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Mayday 2005 - Euromayday and More

features | 01.05.2005 00:05 | Globalisation | Birmingham

This years Mayday Events saw Euromayday protests and actions happening in 20 cities around Europe, all based around the theme of 'precarity'[Photos] The Euromayday events have been happening over the last years in Europe, and getting bigger every year, with parades of causalised workers, temps, part-timers, immigrants and unemployed marching through Europe's capitals to demand new social rights for the most marginalised [see audio background interviews 1, 2 from globalproject.info]

London

Precarity Action The location of the euroMAYDAY/Flexmob action were texted to people's mobile phones at the last minute. Several hundred turned up at the Hackney Tesco, including Sambistas and a banner "All we have to loose is our chainstores". They stayed for some time before a huge police presence moved them out. Reports of several violent arrests [Arrest appeal]. The day finished with everyone continuing on to London Fields
[ Timeline | IMC London Feature | Precarity Assembly Report | Personal Account ] [ Reports and Pictures: 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 ] [Videos 1 | 2 | 3 | 4]

At the same time, the TUC Trade Union March formed at 12pm [More] At 2pm, the Spacehijackers cricket match was played in Parliament Square [report]

London Critical Mass celebrated their 11th year of monthly bike rides with a huge event on Friday 29th April [Pics 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6], as well as a G8 bike ride benefit in the evening of May 1st. Other Critical Mass rides took place around the country for Mayday weekend.

Glasgow

A Reclaim The Streets Party started off at 1pm [Timeline and Reports], the Camcorder Guerillas screened their new G8 film "Why Close the G8" at 4pm, while the usual STUC Mayday Rally takes place at George Square at 11am. On Friday there was also a Critical Mass bike ride.

See Indymedia Scotland for further round-up of the days events.

Other actions

In Birmingham there was a march through The Bullring™ in support of workers' rights in response to the asset stripping and demise of Rover which clashed with a pro-capitalist bloc extolling the virtues of unfettered capitalism, ending with a picnic in Pigeon park by the cathedral [Report].

In Bradford the first Critical Mass Critial Mass for some time went ahead successfully this Mayday. [Report].

In Lancaster Mayday Picnic on the Priory field at 1pm, as part of the reclaiming International Workers' Day festival.

In Sedgefield (Blair's constituancy) there's a pre-election Mayday WMD Festival running May 1st-2nd with music, comedy and a peace camp set up.

Liverpool saw a critical mass on the Friday followed by a Trade Union march and then gig on the first. [Announcement]

Manchester held a party on Plattlands Park with a critical mass leading off to it. [Announcement] [Audio report]. There was also a Trade Union march, and before the Radical Bookfair.

Oxford Oxford International Workers' Day: Pensions not War [Photos] and Oxford samba Mayday madness [Report and Pics]

In Ireland, the scene of last years major Against Fortress Europe Mayday demonstrations, Dublin will have an Anti-G8 Reclaim The Streets Party on Monday 2nd, as well as a Euromayday Precarity Block on the usual Trade Unions march on Saturday 30th April.

See Also:

London: 30th April Anti-authoritarian Film Festival
Oxford: May 2nd Protest against war on Iraq and pensions
Worthing: Friday Anti-G8 Critical Mass
Euromayday Net Parade | CopyRiot euroLANparty005



London Euromayday Timeline

[12.00] Led by text messages, people gather at two north london tube stations for the euroMAYDAY/Flexmob action.
[14.00] Around 250 people are around the Tesco Megastore near Hackney Town Hall. A Samba band played inside Tesco, and has now moved on, strongly encouraged by about 150 metropolitan police. [Photos 1 | 2 | 3 ]
[14.30] The crowd has been surrounded by the Police in what looks like a Section 60, and activists are being arrested one by one. A large banner read "All we have to lose is our chainstores". [Reports 1 | 2 ]
[14.45] 50 or 60 people are now surrounded by over 100 police who continue to arrest, stop and search individuals, and are reported to be acting very violently to the situation. The rest of the crowd is being split up and harassed. [ Photos 1 ]
[15.30] The crowd is marched down Mare Street, surrounded by met police. The Samba is playing and the banner unfurled again.
[15.50] The police have released the crowd into London Fields, leaving 150 people and the Samba to celebrate Mayday in peace.
[16.00] Arrests have started again with four or five more people being dragged away violently.
[17.00] With about 100 left in the park and the samba playing, everyone is enjoying MayDay.

London Trades Unions March

[TUC Trade Union March] Thousands of people took to the streets for the annual Mayday march to Trafalgar Square. Visitors to the capital were given more than the usual sights to look at as the marchers passed by in a noisy and good-natured parade. Once in the Square marchers enjoyed music, poetry and dance, as well as putting up with the usual dull speeches from jump-on-the-bandwagon politicians. The size of the march confounded those who had predicted that this year's event would be a damp squib. [ Photos ]

Glasgow Reclaim the Streets

[13.30] Reclaim the Streets: A few hundred people have met up in Buchanan Street, where a Sound System started up. A second Sound System arrived, full of clowns, with banners saying "Cre8 not G8", Make Poverty History" and DIY Party People". All are now moving off on a route around the city with a good atmosphere, and little police presence apart from 4/5 fit teams photgraphing everyone.
[14.45] The party protest has now moved to St. Vincent street, where there was an attempt to get a third sound system in, one van made it but not the rig. Still good natured and taking over the streets!
[15.45] After a few scuffles at the entrance to the park, where the crowd negociated the someones release, the 3 Sounds Systems are now playing and the party continues. Three arrests during the day [unconfirmed]
RTS Photos: "[1]"

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POST PAKI MAYDAY

29.04.2005 10:44

POST PAKI MAYDAY

on the May Day March and ask you to join us:

Meet 12 noon
Sunday 1st May
Clerkenwell Green London EC1

(nearest tube Farringdon)


Geographically, Europe does not exist, since it is only a peninsula on the vast Eurasian continent . . . Europe has always been a political and cultural definition . . . Before the 19th century, geographers generally referred to it as "Christensom." When colonialism began to spread Western culture and religion to all corners of the globe, some British and German geographers began to delineate the eastern boundaries of a European continent. What they were actually doing was trying to draw for eastern limits of "western civilization" and the white race (Grossman, 1994, p. 39).

This is an important illustration of how false "facts" become part of our taken-for-granted knowledge of the world. That assumed "knowledge" extends beyond the mere creation of this fictious geographic entity to proclaiming Europe's centrality in the creation of knowledge and the development of "civilization." In the Eurocentric account, Europe (and "Europeanized" areas like the U.S.A.) has always been and currently is the superior Center from which knowledge, creativity, technology, culture, and so forth flow forth to the inferior Periphery, the so-called underdeveloped countries.

Of course, there are significant intellectual challenges to Eurocentrrism. Now it was as a result of the perpetual working of these eternal, mysterious forces of ?Nature that there was born in 1933 a new ideology, as dynamic and fateful as that of ?Hellenism in the twelfth century B.C. and ?Yankeeism in the eighteenth century A.D. This was the ideology of "?Pakism"

All Hail Mikhael Bakunin the Anarchist Freemason

I asked two of the WOMC red group, who had decided to go undercover as reporters into the Evening Standard with Tasha, about plans to divide and conquer revolutionary anti-capitalism, “anarchists” from ‘kids’ and ‘muslims’ ‘imigrants’ and the ‘left’. the ES editorial was worried about theses anti-war elements uniting. Contrary to the establishmed mediated cultural hegemony, these elements were in no need of being ‘united’. Heretical Hurufi Islamic, Rosecrucian Christian and Kabalist Jewish sects were already working an invisible hand (via Situationist and other forces conceptualised as ‘anarchist’) behind the actions of all sorts of social bodies from the police, MI5, Reuters (which leads for example, to US troops opening fire on Reuters reporters in Iraq – ‘we were being shot at’ they claimed – all too true, but the shots were from cameras, not guns!). Operating antithetically to the Masonic organisations that are fronted by G8, WTO etc, these groups were more than ready to abolish themselves and be absorbed into open workers’ organisations at any given moment. They told me that the Forward ‘Intelligence’ Team of Scotland Yard had infiltrated the London Action Resource Centre in Whitechapel where ‘Indymedia’ were meeting in order to configure indymedia as constituting an antithetical pole to the mass-media! Just as FBI had to justify its depart-mental funding of web-warriors to deal with this threat to ‘freedom of speech’, so the FIT goons had been briefed that they were actually stealing peoples souls when they took pictures of them. The spooks that ran the department had become convinced that by running Mandrake Face Recognition software (open source) in reverse, they could re/construct the face of god. meanwhile… evoL PsychogeogrAphix had joined other non-hierarchical cabals to bless the Trade Union march route to the Freemasons Hall. Tony Benn who stood at the front of the march stuffed some genetically modified superskunk into his trademark pipe. This was to kick start the paranoic critical method that would be used to stir the spirits all along the procession route. Then, at a signal from her Masonic mind controllers, the undercover reporter with the WOMC crew started performing the silent dance in order to raise up Londons’ ancient revolutionary ancestry along Red Lion Square, the ‘place’ of Socialism’s illlegitimate conception. The libations ritual which inaugurated the RTS party showed up this cover story for the ruse it was. According to Tasha, who was by now claiming to be controlled by Masonic synthetic telepathy and ‘Induced Experiences Mimicking Psychosis’, the prohibition of drinking in Islam is just one example of the misrepresentation of revolutionary forms in the mass media. Rum is collected in the mouth and then the ‘spirit’ is breathed in, after which the liquid was spat out onto the tiled entrance of the Freemasons Hall. This was then ignited much to the assembled masons chagrin, thus burning out the remaining spirits not already infused into the body of the unfaithful. Don’t Believe (The Hype) John vidal from the Guardian was keen to setup the trade unions as the antithetical pole to the british state/ establishment. It is important that the ‘anarchist’ movement does not constitute this node. It is impossible to infiltrate a non hierarchical organisation and so when john vidal turned up for the trouserless demo at 3:33 he was surprised to find s/he was the only one there. John wore a pair of nike shorts and promptly at 3:33:33 he heard voices from the phone box telling him to take off his shorts and drape a flag round his midrift like a skirt. “shorts are short trousers! Colaborator! Infiltraitor! Infidel! Traitor! Reformist!” quick as a flash vidal stripped and changed in the phone box and legged it down the street towards the freemasons hall b4 the gathered police could become aware of his revolutionary presence. He met up with the WOMC green group at the front doors of the hall, where the assembled crowd were dancing and she started gyrating in the police line, rubbing his bare crotch in their faces. Tash had started ranting about her Masters’ plans to crush the revolutionary movements. She was channelling voices that told her to charecterise the RTS front “Weapons of Mass Construction” as ANARCHIST despite this word not being used in the promotional lit. or the website. Also, by focussing on celebrity ‘leaders’ she could alienate them from the broader movement. It was certainly useful to construct an antithetical node to the notions of ‘non-violent’ direct action and protest. The papers would certainly not use ‘anti-capitalist’ despite the London Chamber of Commerce has requested a quote be used in the Metro article of 30/4 in order to incite those taking part in the WOMC . evoL PsychogeogrAphix even wrote to the metro taking issue with their definition of psychogeographical material, a map as “war zone: an anarchist version of the tube map.” The also issued an invoice to the metro for their use of a psychogeographical map. Obviously, the media love to use pschogeographical maps especially in wartime because the effects of these maps are often subconscious. The WOMC map was made consciously with the media in mind. Alphabetical listings of targets made it easier for journalists than activists on the street. Was this done to save time or as a conscious ruse to entrap both the media and the police? She was keen to begin the alchemical procession of the London police. Having collected badge numbers, multi millionare Andy Trotter wanted to test police reactions in the Masonic heartland. S/he had been studying maps of how Baghdad had defended its museum, and wanted to test how the metropolitan police Scotland yard and mi5 would react if America did invade London directly. The freemasons were piling out of the new Conault rooms and into the freemasons hall. Those that had assembled at the british museum were also heading down now. When I met her later on at Trafalgar square she told me that the media is a political fiction. She had been given orders from Andy Trotter to split the party at Traf Square. She kept mumbling about ‘Unity in division’. Since the soundsystem encircled by ravers had been surrounded by police, we were to start another party on the other side of the square in order to split police resources. That would make it easier to push through their lines towards Whitehall. That was at 4pm when the police were expecting a mass convergence at shell on the strand. That meeting point had always been a decoy to detract from the trouserless ritual.






EVERYDAY IS NOT MAYDAY







POST PAKI MAYDAY


May Day 2005

30.04.2005 21:10

And if you don't have a mobile phone? I don't and I expect many jobless/flexi-worers don't have either. I think this 'secrecy' business is just a bit silly really.
Good luck anyway.

Fiona.

Fiona


re phone

01.05.2005 19:11

I have a mobile phone. I fact I could not do casual work without it. Agencies expect people to have mobiles. I also have an interet connection like you. Perhaps a frioend with a phone could contact you.

m


Don't be like the Trots

08.06.2005 09:39

Why does the indymedia article exaggerate the number of people on the ridiculously-named "flexmob" action?

"Several hundred people" - ridiculous. Even the organisers couldn't claim more than 80, when about 40-50 were actually present.

Don't be like the SWP, in desperately trying to act like that kind of activism is not dead in the water.

solidarity forever