The protest you are not allowed to see

Yesterday I was one of the 50,000 people who marched through the centre of London, from the new BBC Broadcasting House, down Oxford Street, through Trafalgar and Piccadilly, to a rally in Parliament Square. We listened to short speeches from Owen Jones, Caroline Lucas, Mark Steele, Francesca Martinez, Len McCluskey, Diane Abbott, Jeremy Corbyn, Matt Wrack and Russell Brand.

But you probably don’t know anything about this, as the protest was not reported on the BBC, ITV or Sky. It was only on Channel 4 News and reported by Russia Today. The Guardian website reported it, but in common with every other major newspaper, The Observer did not run the story. 

The BBC obviously had forewarning that the protest was taking place. Note the extra heavies, and the fact that the plaza in front of the BBC was closed off. Yet no reporters, no camera crews, nothing.

The building on the left in this photo is the BBC. They would have heard the speeches, seen the banners and the people - all they had to do was stick a camera out of a window.

I took a camera because I wanted to blog about the protest, what was said by the speakers, spread the message. I didn’t know that once again, I’d be writing about BBC bias and control of the mainstream media by the government. 

The protest was one of the biggest I've been on, and was supported by a wide selection of trade unions, lobby and pressure groups and thousands of ordinary people who belong to none of the above, but just turned up to protest, with the idea of making their voices heard. 

Or so they thought.

The problem with our media-saturated society is that (in a twist to Baudrillard) if something isn't reported, it didn't happen. It isn't so much the media report supplanting the reality, it creates the reality. By running a media blackout, the effect of the protest is practically and easily negated. 

To an extent, the fact that the protest was not reported by the papers can be understood as they all have a particular ideological slant and political affiliation. But the BBC is a public service broadcaster, not supposed to have any bias whatsoever. Clearly in this case, the editorial decision was made in advance not to cover the protest at all. If not bias, what legitimate reason could there be for this?

The March

It was a very hot and sunny day yesterday, and the marchers were in good spirits; a good atmosphere right from the start. Whilst marchers continued to assemble, some of the speakers addressed the crowd - however I couldn't tell you who was there and what they said, as a police helicopter came in and hovered over the stage for some reason.

We set off and kept a good pace. I couldn't find the Green Party or UCU so ended up marching with comrades from the NUT. The hundreds of police lining the route had done a good job at stopping the traffic and closing all the roads, so there were no choke points. 

All of Parliament Square had been stopped to traffic, which was good given the number of people who eventually squeezed into it.

The speakers started off with Owen Jones, who gave a real old-fashioned tub-thumper of a speech. A line that stuck out in my mind, and I tweeted at the time, was that as a growing part of the population were disenfranchised by the major parties and were suffering under the austerity measures, they were losing hope. And this loss of hope had lead to the rise of UKIP. 

All the speakers underlined the themes of the protest, why all these groups had come together in common cause:

• The current economic problems were not caused by the poor, but by the bankers, the super-rich, and yet it was the poor that were having to pay for it. We used to be able to afford all this stuff, libraries, education, the NHS and the welfare state, but now we can't because all the money has gone, and we are being told that it is the poor that have taken it.
• Divide and rule - Tories divide the working class against itself by victimising the unemployed and disabled - blaming the immigrants who come here to work with stories about 'benefit tourists' - when it is the immigrants who supply a large proportion of the infrastructure.
• Wages are coming down - not due to immigration, but the increase in zero-hours contracts and the creation of an 'army of the self-unemployed' - where most of the people in poverty and in receipt of benefits are actually working. The benefit system is being used to subsidise corporations who can then pay poverty-level wages - and also who coincidentally pay little or no tax in the UK.
  
  
• The Tories are running a propaganda war against the welfare state and NHS in order to cut resistance to privatisation and eventual dissolution - despite a report this week that revealed that the NHS was the best public health service in the world. 
• Welfare should not be based on the contributory principle. We all pay in for the good of society in general and consequently we all benefit from it, directly or indirectly.
• Resistance is possible. The E15 mothers stopped themselves from being re-housed hundreds of miles away from their families; the  Doncaster Care UK strikers fighting NHS privatisation at ground level; the FBU - by the way, did you know they were on strike yesterday?

Miliband came in for particular criticism from Abbot, Corbyn and others over his 'youth tax' and pandering to the fabled 'middle-ground' of dissatisfied Tories instead of  arguing for principle and supporting his base. There were 50k of his base outside Parliament right there, and all of them were against this. Miliband may just have made himself unelectable and alienated many more people than he could have ever gained.

Green Party MP Caroline Lucas received a raucous welcome and seemed almost overwhelmed by the response from the crowd to what she had to say, one of those being support for a Robin Hood tax.

The best speech of the day in my opinion was given by comedian and writer Francesca Martinez.

Francesca was also interviewed by Channel 4 News - obviously what she has to say is irrelevant as far as the BBC is concerned. 

Later on, Russell Brand showed up. Personally, I'm not a fan. Nevertheless, if his celebrity value gets more people interested in the cause, then I'm not going to knock it. 

And the fight continues.

• People's Assembly Stand-up Benefit gig on 7th July 
• Public service strike on July 10th to include NUT, FBU, PCS, Unison, Unite and the GMB.
• People's March for the NHS, Jarrow to London, starting 16th August
• Mass Demonstration by the TUC in London, 18th October

The government and corporations may have almost total control over the mainstream media, but we can't let them win. We have social media, and we have ourselves. Everyone who was there yesterday can go back to their communities and spread the word, so even if we are censored they can't stop us from talking, from fund-raising, and ultimately from voting.

And as far as the BBC goes, the broadcaster we all own?

28 June - Owen Jones takes the BBC to task on indefensible bias and censorship:

Blair - We will be your Judge

PhotoOp by Kennardphillipps

I was going to write about the excellent Don’t Spy on Us day of action that I attended last weekend. But then Iraq erupted – and Blair was given 3000 words in the Independent to explain why it wasn’t his fault – and why once again, we should be bombing the shit out of Iraq.

Read Blair’s essay. His justification for the Iraq war remains, but now he has introduced another element of utter absurdity. 

The first is there was no WMD risk from Saddam and therefore the casus belli was wrong. What we now know from Syria is that Assad, without any detection from the West, was manufacturing chemical weapons. We only discovered this when he used them. We also know, from the final weapons inspectors reports, that though it is true that Saddam got rid of the physical weapons, he retained the expertise and capability to manufacture them. Is it likely that, knowing what we now know about Assad, Saddam, who had used chemical weapons against both the Iranians in the 1980s war that resulted in over one million casualties and against his own people, would have refrained from returning to his old ways?

The Iraq war was sold to parliament and the press on the basis of the dodgy dossier, that Saddam had mobile WMD factories and the ’45 minutes’ nonsense. We now know that all this was a fabrication, it was a pretence so that Bush and Cheney could exploit 9/11 to prosecute an illegal war and take Iraq’s oil once and for all. And also to punish Saddam, who was a CIA asset who was no longer behaving.

We know this, even as the US and the UK governments continue to block the release of the Chilcott report.

Assad, then or now, has absolutely nothing to do with it. ‘Knowing what we now know about Assad…’ – like when didn’t we know Assad had WMD? We had very strong ties with Assad - he was the archetypical cuddly British-trained despot, even having a British wife. His officer elite is British educated and Sandhurst-trained. 

Blair’s second argument is that if Saddam had still been in power, the Arab Spring would have been a ‘cauldron’ with Saddam and his sons kicking off major Sunni vs. Shia wars. Aside from the fact that the Arab Spring wouldn’t have happened without the Iraq war, and that the campaigns from one country to the next were being directly assisted and kicked off by the US – citing a ‘what if’ to justify actions taken ten years ago is ridiculous.

Western governments went out of their way to court every dictator in the middle east and north Africa to engineer the ‘coalition of the willing’ to support the invasion, or at the very least, not oppose it. Dodgy deals were done left and right and Blair was a part of this. When Iraq and Afghanistan started to go bad, then they tried something else – which has left failed states, tribal genocide and banditry in its wake.

Blair goes on to argue that ‘we’ are not to blame. And it is very difficult to read the next few paragraphs of his essay without seeing them as the worst kind of post-colonial ‘white-man’s burden’ reasoning. The governments failed because they don’t know how to govern, and they didn’t know how to establish a ‘sensible’ relationship between Islam and the state. Let’s forget the fact that most of the middle-eastern states have borders drawn onto maps by elements of the British and other western armies over the past century. Iran has been the bête-noire in the eyes of the US and UK since they overthrew the vicious dictator we installed, and Saddam was the one we picked, supplied (with WMD) and financed to fight a long and horrendous war against them.

Right-wing pundits here and in the US are blaming the whole thing on Obama and his presidential campaign commitment to pull all the troops out of Iraq and Afghanistan. But the ‘vietnamisation’ of Iraq was a part of the initial withdrawal strategy. Obama perhaps thought that with the millions of dollars invested in training, hardware and bribes, coupled with drones directed from orbit, the situation would be controlled. But he was wrong. The thing about vietnamisation was – it didn’t work. And those pictures we remember of Hueys evacuating the last US staff from Saigon are probably being repeated right now in Baghdad.

Blair stops short of re-invading Iraq but he does seem to think that military intervention of some sort is absolutely necessary – i.e. air strikes. It will achieve nothing, just as it is achieving nothing in Pakistan, in Yemen or Somalia. All it does is kill lots of people, a lot of them ‘collateral damage’. It breeds further resentment, fear and radicalisation. You can’t stop terrorism by terrorising the population.

Blair had the arrogance to ignore the people he governed – to ignore the biggest popular demonstration in the history of the UK. Tens of thousands died and continue to die and the fault is his. He said in 2003 that history and later (after his conversion to Catholicism) that god would be his judge on his decisions over Iraq.

I think the International Criminal Court would do nicely.

And finally – I think this song is about Blair. What do you think?

And if you should desist from deceiving
And if you should confess to the crime
It won't be enough these days to say sorry
No, no, sorry won't save you this time

You may lay down your guilt on the altar
Nail your remorse to the cross
But it's not enough these days to say sorry
No, no, sorry won't pay for this loss

UKIP is not Racist.

UKIP is not racist.

You might be surprised to see me writing that but actually I believe it to be true. I said is rather than are on purpose - we have seen that, despite their vetting procedure, a number of UKIP candidates have voiced racist views. You only need to go to Twitter to see what the views of Farage’s People’s Army actually are. UKIP is aware of this, and though in the past they deliberately courted the BNP vote, they have made concerted efforts to distance themselves from open racism and have taken efforts to eliminate these sections within the party.

Not Racism - Cynical Populism

The first thing that leads me to this conclusion is research into the history of the party. I thoroughly recommend Revolt on the Right: Explaining Support for the Radical Right in Britain (Robert Ford & M.J.Goodwin, Routledge, 2014). What follows is mostly from there. The book is also recommended by figures within UKIP – but I suspect they haven’t read it!

When the party was founded it was little more than a one issue pressure group, with the ultimate end of getting the UK out of the EU. If elected to office, they intended to immediately stand down and dissolve the party once their goal was achieved, and they had no intention of standing against euro-sceptic Tories.

However as the party gained in popularity the original idealism and even the ideology was put aside. The Kilroy era showed that with money, publicity and drive (not forgetting Farage too at this point) it was possible for them to advance from the fringe into the mainstream, take and hold office. And for this, they needed policies to get more votes and widen their target demographic. Nuttall had the idea of going after the ‘low-hanging fruit’ of disaffected traditional Labour supporters and blue-collar workers, and targeting the fears over immigration in particular.

In elections after 2000 Tories and BNP both chose immigration as one of their targets, though both coming from ideological standpoints, and with the Tories, it was just one amongst a raft of domestic policies they were campaigning on. The only ideology that governed UKIP however was populism – their sole reason for selecting this target was to cynically exploit the issue in order to get votes. This is why in particular the myth they created and fed had no basis in reality – they played directly to the audience, with a massive poster campaign directly into their target areas.

Analysis of the 2013 council elections revealed that the greatest upswing of UKIP support was coming from the deprived, working class and poorly qualified people. It made sense then to make this demographic the target and immigration the single issue for the 2014 campaign.

And it seemed to pay off. UKIP managed to capture virtually all of the BNP vote, ending them as a political party. And whilst they were virtually wiped out of every major city in the UK, they gained councillors and MEPs in traditional Labour heartlands. But Ford and Goodwin argue that contrary to the popular conception, UKIP wasn’t ‘widening their support base, but deepening it.’

UKIP Supporters – the Grey Revolution

UKIP supporters are mostly male (57%), white (99.6%), over 55 (57%), working class (42% - compared to 35% for Labour!), and left school at 16 or younger (only 24% went on to further/higher education – compare that to the Greens at 60%).

From the Guardian, UKIP supporters have the least interest in other countries and cultures, don’t regularly try food from other cultures and don’t use social media.

It is in fact entirely accurate to depict UKIP as a throwback party, looking back nostalgically to a time of traditional values and homogeneity, of establishment and pride in Britain. This of course is a sepia-tinged fantasy that actually never existed. But UKIP is fixed in time to before we joined the EU in 1973 – so of course most of the support is going to come from people who can actually remember it. But they are remembering the fantasy – not the strikes, the height of the Troubles, the Cod War, and then later the Three-Day Week, power cuts, bread rationing, unemployment hitting 1m for the first time since the 1930s…

Targeting Romanians

As I pointed out in an earlier post, the manifesto deliberately misquotes a FOI report from the Met about numbers of arrests of foreign nationals, Farage’s open letter of excuses after his disastrous LBC interview makes the same errors. When challenged on these inaccuracies, Farage said he merely ‘simplified’ the report. I’ll let you judge that for yourself.

It’s not just that the report was distorted, it’s the way it was distorted. The figures all go back to the five years prior to 2012, yet the manifesto stated, ’28,000 Romanians are held for crimes in London.’

It concentrates on Romanians and says that they come second for the levels of serious crime – they don’t, they come third. And the biggest group by far with more than twice the number of arrests for serious crime are the Polish (11,103); Jamaica comes second (5,635); Romania a close third (5,393). If this was about racism, then why pick on the third group on the list, why not the Poles and Jamaicans?

The reason why Farage picked on Romanians and Bulgarians is that these nations became eligible for Free Movement this year, and Farage wanted to demonstrate that whilst these countries had been admitted to the EU, they weren’t ready, and they could now flood into the UK. UKIP had already put all their money on this actually happening, to supply them with hard data they would need to justify their campaign of fear.

From the figures released before the election we now know they didn’t come, and in fact, fewer Romanians and Bulgarians came here than before the ‘borders were opened’. The arrest rate for these nationalities has also significantly dropped. But UKIP had already sent the manifesto to the printers – they were committed. And the facts don’t matter – the myth had been fixed in the consciousness of the voters. Now UKIP can set the agenda – Labour and the Tories will not challenge the myth, but will dance to UKIP’s tune.

UKIP may not be ideologically racist – as its only ideology is populism and the pursuit of power for its own sake – but the membership and candidature is undeniably extreme right-wing, and the ultimate result of exploiting fears about immigration and targeting a particular group for blame and derision is racism.