Random Blowe

Why It's Kicking Off Everywhere

2012-02-09T13:09:00.002Z

Newham Bookshop has managed to persuade Newsnight economics editor and author Paul Mason to talk about his book "Why It's Kicking Off Everywhere: The New Global Revolutions" at Wanstead Library on Saturday 17 March at 7pm.

Mason's book explores the wave of protest that emerged in 2011, from the so-called 'Arab Spring' to the Occupy movement, and whether new forms of activism involving dynamic networks of young, social media savvy cyber-protesters are redefining what 'revolution' and political alternatives to capitalism now means.

Tickets for the event, which is likely to sell out very quickly, can be reserved by calling 020 8552 9993. Wanstead Library is on Spratt Hall Road, Wanstead, London E11 2RQ

More Bad News For Forest Gate Developers

2012-02-08T15:46:00.009Z

Aston-Mansfield, one of Newham's oldest charities and the owner of Durning Hall Community Centre, has today issued a statement on its formal objection to controversial regeneration proposals for Forest Gate submitted by developers Obsidian.

Last month, Obsidian's plans were rejected by Mayor of London Boris Johnson, with the Greater London Authority questioning the suitability of a 20 storey tower block on the current Durning Hall site and raising serious concerns about the lack of clarity on a range of issues from affordable housing to community facilities. Now the objection of a significant Forest Gate landowner - as well as Durning Hall, the charity owns a number of other properties in Woodgrange Road and Earlham Grove - has put further pressure on Obsidian to drastically change its plans. Whilst accepting that Forest Gate is in urgent need of redevelopment (lets not talk about the £92 million spent on the seven-year SRB programme that was supposed to rejuvenate the area), the charity's statement says:

Aston-Mansfield supports the principle of regenerating Forest Gate but does not believe that the proposals set out in the current Obsidian planning applications adequately meet the Council’s regeneration objectives nor are they in the best interests of the local residents and community groups. In particular:
The volume of space that Aston Mansfield currently provides for community use in Forest Gate is more than two and a half times larger than the amount proposed in the application;

We agree with high density housing near the station but think the proposed tower requires much greater justification both in terms of visual impact and financial viability;

The application makes no contribution to affordable housing and no mention of how the temporary hostel for homeless people provided within Durning Hall will be replaced or improved;

The five phase development proposed could disrupt life and work in the area for years causing operational difficulties and planning blight that will severely compromise our work;

There is no indication as to how the Charity is expected to maintain its services whilst the Durning Hall site is redeveloped.
Consequently the Charity is unable to support the application as it currently stands and is working on some constructive suggestions to put to Obsidian and the Council if the current application can be deferred for further consultation.

If this does not happen there is a real danger that Durning Hall will have to close during the period of redevelopment and may not be able to reopen in Forest Gate.

Aston-Mansfield's intervention will make it far more difficult for Newham council, which has been supportive of Obsidian's proposals, to make an early decision on the planning application in its current form. The planning committee is due to meet on on 21 February and if it decides to reject the call for further consultation and grant planning approval, the developers have said they aim to start construction work this year.

The Save Forest Gate camnpaign continues to call for local people to lobby councillors - more information here.

Is Getting Rid Of The Dear Leader Really Enough?

2012-01-31T16:26:00.006Z

Over lunch at Saturday’s Counter Olympic Conference, I was once again pulled into a discussion with campaigners about Newham’s terrible directly-elected Mayor and how much better the borough would be without him. The plea I made in December not to hear another grumbled but inconclusive conversation about how vital it is that we are rid of Sir Robin Wales clearly hasn’t worked.

As I explained back then and again on Saturday, the means are now available under the Localism Act to change the way Newham is governed. However, even if there are enough people willing to put in the hard work to collect signatures and trigger a referendum, any local 'Bring Back Democracy' campaign would also need to be brilliantly organised, better than anything the borough has seen previously. It would need the confidence to guarantee that enough people actually turn out to vote for change: in January 2002, the referendum that created the Mayor and Cabinet system had only a 26% turn-out. That would mean ward-by-ward voter mobilisation, lots of willing volunteers and money: enough to pay for publicity to cover over 91,000 households.

Thinking more about this over the weekend, the organisational obstacles are only the start. If, by some Herculean effort, the position of directly-elected Mayor was eventually abolished, what would happen then? In an area where integrity mattered, it would be nice to think that the current incumbent would resign, but it’s just as likely that Wales would simply step back into the position of council leader, one he held from 1995 until 2002. Even if his position was untenable within the local Labour Party, look at the calibre of politicians in Newham and imagine who would take over – probably one of the long line of staggering mediocrities who have loyally served the Dear Leader over the last decade.

Nor would we ignore one of the principal reasons for the deference displayed by most councillors on key issues over the last ten years. Many are now dependent on a salary for representing their constituents that is far higher than the average local wage. Disobedience carries the risk of demotion, political exile and even the dole. No wonder they toe whatever line is given by whoever holds the power of patronage.

It will be tough to encourage a large number of local people to vote for a change in the governance of Newham when all that is on offer is a return to the way things were in 2001. Yes, seeing Sir Robin Wales humiliated might be satisfying, but perhaps it’s worth thinking a little more ambitiously?

Personally, I think a 'Bring Back Democracy' campaign needs to argue not only for a referendum on the Mayor and Cabinet system but for:

an end to full-time councillor positions and to automatic allowances, with elected representatives paid only for time off work (possibly as compensation to their employer, if they are working, to encourage companies to support the principle of local public service).
a right of local residents to demand an annual recall vote of their elected representatives if they believe their councillor is useless and can gather enough signatures in support.
far greater openness and transparency, including a presumption of automatic publication of everything unless the council can show that disclosure would cause genuine harm.
the establishment of Neighbourhood Forums in Newham that are created by local people themselves (perhaps with a minimum requirement for the numbers of streets) but formally recognised by the council and
the use of further local referenda to validate any large scale redevelopment plans (such as the proposals for Forest Gate, Canning Town or for Queens Market in Upton Park).

The system that has operated in this borough since 2002 has created a fiefdom in which, as I argued in 2009, “timidity crushes initiative, fear ingrains institutional inertia, culminating in a mixture of incompetence and officiousness”. Pulling it down requires a political earthquake in Newham, not just a change of personality at the top.

Report on Yesterday's Counter Olympic Conference

2012-01-29T12:06:00.006Z

Yesterday's 'Countering the Olympics' conference at Toynbee Hall certainly didn't lack ambition: nothing less than constructing an alternative narrative to the constant, almost cult-like cheerleading in support of this summer's Games.

It brought together many of the local campaigns that have tried to resist the anti-democratic imposition of the Olympics on London, one that has pressed ahead with little regard for Londoners as anything other than passive spectators and with even less interest in the notion that 'consultation' means listening and acting upon the concerns of local people. There were valuable contributions from campaigners concerned with the issues that have dogged previous Games: the International Olympics Committee's obsession with satisfying the money-making needs of its corporate sponsors, the use of sweatshop labour in manufacturing athletes' kit and the dubious claims that the Games will be 'ethical and green'. Colin Toogood gave an interesting account of the campaign by the Bhopal Medical Appeal against the involvement of Dow as the 'official chemical company of the Olympics' and Anna Minton, author of 'Ground Control', was excellent in highlighting how London 2012 represents just as much of a government 'bailout' as the one gifted to RBS. Despite promises that £738 million would come from the private sector for core Olympic costs, companies have contributed only 2% of the overall figure.

My own contribution was on the security implications of the Games, both on local people and on the right to legitimately protest. There are genuine reasons to fear that east London will resemble a militarised zone in July and August (more so now that soldiers drafted in to support G4S private security will wear their own uniforms) and concern about the excessive use of police powers to stop and question anyone, especially the young. It was good to focus on some positive plans already in place to deal with this: the lead by the Network for Police Monitoring on legal observation of protest and plans by Newham Monitoring Project to offer an Olympics civil liberties helpline, trained Community Legal Observers near to event venues, a basic rights information card and workshops for youth and community groups.

What I couldn't shake, however, was the feeling that 100 people in a hall in Whitechapel, six months before the start of the Games, have an enormous task in providing a critical perspective on the Olympics that will be listened to. It felt as though the yesterday's conference was happening rather late in the day, although it probably would have been impossible until now to both get everyone together and to encourage a disparate group of activists to recognise why the Olympics will have an enormous impact on everything from policing to planning. I also detect a degree of wishful thinking in seeing the experience of previous Olympic cities as a model for how opposition can be mobilised, particularly Vancouver's hosting of the Winter Olympics in 2010. The reality is that there has simply been no history of active anti-Olympic resistance in London since the announcement of the winning bid in 2005 that is anything like the scale that there was in British Columbia.

Nevertheless, there will be media organisations from all over the world in our city this summer and the majority, carrying no official accreditation from the London Organising Committee, will be eager for stories. The strapline that appears at the top of this blog has therefore never been more true: if you don't like what's in the news, then go out and make some of your own. If nothing else, London activists will need their own independent media centre to coordinate and distribute information on the news we create and, considering the Metropolitan police's enthusiasm for clamping down on the squatting of empty buildings, we preferably need one that is secure and cannot easily be raided and closed down.

So does anyone have an empty building or a hall they want to offer over the summer, preferably near Stratford and on a peppercorn rent, for a independent media convergence space?

Anti-Olympics Poster Competition - The Results

2012-01-27T08:49:00.004Z

Having announced an entirely unofficial and not entirely serious Olympics poster competition back in December, the deadline for publishing submissions has arrived (changed for tomorrow's Countering the Olympics Conference in Whitechapel, which I'm speaking at). I'm pleased to share some of the excellent designs, most provided anonymously, that I've been sent.

As 'lawgraduate' points out in a comment to my original posting, the London Olympic Games (Trading and Advertising) (England) Regulations 2011 do not apply to "advertising activity intended to demonstrate support for or opposition to the views or actions of any person or body of persons" or to "publicise a belief, cause or campaign". These were only published on 1 December 2011, which is why I missed them, but they relate primarily to an attempt to control 'ambush marketing' by companies inside the 'event zone'.

However, several of these designs definitely are "a representation of something so similar to the Olympic symbol" under the Olympic Symbol etc. (Protection) Act 1995 that they could be illegal if someone were to "incorporates it in a flag or banner". It's something of a legal minefield and I'm not a lawyer, but whatever way you look at it, I doubt whether you'll get past G4S security into the Olympic stadium with a t-shirt bearing any of them. Anyway, enjoy:

A comment on the potential overall cost:

From the frankly obscene:

To this more cerebral comment on Olympic brand enclosures:

Thanks to everyone who sent in an entry (if 'teacherdude' wants to send me his original,I'll stick that up here too). ~~I'll have these turned into PDFs shortly~~.

UPDATE

(Most of) the posters are now ready as PDFs. The set are available here or individually:

Olympigs - A4 | A3
CCTV - A4 | A3
"We Don't Want Your Olympics Here" - A4 | A3
"Go Ahead, Arrest Me!" - A4 | A3
Siege City - A4 | A3
Potential overall cost - A4 | A3
Brand Enclosures - A4 | A3

Newham Seeks To Make Olympic ANPR Surveillance Permanent

2012-01-24T16:52:00.012Z

There seems to be a fair amount of confusion and rumour about the exact impact of this summer’s Olympics on restrictions of movement, access, parking and surveillance of residents and businesses in Newham.

Due to a lack of clear and accessible information, I’ve therefore tried to gather together whatever detail I can find, although the problem is that the London 2012 “Local access and parking plans” web page is rather sketchy and the council’s “Games time access and parking plans” is little better. However, reports submitted to Newham’s Cabinet meeting in October 2011 and to this Thursday’s meeting shed more light on what we can expect. What they confirm is this:

Across Newham

The existing 18 Residential Parking Zones (RPZs) will be extended into one giant zone to cover the whole of the borough during the Olympics (not just 1.5 miles from venues as originally proposed), with parking restrictions covering every street from 8am to 9pm.

The council will use Automatic Number Plate Recognition (ANPR) surveillance to monitor whether vehicles are owned by residents. It will operate its own enforcement database with information provided by the DVLA on every vehicle registered to addresses in Newham. These vehicles will have an automatic right to park.

Vehicles not registered to an address in Newham will need permission to park and need to apply for inclusion on the database. This includes businesses and service providers needing vehicular access to the area. Residents will be required to register any visitor’s vehicle online or by phone when the visitor arrives and will be offered up to 40 “games time only” all day visitor vouchers, at a subsidised cost of £1 per day. Applications are likely to be limited to those residents registered on the electoral roll. Non-resident/business visitors and commuters will be prohibited from parking in the borough during the Games.

LOCOG-provided ANPR vehicles will provide “real time” information on cars and vans that are not on the database and Newham has contracted Mouchel Ltd to enforce parking restrictions, including vehicle removal (it’s a timely contact for the company, who in December announced annual losses of £65m). Mouchel will employ a team of 18 mobile Civil Enforcement Officers (on mopeds) and 33 Parking Marshals. Enforcement is likely to be stringent and there are plans for a back-up system if the technology fails.

Newham is lobbying to increase the penalty charge to £200 on the entire borough’s roads, bring it in line with the charge for the Olympic Route Network (see below).

This is the alarming legacy issue: the council papers for Thursday’s Cabinet [PDF] say that LOCOG has indicated that after the Olympics are over, “they would be willing to negotiate with Newham regarding the sale of their ANPR vehicles”. Moreover, whilst the DVLA have said that supplying vehicle registration for the Games is a one-off, “Newham and other London Authorities will continue to lobby to have direct access to the DVLA data base to assist with improved efficiencies in administering parking permits to Newham residents and businesses”. The report adds:

Notwithstanding direct access to the DVLA data base it is the intention of Newham to roll out its own virtual permit system as a way of reducing administration costs and providing a more accessible service to all residents and businesses. ANPR would be used to automatically recognise vehicles parked without a valid permit which in turn will improve parking enforcement and enable Newham to have a much more proactive enforcement regime with regards to identifying persistent evaders.

Olympic surveillance using ANPR is to become a permanent feature, in other words.

The Olympic Route Network

In Newham, the Olympic Route Network (ORN) and Paralympic Route Network (PRN) will primarily affect residents in Stratford, Canning Town and Custom House. The roads affected are:

Lea Interchange to Bow Roundabout via Stratford. This includes Great Eastern Road, The Grove, Stratford Broadway, Angel Lane and Leyton Road.
A12 from Leytonstone to Redbridge Roundabout (Eastern Avenue)
A12 from Leytonstone to Bromley-by-Bow
Silvertown Way to ExCeL

It will mean changes to traffic signal timings, restricted turns, side road closures to general traffic, bus diversions and the suspension of parking, waiting bays and some pedestrian crossings. In addition, around a third (35 miles of the ORN in London) of the ORN/PRN will include temporary Games Lanes that are only accessible to the 4000 BMW cars for VIPs and a fleet of 1500 coaches for athletes, games officials and the media. Enforcement will operate between 6am and midnight, seven days a week from 25 July to 14 August for the Olympics and from 27 August to 11 September for the Paralympics. The fixed penalty charge will be £200.

Not all the details of local restrictions or the ORN/PRN arrangements have been finalised. I’ll write more when I hear about it – and if anyone has any extra information they’d like to share, please let me know.

In Memory of NMP Supporter Rhona Badham

2012-01-23T19:35:00.011Z

Sadly, pressure of work mean I was unable to attend the funeral in Brentwood today of Newham Monitoring Project supporter Rhona Badham, nor the wake held at the George pub in Wanstead this evening.

Rhona (on the left in the picture, appropriately) was a local activist and campaigner, one of those sometimes-maligned and always overworked individuals that are essential for helping in some small way to glue their community together. I knew her as a regular volunteer for NMP's Emergency Service in the early 1990s, someone who was always willing to step in if we were short of someone to cover the telephone helpline, as well as someone who I saw on numerous anti-racist and anti-war demonstrations. Rhona was also a trade unionist, a socialist and a peace campaigner who was very active in Labour CND and in Newham's voluntary sector too: running the Citizens Advice Bureau at Lawrence Hall in Plaistow during the 1970s and serving as a director of the Parents' Centre (from which Newham Bookshop was founded).

The history of resistance to racist violence in Newham is a proud one. That resistance was always made possible by the many individuals who never sought acclaim or political influence from their activism, but who worked hard to offer practical support to communities under attack. Rhona was one of those people and, speaking for everyone at Newham Monitoring Project. I know she deserves to be recognised and remembered for the contribution that she made over many, many years.

Photo: Labour CND

Stratford - A Scrap Metal Paradise

2012-01-22T19:19:00.011Z

Remember the 'titanium trees' that I mentioned back in June 2010? They're designed to hide the old Stratford shopping centre from the delicate gaze of Olympic visitors and were originally rejected by Newham council’s own design review panel. But now they are nearing completion and unless the 'canopies' that come next can somehow transform them, they really are quite spectacularly ugly:

Another far from stunning steel construction, the 115-metre high ArcelorMittal Orbit observation tower in the Olympic Park, has also come a long way since I last dropped by at the end of July 2011. More photos from a brief visit today can be found here.

Left: July 2011 Right: January 2012

Exhibition Remembers 25th Anniversary Of Wapping Dispute

2012-01-22T08:18:00.011Z

Yesterday afternoon I stopped by at the Bishopsgate Institute near Spitalfields to visit the exhibition marking the 25th anniversary of the Wapping Dispute, made all the more interesting for having a long chat there with John Bailey, a former print worker and and NGA chapel father at The Sun.

John very kindly suggested that I couldn't possibly be old enough to remember the strike, but it began on 24 January 1986, the year before I started a degree at City of London Polytechnic in Aldgate. Indeed, I still have old copies of flyers and "Don't Buy The Sun" stickers buried in a trunk in my flat, many of which are included in an exhibition that quite deliberately sets out to provide a workers' perspective on the strike. I also remember the staggering police violence against print workers and protesters, which having probably had more impact on me as an 18-year-old than the Miners' Strike a couple of years earlier. Equally, having pitched up in Tower Hamlets in 1987, the legacy of the dispute, its effect on local communities in Wapping and the defeat of the print unions was a prominent part of the political background of my first year at college.

The other legacies of the strike have become clear: removing trade unions from Wapping gave Rupert Murdoch the absolute power to ensure that his journalists did whatever was necessary in the pursuit of greater profit - even when, as we've seen with the phone hacking scandal, the methods used were illegal. It also cemented a cosy and corrupting relationship between News International, the government and the Metropolitan Police that has continued for 25 years, one that only now is the Leveson Inquiry beginning to pick apart.

The exhibition continues at the Bishopsgate Institute until 29th February. It is open Monday to Thursday and Saturday from 10am to 5.30pm and on Friday from 10am to 2pm. This video gives a flavour of what is on display:

London Mayor Rejects Forest Gate Redevelopment Plans

2012-01-21T10:47:00.010Z

In a letter sent on Wednesday to Newham council, Mayor of London Boris Johnson has rejected the planning application for major regeneration in Forest Gate centred around Earlham Grove, which would have involved 800 new homes and a highly controversial 27 storey tower block.

The letter from the Senior Planning Manager at the Greater London Authority says:

"The Mayor considers that the application does not comply with the London Plan... Having consider the report the Mayor takes a different view on the acceptability of the tall building in this location. He does not consider that this location is suitable for a tall building on this scale."

The decision to reject the application also sets out (in paragraph 141) a number of other concerns, including insufficient information on housing quality, the impact on equalities, community facilities and heritage considerations.

In a statement e-mailed from the Save Forest Gate Campaign, local resident Paul Holloway said:

"This is fantastic news for the community in Forest Gate, which has been overwhelmingly opposed to this development since it first became public knowledge in the summer.

The GLA also criticised the planning application regarding the Retail Strategy, loss of community facilities, the impact on ethnic minorities, lack of affordable, family housing – and the GLA also makes it clear that the housing density is excessive – and that it had been under-stated in the planning application".

Dr Opara-Mottoh, Member of the Methodist Church Council added:

“We are very glad that Boris Johnson has seen sense in rejecting the planning application and we hope that Newham Council will also see sense when they consider the application in February”.

The rejection of the plans does not necessarily mean that the project is dead: the GLA report sets out (in paragraph 142) a number of remedies that property developers Obsidian can consider "that would possibly lead to the application becoming complaint with the London Plan." However, the decision by Boris Johnson's administration to reject another planning application in Newham, one that also centred around a huge tower block, completely killed off efforts by developers St Modwen to redevelop Queens Market in Upton Park.

Obsidian will have a massive task - and potentially an hugely expensive one - if they intend to rescue their deeply flawed proposals. As Dr Opara-Mottoh says, it will be interesting to see what Newham council decides to do next.

New Monitoring Role For Wanstead Flats Campaign

2012-01-19T22:23:00.006Z

Rather like the very first public meeting on plans to place an Olympics police operations base on Wanstead Flats, back in July 2010, I had no idea how many people would turn up at Durning Hall in Forest Gate last night to discuss what residents wanted to do next. After the disappointment of December's court decision, would people vote with their feet or was there still a popular commitment to defend the Flats?

Attendance by around forty people yesterday, almost half of them teenagers, was therefore very welcome. The 90-minute debate ranged from concerns about the scale of Olympic security (an issue I'll return to in more detail in a future article) to how decisions were made by the City of London Corporation and Redbridge council. Encouragingly, a number of important decisions were made - most notably that the Save Wanstead Flats campaign will continue. Its new role will focus on monitoring the impact of the Metropolitan Police's base on the local neighbourhood and on people who use Wanstead Flats, as well as the extent of damage to the site after the Olympics are over. The campaign is looking for written assurances from the police that there will be no restrictions on access to the Flats beyond the boundaries of the fenced enclosure and on our ability to enjoy the remainder of the land for its intended recreation and leisure purposes.

The Save Wanstead Flats campaign website will soon include a reporting form so that local people can feed back and report any concerns or complaints. The intention is both to highlight immediate problems and draw together lessons that illustrate why any future attempt to use the Flats for security purposes would be completely inappropriate. Some residents also want to take up issues such as challenging the undemocratic nature of the Legislative and Regulatory Reform Act 2006 and changing the way planning permission on the Flats is solely the responsibility of Redbridge council, in situations that mainly affect people from other boroughs. But the main decision, overwhelmingly supported last night, was to mark the beginning and end of the police occupation of Wanstead Flats with a reminder that the land remains public and belongs to us.

On Sunday 10th June, the campaign is inviting everyone to 'Come Dine With Us On Wanstead Flats' with a community picnic on the planned site of the operations base, similar to the event organised in September 2010. A further gathering, to welcome the Flats back to full open access for all, will be held once the site is restored in late September. More details on this and a further campaign meeting will follow soon - but for the time being, keep 10th June in your diary free.

Is Police Database Abuse Becoming Endemic?

2012-01-15T20:48:00.004Z

On Twitter, I regularly share (from @copwatcher) news stories about policing in Britain that interest me. An item today on the Daily Mail website, about eight Essex police officers losing their jobs after illegally accessing confidential police databases, made me realise that lately I’ve been seeing similar stories appear again and again.

Looking back over my Twitter timeline, I have noticed that from November 2011, there have been six reports in only three months that involve abuse of personal data by serving officers. As well as today’s story, these include:

A Merseyside Police officer who was dismissed this month for making 170 unauthorised checks on women over a three-year period.
A Bedfordshire Police officer jailed for 15 months after gave information obtained from a police computer to her boyfriend, who passed it on to a friend facing arrest.
A Derbyshire Police officer prosecuted for misusing information from a police database to target vulnerable women for sex.
Two Lincolnshire Police community support officers forced to resign for unspecified misuse of police computers.
Another Merseyside Police officer, a Detective Chief Inspector, charged with six counts of the unauthorised accessing of personal data.

In addition, a news report in November on breaches of the Data Protection Act in Norfolk and Suffolk since 2008 identified 22 incidents within Norfolk Police, a number that involved the dismissal of police officers or community support officers.

Today’s report about Essex Police reveals that it took a whistle-blower, rather than strict rules and policies usually defended by police press officers, to highlight ‘routine abuses’ of IT systems. Although browsing back through my Twitter timeline involves a far from vigorous methodology, the number of stories from around the country does point to the possibility that this kind of routine police misuse of personal data may be far greater than reported, perhaps even commonplace.

If this is the case and if even a small proportion of these abuses of power are for financial gain (the Mail on Sunday alleges Essex officers had routinely attempted to access the private details of celebrities), then this would represent a significant level of police corruption and the kind of unhealthy relationships with the media that go way beyond the ‘drinking and flirting’ focused on by the recent report by Elizabeth Filkin. Perhaps the Levenson Inquiry, currently considering the culture, practices and ethics of the press, should consider asking for details of data protection breaches from all 43 constabularies, along with information on the number of incidents where there were suspicions that personal information was passed on to journalists?

The failure of the surveillance society to maintain control of the data it routinely hoovers up is one of the reasons why its defenders’ claim, that "if you have nothing to hide you have nothing to fear," has always been a myth. Data gathering is a huge operation, the depth and breadth of information held is unprecedented and it can be incredibly difficult to have personal data removed from police databases – and as two teenagers in Bishop Auckland found out in December, after helping a five-year-old girl asleep in the back of a stolen car, far easier to wrongly end up on one.

That’s what makes the prospect of endemic misuse of IT by police officers across the country so alarming.

UPDATES

17 January 2012: A civilian worker at Lancashire Police who was sacked for accessing personal data has told an employment tribunal that police officers and staff regularly checked files for their own benefit.

9 December 2011: the Leicestershire police inspector Tobias Day, who murdered his wife and daughter, had just been sacked for misusing his force's computer systems.

A Brief History Of The Save Wanstead Flats Campaign

2012-01-12T15:40:00.012Z

The Save Wanstead Flats campaign meets next week to decide its next steps and a request from the Wanstead Village Directory website for a brief history of the campaign has meant I've been able to write up an account of what has been organised between June 2010 and January 2012.

This is something I've meant to do with other campaigns that I've been involved in: the activities of the Jean Charles de Menezes Family Campaign, for example, really needs recording properly. But anyway. Here's the unfinished story of the battle to defend Wanstead Flats from the Metropolitan Police.

On 18 January, a residents meeting at Durning Hall community centre in Forest Gate will decide whether to continue the campaign begun in 2010 against plans by the Metropolitan Police to set up a deployment base, for thousands of officers during this summer’s Olympics, on Wanstead Flats.

Back in June 2010, news of these plans was leaked to the Evening Standard and as a result, a number of local people from Forest Gate who were concerned about the implications of this proposal came to see me where I work at Durning Hall. The charity that runs the building was able to offer help with publicity and a free venue for a residents meeting to test the true level of local opposition. This was held on 14 July and to everyone’s surprise, the centre’s main hall was packed to capacity: instead of the expected 50 people attending, there was nearer to 250. It was only after this meeting that the Metropolitan Police launched a public relations campaign, a website for their plans and a ‘pre-consultation event’ in August at the Cherry Tree Cafe in Wanstead. The response of the newly-formed Save Wanstead Flats campaign was to organise local people to gather together, on, 5 September 2010, for a well-attended Community Picnic on the Flats.

From the start, one of the main objections raised by campaigners to the police’s plans was that it undermined the protection given to Wanstead Flats by the Epping Forest Act, a law passed in 1878 after hard-fought battles by local people against building and enclosure. The worry has always been about the precedent this would set for future enclosure of parts of the Flats, especially as other major sporting events at the new Olympic Park (for the World Athletics Championships in 2017, for example) will inevitably involve further concerns about policing and security. We objected to the idea that Wanstead Flats is just ‘waste ground’, rather than public land that is valued by local people.

The Home Office planned to use a parliamentary process called a Legislative Reform Order (LRO) to overturn parts of the Epping Forest Act, even though a promise had been made, when the legislation creating this procedure was passed in 2006, that not be used for controversial proposals. An LRO had never been used for anything more than minor administrative ‘tidying-up’ of existing laws before and never in the face of significant opposition. On 14 September 2010, the Home Secretary launched consultation of the LRO and gave residents until December to comment.

In early October, a second residents meeting was held at Durning Hall, this time with representatives of the police and the City of London Corporation (the ‘conservators’ of Wanstead Flats) on a panel facing questions from another packed audience. Their responses were vague and largely unhelpful, with an underlying message that local people had had their opportunity to complain but that the plans would go ahead anyway. However, later that month the Save Wanstead Flats campaign made it clear that opposition would continue and issued a 'pre-action' warning to Home Secretary Theresa May, reserving the right to take legal action by way of judicial review. On 21 November, campaigners also organised an event called Take Back Wanstead Flats, which involved staking out the dimensions of the proposed site (using gardening canes and over a kilometre of 'Police Do Not Cross' tape) to show just how massive the Olympic operations base would actually be.

In December, Redbridge council opened consultation on the planning application for the site. During the planning period, the Home Office responded to its LRO consultation by acknowledging it had failed to understand the legislation that protects Epping Forest and Wanstead Flats – but said that it nevertheless intended to plough on anyway with an order to overcome legal hurdles standing in the way of a police operations base. On 24 February 2011, Redbridge council’s Regulatory Committee met to consider the planning application and rubber-stamped it with little debate, despite an 1800-strong petition from local residents, more than 80 formal objections and the objection of neighbouring Newham council. It was becoming clear how difficult it is to stand in the way of the Olympics juggernaut.

In March, the Home Office published the draft Legislative Reform Order, which meant that the future of Wanstead Flats was now in the hands of the obscure parliamentary Hybrid Instruments Committee. In May, the Regulatory Reform Committee of the House of Commons decided by 5 votes to 3 in favour of granting the LRO but was highly critical of it.

In a last-ditch attempt to stop the police’s plans by legal means, Forest Gate resident Michael Pelling decided to take on the Home Secretary and Metropolitan Police by seeking a judicial review of the consultation process and the quashing of the LRO. The Save Wanstead Flats Campaign was named as an "interested party" in the case. In early October 2011, the original request for permission to apply for a judicial review was turned down and after a renewal hearing in November, the case was finally argued on 5 December at the Royal Courts of Justice. However, Mrs Justice Dobbs refused leave for the presentation of the case for overturning LRO, a judgement that campaigners believe significantly increases the risk that parts of Wanstead Flats may be 'temporarily' enclosed again and again in the future, whenever it is deemed convenient or necessary.

This is why, over eighteen months since the first leak to the Evening Standard, those who have fought to protect Wanstead Flats are now meeting again to decide what steps, if any, they wish to take next. There are question of how to prevent the use of the Flats as a 'security exclusion zone' in the future and what, if anything, can be done to strengthen the Epping Forest Act, which has been severely undermined by the Legislative Reform Order. When the base opens, the immediate issues facing residents in Forest Gate, Wanstead and Leyton include the potential disruption, restricted access to the Flats and the impact of heightened security on freedom of movement.

Ultimately, the residents-organised Save Wanstead Flats campaign will also decide whether it can do any more to try and stop the Metropolitan Police plans - or whether it is time for the campaign to call it a day.

What Happens To Bookshops at Night?

2012-01-10T17:10:00.004Z

If you have ever been curious about happens at night inside the wonderful Newham Bookshop on Barking Road, this brilliant animation from a store called Type in Toronto gives the game away:

Ain't Gonna Ride In London No More

2012-01-09T13:10:00.018Z

This evening at 6pm, the cyclists direct action group Bikes Alive are protesting outside King's Cross station, at the junction of York Way, Pentonville Road and Euston Road, to highlight the 60 percent rise in cycling deaths in London in the last two years.

This is the spot where, on 3 October 2011, student Min Joo Lee was killed, one of a number of cycling fatalities at the end of last year that included the death of Brian Dorling on 24 October at Bow roundabout and Svitlana Tereschenko, a Bow resident who died at the same junction on 11 November. Bikes Alive accuses Transport for London of exacerbating the risks for cyclists on major roads and junctions in London by prioritising speed and volume of motor vehicles over safety. Albert Beale, in a statement on behalf of the campaign, said:

"Monday’s event is the first step in a campaign to stop – by whatever nonviolent means needed – the completely unnecessary level of deaths, injuries and fear inflicted by motorists on the more vulnerable. I urge cyclists to join us on Monday. And if you don’t have a bike, bring your dancing shoes…"

Even before last year, London was the most dangerous place for cyclists in the UK , according to Department of Transport figures. The Mayor of London's cycle superhighway project, which essentially involves painting part of the road blue and encouraging motorists to avoid it (but with no legal sanctions if they don't), has been criticised as providing the illusion of greater cyclist safety without reducing traffic flows, particularly the number of heavy goods vehicles. The other big issue is the speed and carelessness of drivers, particularly at junctions, which often makes cycling in the capital a terrifying experience.

Unfortunately, I can't join the protest this evening: I do have dancing shoes but my dancing days are over and I can no longer cycle. In March 2010 I was hit by a car that sped out of Vallance Road in east London whilst I waited at the junction to turn into Whitechapel Road. I was lucky, in a way: stupidly I wasn't wearing a helmet, so I was fortunate not to have joined the grim fatality statistics after a head-on collision with a speeding vehicle. But the impact completely shattered my shoulder, has left me in constant pain over the last 22 months and has resulted in three unsuccessful operations (a fourth may eventually be scheduled this year). To add insult to these injuries, the Metropolitan police's Traffic Criminal Justice Unit failed to secure CCTV images of the accident before they were wiped after 30 days and after six months, had not even managed to get hold of the notebook of the attending police officer. It was therefore hardly a surprise that the driver was not charged with dangerous driving.

The accident and injuries I sustained have been life-changing. I'm an activist that can no longer take part in demonstrations (the slightest jolt on my shoulder is agonising), a former keen cyclist who has been relegated to an exercise bike and a person who rarely took anything more than the occasional paracetamol who is now addicted to industrial-strength pain killers. Whilst I may have had few illusions about the competence of the police before the incident, even I was flabbergasted by how cursory their investigation was. More importantly, my injuries are permanent. I may never be able to cycle again - but even if this changes and eventually it becomes possible to ride once more, I'm not sure that I'll want to, at least not in London.

There was a time when I would argue passionately that cycling was the best way to get around the city - and I'd ride 40 or 50 miles every week to prove it. But as long as such an overwhelming priority is given to impatient motorists over the safety of cyclists and pedestrians, my advice to potential riders is now always: it is just too dangerous.

Image of ghost bike for Min Joo Lee from I Bike London

Some Thoughts On The Stephen Lawrence Convictions

2012-01-04T11:47:00.027Z

Yesterday's announcement of the conviction of racist thugs Gary Dobson and David Norris for the murder of Stephen Lawrence in 1993 led to a busy afternoon of messages from activist friends and some mixed feelings, including a certain amount of ambivalence that I know others shared.

The phone calls came because Newham Monitoring Project played a key role in supporting the Lawrence family during the public inquiry. In May and June 1998, I remember dashing around the Elephant and Castle shopping centre, organising events, plotting in meetings and, memorably, carrying the massive iconic painting of Stephen (that was placed by the entrance to the inquiry) through the labyrinthine underpass tunnels between the New Kent Road and Hannibal House. However, the person who spent the most time with Doreen and Neville during that period and who worked for the Family Campaign was my old friend Gilly Mundy, who died in 2007 (pictured at the inquiry on the left of the picture above). Yesterday reminded me and his many friends of just how much we miss him and of the satisfaction he may have felt yesterday at news of the jury verdict.

Perhaps satisfaction is the wrong word, though. My surprising ambivalence about the verdict comes from the knowledge that the police had the names of the five suspects within 24 hours of Stephen's murder and that a successful prosecution could have happened years ago if police racism hadn't dismissed Stephen as a probable gang member. As a result of the botched investigation, Doreen and Neville have devoted a significant part of their life to fighting for justice and have paid a heavy price for doing so, including the breakdown of their marriage. The Metropolitan Police, inevitably, has been keen to rewrite history, emphasising that the convictions were the result of "previously unavailable scientific technology and techniques which led to the discovery of the new evidence". They would prefer the public to forget that a prosecution would never have been reliant on evidence from microscopic DNA samples if the original investigation hadn't been handled so disastrously and the subsequent Barker 'review' hadn't been a whitewash. It also has to be said that, considering the way exhibits were handled back in 1993 and the strong possibility of contamination, the CPS were extremely fortunate to have secured a conviction at all.

On top of that, the choice of Deputy Commissioner Cressida Dick as the senior officer speaking for the Metropolitan police yesterday was a particularly poor one: it was Ms Dick who had overall responsibility for the operation that led to the execution of Jean Charles de Menezes and she is about the worst person to praise a bereaved family for "campaigning tirelessly for justice" when the Met has denied any for Jean Charles' relatives. Equally infuriating was the way that certain MPs were so keen to emphasise the 'dignity' of the Lawrences, as if a refusal to express anger and disgust at the way they have been treated for so many years might in some way have been the deciding factor in their search for justice. Here are just a couple of examples:
Outside the Central Criminal Court yesterday, Doreen Lawrence was having none of this opportunistic bullshit or of the police's attempts at media spin. Her statement was overtly angry, political and pointedly blamed the failure to secure an earlier conviction squarely at the police:

How can I celebrate when I know that this day could have come 18 years ago if the police who were meant to find my son's killers (had not) failed so miserably to do so. These are not a reason to celebrate.

All I now feel is relief that two of my son's killers have finally been caught and brought to justice; relief that these racist men can no longer think that they can murder a black man and get away with it; relief that despite the defence being able to raise issues of contamination, the jury saw through it.

I feel relieved that, to some extent, I can move forward with my life. But mixed with relief is anger - anger that me and my family were put through 18 years of grief and uncertainty, not knowing if or when we would ever get justice.

Had the police done their job properly, I would have spent the last 18 years grieving for my son rather than fighting to get his killers to court.

Anger that despite the police saying that this case was so important to them, the exhibits were treated in such a way the defence could suggest contamination.

This result shows that the police can do their job properly but only if they want to. I only hope that they have learnt their lesson and don't put any other family through what we have been put through.

The fact is that racism and racist attacks are still happening in this country and the police should not use my son's name to say that we can move on.

So, leaving aside any my own hesitance to celebrate, where do yesterday's much-analysed events now leave us? Has Stephen Lawrence's death really 'changed Britain'? I argued in 2008 on the tenth anniversary of the Stephen Lawrence Inquiry report that the window of opportunity opened up by the inquiry, particularly around stop and search. has now closed. The stereotypical view of black communities within the police that was briefly suppressing after the inquiry's recommendations were published is once again a major cause of complaint, as we have seen in evidence from young people in Newham. And as Doreen said yesterday, racist attacks still continue every day in towns across Britain.

Meanwhile, three of the five original suspects - Luke Knight, Jamie Acourt and Neil Acourt - remain free. Yesterday was a victory of sorts - but in many ways it was still a hollow one.

Films Of The Year 2011

2011-12-31T08:32:00.003Z

For the eighth year running, it's time to reflect on the films I've seen over the last 12 months. During 2011, I've managed to make it to the cinema on 47 occasions, significantly more than last year. I put this down to the surgery I had in February: to avoid remaining stuck at home, bored out of my mind, there really aren't that many options available apart from the cinema during recovery from a horrible operation

In keeping with previous years, I only count actual trips to a cinema - not films on DVD - and as usual I've rated the films I've seen. You can find ratings for previous years here.

Ratings:
5 stars: Unmissable!
4 stars: Definitely worth seeing
3 stars: Decent film
2 stars: Disappointing
1 star: Pants
No stars: Why was this released?

In date order - five star films highlighted in bold:

127 Hours (****)
The King's Speech (****)
Black Swan (*)
Hereafter (**)
The Fighter (***)
Never Let Me Go (***)
True Grit (*****)
Paul (***)
The Adjustment Bureau (****)
Route Irish (***)
The Eagle (**)
Source Code (*****)
Cave of Forgotten Dreams (****)
Oranges and Sunshine (***)
Hanna (***)
Fire in Babylon (****)
Attack the Block (***)
X-Men: First Class (**)
Senna (*****)
Incendies (****)
Just Do It (***)
The First Avenger: Capitan America (***)
Super 8 (****)
Rise of the Planet of the Apes (****)
Sarah's Key (***)
Cowboys & Aliens (****)
The Guard (*****)
The Skin That I Live In (*)
Troll Hunter (*****)
Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (*****)
Memento (*****) - part of the BMW Origins Season
Drive (*****)
We Need To Talk About Kevin (*****)
The Ides of March (**)
The Help (***)
Contagion (***)
The Awakening (***)
The Rum Diary (***)
In Time (***)
The Adventures of Tintin (***)
Hugo (****)
Another Earth (***)
The Deep Blue Sea (***)
Sherlock Holmes – Game of Shadows (****)
Dreams of a Life (****)
Moneyball (***)
Mission Impossible 4: Ghost Protocol (***)
The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo [2011] (***)

The Random Blowe Festive Christmas Card

2011-12-25T08:28:00.006Z

A very happy Christmas to my friends in Newham, Hackney, Leyton, Haringey, Brighton, Leamington Spa, Birmingham, Cardiff, Cornwall, Goa, Chiang Mai, Basle, New Orleans, New York - too many to name in person - and to everyone who took the time to read this blog during 2011.

Next year, the area where I live will be crawling with armed police. It'll be our job to keep an eye on the buggers.

The Return of 'Building Resilience'

2011-12-22T08:13:00.004Z

As regular visitors to this blog will know, I have tried - without success - to find out how Newham council has spent its huge 'Preventing Violent Extremism' funding (see here, here and here). Trying to understand the notoriously opaque internal workings of the council is like the employing the guesswork of a 1970s Kreminologist - but occasionally it's possible to stumble upon a nugget of information. For instance, earlier this week I found out quite by accident that a consultancy firm called The Campaign Company is paid by the borough for "a project using values-based segmentation to understand why young Muslims radicalise as part of the PREVENT programme".

It's the kind of detail that the council has refused to share, even though it can be found with a little digging on the consultants' website. However, the real reason I Googled them had nothing to do with Newham's shadowy 'Prevent' work, but a new contract that the Campaign Company has been given to undertake something called "Newham Resilience Research".

Those who remember the launch of the council's 'Building Resilience' project back in May are aware that it is another slice of New Labour authoritarianism that is essentially about blaming people for their poverty and providing a dubious ideological justification for local cuts. We haven't much more about since, but now the Campaign Company has contacted some local groups saying:

Newham Council has commissioned research from The Campaign Company and the Royal Society of Arts to find more about the strength of communities and how they may be affected by the cuts in Newham. We want to understand more about the connections people have to both the individuals and organisations in their local area, in order to build stronger communities in which everyone can play their part.

The Campaign Company is currently surveying the residents of Newham and to tie in with this, we would also like to get in touch with all community and faith groups affiliated with Newham. As organisations within Newham, you all play an integral role in community cohesion and resilience, and your thoughts and perspectives would therefore be very valuable for our work. We would really appreciate it if a representative or leader from your organisation or group could take some time to speak with us over the next week. Our interview should take no longer than 15 to 20 minutes.

It all sounds terribly reassuring, but strangely enough, I didn't receive this e-mail directly. In fact, no-one working for the borough's various second-tier organisations, who have long-established relationships with the voluntary, community and faith sectors in Newham and a wealth of information about local communities and their diverse needs, appears to have been contacted either. I'm sure this is wasn't deliberate (cough) so why, I wonder, does Newham keep shelling out money on consultancies who have no idea that independent charitable groups in the borough have their own established networks and structures?

Instead I found out about the research from a friend who is part of a local campaign group (one fiercely critical of the council) and who sent the e-mail with the words, "this looks unbelievably dodgy". I can see why she is so suspicious. One reason the council could be looking to map connections between individuals and organisations is because its 'Building Resilience' plans, if they ever get further than the drawing board, involve a staged withdrawal from the provision of more and more council services, apart from core support for the most vulnerable, leaving the majority of residents dependent on voluntary groups, informal networks and friends. 'Resilience' looks a lot like a rebranding of the government's massively discredited 'Big Society' proposals.

Being Newham, of course, it's all rather chaotic and poorly executed. The Campaign Company say they are 'carefully' targeting only 60 groups but have been relying on a list of organisation contacts provided by the council in which 75% of the e-mail addresses are wrong. Furthermore, on the evidence of a brief conversation with them, they don't appear to have much of an idea of the geography of their target wards or who are the useful contacts within them. Sadly, I can't imagine the results of the research will adequately reflect Newham's voluntary, community and faith sectors in any meaningful way.

Why, I'm left wondering for the umpteenth time, does Newham council keep shelling out money on consultants with so little actual knowledge of the borough?

Lift-Off

2011-12-21T11:18:00.001Z

Yes, that really is my photo on the Newham Recorder website of the London Air Ambulance taking off from the junction of Woodgrange Road and Romford Road today. I waived my usual fee* in exchange for a credit - hey, today was my last day at work and I was in a good mood!

* yeah, as if I'm likely to have a 'usual fee'!

Launching The Anti-Olympics Poster Competition

2011-12-19T08:02:00.008Z

Even this close to next year's Games, the impact of the wide-reaching London Olympic Games and Paralympic Games Act 2006 is little known. However, as I noted in February, it includes strict regulations that apply to "advertising of any kind" in the vicinity of London Olympic events, even leaflets, posters, announcements or notices of "a non-commercial nature". This means that you decide to stick an anti-Olympic poster in your window, section 22 of the Act provides "a constable or enforcement officer" with the powers to:

(a) enter land or premises on which they reasonably believe a contravention of regulations under section 19 is occurring (whether by reason of advertising on that land or premises or by the use of that land or premises to cause an advertisement to appear elsewhere);

(b) remove, destroy, conceal or erase any infringing article;

(c) when entering land under paragraph (a), be accompanied by one or more persons for the purpose of taking action under paragraph (b);

(d) use, or authorise the use of, reasonable force for the purpose of taking action under this subsection.

Pretty damn draconian, don't you think? But also a definite 'red rag to a bull' for stubborn east Londoners, despite the threat that conviction can lead to to "a fine not exceeding £20,000".

Anyway, thanks to great idea by Luther, today I'm launching a decidedly unofficial "Anti-Olympics Poster Competition". Design the ideal poster for us locals to put up in our windows so we can see whether we get a visit from a "a constable or enforcement officer".

Send one entry per person please (in PDF, JPEG or TIFF format) to copwatcher [at] gmail.com by 31 January 2012.

I'll display the best entries (along with downloadable PDFs) on this blog.

So What Do We Do About Fortress Wanstead Flats?

2011-12-18T10:15:00.012Z

After much debate about how to follow the court decision to refuse to listen to the case for a judicial review, the Save Wanstead Flats campaign is inviting local residents to a meeting at Durning Hall Community Centre in Forest Gate on Wednesday 18 January at 7pm.

This meeting offers an opportunity to discuss what to do next, which inevitably covers a broad range of concerns. For instance, there are the question of how to prevent the use of the Flats as a 'security exclusion zone' in the future (for the World Athletics Championships in 2017, for example) and what, if anything, can be done to strengthen the Epping Forest Act 1876, which has been severely undermined by the Legislative Reform Order and the City of London Corporation's cowardice. There is also a discussion that must be had about what other steps might still be taken by the Save Wanstead Flats Campaign to try and stop the Met police’s plans - or whether it is time for the campaign to call it a day and let others take over.

Campaigns always come to an end eventually but, from a personal point of view, I believe the impact of a Met police 'Muster Briefing and Deployment Centre' on the local area next year still demands further action. There are, of course, immediate issues facing residents in Forest Gate, Wanstead and Leyton when the base opens, not least the potential disruption and restricted access to the Flats that may be far worse than we have ever expected. This is something that residents' groups may decide to take on. One group I've been involved with for many years, Newham Monitoring Project, has grave concerns about the effect on local people's rights of a massive security presence in east London next summer and is keen to monitor the impact of the base on the use of excessive stop & search powers. In addition, there is more scrutiny necessary in checking that promises made about the base during consultation and planning in 2010 are not broken because of 'changing security demands'

One way or another, Fortress Wanstead Flats will demand our attention next summer. And you never know - perhaps someone has a creative and imaginitive way that we can still stop it.

What Next For Wanstead Flats?
Residents' Meeting
7pm, Wednesday 18 January 2012
Durning Hall Community Centre, Earlham Grove, Forest Gate

Let your friends and neighbours know - publicise the event on Facebook or download a flyer and distribute widely.

Council In Trouble Over Sport England Grant To Threatened Sports Centre

2011-12-07T12:29:00.006Z

This week's Private Eye 'Rotten Boroughs' column reports:

"Eye 1301 reported on how Newham, London's 'Olympic' borough, plans to close the Atherton leisure centre - the only public sports facility of its kind in the 'Olympic zone'.

Newham's mayor, "Sir" Robin Wales, says the Atherton has to go because the council can't afford the £2.2m required to run it for the next ten years. Wales has promised a new "state-of-the-art" pool and sports centre, but no funds have been earmarked.

Campaigners who want to keep the pool open have discovered that Sir Robin hasn't done his sums properly. Back in 199 the council obtained a £2.36m grant from Sport England to refurbish the centre. One of the conditions of the funding was that the council had to keep it open for at least 21 years - ie until 2020. if not it would be liable to repay some or all of the £2.36m... over £100,000 more than it would "save" by closure. Brilliant!"

UPDATE

This information came from a Freedom of Information request made to Sport England by the Save Atherton Leisure Centre Campaign - see this press release.

UPDATE - 12 December

Papers for this Thursday's Newham council Cabinet meeting include reference to the grant and say that Sport England "are not currently intending to seek repayment of any lottery grant although this remains an option":

8.6 Lottery Grant repayment
The Council was the beneficiary of a £2.3m Lottery grant via Sport England in relation to the Atherton Centre. The grant agreement allows for Sport England to claw the funding back should the service no longer be provided. However, Sport England have been involved in early development of facility options and remain committed to working with Newham to secure long term sustainable investment in leisure. Sport England have confirmed that their priority is to secure this and welcome the Mayor’s comments about reproviding a new leisure centre. They are not currently intending to seek repayment of any lottery grant although this remains an option. Officers will continue to liaise with Sport England to mitigate this risk.

Wanstead Flats - A Terrible Precedent Is Born

2011-12-06T00:41:00.012Z

It is now either very late at night or very early in the morning, but I need to bang this out if I'm going to get any sleep.

The campaign against the use of Wanstead Flats during next year's Olympics by the police for a Muster Briefing and Deployment Centre has never just been about what happens in 2012. From the beginning, it has always been about the precedent set by choosing to enclose part of Epping Forest, an area supposedly protected by a 135-year-old Act of Parliament.

Yesterday's terrible judicial decision, by Mrs Justice Dobbs at the Royal Courts of Justice, meant that leave was refused for the presentation of the case for overturning the Home Secretary's order, which sets aside, albeit temporarily, the protection of the Epping Forest Act 1876. That judgment significantly increases the risk that parts of Wanstead Flats may be 'temporarily' enclosed again and again in the future, whenever it is deemed convenient or necessary.

Take, as an example, the World Athletics Championship that will be held in London in 2017. The likelihood that the interests of security will demand another Metropolitan Police Muster Briefing and Deployment Centre are high - the Met described such centres as an important tactic in their court submissions. Where better to site it then, from the police's point of view, than Wanstead Flats? Yesterday's decision clears the way for another half-hearted 'consultation' and the use of the Legislative and Regulatory Reform Act to once again sweep away the legal protections afforded to the Flats.

It doesn't matter the Home Office's own preparation was screwed up the first time they tried, or that this piece of highly contentious legislation has only, up until now, been used for minor, almost trivial 'tidying up' of existing laws: the judge decided yesterday that strong public objections are not covered by ministerial pledges to avoid the use of such sweeping powers for 'highly controversial' issues. In future, government departments will be able to change primary legalisation using a legislative order, with little debate in the House of Commons or House of Lords, as long as the majority of an obscure parliamentary committee, voting on party lines (as they did this spring), deem the decision uncontroversial. We, the public, have little say in the matter and no grounds to object.

Then, of course, there is the precedent set by the planning decision of Redbridge council. It too doesn't matter that Newham and Waltham Forest councils objected to the planned Olympics police base, or that more than 1800 signatures we collected in opposition, or than the planning committee in Redbridge told people that potential alternative sites were outside its remit. The decision was taken, with little apparent consideration of the objections, and the damage has been done. After next year, Wanstead Flats effectively becomes a useful 'security zone' whenever another major sporting event - held in the next borough at a staggeringly expensive arena that needs to recoup its costs and justify its existence - makes policing considerations a necessity.

Almost every weekend, I tend to end up walking on the Flats. All of my friends who live locally say it's one of the places that they love most about living in Newham - one of the few places, in many instances. Had it not been for the fact that I work in Forest Gate and was the first person approached in June 2010 by residents concerned about the police's plans, it may have been months before I found out that a place we love, an open space intended for our leisure and recreation, would be partially closed off during the Olympics. I can say this because I don't live on one of the streets closest to the Flats, where the limited publicity by the police was allegedly distributed, but a mile away.

I wonder how many people found out about the plans very late in the day: how many people missed the leaflets put out by the police, or even by the Save Wanstead Flats Campaign because it only had a budget of £180 in donations. I wonder how many people tried to make sense of what they could and couldn't include in a planning objection, or struggled to decypher and understand the laughable consultation document published by Home Secretary on her Legislative Reform Order. I wonder how many people even knew where to find it.

Those who expected, perhaps more than I have, that the courts exist to balance the rights of ordinary citizens against powerful state interests have given an important lesson - that they may have been hoping for too much from the judiciary. After all, it took the active support of the City of London Corporation in the 1870s and in 1946 when the Flats were under threat, instead of the tacit, shameful endorsement of the 'Conservators' in 2010-11, to prevent enclosure. This time, the Corporation took the money offered to them and residents were left to fight alone.

Back in 1871, history reminds us that it also took huge demonstrations on the Flats to stop the plans of powerful interests, with protests that demolished illegally erected fencing. Sadly, such passionate resistance is probably now a thing of the past, the product of a different age - and as Mark Twain once said: "there was but one solitary thing about the past worth remembering, and that was the fact that it is past and can't be restored."

Nevertheless, I must confess that, should I find myself wandering on Wanstead Flats this weekend, I know I'll hope that Twain, a satirist and writer who was right about so many things, was wrong about the past. Hope is always something worth hanging on to.

Wanstead Flats: When Is An Undertaking Not An Undertaking?

2011-12-04T12:25:00.006Z

Tomorrow morning, at 10.30am in court 19 at the Royal Courts of Justice, Mrs Justice Dobbs will preside over the the final hearing of a judicial review on the Metropolitan police's Olympic operations base on Wanstead Flats. The court case continues to be a real David versus Goliath affair, with Forest Gate resident Dr Michael Pelling acting as a 'litigant in person' against the expensive legal teams for the Home Office and the police.

Those who have been following this case will know that the Home Office used a Legislative Reform Order (LRO) under the provisions of the Legislative and Regulatory Reform Act (LRRA) to override the specific legal protection afforded to Wanstead Flats by an act of parliament back in 1876. At the time of its introduction in 2006, the LRRA was fiercely criticised for giving arbitrary 'modernising' powers without the proper scrutiny of parliament. The Telegraph reported that even Clifford Chance, the world's largest corporate law firm, briefed its clients that the only red tape the LRRA would remove is "the red tape of Parliamentary scrutiny for primary legislation".

The government, however, gave 'clear undertakings' that the powers of the LRRA would not be used to force through controversial measures - not once but on three separate occasions:

Jim Murphy, Cabinet Office Parliamentary Secretary
(Commons Hansard 9 February 2006: columns 1058-1059)

I am giving a clear undertaking today that orders will not be used to implement highly controversial reforms, that they will not be forced through in the face of opposition from the Committees of this House and that the Committees’ views of what is appropriate for delivery by order will be final.

Pat McFadden, Cabinet Office Parliamentary Secretary
(Commons Hansard 15 May 2006: column 795)

The Government have also given an undertaking that they will not do anything highly controversial using an order and that an order will not be forced through despite opposition from the relevant parliamentary Committees. (..) the Government have placed on a statutory footing a veto for relevant Committees of either House. That will provide further assurance for those concerned that an order will proceed only if the informed view of the House and another place is satisfied that its outcome is desirable.

Lord Bassam of Brighton
(Lords Hansard 13 June 2006: column 125)

I can reiterate two key Government undertakings: that the Government will not deliver highly controversial measures by order and that we will not force through orders in the face of opposition from the parliamentary Committees.

However, the skeleton argument put forward by the lawyers for the Met Commissioner makes an astonishing suggestion - that these undertakings were made only to parliament, not to the public, and therefore are really none of our concern. In section 104 it says:

"The undertakings provided to Parliament are not undertakings to the world at large; rather they are undertakings to Parliament and intended to be enforceable only within Parliamentary processes".

Their skeleton argument goes on to suggest that "the mere fact that objections have been raised does not mean that an LRO is highly controversial. There must be something of significance constitutionally regarding the reform proposed".

So what, you may ask, is Parliament if not the elected representatives of the world at large? I know that much of the time, the massive disconnection between parliamentarians and the public makes it seem like MPs and Lords are living in a different world, but in theory they still represent us. Right?

And when, you may also wonder, is a 'clear undertaking' by the government to resist using powers in controversial circumstances not really an undertaking? As far as the Metropolitan police's lawyers are concerned, when an issue is challenged by members of the public. So much for the government's "localism" rhetoric about local people having a say in decision-making that affects us. As for second statement by the Met's lawyers, it's simply : the LRRA was allegedly designed to 'remove or reduce burdens' - but there is absolutely nothing in it about these burdens needing any constitutional significance.

Key to this case is the requirement that Ministers consult widely before making an LRO - and Dr Pelling and the Save Wanstead Flats Campaign argues that the consultation was based misleading, based upon a reading of the Epping Forest Act that even the Home Office admits was flawed. What this case has shown is the real dangers of using powerful draconian legislation like the Legislative and Regulatory Reform Act to drive though decisions simply for the sake of convenience - especially when it involves a prestige government project like the staging of the Olympics.

If the Met police's arguments are accepted and the state wins this case tomorrow, another precedent may well be set - not only over future misuse of Wanstead Flats, but also that 'clear undertakings' by government are demonstrably no longer worth the paper they are printed on.

How To Get Rid Of Newham's Dear Leader

2011-12-01T21:28:00.004Z

Over the years and usually over a few drinks, conversation has turned repeatedly to a reoccurring and increasingly tiring topic: are we stuck with Newham's Mayor Sir Robin Wales for ever?

For seven years before taking up his current post, Wales was council leader and since 2002, he has presided over a cabinet system in Newham that carries considerable patronage and influence from the top. This has made Wales extraordinarily powerful, because uniquely among the fourteen local authority areas that have directly-elected Mayors, there is no political opposition - Newham's municipal politics are the Labour Group's internal politics.

The fact that a majority of those who bothered to turn out for mayoral elections (34% in 2006 rising to 52% in 2010, on the back of a closely fought General Election) tend to heavily vote Labour in Newham has always been one of the biggest obstacles for those who would like to see the back of Sir Robin Wales. Opposition parties have been unable to agree upon a single candidate to stand against him that they can all support. So too has been the lack of of term limits: the Local Government Act 2000 that introduced directly-elected mayors did not include them and it remains the decision of political parties to choose who they select. Locally, there is no-one in the Labour Party likely to mount a challenge to Wales (and therefore risk their comfortable council allowances) unless he chooses to stand down and so the Mayor, now 56, could easily be with us for the next 20 years or more. Imagine how imperious he'd be in 2031...

The other more significant problem with the 2000 Act, especially for those of us who believe the mayoral system places far too much power in one individual's hands, was its lack of a mechanism for undoing the referendum that created the post of Mayor back in January 2002, on a meagre 26% turn-out. However, I am indebted to Forest Gate resident Kevin Mansell for pointing out that this is no longer the case. Under the Localism Act 2011, which fulfilled the Coalition Agreement pledge to "allow Councils to return to the committee system, should they wish to", it is now possible to hold another referendum if a council's current model of governance was itself the subject of a vote. Local authorities can do so by a resolution of the full council, which in this borough is never going to happened. But the new law also says that a referendum can be triggered if a petition signed by 5% of the electorate is submitted to the council.

In 2010, there were 195,058 people on the electoral register. That means a petition would require 9753 signatures. At the last local election, all the opposition parties were committed to a new referendum and 30,446 electors voted against Sir Robin. Finding less than a third of them to sign up to a call for a new vote should not be an insurmountable task.

That's not the end of the story of course: even if a referendum was triggered, any fledgling 'Bring Back Democracy' campaign in Newham would have to make damn sure that it pulled people out to actually vote against the continuation of a directly-elected Mayor. Even with a broad alliance, including all those who are unhappy about council cuts, that's not such an easy task given the patterns of electorate turn-out in the past. Moreover, if the campaign failed, the Localism Act prevents another challenge for another ten years.

But as far as I'm concerned, I don't want to ever hear another grumbled conversation about how vital it is that we are rid of our dictatorial Mayor. If people are really serious, then the means are now available to make it happen if they are willing to put in the hard work.

However, with the next local elections in London due in 2014, any decision on starting a petition and launching a campaign must be made in 2012. And no, I'm not volunteering to organise it - after all, I'm not the person who ever starts the reoccurring and increasingly tiring conversations...

Public Sector Strike Action Tomorrow

2011-11-29T19:10:00.003Z

Tomorrow, around two million public sector workers begin a one-day strike over government plans to change their pensions. In total, 23 unions having voted for industrial action and everything from the courts to council services and hospitals will be affected. It's a measure of how much this represents the first serious mainstream challenge to the Coalition government - one sadly missing from the Labour opposition - that ministers like Education Secretary Michael Gove have resorted to red-baiting in the desperate hope that this may dent the 61% of the public who support strike action, according to yesterday's opinion poll commissioned by BBC News. There's a useful analysis of the claims and counter-claims by Polly Curtis on the Guardian website that illustrates the weakness of the government's case.

In Newham, however, despite the inevitable disruption, it may be easy to miss the fact that strikes are even taking place. Friends of mine who work in the public sector been rather hazy about whether there will be picket lines anywhere in the borough and the False Economy website, which has a map of activities taking place across London, includes nothing about Newham but a host of activities taking place in neighbouring Tower Hamlets, including a march from George Greens School on the Isle of Dogs to Canary Wharf as a warm-up for the SERTUC rally and march from Lincoln's Inn Fields. I'm not sure what this says about the generally demoralised state of local politics and union activism here in Newham - it's not as though there won't be extensice strike action taking place. Newham council reports that the majority of local schools will close, as will Beckton Globe, Green Street and Docklands Local Service Centres. This map shows the extent of the strikes in the borough:

View Newham N30 Strike Map in a larger map
If all goes to plan, I'll be heading into town for noon to join the march to Victoria Embankment. Let's hold the police don't decide to kettle protesters and that the key advice from Green & Black Cross won't be needed tomorrow.

Today's "Writers: Pictures in a Tunnel" Exhibition

2011-11-27T17:31:00.010Z

Even after 25 years in the city, there is so much I don't know about London - for instance, that Leake Street in Lambeth, under Waterloo station, is an unofficial 'authorised graffiti area'. Marc Vallée, who with Brian David Stevens held a 'pop up exhibition' there today, told me the rumour that the pedestrian-only tunnel is still leased from owners Eurostar by the artist Banksy, who hosted the 'Cans Festival' there in 2008. Whether this is true or not, graffiti artists are quite obviously tolerated - nobody bothered to even glance up from their work as two police officers walking through while we were there.

The lunchtime exhibition included images of some of these 'writers', the result of Marc's decision to work with Brian to document the London graffiti scene after eight years of photographing political protest and dissent (which is how my mate Cilius and I know him). Some of the images from this new project can be found here and on Brian's 'Drifting Camera' blog here: my more amateur efforts from Leake Street and the exhibition itself can be found in this Flickr set and below.

Going Underground - Aldwych Station

2011-11-26T11:44:00.003Z

After yesterday's Royal Courts of Justice hearing, an entirely different experience: one of my friends got hold of tickets for a rare opening of the disused Aldwych station. I wasn't sure what to expect but it was interesting to see what has become a popular film set - especially the 1970s advertising. Here are a few pictures:

More on Flickr

Wanstead Flats - At The Royal Courts Of Justice

2011-11-25T20:47:00.006Z

This morning I attending a hearing at the Royal Courts of Justice for the first time since 1988, when I was there because my polytechnic was trying to shut down a student occupation (that time, due to lack of sleep, I fell asleep in one of the corridors).

As regular readers of this blog will know, a Legislative Reform Order (LRO) amending the Epping Forest Act was passed with little debate by Parliament some months ago. However, the Save Wanstead Flats Campaign has continued to argue that because the consultation carried out by the Home Office was so poor and denied local people a proper chance to challenge the decision, it should be overturned. One resident and Campaign member, Dr Michael Pelling, has therefore taken on the Home Secretary and Metropolitan Police by seeking a judicial review of the consultation process and the quashing of the LRO. The Save Wanstead Flats Campaign is an "interested party" in the case.

In early October, the original request for permission to apply for a judicial review was turned down by Mr Justice Irwin. Some of his reasoning was decidedly peculiar – he argued, for instance, that the existence of “a local action group that mounted an active campaign” means that “the idea that the proposal [from the Home Office] was somehow concealed from the local community is quite fanciful”. The ludicrous notion that local campaigners, with extremely limited resources (about £180 raised at public meetings, some of my time provided by my employer and the passion and dedication of local people), are able to force the police and the Home Office to release information shows just how out of touch the judiciary can often be. As the Save Wanstead Flats Campaign pointed out a year ago, the police’s decision to release limited details of alternative sites only a few weeks before the close of the consultation made it impossible to check how reliable this information actually was. We didn't have the funds or the time to check every location on its 'long-list' of potential sites.

As a result of Mr Justice Irwin's unimpressive ruling, Dr Pelling sought a Renewal Hearing. Yesterday’s presentation at the Royal Courts of Justice in front of Mr Justice Bean was to prepare for a full hearing in December. Michael asked for disclosure from the Home Office and the police of the ‘alternative sites’ they had identified in the event that the LRO is overturned – this was refused. So too was an argument against a ‘rolled-up’ hearing, which would mean seeking a renewal of the judicial review and, if successful, holding the review itself on the same day. This makes Michael’s job considerably harder, but he has managed to secure some protection against costs.

The ‘rolled up’ hearing is scheduled to take place on 5 December, back at the Royal Courts of Justice. One way of another, we will know the outcome of the legal challenge against the Home Office in defence of keeping Wanstead Flats open to the public – and it is essential that as many people as possible come along and show the level of opposition to the planned Olympics operations base.

What's In Newham's Stop & Search Scrutiny Report?

2011-11-22T17:48:00.015Z

Last week, the final report of the Crime and Disorder Scrutiny Commission ‘Review of Stop and Search Procedures in Newham’ [PDF] was finally discussed by the council’s Cabinet after it slipped off its agenda in July. It makes for interesting reading.

It confirms that during June and July 2010, compared to neighbouring boroughs, Newham’s police carried out the highest number of stop and searches under Section 60 of the Criminal Justice and Public Order Act 1994. 'Section 60s', unlike other police stop & search powers, do not require an officer to justify having a ‘reasonable suspicion’ that a person may be about to commit a crime (although justifications under other powers can often seem pretty dubious). The report also confirms that the impact of this ‘intelligence-led’ power, usually justified to tackle knife crime, was very low, that few people stopped were ever carrying a knife and that “it was very difficult to assess what crime had been prevented by stopping and searching members of the public”.

Nevertheless, Newham's senior officers told the Crime and Disorder Scrutiny Commission that the local police have “the support of the community” in using these powers and that “consultation took place, in particular with young people”. However, the evidence provided by focus groups of young people themselves seems to suggest a far less rosy picture. The Commission found that:

"Overall, there were fairly negative connotations and experiences associated with stop and search procedures. A general lack of explanation and being stopped for no apparent reason was evident in the experiences of the young people in the groups. Feelings associated with stop and search included resentment, embarrassment, frustration and the feeling that it was a waste of time. More explanation, respect and privacy were wanted if young people were to be stopped and searched. It was also very much thought that stop and search procedures was not as random as it should be and that the young people felt targeted for a number of reasons e.g. race/ethnic background, appearance, social class, etc".

Unfortunately, the response of the Youth Strategy Lead for Newham Police, Chief Inspector Gary Brown, was not a recognition that stop & search is something of a blunt instrument, one that produces limited results in combating knife crime and is, according to the testimony of young people, not always conducted in a “respectful and dignified manner”. Instead, he dismissed the Scrutiny Commission’s qualitative research as unrepresentative compared to the “thousands of young people” he had personally spoken to.

The overall impression is that although "feedback is welcome", Newham's police treated the Scrutiny Commission as a distraction that can be safely ignored, despite statistics released in July 2011 [PDF] that show there were 13,780 'Section 60s' in Newham over a 12-month period (one that doesn't include August's riots). Chief Inspector Brown, in the formal response to the report [PDF], offers only to "look into" the recommendation for ‘young engagement classes for officers’, which somehow managed to attract some publicity in the Evening Standard last week. My guess is the idea is unlikely to ever materialise.

Fog & Sunset On Wanstead Flats

2011-11-20T19:54:00.007Z

This afternoon I joined a friend to wander across Wanstead Flats and on to Wanstead Park. On the way back, a low-lying fog descended just as the sun began to set - and the result was stunning, the Flats at its most beautiful.

Photos from today have been added to a set on Flickr, "Wanstead Flats Over One Year", with pictures of the changing seasons on the Flats from October 2010.

Bank of Ideas - The Surveillance State

2011-11-19T20:42:00.017Z

During the week, protesters against the banks and the power of the City of London set up the Bank of Ideas, the new squatted space at an office block owned by the Swiss bank USB in Sun Street. The Bank of Ideas has been running a series of lectures and discussions and at 2pm this afternoon, I dropped in to listen to Nick Pickles from Big Brother Watch on "The Surveillance State".

What intrigued me was the choice of speaker by Occupy London activists: after all, Pickles (right) was a Conservative Party candidate in West Yorkshire and Big Brother Watch has close associations with the right-wing Taxpayers Alliance (it shares a Chief Executive, Matthew Elliot). It is most definitely a creature of the right: it's first director Alex Deane was David Cameron’s first chief of staff. That doesn't mean the libertarian right hasn't been making some valid arguments about civil liberties and the power of the state, just as the centre-left, particularly under the Blair government, decided that individual freedoms should be abandoned, indeed sacrificed completely, in the name of 'security'.

As a result, there was little that I would necessarily disagree with as Nick Pickles outlined concerns about the growth of government databases, the unaccountable influence of Association of Chief Police Officers (ACPO) or the misuse of police powers of stop & search. However, much of the debate today concentrated on privacy and data protection issues and Pickles spoke a lot about local councils and the NHS, the right's traditional focus of attack (although defending the intrusive actions of useless councils and hospital trusts simply because they are public sector bodies is a trap that the left should really try and avoid more often - the state is still the state, even if it is threatened with cuts).

Where I also disagreed completely was in the emphasis on why abuses of civil liberties happen - for instance, I don't accept the argument made by Pickles that it is also the fault of bureaucratic target setting and incompetence, or that police officers actively resent having to conduct arbitrary stops and searches to meet targets. All the evidence available suggests that officers actually relish the power they exercise, especially over young people (for instance, see the Newham scrutiny commission report on stop & search [PDF] released last week). The powers to interfere, intimidate and spy on people's lives are deliberate, not accidental. Furthermore, I still think Big Brother Watch, like others, places far too much emphasis on legal processes after people's rights have been abused. This continues to feel like a response that is too late, is too much like desperately holding the line in the face of a growing surveillance state and is far too dependent upon the uncertain decision-making of another conservative part of the establishment, the judiciary.

Nevertheless, many of the points made by Pickles are arguments that sections of the protest movement are themselves making and are highlighted by the campaign led by the Network for Police Monitoring, 'Kettling the Powers of the Police'. The position of Big Brother Watch may be similar to that adopted by groups like Liberty, who I have different problems with. But they did turn up and speak at the Bank of Ideas - which, to be honest, I can't imagine that Shami Chakrabarti would ever contemplate.

Anonymous Sources Raise Olympic Trial Balloon

2011-11-15T12:30:00.004Z

I see that yesterday’s Guardian article claiming that the United States has raised serious concerns about security measures for next year’s Olympic Games has been rejected by the US State Department.

I’m not really that surprised, for in truth, it was always highly likely that during the Olympics there would be substantial number of overseas security personnel, including FBI agents “to provide protection for America's contestants and diplomats”, just as it was likely that we’d see the deployment of ground-to-air missiles to ‘protect London’. The fact that “the sponsors of the Games, including Coca-Cola, will have their own private security details” was an intriguing extra, but nevertheless, some of us living near to the Olympic site have been saying for several years that our community will effectively become a militarised zone from around May 2012.

What is perhaps most significant about the Guardian piece is its extensive use of unattributed contacts from within the security and intelligence establishment – “one security official” and a “well-placed Whitehall source” – and the eagerness of these sources to blame everything on the Americans. Rereading the article, the issues of ‘concern’ they raise, from the meddling of foreign agencies to restrictions on the scope of anti-terrorism stop and search powers and budgetary limitations, look very much like their own gripes, particularly as Britain’s securitariat is notorious for its turf wars and petty jealousies . What the piece also looks like is the raising of a trial balloon for more money and more draconian powers (especially around stop & search) to see how much is shot down by politicians and public opinion (rather than the aforementioned naval missile batteries).

With under a year until the start of the Games, it feels like the process of soften us up for potentially sweeping new powers – in the name of Olympic security – has finally begun This may well mean more arguments for a ‘temporary’ reversal of the repeal of section 44 of the Terrorism Act, which allowed police to stop and search people with impunity, along with demands for a range of new laws to clamp down on public gatherings, ban protests and install a far more intimidating level of visible security in east London than many people may have perhaps realised.

The security establishment used to use the Murdoch press, especially the Sunday Times, as its vehicle for communicating its messages. The right, however, is already largely onside. That this story appeared first in the Guardian does tend to therefore suggest a more targeted audience, aiming to persuade liberals who are more likely to complain about infringements on civil liberties that draconian measures are necessary in the ‘special circumstances’ of the Olympics – and pointing the finger of blame at those terribly hawkish, ‘risk-averse’ Yanks.

Sadly, it’s a strategy that is likely to work – we only have to look at the meek acceptance of the Blair government’s aggressive legislation over a decade of ‘the war on terror’ to see how fragile the liberal establishment’s support for civil liberties can be during ‘special circumstances’. However, the implications for those living near the Olympic park remain genuinely frightening, especially if you are young, black, Muslim, poor and unable to afford to escape to Tuscany during July and August next year.

Catching Up On Political Protest

2011-11-06T21:27:00.009Z

Having been away, I've missed an eventful month that has included some particularly oppressive policing (see this report from the Network for Police Monitoring) and the Occupy London protest outside St Paul's Cathedral. Today I dropped by the West Courtyard, caught up with some friends who have been taking part from the start and chatted with some new, first time protesters.

For those of us who are unable to take part on a daily basis, there are still ways of offering some practical solidarity. The Occupy London website has a list of 'tat' that the camp needs - more here.

[More photos on Flickr]

Back From India Part 2 - Haryana in Black & White

2011-11-06T21:04:00.003Z

After a week back in the UK, the jet lag has finally disappeared and I'm starting to get used to the cold. One thing I've been looking forward to seeing the results from this week is an experiment in taking black & white photos using an old school film camera whilst I was in India.

Sadly, the results have been far from a success - the photo service that I used have made a complete mess of developing the black & white film. What I have learnt? That there are real advantages with digital photography - and that Bhogals Pharmacy on Green Street are complete cowboys who have no clue how to develop and print film without screwing up massively. Anyway, here are the pictures. Next time I'll go to Jessops.

Back From India

2011-11-01T21:49:00.003Z

Apologies for the fact that this blog has gone rather quiet over the last month. Since the beginning of October, I have been in India visiting the school built as a memorial to my old friend Gilly Mundy, who died in 2007 at far too young an age.

Thanks to fundraising by the Buwan Kothi International Trust (of which I am Treasurer), a field in a fairly isolated rural village in Haryana in northern India has been transformed into a school with over 500 students in just over three years - and this was the first chance I have had to see it.

Here are some pictures from the school - I'll try and add more on an eventful trip to the Golden Temple at Amritsar and the India/Pakistan border in the next few days.

Wanstead Flats - Corporation Can't Wait To Spend Met Police's Money

2011-09-30T11:58:00.004+01:00

It seems that an impatient City of London Corporation isn't interested in waiting for the outcome of the judicial review of plans by the Metropolitan Police to site its Olympic operations base on Wanstead Flats. It is already eager to spend the money - the incredibly small sum - that the Met has offered for 'rental'.

Consultation [see this PDF] is due to end on 31 October with local people asked to vote on four potential projects: improving the landscape around Alexandra Lake; restoring the tree avenues at Bush Wood; redeveloping the sports facility on Capel Road; and relining Jubilee Pond. The Corporation plans a display of these projects at Capel Road Football Changing Rooms this Sunday (2 October) from 12pm to 3pm and at Aldersbrook Library (date to be confirmed).

This is all part of an desperate attempt to pretend that the operations base is a positive move for Wanstead Flats - a case that the Corporation has singularly failed to convince most local people of over the last year.

Newham Council To Close Atherton Leisure Centre

2011-09-30T10:45:00.003+01:00

More evidence of the true face of the Olympic "sporting legacy", as Newham council has announced that it plans to shut down the Atherton Leisure Centre in Stratford on December 31st 2011.

In a statement on the council's website, it says that the closure is the result of "spiralling costs for the repair of the ceiling over the centre's main pool and an estimated maintenance requirement of more than £2.2 million over the next ten years". Mayor Sir Robin Wales insists that the council is committed "to providing a new facility with a pool as quickly as possible and we want people to have a say in what else might go in it", adding:.

"We would like to have kept the centre open while we look at all the options but we simply cannot afford to do that. It would be foolish and a complete waste of money. We need to replace the leisure facility. Doing repairs is money down the drain."

However, minutes of a council meeting on 22 September [PDF] make clear that "at present there is no identified capital funding for the new facility [to replace the Atherton Centre], and no external investment has been secured". It adds that "here is significant risk that the capital financing will not be secured for a replacement facility".

Council officers also acknowledge that there is insufficient capacity within other facilities in the borough to cope with the closure of the Atherton Centre - there will be severe problems in accommodating the School Swimming Lesson Programme that currently uses the Atherton pool to full capacity, as well as 81 private swimming lessons and aerobics classes, fitness sessions and football clubs.

The Atherton Centre has approximately 240 000 visits a year, 23% of the borough total visits to Leisure Centres. Its loss, with no concrete plans for a replacement, will have a significant impact on leisure facilities locally and it will cost local taxpayers £80,000 to decommission the building. The planned closure also seems to have been in part influenced by the end of the current contract with Greenwich Leisure Ltd, who currently tun the centre. Meanwhile, the planned opening of the Olympic Pool to the public is not due to take place until 2014. So what happens over the next two years?

Tomorrow , a protest is planned to show the council that local people are not prepared to accept the closure of a popular community resource. Meet outside the Atherton Centre (189 Romford Road) at 11am.

LAZY FRIDAY - What If Computer Problems Were Real?

2011-09-23T12:10:00.003+01:00

What if computer problems were real? This week's Friday lunchtime distraction is for everyone having a really bad day at the office.

Olympics Sponsor Coca Cola Recruits Distributors - But Isn't Paying Them

2011-09-19T15:51:00.006+01:00

Many thanks to Pete from local community radio station NuSound for letting me know that for next year's London Olympics, official sponsor Coca-Cola is recruiting people "to help distribute drinks to athletes, visitors, staff and volunteers within the Olympic Park and other London 2012 venue" - but isn't paying them.

The posts of 'Venue Operator Interns' will involve, amongst other tasks, the distribution and arrangement of "up to an average of 80 cases of product per day", as well as ensuring "the correct amounts of stock are maintained and recorded". Internships are full time for a period of 4 to 8 weeks between 18 July and 12 September next year and their hours may include late night shifts. The work is evidently demanding: applicants are expected to be "physically fit with a high level of energy".

So much of been made about the employment opportunities that the Games will bring to local people, although there are only 11 jobs in east London listed (as of today) on the official Jobs for the Games website. But it's still a shock to discover that a 'Worldwide Olympic Partner' like Coca Cola has found a way around minimum wage legislation by not paying interns a wage at all - especially when even the Department for Business Innovation and Skills has produced guidance advising that intern positions should be paid the National Minimum Wage.

Unsurprisingly, the offer of sharing a twin room in a hotel, a "healthy breakfast and working lunch" and expenses didn't feature in this guidance as an adequate alternative to proper pay of at least £8.30 an hour.

During the Labour leadership campaign Ed Miliband signed a pledge organised by the campaign Intern Aware promising that, if elected, he would "campaign for Labour’s Minimum Wage Act to be fully enforced so that employers must pay their interns what they are due". Somehow, I imagine the chances are slim at best that he'll speak up and demand that this includes the Olympics in 2012.

Property Investor Gave £50K To Tories Months Before Winning Olympic Village Bid

2011-09-18T11:48:00.004+01:00

From this week's Private Eye [16-23 Sept 2011]:

Property investor Jamie Ritblat's company Delancey made a £50,000 donation to the Conservative Party just months before it bought the Olympic athletes' village in east London at a £275m loss to taxpayers.

This is the first time Ritblat, Eton-educated son of property giant John Ritblat, or his firm had donated to the Tories, according to the Electoral Commission.

Delancey bought the Olympic Village with Qatari Diar, the Qatar investment vehicle, for £557m – nearly £300m less than the Olympic Delivery Authority had paid to build it. Other bidders had offered even less, so the dead at least represented the smallest loss to the public purse.

The deal's supporters say that the Olympic homes, which have no kitchens, require a lot of remodelling before they can be rented or sold after the games. The Wellcome Foundation, which also bid, wanted a larger slice of the site and to build a research centre, which would have netted less money in the short term but potentially could have done more to create jobs and boost the economy. The strong possibility that the Delancey-Qatari owners may sell many of the properties to overseas buyers may also add controversy.

Ritblat will have plenty of opportunities to discuss these issues with the government: £50,000 buys him a place at the Tory party's “leader's group” and the chance to rub shoulders with David Cameron and other party bigwigs.

Though culture secretary Jeremy Hunt described the Stratford deal as “fantastic”, as it would “give taxpayers a great return”, Ritblat Jnr's ventures haven't always been so good for the public. Delancey was part of the notorious “Mapeley” consortium which bought all the UK's tax offices and leased them back to the UK government, with a lot of cash flowing offshore into a tax haven.

Campaign Launched Against Secretive Cuts To Stratford Children's Library

2011-09-15T14:24:00.005+01:00

There’s little doubt that Stratford library is always busy – it’s often difficult to find a seat amongst the students who use it regularly and its children’s area is popular with local parents. However, most may not know that the library is due to close for six months from 1 October for what Newham council calls “refurbishment” – and what in practice means the incorporation of the Local Service Centre, currently across the road near the Fox pub, are part of the Mayor's plan for "Integrated Front Offices". With no notice and no public consultation, this will involve a drastic reduction in the children's library area.

The few Stratford library users who have heard about this proposal are understandably furious and I am indebted to Claire Perez for letting me know about a campaign to “end the clandestine cutting of community services upon which our children depend”. A campaign website has been set up and a petition launched. In a letter to Mayor Sir Robin Wales, Ms Perez says:

According to my conversation with senior library management, the Borough’s communications team had not authorised them to inform library users of these impending changes. This is unacceptable and makes parents and children feel that they are victim to cynical machine politics. Parents and children of Newham will not be able to forgive politicians who stand back and allow a whole generation of young people to be betrayed in this way.

Sadly this kind of secrecy is commonplace in Newham. As those of us with a long memory also know well, efforts to persuade Sir Robin to change his mind are notoriously difficult, especially when squeezing other council services into a smaller, more overcrowded Stratford Library enables him to continue to claim that no library in Newham will actually close. The campaign by parents therefore needs all the support it can get from local people. You can find out about how to do so here.

Newham's Conspicuous Consumption Day

2011-09-13T23:55:00.003+01:00

Down in Docklands today, arms dealers gathered at the ExCel Centre to spend millions on arms, ammunition and equipment. Meanwhile, the new Stratford Westfield shopping mall also had its opening day and was mobbed by crowds reminiscent of the pre-Christmas rush on Oxford Street.

Due to work commitments I was able to make it down to Custom House, where I hear that protests were smaller than in previous years. As for Westfield - as well as the 'smarter' shops, the mall also has its fair share of the usual chains, including Primark, Footlocker and Greggs. There's little doubt it will kill the old Stratford Shopping Centre, but will the crowds really return to Westfield in the same numbers once the novelty has worn off?

More pictures on Flickr

Protest Ban in Newham Lifted

2011-09-12T23:07:00.002+01:00

From a press release this evening from Christian Khan Solicitors:

The Metropolitan Police today applied to the Home Secretary for consent to lift a blanket ban on protest marches in four East London boroughs to allow a march against the world's largest arms fair to go ahead on Wednesday 14 September 2011, following a threat to bring legal proceedings challenging the lawfulness of the ban.

Taherali Gulamhussein, a protestor and volunteer with the Network for Police Monitoring, last week instructed Kat Craig of Christian Khan Solicitors to send a Letter before Action challenging the 30-day blanket ban on protests imposed on all marches in five London boroughs, namely Tower Hamlets, Hackney, Islington, Waltham Forest, and Newham.

The decision to vary the ban, which had been applied for by the Metropolitan Police under Section 13 of the Public Order Act 1986, came one minute before a deadline given by Mr Gulamhussein’s lawyers to cancel or vary the ban, or be taken to the High Court tomorrow (Tuesday) morning. The ban has now been lifted in all boroughs except Tower Hamlets.

Mr Gulamhussein challenged the ban when he realised that a march he wished to attend, organised by the University of East London Students’ Union to the Excel Centre in East London in protest against the arms trade, would be prohibited. He said:

“There appears to be an increasing and worrying tendency by the state to attempt to silence legitimate opposition in the form of peaceful protest.”

The ban, which came into force on 2 September 2011, was originally believed to have been put in place following concerns about a march planned by far-right group the English Defence League (EDL) in Tower Hamlets on 3 September 2011. However, activists and lawyers raised concerns when they noted that it extended far beyond the area where the EDL intended to march, and was due to be in force for a period of 30 days.

Kat Craig, who specialises in bringing challenges against the police for interfering with the right to peaceful protest, said:

“The ban was patently disproportionate and excessive. Leaving to one side its initial purported aim, it would have prevented any march in the five boroughs, regardless of why and by whom it had been organised. It was a clear and flagrant infringement of the right to freedom of expression.”

In response to the threatened legal action, the Metropolitan Police disclosed that concerns about further public disorder following the shooting by police of Mark Duggan, whose funeral took place last Friday, were one of the reasons the ban was proposed.

Mr Gulamhussein, continued:

"It is deeply concerning that the police and the Home Secretary attempted to use the funeral of an innocent man, who died at the hands of state agents, to prevent legitimate protests taking place. Further, it makes no sense as the ban covered a completely different geographical area. This is yet another example of the lack of transparency we face when dealing with the police, and shows that we must challenge their decisions to ensure accountability."

LAZY FRIDAY - Go Forth And Revolt

2011-09-09T12:38:00.001+01:00

This Friday's lunchtime distraction is a anti-capitalist parody of the staggeringly awful Levi's advert playing in cinemas at the moment. It gets far closer to some real truths than the noodling jazz of the jeans ad.

Newham Mayor Paid £10K By Olympic Organisers in 2011

2011-09-07T14:08:00.006+01:00

Today the London Organising Committee of the Olympic Games and Paralympic Games (LOCOG) published its financial report and accounts for 2010-11, which includes details of directors' remuneration.

It comes as a surprise to find, on page 69 of the report [PDF], that one elected public official who sits as a non-executive director - Newham's Mayor Sir Robin Wales - was paid £10,000 by LOCOG in 2011 and £7000 in 2010. This is on top of an inflation-busting 4% pay rise from Newham council in 2010, which took his Mayor's salary to £81,029 a year.

Intriguingly, the accounts indicate that Stephen Lovegrove, a senior civil servant within the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills, "does not draw a fee for his services as a Non-executive Director given the nature of his role within the UK Government". I had always assumed that Sir Robin's role within local government, representing one of the Olympic host boroughs, would mean the same. But presumably LOCOG pays for his dynamic communication and interpersonal skills, not for the fact that he has final say on a huge range of council decisions that impact on the organisation of next year's Games.

If you're thinking this may throw up potential conflicts of interest, then don't worry - Sir Robin chairs LOCOG's Remuneration Committee and I'm sure he knows what he is doing...

POSTSCRIPT

The FT reports that LOCOG chief executive Paul Deighton has decided to donate his £220,000 performance and loyalty bonus to charity. As Sir Robin already has a full-time job working as the elected Mayor of Newham, perhaps he might consider donating his £10K towards, say, the youth projects that have been cut in the borough?

Wanstead Flats Campaign Update

2011-09-05T14:58:00.010+01:00

The judicial review of the Home Office's plans to amend the 133-year old law that protects Wanstead Flats and stands in the way of the proposed Olympics police base, will soon mean a weekday hearing at the Royal Courts of Justice in the Strand.

As regular visitors to this blog will know, the 'Legislative Reform Order' amending the Epping Forest Act was passed with little debate by Parliament some months ago. However, the Save Wanstead Flats campaign has continued to argue that because the consultation carried out by the Home Office was so poor, denying local people a proper chance to challenge the decision, it should be overturned. One resident, Dr Michael Pelling, has therefore sought a judicial review of the Home Office consultation process, with the Save Wanstead Flats campaign named as an 'interested party'. At some point within the next eight weeks, a hearing date will be set and as soon as it is, the Save Wanstead Flats campaign plans to hold a protest outside of the court. Local residents will then be able go in and witness the hearing.

A leaflet is circulating to homes locally asking if residents want to receive an update on the final court date. A copy can be downloaded from here [PDF].

Meanwhile, over on the 'Protect Wanstead Flats and Epping Forest' FaceBook page, some unscrupulous rumour-mongering about the prospect of a compulsory purchase order of the Wanstead Flats site, if the Home Office loses the judicial review, has attracted the attention of the Metropolitan Police. On 5 August, someone called Tim Knight posted the following:

The implication is clearly that any blame for a compulsory purchase order would fall upon Save Wanstead Flats campaign members, for refusing to "just let it happen for a couple of months". I only became aware of this dubious piece of shit-stirring when I received an e-mail from Detective Chief Superintendent Alaric Bonthron from the Met's Olympics community relations team, who said:

"In response to the comment posted earlier on a social networking site, the Met have not issued a compulsory purchase order for land at Wanstead Flats and have no intention to. As set out in the Met's planning application, the use of the fairground area of Wanstead Flats is for a temporary period of 90 days in the summer of 2012 and awaits the outcome of the judicial review process which is currently with the High Court. "

As Mr Knight went on to suggest on FaceBook that the source of his claim is "Epping Forest HQ", I have contacted the Head of Open Spaces at the City of London Corporation asking for confirmation that no discussions about a compulsory purchase order have taken place. As soon as a reply comes through, I'll pass on the Corporation's comments too.

POSTSCRIPT - 6 September

Sue Ireland, the Director of Open Spaces at the City of London Corporation, has e-mailed with this:

I can confirm that, since the decision was taken to apply for a LRO, there has been no discussion with the Met about use of a Compulsory Purchase Order and we await the outcome of the judicial review process.

So Tim Knight, whoever you are - where did you get your information from, eh?

Yesterday's Anti-EDL Protest In Whitechapel

2011-09-04T12:27:00.004+01:00

There were around 1500 anti-fascist protesters out on the streets of Whitechapel yesterday, along with about 3000 police. Unfortunately I missed the eventual arrival of around 600 members of the English Defence League at Aldgate on the border of Tower Hamlets, the arrest of EDL leader Stephen Yaxley-Lennon (dressed, bizarrely, as a rabbi) and the march by anti-fascists back along the Whitechapel Road, which proved that the Home Secretary's ban on processions in five east London boroughs is unenforcible if protesters have the numbers. But here are a few photographs at yesterday's 'static demonstration' at the junction of Vallance Road:

LAZY FRIDAY - Your Ad Here

2011-09-02T12:42:00.001+01:00

I'm guess I'm not the only one who gets irritated by adverts in front of YouTube videos. Today's Friday lunchtime distraction features Mario and Fafa from Glove and Boots discuss the finer points of YouTube advertising as they try to figure out how to make money their video blog.

Hat-tip: The Laughing Squid

'Preventing Violent Extremism' - More Wilful Obfuscation By Newham Council

2011-09-01T23:06:00.011+01:00

The battle to try and persuade Newham council to explain how it has actually spent hundreds of thousands of pounds allocated for its ‘Preventing Violent Extremism’ programme has been rumbling on since February 2010. In July this, as I reported at the time, a series of specific questions put to the senior officer responsible for PVE, following a meeting in May 2011, had still not been answered. But yesterday, after more than three months, a reply finally appeared: an eighty one word e-mail of more wilful obfuscation.

Up until now, I haven't named the council officer who is stonewalling questions about the council's lack of openness, but considering how insulting and evasive his latest response has been, I feel it only right that I now do so. As council tax payers, we fund the salaries of senior officers after all and, as the campaigner Heather Broke points out in her book The Silent State, the ability of bureaucrats to hide behind anonymity often contributes to an even greater lack of transparency. So anyway... the official in this case is Geraint Evans and he is the 'Community Resilience Manager' within the Safer Newham Partnership Team.

In May, Evans had been asked two questions about the way Newham council had consumed a large chunk of its PVE funding – what had happened to £200,000 for projects in 2010/11, what they were and what their intended outcomes had been; and exactly how an allocated £67,425 in 2010/11 to “undertake a programme of communications and events to improve community cohesion throughout the borough” was actually spent. Unfortunately, my 2010 Freedom of Information request (PDF) had failed to elicit any detail, which makes Evans’ response all the more infuriating:

"As for the questions on budgets and spending, I would refer you to the Freedom of Information section on the Newham website, where similar questions have recently been answered".

But sadly, they haven’t been answered. It is impossible to comprehend why these questions couldn’t just receive a straight answer, instead of requiring a trawl through pages and pages of the council’s FOI Disclosure logs. But I have searched through them – and the FOI requests on PVE budgets are my own and they did not answer the specific question on how huge sums of council money were actually spent. That was the point of asking for more detail in the first place – and Evans’ response is nothing short of utter nonsense.

Evans was also asked about the PVE ‘Channel’ programme, which identifies those who are allegedly vulnerable to recruitment by extremists and then seeks to channel them in a different direction. Newham has one of the largest ‘Channel’ caseloads in the country. In May’s meeting, Evans had dodged the opportunity to confirm the proportion of Muslims caught up in the programme, insisting there is no discrimination and that the council is concerned with all forms of terrorism. We still have no way of checking how true this is, for Evans has found a new and imaginative way to avoid giving an answer, saying:

“I should also remind you that any questions regarding Channel should be put to the Police, rather than to LBN, as they are responsible for such things”.

So despite insisting that Prevent doesn’t target the Muslim community, Evans now insists that Channel has nothing to do with him. How, then, can he claim to know?

Finally, Evans was asked for a copy of the London Borough of Newham’s current strategy document for delivering the Prevent programme locally. A simple request, surely? Sadly not, for the response simply said:

“LBN are currently working on a new delivery plan."

You will note that there is no indication when the new plan might be ready or whether it would ever be made publicly available once it has been finalised. Neither is there what was asked for: not even an invitation to spend hours searching through the council's website for its current strategy document. It's hard to imagine how this reply could have been any more unhelpful.

The only potentially useful information provided was a copy of an external assessment of the delivery of the PVE programme in Newham, conducted by the Office for Public Management (OPM). This report is interesting, for it raises serious questions about why Newham has such a huge PVE caseload, as many of those questioned by OPM felt that Muslim radicalisation in Newham “was nonexistent, limited or ‘moderate’ at worst”. I’ll cover the 108-page document in a further blog post soon.

'Random' Security For Carnival Weekend

2011-08-29T09:56:00.001+01:00

Over the weekend I have seen an extraordinary number of stop & search incidents around the borough. In East Ham, in Forest Gate, in front of Stratford shopping centre and outside the station - where yesterday, the British Transport Police had also set up an airport style security arch.

Why, asked one of my friends when I was taking the photos above, was a metal detector necessary? "Because of Carnival," said the senior officer on duty. And what was the criteria for choosing who to force through the arch, considering neither one of us had been pulled over? "It's random," came the reply.

Random? Everyone subjected to special security checks in the time we were hanging around the station was young and black. Indeed, everyone I've seen stopped and searched this weekend has been young and black. I'm just saying...

Why Calls To Ban Demonstrations Are Dangerously Shortsighted

2011-08-26T07:33:00.004+01:00

Yesterday the Metropolitan Police finally confirmed that it is seeking the authority of Home Secretary Theresa May to exercise powers, under Section 13 of the Public Order Act 1986, to impose a banning order on an EDL march in Tower Hamlets. Approval is almost inevitable and a ban will therefore last from 2 September to 2 October and affect five London boroughs - and seem likely to affect all marches in east London, including a protest by Unite Against Fascism on 3 September.

This was always the likely outcome of the concerned campaign organised by Searchlight / HOPE Not Hate and backed by London's municipal establishment. Previous attempts by the EDL to march in Bradford and in Leicester led to blanket restrictions on demonstrations, including those by anti-fascists. However, the wider ramification of what the Met is actually asking for hasn’t worried 'HOPE Not Hate' coordinator Nick Lowles, who called yesterday’s announcement "great news" and "a victory for common sense."

Nevertheless, it seem even the police recognise a month-long blanket ban is likely cause significant disruption to life in east London and as Dave Hill has pointed out, some exceptions are expected for, amongst other things, funerals and processions that are "deemed part of local cultural custom and practice".

Even without a banning order, the police already have considerable public order powers to limit and contain marches on Britain’s streets. However, a protracted banning order would represent something new: for the first time in decades, the state wouldn’t need to negotiate with protest organisers but instead can pick and choose whether to sanction or flatly deny the right to freedom of assembly, depending on how innocuous, low-risk and 'cultural' it decides an individual procession might be. Anything spontaneous, anything urgent, anything likely to involved raised voices - anything political, in other words - is far less likely to pass an arbitrary 'acceptability' test

As yet, the east London boroughs affected have not been named but a banning order could potentially disrupt protests against the DSEi arms fair on 13 September (although after a decade, these may fall under into the category of ‘local custom and practice'). Ironically considering its organisers support for a ban on the EDL, the East London Pride parade on 24 September could also be affected. As cuts in local services are only now starting to hit home in London, it could also prevent local people calling, for example, any march in September against the closure of their local library or other services.

There is nothing that 'HOPE Not Hate' has said about the EDL itself that I profoundly disagree with. It is undoubtedly a “violent racist organisation that seeks to vilify Muslim communities" and the EDL's marches and pickets are clearly intended to "embolden local racists and seek a violent reaction from local Muslim youths, which in turn creates a new cycle of violence." However, these are also good arguments for physically confronting the EDL instead of calling for a ban. Having spent almost twenty years as an anti-racist campaigner in east London, working with Newham Monitoring Project, I therefore think it's worth picking apart some of the arguments made by those favouring a ban and seeing how they stand up.

For at first glance, the position of those supporting a ban seems to place no value on public protest at all. Last month, a letter from the great and the good in Tower Hamlets dismissed the famous Battle of Cable Street - when Jewish working class anti-fascists stopped Oswald Mosley's Blackshirts from parading in the East End in 1936 - as a failure, one of the "mistakes of history". This is an astonishing claim, considering that Mosley was forced to abandon the march through Whitechapel and his thugs were dispersed towards Hyde Park. Cable Street represents an important working-class victory, not a failure, one that gave enormous confidence to the East End’s Jewish community.

In mid August, I know that at one Tower Hamlets community meeting, Bengali 'leaders' adopted a different tack, reasoning that a ban was vital to prevent 'their' young people from getting involved in confrontation that might lead to arrest and criminalisation by the police. This is an admission that the borough has less of a “cohesive atmosphere” than Mayor Lutfur Rahman and the local MPs like to pretend, particular in the relationship between Bengali youth and the police. It also mirrors similar attempts in other parts of the country to stop young people, ‘for their own good’, from engaging with political ideas and taking to the streets in opposition to the EDL. It’s a fear, too, of the militancy of the young. As a Network for Police Monitoring report [PDF] pointed out in March, police in Leicester “strongly promoted a ‘stay at home’ message “ and “issued leaflets to young people advising them they could be picked up at the demonstration, held by police and referred to social services under provisions in the Children Act”.

Then this week, a collective statement from London Labour council leaders argued that an EDL march would simply be too expensive, a "drain on resources" after the recent riots in the capital. Placing a monetary value on the freedom to assemble is an argument that could (and, in the minds of Labour politicians, probably does) apply to any street protest and treats political processions as little more than a costly public nuisance, rather than an essential part of democratic participation. It's a dangerously illiberal position to adopt.

It strikes me that none of these arguments are really about trying to halt the growth of the EDL or defeat the racist ideas they propagate, but are instead about shutting the gates of the village and desperately hoping the EDL will simply disappear. It's a strategy that is likely to fail in the longer term. It seems highly unlikely that a ban will stop the EDL from seeking a future march in Tower Hamlets and almost inevitable that we’ll be back with the same demands for a ban again next year.

Collecting 25,000 signatures, as 'HOPE Not Hate' has done, is an admirable achievement – but imagine 25,000 people, from every community, standing on Whitechapel Road and inspired by the anti-fascist slogan ‘¡No Pasarán! (They Shall Not Pass)’. Then ask yourself if proudly taking to the streets in collective opposition to the EDL, rather than a police ban, is more likely undermine the vilification of Muslim communities and terrify, rather than embolden, local racist sentiment.

Update: according to Defend The Right To Protest, the ban will cover "Tower Hamlets, Newham, Hackney, Islington, Waltham Forest + possibly the City too"

Tonight: Newham Monitoring Project Holds Tottenham Legal Training Session

2011-08-25T06:51:00.005+01:00

This evening, Newham Monitoring Project has organised a training session in Tottenham from 7-9pm at North London Community House, Moorefield Road, London N17 6P (nearest station: Tottenham Hale).

The training will be facilitated by experienced lawyers and aims to cover core legal rights in relation to:

Stop & Search under the various and most relevant powers
Warrants for arrest
House raids and seizure of property
Arrest & Detention
Bail - what is is and how it works
Going to court, processes & appeals

The session will also touch on police complaints and accountability. It is aimed both at people who are trusted and well-positioned within the local community in Tottenham, such as youth and community workers, as well as those interested in volunteering to disseminate information about a planned Tottenham Defence Campaign. The intention is to ensure that participants are more aware of key legal issues so they can provide guidance if approached and ultimately advise people when and how to seek professional legal representation.

If you are interested please contact NMP on spw@nmp.org.uk

Newham Monitoring Project has also produced an A6-sized Stop & Search Rights Card for groups and individuals working in Tottenham - see here

LAZY FRIDAY - The Forces of Anarchy

2011-08-19T13:07:00.004+01:00

Today's Friday lunchtime distraction is from the classic 1970s sitcom The Rise and Fall of Reginald Perrin. Just like Perrin's brother-in-law Jimmy, what little that goes on in the minds of grandstanding politicians, rabid right wing newspaper columnists and merciless magistrates benches in the aftermath of England's riots is a moral panic about the threat from the "forces of anarchy and wreckers of law and order." They're out there, you know...

London Riots - Aftershocks

2011-08-18T19:17:00.013+01:00

At the start of last week, with sections of the nation’s youth deciding to break the unwritten social contract that maintains stability in some of our major cities, I was asked to write an article analysing the riots in London and why they had erupted. I had to decline, partly because I was back in hospital and partly because events were still unfolding (this was before disturbances had spread to Manchester and Birmingham and before six people had died). The main reason I couldn’t write anything, however, was that in truth, I had no more idea than everyone else about why riots erupted at the moment that they did and why they spread from their original incendiary source, the death of Mark Duggan in Tottenham at the hands of the police.

A week on, the avalanche of commentary has hardly helped to make things clearer. The right blame poor parenting, although only 21% of those appearing in court are under 18. Much of the left directly blame cuts in services, especially for the young, which may be a vital factor in parts of the country but less so in areas they haven’t been implemented yet. I'm far from convinced by some of the rhetoric on the left: the claim by Socialist Worker that the riots are a "rising against Tory Britain" is simply too simplistic. However, its statement that the riots represent an "explosion of bitterness and rage" is probably closer to the truth.

Since the election of the Coalition government, commentators have been discussing the way that the gap between rich and poor, the widest in 40 years, has fuelled a general public resentment about the way the burden of government austerity measures have fallen on the country’s poorest. It's also possible too that our voraciously brand-obsessed consumer culture may have finally turned on itself. It can be no accident that brands like Footlocker, JD Sports and mobile phone retailers, whose aggressively 'urban and street' marketing is aimed squarely at the young, were the targets of looting last week, just as it's no accident that their goods are routinely ‘looted’ from young people every week, long after they have left the shops. As overall crime has fallen, young people now snarled at as 'feral rats' remain more likely to themselves become victims of street violence and theft.

With less money, fewer prospects of employment and (in London) the massive cost of private rented accommodation, it’s hardly a surprise that many, many people feel completely powerless. One of the dynamics behind the rioting that I haven’t seen addressed in the coverage I’ve read so far is how exhilarating a riot can make people feel, albeit for a short time. Ask anyone who has been on a protest that has kicked off (or, indeed, the advertising agency working for Levis, who tried to appropriate this energy to sell more jeans). Inevitably, as a means of handing people real long term power, that brief heady sense of freedom is illusionary – the state commands an overwhelming ability to exact vengeance, as we have seen from the way that court sentencing guidelines have been abandoned – but it may explain the number of the young, poor and unemployed in the courts. Far from representing 'sheer thuggery', it's just as likely that many of those who joined the looting did so because they were swept up in the excitement of the moment.

However, the fact that much of the rioting involved a direct, often targeted confrontation with the police should be far less of a surprise. Everyone who complains about the breakdown of respect for authority should listen more closely to what young people, especially in economically disadvantaged areas, have to say about their relationship with the police. In the numerous sessions run by Newham Monitoring Project in east London, everyone complains about stop & search, particularly since the government initiatives to reduce knife crime, and everyone has experienced it themselves or knows someone who has. It has become a part of growing up, some commonplace that it has become routine, but what angers the young is not just the stops and the searches but the way they say they are treated: not as citizens or as people but collectively as criminals. So often, we have heard that officers try and provoke a reaction that leads to an arrest and there was an example of this last week in Newham on Barking Road:

Where I live in Newham, like the vast majority of the country, the disturbances were nothing like the major flashpoints in Croydon, Woolwich or Enfield, which has made it more difficult to get a clearer sense of what triggered them. There were a few broken windows and theft targeted largely on the Currys and Argos stores in East Ham. This hasn’t stopped the Newham Recorder from announcing that “our communities will survive this”, as though the level of disturbance was on a par with east London’s famous endurance of the Blitz (itself mythologised: we rarely talk about widespread looting in 1940). Neither has it stopped the borough’s Mayor from joining in the calls for hardline retribution: in a special issue of the local free sheet ‘The Newham Mag’, the council promises to evict tenants convicted of riot-connected crimes, including people living with them who have committed no crime themselves. Anecdotally, there has also been a huge rise in the number of police stop & search incidents.

More than anything this reaction, mirrored across the country, looks like locking the stable after the horse has bolted. Having been surprised by the rioting - and humiliated by the rioters - police and politicians are lashing out in anger, apparently with little consideration of the potential problems they create in the future. Randomly disrupting the daily lives of huge numbers of young people isn't going to restore respect in the police, whilst the arbitrary punishment of parents whose children face imprisonment, by seeking to make them homeless, isn't likely to convince people in the long term that local government values fairness or justice. Equally, are those released from overcrowded prisons in a few months time, after wholly disproportionate sentences, likely to feel even more resentful or instead chastened - and if politicians really think incarceration makes people better citizens, how do they explain the higher rate of reoffending after short prison terms?

We've had moral panics before, a long history of them in fact, but always voices that have stood out against them. Thirty years ago, after the 1981 riots, the then Newham MP Ron Leighton warned Margaret Thatcher that "if society rejects those young people and says that it has no use for them, they are likely to reject society and act in an anti-social way." How times have changed. If the man whose name now adorns 'Ron Leighton Way', the road bypassing East Ham's damaged shopping area, was alive and a Labour Party member today, a comment like that would most likely lead to violent accusations that he was condemning too little and seeking to understand too much.

Normal Service Gradually Resuming

2011-08-18T08:42:00.002+01:00

I haven't managed to write anything for over a week - and what a week it has been. Unfortunately on 8 August I found out that there is little prospect that my injuries from last year's cycle accident will ever fully recover - and that the Royal London hospital, which has been so good in proving care up to now, has decided I have to wait until the end of the year to find out whether I spend the next forty years in constant pain.

Understandably, it has been extremely difficult to come to terms with, hence my inability to think about the momentous events elsewhere in London. Many thanks to all my mates for their support in what has been a particularly tough fortnight.

LAZY FRIDAY - Animated Debate

2011-08-05T12:51:00.003+01:00

Today's Friday lunchtime distraction is a great little animation by Intelligence Squared of a debate between former MP turned dodgy reality TV star Ann Widdecombe and professional smug git Stephen Fry, who lock horns over the motion 'The Catholic Church is a force for good in the world'. For those who can't be arsed to see it through to the end, Fry wins on evidence-based points.

Access Newham Council's Accounts

2011-08-03T08:47:00.002+01:00

The freedom of information campaigner Heather Brookes, whose dogged persistence led to the full disclosure of the MPs’ expenses scandal, has posted the following useful reminder on her website:

For 20 days in June, July or August, every council is legally required to open up its draft accounts for public inspection. Under the Audit Commission Act 1988 you have a legal right to see detailed contracts, invoices, receipts, books and bills, the right to make copies and the right to raise other points of interest with the auditor. This is one of the most powerful rights citizens in the UK have to uncover the nitty gritty details of how public bodies are spending public money.

Chances are if you rock up to your council office you may be the first one to do so in years. But don’t be put off. You have every right to be there and too few citizens make the effort to hold local councils accountable for the money they spend in the public’s name. Certainly as local newspapers disappear it could be that the local nosey parker is all that stands in the way of a corruption scandal continuing undetected for years.

The Orchard News Bureau has provided a helpful list of Public Access to Local Authority Financial Information in London boroughs and as yet, Newham has not published details on inspection dates, unlike neighbouring Barking & Dagenham, Hackney, Redbridge or Waltham Forest. Access for the previous financial year was between 13 July and 9 August 2010, so clearly there has been a delay. However, Newham's draft Statement of Accounts is available online.

So if you have a hankering to more closely inspect Newham's accounts and related documents (comprising books, deeds, contracts, bills, vouchers and receipts) I'll provide an update as soon as I hear when it plans to open its books.

Let's hope that the council remembers - poor old Richmond-upon-Thames council was forced to revise its inspection period because the original was illegal, as it had failed to comply with new regulations from March 2011 that required it to post a copy of the public notice on its website at least 14 days in advance of the commencement. Luckily that problem is now fixed.

In October 2010, the Court of Appeal ruled that voters are entitled to examine local authority contracts, including those relating to Private Finance Initiative (PFI) contractors, unless there is a there is a 'strong public interest' against disclosure.

REVIEW - Chavs: the Demonization of the Working Class

2011-08-02T08:32:00.007+01:00

A edited version of this review appears in the next issue of Red Pepper

The stereotypical ‘chav’ may be a fairly recent phenomenon but it has become so pervasive that few would struggle to conjure up their own image of what it represents. In a thoughtful, polemical examination of the changing perceptions of working class culture, Owen Jones draws on testimony from extensive interviews to unravel how ‘chavs’ have become a byword for a vision of society that David Cameron calls ‘broken Britain’ and is used to blame the poor and dispossessed for ‘choosing’ their poverty and exclusion.

In part, Jones points the finger at websites such as the appalling ‘Chavscum’ and comedians like the creators of Little Britain, famous for picking on society’s most vulnerable, for the spread of the new chav caricature, as well as the kind of lazy journalism exposed in Nick Davies’ excellent Flat Earth News. However, he argues persuasively that the roots of renewed and vicious class hatred are found in the destruction of working class communities that began with rapid deindustrialisation under Thatcher and that led to a collapse in values like solidarity in favour of rampant, dog-eat-dog individualism. For thirty years, “to be working class was no longer something to be proud of, never mind to celebrate”, as first the Tories and then New Labour have tried to persuade us that we are now ‘all middle class’. Those who failed to prosper during the boom years have been written off and ridiculed as a ‘chav’ rump, a despised underclass.

Jones argues that in truth, “the myth of the classless society gained ground just as society became more rigged in favour of the middle class. Britain remains as divided by class as it ever was”. He makes a persuasive and at times exhaustive case, but it begins to lose its way when trying to explain support for the BNP in working class areas. He rightly condemns Labour for abandoning communities like Barking and criticises liberal multiculturalism for ignoring class by descending into identity politics. However, he is too quick to explain away the conscious racism that leads a minority to deliberately vote for the far-Right and at times embraces a simplistic economic reductionism that risks focusing on the legitimate grievances of the white working class at the expense of other, equally exploited and marginalised workers. The slogan ‘black and white, unite and fight’ has been around for years, but the problem has always been that achieving this laudable aim is impossible without black workers confronting the racism of many of their white counterparts.

Jones is also too ready to accept that the Labour Party remains the vehicle for a ‘new class politics’ that can mobilise the working class electorate, when the evidence suggests its only interest is in mild placation of its base. His sentimentality for Labour’s past, one that can be restored by "the first priority" of improving working class parliamentary representation, is rather at odds with the call for new ideas and new initiatives.

Nevertheless, Chavs is a useful and informative book: not least because the wider left is just as ill-prepared to confront the open class hostility of the wealthy and powerful when it has no sizable base in working class communities. Single issue campaigns are important, but only if they become a stepping stone to a broader class-conscious movement.

Chavs is published by Verso.

On Monday 19 September, Owen Jones will be discussing and signing his book at St John's Church in Stratford, at an event starting at 7pm and organised by Newham Bookshop and Newham Monitoring Project. Flyer here.

Tickets cost £5 and are available from the bookshop. Call 020 8552 9993 to reserve yours.

Casing The Olympic Park

2011-08-01T15:06:00.005+01:00

Leaving aside the possibility raised by yesterday's post that my actions might well be misconstrued as 'casing the joint', I headed over to Stratford yesterday to photograph the Olympic stadium, the tremendously ugly ArcelorMittal Orbit and the surrounding area.

Here are a couple of pictures: more are available on Flickr.

Report Your Local Anarchist

2011-07-31T10:34:00.006+01:00

I doubt many people have heard of Project Griffin. It is a joint initiative between the City of London Police and the Metropolitan Police, set up in 2004 and based at the City Police's HQ, which has spread its network to police forces around the country and seeks to "advise and familiarise managers, security officers and employees of large public and private sector organisations across the capital on security, counter-terrorism and crime prevention issues".

Every week, Chief Inspector Nick Smith and his team at the 'Westminster Counter Terrorism Focus Desk', one of the Project Griffin projects, send out a briefing to businesses and this week's edition [PDF] includes the extraordinary advice above. Leaving aside the rather limited definition of 'anarchism', the suggestion that "any information relating to anarchists should be reported to your local Police" is another example of the attempted criminalisation of ideas.

For the time being, holding anarchist sympathies is not a crime - although presumably any gossip, however dubious and ill-informed, will be passed on by borough-level SO15 Counter Terrorism Liaison Officers to the feverish data collectors at the National Extremism Tactical Co-ordination Unit. Are the Metropolitan Police simply starting to run low on 'Islamists' to keep tabs or are we seeing a shift towards the creation of a new amorphous, imaginary bogeyman?

Hat-tip: @willcommon

One Year To Go To Olympics - Some Unfinished Business

2011-07-27T16:23:00.004+01:00

Exactly one year before the London 2012 opening ceremony, local people in east London have reminded Olympic organisers busy congratulating themselves today on preparations for the Games that there remains one piece of important unfinished business.

This morning, papers seeking a judicial review of the Home Office’s botched consultation on amending a 123-year old law protecting Wanstead Flats, the proposed site of a massive police operations base during the Olympics, were filed in the High Court. The Home Office, the Metropolitan Police and the City of London Corporation have also been visited and served with notice of the judicial review.

It will come as little surprise that the people serving papers to the Metropolitan Police today were refused entry to even the foyer at Scotland Yard and were made to stand outside and wait for a representative of the Met's legal department to take a copy of the claim form and court bundle from them.

The case has been brought by a local resident living close to the Flats, with the Save Wanstead Flats campaign included as an ‘interested party’. The aim of the judicial review is for the High Court to quash the Legislative Reform Order that amends the Epping Forest Act and therefore removes the legal obstacle to the Metropolitan police’s plans next year, because of the unfairness and inadequacy of the Home Office’s alleged ‘consultation’ with local people.

Today is also an appropriate one to highlight the trailer [see below] for 'Ahead of the Game', a feature length documentary set in the heart of the neighbourhoods hosting the London 2012 Olympics. It is a personal exploration of the multi billion pound project as seen through the eyes of AJ, a 20 year old from Newnham who exposes the reality of development in one of the poorest places in the UK.

FILM REVIEW: 'Just Do It'

2011-07-25T20:36:00.008+01:00

At the Rio in Dalston on Sunday, I admit I had severe misgivings at the start of a screening of Just Do It, a film that describes itself as "a tale of modern-day outlaws" and focuses on the experiences of some of the campaigners who took part in environmental direct action during 2009 and 2010. During its first ten minutes, director Emily James' documentary seemed likely to reinforce the cynical, stereotypical portrayal of climate activists as essentially rather lovable English eccentrics, people who are privileged enough to pursue their unconventional activism full-time but are concerned more with the appearance of doing good than really changing anything. My heart sank at the agonisingly long silence that followed a question put to one of the film's main protagonists, Marina Pepper, about whether her actions really make any difference.

But then appeared the images that I have seen so many times through my involvement in the Ian Tomlinson Family Campaign that I can hardly bear to watch them now: the footage of Ian as he is pushed violently to the floor and of G20 protesters battered and corralled by riot police. It was a reminder that the low-level policing of the Camp for Climate Action on Blackheath in August 2009 was a surprising exception, the result of huge pressure upon the Metropolitan police following its brutal tactics three months earlier. Far more often, climate activists engaged in direct action choose to risk the possibility of violent policing, the likelihood of arrest and the realistic prospect of conviction. Eccentric some may well be, but it's far from a game: everyone who appeared in the film are also incredibly brave individuals.

This willingness to get stuck in, to forcefully but peaceably disrupt the companies contributing to climate change and the police and security guards that defend them, really came to life as the film moved on to the Great Climate Swoop at Ratcliffe on Soar power station in October 2009, focusing on the tactics adopted by the protesters, how affinity groups are organised and how carry out a 'de-arrest'. Sadly, recent developments involving the unmasking of the undercover police spy Mark Kennedy came too late for the film's final cut and its most powerful section therefore focused on what became a turning point for many climate activists: the UN's COP15 conference in Copenhagen in December 2009, when the world's governments came together to try and thrash out a deal to cut global carbon emissions.

Billed in advance as a 'last chance' to tackle climate change, Denmark's government brought in sweeping new police powers to try and prevent protesters from causing disruption and almost 1000 arrests were made during demonstrations. The film documents the deplorable treatment of activists by the Danish police, including the prolonged detention without charge in cages, and how little police officers understood the powers they had been handed (something they have in common with their counterparts in the UK). But in spite of the protesters' efforts and the huge anticipation that had proceeded it, the conference failed to deliver. Some activists returned disheartened and many questioned where the climate justice movement should go next but for others, including Sophie Nathan who appeared in the film, the experience was radicalising and led to a more openly anti-capitalist viewpoint that has been strengthened by the election of a new government in Britain. Climate Camp activists have gone on to provide the driving force for the emergence of UKUncut.

Just Do It does have its weaknesses: it would have benefited from spending more time explaining the grassroots campaigning by Plane Stupid in support of residents fighting the planned third runway at Heathrow and how this campaign, with a clearly defined objective, led to eventual victory. It is also difficult to see what its target audience really is - in the question-and-answer session that followed the film, Emily James told a sympathetic Hackney audience, surely its core demographic, that it isn't aimed at activists but at those who are thinking of becoming more active. I'm not entirely convinced.

Another weakness is that in many ways the Q&A was almost more enlightening than elements of the film itself, providing answers to some of the unresolved questions about the purpose of direct action (disappointingly, the focus was more on its individualistic value in offering 'personal transformation' than on movement-building). It also addressed the dilemma posed by heavy handed policing, which helps to draw people together as it did in Copenhagen and at Kingsnorth in 2008, which Marina Pepper said was "the making of the movement", but can drown out the issues. The debate on Sunday allowed the director to talk about the the difficulties of not "engaging in riot porn" but never backing away from material simply because it might scare new people away.

Overall, however, Just Do It is an absorbing, illuminating and at times very funny film that opens up what is the necessarily secretive world of planning and executing direct action. It also highlights how climate activism's initially peculiar 'flappy hands' consensus decision-making, although far from perfect, has ensured that women are central to its planning and participation, which can't always be said for other movements of the anti-capitalist left.

Equally, as a means of documenting the work of activists, the film is also a model for others to follow: the process of talking to campaigners, gaining their trust and working through potential legal implications with lawyers, for six months before filming began, is an object lesson in preparation that the Guardian's proposed new crowd-sourced book on undercover policing could really learn a great deal from.

'Just Do It' is screening again tomorrow (Tuesday 26 July) at Picturehouse Greenwich at 6.30pm. See here for more details

Update: Council Ignores Questions On Prevent Programme

2011-07-19T11:48:00.005+01:00

As I reported in May, council officers who turned up to a community meeting to sing the praises of Newham’s 'Preventing Violent Extremism' (PVE) Programme faced some tough questions: at the time, I said that it felt like "the first time that their upbeat and rosy view of Prevent had been challenged at a local level”.

The Newham Community Cohesion Network, who arranged the discussion on PVE, was due to meet again this morning and had therefore asked a number of questions and points of clarification to pass on to its members today:

How much of an allocated £200,000 in 2010/11 for developing in-house capacity was spend on specific projects to improve resilience to extremism in Newham – and what were these projects and what was their intended outcome?

How was the allocated £67,425 in 2010/11 to “undertake a programme of communications and events to improve community cohesion throughout the borough” actually spent?

How many people within Newham’s Channel programme caseload are Muslim and how many are non-Muslim?

Whether the Office for Public Management final report 7740 “Research into best practice in Preventing Violent Extremism and understanding the causes of violent extremism”, written for the London Borough of Newham and dated October 2010, can be made publicly available so that the members of the Community Cohesion Network can read an external assessment of the delivery of the programme & its exceptional standard.

Whether a copy of the London Borough of Newham’s current strategy document for delivering the Prevent programme locally could be distributed in light of the recent review [by the Home Office].

Newham council officers claimed in May that its PVE Programme is ‘uniquely’ excellent, with none of the problems that have occurred in other parts of the country. However, that hasn't stopped the council from insultingly failing to respond to any of these perfectly reasonable questions – despite having almost two months to do so.

We've become so used to this kind of stonewalling locally that it's no longer a surprise. But how can a PVE Programme really be described as ‘uniquely' excellent when it so obviously lacks transparency and is shrouded in such intense secrecy?

Let's see whether a Freedom of Information request will help to reveal a little more.

A Peculiar Kind Of Britishness

2011-07-14T23:13:00.005+01:00

Last week at a meeting I attended in Barking, the chair of the Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC) Trevor Philips was asked what he thought of the concept of ‘Britishness’ and his reply was interesting: according to my notes he said:

“We need to worry about Britishness less. It is less about institutions and more about manners, the way we treat each other. We ought not to get caught up in talk about ‘British Days’ and focus on this instead”.

For those who don’t recognise it, the reference to ‘British Days’ relates to a 2006 Fabian Society speech by this week’s unlikely anti-Murdoch crusader, the former Prime Minister Gordon Brown, who proposed that Remembrance Sunday should become a national day of patriotism. The idea was still staggering along in 2008, when it was condemned by Scottish nationalists as “desperate, motivated by self interest rather than national interest.”

For once (and it doesn't happen often), I agree with Philips – the notion of ‘Britishness’ is so completely confused, particularly in a multi-ethnic borough like Newham, that it has almost no real meaning, while the way we treat each other most certainly does. But Philips is wrong to suggest that we needn’t worry about it, for as I noted recently, Newham council’s Executive Member for Crime and Anti-Social Behaviour, Cllr Unmesh Desai, has taken to the pages of a national newspaper to extol the virtues of “building Britishness” and the development of “common values around a common agenda”. In Newham, it seems that some form of 'Britishness' is now council policy.

So what might this mean in practice? In May we heard that Mayor Sir Robin Wales' has removed foreign language newspapers from the borough's libraries because he feels they discourage local people from learning and speaking English. There are many who profoundly disagree, arguing that the decision is “illiterate and ignorant” and that bilingualism is an important skill “enabling cultural and commercial relations to operate well both within and between countries”.

A meeting on Tuesday of the campaign against the Mayor’s decision has revealed one particularly interesting fact, however: as well as community language newspapers and journals, the Mayor has chosen to cut English language publications serving Black and Asian communities, including The Asian Age, The Eastern Eye, The Voice, Ebony and Pride. However, both the Irish Times and Irish Independent have been spared.

Coming, as I do from a family that traces some of its roots to County Cork and having a keen interest in Irish politics and current affairs, I naturally have nothing against either of these papers. But what does it say when Newham’s libraries stock material aimed mainly at the borough’s 2500 White Irish people, 1% of the local population according to 2007 figures, but removes those serving the 84,500 (33.85%) Asian and 49,100 (19.67%) strong Black communities?

Trevor Philips last week was keen to promote the new Equalities Act 2010 and in particular the new ‘equality duty’, which is designed to place an obligation on public authorities “to demonstrate that they are making financial decisions in a fair, transparent and accountable way, considering the needs and the rights of different members of their community.”

Newham council claims it has carried out an Equality Impact Assessment but now it has to be prepared to actually prove that it has made decisions based on evidence and that its decision-making process is transparent.

Having scrapped all the newspapers that happened to be written and published by Black and Asian communities and kept the ones that aren't, apparently on nothing more than the whim of the Great Helmsman himself, how on earth does the council expect to be able to offer, if required to, that kind of convincing proof to the EHRC?

The Forest Gate Raids And Secret Briefings To Journalists

2011-07-13T10:42:00.005+01:00

Now that the issue of secret briefings by police officers to journalists is suddenly all over the news, it is time for a "we told you so" moment.

In 2006, the Metropolitan Police Authority held a scrutiny of communication and media at the Metropolitan Police Service, with particular reference to the way the police handling these issues during the Forest Gate 'anti-terrorist' raids of that year. In a submission I wrote for Newham Monitoring Project, we said:

If the constant stream of unofficial briefings that appeared in the press following the Forest Gate raids as ‘police sources’ were not officially orchestrated, then the MPS has by allowing them condoned the actions of a small group of police officers. who have anonymously fed information to the media in return either for cash, the conducting of inter-agency feuding between the Met and the security services over apportioning blame or simply in order to undermine the accountability of a public service. In either scenario, police officers based at Scotland Yard have been responsible for misconduct and this needs to be investigated urgently.

A further outcome of the selective leaking of misinformation, half truths and unrelated associations was to place further strain on the slender strands of public accountability over the MPS by the Metropolitan Police Authority. Those with a role in holding the MPS to account appear to have no effective means of rescuing a media strategy that is seemingly out of control. Moreover, after the Forest Gate raids, there does not seem to be mechanisms available to the MPA to effectively evaluate the basis of what MPS ‘thought was true’, even when the police’s presentation of information contradicted common sense and the reality of physical evidence.

The full submission is available here. It shows not only a further example of the cosy relationship between the Met and the press, but also how complete useless the Metropolitan Police Authority has always been at holding those responsible for secret briefings to account.

London in Peril - From The Threat Of Ineffective Protest

2011-07-12T17:45:00.003+01:00

“Protest,” said the journalist Robert Elms at London’s Bishopsgate Institute last Thursday, “is the lifeblood of London.” That may be so: the city has a long and rich history of protest and dissent. But how much longer can it remain an integral part of London life, when there is a fundamental disjunction between the police's increasing tendency to brand demonstrators as 'criminals' and the desire of the protesters to genuinely influence change?

The cultural and literary centre near Liverpool Street has been running a series of events hosted by Elms under the banner London in Peril, which have explored the past, present and future threats facing the capital. Last week's 'Protesting London' debate was ambitiously billed as an exploration of “the effectiveness of protest, the attempts at constraint, the impact on London and its communities and what the future of protest may hold” and without doubt, the inclusion on the panel of one of the Metropolitan Police's most senior officers, Assistant Commissioner Lynne Owens, who has overall responsibility for public order, was the reason why tickets had sold-out well in advance.

That the debate failed to deliver, however, was perhaps inevitable. There was insufficient time to properly probe and question the speakers, who also included Stop the War Coalition convenor Lindsey German and the academic and writer Clive Bloom. More importantly, Assistant Commissioner Owens might have provided a certain novelty value, but no-one rises to such an elevated position in the Metropolitan Police without learning how deflect questions and say very little. Throughout, her message was resolutely upbeat, despite the audience’s awareness of the intense criticism the Met has faced after the G20 protests in April 2009 and subsequent demonstrations.

In her opening remarks, Owens steered clear of these controversies, focusing instead on the “public order successes” of the Notting Hill Carnival and the annual Gay Pride March, although both are now examples of corporate-sponsored street entertainment rather than protests. The Royal Wedding was also cited as an “example of peaceful protest,” which may come as a surprise to the small number of anti-monarchist protesters who were snatched in Soho Square and faced pre-emptive arrests that in all likelihood were unlawful.

However, it was evident that the Met is particularly pleased with the way it took hold of and controlled the narrative around the TUC’s demonstration in March this year. Owens was quick to praise the political cover provided by the human rights charity Liberty, who provided 'official' legal observers during the march itself, whilst contrasting the union protest with other events on the day. In attempting to do so and in response to a question about the arrests of UKUncut activists in Piccadilly, she quickly overreached by insisting, to the surprise of many of us, that “ the route of the march did not go past Fortnum & Mason” (a fact, for those who couldn't make it on 26 March, that a glance at this steward's route map [pdf] will confirm is nonsense).

It was a sign, perhaps, of the awkward position the Met continues to find itself in since its mass arrest of protesters who briefly (and peacefully) occupied the exclusive store. Back in March, when giving evidence to the House of Commons Home Affairs Select Committee, Owens seemed to suggest that the Fortnum & Mason arrests were an intelligence gathering 'fishing trip', saying that “the fact that we arrested as many people as we did is so important to us because that obviously gives us some really important intelligence opportunities”. Last week, when asked about the prospect of increased use of baton rounds or water cannon on London streets, Owens was keen to point out that in recent protests in Greece, “it didn’t reduce the level of violence on the street” and to contrast this with the “value of intelligence gathering”. The experience of UKUncut campaigners and Owens' own testimony suggests the Met's idea of intelligence gathering can be just as indiscriminate and even more likely to result in the criminalisation of protesters (whether 'violent' or not) as the overwhelming use of force.

Owens did make one statement, however, that I am in complete agreement with – that senior officers have a “leadership responsibility to prevent a locker-room mentality” amongst their officers. If only this really meant something in practice. From G20 and the death of Ian Tomlinson to the Gaza protest and student demonstrations last year, senior officers have repeatedly failed to shoulder responsibility for the misconduct of their officers and in this respect, Assistant Commissioner Owens was no different from her colleagues. “What we have seen,” she said, “is ill-informed communication about our actions”, a message intended to suggest that confusion over police tactics, rather than outright police brutality, is the reason why the Metropolitan Police has faced criticism. She even claimed that the removal of epaulette ID numbers by riot officers, condemned by both the Chief Inspector of Constabulary and the Independent Police Complaints Commission, were simply “isolated incidents”.

The gulf in understanding between police and protesters, however, really emerged over the question of what makes an effective protest. Owens' answer was straight-forward: “people coming peacefully and who don’t engage in violence”, adding that “the best of all worlds is a protest that is self-policed”. This is a perspective that sees 'effectiveness' simply in terms of the rigid containment of demonstrators by a combination of stewards or police officers and without reference to the impact that a protest hopes to make. It is also one that makes the attention given to the merits of the tactic of 'kettling' almost superfluous – the ideal protest, in the view of the Assistant Commissioner, Is one that is kettled from start to finish.

Unfortunately, neither Lindsey German and Clive Bloom were able to compelling draw out the counter-argument. German said that “every tactic” is important to ensure that a protest is effective but was keener to praise the huge numbers on the TUC demonstration as an indicator that “most protests are not violent”. However, it is questionable whether a march lacking any coherent strategy about what would happen after the marchers had listened to Ed Miliband make a poor speech and gone home was really any less of an ineffectual stroll through London than the post-2003 Stop the War Coalition marches, whatever the numbers who attended. Bloom, meanwhile, was too busy reining back from the faux-radical position he had begun the evening with, that “the only successful marches are the violent ones”, to offer anything more than a confused argument that 'virtual protest' means “you don't have to be on the street any more”.

Both missed the chance to persuasively argue that a 'contained' protest and an effective one are almost always mutually exclusive - and that the police's implacably rigid view of what constitutes 'legitimate' protest is by far the greatest threat to the future of effective protest in the capital.

LAZY FRIDAY - "Plot Device"

2011-07-08T13:03:00.000+01:00

Another great Friday lunchtime distraction for film fans in particular - when an aspiring filmmaker adds a "Plot Device" to his Amazon shopping basket, he has no idea of the consequences.

Liberty Backs Police Over Bail Judgement

2011-07-04T19:28:00.005+01:00

It was reported today that the government is rushing through an emergency bill in the wake of a Salford magistrates court ruling, subsequently backed by a judicial review at the supreme court, that means police officers cannot bail suspects for more than 96 hours without either charging or releasing them. For years, the police and the courts have assumed that this time limit could be spread out, often over months, whilst suspects often have severe restrictions placed upon them before being called back for further questioning.

The BBC's Mark Easton, in an excellent article last week, highlighted the potential consequences of such restrictions on political activists and campaigners:

Consider the case of four women peace protesters arrested in February last year for obstructing a highway following a day of action at the atomic weapons establishment at Aldermaston.

Police didn't have enough evidence to charge them with any offence, so they released them on bail pending further enquiries. But the bail included strict conditions as to where they could go, including a ruling that they couldn't join their friends on the peace camp at the Trident factory.

Now, whatever you might think of the protest, we are talking here about four women against whom the police do not have sufficient evidence of a crime having been committed to charge them. For two months their liberty was restricted while detectives apparently searched for clues and found none.

A letter to the Observer yesterday from a number of lawyers and experienced civil rights campaigners (including Newham Monitoring Project) has welcomed the supreme court ruling, arguing that bail conditions have been routinely used "as part of a wider public order strategy aimed at disrupting protest movements". Interestingly, one prominent civil liberties group, Liberty, is missing from the signatories to the letter - which is not surprising, because it supports the police's position that they should be allowed to bail suspects for more than 96 hours, despite evidence that the practice can lead to severe restrictions on the freedoms of people who have been convicted of no crime.

This is not the first time that Britain's "pre-eminent" civil liberties charity has adopted decidedly strange positions. In the past, it has minced its words over the shooting of Jean Charles de Menezes and over new anti-terrorism stop & search powers and entered into an unhealthily close collaboration with the police over March's TUC demonstration. As Mark Easton accurately points out, there really is no basis to the alarmist right wing nonsense warning that "tens of thousands of suspected murderers, rapists and other criminals could walk free". However, it appears that Liberty has decided, once again, to play it safe and call for 'safeguards', instead of grasping what Easton describes as "the opportunity for a public debate about the use of police bail and how we might encourage speedy and just processes".

In doing so, the emerging gulf between its 'respectable' Westminster and media focused approach to policing issues and that of the people with first-hand experience of the abuse of police power has grown a little wider. Not for the first time, I'm so glad that I cancelled my membership long ago.

Wanstead Flats - See You in Court Home Secretary

2011-07-04T00:52:00.003+01:00

It was reported earlier in the week that MPs have voted to temporarily amend the Epping Forest Act, in order to allow the Metropolitan Police to leap a legal hurdle standing in the way of its plans for a base on Wanstead Flats during the Olympics. This, in all honesty, was no great surprise. The House of Lords must next debate the Legislative Reform Order and they too will nod it through. The prospect that parliamentarians would stand in the way of the Olympic juggernaut was always remote.

A number of local reporters have been in contact asking whether this is the end of the battle by residents against the Met's plans. So, to clarify, this is the current position. I can state categorically that there will be a judicial review once the House of Lords has voted, that papers are currently in preparation and that one resident has agreed to act as Claimant, with the Save Wanstead Flats Campaign appearing in the proceedings as an Interested Party. Anyone wanting to get in contact with the Claimant can contact me in the usual ways.

This is what was promised back in October 2010 - and we weren't joking.

LAZY FRIDAY - "These Strikes Are Wrong"

2011-07-01T13:45:00.001+01:00

Despite the fact that this is such a dispiriting but inevitable betrayal of the labour movement, Ed Miliband behaving like an spin doctor's automaton is one of the funniest things I have seen in ages. The sense that the eyes are open but nobody is really home is almost too painful to watch.

So repeat after Ed for two minutes and 30 seconds - "reckless and provocative manner" .... "set aside the rhetoric"... ""get around the negotiating table"..."resistance is futile"... "exterminate!"

‘Cyber-Utopianism’ And The Impact On Protest Movements

2011-06-26T22:41:00.004+01:00

Another fascinating animation from the Royal Society for the Arts [definitely worth watching in Full Screen - click on the button at the botom right of the video].

This time it illustrates an RSA talk by Evgeny Morozov, a Belarus-born journalist who is critical of overstating the impact of the internet and other technologies in bringing about social or political change. He argues that at times, the internet can instead aid dictatorships and the spread of right-wing or nationalist ideas. I can't say I entirely agree but it's an interesting argument, one that also has some validity when considering the activities of the 'hasbarats' in disseminating pro-Israel propaganda.

The Journey From Young Radical To Old Conformist

2011-06-26T16:07:00.006+01:00

My apologies for the length of this post. I'm not in the habit of fisking articles in the Guardian but I got carried away.

A Guardian article by Newham's Labour councillor for East Ham Central, Unmesh Desai (right), in which he defends the Prevent prgramme that supposedly aims to tackle 'radicalisation' amongst young Muslims, has attracted much attention locally. The Newham Recorder this week says that Desai has “got tough on Islamic extremism” for his position that 'non-violent' and 'violent' extremism “are different sides of the same coin, and both have to be fought together”.

Twenty years ago, before becoming a councillor, Desai was an admired anti-racist campaigner, someone I personally respected as an activist who argued passionately that the state is neither benign or restrained: given the opportunity, state authorities would always seek to extend their powers in potentially repressive and intrusive ways. So it is saddening to see the political trajectory towards mainstream conformism he has followed over the intervening years. Nevertheless, lumping together as extremists all those from Muslim communities who fail to adhere to unspecified “common values around a common agenda,” directed towards something as confused and ill-defined as "Britishness," represents a new low.

In his article, Desai begins by raising the case of Roshonara Choudhry, who stabbed and seriously wounded local MP Stephen Timms in May 2010. He offers her actions as evidence to show there is a linear progression “where individuals become angry, turning religious or political, and then to terror”. But the attack on Timms proves nothing of the kind. It does demonstrate that there is some vile material on the internet but as a Guardian profile of Choudhry in November 2010 reminded us:

After her arrest police seized and scoured her computers for contacts with jihadists, of which none were found, and for details of websites she had visited. She had no known connection to any Islamist groups, and there was no evidence she had attended meetings or owned any potentially extremist literature.

Chowdhury's actions were clearly the isolated actions of a deluded loner who spent too much time online – she was not shaped and moulded by the “non-violent extremists” Desai wants to package together with bomb plotters as one demonic enemy. I therefore have question the appropriateness – and indeed the morality – of generalising the actions of one disturbed individual with mental health problems and using it to justify a policy that targets an entire faith group. To his credit Stephen Timms, who strikes me as a fundamentally decent man who made some terrible decisions over the Iraq war, has been far more circumspect in avoiding the search for political capital from his traumatic and deplorable assault.

Desai goes on to ask whether, “if one does not counter the basis of extremist ideology, isn't it then too late to stop it being translated into terrorist action?” The answer to this is quite obviously 'not necessarily'. As he hints at in his attack on the Federation of Student Islamic Societies – again tarring them all for the actions of another loner, the alleged transatlantic bomber, Umar Abdulmutallab – the adoption of rigid, doctrinaire and fringe views is often more likely to be found amongst the young, whether it involves unrealistic demands for a 'general strike now' or the equally unlikely call for the creation of a caliphate. But youthful rebellion does not necessarily result in ever greater radicalism – on the left, sadly, it's more often a phase that people grow out of, a path that leads to ever greater conformity and reaction in middle age.

Witness all the young revolutionaries in far-Left groups who moved rapidly to the right: former Socialist Workers Party (SWP) members like the journalists Julie Birchill, Christopher Hitchens, his brother Peter and associate Spectator editor Rod Liddle, or the Tower Hamlets MP Jim Fitzpatrick... or indeed, a youthful Unmesh Desai, who as a young militant was expelled from the SWP in the early 1980s for advocating violent confrontation with the far-right, what the comrades called “squadism”.

What might it tell us about a person if even a Trotskyist organisation kicks you out of their party for alleged 'violent extremism'? Completely nothing, of course – other than the interpretation of such terms are dependent on the political bias, value judgements and ulterior motives of the people who make them. What is deeply disappointing is that Desai, who once was prepared to proudly and defiantly stand alongside councillors from Sinn Fein, at a time when the British state and the mainstream press were condemning them as sympathisers for violent extremists, has apparently forgotten this.

Ireland is, of course, the classic example of the way that the British state can brand an entire community as potentially subversive and dangerous. Under the Prevention of Terrorism Act, 7,052 people were detained between 1974 and 1991, the vast majority of them Irish, but 86 per cent were subsequently released without charge and only 3% convicted. Even then, convictions involved the imprisonment of innocents, as miscarriages of justice such as the Birmingham Six and the Guildford Four have revealed. As Paddy Donovan of the Irish Post commented in 2005,

"The community shrank into itself. In Liverpool many Irish people went absent from work the day after a bombing atrocity, for fear of reprisals. Irish clubs developed as a network of havens where people could mix with their own”.

In the face of constant vilification and harassment that “caused injustice, alienated law-abiding citizens and created resentment among people whose co-operation could have been invaluable for government and police,” this was an entirely understandable reaction. No doubt, however, there was a politician somewhere during the 1980s blaming the Irish for failing to integrate and perhaps even saying that “for too long we have allowed communities to go their own ways and live separate lives”.

The Irish in Britain were treated as stereotypical 'untrustworthy paddies' for appearing, at least in the minds of the prejudiced, to share a view at odds with British foreign policy, although there is little doubt that support for Irish nationalism was fuelled by what Donovan calls “the feeling of collective isolation and threat” that fosters “sympathy where there may have been none”. But Desai thinks that foreign policy as a key driver of 'radicalisation' is now “lazy thinking”.

He goes on to use the extraordinary example (albeit a prudently opportunist one in the context of Newham's political landscape) of 2009's British Tamil occupation of Parliament Square, citing it as a diaspora community that is “unhappy with our foreign policy and have not resorted to terror” (unlike the deeply suspicious Muslims, presumably). These are the same protesters who were battered by the police and who are likely to now find themselves on a police database as a different kind of extremist – a “domestic extremist” - that drags in a wide swathe of activists (including myself) that support attempts to change government policy “outside of the normal democratic process”. Moreover, given the prominence of flags bearing the emblem of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam, an organisation proscribed under the Terrorism Act 2000, some of those who took part in the occupation may now find themselves under an even greater level of surveillance by suspicious state agencies.

But that's the problem with trying to define 'extremism' – whatever Councillor Desai thinks it means, the state is neither benign or restrained in who it chooses to include, which is why lumping together 'violent and 'non-violent' extremists is so fraught with risk.

I know he is familiar with the work of the Institute of Race Relations, so perhaps Desai should read its 2009 report 'Spooked', which concludes that the failed Prevent programme he so vigorously defends has treated the whole Muslim population as a 'suspect community' and and “is counter-productive in reducing the risk of political violence”. The report's author Arun Kundnani was unable to document any practical Prevent work that was not directed in some way at Muslim communities or, for instance, “find any examples of work that focuses substantially on far-Right extremism”. The bread and butter community events that Desai celebrates in his Guardian article either have little relevance to actually tackling 'radicalisation' or, if they do, are treated with distrust and suspicion precisely because of their specific links to a Muslim-focused counter-terrorism agenda.

As I've written before, Newham council officers responsible for Prevent have denied this but refused to give a single example of activities that do not target Muslims. This is in spite of the fact that the most immediate and prominent threat from 'extremists' probably now comes from the far-Right English Defence League. An EDL march two weekends ago and not far away in Goodmayes led to attacks on Asians that left three injured and one hospitalised. Must we really wait for the EDL to turn up in Newham before Councillor Desai lays off the grandstanding about Islamic extremism and gets his priorities right?

Leamington Peace Festival 2011

2011-06-20T08:08:00.004+01:00

It's been a busy weekend: up to Warwickshire to help run a stall for the Buwan Kothi International Trust at the Leamington Peace Festival, which as always was great fun and full of decidedly strange people. Then rushing back yesterday to see the comedian Stewart Lee talk to Michael Rosen about his book How I Escaped My Certain Fate, at a packed Stratford Circus. I'll be glad to get back to work for a rest - here are a few photos from the festival (more here).

I’m a Photographer, Not a Terrorist! – A Brief History

2011-06-15T16:58:00.003+01:00

Last night I dropped by the launch of I’m a Photographer, Not a Terrorist! – A Brief History, the pamphlet written by campaigners who have been protesting again the surveillance and harassment of photographers by the Metropolitan Police.

Using Facebook and Twitter, PHNAT has organised a series of brilliant flashmobs against the misuse of anti-terrorism powers by the police and the heavy-handed reactions of private security guards, including one at Canary Wharf, a mass gathering of photographers at Trafalgar Square and a victory celebration at Scotland Yard. The pamphlet records the development of the campaign.

A PDF version of the pamphlet can be downloaded from here or you can get one by sending a double stamped self-addressed envelope to Photographer Not a Terrorist, 308-312 Gray’s Inn Rd, London WC1X 8DP.

Olympic Organisers Seeks Ownership Of Entire Year

2011-06-14T22:47:00.004+01:00

The full extent of the sweeping powers handed to next year's Olympic organisers under the Olympic Symbol (Protection) Act 1995 have taken a turn towards the bizarre with this story in today's Independent:

The overseers of the London 2012 Olympics are hinting at legal action against an events company after objecting to their use of next year's date, "2012", in the name of a forthcoming series of events celebrating British culture.

The London Organising Committee of the Olympic Games (Locog) is objecting against plans to trademark the name of the forthcoming "Great Exhibition 2012", a series of nationwide initiatives culminating with a two-week festival planned for next August.

Locog has given the exhibition's organisers, the Great Exhibitions Company, until 27 June to withdraw their application or potentially face legal proceedings. They particularly object to the use of "2012" in the event's name, as they consider that date is now widely used to refer to next year's Games.

"I just feel generally upset, as all I am asking for is the right for people to celebrate," said the Great Exhibition Company's chief executive Julie Benson. "At the moment the country next year is a jigsaw and the only bit that is coloured in is London. I just want to go about my business and the law just seems so draconian".

Madness, right? Lets take a look at who else might fall victim to Locog's attempt to claim absolute ownership of an entire year. There's the London International Ska Festival 2012 and the British Science Festival 2012, for instance. The Big Tent Festival 2012 had better watch its step, as should the High Tide Festival 2012. It's ludicrous of course - there's no way that Games organisers can possible stop hundreds of events with no apparent links to the Olympics mentioning 2012 during... 2012. And if they do happen to mention 'Cultural Olympiad values', like the Earth Festival 2012, does this imply that it was necessary to seek prior permission from officious Locog bureaucrats?

The only saving grace I can foresee is the temporary withdrawal of this particular cinematic atrocity and legal action against a load of New Age conspiracy theorists. Plans next year to rename this blog 'Random Blowe 2012' just to irritate the buggers are, I'm sure, entirely unfounded.

Dealers In Death Return To Canning Town

2011-06-13T20:41:00.005+01:00

In three months time, from 13-16 September, the arms companies that sold tear gas, crowd control armament and sniper rifles to Libya and Bahrain in 2010 are back at the ExCeL conference centre in Canning Town.

Yet again, Newham sees the unwelcome return of the Defence & Security Equipment International (DSEi) Arms Fair and its guests, who included an impressive number of the world's most repressive regimes seeking to shore up their power with the latest weapons technologies. UK companies exhibiting include those who supplied armoured carriers used against protesters in Libya in 2011 and they will be joined by arms manufacturers such as Lockheed Martin from the US, Pakistan Ordnance Factories, the state-owned Israeli arms company Rafael and Heckler & Koch from Germany. Just months after its attack on Gaza in 2008-9, Israel hosted a huge pavilion at the last DSEi fair of its "battle-tested" exports, whilst countries that are at threat of war with each other - such as India and Pakistan - shopped side-by-side.

In 2011, DSEi publicity boasts that the arms fair will be "even bigger" and will host the "Largest Unmanned & Robotics Demonstration area in Europe". On 13 September, the Stop the Arms Fair coalition is calling a mass day of action to make it too difficult for the arms companies to do business, by supporting a mass of diverse and creative actions against the fair.

Thousands of people in Newham have been forced from their homes in war zones around the world and have settled in the borough as exiles, in part because of arms exporters who help prolong violent conflict and profit from the human tragedy it brings. But Clarion Events, the private company that owns the arms fair, says that it is supported by the government, so it must be OK. This is our opportunity to make it clear that arming repressive regimes at an event on our doorstep is NOT OK, by providing practical support to protesters and taking part in demonstrations ourselves.

More details soon, but for more information see the Campaign Against the Arms Trade, Disarm DSEi and East London Against Arms Fairs websites for more information.

Epping Forest Faces Cuts As Wanstead Flats Leased For Peppercorn Rent

2011-06-08T16:37:00.006+01:00

There are plenty of reasons why the Olympics juggernaut has been able to roll ahead without comment or proper consultation, but some appear to have been far more supine than others in allowing it to plough on without thinking through the consequences.

Take the City of London Corporation, for example. It has bent over backwards to support the bid by the Metropolitan Police to use part of Wanstead Flats for an operations base next year, despite concerted opposition from people living nearby. The controversial Legislative Reform Order (LRO), a parliamentary procedure to amend the Epping Forest Act that protects the Flats, is currently awaiting final discussion in the House of Lords and the House of Commons. The prospects that the LRO will be nodded through are extremely high.

One of the many surprising decisions made by the Corporation was to propose to charge the Met a measly rent of £170,000 for four months use of the Flats, instead of a more commercially sensible sum. This is all the more mystifying when seen against the following statement in the Summer 20011 edition of Forest Focus [PDF], the Corporation's Epping Forest newsletter:

Currently it costs the City of London £4.4 million per year to run Epping Forest including income generated. Carefully targeted reductions in service are being made totalling £457,000 which will sadly result in reductions in funding for tree work, ride maintenance, equipment and machinery, together with less improvement work on the Forest's farmed estate. Safety will remain paramount.

As a result, the budget for annual events has been reduced, meaning that long-standing events, including the Epping Forest Festival, which has traditionally taken place in September, will cease until further notice....

As a charitable trust, Epping Forest is seeking to offset the impact of proposed cuts by seeking additional grant support from key charities for the City's invaluable work on environmental education and biodiversity research. An update will follow on this application in the next edition of Forest Focus.

It seems entirely fair to pose the following question: how, when the City of London Corporation is making cuts and cancelling the Epping Forest Festival, was it prudent to support a controversial scheme that would recoup only £170,000, a tiny fraction of the massive £10 billions Olympics budget? Or, despite Epping Forest being a charitable trust, are its trustees unaware of their legal duty of prudence?

Increasingly, it looks as though the Forest has been sold short by people who have been blinded by the spectacle of the Olympics into handing over land held in trust for local people for what is essentially a peppercorn rent.

Perhaps the time has come to ask another entirely fair question - would Epping Forest and Wanstead Flats be better managed by someone other than the City of London Corporation?

POSTSCRIPT

The Corporation may say it is "seeking additional grant support from key charities". So why, after the Wanstead Parklands Community Project (WPCP) went to considerable effort to work with Conservators to apply for a lottery grant - even conducting a public consultation - did a small group of officials decide that they wouldn't even put the proposal through to the relevant City of London committee?

WPCP has expressed "shock and frustration" at this decision. What on earth is going on?

Former Children's Laureate Condemns Newham's "Act Of Cultural Vandalism"

2011-06-05T20:18:00.006+01:00

Following on from my post on Newham council's new 'Building Resilience' strategy, it seems that a number of community groups, led by Asian elders group Ekta and campaigners from Newham Monitoring Project, have been busy building some resilience - or rather resistance - of their own.

Bouncing back from the first example of the new strategy in action, namely Mayor Sir Robin Wales' decision to to remove foreign language newspapers from the borough's libraries because he feels they discourage local people from learning and speaking English, a petition has been launched (download from here). It calls not only for the reinstatement of community-language newspapers but also for more funding for English as a Second Language (ESOL) classes and for the council to "recognise and celebrate the unique diversity of the London Borough of Newham, includes recognition of the languages and cultures of its individual communities".

The campaign has attracted the support of the respected writer, poet and former Children's Laureate Michael Rosen, who works regularly with Newham's schools and with the Newvic Sixth Form Centre. Michael says:

"Removing from Newham libraries newspapers written in languages other than English is an act of cultural vandalism. It deprives people of access to news about their communities and links with their countries of origin. Communities with origins from outside the British Isles make a massive contribution to the life of the UK, its economy and culture and are entitled to express themselves in any language they like. Speaking and writing their own languages doesn't stop them from making those contributions and doesn't stop them from learning English. It is illiterate and ignorant to imagine that migrant communities can't manage to be bi-lingual just because their members speak a language other than English. All over the world, bilingualism is common and normal. In fact, it's a massive skill, enabling cultural and commercial relations to operate well both within and between countries.

From an autobiographical perspective, I can testify that my own origins are founded in bi- and tri-lingualism which was thankfully supported by the local library where books and newspapers in my grandparents' tongue were stocked and heavily used. As a result of the confidence and ease of moving between languages, my parents became the first university educated people in my family.

It is vital for the sake of Newham's cultural and economic vitality to continue to provide newspapers in all the appropriate languages. We all benefit from their presence in our libraries."

To support the campaign contact Prity Patel-Bedia at Newham Monitoring Project.

LAZY FRIDAY - Star Wars Meets Withnail & I

2011-05-27T13:47:00.003+01:00

Back after an eight month absence, today's Friday lunchtime distraction comes courtesy of Raff Jones. When an out-of-work droid finds himself far from his natural habitat of Camden, thrown deep into a galaxy far far away, it does nothing to dampen his quest for cake, tea and the finest wines available to humanity...

Hat-tip: Boing Boing

Newham Unveils "Building Resilience" - Its New Grand Idea

2011-05-25T08:36:00.028+01:00

In our supposedly 'post-ideological' age, with political theory elbowed aside by moral rhetoric turning debate into battles between right and wrong instead of left and right, it seems mainstream politicians of all shades have a fondness for top-down, ill-defined but apparently all-embracing 'grand ideas' designed to change the behaviour of the citizens they govern - and to do so by coercion if necessary.

The Tories have the Big Society, which David Cameron described as "a huge culture change, where people, in their everyday live… don’t always turn to officials, local authorities or central government for answers to the problems they face, but instead feel both free and powerful enough to help themselves and their own communities". Now Newham's Labour council is pushing its own visionary Grand Idea and it’s one that sounds remarkably similar to the Big Society: a buzzword providing an ideological basis for the local authority's opposition to what it calls ‘dependency’, in which "too many people… come to rely on the state – letting someone else determine what happens in their lives rather than taking personal control".

It’s called ‘Building Resilience’ and we’ll be hearing a great deal about it in the coming months. In an e-mail circulated last Friday, the borough's Mayor Sir Robin Wales launched a consultation on Newham council’s plans to "radically change the way we work with residents and our partners," set out in a document called 'A Strong Community: Building Resilience in Newham'.

So what does 'resilience' actually mean? It's a term that pops up in psychology, to describe people's capacity to cope with stress and catastrophe, whilst it is also associated with emergency planning and the government's Prevent anti-extremism programme. Generally it denotes the ability of people to 'bounce back' from adversity but Newham's strategy sees 'Building Resilience' as rather more: it is about providing 'positive outlook' skills like confidence-building, social awareness and motivation, about local people solving more of their problems themselves and about residents seeking advice and help from 'community networks' and their neighbours rather than the local authority. Newham council says it also wants to "embed responsibility and reciprocity in the relationship between state and citizen". What it means by this is that more local services will become conditional on people's behaviour, with "rewards and incentives going to those who help themselves and others whilst those who do not should not have an automatic right to the full range of support."

Not unlike the government's Big Society policy, with its warm and fluffy emphasis on 'empowering' local people and supporting charities, elements of 'Building Resilience' seem, at first glance, superficially appealing. Acknowledging that a circle of close friends and wider supportive networks like community groups are positively beneficial seems like common sense, as does the idea that "the broader the range of people we interact with, the more resources and potential support we have at our disposal". It is also true that the majority of local people already depend far more on friends and contacts for mutual aid than they do on direct support from the local state, not only because council assistance is often difficult to find but because most of us do not welcome state 'interference' in our daily lives. Few would disagree too that a well-paid, secure job is far better than unemployment and poverty.

But, just like the Big Society, are there other motivations behind these efforts to promote 'radical' change in our behaviour and expectations in Newham? For all its talk of handing power to local people, we now know the Tories' flagship policy turned out to really mean saving money, justifying cuts in council-run services and handing considerable influence and valuable contracts to private companies and a few large charities. Like the Big Society, 'Building Resilience' seems to advocate the gradual withdrawal of the local state beyond a core of support for the most vulnerable, leaving more of us dependent on making our own arrangements, although unlike the Coalition government's plans, voluntary groups barely receive a mention. It also seems to share an underlying belief that residents can no longer expect "something for nothing" or the certainty that local services will always be there when we need them.

Moreover, 'Building Resilience' does seem to mirror what would usually be seen as Tory morality in suggesting that, rather than the lack of jobs in the current climate or capitalism's endemic economic inequality, it is local people themselves in deprived areas like Newham who must take a large part of the blame (or 'personal responsibility') for their poverty and joblessness and must therefore be coerced into pulling themselves up by their bootstraps.

One of the first local battlegrounds of this approach to changing residents' behaviour is over language. Learning English is undoubtedly a vital skill for new migrants, not only for finding work but to ensure that people are not fobbed off, talked down to, exploited and misled. However, as the majority of us who have ever tried to learn a new language will know, it's often extremely difficult to develop proficiency and requires a considerable investment in decent language classes. But it is evident that Newham council believes most local people with poor English are simply not trying hard enough. Sir Robin Wales has made it clear that his recent controversial decision to remove foreign language newspapers from the borough's libraries is an act of compulsion to "encourage people to speak and learn English". This is obviously what 'Building Resilience' means in action.

Unfortunately, Newham's new strategy document is extremely abstruse and, like other 'grand ideas', seems like an attempt to provide intellectual justification for the drastic local cuts in services we will soon be facing. Furthermore, 'Building Resilience' already seems to say far more about the Victorian moral authoritarianism of the Labour politicians who are backing it than it does the ability of people living in Newham to bounce back from economic austerity.

Consultation on 'A Strong Community: Building Resilience in Newham' opened on Friday 20 May and closes on Friday 3rd June. See here for more details

Long Road To Justice Continues For Tomlinson Family

2011-05-24T20:20:00.006+01:00

Today's decision by the Director of Public Prosecutions to charge PC Simon Harwood with the manslaughter of Ian Tomlinson, the newspaper seller who died during the G20 protests in 2009, is hugely significant precisely because it is so unusual.

Statistics from the custody-death campaigners INQUEST show that in the last twenty years, there have been nine 'unlawful killing' verdicts reached at coroner's court inquests concerning deaths in police custody and one 'narrative' verdict that placed the spotlight firmly on police conduct. Of these, three decisions were later quashed. Having seen evidence tested in front of a jury, there has nevertheless been only three criminal trials following inquests: two led to acquittals and one collapsed. The two families I got to know well in the 1990s - the relatives of Shiji Lapite and Ibrahima Sey, who both lived and died in east London - were denied even that opportunity.

And no officer has been convicted since the trial in 1971 - forty years ago - of those responsible for the death of David Oluwale (and even then, manslaughter charges were dropped).

The trial that collapsed in 2002 involved officers accused of standing by and watching Christopher Alder die on the floor of a police station in Hull. I attended part of that trial and remember well the prosecution's disastrous and disorganised performance, after the CPS had to be reluctantly dragged into a manslaughter prosecution. The CPS' failings are outlined in this INQUEST briefing [PDF]. I mention this only because the Tomlinson family still has a long way to go before they see justice delivered. The next steps remain out of their control and in the hands of CPS prosecutors - and the probable lead Counsel in the forthcoming trial is the same barrister who advised the DPP, Keir Starmer, in July 2010 that there was insufficient evidence to charge Harwood.

If it wants some of its credibility restored, the CPS really does have a great deal to prove after reaching that ludicrous decision.

Now Police Want Armed Officers Underground

2011-05-20T16:54:00.008+01:00

The general expectation of most people living and working near to the Olympic Park in east London is that, next year, transport will be appalling and the area around Stratford will quickly start to resemble an military camp.

The 2012 Games undoubtedly represent the world's biggest terrorist target, what the Home Office calls "the biggest peace-time security operation in UK history". This is why, at a time of huge cuts, the government announced in December 2010 that it is committed to providing staggering amounts of money to fund it: £567m in 2011/12 and £564m in 2012/13 for counter-terrorism policing, "much of which is devoted to the Olympics". On top of that, we also know that the London Organising Committee (LOCOG) has signed a £100m contract with the private security firm G4S to provide stewards and guards inside the Olympic venues.

However, next year's Games is also providing the main justification for senior police officers to see how far they can pushing the boundaries. Today, it's the announcement that the British Transport Police wants its own armed response unit "in time for the 2012 Olympics", with officers based at main rail stations "but also deployed for occasional patrols on the Underground".

This is an insane idea. Radio communication underground may well have improved dramatically since the execution of innocent Tube traveller Jean Charles de Menezes at Stockwell station in July 2005, but that doesn't mean that the control of gung-ho firearms officers is any less of a huge risk - especially when they are carrying Heckler and Koch carbines and Glock 9mm pistols in confined spaces underground. All that their deployment on the Tube will do is greatly increase fear and panic amongst members of the public who well remember the circumstances of a fellow commuter's horrific and 'accidental' killing, whilst further normalising the routine arming of a supposedly unarmed constabulary. And unlike, say, accurate intelligence, what police-with-guns most certainly won't do is stop a terrorist attack from taking place - any more than armed officers in Mumbai stopped the awful shooting spree in 2008.

It makes no difference how often the police and Olympic organisers say next year "is a sporting event, not a security event" if London becomes more and more militarised. But that's the direction we seem to be going.

No Need To Worry About Census Threats

2011-05-18T19:38:00.001+01:00

If only I'd known back in March how little information the organisers of this year's census were prepared to accept, this post about my intention to complete the form but to make it as expensive as possible for US arms company Lockheed Martin (who hold the contract to process census data) would have been very different.

I filled in the census form and sent it back with an unofficial 'Supplementary Questions' sheet [PDF] in early April. However, I still had a visit last week from a census collector, who explained that there was no record of the receipt of the form, that Lockheed Martin had evidently lost it and that I'd have to complete another - but not every question.

Remarkably, I was told that at this late stage, forms were accepted as 'complete' as long as H3 (who lives in the household) and individual questions 1 to 4 (name, gender, date of birth and marital status) were filled in. That's it - meaning all the other information, including country of birth, general level of health, ethnicity, qualifications, religion and indepth employment details, were no longer as important as the threat of a £1000 fine seemed to imply.

Now I realise that the Office for National Statistics is keen to improve on lower levels of returned forms in London, but when senior officials say they are "cautiously optimistic" that targets of an average 94% return rate would be met, with no single local authority area returning less than 80% of forms, we should adopt the usual wariness about anyone bandying with statistical assertions, never mind a statistician. These targets may no doubt be achieved, but if my experience is anything to go by, there will be huge holes in the census data that render much of it meaningless.

In the event that there is another census in 2021 (which is in some doubt), the advice to anyone concerned about the privacy implications of handing personal information to the state is also pretty clear: forget about the complicated avoidance tactics and just wait six weeks, pretend you've already sent the form back and then just answer the basic questions. Job done.

James Connolly And The Queen's Visit To Ireland

2011-05-17T15:42:00.005+01:00

As the Guardian provides 'live updates' on today's visit by the Queen to the Republic of Ireland, I've been rereading this by Irish socialist and republican James Connolly, on the last visit of a British monarch, Lizzie's grandfather, Emperor George V, in 1910:

FELLOW WORKERS - As you are aware from reading the daily and weekly newspapers, we are about to be blessed with a visit from King George V.

Knowing from previous experience of Royal Visits, as well as from the Coronation orgies of the past few weeks, that the occasion will be utilised to make propaganda on behalf of royalty and aristocracy against the oncoming forces of democracy and National freedom, we desire to place before you some few reasons why you should unanimously refuse to countenance this visit, or to recognise it by your presence at its attendant processions or demonstrations. We appeal to you as workers, speaking to workers, whether your work be that of the brain or of the hand – manual or mental toil – it is of you and your children we are thinking; it is your cause we wish to safeguard and foster.

The future of the working class requires that all political and social positions should be open to all men and women; that all privileges of birth or wealth be abolished, and that every man or woman born into this land should have an equal opportunity to attain to the proudest position in the land. The Socialist demands that the only birthright necessary to qualify for public office should be the birthright of our common humanity.

Believing as we do that there is nothing on earth more sacred than humanity, we deny all allegiance to this institution of royalty, and hence we can only regard the visit of the King as adding fresh fuel to the fire of hatred with which we regard the plundering institutions of which he is the representative. Let the capitalist and landlord class flock to exalt him; he is theirs; in him they see embodied the idea of caste and class; they glorify him and exalt his importance that they might familiarise the public mind with the conception of political inequality, knowing well that a people mentally poisoned by the adulation of royalty can never attain to that spirit of self-reliant democracy necessary for the attainment of social freedom. The mind accustomed to political kings can easily be reconciled to social kings – capitalist kings of the workshop, the mill, the railway, the ships and the docks. Thus coronation and king's visits are by our astute neversleeping masters made into huge Imperialist propagandist campaigns in favour of political and social schemes against democracy. But if our masters and rulers are sleepless in their schemes against us, so we, rebels against their rule, must never sleep in our appeal to our fellows to maintain as publicly our belief in the dignity of our class – in the ultimate sovereignty of those who labour.

What is monarchy? From whence does it derive its sanction? What has been its gift to humanity? Monarchy is a survival of the tyranny imposed by the hand of greed and treachery upon the human race in the darkest and most ignorant days of our history. It derives its only sanction from the sword of the marauder, and the helplessness of the producer, and its gifts to humanity are unknown, save as they can be measured in the pernicious examples of triumphant and shameless iniquities.

Every class in society save royalty, and especially British royalty, has through some of its members contributed something to the elevation of the race. But neither in science, nor in art, nor in literature, nor in exploration, nor in mechanical invention, nor in humanising of laws, nor in any sphere of human activity has a representative of British royalty helped forward the moral, intellectual or material improvement of mankind. But that royal family has opposed every forward move, fought every reform, persecuted every patriot, and intrigued against every good cause. Slandering every friend of the people, it has befriended every oppressor. Eulogised today by misguided clerics, it has been notorious in history for the revolting nature of its crimes. Murder, treachery, adultery, incest, theft, perjury – every crime known to man has been committed by some one or other of the race of monarchs from whom King George is proud to trace his descent.

"His blood
Has crept through scoundrels since the flood."

We will not blame him for the crimes of his ancestors if he relinquishes the royal rights of his ancestors; but as long as he claims their rights, by virtue of descent, then, by virtue of descent, he must shoulder the responsibility for their crimes.

Fellow-workers, stand by the dignity of your class. All these parading royalties, all this insolent aristocracy, all these grovelling, dirt-eating capitalist traitors, all these are but signs of disease in any social state – diseases which a royal visit brings to a head and spews in all its nastiness before our horrified eyes. But as the recognition of the disease is the first stage towards its cure, so that we may rid our social state of its political and social diseases, we must recognise the elements of corruption. Hence, in bringing them all together and exposing their unity, even a royal visit may help us to understand and understanding, help us to know how to destroy the royal, aristocratic and capitalistic classes who live upon our labour. Their workshops, their lands, their mills, their factories, their ships, their railways must be voted into our hands who alone use them, public ownership must take the place of capitalist ownership, social democracy replace political and social inequality, the sovereignty of labour must supersede and destroy the sovereignty of birth and the monarchy of capitalism.

Ours be the task to enlighten the ignorant among our class, to dissipate and destroy the political and social superstitions of the enslaved masses and to hasten the coming day when, in the words of Joseph Brenan, the fearless patriot of ’48, all the world will maintain

“The Right Divine of Labour
To be first of earthly things;
That the Thinker and the Worker
Are Manhood’s only Kings.”

Fire In Babylon

2011-05-13T19:58:00.004+01:00

This is the trailer for the brilliant Fire in Babylon, which I saw last night at Stratford Picturehouse. It is the story of the West Indies cricket team's rise from nowhere in the 1970s, which was as much a blow against racism, colonialism and inequality as it was about sport. Check it out when it goes on general release:

The Fantasy World Of Newham’s Counter-Terror Experts

2011-05-12T18:01:00.001+01:00

After two decades of activism in Newham, I’ve almost become immune to the council making claims it can rarely substantiate, especially about how wonderful its work is. It is exactly this tendency towards concentric circles of fantasy and bullshit that made a meeting on Tuesday, about the controversial ‘Preventing Violent Extremism’ (PVE) programme, all the more fascinating.

PVE (also known as ‘Prevent’) is one part of the government’s counter terrorism strategy and targets mainly young people who are at risk of radicalisation by extremist groups. Around £53m has been spent on PVE since it started in 2007 and in 2010-11, 94 local authorities were given £24m. Those involved in delivering Prevent activities like to describe them as a nothing more than a crime prevention programme aimed at making it less likely that young people will be drawn in terrorism, but its critics say it is "the biggest spying programme in Britain in modern times", one that has helped fuel the perception of local Muslim populations as a 'suspect community'.

The Institute of Race Relations (IRR) in its report “Spooked: how not to prevent violent extremism”, alleges that youth workers have become “increasingly wary of the expectations on them to provide the police with information on young Muslims and their religious and political opinions”, whilst the emphasis on “depoliticising young people and restricting radical dissent is actually counter-productive because it strengthens the hands of those who say democracy is pointless”.

The government has repeatedly denied that Prevent involves spying but acknowledges that one part of it, known as the Channel programme, does identify people thought to be at risk of radicalisation, who may then receive some form of intervention. However, it is almost impossible to identify people who are not terrorists but might become so at some point in the future. Instead, young Muslims with 'extreme' opinions as marked out as what the IRR calls a 'pre-terrorist', their details held on counter-terrorism databases as a potential violent extremist in the eyes of the police and the intelligence services, with no way of having this data removed.

Many of the criticisms come not only from civil liberties campaigners but from within parliament. In March 2010, the Communities and Local Government Select Committee attacked Prevent, saying it was “stigmatising, potentially alienating, and fails to address the fact that that no section of a population exists in isolation from others”. Its chair, Dr Phyllis Starkey said:

"The misuse of terms such as 'intelligence gathering' amongst Prevent partners has clearly discredited the programme and fed distrust.

"Information required to manage Prevent has been confused with intelligence gathering undertaken by the police to combat crime and surveillance used by the security services to actively pursue terrorism suspects.

"These allegations of spying under Prevent will retain widespread credibility within some communities until the government commissions an independent investigation into the allegations."

In November 2010, Home Secretary Teresa May acknowledged that Prevent was not working well and announced a review, which is due to report next month. She refused, however, to allow an examination into allegations that Prevent is a fundamentally a spying operation.

On top of the controversy over motives and delivery, there is also concern about the lack of transparency and accountability in local decision-making on Prevent activities. In May 2010, I recounted my efforts to find out how Newham council has spend more than £1.3million in funding for its local Prevent programme. Eventually I received some scant details (PDF) but these say very little about what this money has actually been used for. I know that others have had similar difficulties with Freedom of Information requests on local PVE spending.

Clearly Prevent has has deeply alienated Muslim communities and raised such serious concerns about the way it operates that it faces an complete overhaul. All of which brings me to the meeting in Newham on Tuesday, where I had been asked at the last minute to present a personal overview of the Prevent strategy and its consequences for community cohesion.

This is where I heard the fantastic claims of the officers responsible for delivering Prevent in a borough with one of the largest Channel caseloads in the country. And what a story they had to tell – one where there is nothing whatsoever to concern anyone about the way the programme is delivered locally. In fact, everything is uniquely excellent in Newham, apparently, with none of the unfortunate problems that have all occurred in other parts of the country. However, in reality it is impossible to know what impact the programme makes - an October 2010 report by the Office for Public Management on Prevent in Newham has never been released publicly. And having briefly worked for Newham council, I can tell you: nothing is ever perfect.

Council officers claimed that the local decision not to fund single faith groups and instead keep the funding in-house is a positive advantage, but were just as opaque in providing more information on how their funding is spent as they have been in the past. Questions were hastily skipped over. They also insisted that there is absolutely no discrimination against Muslims and that Prevent is concerned about all forms of terrorism, including dissident Irish Republicanism, Sikh fundamentalism and support for the Tamil Tigers – but refused to confirm the proportion of Muslims within Newham’s Channel programme. That in itself speaks volumes.

When asked how decisions about individuals are made and the factors used to determine risk of radicalisation, they skipped over this too, saying that they often spend time rejecting vindictive allegations of extremism. How nice and fluffy is that? But what this reveals is the extraordinary level of power that a small group of obscure officers have to investigate and potentially brand someone as calls a 'pre-terrorist' with almost no scrutiny or oversight, but with potentially huge consequences. Indeed, I had the feeling that the meeting on Tuesday was the first time that their upbeat and rosy view of Prevent had been challenged at a local level.

No wonder so many officers turned up en masse to a small community event. But attending to say little or nothing isn't likely to reassure anyone, whilst pretending everything is perfect is itself deeply suspicious. What, one wonders, would real transparency and accountability uncover?

AV - Like, Whatever

2011-05-04T19:54:00.002+01:00

Wouldn't it be convenient if the most serious problem with our political system wasn't the interests that control it, or the careerists who are eager to make names for themselves within it, or even the politicians who'll make any number of sordid compromises just to reach its dizzy heights and ride in a bullet-proof limo? What if, instead, the main problem was the way our votes are counted and distributed?

Most of us know that's not the case and that the imbalance of power between government and governed has roots that are far deeper than the method of holding elections every four to five years. The controversy over MPs expenses helped to expose an entire political class that is removed from and largely unaccountable to voters, whilst the enormous influence that corporate lobbyists wield is surely the next long-overdue scandal to erupt in Westminster. A small change in the voting system, one that isn't proportional to the number of votes cast or even popular with supporters of electoral reform, won't suddenly throw open the doors of parliament. That's not what the decision to hold a referendum was for. It was instead the deal that Nick Clegg was able to squeeze out of the reluctant Tories in exchange for the Liberal Democrats selling out every principle they claimed to believe in.

That's why it's all the more surprising that otherwise sane and reasonable people are kidding themselves that AV is the 'defining' issue of this parliament - and in the process are getting so spectacularly angry about the prospect of losing tomorrow's referendum. Some of the intemperate, frustrated comments I've read today are signs that many already know the Yes campaign has no chance of winning.

I can understand why partisans of different political parties, from the Tories to the Greens, are so animated about AV, because they are weighing the electoral opportunities or threats that a different way of counting votes will have on them. I also see why much of the liberal commentariat are so fixated on the referendum - for them, politics begins and ends within the Westminster bubble. But why would anyone else, especially on the left, give a toss one way or another? It's not as though there aren't more pressing and important subjects to get fired up about, or that we have unlimited reserves of hope and energy to waste. It's certainly not that the issue has motivated and galvanised the wider public. The campaigns for and against AV have both been monumentally uninspiring.

As I've explained before, I didn't vote in last year's general election and don't consider it anywhere near the highpoint of my political activity, so the technicalities of how votes are counted is obviously even less of a priority. In February, I nevertheless argued that a vote against AV could be seen as "a deliberate act of mischief". But I'm not even sure about that now.

I'm really won't know whether I'll be dropping in to the polling station at the nearest school, for the first time in many years, until I wake up tomorrow.

Royalty's Last Hurrah

2011-05-02T18:37:00.017+01:00

Now that a new global media event, the execution of Osama bin Laden, has completely pushed aside the endless coverage of the royal wedding, there's at last a chance to reflect on what, if anything, last Friday's anachronistic nonsense says about Britain.

Like many a secular anti-monarchist, I had vague plans to get out of the country for the duration of William Windsor's wedding. But instead I was with close friends in the West Midlands and found myself, amusingly, at a royal wedding street party in a suburb of Coventry. Even more of a surprise is that I quite enjoyed myself, although it was decidedly strange. I've no idea, of course, whether this street party was representative of others around the country, but it certainly lacked the patriotic fervour I remember from previous royal weddings. Nor did it share the flag-waving sycophancy on display in the Mall earlier in the day. There were Union flags, naturally, plus plenty of red, white and blue bunting; but it seemed rather appropriate that the faces of the privileged bride and the cosseted groom had been cut out of the large portrait photo so the kids could pose for pictures. The royals were essentially missing from the street party and it was all just an excuse for sharing a few beers in the street without the prospect of complaints from the neighbours about anti-social behaviour.

Oh, and then there was the Morris dancers. I suppose they were supposed to represent a quaint vision of what it means to be English, not unlike the wedding itself, but most people looked on in bemusement during their first jig and then ignored them altogether.

This kind of general indifference, combined with disappearing levels of deference towards symbols of authority, meant that for all the appearance of popular enthusiasm and involvement, the royal wedding was really just a pageant, a fashion show and a celebrity photo opportunity, one that needed the bribe of a public holiday and plenty of official encouragement for people to join in. For all the ludicrous Ruritanian uniforms and gilded fairytale coaches, what the public seemed most concerned about was true of any wedding - how did the bride's expensive dress look and would the best man pull the chief bridesmaid? And that's why I can't see the monarchy ever managing to carry anything like it in the future. This was its last hurrah.

But in the mean time, God help anyone who showed the slightest dissent. The response of the police to the limited number of tiny and mostly irrelevant protests was completely disproportionate (see below). So too was their reaction to an 'unofficial' gathering in Glasgow - perhaps the youths who arranged it on FaceBook should have considered booking some Morris dancers.

This level of heavy-handedness is either rooted in a belief that no-one will care enough to complain, or a nervousness in the days and weeks before Friday that perhaps more people would refuse to fall into line behind the official narrative. On the day, the state got away with it comfortably, showing just how far our basic civil liberties have been undermined - but perhaps the growing number of protests since the coalition government took office has had a greater impact in unnerving those in power than we had all previously realised.

'YOU WILL OBEY' UPDATE: 3rd MAY

And then there's this: news that the police shot someone with a Taser at an unofficial royal wedding street party in Cornwall.

Warning - Police Surveillance Is Big Business

2011-04-15T00:29:00.007+01:00

This is the second of a couple of posts in advance of the ‘Standing Up To Surveillance’ conference on Sunday.

In January, I idly speculated in a piece for Red Pepper that groups who increasingly challenge economic and corporate interests, like UKUncut, might start to face a far greater degree of police surveillance. Recent comments made by Met Assistant Commissioner Lynne Owens, on the opportunity to “improve the intelligence picture” offered by the mass arrest of UK Uncut activists last month, seem to indicate that “targeting potential troublemakers” is already starting to receive a higher priority. The crystal ball is working better than I realised.

In the case of those lifted on leaving the occupation of Fortnum & Mason on 26 March, 'improving the intelligence picture' presumably refers to the confiscation and examination of individuals' mobile phones, a reminder that the police are increasingly using highly technological solutions to gather intelligence, as well as their photographers, spotters and plain-clothed officers. And although it may seem strange at a time when senior police officers are warning of cuts in frontline staff, there are big profits to be made by the security & arms corporations that produce and supply the latest software and equipment for direct surveillance, tracking and eavesdropping.

Much of this technology starts life with a focus on countering international terrorism, through a ‘cross-government programme’ run by the Home Office called INSTINCT (Innovative Science and Technology in Counter-Terrorism), designed to invest in private sector research. But through a process of ‘function creep’, what might initially appear to have a solely military or anti-terrorist purpose can soon end up as a serious option for domestic policing. Not everything works out – the use of a surveillance ‘blimp’ developed by a Birmingham company for Greater Manchester Police proved disastrous – but the deployment of the kind of unmanned aerial ‘drone’ used in Afghanistan, provided by MW Power for Merseyside police and equipped with high-resolution cameras instead of weapons, is an obvious example.

However, much of the new surveillance technology is focused on targeting individuals and tracking personal behaviour. There are companies promoting products to Britain’s police forces who are developing software to track mobiles through their GPS information, to hack into wireless networks or to constantly monitor websites and social media, including those that are password-protected. The greater availability of wireless technology means it is possible to make far greater use of temporary video surveillance rather than permanent CCTV and to stream high definition video straight from police vehicles to command centres. The quality of CCTV has been refined though its use for many years at football matches and images are greatly improved, as is the police’s ability to pick out and identify individuals from a greater distance. A number of companies are even developing the capacity for ‘behavioural analytics’ software and 'artificial neural networks' to supposedly recognise and ‘learn’ unusual or suspicious behaviour of individuals in large public spaces.

The surveillance trade is invariably involved in a hard-sell of its ‘cost-effective’ alternatives to both human decision-making and the need for extra officers on duty and claiming overtime. This is likely to seem like an increasingly attractive offer for government and for senior police officers at a time of austerity and budget cuts, but what these products amount to are tools for an ever growing surveillance society.

The idea that targeting potential ‘troublemakers’ means tracking and adding them to a secret database - because it is a cheap option compared to the cost of more public order police - can lead to the idea that ‘improving the intelligence picture’ means adding more and more names, including those with no criminal record or history of violence. Using the excuse of saving even more public money, this can in turn mean routinely arresting people to gain access to their mobile phones and see who they associate with – and then the next steps are tracking those mobiles, monitoring e-mail accounts, using video surveillance and even, in the case of protesters, restricting the movement of activists travelling to demonstrations.

If this seems far-fetched, consider how unlikely it would have seemed only five years ago for the police to start using a version of a military unmanned spy drone - or the likelihood that a British police force working with the country’s largest arms manufacturer would one day suggest that this kind of surveillance technology could be used to tackle such terrifying national security priorities as “theft from cash machines, preventing theft of tractors and monitoring antisocial driving”. The slide towards greater surveillance always starts somewhere – and the squeeze on spending might well turn out to signal a new and unwelcome starting point.

Rethinking The Politics Of Kettling

2011-04-12T21:17:00.002+01:00

As a way to develop some of my own thinking for the forthcoming ‘Standing Up To Surveillance’ conference on Sunday, this is the first of a couple of posts looking at how protesters’ attitudes toward the policing of their demonstrations are constantly evolving. These ideas aren't fully formed yet so feel free to comment.

An online campaign calling for a ban on kettling seems, on the face of it, like a complete no-brainer for anyone who has attended a major protest in the last two years. The enforced street containment of protesters for long periods and severe restriction on their freedom of movement by the police appears designed to deliberately shut down legitimate dissent and has a marked tendency to increase the likelihood of confrontation.

But here's a question: if kettling WAS actually banned, would the policing of marches and demonstrations suddenly and significantly change for the better?

Containment is, after all, just another way of saying 'control within strict limits' - and rigid control of protest does seem like an essential part of the way all demonstrations are now policed. For instance, we've all seen that efforts to 'kettle the message' - through the control of accurate information on unfolding events, of the way news is reported by the media, by talking up the prospect of violence and planting the odd outrageous claim about ‘ammonia filled lightbulbs’, or simply seeking to dictate the boundaries of what is a ‘reasonable’ right to freedom of assembly and expression – is seen as just as important to the police as containing people and controlling public space. When this control of the message breaks down, as it did with the unusually high level of public scrutiny following 2009's G20 protests (resulting from a combination of public disquiet at Ian Tomlinson’s death, protesters’ own video evidence and eye-witness testimony), we've then seen how desperately keen the police become to put as much distance as possible between themselves and the consequences of their containment tactics.

Let's take the boundaries of what is a ‘reasonable’ as another example. One of the striking features of the recent Joint Committee on Human Rights report "Facilitating Peaceful Protest" is that all its recommendations relate to just one type of street protest - the stewarded march from point X to point Y along a pre-arranged route, sanctioned by the police under prior negotiation.

Now marches are undoubtedly an important part of the popular expression of dissent and only the biggest cynic would argue that the recent, enormous TUC anti-cuts march wasn't a significant achievement. It was, however, far from typical because of its size and the value of the 'point X to point Y' march as a tactic has been diminished by the disillusionment a generation of demonstrators felt after raised expectations of the impact of the huge march against the Iraq war in 2003. In addition, anyone who has attended a number of marches begins to notice that they often feel distinctly like a 'enclosed public space', separate and isolated from the world beyond the lines of police and stewards, with little interaction with the areas that marchers pass through and, commonly, with very little wider media coverage.

Growing disillusionment with 'traditional' marches may in part explain why police contact with protesters is far more likely to be confrontational during protests that, until recently, have been studiously ignored in the establishment debate over public order - protests such as sit-ins, occupations, blockades and spontaneous action that targets economic and corporate interests including banks, carbon traders or businesses that like to avoid their tax responsibilities. These tactics have grown in popularity over the last five years. So are the vast majority of these kind of protesters not also engaged in 'reasonable' dissent, even though they don't ask for prior permission and deliberately avoid attempts by the police to control and contain them? The mass arrest of UK Uncut activists at Fortnum & Mason on 26 March does rather suggest that the police have already made up their minds on this question.

But back to the question of what wider impact, if any, a ban on kettling would have in practice on the general treatment of demonstrators. The way people respond to this probably depends upon whether they feel the police are really trying to facilitate protest or rather to impose 'control within strict limits'. I would argue that the evidence for the latter seems harder and harder to ignore - which makes kettling is a symptom, rather than a cause, of the ideological gulf between the police and direct action / civil disobedience activists over what constitutes 'legitimate' protest.

This Sunday - Standing Up To Surveillance

2011-04-12T14:20:00.003+01:00

This Sunday at the Rich Mix in Bethnal Green is a conference that is looking at the way that ‘intelligence’ is gathered by police on political protesters and minority communities - and one of the speakers is yours truly...

A number of the most controversial examples of police surveillance, such as the use of undercover officers to infiltrate pacifist and environmental campaigns or installing ’covert’ cameras to watch the movements of Birmingham’s Muslim population, have been widely reported in the national press. But many others have become routine and systematic. They include photographing people attending demonstrations; demanding names and addresses; ’mapping’ communities, gathering information from universities, mosques and community organisations; and building up a database of protesters and their activities. Intelligence gathering is big business with huge sums to be made by the companies that produce and supply the latest surveillance equipment or analytical software.

What is driving this rapid and seemingly unstoppable descent into a surveillance state? Why are so many of us potential targets for state scrutiny? Is an increasing demand for intelligence driven by a fear of ‘extremism’? Or by the availability of technology and the millions that can be made from it? And what can be done to stop it?

Sunday 17th April
10.30am – 5pm
Rich Mix
35 – 47 Bethnal Green Road
London, E1 6LA

The conference hosted by the Network for Police Monitoring.
More info on the event here

UK Uncut Protesters Arrested In Intelligence 'Fishing Trip'?

2011-04-08T13:58:00.010+01:00

Now hang on just ONE minute:

Did Metropolitan Police Assistant Commissioner Lynne Owens just come perilously close to admitting that the mass arrest of activists from UK Uncut on 26 March was an intelligence-gathering fishing trip against "sort of anarchist groups" - an opportunity to confiscate and poke around in individuals' mobile phones in the hope that it might "improve the intelligence picture"?

The following is taken from evidence given by Owens on 29 March to the Home Affairs Select Committee investigation on the policing of the TUC's massive anti-cuts demonstration:

Mark Reckless (Tory MP for Rochester and Strood): "... do you feel there is an issue with the Met’s ability to get intelligence on some of these so-called sort of anarchist groups, and can you see ways in which you may be able to improve that sort of pre-warning intelligence network?"

Lynne Owens: "I think we are seeing a changing face of protest. We have not had protests in London for over five years of the scale that we have seen since the end of last year. We did do, contrary to all the commentary, a fairly significant amount of pre-event work on known groups of people, and indeed a number of arrests were made as part of that process. Do we now need to build on that intelligence picture? Yes, we do. It is why the fact that we arrested as many people as we did is so important to us because that obviously gives us some really important intelligence opportunities. I think it is interesting, and perhaps somewhat ironic, that we find ourselves in this position where we are being asked questions about intelligence pictures where less than a month ago we were being asked about whether it was proportionate to deploy undercover officers in public protests and public order situations. So I think there is something for the police service about getting the balance right. We do need to improve the intelligence picture, but our ability to arrest over 200 people at the weekend gives us a very good starting point in terms of building that picture.

[emphasis added]