By Koos Couvée

The decision by a court judge to postpone the John Terry vs. Anton Ferdinand racism trial until after the European Championships is a serious mistake that favours the defendant, John Terry. The ruling, based on a technicality, tells us that racism is not serious enough an issue for it to warrant immediate action, and, since Capello publicly backed Terry, would have allowed JT to remain captain of the England side during the Euro’s had it not been for the FA’s decision to strip him of the armband last week.

The real issue, of course, is that delaying a court ruling is highly problematic in this case, as the video showing Terry’s alleged abuse went viral minutes after the match had ended and millions of people watched it online. Jason Roberts, Reading striker, Kick it Out campaigner and BBC football pundit was very clear on his position in an interview with Talk Sport last year: “I can lip read, so can everyone else”, suggesting it was obvious to him that Terry had racially abused Ferdinand. Joey Barton made similar remarks on his Twitter page last week when he called on JT to apologise and take the penalty.

The media has to walk a fine line here, and for legal reasons cannot be seen to prejudice the trial in any way. But the crux in this matter is the relationship between official statements in press releases from the FA, the clubs and the court, and the word on the street. Most people have seen the video, made up their mind on the issue and want the case to appear in court as soon as possible.

The official reason given for the decision to postpone the trial until July 9 was taken because the sheer volume of footballer witnesses would make it impractical to hold the trial until the end of the season. Why? Because Westminster Magistrates’ Court is such a trek from west London? Players are too busy golfing? The ruling to push back the court case disturbs Anton Ferdinand’s pre-season preparation with Queens Park Rangers and rules entirely in Terry’s favour, who is, though without the captain’s armband, able to play the Euro’s undisgraced.

In principle, Terry is innocent until proven guilty. But that principle rings hollow considering the wider dynamics the case has taken on in a media saturated society. Since JT has been charged in an incident of which most people have seen the footage, it becomes an all together different matter. The principle of innocent until proven guilty refers to how we want the state to treat people accused of a crime. Now the trial has been delayed until after the Euro’s it appears to be used as a smokescreen to stop a high profile footballer from facing the potential consequences of a serious offence. Fabio Capello’s words “innocent until proven guilty…this is a civil case…” smack of ego and pure pragmatism. Considering the seriousness of the allegation, he should have dropped Terry immediately after the latter was charged and pushed for a speedy verdict, regardless of whether he thought Terry is guilty or not.

The ruling delays any form of closure for the two parties, which is sought after particularly by Ferdinand and his club, Queens Park Rangers. Furthermore, it sends out two signals to the general public. Firstly, that the issue of racism is not important enough to require a speedy verdict, even when it involves the captain of the national side. Secondly, it does nothing to dislodge the belief amongst many British citizens that this country has two legal systems, one for the rich, and one for the poor. Justice delayed, is justice denied.

So it was the big day for Welfare Reform Bill, with plans of cutting benefit to disabled children, cancer patients and families living in adequate accommodation. Labour had a big chance to show whose side they were on and… well read it for yourself.

Farrely (Lab): You are cutting front line officers. Stop that shit
PM: Labour support the cuts and we’re sacking police pen pushers

Sharma: We all should support the Coalition screwing over the poor
PM: Indeed. Tonight we’ll see what Labour Party really stands for!

Ed M: When will you show the millionaires on state banks payroll?
PM: We’re so tough on banks its Mr Fred the Shred now not regulation

ne said: “We support those proposals”. Make it happen.
PM: Labour gave out £1.3 billion in bonuses! You did jack shit.

Ed M: So you are leading the class war against bankers then?
Speaker: PM please don’t call names to fellow hypocrites.
PM: Ok. Pleb.

Ed M: Gideon was in Davos saying he wants to lower income tax for the rich
PM: You are struggling. You were in Davos with him!

Davis (Con): Jobs from India are going to France instead of my patch. Shall we cut their aid?
PM: Not over yet. They might buy British

MP: Means testing for pensioner bus passes? Is that fair?
PM: Absolutely.

Mordaunt: Save Pompey football club make it co-op!
PM: I’ll look into it.

Ed M: All NHS staff say: Tory Health bill is a dangerous pile of shit
PM: No Welfare cap question? We are giving patients false choice

Ed M: The public and professions are against the bill. Drop it.
PM: I’m just finishing the work Tony Blair and New Labour started

Sandys (Con): Thanks for the exploitation zone in my patch.
PM: We’ve done great work keeping jobs in Britain by taking less tax.

Jarvis (Lab): People are dying from the cold because of wasteful NHS re-organisation.
PM: We kept cold winter payments. So be grateful

Brake: We need a new way of working for merging hospitals in my patch
PM: The department of health will help you out.

Ritchie (SDLP): Removal of child & working tax credit won’t make work pay.
PM: We are helping people shift to the poorer way of life.

McVey: A Labour council allowed vicious fuckers work in adult care.
PM: A quango will continue to expose this terrible market failure.

Clark: You are making a 50% cut to disabled children benefit.
PM: Wrong. No one will be affected on the lower end.

Nuttall: Let’s end the something for nothing culture amongst the poor not banksters.
PM: Yup Labour can’t tell me what they stand for.

Gilmore (Lab): PM is tougher on the vulnerable than bankers
PM: Now you don’t support Housing cuts, its Labour complaining about it

MP (Con): Right-wing voters are upset that people are getting enough to live on via benefits. PM: Absolutely, and Labour is a vacuum

MP (LD): Offshore companies are ripping off Britain.
PM: A funder of your party is also based offshore

MP:
PM: There are many people who reckon us Tories are too generous giving benefits on £26,000.

Gapes: RBS is not paying a Living Wage.
PM: We cut the bonus pool, we’ve capped cash bonuses to £2K. Labour didn’t.

Huppert: Cut tax for the poor
PM: We’ll look into it

Cooper (Lab): Midwives are being reduced, were you lying?
PM: Your figures are wrong, the public can trust me on the NHS.

Mulholland (LD): Meet with the family, let’s stop death by driving suspects, driving.
PM: I will listen to their concerns.

MP (DUP): We will support the govt to punish the poor and disabled. But don’t rush it.
PM: Together, we’ll force people into work.

Jones (Con): Labour are flip-flopping on Welfare Reform.
PM: They are not flip-flopping, just flopping.

As heard by @Justinthelibsoc

Mallam Sanusi Lamido Sanusi, Governor of the Central Bank of Nigeria

Date: Monday 23 January 2012
Time: 6.30-8pm
Venue: Sheikh Zayed Theatre, New Academic Building
Speaker: Mallam Sanusi Lamido Sanusi
Chair: Professor Judith Rees

More details here

Sanusi Lamido Sanusi as Governor of the Central Bank of Nigeria has been a staunch supporter of the withdrawal of the Nigerian fuel subsidy. He maintains that “Subsidies should be subsidies for production and not for consumption”.

He may believe in improving Nigeria by causing suffering and further destitution for those who on the poverty line, but perhaps young diaspora activists like Nicholas Ibekwe and Occupy Nigeria in London may have other views.

By Mehdi Hasan / @ns_mehdihasan

Newspaper comment pages don’t reflect the diversity of 21st-century readers.

Union leader slams Ed Miliband but who put him there in the first place?

Credit: Manchester Evening News

By Jerry Hicks

Unite General Secretary Len McCluskey has launched a stinging attack on the Labour leader Ed Miliband claiming that he  is “leading Labour to destruction”. McCluskey lambasts the Labour leader for “failing to support millions of low paid trade unionists” and thereby “disenfranchising the party’s [Labour] core support”.

All this ire from a union leader so influential, and rightfully so, but McCluskey not once mentions that he supported Ed Miliband’s leadership bid, he urged 1.3million members to vote for him and gave Ed Miliband £100,000 of members’ money so he could campaign to become Labour leader.

Worse still, in my view, Unite and Len McCluskey ensured that John McDonnell would not get on the ballot paper, thus preventing members from having a real choice. Strange seeing as it is McDonnell not Miliband who has always mirrored Unite’s policies on repeal of anti union laws and has a record of unwavering support for workers in struggle.

At first glance of McCluskey’s outpourings one might think that Ed Milliband has suddenly and out of the blue made a dramatic rightwards shift in his position.

Does McCluskey not remember a year ago in April 2011 Milliband’s ‘Blue Labour’ hitting the headlines? Then weeks later in June he failed to support ¼ million striking public sector workers, some of the poorest paid workers, for what he called ‘irresponsible strikes’, insulting all those prepared to fight.

A month later in July he refused to speak at the Durham Miners Gala which is always attended by over 100,000 trade unionists and natural Labour voters.

By November last year the Labour leader surpassed himself even by his standards when not backing over one million trade unionists including Unite, were taking part in the biggest strike in recent history over cuts to their pensions.

McCluskey criticises aplenty and I agree with his comments, but he should have seen it coming, he has been slow to speak out, and he offers no alternative and no solution.

There is an alternative, and my position is clear and consistent. Unite should only fund the Labour Party when it supports our union’s policies. I say to McCluskey “Stop wringing your hands, stop moaning and stop funding them!”

This should be the day we say “Defy the cuts, confront the anti union laws and follow the lead given by construction workers, by supporting demonstrations, walkouts and occupations.”

The bosses of the banks and financial institutions caused this crisis. That is why we should not pay the price in cuts to jobs, pay, pensions and services. The very rich and big business owes us the debt and they should be paying the price. They have failed to pay £120 billion in non-collected tax. Tax the banking bosses’ bonuses along with the profits of big business. End the foreign adventures; bring the troops and warplanes home.

In times of crisis good judgement is crucial. Oh Len, I can’t seem to stop myself humming the ‘Con’[nie] Francis song ‘Who’s sorry now’?

By Neil Griffiths / @_griff

Historically crippled by international debts, the middle of the twentieth century saw the IMF force Haiti (then occupied by America) to open its market to imported, highly subsidised U.S rice and sugar.

By Matt Potter / @mattpotter

Some stories write themselves. Some never get written, though they’re better by far. There’s something irreducible about them, too many loose ends. They don’t have neat beginnings and endings. They don’t fit our (journalists’, readers’) idea of the arc. Sometimes they’re just collected impressions.

This one’s like that, and I’m setting it down here simply because I think someone should write the story that never got written. Maybe it isn’t a story after all, but a diary of sorts. You tell me.

It starts (though I didn’t know it at the time) nearly 20 years ago. As a newly arrived, young, white Londoner, I followed the Stephen Lawrence case through the 1990s, then the 2000s, if not avidly then certainly with the odd mixture of horror, casual compulsion, mounting disbelief at the catalogue of establishment errors or worse, and something… what was that other thing? I guess it a bit like shame, only less easily pinned down. It was a vague, nagging, sticky discomfort that came and went. Something I didn’t like feeling, but knew it wasn’t to be shied away from. It was an itching unease about what might, for others, lurk beneath the surface of a society that I, white, lower-middle-class and male, may not always have liked, but had always, personally at least, experienced as fair and neutral in its justice.

I knew names, places, details from the news. I remember Martin Bashir’s documentary on the Dobson-Norris gang as a consensus TV moment: the one we all knew we’d all watched, whatever our age, background or colour. That photograph of the teenage Stephen Lawrence – striped top, grin, one arm folded upwards – was one of the defining images of 1990s Britain. Printed and reprinted, flickering on screens from electrical shops and pub TV sets, for a generation it became as ubiquitous, as powerful, as any shot of Neville Chamberlain, heavy-eyed, monochrome Myra Hindley or triangular, flag-topped Iwo Jima.

I knew the names of the gang members. Acourt, Acourt, Norris, Knight, Dobson. The first two sounding posh and French, then the three identikit English names. They took on a strange voodoo, these names. Bad luck to utter them. Creepily average. I looked at the faces, and tried to remember them too.

There was one name I did not know. The other person who’d been present – Stephen Lawrence’s friend, the boy who managed to escape. I’m not sure how I missed it, but somehow it never registered. Eventually, that boy faded from my memory altogether, and only the crime – the innocent victim, the actions of the mob – remained.

By 2011, I was living in south-east London. It’s a big, open, hilly place. A few train stops and two decades separated my neighbourhood from early-1990s Eltham. Still, some things bubble and blister beneath the surface, and occasionally they rise. The London riots, when they came that summer, tore through the High Street, smashing faces and homes and shops and trust. Then they slipped round quiet neighbourhood corners and into evacuated parks. Until the next day.

I wasn’t watching it on TV this time. Walking home, passing groups of people heading the other way. There were fights, screams and the sound of car doors. There were chases, and mock-furtive, too-loud talk of where was next, which houses were marked for tonight, and who was doing what. Like everyone, I was on edge, cautious, rattled. But I was curious too. So sometimes I followed as close as I could, to see what happened next. I set up mutiple TweetDeck feeds, to monitor the streets, neighbourhoods and tags I suspected would see action. I began examining coverage, mapping claim against reality.

And what I saw, on the streets, in the galloping updates on my Twitter feeds, and when I turned on the TV that night, was fear. Any journalist knows TV cameras can do that – point a camera at a burning car or smoking Tube station from enough angles, and that night it will look like the whole city is ablaze. But somehow, those flickering black-and-orange images leapt off the screens and captured people’s imaginations.

Fear bowled along the streets of Lewisham in those mad days, even when nobody else did. Rumours spread. More riots would be coming tonight. The freesheets ran with it. Offices buzzed with it. A group of 1,000 rioters had been spotted heading North along the next road. EDL members were marching now. A race riot was about to kick off. Shops were being looted.

There were no police. Senior members of the Government were all caught out, still on holiday, as was Boris Johnson, the mayor of London. Tracked down by broadcast news, they looked lost, floundering, and smaller somehow. So did London. I knew it wasn’t an apocalypse, and that cover of Newsweek was just silly, but the speculation, more than any fires or smashed windows, quickly lay waste to a lot of the residual trust people felt, not just in the police and government, but in fellow Londoners.

There was one public figure in the city who seemed to be playing a blinder, though. I’d never even heard of him before – or at least I didn’t think I had. He was a Lib Dem Councillor in Lewisham, and suddenly he was everywhere. He seems, at one point early on, to have made it his personal mission to take on the misinformation, the rumour-mongering, the panic and the suspicion. His tweets tell the story today if you care to look back over them. He went from place to place and tweeted what he saw. When Alex Tomlinson of Channel 4 News repeated an unverified rumour about a brewing race riot near Eltham, the Councillor debunked it. The Councillor replied publicly to people who claimed they’d witnessed improbable acts of mass violence, and asked them for details over the 3G airwaves. Where was this? Had they seen it? Because he was there now and the shop window looked intact. He asked Londoners to refrain from indulging rumours and retweets of things they could not personally verify. One tweet said simply: “No fighting no riots no looting no NF in #lewisham. Please stop tweeting nonsense. This is not a game. People are scared. #fixup please.”

He went further. He put his personal mobile number on his site, and tweeted it, so people could call and ask him what was happening, anywhere in the area, when they had no reliable information. He became, briefly, the single most trustworthy medium for news on developments in South London’s melting pot turned bubbling cauldron. He replied to tweets – all of them, publicly or individually. He damped wild speculation about the racial demographic of rioters, and he quashed rumours about white racist vigilante groups. His huge presence, his championing of perspective and truth, was quite a contrast to the vacuum the Met and the Cabinet had left us inhabiting those first few hot, suspicion-filled, dangerous days. I remember tweeting his details at the time, “[Councillor's name] – he’s on fire. This is what politicians are for!”

And all the while, in the midst of the chaos, I had two images in my head. One was of something this local politician reminded me of, an image drawn from the book I had just finished. It was Boris Yeltsin clambering up on a tank in front of Moscow’s Parliament building during the attempted Russian coup of 1991, and facing down the crisis with sheer presence (and reportedly some vodka too). It made me laugh with its bathos even then, but on some level it was true too.

The other image?

That didn’t make me laugh, it made me tense. It was an image of the worst that can happen in South London. It was a picture of what the city had to avoid, at all costs. It was a picture from 1993, of what happens, of what is lost, when people let themselves hate and mistrust, blindly. It was that shot of Stephen Lawrence, and I kept it in mind every time something immoderate appeared on a front page, or crackled over the airwaves.

The riots ended with the run of hot weather, and with the late, slow arrival of the police. I meant to thank the Councillor. I’d heard phrases like ‘community leaders’ before, and I’d always sort of thought they referred to self-appointed spokesmen or religious elders among discrete, probably ethnically or culturally homogeneous communities. Muslim community leaders. Black community leaders. I suppose for the first time I saw leadership being shown, rather than claimed, and I realized that I was part of one of those communities experiencing a degree of leadership. So I thought about composing a quick email – maybe a tweet – just to say how much of a difference his work for those few days had made. But I never did. I left it just too late. And by then, the man I wanted to thank was in the news again, for very different reasons, and probably receiving more emails than anybody could be expected to handle.

I saw the Councillor in the news. His name was Duwayne Brooks, and back on that evening in 1993, he’d been the friend who’d escaped from the gang who killed Stephen. I felt stupid for not having remembered the name’s significance that summer. Then I thought: wow.

Over the past couple of months, I’ve read more about Duwayne Brooks – the terrible impact of the murder itself; the long campaign of intimidation, prejudice and smears against him by the Metropolitan Police; his treatment at the hands of the law and, often, the media; his transformation from frightened, suspicious virtual fugitive to politician; and his dignity and perseverance at the final reckoning for two of the murderers.

And here’s what impressed me most. If there was ever anyone who had the right to feel hate, or suspicion, or to welcome some form of reckoning against the power structures of a city that had let him and his friend down so badly, it was Duwayne Brooks. If anyone could have been forgiven for succumbing to paranoia about a police vacuum and rumours of racial conflict in South London, it would have been him.

But that wasn’t what happened. Instead, for those long, hot days in South London, when those structures let everyone down and fear threatened to take over the streets, he was as a powerful force for tolerance, truth, reason, calm, and – more than anything – trust. He was markedly less speculative, panicky or paranoid than most of the better journalists I know.

So what can I say? I don’t usually write praise for politicians, but in this era of photo opps, press briefings and presubmitted questions, It’s worth remembering Duwayne Brooks was there for the people he represented. On his mobile, on the streets, and on the case.

Still, this is not about politics either. It’s about how we let ourselves feel as people, as Londoners, and about how we react to what shapes us. Because if a city like this can’t learn more from Duwayne Brooks than how to survive a terrible ordeal and come through, then we miss the point. And if we can’t learn from his incredible presence during that week of madness how to help others through their troubles and suspicion and fear too, then we’ve got no-one to blame but ourselves.

So… So what? I don’t know the rest. Like I said at the start, it’s not really a story, and this is too messy to be an ending. But in the years to come, I hope we – Londoners, people, whatever – can give it an ending, and make it a proper story. And I really hope we make it a good one.

Originally published on his blog

By Koos Couvee

The media storm Hackney MP Diane Abbott caused last week as a result of her ‘divide and rule’ comment on Twitter is indicative of the ways in which Britain’s political elite is still able to turn issues of race and racism to its advantage and brush the lived reality of so many black Britons under the carpet.

When Diane Abbott tweeted: “White people love playing ‘divide & rule’ We should not play their game #tacticasoldascolonialism”, she was not referring to 19^th century colonialism, which is what she later said to defend her comment. Firstly, if that were the case she would have put the sentence in the past tense. Secondly, the tweet came as part of a conversation about present day politics with Hackney based freelance journalist Bim Adewunmi, who had expressed concern to Abbott about what she perceived to be the red herring ‘black community’.

Conservative blogger Harry Cole, who at times also refers to himself as a journalist, eloquently summed up the deep pain and outrage felt by white people as a result of Abbott’s tweet in his debate with race and human rights activist Lee Jasper on Sky News. He told viewers that Abbott’s comments were derogatory to an entire ethnic group, based on the colour of their skin. Indeed, Cole pointed out, racism works both ways and should not have been used as a political tool by the opportunistic Hackney MP.

Whilst Lee Jasper did a good job of defending Diane Abbott’s record as anti-racist campaigner, he did not attack Cole’s positioning as a victim of a racist jibe, or the notion that white people can also be the victims of racism. He simply laughed, shook his head and said: “Dear, oh dear, oh dear”, which perhaps, in that setting, was the appropriate reaction to Cole’s phony outrage.

But the point needs to be made. In a society where whiteness is the norm and racial otherness – being black, Asian, or Muslim – is still seen as irreconcilable with mainstream Britishness, the notion of anti-white racism rings hollow.

Because its wording is so much more lucid than I could ever put it, I will quote a definition of racism as it appeared in an article in the Guardian last week.

“Racism is the systemic discrimination of whole groups of people cast as outsiders, deemed incapable of full incorporation into society, and treated with suspicion on this basis. It has a deep and lasting effect on individuals’ life chances and consequent wellbeing, and is damaging to the social fabric as a whole.”

The crucial bit follows:

“For all the equivalences drawn between clumsy and prejudicial references to skin colour, racism is inherently political; it requires the power to contribute to racial oppression.”

Do people of colour in Britain have the power to exercise racial oppression over whites? No. Can a black person generalise about white people? Obviously. Is the hurt caused by such a generalisation felt by a white person equivalent to that felt by a black person? Most definitely not.

Diane Abbott’s tweet must be read not as a generalisation about white people, but as coming from a place of honesty and anger over the present state of race politics in Britain. The choice of the term ‘white people’ was far from smart for an MP whose constituency is 61 per cent white, but surely the general idea behind the tweet was historically accurate?

It is unfortunate that those defending Abbott in the media did not make this point. And it is a shame that Abbott, in the media storm that ensued, was forced to backtrack and apologise. Because rather than using this opportunity to talk about racism, its history and its current manifestations, the political establishment posited themselves as victims of a crude generalisation without regard to the context and sentiment of Abbott’s comment. The underlying context of racism Abbott was referring to in her tweet was neatly brushed under the carpet.

The Abbott affair shows that people of colour are in a no-win situation when it comes to getting racism discussed as a lived reality in Britain today. In the case of Stephen Lawrence, there was an acknowledgement of racial injustice, but it was is partial and served after 18 years, largely because of the determination of a single woman, Doreen Lawrence. It is unknown to most Britons that there are countless black mothers like Doreen out there, like those seeking justice for the deaths of sons and daughters at the hands of police officers – singer Smiley Culture and Tottenham’s Mark Duggan being prominent examples of the last year.

The media hype dubbed ‘Abbottgate’ revealed that when a black MP, in her position as community leader, speaks from a place of anger and honesty to one of her constituents, she is hung out to dry and accused of exactly the thing she has been campaigning against all her life.

Diane Abbott merely pointed to the fact that Britain today is still a racist place. The question is – what would it mean to have an actual multiculturalism where the grievances of people of colour around racism are acknowledged and discussed in the same way as issues around education, housing and healthcare? It would certainly upset existing racial hierarchies in society. We are a long way off that scenario, but a good look into divide and rule strategies in British society today may be a good place to continue that process.

Twitter: @KoosCouvee

A video by UpshotTV, commentary by @Nabilu

by Damien Gayle / @damiengayle

Days after the NYPD imposed a media blackout to stop the world seeing how they evicted the Occupy Wall Street camp, I fell victim to Occupy LSX’s own press ban.

I had been visiting their newest occupation, a vast network of buildings owned by banking giant UBS, on Sun Street, near Moorgate station, on the edge of the City.

I wasn’t even there in a professional capacity. I was on my last day of paternity leave, following the birth of my daughter two weeks ago. But when I read the news of the latest occupation, I had to go down to witness it.

After all, what’s the point in being a journalist if you don’t go and witness historic events as they happen?

Before I even made it into the squat, I had been on the receiving end of some curt questioning by police. A WPC had demanded to know my identity and, bizarrely, kept asking me if I owned the building. I don’t even own my own home, I told her. But I hadn’t expected such a curt response from the activists inside as well.

I had not tried to hide my the fact I’m a journalist. While I didn’t have my press card showing on a lanyard (I don’t even HAVE a press card…), I wandered around the place openly taking notes in a reporters’ notebook. For a few hours, no-one seemed to be bothered that I was there watching things unfold. It was only when someone recognised me from my Twitter profile picture that things got unfriendly.

An older crusty, who called himself Phoenix and had been directing the other activists, came over to me and said: ‘Someone’s told me you write things for the Daily Mail.’

‘That’s right,’ I answered. ‘Well, for the MailOnline. But I’m not here for them. I’m here for myself.

‘In fact, maybe you can help. I’d quite like to speak to someone about why you’ve squatted this place.’

He wasn’t keen to help. Instead, he insisted I leave. My requests for someone to talk to about politics were answered with a post-it note on which someone had written a press office number.

‘I think it’s time for you to leave,’ he said. ‘We had a press conference earlier. Now we don’t want to be in press mode.’

Again I tried to explain to him that I wasn’t there on my bosses’ behalf, but he didn’t want to hear it. I said that instead of speaking to someone, I would be happy instead to just soak up the atmosphere until they all wanted to go to bed. Although he was friendly(-ish), Phoenix made it clear that he didn’t want me to stay, although it was hours before they were due to shut things up for the night.

Perhaps their hostility was understandable, given the less than positive pieces some of my colleagues have written about the Occupy LSX camp outside St Pauls. But it pissed me off, still. Their response to me as a journalist stank of double standards. The Occupy protests are demanding – among other things – greater scrutiny of City institutions. But, it seems, they are not so keen on being scrutinised themselves.

Don’t get me wrong. I support the Occupy camps in London. I’m glad that people are willing to take a stand against the City institutions that have dragged us into recession. But in order to represent the 99 per cent of the people, they have to be open to the people – and that includes journalists, of whatever stripe. If they are not open to the public, the only people they represent are themselves.

If they want to tightly manage their press coverage, then they are really no better than any other special interest group. To try to fob me off with a press office number makes them no better than a stonewalling cop. At the nub of it is the question of whether these activists are really revolutionaries, or just reactionaries.

The reactionary response to finding out a reporter from the corporate media is in your midst is to kick them out. The revolutionary response would be to welcome them, to talk to them, to bring them over to your side.

Another thing that left me feeling distinctly jaded was that one person who was playing a major role in the organisation of the squat asked me for crack cocaine.

This pissed me off on two levels. First because I fucking HATE crack and crackheads. And secondly that someone thought because I am black and wear a baseball cap and trainers that I am likely to be carrying that kind of shit. I still support the protests, but I hope there are some Occupy LSX people who find this blog post and read it. And comment.

Originally published on Damien Gayle’s Blog