UK Newswire Archive
Solidarity with Afghanistan War Refusenik Michael Lyons - Colchester Prison
11-08-2011 14:00
YOUTUBE Speaking Outside Colchester Military Prison - Ciaron O'Reilly from Giuseppe Conlon House/ Catholic Worker, Naomi from "UK Friends of Bradley Manning", Katrina recites a poem, Ben Griffin Afghanistan/Iraq combt veteran "Veterans for Peace", Jill Harris Michael Lyon's mother, Fr. Martin Newell Giuseppe Conlon House , Giorgio Riva Payday
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vxazNPBw8oo
Vandalism to back of Victoria Centre
11-08-2011 13:55
Initial damage to the back of the Victoria Centre and sports shop.
In common with Nottingham Post pictures and footage on BBC i fancied taking this picture .... however, this hassled photographer given a hard time by these guys. So, I did them as well
London Riots: Life in the Rolling War Zone
11-08-2011 13:55
London is on edge, twitchy; a tense atmosphere pervades the city, in the office, on the train, on the streets. The crowds have thinned, people scuttle to and from work, before the darkness descends; shopkeepers stand outside and keep an eye on the situation on the street, while nervous rumours spread, conversation can't keep off the topic, and for the moment at least, London has lost its haughty smugness. Instead, there hangs a heavy atmosphere, perhaps even reflective, as the consequences of the great engine of power's greed and corruption comes back to haunt it. But, at least we haven't heard about the Olympics for a while.
The Met's murder of Mark Duggan last week, and the subsequent attack on a peaceful demonstrator at the vigil, has caused a wildfire – hotter and more vicious than could ever be predicted - that has spread across the capital and beyond; the untouchable Met – responsible for the murders of Ian Tomlinson, Smiley Culture and so many others – are at last getting some comeuppance, having been protected so far by the not-so-independent IPCC. But there is little pleasure in this for most, because people are scared: will I get home tonight, will I be robbed or attacked, why can't all this be over? But maybe we citizens of London are at last coming face to face with what it must be like to live on a bad estate, or even a war zone, faced with the reality that the City forces on to others, in other places, far from view.
The media has up built up a hysterical frenzy, the politicians are back from hols (hope it was lovely), the police are overstretched, the spin doctors coining terms like “criminality”, and now the right-wing Breiviks of the EDL, NF and BNP are declaring themselves guardian protectors of the community. Last night these right-wing fascists threatened to march from Eltham to Lewisham, in Southeast London to spark a full-scale race war (bringing back memories of the 1970's New Cross Fire and the Battle of Lewisham), while the BBC declared that it wasn't covering the event because it “didn't want to encourage rioters” (rather hypocritical since its covering the riots in Eltham tonight). Londoners are stuck between a rock and a hard place – do you get into bed with the distasteful authoritarians and disciplinarians, or face the wrath of the unsettled hornets' nest of youth? We shouldn't have to be faced with this simple choice, so calculated and engineered, the old lesser-of-two-evils trick (eg Labour vs Conservative) that maintains the “elected oligarchy”.
But already people are finding ways to come together to combat threats to small businesses and local streets by forming self-defence units, which the Met has called “vigilantes”, no doubt afraid that their monopoly on community safety will be challenged. These have generally been formed where there already exists a traditional community, whether ethnic or organic (ie built up over time), while the rest of the city locks themselves behind doors trapped by their isolated individualism. Other outcomes have been street cleaning groups and donation centres, where those who have lost their homes in the riots can pick up donated goods; Londoners have sought to direct their fear into positive actions, into mutual aid (a bedrock of anarchism), instead of internalising it into the racial hatred, bigotry and hysteria of the Daily Mail reader.
Regarding the rioters and looters, there seems a cross-section of characteristics, from the polite and helpful (seen in a number on Indy articles, such as those warning others to watch out for their possessions) to the more shark-like (or the fashionable word at the moment, “feral”), who would attack or steal anything from anyone. While the media and bigots would have us believe they are all former, it cannot be doubted that there is a range; nevertheless, if people are to have solidarity with the rioters, then the attacks on small businesses, public transport, homes, cyclists and people must end. There need to be clear ground-rules that these must never be targets, and some sort of code within the rioters themselves that such acts will be prevented or punished. Secondly, attacks on our local areas, which are generally shit-holes anyway, need to stop; sure, they are easy targets but the real wealth of the corrupt oligarchs of West London, the City boys in the Docklands, and all the white-collar criminals in London have remained untouched. If you want people to stand behind you, to cheer you on, and get real loot into the bargain, then these are targets more worthy of the rioters' brilliantly effective tactics.
If these actions are to move beyond the spectacular and become a movement for social justice, for more than just harsher repression after the fires have died away, then rioters need to work more intelligently. By reassuring Londoners that they are not, and will not, be victims of attack, is a start; you will need everyone's solidarity afterwards. By choosing your targets cleverly – like the large supermarkets (Tesco, Sainsburys) who undercut small farmers and local businesses, banks and money shops who steal from us all daily, large retailers who use sweat-shop labour, and so on – the riots become “political” (ie with purpose), which commentators can't dismiss as “mindless” (ie in anger).
Let us hope this becomes something more, something liberatory and not just a flash in the pan, followed by severe repression. Good luck, stay safe and all power to the streets.
Riot Special: The Circled A Radio show with ALARM
11-08-2011 08:17
Over 1,000 Arrested in U.K. as Anger over Inequality, Racism Boils Over
11-08-2011 07:33
Unrest continues to spread across England after protests erupted Saturday in London when police shot to death Mark Duggan, a 29-year-old black man. Mobs firebombed police stations and set shops on fire in London, Manchester, Salford, Liverpool, Nottingham and Birmingham. After waiting for several days, Prime Minister David Cameron has cut short his vacation and recalled Parliament from summer recess. Scotland Yard has ordered its officers to deploy every available force to stop the unrest, including water cannons and possibly the use of plastic bullets. London has been flooded with 16,000 officers, the largest police presence in the city’s history. We go to London to speak with journalist Darcus Howe, a longtime critic of police brutality in black and West Indian communities across the U.K., and author and blogger Richard Seymour of the popular British site "Lenin’s Tomb." "There is a mass insurrection. And I’m not talking about rioting; I’m talking about an insurrection that comes from the depths of society, from the consciousness, collectively, of the young blacks and whites, but overwhelmingly black, as a result of the consistent stopping and searching young blacks without cause," says Howe of the uprising. Seymour notes that anti-terror legislation has led to an unprecedented number of stops, predominantly of youth of color, but protests against the stops have been largely ignored by the British media. "A political establishment, a media, and a state system that gives people…the impression that they won’t be listened to, unless they force themselves onto your attention, is going to lead to riots," says Seymour.An open letter to David Cameron's parents
11-08-2011 07:27
Dear Mr & Mrs Cameron,Why did you never take the time to teach your child basic morality?
Solidarity from greece to england 's revolution fighters
11-08-2011 05:54
Solidarity demonstrationRestrictions in legal aid creates criminals
11-08-2011 05:11
legal aid is fundamental to justicelooting in london
11-08-2011 00:55
this side or the other
do you find more disgusting to steal a mobile or to buy it with half your wage?
to rob a betting agency or to bet your savings in it?
to see a police car burning or to see it patrolling?
if you chose the first ones, you're politicians
otherwise, you're human beings
On the Insurrection
10-08-2011 22:55
Thoughts on the ongoing insurrection in the UK
The ongoing riots in England are profoundly political. They erupted at a time when representative democracy and the system of the market economy have reached an all-time low level of credibility among the people. The consecutive years that New Labour has spent in power has proved that no left-wing alternative exists within the political system, because the system itself has succumbed to an inescapable general shift to the extreme right and towards notions and concepts of dictatorial government for the sole benefit of the economic elites. Voters tried to punish Labour by reinstating the Torries in government, mitigating their innate antisocial proclivities by forcing them to enter into a coalition government with the Liberal Democrats. Soon they realized the magnitude of their blunder when the new "coalition" announced plans to curtail public spending, to dismantle much needed state welfare services and to increase tuition fees in universities. Given the uneven distribution of wealth and the monstrous inequality that prevails in contemporary UK society, reduction of public spending in the form of imposing cuts in unemployment benefits, downgrading the national health-care system, withdrawing public funds from education, etc, effectively means a virtual freeze on the process of social mobility, the ever-greater concentration of income and wealth in the hands of a privileged minority and the growing inability of the disenfranchised majority of the population even to meet its basic material needs. The violence that erupted during the massive student demonstrations a few months ago was only a warning of greater disturbances to come, since no institutional mechanisms exist within the political system allowing the disenfranchised sections of the population, not only to express their opposition to antisocial measures, but more importantly to resist and avert their implementation by the elites. The general strike of public sector workers was another clear sign of alienation and the growing rift between the political and economic elites on the one side, and the bulk of British society on the other. An even more disturbing sign was the complete indifference with which the coalition government treated the industrial action of the civil servants, the smearing campaign it launched against them and the violent repression and brutalization of demonstrators (remember Jody McIntyre) exercised without any remorse or moral reserve by a police force which has come increasingly to resemble a band of thugs. The English political and economic elite knows that having lost its legitimacy and being unable to rule by means of ideological coercion, it has to rely increasingly on brute force and ruthless police measures in order to impose its will on the deprived underclass of British society. The killing of Ian Tomlinson during the G20 protests, the shameful maltreatment of Jody McIntyre by police thugs were only the sad precursors of the shooting of Mark Duggan. And this is the reason why an impartial investigation of Mark Duggan's murder by the authorities is out of the question. The system needs its apparatus of organized repression intact and has to keep the morale of the security forces high, for the police and the security services are the cornerstone institutions for the consolidation of the emerging British police state. The underclass has grasped this new reality since they are at the receiving end of the policies of victimization against underprivileged social groups implemented by the systemic elites. They attacked police stations and petrol-bombed police cars, because they reject the dominance of a ruling class which attempts to impose social conformity and subjugate them by brute force. The forced expropriation of goods and products by the rebellious masses (what the systemic media calls «looting») points to the class-nature of the insurrection, since the looters can be said to be acting on the impulse of amassing (in these conditions of a complete breakdown of authority) all those goods and products they will never be able to obtain in the course of their everyday lives. Under this light, the violence and plight of department stores and businesses is hardly an irrational action. Also, we should not be surprised that mass violence is the chosen method of political intervention selected by the insurrectionists of marginalized working-class areas in every major English city. Most of them are unemployed. They do not belong to the general organized workforce and consequently they do not possess the institutional means to embark on collective action, for example, by means of a strike movement. Uprisings, sabotage and violent insurrection are the political tools utilized by the marginalized sectors of society and the unemployed so as to resist the onslaught of plutocracy and globalization. In that sense, it is effectively an action of self-defence, a counter-violence aimed against the structural violence which is embedded in a hierarchical social system, which functions through the unequal distribution of all forms of power (political, economic, cultural) among those at the top of the social pyramid and those at the bottom. The total absence of race as a determining factor in the riots and the spontaneous elimination of ethnic divisions in the process of forming a singular insurrectionary social subject engaged in common action, albeit decentralized and dispersed, is an encouraging sign that the ethnic elements falsely dominating the self-perception of the British underclass are fast disappearing opening the way to the notion that there is only one class enemy: capitalism and the system of internationalized market economy.
Manchester Riots - 9th August
10-08-2011 21:55
Greater Manchester Police arrested 113 people overnight on Tuesday 9th August
as thousands of youths ransacked shops, attacked officers and torched cars in the city centre.
Mr Stringer, Labour MP for Blackley & Broughton, said he believed the chief constable of Greater Manchester Police "has a lot to answer for".
"It was known that this was coming to Salford and Manchester, and now shops have been looted and set on fire
"The police knew it was coming. It was co-ordinated and organised by well-known criminals and gangsters.
"A lot more people should have been arrested for inciting this kind of behaviour."
"There were occasions where the crowds were so large and so violent that it would have been unsafe to deploy a handful of officers into those situations."
Meanwhile, hundreds of people joined council staff and business owners in a clean-up operation across the city centre, sweeping up broken glass and wreckage from the devastation caused the night before.
Ed Miliband, Leader of the Labour Party and Leader of the Opposition toured the city centre today speaking with council leaders, the police and local business owners.
All Images © Stillshooter 2011. More at: http://stillshooter.photoshelter.com
An eyewitness perspective on the riots in Salford and Manchester
10-08-2011 20:26
Hearing so many conflicting accounts and theories about the nature and motives behind the London riots, when things kicked off in Salford and Manchester, we decided we'd better go to go into town and see first hand what was going on. Most importantly, we wanted to get a sense of who was on the streets and what they were about.The 50th anniversary of dioxin spraying in Vietnam & H.R. 2634
10-08-2011 20:12
August 10, 2011 marks the 50th anniversary of the spraying of toxic herbicides (Agent Orange) on Vietnam by US Forces. The global detrimental effects of dioxin exposure over the last 5 decades have been documented and exhibited by veterans, civilians, their families, and activists. A new bill presented by Democratic house representative Bob Filner would establish assistance and acknowledgment for the horrendous social injustice that has been largely ignored for the past 5 decades.England's 'riots': When governments put shit in one end no one should be surprised when it comes out the other
10-08-2011 19:17
“Look Mick when governments put shit in one end no one should be surprised when it comes out the other end.”