CC licensed image by David Shankbone

The phone hacking scandal in the UK is moving quickly. Senior media and police resign, and the storm starts gathering around Downing Street. The immorality of the gutter press is shocking but unsurprising; their illegal dealings with the police is likewise no news to anyone half-awake. The fact that it’s all been aired in public at last, with some genuine repercussions, seems astonishing. What’s happening seems somehow far more important than a general election in terms of shaping the political landscape of this country.

But John Pilger reminds us that a far greater Murdoch scandal remains mostly hidden Down Under:

The most enduring and insidious Murdoch campaign has been against the Aboriginal people, who were dispossessed by the arrival of the British in the late 18th century and have never been allowed to recover. “Nigger hunts” continued into the 1960s and beyond. The officially-inspired theft of children from Aboriginal families, justified by the racist theories of the eugenics movement, produced those known as the Stolen Generation and in 1997 was identified as genocide. Today, the first Australians have the shortest life expectancy of any of the world’s 90 indigenous peoples. Australia imprisons Aborigines at five times the rate South Africa during the apartheid years. In the state of Western Australia, the figure is eight times the apartheid rate.

Political power in Australia often rests in the control of resource-rich land. Most of the uranium, iron ore, gold, oil and natural gas is in Western Australia and Northern Territory—on Aboriginal land. Indeed, Aboriginal “progress” is all but defined by the mining industry and its political guardians in both Labor and coalition (conservative) governments. Their faithful, strident voice is the Murdoch press. The exceptional, reformist Labor government of Gough Whitlam in the 1970s set up a royal commission that made clear that social justice for Australia’s first people would only be achieved with universal land rights and a share the national wealth with dignity. In 1975, Whitlam was sacked by the governor-general in a “constitutional coup”. The Murdoch press had turned on Whitlam with such venom that rebellious journalists on The Australian burned their newspaper in the street. [...]

Using the language of its soulmate the London Sun, the Australian derides the “abstract debate” of “land rights, apologies, treaties” as a “moralizing mumbo-jumbo spreading like a virus”. The aim is to silence those who dare tell Australia’s dirty secret.

Read the full article here.

Firstly, George Monbiot’s ‘The Real Domestic Extremists’ is important because it reveals the disturbing backdrop to this sorry saga.

The National Public Order Intelligence Unit (NPOIU) employed the undercover officer Mark Kennedy, who was embedded and bedded for seven years among peaceful green activists. Kennedy claims that it has supervised 15 other undercover agents on the same mission. But what is the mission? Sorry, can’t tell you. NPOIU is run by the Association of Chief Police Officers. As Simon Jenkins pointed out last week, ACPO is not a police force but a private limited company, beyond democratic scrutiny, not subject to freedom of information laws. (Read more »)

Secondly, anyone who’s followed the debate around this story will no doubt have heard someone (perhaps themselves) justifying the Mark Kennedy’s “mission” on the grounds that the people he was spying on were planning to shut down a power station—surely a grossly dangerous act that should indeed be treated as terrorism. Merrick’s ‘Lock Up Your Grannies’ demonstrates this argument to be high-grade bullshit, still being peddled by ACPO and anyone else irrationally desperate to demonize people fighting for society’s future.

Being smart human beings, the activists knew full well that the way the National Grid works “meant that there was no chance of anyone’s electricity supply being disrupted. Rather, it meant cleaner-burning gas stations would come onstream.” The judge sentencing them said:

It is right to emphasise that this the planned action would have had no practical effect on the electricity supply … It was your intention that this invasion would have been peaceable and safe. Violence was to be avoided, and the safety of the workers at the power station was paramount. You were fully equipped to carry out your roles safely.

But yesterday, ACPO spokesman Jon Murphy said that some of the people they were monitoring

are intent on causing harm, committing crime and on occasions disabling parts of the national critical infrastructure. That has the potential to deny utilities to hospitals, schools, businesses and your granny. [My emphasis; but you get the impression that it may as well have been his, in a stern, patronizing tone.]

As one of the activist defendants said:

I find it deeply disturbing that a senior police officer with a responsibility for the country’s national security doesn’t seem to comprehend how his own National Grid works.

Firstly, Jim Bliss has an excellent piece on the absolute culpability of the media in how the relatively minor violent aspects of protests derail the event and its impact in popular consciousness.

Secondly, it seems that the police have succeeded in taking down a site that offered advice to the many who were arrested during that demo. Merrick has explained the situation on his blog, and has joined a number of people reprinting the advice, both to keep it available on the web, and to show solidarity with the protestors. Personally, without the people willing to take to the streets, the near future looks much glummer than it need be. Here is Merrick’s explanation and the original advice:

The trashing of Conservative Party HQ during a student demo last week took a lot of people by surprise, not just the police and public but many of the participants.

Many of them had never done anything like it before. As such, they are largely identifable on the footage, and police have been arresting many.

FITwatch—a site that campaigns about police repression of protest, especially throught the use of Forward Intelligence Teams who film and photograph everything—published some advice to protesters.

The police responded by making the webhost take the FITwatch site down for a year. FITwatch nonetheless remain committed to their work.

In defiance of this censorship, and also to assist with the prevention of people who’d only trashed property from getting arrested, the offending post has been republished all over the internet. The more places do it, the more likeoly it is that the Met will give up and leave it be.

So here it is. If you think it should be in the public domain, please republish it on blogs and message boards.

The remarkable and brilliant student action at [Conservative Party headquarters] Millbank has produced some predictable frothing at the mouth from the establishment and right wing press. Cameron has called for the ‘full weight of the law’ to fall on those who had caused tens of thousands of pounds of damage to the expensive decor at Tory party HQ. Responsibility is being placed on ‘a violent faction’, after the march was ‘infiltrated’ by anarchists.

There are an encouraging number of intiatives to show solidarity with the arrested students – something that is vital if they are to avoid the sort of punitive ‘deterrent’ sentences handed out to the Gaza demonstrators. A legal support group has been established and the National Campaign against Cuts and Fees has started a support campaign. Goldsmiths lecturers union has publicly commended the students for a ‘magnificent demonstration’ .

This is all much needed, as the establishment is clearly on the march with this one. The Torygraph has published an irresponsible and frenzied ‘shop-a-student’ piece and the Met are clearly under pressure to produce ‘results’ after what they have admitted was a policing ‘embarrassment’.

51 people have been arrested so far, and the police have claimed they took the details of a further 250 people in the kettle using powers under the Police Reform Act. There may be more arrests to come.

Students who are worried should consider taking the following actions:

If you have been arrested, or had your details taken – contact the legal support campaign. As a group you can support each other, and mount a coherent campaign.

If you fear you may be arrested as a result of identification by CCTV, FIT or press photography;

DONT panic. Press photos are not necessarily conclusive evidence, and just because the police have a photo of you doesn’t mean they know who you are.

DONT hand yourself in. The police often use the psychological pressure of knowing they have your picture to persuade you to ‘come forward’. Unless you have a very pressing reason to do otherwise, let them come and find you, if they know who you are.

DO get rid of your clothes. There is no chance of suggesting the bloke in the video is not you if the clothes he is wearing have been found in your wardrobe. Get rid of ALL clothes you were wearing at the demo, including YOUR SHOES, your bag, and any distinctive jewellery you were wearing at the time. Yes, this is difficult, especially if it is your only warm coat or decent pair of boots. But it will be harder still if finding these clothes in your flat gets you convicted of violent disorder.

DONT assume that because you can identify yourself in a video, a judge will be able to as well. ‘That isn’t me’ has got many a person off before now.

DO keep away from other demos for a while. The police will be on the look-out at other demos, especially student ones, for people they have put on their ‘wanted’ list. Keep a low profile.

DO think about changing your appearance. Perhaps now is a good time for a make-over. Get a haircut and colour, grow a beard, wear glasses. It isn’t a guarantee, but may help throw them off the scent.

DO keep your house clean. Get rid of spray cans, demo related stuff, and dodgy texts / photos on your phone. Don’t make life easy for them by having drugs, weapons or anything illegal in the house.

DO get the name and number of a good lawyer you can call if things go badly. The support group has the names of recommended lawyers on their site. Take a bit of time to read up on your rights in custody, especially the benefits of not commenting in interview.

DO be careful who you speak about this to. Admit your involvement in criminal damage / disorder ONLY to people you really trust.

DO try and control the nerves and panic. Waiting for a knock on the door is stressful in the extreme, but you need to find a way to get on with business as normal.

Otherwise you’ll be serving the sentence before you are even arrested.

(Transcript here.)

When he first posted about it, someone piped up with concerns about Merrick’s tone.

The third question regards the (to me) overly aggressive attitude you took whilst you were talking about the Liberal Democrats. I was wondering how you thought it would come across to the general population of the UK? I compare this to the amiable way that Nick Clegg spoke after you.

Our culture’s gone through many cycles of upheaval, greater and lesser anger against the State and the failings of our elected representatives (and the lack of real alternative offered by their rivals). Direct action seeped into mainstream consciousness in the 1990s, mainly through environmental activism such as anti-road and anti-GM protests.

As the scientific evidence of the seriousness of our ecological blundering mounted, and the blundering continued apace, many assumed that the (supposedly) incoherent, “angry” approach to political action had failed. Corporations and the bland public reality they’ve created dominate, so the only game left is to work from within, they said. It’s the “smart” way forward; ranting from the sidelines simply engenders conflict and stand-offs, and doesn’t win over the public at large. People like “nice”, so that’s what we need to give them if we want to win them over.

There’s rarely a day goes by now that doesn’t show this attitude to be a load of shit. Of course, any intelligent person recognizes the value of tactics. However, I question the automatic association of anger with incoherence. I think this is a legacy of a culture—and I’m especially talking about my own country here, England—that seems constitutionally uncomfortable with strong human emotions. We lose coherence when angry because we’re entering alien territory, natural emotional landscapes that we’ve been alienated from.

Hatred, as Primal Scream said, will eat you whole, and has to be let go of. But all too often, in therapy, politics, and society in general, we confuse these twisted emotional brambles with the healthy shoots of anger. Our lack of emotional literacy leaves us prey to those who want us to “let go”, when actually they’re talking about repressing.

Merrick got quite a few boos at Glastonbury. The commenter on his blog took this as an indication that, if even such a left-leaning audience as Glastonbury Festival booed, the public at large would react badly to the anger expressed at the Lib Dem’s failure to offer a real alternative. Therefore, we should tone down our anger, and be more “amiable”, like Clegg. Better still, we could “let go” of our anger…

If you’re not angry—at least sometimes—at 99% of politicians today, you’re blind or numb, or both. And if you think the way forward is to publically make our emotions conform to the flattened landscape that is preferred by politics and corporations, where most of us are forced to live much of the time, you’re wrong. This public landscape, where spontaneous emotion is distrusted, and emotion and intelligence are forced apart, is the medium through which our catastrophic disconnection from nature and each other is expressed.

Anger isn’t a “solution”, and focused on to the exclusion of joy, sadness, compassion, and the rest of the spectrum (a reasonable working definition of “hate”), it can become as much of a distortion of humanity as its repression. But it’s precisely the amiable fuzziness, the tactical avoidance of anything uncomfortable or unseemly, of people like Clegg that has us continuing our trajectory towards ecological collapse.

The apocalypse is enabled with a whimper, not a bang.

Having got past the initial juvenile—and cripplingly funny—bout of gangsta-rap parody, Merricks still fears he “may never blog in another format ever again”. But with gems like the one I’ve embedded below, mercilessly nailing the woeful orgy of confused stupidity that was the European elections—is this such a bad thing?

While you’re at it, do read his take on the MP expenses row. Has there been a more just and rational solution to the second home issue than making MPs eligible for Housing Benefit? I think not.

From indefatigable comedian and activist Mark Thomas, an impassioned rant against “neo-liberal capitalism” given at the Put People First G20 rally in Hyde Park, London, 28/3/09:

And a more in-depth, though equally passionate call for the decentralization of currency from media theorist Douglas Rushkoff, given at the Web 2.0 Expo, San Francisco, 2/4/09:

In the wake of his splendid Black Sheep album, inspired by the Clash’s 1986 busking tour, Julian Cope’s undertaking a brief, bold tour around England this week. Starting at 10am tomorrow, Monday 27th October, at the ancient law hill Swanborough Tump in the Vale of Pewsey, it sweeps through a fascinating array of landmarks in the history of British protest, ending at the C.G. Jung statue in Liverpool at the end of Wednesday.

There’s a list of days and locations; times for each performance are being left rough, ready and open. Pull a sickie and catch one.

Still, this is just the beginning. As George Monbiot highlights, the economic crash is merely a prelude to the coming ecological crash. Our relief at apparently heading back for business-almost-as-usual may last long enough for us to deny the onset of that, too:

As we goggle at the fluttering financial figures, a different set of numbers passes us by. On Friday, Pavan Sukhdev, the Deutsche Bank economist leading a European study on ecosystems, reported that we are losing natural capital worth between $2 trillion and $5 trillion every year, as a result of deforestation alone. The losses incurred so far by the financial sector amount to between $1 trillion and $1.5 trillion. [...] The two crises have the same cause. In both cases, those who exploit the resource have demanded impossible rates of return and invoked debts that can never be repaid. In both cases we denied the likely consequences. I used to believe that collective denial was peculiar to climate change. Now I know that it’s the first response to every impending dislocation.

And glancing through the rest of the article, I fear the government’s tough policy on cannabis may be failing miserably. Surely only habitual skunk use on a previously unimagined scale could account for such sort-term memory loss? I guess they’re quietly turning a blind eye. After all, how else could we champion Gordon Brown as a stolid, reliable saviour?

I congratulate you Lord Mayor and the City of London on these remarkable achievements, an era that history will record as the beginning of a new golden age for the City of London.

And I believe the lesson we learn from the success of the City has ramifications far beyond the City itself—that we are leading because we are first in putting to work exactly that set of qualities that is needed for global success:

• openness to the world and global reach,
• pioneers of free trade and its leading defenders,
• with a deep and abiding belief in open markets,
• [...]

And I believe it will be said of this age, the first decades of the 21st century, that out of the greatest restructuring of the global economy, perhaps even greater than the industrial revolution, a new world order was created.

[...]

So let me say as I begin my new job, I want to continue to work with you in helping you do yours, listening to what you say, always recognising your international success is critical to that of Britain’s overall and considering together the things that we must do—and, just as important, things we should not do—to maintain our competitiveness:

• enhancing a risk based regulatory approach, as we did in resisting pressure for a British Sarbannes-Oxley after Enron and Worldcom,

Speech by the Chancellor of the Exchequer, the Rt Hon Gordon Brown MP, to Mansion House, 20/6/07

[...] in budget after budget I want us to do even more to encourage the risk takers, those with ambition, to turn their ideas into reality and make the most of their talents.

Speech by the Chancellor of the Exchequer, the Rt Hon Gordon Brown MP, to Mansion House, 16/6/04

Of course, no surprises. He was doing what seemed politically expedient. Just as he—and every other politician—is doing now. Throwing money at a creaking system to prop it up, hoping desperately the lynch mob won’t be able to track them down when it crashes even harder.

Former police chief constable David Blakey, of the UK Drug Policy Commission, said enforcement agencies tended to be judged by the amount they had managed to capture.

“This is a pity as it is very difficult to show that increasing drug seizures actually leads to less drug-related harm,” he added.

But he later said asking whether the money spent on enforcement was wasted was “more of a moot question”.

“This is against the law and the law needs to be enforced so whether or not we are actually driving drugs down and making drugs disappear – which I think would be asking too much of any country – there is an element of law enforcement which should and must continue,” he told the BBC.

Don’t try to follow the logic here too closely—this kind of insanity can be contagious.