The Winter of Direct Action?

I recently had a discussion with my mum about peaceful protesting. She said that in her view violence was never justified. Expressing your political ideologies through violence puts you in the same bracket as suicide bombers and other extremists. She said that peaceful protest was the only civilised way to exercise your democratic rights, and to make sure that public opinion is with you. If public opinion is with you, then leaders will have to listen to you.

I agreed, and stated that in no way did I condone violence towards individuals - from either protestors or the police. I hate the met with a passion, but would not assault an officer, and would not condone anyone I knew doing so (except in very extreme circumstances - never say never, eh?)

However, I said - sometimes peaceful protest is not enough. I used the student protests as an example (as she had not yet read my blog - thankfully she is not one of those mums who comments on my facebook statuses). The point I made was this - sometimes in order to negotiate with someone, you must force them to sit at the negotiation table. I reiterated my point from the previous post about a march being too easy to brush aside. Without Millbank, I could literally imagine Cameron getting back from China to see that all was as it was, and saying to himself that "the cuts were hard to swallow, but necessary and right. These left-wing loons will protest about anything anyway, won't they?", as he continues going about the business of destroying life in Britain for the majority of people. The reports of him anxiously watching the events at Millbank unfold on TV in his hotel room encourage me that we have at least forced his attention.

When you are faced with a government who are as close to unelected as you could reasonably get in 21st Century Britain (the majority needed for parliament only being made after an uneasy and - it has now proved - completely uneven coalition with a party whose election promises are disappearing faster than housing benefits), and who seem determined to unleash the deepest, fastest, and most ideologically-driven cuts in 90-odd years upon a public who not only have had almost no say in them, but are also not even being allowed to fully know the extent of them - that is when voicing your dissent through the means of peaceful protest is no longer enough.

This government, in its short tenure, has already proved that not only is it more than willing to renege on any and every pre-election promise under the shadowy banner of the coalition 'agreement', but it is also willing to push forward with the most extreme measures seen on these shores in almost a century of governance, and it is willing to do this with little or no consultation, and with almost immediate effect.

This government, in my opinion, is not a government with whom peaceful demonstration will work. Showing this government that we do not agree with them is futile. They already know they are deeply unpopular, and do not seem to mind. They are set upon their ideological task, pushed forward by the values which they hold, certain that they are correct. What is needed is to force them into engaging with the public - and once there, to set forth a compelling enough argument so that they have no choice but to negotiate.

As Des Freedman said last week, the violence here is not in the few smashed windows, but in the destruction of the cuts. Direct action - in the form of walk-outs, strikes, and occupations - if done properly, has the potential to force the ConDem's to engage with pubic opinion. To come to an agreement. To find a middle ground.

Aung San Suu Kyi, an international symbol of peaceful resistance, was freed on Saturday after spending 15 of the past 21 years under house arrest in Burma. Upon her release, she said, "There is a time to be silent and a time to talk. People must work in unison. Only then can we achieve our goal". This is our time to talk, and this is our time to force the government to listen. We do not have 15 years. Time is not on our side. If the current government gets its way, it will be too late by midway through next year. We must organise, resist, and occupy. We must force the ConDem's hand. If they won't sit at our table and negotiate, we must put the table in front of their door so that they cannot leave without sitting at it.

I have been in and around other succesful occupations - when done properly, they work. We should re-occupy Millbank. But we should also target the Lib Dem's, who made this government possible. If we can break the coalition, we can enact change. The British may not be used to large-scale protest and direct action, and the 80's may have suffocated much of the air from this political spirit, but this government has inadvertantly breathed new life into it. Now is its time to live again. Now is the time for direct action. Now is the time to effect change.

The Power of The Press

When actors exert power in abstract ways, that is when they begin to hold sway over their target's actions, and even the target's view of itself and its own expectations. The press does this with extraordinary success.

In “The Manufacturing of Consent”, Noam Chomsky writes that the liberal western press is completely controlled by capital, because editors and press barons bow down to the demands of private share holders. Media accuracy and plurality is stifled by those who are from the thin layer of unaccountable cream that lies on top of our unequal society. The press, with their strings pulled by these tycoons, then provides smoke screens for why the economy is slumping, crime is up and tube lines get bombed. The economy is in a bad place because too much money goes to the EU. Crime is up because of an influx of immigrants. The tube lines get bombed because of Islamic extremism. This anti-historical diagnosis to why things happen is extremely dangerous and divisive, and does not examine the specific phenomena in any detail.

The power that the press wields over the identities of the public is incredible. Not even the Catholic Church exerted this amount of control over such huge swathes of people, yet this new dogma is often hailed as a transparent benchmark of the western world. When, at the end of the Cold War, Gorbachev introduced Glasnost into the crumbling USSR, he was hailed as a champion of democracy and the free press. At last, it was said, Russians would receive what they justly deserved - freedom of the press and media plurality. As Margaret Thatcher said, Gorbachev was a man who “she could do business with”. Unfortunately, in 2005 the fearless journalist Anna Politskovkaya was not someone Putin could do business with. She received four bullets at point blank range into her head and chest for her polemics on Russian aggression in Chechnya.

Many of you reading this will say, "well everyone knows that the racist, bigoted news you read in todays press comes from discredited journalists like Melanie Philips and Murdoch-moulded media news channels such as Fox and Sky, Russia merely needs time to separate its media from the state apparatus". This is completely true, but it seems to John Pilger (see link at the bottom of the page) that even the BBC is turning to the tactics of the corporate press (an argument with which I concur greatly).

The respect that the BBC garners lies in its reputation. For many of those in the generation before mine - before the age of the Internet - the BBC was their current affairs bread and butter. However in recent years the BBC has seemed to have lost its credibility and seems more and more answerable to the government. After the Hutton enquiry (which cleared the Labour government of any wrong-doing in the suspicious death of biological weapons expert Richard Kelly and the subsequent purge of possible dissidents within the corporation), the BBC swung to the right. Mark Thompson took over from the no-bullshit Greg Dyke and started to neuter any cutting edge journalistic prowess the BBC had left. To take just two examples; Panorama, a documentary series that used to cut to the very core of the inefficiencies of our government and society, has lost its panache and is currently relegated to analysing tax bureaucracy (see latest showing), and the Daily Politics show is now a platform for slobbering partisan lackeys within the government and the BBC to illustrate their admiration for the red or yellow/blue corner. My grandmother has received more incisive questions on the contents of her homemade cider than any politician has received on this show.

But is it any wonder that the status quo is never truly challenged when the BBC's director general, Mark Thompson, is on over £800k/year, and other such self-proclaimed 'guardians of media plurality' such as Andrew Marr and Fiona Bruce are on similarly stratospheric salaries? It seems Britain is reaching a Berlusconi moment, where political critique is reserved to those who have nothing to gain from turning the establishment on its head.


Nick Rodrigo


John Pilger on the BBC: http://www.johnpilger.com/articles/the-bbc-is-on-murdoch-s-side


More information on the Hutton Enquiry: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hutton_Inquiry

10-11-10: The ConDemNation

It was after the last large-scale protest I attended, the G20 marches at the Bank of England last year, that I first had the wish to create this blog. I was appalled by the tactics used by the attending police officers, whose brutality led to the death of innocent bystander Ian Tomlinson. I myself was kettled for 9 hours, without access to food, water, or a toilet. More to come on that particular experience in future posts.

Two days ago I was fortunate enough to be one of the 50,000 or so protestors on the demonstration against the proposed cuts to the higher education budget. I arrived out of the tube at Westminster having missed the earlier meet-up due to a prior commitment, and immediately felt as though the atmosphere was completely different to that at the G20 march.


We were pleasantly surprised at the large turn-out, but the atmosphere for me was too jovial - a waste of such a successful student mobilisation. It was an event which was too easy to be brushed aside. Until we got to Millbank.


Now, most of the time, I am an advocate of peaceful protest. I believe that if possible, it is much better when confronted with injustice to be the 'bigger person', and to assert your rights in a dignified and educated manner. However, there has to be an impact from your actions. The non-violent resistance of advocates such as Ghandi, Vàclav Havel, and Martin Luther King Jr. worked because of their ability to succesfully mobilise and to draw positive attention to their causes. In each case, a subjugated people were emancipated through the recognition of their humanity and independence. In our media-saturated world, public opinion (as defined by the media portrayal of your cause) is extremely important, and this is why nonviolent and reasonable protest is a good way to show that "we are human too, and we deserve our rights the same as yours".


However, sometimes there is a need for direct action. Sometimes, sitting-in or peacefully demonstrating isn't going to cut it. With Cameron out of the country, and facing the deepest cuts and the hardest shafting we as a nation have ever faced, it is my opinion that our voice needs to be felt, and not just heard. We do not need a peaceful protest. This is not about emancipation or about winning public opinion. This is about showing the government that we, as the younger generation, are not willing to lie down and pay for the mistakes our elders have made, that we are not willing to face a lifetime of hardship so that they can maintain their comfortable lifestyles, that we are not willing to be lied to by a party who portray themselves as 'different' from New Labour or the Tories, and that we are willing to mobilise and to fight the impositions about to be placed upon us. For me, the difference in the type of the fight justifies a difference in the weapons used in that fight.


I am proud to see that the European spirit of direct action has not completely been washed from these shores by the English Channel. I am proud that my university, Goldsmiths, has stood up and defended the actions at Millbank (see links at bottom of page). And I am proud of the students and activists who took action on Wednesday 10th November.


I am not going to use the oft-cited line of defence that "it was only a minority" who sought direct action, and that the majority of the protest was peaceful. For me, that is a failure in the majority of the protest. If Mr. Porter and the rest of the NUS wish to distance themselves from the scenes at Millbank, then so be it. The careerists can have their careers. We will have our protest. We will have our say.


So, don't worry about the media condemnation. Do worry about the future, as outlined, in the ConDem Nation.


Sam Bailey




Statement from Des Freedman and John Wadsworth at Goldsmiths: http://hutnyk.wordpress.com/2010/11/10/todays-demo-gucu-view/


Evening Standard reaction to this: http://bit.ly/92nIoM


Guardian coverage of demo: http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2010/nov/10/student-protests-conservative-party-hq-occupation

Introduction

I will be using this space to document, protest against, and opine on what I have chosen to term the 'subtle fascism' which is increasingly pervading British society.

Since New Labour swept to power on a tide of optimism in 1997, life for the average individual in Britain has become less and less private, more catalogued and more recorded and documented than at any other era. The all-pervasive 'Big Brother' police state of George Orwell's 1984 has well and truly arrived, and the ConDem coalition look keen to continue this fine tradition.


I created this page a year ago, on Blogger's 10th birthday, and intended to try and use the democratising virtues of blogging to attempt to resist, in my own small way, the increasingly un-democratic society of which I am a member. Unfortunately time was not my friend last year, and so it is in November 2010 that I publish my first post here.


Jurgen Habermas, the German cultural theorist, is one major thinker to draw attention to the modern media's erosion of what he calls the 'public sphere'. Habermas describes how the first newspapers (arguably the first form the 'modern' media took) served two main purposes. One was to unite the nation as one homogenous being, through the standardisation of language and the creation of the idea of the nation as a 'community' (you should read Benedict Anderson's 'Imagined Communities' if this interests you). The second was to act as a forum for raw democracy - newspapers would be read aloud in coffee-houses, as large groups of men debated the issues raised, questioned government policy, and sought democratic change by challenging the actions of the state.


Contrast this to today's media outlets - both newspapers and television. As well as the obvious shift from factual or political content to a much more entertainment-focused media, there is also the question of whether newspapers and other media products really present us the news in order to stimulate democratic debate, or whether instead they seek to manipulate the emotions of the media consumer, and bend their will to fit the ideologies and financial motivations of the media institution. A quick flick through the Daily Mail or The Sun is enough evidence to support the latter - with the Mail forever pushing seemingly set ideologies, and The Sun twisting every story to fit the face of whichever power outfit is set to offer them assistance. It does not take me to tell you of Murdoch's perennial plays for power through the switching of The Sun's party allegiance.


There are many problems with Habermas' theory which immediately present themselves - as his image of wealthy, educated and at-leisure men negates the majority of the populace, who could not afford, or were not permitted to, participate in their coffee-house 'democracy'. However, the point he is making, about the media as a 'medium'; i.e as a reasonably impartial purveyor of information, as opposed to a mouthpiece of ideology, holds true. For me, all that has changed is that the men of the coffee-house are now the heads of the media themselves, a closed-off group of private-interest holders who force their version of events upon a public for whom supposedly 'democratic' decisions have already been made.


Submissions are always welcome, email me at shhbbailey@gmail.com if you want to submit anything.


Sam Bailey