The Clapton Ultras v Strike!

This article appears in the current edition of Strike!

A football club where minorities not only feel welcome, but get involved, can never really be a bad thing, no matter how much gushing, middle-class wankery gets written about them. Wankery that they aren't responsible for, remember...

Comment on 'When Saturday Comes' message board

Before 2012 there were no Clapton Ultras: over the space of only three seasons, a group of left-wing anti-fascist football fans have, with their passion, noisy songs and a fondness for smoke flares in support of Clapton FC, a club in Forest Gate in east London, shaken up the staid, parochial county league that the team plays in.

In doing so, Clapton fans have also attracted increasing outside interest and often unwelcome attention. One senior left-wing union official tried unsuccessfully to use the terrace where the Ultras gather as a stage for some shameless personal grandstanding, whilst far-right groups have repeatedly complained to an indifferent London FA about the Ultras 'political' flags (something we are entirely guilty of). Last year, as numbers grew to over 200 and more and more people headed east to find out what all the fuss was about, the Ultras also started to face attempts to pin one label or another onto us. We have been described both as saviours of the left and condemned as an insufficiently hard-case anti-fascist 'firm'. Memorably, someone even called us 'metrosexual Palestine hipsters', an insult so brilliantly hilarious that it is destined soon to feature on a supporters' banner.

Why it's always seen as necessary to fit everything new into a preconceived and largely pointless category is a mystery to me. Still, none of it has come close to explaining the phenomenal rise of the Clapton Ultras or the upsurge of support – over 500 supporters at the end of last season - for a lowly non-league club long overshadowed by its rich and popular neighbour, West Ham United, who are based less than a mile away.

In reality, what is happening in Forest Gate is a reflection of a growing trend amongst an increasing number of football fans who are tired of paying £50 or more for a match ticket, or simply cannot afford to, just to watch a game with no atmosphere or spectacle. At Clapton FC, most fans also support a League side, but have adopted a local team, one with a long and rich history but forever at the fringes of football, because it means watching with friends for only £6, a beer in hand, without oppressive policing or officious stewards insisting everyone remains seated. For many, this is what has attracted them to switch to non-league football, or to return to the game after often years away from regular attendance at overpriced Premiership and League fixtures.

There is something else, however, that makes the Clapton Ultras noticeably different from other groups of football supporters: their absolute opposition to the often boorishly sexist, homophobic and right-wing sentiment and behaviour tolerated at many larger clubs. This has been coupled with the adoption of the best elements of a continental anti-fascist Ultras' culture that is strengthened by the presence of many Italian, Spanish and Polish fans.

What I love so much about attending a home game at the Old Spotted Dog Ground and standing with other Clapton Ultras is not just having a few cans of Tyskie and singing daft chants throughout, but the recognition that the people around me are socialists and anarchists, that at any moment the Italian partisans song 'Bella Ciao' may erupt from the Scaffold (the ramshackle stand made of scaffolding poles and corrugated iron where the Ultras congregate), or a banner might appear in support of anti-fascists in Greece or Germany. It's the fact that we produce all our own merchandise, just like Ultras in clubs across Europe, and that our stickers pop up randomly all over the country. It's knowing that someone might shout out a reminder that Maggie Thatcher is definitely still dead, but no-one is about to start calling the referee a 'poof' or claiming that opposing fans are 'gypos' or 'chavs'. Try that kind of shit at a Clapton game and you'll quickly find out what a crowd turning on you feels like!

This attitude extends to the club's place in its local neighbourhood, one of the poorest in London and the most ethnically diverse in the country. Acts of solidarity organised by the Clapton Ultras include distributing rights cards on the powers of immigration enforcement teams, organising food donations for a local project supporting asylum seekers with no access to public funds, raising cash for local group supporting victims of domestic violence and turning up in numbers to support campaigns around homelessness and evictions. At the end of the last season, on a truly magical day involving rainbow-coloured smoke flares, we helped launch an appeal that eventually succeeded in raising funds to keep open Newham's only LGBT youth group, which faced closure because of council cuts.

For many of us, this kind of community organising is just as important as the football: the Ultras bring together, in significant numbers, a group of like-minded activists with years of campaigning experience who can make a real impact locally. This extended to encouraging more local people so Clapton FC better reflects the community where it is based: just recently, we held a stall at the local Forest Gate Festival simply to remind local people that the club still exists and is far more welcoming and family-friendly than many might imagine. It's a real necessary because, perhaps unsurprisingly, the majority of working class football fans remain white, straight and male. Constantly reaffirming our opposition to all forms of discrimination is slowly encouraging a greater level of diversity as the number of supporters increases, but not as fast as we would like.

Fundamentally, though, the Clapton Ultras remain just football fans, who happen to have created a safe, supportive space for others like themselves on the radical, largely unaligned left. It's somewhere to have a laugh, make new friends, temporarily forget what a massive cockwomble David Cameron is and still enjoy an outpouring of emotion at away game in a tiny village somewhere out in the wilds of Essex.

Disappointingly, we are not saviours of the left and definitely not a hard-case 'firm', no matter how much outside observers might want this to be true. As for 'metrosexual Palestine hipsters'? Well, as the fantastic film 'Pride' said, if someone calls you a name, you take that name and you own it. Look out for the banner in the coming season.

You can find the Clapton Ultras online at claptonultras.org, on Facebook at facebook.com/ClaptonUltras and on Twitter at @ClaptonUltras

The Clapton Ultras fanzine, Red Menace, is at redmenacefanzine.wordpress.com
The Clapton Ultras podcast, The Old Spotted Dogcast, is at theoldspotteddogcast.wordpress.com

Newham Mayor Guilty of Breaching Members Code of Conduct

Public accountability proceeds, it seems, at its own solemn pace. Newham council's constitution says a standards committee investigation into the conduct of an elected member should take no longer than three months. However, six months has passed since a complaint was made against Mayor Sir Robin Wales, and only now has the committee published its groundbreaking decision - that the Mayor "breached the members' Code of Conduct by failing to treat a member of the public with respect".

Some background: in July 2014, a video [above] emerged on YouTube showing the Mayor losing control of his temper at the presence of Focus E15 Mothers campaigners at an event in Central Park in East Ham. He was so angry that the footage shows a member of council staff physically restraining him. In the week that followed, a formal complaint was made about the Mayor's behaviour, alleging that Wales had breached the Members' Code of Conduct by failing to observe the statutory principle of “always treating people with respect, including the organisations and public engaged with and those worked alongside”.

I'd met the young activists from the Focus E15 campaign for the first time only the previous weekend, when volunteering as a legal observer for a march they had organised though the borough. Appalled by the Mayor's behaviour, I gave them some advice soon after the video began to circulate about how to make a official complaint. Eventually I decided to submit a complaint myself and so, ever since, I've had a ring-side seat as the formal 'complainant' to the glacial process that has followed.

The complaint was about the conduct shown in the video, which was essentially the only evidence. However, after a meeting of Newham's Standards Advisory Committee on 31 July recommended a formal inquiry, an independent investigator was appointed. In August she interviewed me and some of of the campaigners who appear in the footage. The committee did not meet again until early October and then decided set up a Hearing Sub-Committee to consider the investigator's findings and determine whether a breach of the code of conduct had taken place. It met on 21 October and asked the investigator to rewrite her report with new recommendations. A meeting planned for December was cancelled and the Hearing Sub-Committee did not make its final decision until 15 January – but was unable to announce it because the council's constitution insists it was first checked off by its appointed 'Independent Person' (a requirement under the Localism Act 2011).

The procedure for investigating a complaint is clearly convoluted, slow and in need of reform. I have no idea either how an investigation within three months is even imaginable if evidence is more complex than a short video. I must stress, however, that the independent chair of the Standards Advisory Committee seemed just as frustrated by it as everyone else and was always as helpful as circumstances allowed. What probably hasn't helped was Wales' refusal to cooperate with the formal investigation – to this day, he has not even bothered to deny the accusation against him.

It is, nevertheless, hard to understand why there was a delay in early October to excise references to “the Mayor’s failure to deny the allegation upon which he chose not to comment at all”, when this rather embarrassing detail appears in minutes released this month. This decision was in all likelihood the work of some of the Mayor's slavishly loyal lieutenants on the committee, but as the discussions were held in secret, it is impossible to know for certain.

Even before the committee's decision was made, the question of what sanction it might recommend was always, of course, largely irrelevant. It was never likely they would adopt my tongue-in-cheek suggestion of 'anger management classes' and anyway, apart from a letter to Wales with advice on his conduct, which the Hearing Sub-Committee has asked the council's Monitor Officer to write, there are always few options available when a complaint involves an elected Mayor. His unwillingness to engage with or even acknowledge the investigation suggests any advice will disappear straight into the waste basket.

Nevertheless, what is significant is the decision itself: one of London's most powerful and imperious Labour politicians has received his first slap on the wrist in recent memory. For years, Wales has cultivated the idea that he is completely unassailable and therefore someone whose displeasure people should fear. It has worked too, I've seen it for myself both internally and amongst those who have to deal with the council. Even recently, I've been told by sympathetic insiders of threats that are a variant on “you'll never work in this town again”.

The trouble is, the notion of Sir Robin Wales' impregnability has been successfully undermined: amongst the many impressive achievements of the wonderful Focus E15 Mothers, this is perhaps the most unlikely, but it's true. It may only represent a first step, but I hope it encourages others in future who believe they have been poorly treated by the Mayor or those surrounding him to feel that it is finally worthwhile making a complaint that someone will listen to.

Maybe, too, if the Mayor ever decides to bang the table, shout down local people, issue threats or browbeat members of staff, he'll start to wonder whether his words have been secretly recorded, as evidence for a Standards Advisory Committee that has actually displayed some backbone.

The Investigation Report remains a (local) state secret, but you can see the Decision Notice here

Whatever Happened to the 'Newham Revolution'?

At a local event last week, I found myself making small talk with one of Newham Labour's candidates for councillor positions at this May's elections. I've never been very good at small talk, especially with someone I know only vaguely, which is why the conversation started with the inevitable:“so how are things?” The candidate, who I shan't name, explained how busy everyone was canvassing their wards. As this is Newham, where 60 out of 60 councillors are Labour, I jokingly said, “surely you don't have to worry? I mean, you guaranteed to win, right?”

“Well as Sir Robin says,” came the reply. “We're really fighting the election after next. The cuts that are coming are that bad.” Incredible.

Labour candidates in this borough effectively become councillors-elect as soon as they are selected: the lack of any credible opposition makes victory a certainty. They also know that between their election and May 2018, they are expected to provide unquestioning support to cuts of £41million in 2015/16 and another £53million in 2016/17 – and evidently Mayor Sir Robin Wales isn't terribly confident his own party nationally will reverse the cuts if it wins the General Election next year.

So is Newham Labour really worried that the devastating impact of cuts could trigger a change in local politics? Casting an eye over Labour's current opponents, it would represent less a shift and more a major seismic event. What's really noticeable is just how barren and marginal municipal activism has become in the borough, after years of control by a single party dominated by a powerful Mayor.

At one time Newham had the Respect Party, which was relaunched at the end of December 2012 by its divisive, opportunist leader, the MP George Galloway. It has since vanished without trace: Galloway's pledge to field a Mayoral and councillor candidates in 2014 has failed to emerge. He was back in February 2013 in support of the woefully misnamed Newham People's Alliance (NPA), essentially an attempt to organise a distinct Muslim voting block. “This is the beginning of the Newham revolution,” blustered Galloway. The following month, the NPA announced its intention to trigger a referendum on Newham's mayoral system. That failed to emerge too. It hasn't updated its website since August 2013.

Meanwhile, the Trade Unionist and Socialist Coalition (essentially the Socialist Party) became the latest in a long line of far-left groups to parachute in, launch themselves on the electorate six weeks before the election and hope for the best. Around the country, the TUSC has barely attracted more than 5% of the vote (you can look here for their own analysis if you're so minded). Even though I personally quite like their Mayoral candidate Lois Austin, who I'm working with on a campaign concerned with police surveillance of activists, the stubborn perseverance involved in repeating the same failed tactic over and over again frankly amazes me.

As for the Greens, Newham is one of the few London boroughs that has no local party. Its Mayoral candidate Jane Lithgow, who seems like a nice person and encouragingly describes herself as a Green Socialist, stood in the General Elections of 2005 and 2010 in West Ham but saw her vote drop to just 1.4% - coming in eighth place behind both UKIP and the National Front (quite an achievement in multicultural Newham). This May, she will count herself lucky not to lose her deposit.

What does this tell us? Perhaps that the opposition to cuts in Newham, if it emerges at all, will not happen through the ballot box but through dozens of small acts of resistance. I hope so. But it also suggests that Sir Robin's rhetoric about “fighting the election after next” is really about scaring some discipline into future councillors for when the cuts start to bite hard, as well as encouraging some of the more complacent candidates to turn up for door-knocking now there's an election approaching.

And given the calibre of most of them, it will probably work too. No wonder local politics is so depleted and dysfunctional.

The Problem is Civil Obedience

This is terrific - Matt Damon, a lifelong friend of the American historian and activist Howard Zinn, who died in January 2010, reads excerpts from a speech Zinn gave in 1970 as part of a debate on civil disobedience.

And our topic is topsy-turvy: civil disobedience. As soon as you say the topic is civil disobedience, you are saying our problem is civil disobedience. That is not our problem.... Our problem is civil obedience. Our problem is the numbers of people all over the world who have obeyed the dictates of the leaders of their government and have gone to war, and millions have been killed because of this obedience.

Welcome To Zero-Hours-Tolerant Newham

In the wake of the CIPD report this week suggesting that up to one million workers in the UK are on zero hours contracts – where an employee is expected to be on-call and is paid only for hours worked – the discovery that Newham council uses them has been highlighted on Mike Law's blog but hasn't yet made it into the Newham Recorder. The paper should probably pay more attention. This is a story that has the potential to deeply embarrass not only Newham Labour's council leadership but the national Labour Party too.

The Freedom of Information (FoI) request that reveals the number of staff on zero-hour contracts is buried deep within the FoI Disclosure logs on the council's website. So that others don't have to search for it, enquiry number 15701 on page 48 of the 228-page log for May 2013 says the following:

Subject: Zero Hour Contracts

I would like to know

(a) How many workers employed by the council are employed through zero hours contracts.

- I’d like figures in the financial year ending 2012-13 and
- for the financial year ending 2009-10

(b) For both years, I’d like a breakdown of workers employed in this way:
i – Directly through the council
ii – By private companies operating on council contracts

c) What percentage the figure is for each year of total council employees

The council's response was as follows:

1. A total of 1060 workers were employed by Newham Council through zero hour contracts during 2012/2013. This represented 7.6% of all of our employees as of the 31st March 2013. These are sessional workers, or casual staff who work on an as-and-when basis. They work largely in schools and community centres delivering advice sessions, tuition and sports coaching.

These sessional workers are not subject to a ‘mutuality of obligation’. That means they do not have to work when asked, nor are we obliged to ask them to work. All other employees are required to work to contract and we are obliged to provide them with their contracted hours.

A total of 1044 workers were employed in the same way through zero hour contracts during 2009/2010. This represented 7.6% of all employees as of 31st March 2010.

2. All of the employees holding zero hour contracts were employed directly through the Council. It is not possible for us to determine whether or not any of the private companies operating on council contracts during the periods given employed any staff on zero hours contracts.

3. As of 31st March 2013, 7.6% of all employees were on zero hour contracts.
As of 31st March 2010, 7.6% of all employees were on zero hour contracts.

Zero-hour contracts are the classic example of McJobs – it's no shock that 90% of McDonalds staff are on them. Not everyone thinks they are a bad thing – the almost comically blue-blooded Etonian Tory MP Jacob Rees-Mogg, a man who married an heiress, took his nanny with him when out canvassing and will never, ever experience what Jarvis Cocker called a life “with no meaning or control”, thinks zero-hour contracts are great for business. However, people I know who have been on them describe this type of contract making their lives more precarious – slashing their previously regular wages when introduced (by as much as 50%) and often leading to dismissal when their period of employment might lead to some actual rights (usually close the two-year mark). Equally, Newham council may talk about ‘mutuality of obligation’ and that workers are not forced to work when asked, but the experience of people I've spoken to (who mainly work in home care) is that refusing to accept on-call hours when asked means an employer stops ringing: you card is marked as 'unreliable'. This places enormous pressure to accept any hours, no matter how inconvenient, which makes the idea of having anything like 'quality time' equally precarious.

What makes the discovery that a significant number of Newham council staff – around one in every thirteen workers – are on zero-hour contracts so politically damaging for Labour is not just the decision of its leader Ed Miliband to highlight how “for too many people in Britain, the workplace is nasty, brutish and unfair” and to specifically condemn “the exploitation of zero hours contracts to keep people insecure” and .”using agency workers to unfairly avoid giving people the pay and conditions offered to permanent staff”. It's that this keynote 'One Nation' speech was made at Newham Dockside, the home of the zero-hours-tolerant Newham council.

It's damaging too because a statement that I wholeheartedly agree with by Dave Prentis, General Secretary of local government union UNISON, said:“the vast majority of workers are only on these contracts because they have no choice. They may give flexibility to a few, but the balance of power favours the employers and makes it hard for workers to complain”. Yet one Unison National Executive Committee member, John Gray. cannot possibly support his General Secretary without facing accusations of hypocrisy, because he is a Labour councillor in zero-hours-tolerant Newham council.

And it's damaging for precisely the reasons Mike Law has highlighted – that not one of the prospective Labour candidates standing for zero-hours-tolerant Newham council has had a single word to say on this issue.

Opposition to zero-hours contracts is apparently Labour Party policy. So will the party's 100% majority of local councillors - and the candidates who face inevitable election in 2014 - make a start on their leader's concerns about "our responsibilities to each other" by taking a stand in their own borough?

Photos from 'They Owe Us' Protest at Canary Wharf

In response to the combined crises of cuts and climate chaos and the call for a week of action against the G8, a number of campaigners including UKUncut, Fuel Poverty Action and Disabled People Against the Cuts came together on Friday to protest in Canary Wharf - what they called "the penthouse suite of global capitalism".

Technically the protest was illegal -in 2011, its owners Canary Wharf Group obtained an indefinite injunction that prohibits "any persons unknown remaining on the Canary Wharf estate in connection to protest action" (all 14 million square feet is private land). The police presence on Friday was pretty heavy for a small protest of 150 people and as usual, Forward Intelligence Team photographers from the Metropolitan Police were busy gathering information for the police 'domestic extremist' database, but the event was entirely peaceful. Here are a few photos I took - the set is on Flickr here

The End of Thatcher

I've been saving these for today, because of the inevitable sycophancy that surrounded today's state-sponsored Conservative Party rally. These photos are from Saturday's "Thatcher's Dead" party in a rain-drenched Trafalgar Square.

UKUncut Protest Against The Bedroom Tax

Photos from yesterday's UKUncut protest against the bedroom tax, outside the "spare" home of Parliamentary Under Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, Lord Freud.

How Credible is Call for Referendum on Newham's Mayor?

It's been a while since I last blogged – the imminent prospect of redundancy has kept me busy these past weeks. There has, however, been loads of things that I've wanted to comment on and one of those is the announcement by George Galloway's latest project, the inappropriately named Newham People’s Alliance (NPA), that plans have been hatched to start a petition calling for a referendum on Newham's mayoral system. On 10 March, the NPA website briefly announced:

In an NPA meeting on Friday night in East Ham, over 100 local community and religious leaders voted unanimously to press ahead to trigger a referendum on the mayoral system. This comes after years of disengagement, faith-phobia, gagged representatives, and trophy projects at the expense of the ordinary people in one of the poorest and most disenfranchised communities in the country.

The NPA will be working closely with its legal team and the Department for Communities and Local Government to submit a petition in the coming months.

That was three weeks ago – and since then, not a word.

Don't get me wrong: if there is a realistic prospect of securing 10,000 local signatures for a petition to get rid not only of Newham Mayor Sir Robin Wales but also the system that enables him to operate with little accountability, then I'm in. I wrote a blog post on how it could be done as far back in December 2011, after all. However, as I warned in a follow-up in January last year, collecting enough signatures is only half the battle:

“...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. ”

In other words, trying to trigger a referendum is not a decision made without a great deal of thought. Get it wrong and the Localism Act prevents another challenge for ten years.

Having worked with Newham's voluntary and community sectors for over a decade, I know there are hundreds of people who will sign a petition for a referendum. I'm just far less convinced that the Newham People's Alliance, which its links to the Respect party and its close identification with the specific concerns of a section of Newham's Muslim communities, has either the capacity or is sufficiently broad-based to coordinate a campaign that is better organised than anything the borough has seen before.

Certainly, in the weeks since the NPA announced its intention to trigger a referendum, there has been little evidence of initial momentum: no attempts at coordination with potential allies, no call for open discussion about the potential obstacles faced, silence on the need to debate more sweeping reforms that might convince local people this isn't just a dull procedural change aimed at returning to the way things were in 2001. Instead, the announcement looks too much like a stunt, an opening shot in Respect's campaign for Yvonne Ridley's candidacy for MP in two years time. And if that's all it it is, then it will fail.

The election for the next Mayor of Newham is in May 2014, which leaves little time for the steps necessary to abolish the mayoral system itself. I really wish a genuinely broad 'Bring Back Democracy' campaign in Newham was possible - but I fear a half-hearted one even more.

Occupy The Night

On Saturday I went to the Bishopsgate Institute to listen to the documentary photographer Ed Thompson talk about photographing the Occupy London protest outside St Paul's Cathedral, an event that was part of the Photomonth East London International Photography Festival.

I love the idea of turning images into a multimedia presentation, something that Ed generously shared some suggestions about after his talk. I plan to put something together about Newham Monitoring Project's Community Legal Observer project during this summer's Olympics. Meanwhile, here is Ed's great presentation, with spoken word poetry by an occupier called J.J.

Update On Newham Campaign To Save Independent Advice

Back in April I wrote about a campaign set up by local advice agencies who were trying to stop the destruction of independent advice work in the borough and the introduction of a bizarre new system that plans to 'motivate' people not to bother the council with their difficult problems.

As part of that campaign, one Newham resident had brought a judicial review of Newham council's decision on 17th November 2011 to cease funding voluntary sector advice services in the borough and to replace it with an in-house system. On 1st June, this challenge was unsuccessful but Mr Justice Cranston held that it appeared the council had ruled out providing funding to voluntary sector organisations for advice services at the November meeting. As a result of this court case, Newham council has effectively withdrawn its decision and assured the court that it would now consider whether to involve the voluntary sector. The judge made it clear that before the council makes a final decision, it must consult properly.

The consultation was launched on 2nd August, will run until the 25th October 2012 and residents affected by the changes are encouraged to take part. The council's questionnaire is available online at www.newham.gov.uk/adviceconsultation

A paper version of the questionnaire is supposedly available at any local service centre or library. However, campaigners who recently attempted to collect copies from two local libraries discovered that they are not readily available to the public. One of the key arguments of the Save Independent Advice in Newham campaign is that a significant number of Newham residents do not have access to the internet or have the ability to easily navigate online council services. They are therefore urging local people to make a point of going into their local libraries or service centres and asking for paper copies of the consultation questionnaire. If you find there are problems providing one, let the campaign know by e-mailing: saveadvice@romasupportgroup.org.uk

A list of libraries is available here and the few remaining service centres here. Drop in and ask for a questionnaire!

Rebellious Weekend

This afternoon I headed over to Newham Bookshop's stall at Goldsmith Row Book Market, where Clive Bloom was signing copies of his interesting new book "Riot City: Protest and Rebellion in the Capital". I will review the book soon, but Bloom argues that the unprecedented level of unrest in London over the last 12 years has turned the capital into "a battleground for a host of new demands and new ideological standpoints, so much so that protesters and authority alike have had to invent new tactics to cope with the pressure of new demands". There was plenty of evidence of these new demands and new tactics of civil disobedience this weekend, with activists from Climate Siren closing Tower Bridge for around an hour yesterday afternoon, Unite Against Fascism successfully blocking the route of an EDL march in Walthamstow and disabled activists teaming up with UK Uncut to blockade the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) and Atos headquarters on Friday.

Eleven anti-EDL protesters were arrested, as were three Climate Siren activists and one campaigner outside the DWP. Disabled People Against Cuts has complained of a heavy-handed response from the police. Here's more on two of the weekend's direct action protests:

Why Is It So Hard To Find Out About The 'London Race and Criminal Justice Consortium'?

Every now and then Lee Jasper, once the Senior Policy Advisor on Equalities to former London Mayor Ken Livingstone, pops up in the press speaking on behalf of something called the “London Race and Criminal Justice Consortium” (LRCJC). Most recently it was in this article on the terrible experiences of one young man who had been repeatedly stopped and searched by the Metropolitan Police, but Mr Jasper has been quoted as its Chair in national press articles on racism in the Met, race in Britain in 2012 and the racist comments of David Starkey.

After Friday's piece by Guardian journalist Diane Taylor, I started to wonder: who are LRCJC's  members and what work does it actually carry out? I have been an activist campaigning in London on racism and policing issues for 20 years but know absolutely nothing about it. I asked some activist friends with similar interests and contacts but they were equally mystified. A Google search failed to find an LRCJC website and every reference to the 'Consortium' seems to relate directly to a Mr Jasper personally. I did learn, from a article by Operation Black Vote, that back in 2010, LRCJC could be contacted via www.leejasper.com and it planned to “represent organisations such as Metropolitan Black Police association, Society of Black Lawyers and RESPECT the black and ethnic minority prison staff association”. But there was nothing more illuminating than that. Moreover, there are a number of organisations carrying out excellent work on the misuse of stop & search powers – nationally, Stop Watch in particular and at a local level, groups like Newham Monitoring Project. I wondered why the Guardian hadn't asked one of them for comment, rather than the chair (albeit a well-known, high-profile one) of an apparently obscure organisation.

Stuck for answers, I put out a fairly sceptical request for information to followers on Twitter, asking if anyone knew more about LRCJC. Despite a further prompt, no-one replied and, with more interesting things to do over a busy Bank Holiday weekend, that would probably have been that.

However, Lee Jasper then got in contact via Twitter and his reaction to a simple question was so combative and evasive that I was suddenly really interested to know why he seemed so concerned about it.

Jasper demanded to know why I was publicly asking for information about LRCJC and why I hadn't contacted him personally. I guess the latter is a fair question but it had never occurred to me to approach someone I don't really have a great deal of respect for and who I probably haven't spoken to since the early 1990s, although activism circles are fairly small. For a decade I helped organise the United Families & Friends Campaign (UFFC) with custody death families but until 2008, Mr Jasper was still working at City Hall, busy praising the senior officer in charge of the botched operation that shot and killed  Jean Charles de Menezes at Stockwell station (taking a lead from his boss). So it's not as if we are remotely close (I don't even follow him on Twitter).

Just as importantly, what exactly is wrong with publicly asking about the membership of LRCJC when it is quoted regularly in the press?

Mr Jasper's responses to further questions about LRCJC were increasingly evasive and he adopted the classic tactic used by anyone trying to avoid giving an answer – attack the questioner:

As others joined the conversation, there was also an interesting allegation that I have a 'history of sectarianism with sections of black left', which came as news to me:

 In a request for more details, Mr Jasper added this:

I am really looking forward to Mr Jasper's blog post, if it ever appears (I guess this article may feature, as he mistakes 'sectarianism' for 'not accepting his word at face value'). But I'm still no clearer about who the 'London Race and Criminal Justice Consortium' actually represents or what work it has ever done.

In the circumstances, it therefore seems only fair to conclude that – at best – the LRCJC is nothing more than a name, a paper network of groups that Mr Jasper has links to (what the 'white left' might call a 'front organisation'), with no real purpose other than getting his name into the press.

If, however, the LRCJC is not a 'front' but a genuine consortium as Mr Jasper insists, then perhaps he can outline what actual work its members have together carried out on stop and search, or on last summer's riots, or in providing practical support to black students during recent student demonstrations? Other than speeches by its chair and sole spokesperson, what proposals have LRCJC members collectively developed on, say, the changes to the Educational Maintenance Allowance that have negatively affected so many minority students at FE colleagues? What campaigning has it organised against, for example, the abuse of anti-terror laws? What work, indeed, has the 'Consortium' ever undertaken on anything?

Lee Jasper once held a high-profile public position and as an individual, I'm sure he has an interesting point of view on some issues. That doesn't mean he speaks for anyone else but himself. So why don't journalists just ask him to comment in an individual capacity? Why insist on quoting him as a spokesperson of a grandiosely named 'Consortium' that sounds as if it might genuinely represent a wide range of opinion, when there is little evidence that it even exists?

Equally, why does the press insist on doing this, when there are plenty of other respected organisations with a proven track record of casework, research and campaigning on issues around racism or policing? Wouldn't it be more interesting to readers to speak to people in a position to offer something far more helpful than a few words of outrage? 

Bosnians Call For Renaming of ArcelorMittal Orbit As 'Omarska Memorial in Exile'

At a press conference this afternoon, which I was fortunate enough to attend, survivors of a Bosnian concentration camp called for the renaming of the ArcelorMittal Orbit – the Olympic Park's twisted Meccano structure, sometimes known as The Tower of Piffle – as a 'memorial in exile' to Bosniaks and Croats from Prijedor who suffered and died at the camp at the Omarska mining complex.

Omarska was one of many camps set up in northern Bosnia-Herzegovina by Bosnian Serb forces, in an area that the Dayton Agreement later declared as part of Republika Srpska (the details of this Agreement I know very well: it was the subject of my Masters thesis). During the spring and summer of 1992, approximately 3334 non-Serb inmates were held in appalling and brutal conditions, tortured and killed. In the region, 2916 men, 262 women and 11 children are still missing. In early August 1992, reporters Ed Vulliamy, Ian Williams and ITN's Penny Marshall (shaking hands, above, with Bosnian Muslim prisoner Fikret Alic at the Trnopolje concentration camp) gained access to Omarska and their coverage helped to force the United Nations to investigate war crimes committed in the conflict. Following international condemnation, the camp was closed less than a month later.

In 2004, the complex was taken over by the India steel conglomerate ArcelorMittal and the resumption of mining operations halted exhumations of mass graves by forensic investigators, who had unearthed hundreds of remains of war crimes victims from mass grave sites in the area. On 1 December 2005, the company announced at a press conference in Banja Luka that it would build and finance a Memorial Centre at the site. However, in the seven years that have followed, ArcelorMittal has failed to deliver that promise. In February 2006 it said that it is ‘temporarily suspending’ the Omarska memorial project and until May 2011, war crimes victims were denied access to the site – restrictions that returned in 2012. In a press release in May this year, the company appeared to relent on access but added that “the question of a memorial needs to be decided in consensus with all parties” and that it is “not taking sides in this debate”. Such consensus in the face of genocide seems impossible when the current Mayor of Prijedor, Marko Pavic, says any memorial in Omarska would undermine relations between different ethnic groups and continues to deny that the camp was anything other than an "investigation centre."

A year ago ArcelorMittal proudly announced that the 2200 tonnes of steel used in the construction of the Orbit would contain “symbolic quantities from every continent in the world where the Company has operations, reflecting the spirit of the Olympic Games”. Strangely, its operation in Bosnia-Herzegovina was completely missing from its press release. However, in April this year the Director of ArcelorMittal Prijedor, Mladen Jelača, confirmed to Professor Eyal Weizman of Goldsmiths, University of London and artist Milica Tomic of the Monument Group, Belgrade, that iron ore mined at Omarska had been used in the Obrit's fabrication.

For this reason, the war crimes survivors who spoke movingly at today's press conference – Satko Mujagic, Rezak Hukanovic and Kemal Pervanic – argue that in the absence of their promised memorial, London’s ArcelorMittal Orbit is tragically intertwined with the history of war crimes in Bosnia, as the bones of more victims are mixed in with the iron ore. It must therefore be reclaimed: no longer called the Orbit but the 'Omarska Memorial in Exile'.

Susan Schuppli of Goldsmiths Centre for Research Architecture said at today's event:

As the largest steel producer in the world, ArcelorMittal can surely use their considerable influence to overturn the local politics of denial and actively participate in healing the fractured communities out of which their very fortunes are generated. Yet they insist on not taking sides. Not taking sides in an area where persecution and injustice continue – is not neutrality but taking a political position by default.

By doing to, ArcelorMittal is colluding in the covering up of war crimes. As an Indian multi-national (albeit one registered in Luxembourg) and one of the emerging global capitalist players, the company has attracted less criticism than many of its Western counterparts, despite accusations that it created a "state within a state" in Liberia and condemnation of its environmental record. However, those who spoke today described the public art it has sponsored in the Olympic Park this summer as “a monument of shame, not a monument to the Olympic spirit”. They continue to call on ArcelorMittal to preserve structures like the infamous 'White House' (below), where detainees received particularly savage treatment at the mining complex, and to resume its memorial project at Omarska. Until then, the Orbit will remain a 'memorial in exile', the only public commemoration to the people from Prijedor who died in the worst genocide in Europe since 1945.

The infamous 'White House' at Omarska

For more information on today's campaign launch, see A Memorial in Exile

Don't Follow The Crowd This Jubilee Weekend

“The strongest bulwark of authority is uniformity; the least divergence from it is the greatest crime.” 
Emma Goldman

I'm off tomorrow morning to Switzerland to stay with friends for the duration of the Diamond Jubilee nonsense, escaping from the relentless pressure to pay homage to a monarch who has basically done little but spend the last 60 years waving back at the crowds. The number of consumer products that companies are slapping a Union flag onto is getting ridiculous but it's all part of a carefully manufactured nationalist distraction exercise designed to make us spend more money and forget the country is in deep trouble, thanks to the bankers and their pliable political allies.

Whilst I'm away, I can only hope that some of my many troublemaking friends find a way to refuse to follow the flag-waving, bunting-crazed crowd (and manage to avoid pre-emptive arrest like the Starbucks Zombies experienced before the royal wedding last year - I hope the current court case against the Metropolitan police is a success). With this in mind, I offer as inspiration this famous photograph of August Landmesser, a German shipyard worker who dissented when everyone else made the Nazi salute. Now that's what I call stubbornness.

Blogging will resume next week. Have a great republican weekend.

How the FBI Tried to Destroy Progressive Movements

Screening of COINTELPRO 101, hosted by Newham Monitoring Project and Stratford Picturehouse - Thursday 21 June 2012, 8pm

On 8 March 1971, activists from a group called 'Citizens' Commission to Investigate the FBI' broke into an FBI field office in Pennsylvania and stole over 1000 classified documents, which they sent anonymously to a number of American newspapers. Most refused to publish what these documents revealed: the existence of COINTELPRO (an acronym for Counter Intelligence Program), a series of covert and often illegal projects conducted by the FBI, who had spied on, infiltrated, discredited and disrupted a huge range of US political organisations included anti-Vietnam war protesters, Native American groups and especially the Black Panther Party.

But by 1976, what had been initially ignored by the mainstream media had been investigated by the Senate Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities (the 'Church Commission'), which concluded:

Many of the techniques used would be intolerable in a democratic society even if all of the targets had been involved in violent activity, but COINTELPRO went far beyond that...the Bureau conducted a sophisticated vigilante operation aimed squarely at preventing the exercise of First Amendment rights of speech and association, on the theory that preventing the growth of dangerous groups and the propagation of dangerous ideas would protect the national security and deter violence.

The exposure of COINTELPRO revealed, in the words of Noam Chomsky, "a program of subversion carried out not by a couple of petty crooks but by the national political police, the FBI, under four administrations... aimed at the entire new left, at the women's movement, at the whole black movement, it was extremely broad. Its actions went as far as political assassination." US government counter-intelligence agencies had sought to deliberately destroy these movements for self-determination and liberation for Black, Asian, and Indigenous struggles, as well as attack the allies of these movements and other progressive organisations. 

Although the programme was 'officially' terminated in 1971, widespread surveillance and 'intolerable techniques' have continued, both in the US and in Britain and especially since the start of the ‘War on Terror’. So too have tactics designed to disrupt the right to protest, such as the use of agents provocateurs, entrapment, the misuse of stop and search powers and the creation of secret databases on known activists.

On Thursday 21 June, Newham Monitoring Project is hosting the screening of a documentary at Stratford Picturehouse, which examines the history of COINTELPRO and its legacy. Claud Marks, the director of 'COINTELPRO 101,' is over from San Francisco and will join a panel to discuss the experiences of the 60s and 70s and what lessons we can learn for the present - particularly the intensive surveillance of campaigners and activists as part of the massive security crackdown planned for east London during this summer’s Olympics.

Tickets are available directly from Stratford Picturehouse, Salway Road, E15 1BX - box office number: 0871 902 5740

Who Gets To See The Torch? Who Gets To See The Games?

This is a guest post by Mark Perryman, sports writer and co-founder of the excellent Philosophy Football

As the Olympic Torch relay starts its route around Britain, author of a forthcoming book on the Olympics Mark Perryman questions the claim of a Games for all

Beginning its long route around Britain, the Torch Relay is one of the few examples of decentralisation and free-to-watch events that could have transformed the 2012 Olympics into a Games for all.

There is little doubt that the sight of the Olympic torch as it passes through a village, town or city up and down the byways, with photo-ops at famous landmarks will ignite popular interest and huge media coverage.

But the scale of that enthusiasm reveals the lack of ambition behind the 2012 model for the Olympics. In my new book Why the Olympics Aren’t Good For Us, And How They Can Be, I propose Five New Rings for the Olympic symbol. The first, and most important, of these is decentralisation. As a mega-event football’s World Cup has its problems too with new stadia sometimes built with no obvious future likelihood to be full again once the tournament is over. But the singular advantage for the hosts of a World Cup over the Olympics is it is spread all over the country, and sometimes more than one. In this way the global spectacular becomes not only a national event but a local event too. The Olympics is an entirely different model, apart from the yachting and the football tournament every single event is London-based, most of Britain will have no contact with the Games except a fleeting glimpse of the Torch relay as it passes through.

Decentralisation could have changed all this, and saved enormous amounts on new builds too. Glasgow and Edinburgh, Cardiff, Manchester, the North-East, Yorkshire and the Midlands all posses world-class stadia and arenas with huge capacities and multi-use possibilities. North Wales, the Lake District and parts of Scotland have the natural landscape perfect for events including the canoe slalom and mountain biking. Badminton is one of the finest three-day event venues in the world, its not in London so its not being used for 2012.

Avoiding those costly new builds by using existing facilities would not only magnify the Olympics’ local appeal but vastly increase capacities too. With imaginative reconfiguring Cardiff’s Millennium Stadium could have hosted the show-jumping, Manchester’s Old Trafford and Eastlands stadiums plus the MEN Arena the boxing, between Glasgow and Edinburgh share the Hockey tournament , the Midlands Stadiums host the Beach volleyball, the North-East already hosts the Great North Run, why not stage the Olympic Marathon there, give Yorkshire the Football tournament and so on.

Decentralisation enables this spread of venues with far bigger capacity than many hosting the events in London. And with Scotland, Wales, regions and cities hosting entire parts of the Olympic programme an effective campaign combining civic pride and participation in the adopted sport could have been mounted.

Decentralisation could also afford an extension of the Olympic programme to include events that are both nation-wide and free to watch. Why not an Olympic Tour of Britain multi-stage cycling race, and a Round Britain sailing race. The potential for crowds lining the streets and the quay-sides to watch , for free, as the Olympics comes to their town or port would have been huge.

The book that I have written is neither anti-Olympics nor it it against sport, I am a fan of both. But I am opposed to what the Olympics have become, the false promises made on their behalf and the chronic lack of ambition in the way they have been organised. My argument is that a different Olympics isn’t only possible, but better. If our only experience of the Games in this much hyped once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to host them is watching them on the TV, well they might as well be anywhere else but here, and a lot less costly too.

Mark Perryman’s Why the Olympics Aren’t Good For Us, And How They Can Be is available at a pre-publication 15% discount from www.orbooks.com

Mark Perryman is the author of Ingerland: Travels with a Football Nation and the editor of Breaking up Britain : Four Nations after a Union.

Mark has written for a range of publications, including the Guardian and The Times, and is a regular commentator on the politics of sport for BBC Radio 5, BBC TV News and Sky Sports News. He is a Research Fellow in Sport and Leisure Culture at the University of Brighton.

Doncaster Shows Rejecting a Mayor is Easier than Abolishing One

It may have been the endorsement of Lord Heseltine and Lord Adonis, or the prospect of Labour's appalling "eager diva" Liam Byrne standing as candidate, that swung the vote, but Birmingham was one of a number of cities that voted in local referenda to reject the idea of directly elected mayors. Nottingham, Manchester, Coventry, Bradford, Wakefield, Sheffield, Newcastle-upon-Tyne and Leeds all made the same decision as the people of Birmingham, with only Bristol voting in favour (with a turnout of only 24%). No wonder Liverpool City Council, unlike other cities, took the shameful decision to do away with consulting local people and plough ahead anyway.

Hopefully, the results from Thursday, which mirror the 25 out of 38 earlier referenda that had already voted against the concentration of power into one person's hands, will fatally undermine the Tories' idea of a 'Boris in every city'. However, there was one result - in Doncaster - that provides an important reminder to those of us, like many residents of Newham, who already have a directly-elected Mayor and would gladly be rid of him.

Doncaster seemed ripe for change: it was officially classified as a 'dyfunctional authority' by the Audit Commission, which criticised the English Democrat mayor Peter Davies and senior councillors for political in-fighting and placing their political objectives above the needs of local people. In 2010, the then Labour government intervened to take control of the town,  appointing three commissioners to oversee a recovery plan. You would think that in those circumstances, the referendum on abolishing Doncaster's mayoral system would be worth a flutter on a 'no' vote. Instead, there was a decisive 62% of those who voted choosing to keep the current system.

This decision may reflect a certain bloody-mindedness by Doncaster's electorate about the imposition of controls by central government but what I think this also proves, as I have argued before, is that managing to secure a new referendum in Newham to rid ourselves of Sir Robin Wales' fiefdom is not nearly enough. A successful 'no' campaign in any subsequent referendum will have to argue for something far more radical than a return to the way things were back in 2001 or it will fail to inspire people to get out and vote.

In a posting in January, I made five initial proposals for what that radical agenda might look like. Please feel free to add your own suggestions in comments to this post.

It's Election Abstention / Climate Activism Day in London

I won't be voting in the London Mayoral election today, but I wish the people of Doncaster the best of luck in (hopefully) getting rid of their directly-elected Mayor. If the same choice is ever on offer in Newham (and rumours of a campaign to petition for a new referendum are still floating around), then I won't just be casting a vote, I'll be working hard to get rid of the staggering power wielded locally by Sir Robin Wales.

With all due respect to the other candidates for London's Mayor, today is really a close race between Boris and Ken for control of the capital's £14 billion budget - and while I'll never vote for a Tory, it still amazes me that sections of the left are prepared to put their faith in a Tammany Hall politician like Livingstone (the reasons why I can't bring myself to vote for him haven't changed since 2008). I already know, however, that if Ken loses, Labour and his supporters on the left will blame abstentions like mine for 'letting Boris back', rather than the rather obvious failings of their candidate.

However, if you fancy something genuinely political instead today, why not join the hundreds of protesters from across the country who will target the UK Energy Summit in the City of London. The conference brings together the Big Six energy companies who have recently come under intense criticism for drawing in record profits whilst one quarter of UK households have been pushed into fuel poverty. The fun starts at 11am - see here for more details.

Newham's 'Social Cleansing' An Inevitable Consequence of Olympic Gentrification

The coverage today about Newham council's shocking decision to write to more than 1179 housing associations to try to move families claiming housing benefit to other parts of the country has been presented as a battle over the government's housing benefits cap. Housing Minister Grant Shapps has accused the council of "playing politics" in the run-up to the local elections and insisted there no justification for forcing families out of London.

But there is more to this story than how best to tackle long waiting lists and whether the council can afford to place families in private accommodation. It may well be true, as the council claims, that the government's new weekly limit on housing benefit (between £250 for a one-bedroom flat and £400 for a four-bedroom property) is already starting to push people out of expensive parts of London into Newham. However, the letter it sent to the Stoke-based Brighter Futures Housing Association makes clear that one of the main reasons why the local private rental sector in the borough is beginning to "overheat" is the "onset of the Olympic Games and the buoyant young professionals market".

As Dr Mary Smith of the University of East London's London East Research Institute explained in A report on the impacts of the Olympic Games and Paralympics on host cities [PDF] in 2008:

“Olympic host cities usually see rises in house prices due to an expectation of inward investment, a belief in regenerative abilities of the Olympics to change the neighbourhoods around it, value and kudos accruing to the Olympic area as a site of some symbolic worth, and a process of gentrification in areas surrounding the Olympics”.

Dr Smith adds that “as a result, each modern Olympics has displaced people – whether from their homes or accommodation”. The result in Sydney in 2000 was that in ‘greatly accelerated gentrification corridor’ in the district leading from the centre of the city, house prices rose exponentially and there was “a move into the area by middle income professionals and an eventual move out by lower income earners or those on government benefits who were hit worst by the rises in rent, or at least could not guard against them”. What we are seeing in Newham is the same effect – an inevitable consequence, it seems, of becoming an Olympic host city.

However, there is another reason why Newham, unlike other Labour councils, has taken the drastic decision to transport people on benefits out of the borough. Gentrification, regeneration and the influx of a new middle-class has long been central to the council's vision of the borough's future and as the Newham Recorder pointed out today, Mayor Sir Robin Wales “has spoken previously about the post-Games regeneration of the likes of Stratford and Canning Town resulting in more people being attracted to living in the borough”. Having 'the UK's largest regeneration project' in Newham may 'overheat' the market but if it is a choice between the 'buoyant young professionals' and the homeless, a Mayor who has persistently linked housing entitlement to worklessness (it's a common thread through the council's “Sustainable Community Strategy”) will always blame the 'undeserving poor' and their failure to find a job.

Displacement is always, as Mary Smith observes, “a matter of planning and priority”. Choosing to ignore the interests of the poorest and most vulnerable is why the the council is prepared to ship the 'problem' elsewhere, no matter how traumatic this may be for the people who are forced to move and who may have depended on their neighbours and their local communities. It is also why, regardless of the housing benefits cap, the accusation of 'social cleansing' by the council is entirely legitimate.