Party at the Pumps 2
A couple of years (or even a year) ago, I would never have dreamed that I would have taken over the forecourt of a petrol station, dancing to samba as the police looked on. To year-ago me, it would have seemed a bit: mad, hippy, reckless, stupid, pointless, illegal (delete as appropriate).
What made me change my mind, and what made me get involved with groups such as the UK Tar Sands Network which facilitated the recent Party at the Pumps actions? Well, it was a few things. Over the past few months I’ve been privileged to meet those from first nations communities who are being affected by the tar sands in Alberta, Canada – dubbed the most destructive project on earth. The tar sands are destroying their lands, their way of life, contaminating the water and food so much that cancer rates have been found to be 30% higher than expected. So many people from these communities are dying that they no longer call the tar sands a “dirty oil” project, they call it “bloody oil”.
One Year On: Ian Tomlinson Still No Justice
Sgt Delroy Smellie leaving court after being acquitted. Image: Daily Mirror
Today is the year anniversary of the death of Ian Tomlinson, his bereaved family like many others have been misled and discouraged from speaking by the police. Though there has been intense media coverage on this event, and it involves another territorial support group (TSG) officer, to date, the family are still awaiting justice.
On April 1st, 2009, I with 6 others and later thousands made our way to the City of London to demonstrate for people and the planet in response to the G20 meeting in London. Our slogan was “Nature Doesn’t Do Bail-Outs”, we going as prisoners of hope, believing with deep conviction, the unbelievable; that a rag-tag group of activists and students could make a difference on the international stage. Little did we know the cost it would take and what changes were before us.
Us and Them
A year ago today Ian Tomlinson died. He was the latest in a long line of people who have died at the hands of the police. Also on that day hundreds of people were assaulted by police using batons and shields, and thousands were denied the right to move around their city and forced into ‘kettles’, again this is part of very long history of police activity that shows that the attitude of police is not that they are their to uphold the law, but that they ARE the law, and the people are, albeit to varying degrees, outside it.
At a vigil for Ian Tomlinson the next day a video camera caught an incident in which Sgt Delroy Smellie slapped and then hit a young woman with a baton, so far he has been the only police officer to face charges, yesterday he was acquitted of assault, Judge Wickham said: “I am satisfied he honestly believed it was necessary to use force to defend himself.”. In a way the acquittal of Sgt Smellie was correct – the police as a group are taught to fear everyone in these kind of situations and to expect the worst, they are given the tools to deal with this (physical, psychological and legal) and, unsurprisingly, they use them.
Thoughts from the BA Cabin Crew Strike Picket Line
From The Third Estate
Yesterday I went down again to the Heathrow picket lines, to see how the strike is developing, and also to check out the new community garden squatted by Sipson residents and activists.
Last time I didn’t write about my journey down there. (Quick tangent: a crack-of-dawn piccadilly line farce complete with hundreds of tourists, Japanese cameras, garbled German, a replacement bus and a fortuitous chat with a CWU rep on his way to Belfast.)
This time, I arrived at the far more civilised time of midday. As I got out at Hatton Cross station, there was the same picket line with its mandatory 14 picketers. Even though this had been designated by Unite as ‘family day’ (yesterday was ‘International Solidarity Day’) there was still a limited number of supporters, this time the lone child on the side of the motorway with her Unite flag, cheering at honking cars, seemed a dismal response to such an awesomely effective strike.
Give up politics and start changing things instead
This is a guest post by James Holland, a climate camp and a local community activist.
Please add your thoughts below and join the debate.
People who want to make the world a better place usually start with the big things – war, poverty, climate change etc and they usually look to make changes on a national and global level, because surely you can have more impact more quickly that way?
But I want to convince you that in fact you change more by working on apparently very small and local issues. ‘Politics’ as it is, is simply too remote and too conservative, you could spend your whole life lobbying governments and international organisations and get absolutely nowhere, but a few days working to help local people stop their school being closed or even just making sure that someone unfairly denied benefits gets what they’re entitled to could have a much greater effect. This is because in addition to directly helping those specific people the more we give people hope that sticking together and solving our own problems actually works, the more people will have the confidence to try it. In short working on small local stuff is a virtuous cycle of empowerment and small victories, whereas the opposite is true of ‘politics’ where even success can mean that people as a whole feel less able to do things for themselves.
What is Democracy: a Climate Camp POV
Liam Taylor’s speech on radical democracy from last week’s Compass Annual Conference.
I must admit that I feel like something of an anomaly at this conference. Before coming here today I looked on the Compass website at the impressive list of speakers that are here: people from think tanks, from policy institutes, from NGOs, journalists, elected politicians. In other words, people who might be considered ‘experts’, people who do politics for their day job.
And I want to begin by immediately renouncing any claims to such expertise on my part. I probably know less about some of these issues than anybody else in this room. I don’t spend my days reading policy papers for a living; instead, I spend my days teaching secondary schoolchildren in east London. But I think the fact that I am here, and that my presence here feels slightly anomalous, tells us something interesting about politics, and in particular the way that our politics has become increasingly professionalized. That, I think, is a problem – and it goes to the heart of our thinking about radical democracy in this discussion here today.
Climate Camp, I want to suggest, is the antithesis of professionalized politics. We are not an NGO, with a full-time staff; we are not a political party, with appointed leaders. We are a group of ordinary people, from all walks of life, who have come together because of our shared concern about climate change, and our desire to do something about it. Each year, we set up a week-long camp next to one of the root causes of climate change, from power stations to airports, culminating in some form of direct action. In the past we’ve camped outside Drax coal-fired power station; outside Heathrow airport; and, last year, outside the coal-fired power station at Kingsnorth in Kent. Most recently, on 1 April, thousands of people converged on Bishospgate in the City of London for a day-long camp outside the European Climate Exchange, the world’s largest carbon trading centre. It’s not just about protest: it’s about building our little vision of the future, in the here and now, a vision which we develop through workshops and education, through sustainable living, and through the day-to-day practices of direct democracy.
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