The classiest protest song you'll ever hear

The poor, sick, young and old aren't the only victims of George Osborne's larcenous budget: cathedrals are hurting too, and Wakefield's not taking it lying down:



And if you're as pissed off as I am by the BBC's craven grovelling to the Tory Party recently, you'll enjoy this clip from the vaults:

Time for a Plan B, Mr Cameron

I'm not a huge rap fan, to be honest. In fact Ben says my music collection is the whitest in the country. My sum total of rap and hip-hop records is: 1 Credit to the Nation CD, some album Ben bought me as a satirical gesture, and a couple of Tystion albums. If you haven't come across them, they're white and Welsh. You might laugh, but the Welsh language lends itself to rap very impressively.

So you might be surprised to learn that I'm quite a fan of this track - Plan B's Ill Manor - a real return to the lamented protest song genre. Can't say the music does a hell of a lot for me, but I hugely appreciate the sentiment. He's angry and he's been reading Owen Jones's Chavs. Sorry about the ad at the start: Plan B may be advocating social revolution, but Warners Music doesn't see why they shouldn't make money from it. Don't buy the single. Send Plan B a fiver instead.



Of course back in the early days, protest and proto-rap were made for each other: here's a couple of old favourites which some of you will know very well, but others may not have discovered.

Meet the marchers

Contrary to the hysteria of the Daily Mail, which yesterday was openly triumphant at the prospect of 710,000 sackings from the 'bloated' public sector, yesterday's protest was packed with saddened, brave, lovely people. The people who teach you, clean your streets, wipe your bottom (as a baby and as an older person), help you with your benefits, make sure you don't drown in the local pool… all the things you might miss if you're not Jeremy Clarkson.

Apart from the incredible cold, picketing was rather fun. Not many people crossed the line, and those who did tended to look embarrassed about it. The Vice-Chancellor came to have an amiable chat, and loads of people honked and waved in support. No abuse this time, unlike previous actions. I was fed lovely pastries by well-wishers, and another scab managed to hit 'reply to all' when grovelling to management, so that's another one off the Christmas card list.

The rally was stunningly well-attended. I met lots of my students, some of them striking from their own public sector jobs, and even the speeches were short and punchy. Hearing former New Labour MP Rob Marris sound left-wing was very weird. Mind you, after 18 months of Paul Uppal, Pinochet's starting to look a bit pinko.

Here are a few of my favourite shots: click on them to enlarge. The rest are here.

Possibly my favourite of the lot. Lady with Vuvuzela. 

Ah, Vice-Chancellor, how nice of you to join us.

Academic democracy, California Style

Over in the US, the rumble over the casual assaults made on passive, peaceful students by the police - called in by the Vice-Chancellor for 'health and safety' reasons, continues.

After an English professor wrote an open letter to the VC calling for her to resign, the English Department has posted a similar demand on its website.

It couldn't happen here, I think. We tend not to use organisational subgroups as the basis for political action, though if something terrible happened, I'm pretty sure all my colleagues would collectively protest. More prosaically: we don't control our own websites. It takes months for material to appear, and it's never quite sure who has the magic passwords and software.

Occupy again, occupy smarter

Overnight, the New York police smashed up Occupy Wall Street's main base in Zuccotti Park, fulfilling their traditional role as the armed wing of the hegemonic élite.

It's to be expected: the occupation is simply the latest in an American tradition of dignified subaltern camps: it's a more middle-class version of the Hoovervilles of the 1930s, in which thousands of people erected shanty towns in parks and waste grounds, for shelter and protection, but also to make visible the effects of the Depression. No doubt some of them were dystopian hell-holes, but many were vibrant, egalitarian, racially harmonious, leftwing communities which posed a challenge - perhaps a threat - to the status quo: which is why many were violently razed to the ground by the authorities.

This is always the way. OWS was in many ways a carnivalesque space, in Bakhtinian terms: tolerated by the authorities for a period as a safety valve, then shut down when it showed signs of offering a serious alternative to the current system. The challenge is to avoid being tamed, or silenced, while offering more than a brief breathing space for those excluded or revolted by the system.

Where now? I think the various occupations should start drawing on the lessons of the late 1980s-1990s roads protesters. In the UK, this was the strongest and most successful of the countercultures: travellers, crusts, ravers and eco-activists successfully led governments on a merry dance around the country. Draconian laws and tabloid thunderclaps demonstrated the real threat to the Establishment posed by a mobile, creative, strategically clever, fluid and above all disdainful group. I'm no fan of rave, New Age Bollocks, the Levellers (the band: I admire the Civil War group) or dreadlocks, but the sheer weight of heavy-handed legal and police action demonstrated government's failure to comprehend their opponents' tactics or beliefs. It's hard to evoke the public mood of the time: on one side scruffy E-necking ravers who managed to combine fierce idealism with dedicated pursuit of hedonism. On the other, the shrieking newspapers, hysterical tabloids and a police force which treated the travellers like plague-spreaders.

My favourite group was Critical Mass: radical cyclists who got together once a month or so in major cities to cycle really slowly to demonstrate that our urban planning was both dangerous and inhuman. I only managed to join them once or twice, in Birmingham, but it was a wonderful feeling. It's still alive, but the edge has gone. Perhaps I'll get back to them. Other favourites: the wonderful, crazy ways in which road-building was halted and sometimes even defeated, and the Guerrilla Gardening movement: turning concrete into jungle.

The travellers and ravers used to defeat police planning by only announcing locations at the last minute, passed on through temporary phone numbers picked up by eager participants cruising the M25 waiting of the word: Twitter is the ideal successor. It all ended when the rave side of things came to dominate - the individualism of these mobile parties, and the drug aspect, made it an ideal situation for the entrepreneurially-minded amongst them to commodify the scene by reducing it to commercial events, and the energy was inevitably lost.

But Occupy can still learn from them. They can harness the decentralised, fluid, fast-moving aspects of the Summer of Love: they can be one step ahead of the authorities, they can stress the theatrical aspects of protest. Pop up unexpectedly with a dramatic action, then melt away, only to coalesce somewhere else.

One of the things I regret about the British education system is its total silence on the country's brilliant history of rebellion and protest: the Peasants' Revolt of 1381, the Civil War, the Diggers, the Levellers, the Pilgrimage of Grace, the Monmouth Rebellion, the Luddites, Captain Swing, the Rebecca Rioters, the Chartists, the NUWM, the Jarrow March, the Suffragists, the Radical Clubs, CND and Pugwash…, the Miners' Strike and all their supporters… the list is endless. Let's recapture that irreverence, that refusal to blindly accept what we're given.

Fighting your corner

Thousands of students are converging on London to speak up for the poor and young who want to better themselves.

Except from The Dark Place:

London Demo 2011: Find out why we're not supporting it, as we present our Alternative to the National London Demo...

They're putting on a Question Time debate tomorrow (I'm on the panel), but I have to say that this is disappointing. Sometimes, mass numbers on the street focus the minds of the public and politicians in a way that polite letters just don't.

I do worry about our SU: it's under the thumb of the university executive and seems to have lost all confidence in asserting the rights of its student. They've got shiny offices and ranks of computers, and seem to think that that's enough.

We have 23,000 students: 99% working-class, 45% mature students: exactly the kind of people who are already suffering. Their voices should be heard.

More from the Egyptian Uprising

Another eye-witness account of Egypt's demonstrations, this time from a friend of my friend. Happy Police Day!

I listened to the shouting crowds from my balcony yesterday, as groups of protesters were heading to Tahrir square. I wished I could join but fear held me back. Fear of being harassed or harmed by the forces of the National Security* , fear that going through pain and humiliation would make me more and more hateful of our circumstances, and thus lose my stamina towards carrying on my efforts in making things better on the long term without any political confrontation.

Media manipulation and Twitter blocking changed my stance, it got on my nerves so much that I could not stay in. A one minute phone call from a friend got me out of the house, together we went to Tahrir square.

Yesterday was a firm answer putting an end to all the allegations and brain washing that claimed that the current system is better than all other options in front of us, it was also a good revision to all that I have learned through my Political Science courses. And because I believe in what I’ve learned, I see a ray of light. If change doesn’t happen now, it’s coming none the less. We have changed, and we have proven that we want and deserve to change. And even though all political theories may fail to forecast what will happen, one theory stands true, God is Fair.

First of all, it’s a message to the class of people who claim to be intellectual and civilized, the people who look down at the chaos and express that “this is an ignorant population who don’t deserve democracy”, as if they alone got the exclusive seal of democracy for being from a long gone aristocratic descent or holding passports from democratic countries, without possessing any of the democratic political culture of those countries. Yesterday for the first time in downtown, I was not sexually harassed. For the first time I see youth who are not part of Environmental organizations picking up the garbage, and thousands of people, united despite their differences, sharing food, and water and exchanging opinions, carrying appropriate respectful banners.

Second of all, it’s an answer to all those who think that the Muslim Brotherhood is the only alternative. We did not see them in the demonstrations, and I can claim that the only person I heard chanting religious statements while asking for the downfall of the government, received minimal chanting back compared to others.

Thirdly, it’s a response to all those who don’t value information and freedom of expression. Any contribution adds weight even if it’s through the Internet pages. I admit I was critical of all the Twitter fans in the past since I felt they do nothing but talk and complain. I apologize for that now, if it weren’t for those sites, the information sharing and above all the feeling of unity that was created through people’s comments and pictures, no one would have gone to the streets yesterday.

This has proved that each individual has a role to play considering their abilities. If it weren’t for the people who stayed at home trying to find means of sharing information through the Internet or telephones, and if it weren’t for those who put efforts to transmit and provide coverage of the events, we would have all believed that police officers received flowers and gifts in celebration of the police day and similar ridiculous stories, most interesting of which that some newspapers announced the end of the protests before they actually ended. If it weren’t for those who shared facts on how to deal with the tear gas through the various communication channels, many of us, who are far from experienced in the rituals of protests and demonstrations in countries like ours, would not have lasted these many hours.

Fourth, it’s an answer for all those who accuse the political opposition forces of being traitors. They showed up yesterday and integrated into the crowds without carrying signs or statements of their parties, they joined united for one cause.

Fifth, it’s a response for those who say “we are not like Tunis”, no we are like Tunis, and more. I don’t deny that I initially looked at the issue from a purely theoretical perspective. I believed that we needed to have a large base of educated middle class, rather than a polarized population between a struggling incapable class, and an elite indifferent class. However, yesterday proved that the Egyptian people have had enough. Even those who are not facing the daily struggle of finding food for survival, have vision and have a conscience that pushed them to act.

We are a generation not raised on a culture of confrontation; we have had fear built into us since we were born. We are a generation whose intellectuals have been terrorized by the ruling regime, taught to conform and obey. Now is the time to learn the rules of the game.

* As I left the demonstration, I could sense the hesitation and confusion of the national security guards, as if what is on their minds is “maybe these people are right”

Live from Egypt

I have a friend in Egypt. She's been down to the protests with her husband and friends. This is her account.

At first, I was at home yesterday, worrying about sexual harassment (sexual frustration is very high in Egypt and large groups are not always a good place to be). But finally I could stand it no longer and walked through thick lines of police onto the main square (Tahrir) to meet X and his friends, who had marched there to come together with a couple of thousand more demonstrators. I thought: if my children later ask me what I did that day and I say 'I was sitting at home watching it on TV'...that just won't do!

We are all very nervous, because it looks like the police will be more ruthless today. They threaten to break congregations up even before they can develop. They are doing checks all over downtown Cairo. I went for a walk earlier: every rat seems to have turned into a policeman. But I also looked into people's faces last night: their will is stronger than ever and they have seen that they can break through. I don't think they will be deterred easily anymore. This is the first time in modern history that the Egyptian people stand up for their rights, that they said 'NO!'. Their minds have opened to the existence of a possibility of change at THEIR hands. 

The most important thing last night was that people from all backgrounds - social and religious - were in this together. Some went to fetch drink and food and distributed it among the group. People chanted and embraced. Everybody and friendly and supportive and took care of each other. When a group of policemen was surrounded by protesters, they pledged to let them go. And the protesters did - without touching them. The protesters here are really very peaceful, which is something that the media doesn't seem to represent very well. When someone picks up a stone, some others will come and tell him to stop it. 

On the last point, the same thing happened with the student protests here. Endless replays of the idiot dropping a fire extinguisher - very little coverage of the students chanting 'stop dropping shit'.

I really hope her optimism is well-founded. My worry is that there isn't any strong western support. The Americans and the British aren't offering anything stronger than wishy-washy platitudes about listening to the population. If you remember the various Colour Revolutions of the past ten years, they were all funded and supported by the CIA and various front groups - and all staged in countries opposed to US and UK foreign policy interests. The old saying is true: our governments only wish democracy on our enemies. They're more than happy to support dictatorships like Egypt and Tunisia (big fans and supporters of torture, the 'war on terror' and the like, and good sources of slave labour).

New media allows the motivated few over here to offer our good wishes, but that's not much help. We need to remind our governments that they if they claim to believe in democracy, it has to be a universal principle.

Incidentally, I asked my previous MP, Rob Marris, about why the UK support democracy-through-regime-change in Iraq but not Saudi Arabia. He replied that it was 'completely different', though he couldn't elaborate why. Can you? (Without mentioning oil?)

We also serve who stand and Tweet?

I've been following Egypt's 'Day of Rage' (live here), designed to reproduce Tunisia's revolutionary situation. Did you know that Egypt's a dictatorship?

nearly half of Egypt's 80 million people live under or just above the poverty line set by the United Nations at $2 (£1.27) a day. "Poor quality education, healthcare and high unemployment have left large numbers of Egyptians deprived of basic needs," 

Far too many people holiday in repressive places, lulled into acquiescence by a pina colada and cheap exchange rates, unaware that their money doesn't help those in need.

There's been a lot of talk about the positive and negative effects of new media on protest. The jury is - of course - still out. But I do worry that our hyperreal condition (read your Baudrillard) weakens the possibility of full-on, successful resistance. Take a look at this photo.

What I see are brave men and women facing down the security forces. But if you look closer, there are at least half a dozen mobile phones and assorted cameras in use. Where once they would have clenched their fists or clutched petrol bombs, they're now engaged in a process of recording, rather than participating. Evidence collection and propaganda are certainly important, but I worry that we no longer feel something's real unless we've captured it: photos, Tweets, status updates and texts.

That said, I'm protesting on Saturday (Manchester: be there) and I'll be taking my camera. Meanwhile, take a look at these witty New Media takes on classic WW2 Information War posters by Brian Moore, who most definitely knows the score. I couldn't reproduce my favourite, 'Somebody Blogged'…

Ignore him: Wikipedia is cultural misinformation on a grand scale

Hell no, we won't go (until politely asked)

Mr Uppal has been mentioned in our debate - and not by me. Some of the students who went to talk to him asked him why there will be a 20% gap between the current teaching grant and the fees income. Oddly enough, he declined to answer the question, perhaps because this is nothing more than a reactionary, vengeful attack on the notion of education as a public good, rather than a thoughtful policy.

Marginal Paul had better enjoy 2011-2015, because he's not being re-elected.

The rather pleasing consensus of the evening is that we should all be more like Norway. I've been saying it for ages. If we all asked nicely, perhaps they'll invade. I won't resist the Nordic stormtroopers of egalitarianism and stylish furniture.

More photos here.

Sit down for your rights

The Hegemon's SU is staging an overnight set of events to highlight their opposition to fees. I'll stay for a few hours and take some pictures. I'll be part of a debate on education and the market, but escaped the attentions of Midlands Today, thankfully.

I'll take pictures and post them here and a full set here.

Meanwhile, here's a rather more direct and inventive protest from earlier today. Sorry about the advert. To balance it: don't fly by that airline. 

Fear the wrath of the Hegemon Student!

Or rather, don't, judging by this pathetic response to an enquiry as to whether the SU was going to support the Day of Action:

The students' union has taken the decision not to support a local demonstration due to the possibility of public disorder detracting from our message. 

Well, that'll show them. I wasn't expecting Emily Davison or the Buddhist monks incinerating themselves in protest at the Vietnam War, but this truly is shameful. 

They think it's all over… it is now.

The BBC live stream is a good way to follow the student protests, for good or ill.

The demonstration has certainly monopolised the coverage, which is great. However - rolling news is desperate for material, so it's not too difficult. Students are good at this stuff: Twitter and iPhones mean there's an avalanche of material flowing in.

However: I suspect that the coverage would have ended hours ago if the demonstration had remained entirely peaceful. Both sides know this. Unfortunately, the media have form in egging on the behaviour of a minority and then running it as representative (as they are now). On the other side, some protestors will be only too aware that polite protest doesn't get the attention of the press, while others are ready for any opportunity to sell sectarian papers, chant slogans and smash a few windows.

I wish I'd been there - the issue is more important than a couple of seminars - but I also have a responsibility to the students who for whatever reason, chose to come to class. Had I been there, I'd not have supported violence in this context (it's not the Miner's Strike) and the hijacking of the protest by splinter groups, but I certainly support the occupation of Tory HQ. Compared with other countries (and the UK in the 1960s and 1970s) this is mild stuff.

If you need a reminder that the vast majority of students on the march were peaceful and determined to make their point clearly, he's a video of their reaction to one of the provocateurs chucking a fire extinguisher off the roof of Tory HQ: a round of boos and the chant 'stop throwing shit'. Good on them.



Let's hope this march is the first in a massive series of resistance actions from all sectors of society in the coming years.

That's certainly true in some students' minds. Sky News has such a bad reputation now (think Kay Burley - and here -  and Adam Boulton) that their live broadcasts are fair game, as the Guardian reports:

Sky News ran into difficulty about 5 minutes ago when they attempted to go live to one of their reporters on the ground. She appeared to lose her temper as students standing around her began to pitch in with comments like 'ladies and gentlemen the insurrection has started.

"They just want to shout people down," said said, turning to them and telling them (as well as the studio) that the vast majority of people at the protest didn't support what has happened.

Sky cut the link, with an anchor saying, not entirely convincingly : "I'm not sure what was happening there."

What a weird week

I'm going to be nice about the boys in blue for the second time in a week!

Dennis O'Connor has published a report into the police's management of public protest, and it's a gem. He's called for a major reappraisal of the attitudes and behaviour of the police, and has called for them to return to the values of consensual policing, rather than seeing their job as opposing protest - less automatic surveillance, less violence, more care.

What's more, the police seem, so far, to have accepted it.

Life's suddenly becoming all serene.

Rebranding in action

If you legally protest anything - no criminal damage, insulting language etc. - then you're a 'domestic extremist', according to the police, and you get your own page on a range of super databases. If you care about a lot of things (again, perfectly legally), then you're included in a new police card game: The Domestic Extremist Top Trumps Cards, in which the cops tick you off a list whenever they spot you.

I've always thought of my attendance at these events as tokenistic at best, a means of reminding our masters that they may achieve compliance, but they haven't engineered consent. It's rather flattering to be considered a 'domestic extremist' (which actually sounds like a heavily-armed housekeeper).

Vehicles associated with protesters are being tracked via a nationwide system of automatic number plate recognition (ANPR) cameras. One man, who has no criminal record, was stopped more than 25 times in less than three years after a "protest" marker was placed against his car after he attended a small protest against duck and pheasant shooting.

Which is outrageous. That level of stops is usually reserved for black men in the British tradition of policing.

No thanks, Coppers

The police have been roundly criticised, including by their own investigations teams, for their handling of legal protests - they've beaten, harassed and maliciously arrested innocent people. So they're on a charm offensive, and are running a slick PR campaign which claims that all those nasty male coppers wading in boots-first are going to be replaced with nice mumsy officers bearing cups of tea for thirsty sloganeers.

Climate Camp aren't impressed and have declined Plod's request for advance notice of the address of the new super-secret action base:

Stick that in your kettle

One of my distant superiors was involved in the design and defence of 'kettling', the police tactic of imprisoning legal protestors for long periods, allowing them out only if these innocent people surrender their details and images to cops for a database that's been declared illegal.

Well yah boo sucks to you, Professor: your methods have been described as 'inadequate' and outdated by the official report into the G20 events.

Some highlights:

Commanders appeared not to properly understand basic human rights laws or the legal requirements surrounding the use of kettling, the report said. However, O'Connor said this was the case for only some senior officers, and refused to identify those at fault.

It says police are currently failing in their human rights obligations, and describes public order policing guidance issued by the Association of Chief Police Officers – adopted by all forces across England and Wales – as "insufficient".

The national policy should be overhauled, it says, to "demonstrate explicit consideration of the facilitation of peaceful protest".

contrary to claims by senior Met officers ahead of the demonstrations, there was "no specific intelligence which suggested any planned intention to engage in co-ordinated and organised public disorder".

Despite that, senior commanders gave "no consideration" to the idea that the protests might be peaceful and planned how to deal "robustly" with unlawful activity.

Just to be clear: there are some individual officers behaving insensitively and criminally, but this report, and my point, is that there's a structural and institutional problem with policing when it comes to protest: the police force is far to the right of the population and shows no sign of recognising citizens' rights to peaceful protest.

Policing: nature's way

I knew I'd seen the police tactics ('kettling') employed to kill Ian Tomlinson and beat up numerous other inoffensive protesters somewhere else. Sorry about the appalling hyper-America voiceover - I couldn't find the staid BBC footage.

Atten-SHUN

Already overrun with ex-bizzies expounding the joy of 'kettling' peaceful protesters, my esteemed institution is toying with the idea of a degree for squaddies. As we've just merged with the Law school, how about 'Spotting an Illegal War for Dummies', and 'What Actually Constitutes Torture and Why It's A Bad Thing'?

Now the day is over…

Today was sort of successful: I didn't buy any books - though I did receive one, James Naughtie's The Accidental American, a biography of Blair. Thanks (and Happy Birthday) to Sarah, who spotted it in a library sale. Happy Birthday to Mark too!

Meanwhile in London, police were only allowing protestors to leave if they identified themselves and allowed themselves to be photographed. This just isn't legal. The police don't have the right to demand identification unless you've committed a crime. Photography seems to be a grey area, but why should innocent people go on a database unless they've committed an offence?

Know your rights!