Saturday, May 30th, 2009
We decided to set up a serious emcampment on Hampstead Heath today. Matt and I set out with a suitcase and rucksack full of stuff, plus a barbeque, and coolbox. We erected our new gazebo which Matt had sourced from Argos by the model boating pond, and gay boys and girls from across London converged upon it. We had rugs, drinks, food and barbecue cooking activity. The weather was great, not too hot, but nice and sunny. There’s something about having a gazebo that gives a nice focus to the gathering. You’ve got to carry the bugger there, but it’s well worth it.
We popped over to the Pond for a refreshing swim, and picked up a Juicy posse there who joined us over at the gazebo. Phil had brought a little sound system too, and we danced to Kylie as the sun set over the green hills of the Heath.
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Wednesday, May 20th, 2009
Went to see the new Star Trek with Tom P, Neil and Jude, and Dan last night. It was SO good. Two hours long and I was so sad when I realised it was drawing to an end. I was kind of hoping that they would get to fly through the black hole and have a whole further film’s worth of adventures in the future trying to save Romulus or something.
What’s so good about it? I think it’s great the way they’re using all the classic characters from the original Star Trek, whose catchphrases and mannerisms we know so well, but reimagining them with the energy of a brand new youthful cast. At first, you look at them all and think “they’re too young!” – so used as we are to the gradually aging crews of the Star Trek films to date – but then you settle back and really enjoy it.
The actors completely throw themselves into the roles with enthusiasm and not a shred of irony. The acid banter and intense love-hate relationship between Kirk, Spock and Bones is embraced and recreated, Chekhov and Sulu are brazenly ethnic and suitably fun, Scotty is fabulous and funny, and Uhura is beefed up into a cooler, sassier and more capable character, overcoming the sexist and racist limitations of the original 1960s series. I was grinning all the way through, and glad I was in a dark cinema so I wouldn’t feel embarassed about it.
There was loads of Leonard Nimoy too, but that’s one of the first rules of Star Trek. You can never get rid of Leonard Nimoy.
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Tuesday, May 19th, 2009
I’ve been on holiday with Matt in the Middle East over the last couple of weeks, which has been lovely, lots of time to talk and think. It’s been quite fun returning in the middle of this expenses scandal, I’ve even been tempted to buy the Telegraph for all their glorious daily revelations.
It’s a shame though that the media buzz around the G20 policing has been somewhat sidelined by this crisis in Parliamentary credibility. I’ve been thinking about what happened on May Day a lot. After many years of organising and attending protests about poverty and the environment, and feeling inspired by the dedication and energy among climate change activists at the moment, even as formal democracy seems to be dying on its feet, it’s interesting to reflect on where we’ve got to.
The furore around Ian Tomlinson’s death has brought lots of welcome media and wider public attention to bear on the way that the police handle protests. It was canny of Climate Camp to have so many sympathetic journalists embedded among us: there was time for them to overcome their natural scepticism of crusty hippies, engage with the importance of climate change issues, and for once they were all there, in the crowd and in the thick of it, appalled witnesses as the police suddenly started beating up peaceful protesters.
That violence wasn’t a new thing. Ever since I started going on protests ten years ago, these tactics and behaviour from the police have been routine practice. I’ve never known anything different. Watching video footage of strikes and protests in the 1980s, things didn’t look too much better then either.
JQP has shown carefully and thoroughly what the police did on 1st May. They prepared themselves for systematic lawbreaking by concealing their IDs, they lied to the public, to the media and to Ian Tomlinson’s family during and after the protest, they even deployed agents provocateurs among us to throw bottles at the police and deliberately provoke violence. As JQP says, their cynical planned agenda was “to punish dissent”.
When you think that through it is chilling. Our police forces are not there to manage protests safely, to enable people to be democratic citizens, they are there to control protests, and if possible prevent them from ever taking place. A long series of anti-social behaviour and anti-terrorist legislation have given them the tools to do it. I remember being enraged when I was at school when the Tories passed the Criminal Justice and Public Order Act in 1994, which made it illegal to gather together outside and listen to music characterised by ‘a sequence of repetitive beats’. How little did I know how much further Labour would go!
An excellent report by the Free Range Network looks at the role of new secretive police bodies in shaping the state response to legitimate protest.
Outside of the forum of democratic debate and accountability, and using a perceived fear of a terrorist threat, the State is slowly tightening the legal framework within the UK to criminalise many forms of activity and expression that were previously permitted as “normal” within a free society. Moving on from the original purpose of limiting anti-social behaviour, we now see the government and police forces trying to redefine the term “extremism” to reflect many forms of non-violent civil action as both dangerous and threatening to society. We can view this trend in the “politicisation” of the policing of protest against the background of the more general crisis in the representative political system within Western states. As mainstream politics has coalesced around the “liberal economic consensus”, under which large parts of the debate over economic and social policy are, through omission, obfuscation or silence, off-limits to public involvement or debate, any other dissenting opinion within politics, through the media and in wider society, has been marginalised.
George Monbiot writes here in The Guardian about the new challenge of “eco-terrorism” that the police are now grappling with:
So what do the police mean by eco-terrorism? It appears to refer to any environmental action more radical than writing letters to your MP.
George gives a pretty good explanation why this is happening:
There is no place for dissenting views in mainstream politics. I was told recently by a Labour backbencher – a respected MP untainted by the expenses scandal – that “if the door was open just an inch to new ideas, I would stay on. But it has been slammed shut, so I’m resigning at the next election.” Our grossly unfair electoral system, which responds to the concerns of just a few thousand floating voters and shuts out the minor parties; the vicious crackdown on dissent within parliament by whips and spin doctors; the neoliberalism forced upon governments by corporate power and the Washington consensus; the terror of the tabloid press – all combine to create a political culture which cannot respond to altered realities without collapsing. What cannot be accommodated must be suppressed.
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