humor often missing from political punk bands. In these days when a lot of people (myself included) download a lot of music for free illegally I would urge anyone interested in punk and politics to actually go out and BUY this album, as there’s a bunch of multimedia extras you don’t get with a download and you know most of the money will be going to good causes.

The band will also be hitting the UK for the first time in years to promote the new album. The dates are – 04/17/09 in Sheffield at O2 Academy, 04/18/09 in Bristol at Fiddlers, 04/19/09 in London at Islington Academy, 04/20/09 in Brighton at Concorde and 04/21/09 in Norwich at Waterfront.

Finally, something which looks like it might be a bit of fun!

Smash EDO have been campaigning against the arms manufacturers EDO MBM, who have a factory in Brighton, for the last five years.

They’re a very energetic and commited bunch and have organized a variety of actions, from weekly demonstrations outside the EDO factory to more militant direct action such as when six ‘decommissioners’ broke into the factory in January causing £300,000 worth of damage.

A documentary entitled On The Verge has been made chronicling the groups activities and you can download a free bit-torrent of it right here should you want to know more about what they’ve been up to. The police thought this film was so damaging that they went to great lengths to stop people seeing it (see this Guardian article), so you should give it a look, if only because they don’t want you to.

In preparation for the street party there is also a weekend-long ‘Anti-Militarist Gathering’ from May 2nd onwards with a variety of speakers and workshops at the super awesome Cowley Club, so get yourself down for a nice weekend by the sea.

The mass arrests of over 100 climate change demonstrators in Nottingham this Monday is yet another example of worrying trends in the methods the police in the UK are using against activists and direct action groups.

Whilst these sorts of pre-emptive actions are nothing new, mass arrests on this scale are as far as I can ascertain unprecedented. While in police custody the homes of six of the arrested activists were raided and computers and ‘specialist equipment’ (see climate camp articles for some examples of how the police define this) were confiscated, although no one has been charged with anything as of yet.

This demonstrates an alarming disregard for mental and creative privacy, which is in itself objectionable, but when coupled with the emphasis and value placed on private property rights by ‘establishment’ forces such as the police, the current political zeitgeist is shown to be not only constrictive but also exploitative.

Much of the comment on this issue, such as this article from the Autonomous Nottingham blog which deals with this topic in more detail than I do here, emphasises the need for greater security and secrecy within the activist community in order to prevent the police from scuppering actions before they’ve begun, not to mention avoiding harassment and possible arrests.

Whilst this is definitely true it is also important not to get too bogged down in a paranoid siege mentality. I feel like I’m repeating this point in a lot of posts, but all of these intimidation tactics are designed to keep activists on the defensive and de-motivate individuals, rendering effective actions difficult to carry out. There can be no real unity and solidarity if people don’t trust each other and are scared to organise. I can offer no magic solutions to these problems but it seems inevitable that things are going to have to be done a little differently round here.

So much has been written and said already about the events at the anti-G20 demonstrations in London that it feels a bit redundant to be writing this now. The beauty of the medium of blogs is that they provide a means to post instant, up to the minute responses to events as they unfold. What do you do, however when an event you’ve witnessed has been so demoralizing and soul destroying as to make you not want to get out of bed for a week, let alone post some some futile ramblings on the internet about it?

This is the situation these G20 ‘riots’ have left me and many others in – the police overkill, constant searches, raids on squats and two days spent penned outside the bank of England by aggressive thugs have left many involved in the protests feeling weak, powerless and basically pretty depressed, which I’m sure was the main intention of the tactics used by the police in the first place.

In a way though I’m glad I waited a little while, as now the dust is settling and a clearer picture is emerging of exactly how messy those days were and how obscene, and indeed deadly, the methods of policing demonstrations in this country have become.

For the last few days the papers have been full of the news, uncovered by the Guardian, that Ian Tomlinson was assaulted by police immediately prior to his death on April 1st. In case you haven’t seen the footage yet here it is -

As this video clearly shows, the police assaulted an unarmed man while he was walking away from them with his hands in his pockets. Sure, the camera work’s a bit wobbly and we don’t see the events prior to this (ie what Tomlinson may have said or done to the policemen) but I think it’s fairly obvious this attack was unprovoked and unneccasary.

As for the much publicised police claims that the protesters showered them with glass bottles as they tended to Tomlinson, in this video we see protestors rushing to help him while the police stand back and watch, then one plastic bottle thrown at the police in the second section of the video. When this happens the instant reaction of the crowd is to tell people not to throw anything. The way certain sections of the media reported this story in the first few days following the event leant heavily on this unfounded claim, and painted the demonstrators in a very negative light.

Perhaps the saddest irony of the death of Iam Tomlinson (a man who had not even meant to attend the protests), is that through their own thug tactics the police have inadvertantly added weight to what otherwise was a pretty shambolic and dissapointing affair. From the beggining these G20 ‘riots’ had been as much about media hype than any real popular movement, with the press and police working together to get people into a tizzy with their talk of this so-called “summer of rage” and reports of highly organized and tooled up European anarchists dead set on the destruction of our nations great capital.

In reality for every one person doing anything at the protests there were at least five taking a photo of it, and far from rage most of the people I spoke to down there had come down out of a mix of curiosity, vague digruntlement and the fact they thought it might be laugh to get whacked by a copper.

I won’t go too far into my various conspiracy theories surrounding RBS getting smashed, but it seems a bit odd to me that the windows weren’t boarded over (like many in the area were) and most of the people responsible made no attempt to conceal their faces. The cops stood by and watched, letting the press get their nice photo’s before smashing some heads.

So where were all these hardcore euro-anarchist black bloc types we were all promised would be there to entertain us all? Looks like they all went along to the NATO summit in Strasbourg instead . . .

(also, just in case you haven’t seen enough photo’s of cops in riot gear, my friend Janos has posted a good photo essay on Indymedia documenting the goings on – check it.)

The Guardian sees evidence of humor in the police choosing to play ‘I Fought the Law’ at full volume all through the night in order to deprive the demonstrators of sleep. Others might not find using methods of psychological harassment and intimidation on a field full of families and children that much of a giggle.

To give them their due the Guardian has had a lot of reports on the over-zealous policing at Climate Camp, from the constant searches, false injury claims and ridiculous confiscations (kiddies crayons, clown suits anyone??) to the constant sinister surveillance of both campers and journalists present, so check them out.

These sorts of police tactics are an attempt to make effective action impossible, break people down and suck the life any active movements for change. It’s important that people stand up against them and show that we can’t be broken that easily.

The attempted eviction was completely illegal, with bailiffs not declaring themselves and tricking their way into the building by posing as fire inspectors following a small and as yet unexplained fire in the early hours of the morning. Once inside the building they had none of the required paperwork but still chucked everyone out, with the support of the police present.

It was a pretty grim scene when I arrived, people stood on the street with all their stuff and meatheads already getting to work boarding up doors and windows. But then bright spark had the idea of climbing in through the roof, and within the hour the squatters were back in possession of at least one of the buildings.

Perhaps having realised there was actually no legal basis for the eviction, the police were on their way back to the station shortly after this having made no arrests.

So a small victory for the RampArt collective, even if some have been left displaced and basically homeless by today’s actions. There are a lot of questions thrown up by this eviction attempt. Who started the fire early this morning? Is this an isolated incident or part of a greater plan to ‘clean out’ London’s squats in preparation for the G20 conference? What can you do when the police are complicit in breaking the law?

I don’t pretend to know the answers to these questions, one thing I do know for sure though is that even if they do manage to kick the RampArt bunch out of Rampart Street they’ll just regroup and pop up someplace else, our work is never over.

The thing is part of me really wants to love the police. They have a difficult job and everyone hates them, they have to look at a bunch murder scenes n stuff and “someones gotta keep all them murdurs and peedofiles off the streets like”, not to mention scum like Lord Black and Jeffrey Archer.

Most of the cops I’ve had the (mis)fortune of dealing with have been sound enough individuals, with a few notable exceptions, and mostly we get along just swell. Which isn’t so weird, we’re all people and so forth, it’s just that these guys are the foot-soldiers of a cancerous evil empire.

But they make it pretty difficult with their constant messing about and harassing people who are trying their best to adhere to the petty laws and restrictions placed on them.

I can deal with the twice-weekly stop and search and the random rollie sniffing, that’s my own problem. Maybe with a new haircut and a few extra showers these encounters could be avoided.

However in the cases of today’s attempted illegal eviction of the RampArt social centre and the ridiculous policing at last summers Climate Camp, of which the findings of a recent investigation were released today, those involved were doing everything possible by the book.

If you’re going to squat a building, and even more so if organising a large-scale demonstration like the Climate Camp, you probably know a bit about the laws of the land in which you do it. People have to jump through so many hoops these days for the right to protest and live in autonomous spaces, you’d think the least the authorities could do is respect that and not behave in an illegal manner.

Of course these isolated incidents are all a part of a greater strategy, an agenda not set by the police on the streets and at the demo’s but by those guys in the offices with their suits and fat bonuses. It’s in their interest for activists to feel vulnerable and powerless, to be constantly reminded of the instability of our situation and that any time they please we could be out on the streets. It’s a concerted attempt to stifle all forms of resistance and it’s the duty of everyone to do all we can and stand up to it.

blah rant over
the blog Police State Britain is full of more in-depth and detailed examples of why one should always reserve no love for cops.

The wildcat ‘British Jobs for British Workers’ strikes which took place at the beginning of Febuary were widely publicised in the media as racist demonstrations, run by the BNP and attended mostly by far-right thugs. When I first saw the strikes on the news, as a lefty born from immigrant stock, my initial reaction was one of disgust followed closely by dismissal of the strikers and the motives behind their industrial action.

Keeping this in mind, I was suprised to come accross this article on Indymedia, which got me interested in looking a little deeper into the situation and issues surrounding it.

Of course the politics surrounding the strikes are ‘complicated’, and a quick browse of the many message boards and facebook groups concerning ‘british jobs for british workers’ reveals some very nasty and ignorant xenophobic rantings. However, i think the way this racist angle has been emphasised, and how the strikes were portrayed on the whole in the media is very interesting and a little unsettling.

Firstly a few points about the strikes themselves. These are not strikes which were organized to protest against all foreign workers coming to England and ‘stealing our jobs’. They are strikes around specific contracts, whereby foreign companies ship in whole gangs of workers from overseas, giving the British workers (and this includes foreigners who are permanent residents of the UK) no opportunity to apply for the jobs. They do this because they can pay these workers less and house them in sub-standard conditions, such as in portacabins or on barges. It’s quite blatantly an unfair and exploitative practice which should be protested against. The strikes were not organized by the BNP and at strikes in Staythorpe and Immingham the police were called to eject them from the picket line. The organisers emphasise that the strikes were not about racism and it’s been reported that foreign workers have joined in in some places, but the average person glancing at the front page of a newspaper wouldn’t be aware of these things.

Of course if you want to deter racist elements unfurling the union jack and waving placards with ‘Britih Jobs for British Workers’ all over the place is possibly not the best way to go about it. But if you’ll indulge me a little conspiracy theorizing it seems quite conveniant for the powers that be that some of the biggest industrial unrest since the miners’ strike, with walkouts nationwide in crucial industries such as construction and at power plants, should be presented as the handywork of a small minority of racist thugs. This racist angle will have put off many people, both left-wing and conservatives, who might well have otherwise lent there support to the strikes and caused the movement to lose momentum. Of course no-one can support strikes organised by he BNP, but the majority of these weren’t. Had these strikers gained the popular support of the country much could been achieved for the rights of workers, both British and from overseas, which is not what those in power want to happen.

Check out this video to see how the BBC has used selective editting to misrepresent the view of one striking worker. In the uneditted interview he clearly says “we can’t work alongside them. It’s segregated – they’re coming in in full companies.” Which is referencing the contracts mentioned above. The last sentence was editted out for a BBC News broadcast, making it seem as if the man is simply stating that he doesn’t want to work with foreign people and making him appear racist. This sort of thing is eerily similar to the BBC’s actions during the miners’ strike when they re-editted footage of police storming picket lines to make it look as if the police themselves were being attacked.

I am aware that this is mostly speculation on my part, but it’s all another reminder that in a world where political leaders require Rupert Murdoch’s suport to get into power you should never take the media at face value, as there are always backs being scratched in both directions.

see also: this article by Padrag Reidy about the BBC editting fiasco and why the media likes to paint the British working class as racists.

My own thoughts on this ‘summer of rage’ business coming soon.