.......... what have we here?

Anarchists who support the State, authority, hierarchical structures and 93k coppers.

It's a fair cop, guvnor!

Why are 'anarchists' in Brixton wasting time campaigning for some cop ( tool of the state etc) - surely anarchists are against authority ?
Wouldn't you be better off doing something useful , you could put your energies into stopping war, racism, capitalism...there's a lot going on in the world and in Brixton.
There's a march on Saturday of The United Families and Friends Campaign, a coalition of the families of those who have died in custody.
'Sat 26th October 1pm Rally Trafalgar Square, Silent Procession along Whitehall followed by Noisy Protest at Downing Street!
All welcome, please wear black - bring your groups banner but no placards please.'
You might want to ask your mate Paddick about the 100's of deaths in police custody (+ prisons/psychiatric hospitals), institutionalised and often racist killings that the police get away with.
Brixton police like everywhere else are totally unaccountable to the community and it's a joke that "anarchists" are sucking up to Commander Paddick.

these people are clearly not anarchists. Liberals more like.

Of course, all sorts of nutters can call themselves "anarchists", can't they? But I'm not impressed. It's just the usual radical liberal shite that we've all seen many times before.

Thank Bakunin for the Anarchist Federation, I say! We won't tolerate all that soft-cop lovin' muck for one minute.

anarchists do not support anything to do with the police and their state paymasters. unfortunately a few drug addled london centric dickheads are out on their own. So what's new then? Sounds like the swp story.

defy and destroy the war effort in your own way.

The main reason that anarchists have supported Brian Paddick is because of his approach to policing in Brixton. He has actually listened to the problems of local people in Brixton and their concerns unlike other police chiefs. He also introduced a policy of not arrested people for posession of small amounts of cannabisfor personal use which freed up more police time to deal with real problems that the poeple of Brixton want dealing with like street crime which for the first time ever showed a fall.

Below is the urban75 thread about the public meeting in support of brian Paddick.

I'm an anarchist. I live in Brixton. A lot of us marched with the families and friends of the three Black kids Paddicks cops killed in a four month period so he set the
TSG on us....
Some people can't tell the difference between the Green Party- who as far as I can gather pretty much run Urban75 -and anarchists.
Ie who put this story up?

Harlequin, fuck of with your bullshit. Your acceptance of the descripton 'anarchist' used to describe supporters of Paddick, is either based on ignorance about what anarchism actually is about, or is just intended (more likely) to make us look as twatty as your trot and reformist chums.

How loud do we have to shout it?

ANARCHISTS DO NOT SUPPORT FILTH LIKE PADDICK! AND ANYONE WHO DOES IS CLEARLY NOT AN ANARCHIST!

............. not cosying up to rich coppers who went to Oxford, and think that it is "leadership" that will solve the problems in Brixton!

Are any of the people on the thread you posted up Anarchists? Or did you just think that as it was Indymedia, a claim that "anarchists" support this would get you bodies from this readership?

Do you really think that using ploys like this will help to re-instate the man who was chief copper in Brixton when 3 men died at the hands of "his" agents?

I spent five years of my life in London´s Lambeth borough.
For over two years I lived in occupied housing.
I remember looking many times at Brixton Police station from the windows of Canterbury Crescent contemplating the social / community status of the boys and girls within.

Brixton was different then, like loads of other places.
The Railton Road and Landsdor Road occupations and resistance inspired many and left not un counted veterans some of whom made the long journey into exile to amongst othjer places Barcelona. 13000 more squatters lived in the borough 5 years ago than today. The process of speculation which previously had altered Dublin and other cities irreversabily had not yet changed the character of Brixton, other cities are noticably following that course now.

I do my best in my writing and activism to widen the appeal of anarchic beliefs and philosophy. The same for anarcho-ecology and anarcho-sydicalism, much of the formative years of my own personal political development as regards co-operation with "non-anarcho-community elements" occured in Lambeth borough.

If anarchists in present day Brixton want to see a police officer reinstated, that at frist seems rediculous to other anarchists who most probably are thinking "is this man a comrade?
is he vital to the development of an "anarcho-syndicalist community collective ethical consensus"?

Or is the fact that he took drugs considered a "good thing"?

People died in custody in Lambeth when I lived there.
Squats were closed in Lambeth when I lived there.
People died of drug overdoses when I lived in Lambeth.
People saw themselves subjected by wider social negligence to disgusting self-degradation.

If anarchists today in either Brixton or elsewhere are even a little bit like myself they udnerstand what is meant by "autonomy begins with self".
Application of that neat self-referential sentance means that on occassion Anarchists may individully wish to see certain personel in key roles as regards others.
But if an Anarchists chooses to stop eating meat it is not an application of anarchists philosophy or politics.
The Anarchist vegetarian is a vegetarian...

I and many others are noticing in recent years the heightened use by "quasi-neo-liberal" elements of "anarcho-jargon".
This was an expected part of the widening anti-hyper-capitalist movement.

It galls some of us on many ocassion but there you go.
If those "anarchists" succeed in improving the key areas of community concern in Lambeth for those who now live there and spend just as much effort and energy on other "more worthy" articulations of "anarchism" then I suppose I shan´t be marching back to Brixton with the black flag of autonomy just yet...

The blue block play an important role though never forget we don´t like them nor do we need them. However we have much work to do before we can forget them forever.
I have repeatedly argued that Anarchists at the beginning of the twentieth century need to "fellow travel" a while with elements that they may find repugnant, as we have seen in the recent Irish referendum campaigns.
Anarchy and Autonomy for anarchists generally only occurs with open democratic state structures in the background.
That is not to say that they are co-related or co-dependent, certainly part of the "democratic contract" is protest and anarchic criticism but it is more to say that Anarchists have never been afforded voice nor life in totalitarian regimes.

That´s all.

Paddick has achieved a lot in Brixton, he has not only reduced street crime in the area but done a lot to improve police / community relations over the years, as has been shown by the large amount of support he is now getting from local Brixton residents who want his reinstatment.

He has rejected calls for the met police to be armed with plastic bullets and CS gas. He has also said one more than one occassion that he agrees with a lot of the principles of anarchism that crime is largley caused by how modern society is run and has said that he does not believe that cannabis is harmful or should be a priority in the fight against crime. Paddick is no ordinary police commander he is one that believes in serving the community that he polices not just enforcing the rule of law.

Paddick also does not have any control over the Tactical Support Group. The TSG is not under the control of local borough police chiefs but is a london wide organisation attached to the met, which is only called out for backup in emergencies.

Local Brixton anarchists do support Paddick mainly because of his drugs policy which led to a national down grading of Cannabis and a national policy of only cautioning people in possesion of the drug. People who were involved in the now closed 121 anarchist centre on Railton Road in Brixton were at the public meeting.

They leave that to liberal reformists!!!

It's a profoundly "non-anarchist" action to campaign for a copper. He is a part of the system, he is a part of the authoritatrian structure, he is a puppet of the state.

And anarchists aren't big on leaders either, and that's what Paddick is! He's a privileged man with an authoritarian position who controls the working class on behalf of the ruling class, by directing a group of coppers, whose class position is somewhat compromised.

So, maybe these "anarchists" are really liberal-reformists who like to call themselves anarchists?

 http://www.urban75.net/vbulletin/showthread.php?s=&postid=465824#post465824

Anarchists may not campaign for coppers, but on certain occasions realists might prefer one copper to another. This is the same old ‘better Hitler than the Social Democrats’ ideological crap that prepares the ground for defeat and recuperation.

The question is, would the lives of working class people in Brixton be that tiniest bit better under Paddick? Fewer young black men getting killed? Is the anarchist revolution a realistic alternative at this very moment? I’m ambivalent about all these questions, but surely the thing to do would be to go into Brixton and talk to people, rather than spitting out shibboleths about the state and hierarchy like a case of radical Tourette’s. If there’s a persuasive case, I can conceivably see a case for reinstituting him. Of course, he’ll still be the enemy, but there are advantages in choosing your enemy and keeping them close to you.

Before anyone starts wittering on about this approach ‘creating illusions’ in people’s minds, I suggest that, while it may do so with bourgeois liberals (often, remember, ex-anarchists), it seems to me highly unlikely that most black Brixtonians have such short memories – if they get involved, it will most likely be for tactical reasons. I’m sick of the assumption by most bourgeois anarchists that the lower orders are so passive and stupid as to accept every aspect of the spectacle. Such an idea often seems to be a tidy piece of reaction-formation on the part of poor little rich kids: you fear most what you secretly desire to become. King Pleb, who previously impressed with his rants against spectacular gesture politics, disappoints here with his doctrinaire ‘no sell out’ romance.

Bless your beautiful soul, numbnuts: sometimes we get our hands dirty.

 http://www.urban75.net/vbulletin/showthread.php?s=7daebeb2c097f546284109d06072594a&threadid=23110

I'm sure this article is well-meant but it's a dreadful misrepresentation of the lambeth4paddick organisation and its campign to reinstate Cmdr Paddick.

NONE of the campaign organisers are anarchists. The campaign has nothing to do with anarchy whatsoever.

I would hope all can find good in Paddick's policing strategy - he engaged with the community, and policed intelligently by refusing to enforce an unproductive law which many consider oppressive.

But associating the campaign with anarchism is a grave disservice to each party.

THE FIRST POST IS BOLLOCKS

Harlequin is a shit stirring socialist party or some other party troll, who I suspect posts here under a different name - this is a post from Indymedia that harlequin previously made:-

Quote:-

The road proesters over the past 11 years have failed to prevent the building of even one road from Twyford Down to the Newbury by pass, Thanet Way and the M11 Link Road! They will also fail on the Birmingham Northern Relief Road as well!

The road protest movement also seems to have failed to see that the real problem and the root cause of enviromental destruction is the capitalist system itself. To be fair to the road protesters anti-road group Reclaim The Streets did organise a carnival against Capitalism in the City of London in June 1999 but this was attended by a pathetic 4,000 people far less than took part in the mass tresspass at Twford Down.


Until the anti-road protesters and environmental campaigner start fighting the root cause which is capitalism thenthey will achieve nothing!

www.socialistparty.org.uk


End quote


[URL= http://uk.indymedia.org/front.php3?article_id=44796] http://uk.indymedia.org/front.php3?article_id=44796[/URL]

So this report from harlequin who supports the socialist party (though that may be shit stirring as well) cannot be taken as saying anything true about anyone -

I read this quote a couple of days ago and it stuck in my mind cos I was moved to respond to it, but to refind it took a few minutes using the indymedia search engine

I suggest that people check out credentials rather than assuming cos someone posts something as truth it is truth

Of course they are anarchists, urban75 is the biggest direct action website on the internet it is visited by thousands of anarchists every day and many of them are regular posters on the bulletin board there. Many of them have been involved in the campaign to reinistate Paddick, earlier this year Paddick posted his views on that site on drugs and anarchy, saying that anarchy had some good points.

The editor of that site even spoke at the public meeting in Brixton organised by the Lambeth4Paddick campaign and he is an anarchist or at least a fervent anti-capitalist and strong supporter of the anti-capitalist movement!

With the Lambeth4Paddick campaign it is a case of the people of Brixton wanting someone who will really do something about the problems of the area and bring street crime levels down.

Maybe the confusion is due to many in the reinstate Paddick campaign who have very close ideas and outlooks to anarchists not considering themselves part of the anarchist movement as Mike the editor of urban75 says "urban75 is not an anarchist website". But a large number of urban75 posters are involved in the campaign most posters on urban75 are anti-capitalists and have libertarian ideas. If urban75 isn't an anarchist website then it comes very close as it supports anti-capitalist actions and anarchist events like Mayday and is anti-capitalist in outlook.

Many people today also reject the label of anarchism and prefer to call themselves libertarians, Earth Firsters', Eco warrriers or just anti-capitalists. People who in almost every way are anarchists but name.

There are also many anarchists who are purists and reject any form of authority at all and therefore consider anything connected with authority as totally against the principles of anarchism! But if this was so then the campaign to ban fox hunting would have no support from anarchists at all as it is calling for the government to implement the ban and for the state and police to enforce it! Yet many anarchists are strongly in favour of a ban on fox hunting!

Harlequin, with respect, I suspect you don't post on U75, as I do, and it's certainly clear you have played no role in the campaign you write about, as I have.

The Lambeth4Paddick campaign has NOTHING WHATSOEVER to do with anarchy. And let me repeat so you can be quite clear about this - NONE of the organisers of Lambeth4Paddick are remotely anarchic. Of course, you did not deign to actually converse with any of them before writing your nonsense.

As you reveal, your whole piece of fiction is conjectured on the fact that a minority of contributors to U75 are anarchists. This is neither here nor there.

If you wish to assist the Lambeth4Paddick campaign to restore Cmdr Paddick, kindly stop your gratuitous misrepresention of it.