UK Newswire Archive
Trade Unionists march against the cuts in Portsmouth
02-11-2010 21:58
On sunday 100-200 protestors marched through Portsmouth to protest about the cuts.Suspicion of holding or owning a firearm..
02-11-2010 20:58
We no longer have the freedom of speech:EUS liquidated, GRV, Roxy and The Forest to be sold
02-11-2010 20:22
The Edinburgh University Settlement, the charity owning the buildings housing Edinburgh cultural institutions such as The Forest, The GRV and The Roxy, filed for bankruptcy last week on 27th October 2010, allegedly with debts of up to £4 million. This means all their property will both be sold off pronto.
UK government to impose Orwellian-style surveillance
02-11-2010 20:01
The Conservative/Liberal Democrat coalition is pushing ahead with plans to allow Britain’s security services and police to spy on the activities of every citizen who uses a phone or the Internet. The secret services and police will have unlimited powers to track every single phone call, email, text message and website visit made by anybody in the UK.Nuclear Pyrotechnics
02-11-2010 19:23
Whitehaven CID rang up a home address last week to ask if Cumbria anti nuclear groups were planning large protests at Sellafield. Thought for the day was "chance would be a fine thing!"
Protest outside Vodafone, 2pm Saturday 6 November,
02-11-2010 18:25
Notts SOS have called a protest outside Vodafone over their huge unpaid tax bill. protestors will gather outside the store on Clumber Street in the City centre at 2pm to say that business should pay tax too.
If they paid what they owe many thousands of jobs could be saved, services wouldn't be cut, housing benefit could be extended not slashed. Dozens of such protests have taken place across the coutry and more are planned this weekend. If you are coming, go to our Facebook event page and take a moment to invite your frineds and family. the more people we can get on the demo the more successful it will be, and it raises the profile of Notts SOS and our demo on 20 November.
This is one of the first direct actions against the cuts in Notts. Let's make it a big one!
Afghan Voice Forum 21/11/2010 Brighton
02-11-2010 18:05
Palestine Today 11 02 2010
02-11-2010 17:54
Gay marriage bid rejected
02-11-2010 17:42
Lesbian couple will now take legal actionGay marriage ban violates Human Rights Act, they say
‘Equal Love’ campaign seeks gay marriages & straight civil partnerships
London, UK – 2 November 2010
Friend or Food Campaign Launch
02-11-2010 17:25
Animal Aid launched their Friend or Food tour for Vegan Month, featuring a recently refurbished Veggies Trailer, decorated as a spoof organic and free-range dog meat catering trailer, at various Nottingham locations on Tuesday 2nd November.
Well done to all the Veggies, Nottm AR and vegan campaign crew for their help with a ‘dress rehersal' at Clinton Street Market - the original location of Veggies Catering Stall from 1985 - 2002!
From here we rolled around to the nearby McDonalds on Clumber Street. From there it was another opportuntity to roll on down the hightway for the official campaign launch at 12 Noon right by the Council House on the Old Market Square.
Having been denied the opportunity to host the 7th East Midlands Vegan Festival at the Council House, it was appropriate to take it to the streets.
Once we had practiced the patter, the feedback ranged from bemusement to shock.
Apologies are due to the woman who was in tears, before we explained that it was all in the best possible taste - ie intended to draw comparisons between the animals who we pet and those who we eat. Pigs are as intelligent as dogs, and like dogs have only one thing precious to them - their right to life.
It was initially difficult to find the right ‘line', so we were very pleased to have had the ‘dress rehersal'.
When inviting people "try a free sample of Dog Meat" people were often confused and walked away, and those that did stop struggled with the concept. If they were willing to talk it through though, they eventually ‘got it' and were generally quite supportive.
Another approach was to say that we were interested to know if people prefered pork or beef, claim the dog meat to be as tasty as pig meat and get straight to the point - pigs are as intelligent as dogs, and value their lives just as much.
One lady, who eats ‘little meat' but cooks it for her familiy, ended up challenging her own daughter to carefully read the displays and herself talked through the issues involved. The daughter's response "my god, what will they be serving next" was very pertinent as the City Council often invite an ‘exotic meat' farm to cater on the exact same spot. If people are bored by pig or cow meat, and want to try Ostrich, Kangaroo, Crocodile or Wild Boar, then why not Dog!
Can you help with our future campaigns?
Visit http://www.veggies.org.uk, email info@veggies.org.uk or call 07870 861837
Free Consensus Decision Making training
02-11-2010 17:22
at Kebele this Saturday & intro for new volunteers2 free workshops this Saturday at Kebele Social Centre, 14 Robertson Road, Easton, BS5 6JY.
Open to All.
2.30-4.00 An introduction to Kebele Social Centre, how to get involved. Including history, cafe practicalities and how we work. For new volunteers or just the curious!
4.30-6.00 Consensus Decision Making. Why use it? What’s it all about? How can it make our meetings much better and a reflection of the world we want to see? An introduction to the politics and practicalities of effective consensus decision making.
If you would like to attend one or both of the workshops please drop us an email at kebelesocialcentre@riseup.net or just come to cafe at Kebele on Saturday from 11 for brunch.
This training will be repeated over the coming months so if you can't make this one there will be another on Saturday 11th December
Horfield inmates get the vote! - nearly
02-11-2010 17:22
At last prisoners might finally be given the vote.Five years after fudging and delaying the issue the British government has been defeated and has to give prisoners the right to vote.
If the inmates of Horfield had been allowed to vote for a candidate in the area that they live before being placed in custody the election outcome may have been different.
Though the government is still attempting to withhold this human right by dreaming up sanctions such as those sentenced to a certain amount of time will fore fit this right.
Instead of including prisoners in our community and working towards people with a greater stake in how are communities are run the state continues to try and alienate them.
What are our politicians afraid of? If any get to hear of this article maybe they’d care to contribute/
In the meantime – Wahoo!!!
Imc London Animation
02-11-2010 16:22
After improving the video encoder, Imc London is planning to re-encode all videos, which will highly improve the viwing experience. This is a draft for a short clip to be put at the end of videos on Imc London. If you have any comments, please use the additions for feedback.
A Bristol take on our financial state
02-11-2010 16:22
The legacies of Mrs Thatcher have been debated recently on the newswire. As part of this debate, @Boyd gave a fine analysis of our current financial state. His comment, entitled "Worse than Vermin", gives an alternative context to our current "age of austerity"...
He begins by responding to this assertion...:
People who complain about temporary unemployment or social spending cuts forget that the false boom of Blair and Brown is akin to the economic disaster that was Wilson and Callaghan.
Nice try, but you need to widen your reading beyond the Daily Mail and Telegraph. Treasury spending increased by nearly 50,000% in 2008, with £85 billion spent on bank recapitalisation, the same amount as the cuts announced in the Spending Review. Before the recession caused by the bank crisis, the UK National Debt was lower than when Labour came to power in 1997.
Social spending is damaging if it leads to runaway deficitsIt didn't. And what you call 'social spending' i call the necessary infrastructure that keeps this society from collapsing into Total Capitalism, and the banking industry has shown what happens when you leave things up to the markets.
£1.5 billion is estimated to be lost in benefit fraud every year. £2.7 billion is lost to corporate tax fraud, and billions more in avoidance because of the loopholes in laws created by your dear grocer's daughter.
Instead of trying to spin Mrs Thatcher's successes as failures, people should instead be looking closely at the covert way that New Labour undermined them.It would have to be very covert, because even Blair himself ended up calling himself a Thatcherite. If Blair was a commie, why did he not repeal ANY of the draconian Thatcherite anti-union laws, that mean that strikes are almost unwinnable today, and end up denying workers the right to withold their labour as a form of protest? Taff Vale is with us again - like 100 years of class war never happened.
Manipulation of employment figures by creating public sector "jobs" is pointless if people are subsidised to stay in work doing next to nothing.The only reason that benefits are higher than wages is because wages are so low, they fall below the minimum threshold that could support a family. Wages in real terms are lower now than they were in the 1970's. The average household has to rely on debt or benefits to help bridge the gap. I assume you would rather the level of £1 trillion of personal debt in this country was increasing?
Your grocer's daughter destroyed the fabric of community that used to support people, that used to support the vulnerable and the infirm, who know have to rely on council and state aid. She created this society where no one knows their neighbours, and crime is faceless and goes unpunished. And the most disgusting thing is she did it deliberately, just like the Tories are now using the 'shock' of the bank bailout to implement another Thatcherite war on the poor.
FIGHT THE CUTS!
MAKE THE RICH PAY!
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November Autonomist Out Now!
02-11-2010 16:22
Available online from our blog, or at your local autonomous space!http://bristolautonomist.blogspot.com/
Is climate science disinformation a crime against humanity?
02-11-2010 15:22
Climate change and flooding is already affecting countries such as Bangladesh.Bristol’s carbon footprint is around 2.3 million tonnes CO2 per year or 6 tonnes per capita. The major sources are energy use in homes (37%), industrial and commercial energy use (35%) and road transport (18%).
Is climate science disinformation a crime against humanity?
We may not have a word for this type of crime yet, but the international community should find a way of classifying extraordinarily irresponsible scientific claims that could lead to mass suffering as some type of crime against humanity.
Although there is an important role for scepticism in science, for almost 30 years some corporations have supported a disinformation campaign about climate change science.
While it may be reasonable to be somewhat sceptical about climate change models, these untruths are not based upon reasonable scepticism but outright falsification and distortions of climate change science.
These claims have included assertions that the science of climate change has been completely "debunked" and that there is no evidence of human causation of recent observed warming. There are numerous lines of evidence that point to human causation even if it is not a completely settled matter. Reasonable scepticism cannot claim that there is no evidence of causation and some other claims frequently being made by the well-financed climate change disinformation campaign, and they amount to an utter distortion of a body of evidence that the world needs to understand to protect itself from huge potential harms.
On 21 October, 2010, John Broder of the New York Times, reported that "the fossil fuel industries have for decades waged a concerted campaign to raise doubts about the science of global warming and to undermine policies devised to address it".
According the New York Times article, the fossil fuel industry has "created and lavishly financed institutes to produce anti-global warming studies, paid for rallies and websites to question the science, and generated scores of economic analyses that purport to show that policies to reduce emissions of climate-altering gases will have a devastating effect on jobs and the overall economy."
Disinformation about the state of climate change science is extraordinarily – if not criminally – irresponsible, because the consensus scientific view is based upon strong evidence that climate change:
• Is already being experienced by tens of thousands in the world;
• Will be experienced in the future by millions of people from greenhouse gas emissions that have already been emitted but not yet felt due to lags in the climate system; and,
• Will increase dramatically in the future unless greenhouse gas emissions are dramatically reduced from existing global emissions levels.
Threats from climate change include deaths and danger from droughts, floods, heat, storm-related damages, rising oceans, heat impacts on agriculture, loss of animals that are dependent upon for substance purposes, social disputes caused by diminishing resources, sickness from a variety of diseases, the inability to rely upon traditional sources of food, the inability to use property that people depend upon to conduct their life including houses or sleds in cold places, the destruction of water supplies, and the inability to live where has lived to sustain life. The very existence of some small island nations is threatened by climate change.
As long as there is any chance that climate change could create this type of destruction, even assuming, for the sake of argument, that these dangers are not yet fully proven, disinformation about the state of climate change science is extraordinarily morally reprehensible if it leads to non-action in reducing climate change's threat. In fact, how to deal with uncertainty in climate change science is an ethical issue, not only a scientific matter, because the consequences of delay could be so severe and the poorest people in the world as some of the most vulnerable.
The corporations that have funded the sowing of doubt on this issue are clearly doing this because they see greenhouse gas emissions reduction strategies as adversely affecting their financial interests.
This might be understood as a new type of crime against humanity. Scepticism in science is not bad, but sceptics must play by the rules of science including publishing their conclusions in peer-reviewed scientific journals and not make claims that are not substantiated by the peer-reviewed literature. The need for responsible scepticism is particularly urgent if misinformation from sceptics could lead to great harm.
We may not have a word for this type of crime yet, but the international community should find a way of classifying extraordinarily irresponsible scientific claims that could lead to mass suffering as some type of crime against humanity.
Future Survivor
02-11-2010 14:29
Mental Health Campaigners’ Speech Get Workers Support On Social Welfare Cuts
Bookfair 2010 - Counter/Mapping Queen Mary Uni.
02-11-2010 14:22
To begin by asking ‘what is the university’ requires an investigation of the function of the university not only as a knowledge factory but also as a border. Our investigation of what the university produces as knowledge, hierarchies and power exposes the border/s that operate in, on and around the university. That ‘the university is a border’ is made possible by the operation of a filter mechanism. The counting of bodies, money in and money out, who can and can not enter, what are we when we leave, the limits of what is and is not knowledge and the complicity with national and global border regimes – who and what is stopped at the border?
A group of students, staff and researchers at Queen Mary University have set out to map the ways in which migration, border technologies, surveillance and monetary flows intersect with the university as our place of work and study.
Second successful night of strike action by FBU
02-11-2010 14:22
Last night was the second 8 hour strike by firefighters to defend their jobs. Strong picket lines have managed to disrupt the attempts to break the strike by Assetco, a company hired in to break the strike.
In Old Street firefighters barricaded their fire stations and chained station doors to prevent them being taken over by Assetco. In Southwark a firefighter was run down by a scab fire truck.
The London Fire and Emergency Planning Authority (LFEPA) has threatened to unilaterally impose new terms and conditions, specifically a new shift pattern, and has said that any of the 5,500 London fire fighters not willing to sign up to them will be sacked.
The next strike will be on Friday 5th, with the media screaming that this exposes the public to danger, a falsehood as the firefighters have stated clearly that they will still attend life threatening fires.
One striking firefighter stated: "If there's a fire, we're going to go and have a look. If it's a warehouse with no one inside, we'll let it burn down. If there's a life at risk, you'd have a job to do to stop everyone here going to sort it out. That's why we joined."
Assetco was originally proposing to run one fire engine each out of 27 stations. The strength of picketing has evidently made either the scabs or their employer feel uncomfortable, so they've changed the plan. Instead, three engines are being run out of each of nine stations: Shoreditch (Old St), Wembley, East Ham, Wandsworth, Old Kent Road, Croydon, Hillingdon and Hammersmith.
See Ian Lehair, of the London Fire Brigade Union speaking at the start of the anti-cuts march to the TUC in london, October 23rd
For more background on the strike and Assetco see: The Commune