LENIN'S TOMB

Sunday, August 07, 2011

The plot thickens. posted by Richard Seymour

"Initial ballistics tests on the bullet that lodged in a police officer's radio when Mark Duggan died on Thursday night show it was a police issue bullet..."

Labels: enfield, mark duggan, metropolitian police, murder, police brutality, police shooting, riots, tottenham

Enfield not calling posted by Richard Seymour

Just to make this absolutely clear. There have been mass arrests in Enfield. But the rumours that were spread on Twitter, and apparently repeated at the Telegraph, of riots beginning in Enfield Town are absolutely untrue. I visited the town centre this afternoon to pick up some shopping, and saw none of the damage or violence people referred to. The falsehoods being put about include the idea that Enfield Town library is on fire. It's completely untrue. What I saw was a phalanx of police vans, and a large number of arrests taking place such as this one. The police are not arresting people because they've done anything, but because of what they were alleged to be intent on doing.

Specifically, police and local media claim that a large number of kids from outside the area had come in after rumours on social media indicating that there would be a riot. Shops were being closed down in anticipation of violence, apparently on the advice of police. I was told by shopkeepers and security that about 200 young people had been arrested this afternoon. (This was about 3.45pm). For its part, the Enfield Independent claims (at about 5.45pm) that police are targeting around 100 young people who have gathered around the train station in small groups of four or five, wearing hoods. (For what it's worth, none of the people whom I saw being arrested were wearing hoods - as if that's against the law now. They were just boys dressed normally.)

Frankly, I don't find the Independent's story entirely credible. First because 100 people gathered around the train station would be very conspicuous - it's a tiny area - and breaking off into groups of four and five would be pointless. Second because if the area around the train station is extended to include the contiguous promenade of shops and the abutting roads and footpaths, then it's normally a well populated area with lots of young people about. It's an assumption on their part that these were troublemakers. Third because this paper is well known for scaremongering, and has been supporting the campaign by local Tory MPs Nick de Bois and David Burrowes to lower the age at which young boys can be jailed for violent offenses. (By the by, it's also a scab newspaper, as management worked flat out to break a recent NUJ reporters' strike.) It's just possible that the perceptions of whoever is manning the local rag's office have been shaped by the hysteria of police and local businesses.

At any rate, there is no evidence of anyone seeking to cause any kind of trouble in Enfield Town (except for these guys). There is only evidence of provocative behaviour by the police. People keep trying to justify this as a necessary preemptive step against further riots. A far better way to prevent further riots would be to stop shooting people, don't beat up sixteen year old girls, and stop aggravating citizens with provocative bullshit.

Update: Well, there wasn't trouble before. There is now.

Labels: enfield, metropolitian police, police, police brutality, riots, tottenham

Police started the riots posted by Richard Seymour

An eyewitness says the riots began after a 16 year old girl approached police lines and was attacked by riot cops with batons:

Labels: austerity, metropolitian police, police brutality, policing the crisis, racism, riots, tories

Tottenham calling posted by Richard Seymour

The Metropolitan Police shot dead a young man named Mark Duggan in Tottenham on Thursday. As soon as the news emerged, albeit in the rather coy presentation of the television media, it was obvious that something would kick off. The circumstances of the killing are not entirely clear. It is known that the police were from an Operation Trident unit, which deals with gun crime 'in the black community' (because black people need extra special policing, you know). It is known that they pursued Mark Duggan while he was a passenger in a cab, stopped the cab and, during the arrest, shot him dead on the scene. From what I can gather, they seem to have pulled him out of the cab and shot him four times on the spot.

The police seem to have let it be known that they were shot at first, and that a police officer was injured. The impression was thus given in the early media reports that they killed the young man in self-defence. Whatever the officer's injury, he was only kept in hospital overnight. Later, the police claimed that the bullet miraculously struck the officer's police radio which, like a bible or a piece of the true cross, absorbed the shot. They say that in the seconds following this they opened fire in self-defence. An eyewitness, however, claimed that the young man was already restrained on the ground when the shots were fired. If true, this would bear the hallmarks of an extra-legal execution. Suffice to say, anyone who takes the police's version of events at face value at this point must either be a fool, or enjoy being made a fool of.

In Tottenham today, a group of local residents set out to march in anger against the killing. The police allege that 'clashes' began when some marchers threw missiles at cop cars. For what it's worth, some of those present appear to believe these cars were left there as bait. However it began, though, it has certainly become a riot. This is not just a black community response to racist policing - several reports say that local Hasidic Jews have joined the protesters in force. Police cars have been set on fire. Numerous Twitter reports from people at the scene say the high street cop station itself is ablaze, though I have not yet seen this mentioned on the news. Buses are ablaze, as are shops and banks. Eyewitnesses say that locals have set up burning barricades to stop the police from advancing. This has posed a serious problem for riot cops attempting to charge at the crowds on horseback, as the horses can't penetrate the barriers. Meanwhile, the police's own attempt at setting up roadblocks have apparently faced difficulties as one roadblock south of the cop shop was 'taken out'. There are reports of the crowd being 'on the offensive'. But, importantly, the police have manpower, technology, and the advantage of having fully expected this to happen. They may well have lost control, especially as the protests appear to have swollen throughout the evening, but it would short-sighted not to anticipate a sophisticated operation to trap the main body of protesters.

There are rumours - just rumours for now - of deaths at the riots already. Frankly, I think we would have heard a bit more detail if that was true. But given that the police are sending dozens of vans full of riot squad to the scene, and given that at least one was witnessed speeding toward the riot with 'Knight Rider' music playing at top volume, I would not rule out the possibility of another killing. There are also rumours, which BBC Radio 5 Live appears to have fuelled, that riots have also spread to Brixton, Peckham and Croydon. I have seen no confirmation of this anywhere. And in fact, the overall thrust of the BBC's approach has been to play down the 'disturbances' and abort coverage for some stirring patriotic insight into Britain's Olympic aspirations. "Keep Calm and Carry On", as the irritatingly smug, not-quite-ironic, retro poster has it.

Tottenham is ablaze. Not for the first time in its history. Not for the first time over police violence and killing either. But nor is this is the first major riot since the Tories took office. It may well be the first to make a serious impact on national politics, but remember the riots in Bristol and Lewisham. The party of order expected this. That is why the police handling of protests has been so provocative and brutal. That is why 'exemplary' sentences have been handed out for minor protest offenses, with even Murdoch's pie-man being given a custodial sentence. The intention has been to show that the party of order can keep control throughout the coming battles. I hope, with every fibre in my being, that they cannot.

Labels: austerity, metropolitian police, police brutality, police shooting, protest, riots, tories, tottenham

Friday, July 22, 2011

Ruling Britannia II posted by Richard Seymour

Well, since you ask, the ruling class in the UK has been estimated to comprise about 0.1% of the adult population - at the time of this estimate (1991), this would have been 43,500 people. That is the number of people who would both form part of the capitalist class, and rule politically. Today, if the same proportions held, the ruling class would comprise about 50,000 people. However, a caveat. Quantifying the ruling class in this way can be useful for social imaging, but such figures should be taken with a pinch of salt. The ruling class should be understood not first as a quantity, but as a relation. And since those relations are in constant flux, constantly needing to be produced and reproduced, and since capital (and political power) tends to be progressively concentrated among smaller numbers of people, there will be a tendency for the ruling class to shrink relative to the population. At any rate, no such quantity is stable.

Further, in addition to the capitalist class itself, there is a bourgeois penumbra, a set of institutions and agents who rule alongside and on behalf of the capitalist class and whose social power is derivative of the capitalist class - these elites are particularly concentrated in the state. Which brings us back to the point I left you with yesterday, namely that a ruling class is such when it commandeers the state - it must not merely hold wealth but rule politically by virtue of that wealth, and the most important strategic space within which political antagonisms are resolved is in the national state. In the historic development of capitalist social relations, the emergence of a distinctly capitalist ruling class results in a distinctly capitalist form of state power. Robin Blackburn, in the discussion of Hanoverian Britain in The Overthrow of Colonial Slavery, describes how after the 'Glorious Revolution' of 1688 the new political arrangements favoured the direct rule of capital, inasmuch as a monarch with weak legitimacy allowed the propertied oligarchy to be assertive of its interests in parliament, while dominating most state posts at a local as well as national level - as County Commissioners, Lords Lieutenant, or Justices of the Peace, as well as MPs. Highly lucrative public offices - such as the Bank of England and chartered companies - were held as private property. As statesmen, they established corporations; as corporate members, they profited from the enterprise. As MPs they legislated; as Justices of the Peace they interpreted the law. Blackburn points out that this system, with its narrow franchise and rotten boroughs, represented bourgeois rule at an immature stage. As a result of this immaturity, the British capitalist state then had to proceed through centuries of struggle and adaptation, incorporating a franchise for the middle class, then working class men, then women, while also incorporating some popular demands in the form of social democracy. But the major offices of the state, its laws, its apparatus and its division of labour (social as well as technical) were elaborated under bourgeois domination, thus giving us a concrete example of how a state becomes 'impregnated' (in Therborn's phrase) with the drives of a particular social class, the capitalist class, allowing that class to rule politically.

So, this brings us to the role of the police, whose relationship to News International becomes all the more understandable once the former's role is better understood. This relationship included not merely the bribing of junior to middle rank police officers, and not merely wining and dining of senior officers, but the constant circulation of personnel between News International and the Met. There was a confluence of interests and a concert of actions. For example, when the police murdered Jean Charles de Menezes, it was the newspapers, particularly News International that they turned to to vilify the dead man. Lo and behold, we discover that News International was hacking the phone belonging to Menezes' cousin. And the favours were returned. The police not only failed to properly investigate News International's phone hacking when it was revealed, but actively applied pressure on the competition not to pursue the case. To say that this relationship facilitated a criminal conspiracy may be an understatement - when all the facts are out, it may prove more accurate to say that it was a criminal conspiracy.

But why should the police force be so available for corruption in tandem with the reactionary press? To answer this, it is important not to start with too much of a 'police' conception of the police. They are not merely a repressive apparatus. Nicos Poulantzas points out (State, Power, Socialism) that even ‘mainly’ repressive apparatuses such as the army, police, courts, prisons etc., all produce the ideological bases of capitalism. The distinction between the repressive and ideological apparatuses can thus only function at a purely indicative level. To insist on a strict division of labour along these lines leads to a mistaken conception of the state, in which it secures acquiescence either by means of coercion or through 'false consciousness', ignoring the fact that the state must produce a material substratum for consensus, organising aspects of productive relations in such a way as to generate consent. There is a tendency to see the state's role as extrinsic to the economy, as merely the guarantor of an autonomous, self-sufficient capitalist economy. This depends on a certain mechanistic 'base-superstructure' model of the relation of political structures to the economy. It would be more accurate to say that the state constitutes the economy in various ways, in that it condenses, concentrates, organizes and materializes the politico-ideological relations that are already inherent in the relations of production. The police, by upholding the system's political and legal relations, assist in the reproduction of its productive relations; at the same time, by punishing transgressions (and normally issuing statements explaining the normative basis for such punishment), they assist in the moralization and legitimation of the same productive relations.

Let's take a concrete example. The police are aware of a protest that is due to take place in Whitehall. They anticipate what they would term serious violence and disorder. Part of the reason is that this protest is organised by people who challenge the existing social-property relations, and the police consider any attempt to seriously realise such a challenge, however peaceable and democratic, an affront to their authority. Anyway, they coordinate a set of responses intended to bring the protest under tight spatial and physical control, until it can be dispersed. But those responses are not merely technological and technocratic. They proceed in a very ideologically sensitive manner, careful to produce the political-ideological pretext for each move they make. Even if this involves nothing more than arresting many people on trumped up charges, the very fact of people having been arrested will certainly be presented in the media as evidence of serious disorder and violence, because the media automatically accept the legitimacy and validity of police claims until such time as they are rendered ridiculous - and sometimes not even then. That is, the police don't merely exercise a part of the state's monopoly of legitimate violence; they are the authoritative moral arbiter. And it is only because they are such that their highly ideological, politicised action is treated as neutral.

We proceed with the example. The police use a repertoire of violence to coerce and contain the protesters - punches, slaps, baton strikes, mounted charges - and finish the day by isolating a manageable number of protesters and kettling them in a space so confined as to be physically dangerous for a prolonged period of time. The explicit reasoning is that they are being held to prevent a breach of the peace, and that their detention will last no longer than is necessary to assure a peaceful dispersal. But this, of course, is an intensely ideological depiction of affairs, and requires a great deal of ideological preparation and foregrounding for its conduct to be coherent. Certain things must be automatically airbrushed or discounted for. Hence, the media, and especially the most right-wing and authoritarian tabloids, will be a natural ally in this process, particularly in the subsequent witch hunts. At every step here, the police have conducted a series of movements along various dimensions - political, ideological, legal, economic, etc - which isn't reducible to the forms of repression deployed. Even in its repressive moment, the state is enacting ideology - because ideology is not just a field of representation, but precisely a set of material practises, customs, lifestyle etc. When the police punish individuals (and, relevantly, fail to punish others), they contribute to these practises.

So, what is left that is mysterious about the relationship between the police and the media? Yesterday, I said that the capitalist media operates in a specific vector of class power concerned with the reproduction of ideas and images and that its relationship with politicians was thus very natural as the latter also play a key role in the reproduction of ideology. The capitalist media's ability to reproduce the dominant ideas and images in society is expressive of the dominance of capital in and over society. If the state, as we have also said, concretises social relations, then the police in a capitalist state concretise the political and ideological dominance of the capitalist class. Nothing is more logical than an alliance of mutual dependence between a sector of capitalist class power that is ideologically dominant, and a sector of state power that materializes that ideological domination in its day to day practises. Such an alliance, even a corrupt or criminal one, merely formalizes the implicit systemic co-dependence of the two. The fact that it took the form of this kind of criminal conspiracy owes itself to more concrete determinations than we have discussed here - the specific history of the Metropolitan Police, the evolution of the Murdoch empire, the accumulated outcomes of past struggles, the politics of the modern Conservative and Labour parties, and so on. But those will have to be followed up tomorrow.

Labels: capitalist ideology, media, metropolitian police, new labour, police brutality, propaganda, ruling class, rupert murdoch, tories

Tuesday, July 19, 2011

Police and thieves posted by Richard Seymour

The big story of the parliamentary inquiries, I suspect, will not be the Murdochs squirming. It will be the appearance of senior police officers and News International employees who are much more directly exposed in all this. There is something symmetrical and appropriate about the criminal relationship between the police and the corporate media. Is it that both are so innately venal and reactionary from top to bottom that it's hard to tell who is corrupting whom? Is it that the power of both has been sharply enhanced in the era since 1979? Or is it just that they complement one another in the respective forms of politicised class power that they wield? Could it be that, as an ideological power, the Murdoch press took it upon itself to engage in moralised coercion? Or that, as a coercive power, the police and criminal justice system have a clear moral and ideological function - think of the student protests, or 'black on black violence', the Islamophobic crackdowns, and all the way back to the suffragettes, etc.? Is it that when the police wanted to target someone their evidence can't touch, they turn to the tabloids (remember News of the World's claims about the Koyair brothers); and when News International wanted to get an enemy (Sheridan) they turned to the police? At any rate, as the scandal rolls on menacingly toward the Prime Minister, claiming scalps along the way, there is an opportunity to look into the usually opaque and secretive world of the ruling class, its forms of cohesion and coordination and, particularly, its ability to impregnate the state with its imperatives and priorities. So, that's what we'll be doing all week at the Tomb. Stay tuned.

Labels: british state, capitalist ideology, corruption, david cameron, media, metropolitian police, news of the world, propaganda, ruling class, tories

Monday, July 18, 2011

News of the World whistleblower is dead posted by Richard Seymour

The unexplained death of key whistleblower Sean Hoare is not considered suspicious. By police. That is all.

Labels: gangsters, media, metropolitian police, news of the world, police, ruling class, rupert murdoch

Sunday, July 17, 2011

The heads keep rolling posted by Richard Seymour

None of the Murdoch clan have gone yet, but look at this: Rebekah Brook has resigned (and is now in police custody), Dow Jones CEO Les Hinton has resigned, and now the head of the Metropolitan Police Sir Paul Stephenson has gone. Now, when News of the World was first closed down, it was seen by some as a very clever, cynical escape trick: by ditching the paper and its problems, Murdoch could shake off the clamour for investigations and resignations. Rebekah Brooks' job was protected, no senior individual within Newscorp would be touched, and certainly the extensive web of police corruption would hardly be touched on. It hasn't quite worked out that way. A very significant nexus of ruling class power is decomposing. And the weakening of the Met's legitimacy is very important as the force leads the criminal justice system's crackdown on popular opposition to austerity, with highly demonstrative sentences for individuals, and the sick treatment of Alfie Meadows, is hugely important. Chris Bryant MP, who deserves credit for his role in all this, is suggesting that the Metropolitan Police has been corrupted to its core, with good reason. So, when Sir Paul Stephenson lauds the force's handling of the royal wedding and the student protests, it's worth remembering that nothing that comes out of his mouth now will pass the smell test. Also note that some in the Tory Right are gunning for Cameron, who is up to his neck in this and suddenly looks very vulnerable. The Telegraph's leader writer Damian Thompson puts it like this: "it will be difficult to vote Tory at the next election". If the Toriest of Tories can't vote Tory, who the bloody hell can?

ps: Thanks to my Flattrrrrrs. But I just wanted to mention to anyone who doesn't yet use Flattr that the money donated to blogs using that method is actually transferred to Paypal when paid out. This means that a 10% fee is deducted twice. Until I've found a way around this, and unless you already use Flattr and have an interest in supporting its fragile ecosphere, I would ask you please to use Paypal. Thank you again, and can I just say that's a smashing top you're wearing?

Labels: media, metropolitian police, news international, news of the world, propaganda, ruling class, rupert murdoch, tories

Tuesday, April 26, 2011

"The British Police are the best in the world" posted by Richard Seymour

Take a deep breath, and don't let it out until you've finished this sentence: the Metropolitan Police are charging Alfie Meadows with 'violent disorder'. Now you can collect your jaw from the floor.

Alfie Meadows is the student who was beaten so badly by police that he had to undergo serious brain surgery. He was also, reportedly, denied an ambulance by police for a considerable period of time. When he finally boarded an ambulance, police attempted to prevent the ambulance from delivering him to Charing Cross hospital on the grounds that the hospital was reserved for the treatment of injured rozzers, not their victims. This happened on the afternoon of 9th December, Day X 3, the day of the parliamentary vote on tuition fees when tens of thousands protested in Westminster and across the country. It was on that evening, you may recall, that police engaged in a particularly nasty, punitive 'kettle' of protesters on Westminster Bridge. Alfie Meadows was beaten across the skull by a policeman with a baton, but is being charged for an offence that carries a maximum sentence of five years.

Eleven people have been charged with various offenses under the Public Order Act by the 'Operation Malone' unit of the Metropolitan Police. The unit in question was set up with 80 officers solely to investigate the student protests, and as such represents a massive outlay just to arrest people who are either innocent of any crime, or at most guilty of very minor ones. The inclusion of Alfie Meadows on the charge sheet is clearly politicised, bearing in mind the IPCC's ongoing investigation into the case. One also has to take into account the recent High Court decision that the kettling of G20 protesters was illegal, which could and should result in thousands suing the police. But it's also typical of the police's way of handling cases where they may be vulnerable. You might recall the example of Jake Smith, who was arrested after the Gaza protests in 2009. The case collapsed when it was disclosed that the footage showed, not Jake Smith engaging in 'violent disorder', but rather the police engaging in a violent attack on Jake Smith.

Of course, everything that is done by the state with reference to the student protests has a wider social mission, which is to preemptively criminalise the coming social struggles and validate the police's pre-meditated violence. Take the case of Edward Woolard, the 18 year old who dropped a fire extinguisher from the roof of Tory HQ. He was disgracefully given a sentence of 32 months. This was longer than the sentence handed out to some rapists, though no one was harmed. The judge's homily explained that the court was "sending out a very clear message to anyone minded to behave in this way that an offence of this seriousness will not be tolerated". Of course, sending out 'messages', or rather heavily moralised threats, is what the criminal justice system does by nature. And we get the message alright.

Yes, they beat someone's skull in. Yes, this was part of a series of violent tactics deployed by police, which included assaults on young boys, and teenaged girls. Yes, if the protests had continued, and the police had continued with their tactics, they probably would have killed someone just as they killed Ian Tomlinson. We'll be lucky if, in the next few years, they don't kill another protester. And their very clear message is that whatever happens, just as they did with Jean Charles de Menezes and the Koyair brothers, they will always find a way to blame

the victim, exonerate or protect the guilty, and continue as before.

Labels: alfie meadows, austerity, cuts, day x, education, metropolitian police, police, police brutality, protest, students, tories, tuition fees

Monday, March 28, 2011

Plain clothes cops sabotage anti-cuts demonstration posted by Richard Seymour

Via Dan Hind: "police stand by as colleagues in plain clothes break windows"...

The 'violence' on Saturday is now being used to justify a new crackdown on protesters - and, judging from today's Evening Standard, the UK Uncut is a major target.

Labels: metropolitian police, repression

Wednesday, December 15, 2010

Imaginationland posted by Richard Seymour

Imagine it was North Korea, says China. Imagine it was Iran or Zimbabwe or Burma. Among scenes of 'violence', with police lashing out at protesters landing one in hospital with a serious brain injury, there is some shocking footage:

The scene: a mass demonstration in Tehran/Harare/Rangoon/Pyongyang/&c. The police are filmed shoving a 20-yr-old demonstrator with cerebral palsy from her/his wheelchair & dragging her/him across the pavement, to the horror of onlookers. Footage of this event is sneaked out & publicised. Accordingly, Iranian/Zimbabwean/Burmese/North Korean/&c state broadcasters cannot ignore it. Forced to report it, they stress, however, that there ‘is a suggestion’ that said demonstrator was ‘rolling towards the police’.

Oh yes, imagine. Hold your breath. Make a wish. Count to three. And enter a world of pure imagination. And now imagine if the chief of police in the capital city of any of those countries, having claimed that the protesters were fortunate not to have been shot dead, announced that it was planning to ban all marches against the government on the spurious pretext of ‘violence’ by protesters. Imagine this isn’t the normal response of capitalist states to dissent outside of anomalously stable periods of class compromise. Imagine that the already impoverished political democracy is about to take a nasty turn to the methods of the police state. Imagine… imagine… imagine…

Labels: education, education maintenance allowance, liberal democrats, metropolitian police, police, police brutality, police state, students, tories, tuition fees, universities

Tuesday, December 14, 2010

Shameless posted by Richard Seymour

So, the BBC has responded to the furore over its ludicrous interview with Jody Mcintyre, thus: "I have reviewed the interview a few times and I would suggest that we interviewed Mr McIntyre in the same way that we would have questioned any other interviewee in the same circumstances." That's exactly the problem. The BBC's absurd willingness to abase itself before the powerful, to bully and browbeat people on behalf of power, to instinctively side with authority wherever it is contested, does not vary. What has happened here is that the interviewer, Ben Brown, was so committed to this role that he failed to notice how utterly absurd and obscene it is to imply that a wheelchair bound man with cerebral palsy is any physical threat to armed policemen. Brown regurgitated, without a moment's reflection as to its credibility, the "suggestion" that Mcintyre was wheeling his wheelchair toward the police, as if that was relevant, as if it would pose a threat that could possibly justify assaulting Mcintyre in his wheelchair, throwing him onto the road and dragging him across its surface. He did this because that's what people like him always instinctively do, and it simply didn't occur to him that there was any other way to behave. And that's the whole problem.

Labels: austerity, bbc, cuts, education, metropolitian police, police brutality, protests, students, tuition fees

Monday, December 13, 2010

Agents provocateurs posted by Richard Seymour

Interesting. Press TV reports the presence of potential agents provocateurs at the Day X protest on 9th December 2010:

[Flash 10 is required to watch video]

Labels: agent provocateur, cops, education, education maintenance allowance, metropolitian police, protests, students, tuition fees

Police attack on disabled man posted by Richard Seymour

Peter Hallward writes: "Unable to sustain let alone win the argument in public debate, unwilling to devote even minimal time for general consultation and discussion, the government has instead opted to quash our demonstrations with naked force, intimidation and collective punishment." That certainly explains the open brutality of the police's response - it has become a counterinsurgency, in which the population of the UK is becoming the 'enemy within' once more. The British police system was, after all, partially constructed from the materials of the colonial repression. Before Scotland Yard, there was the Thugee and Dagocity colonial police department. Many of the Met's modern policing techniques were pioneered in India first, as part of the business of subduing the native population.

But look what happens when you let London's finest thugs off the leash. Here, they turf Jody Macintyre out of his wheelchair, throwing him onto the road, and drag him along until horrified students intervene on his behalf:

These are people who come armed to the teeth, helmeted, shielded, combat-trained and baton-wielding. Then they take a dive for the cameras the moment anything more wounding than "hello" comes their way - some of them evidently graduated from the Gillian McKeith school of melodramatic swooning. But they aren't scared to have a go at someone in a wheelchair if they feel like it. They aren't shy about beating up teenage girls, or giving students brain damage either. So, definitely, give them the use of the water cannon by all means.

Update: Here is the BBC's version of the same story. Brace yourself:

Labels: austerity, cuts, metropolitian police, police brutality, tories

Patrick Mercer vs Bat on student protests posted by Richard Seymour

There was good, frequently funny, debate between bat020 and Tory MP Patrick Mercer on Radio 5 Live over the weekend. It was predictably about whether 'violence' was justifiable in the service of protests. The government has just cleared the way for the use of water cannons, using the excuse of the mysterious 'contact' between Camilla and an unknown prole. But Mercer's moronic blithering suggests that the government's ideological position is weak, and they know it. It's worth listening to the whole thing - you know the Tory's in trouble when he strolls blithely into the minefield of the Northern Ireland civil rights struggle. Listen here.

Labels: austerity, capitalist crisis, cuts, education, education maintenance allowance, liberals, metropolitian police, protest, recession, repression, students, tories

Friday, December 10, 2010

Police violence last night posted by Richard Seymour

Last night, among the mounted police charges, and baton charges, there was one person very gravely injured. Alfie, a student from Middlesex University, was beaten on the head with a truncheon. He suffered bleeding in the brain and fell unconscious on the way to hospital. He said it was the hugest blow he ever felt in his life. This follows from last week's protest, in which a student from Queen Mary named Tahmeena Bax was struck on the head three times with a baton, before being left to lie unconscious while police dismissed her injuries, insisting she was "just upset". Given the police's casual willingness to use unprovoked violence against people they don't like the look of, you have to wonder how long it will be before there is another Blair Peach or Ian Tomlinson.

Labels: austerity, cuts, metropolitian police, police brutality, protest, students, tories

Tuesday, November 30, 2010

Lewisham protesters have been pushed to the edge posted by Richard Seymour

Yours truly in The Guardian:

Hundreds of angry protesters besieged Lewisham town hall in Catford last night, as the council forced through cuts. They stood outside and demanded "Let us in!", as councillors voted behind closed doors. Before long, about a hundred of them got into the building, some letting off smoke bombs. Soon dozens of police vans loaded with riot squad had arrived, and were engaged in combat with some of the protesters.

This was the furious response to Lewisham council's decision to implement half of the long-term projected cuts of £60m – or "efficiency savings", as the official euphemism has it – to local services. These cuts affect services for children and young people, libraries and support for schools. The immediate cost in jobs will be 446 redundancies. This is a microcosm of what is happening to local services across the country, with the total cuts package costing half a million jobs. And the protest comes amid a wave of student action, which some of the protesters said had inspired
them.

With the usual assortment of right-wing trolls below the main article...

Labels: austerity, capitalist crisis, cuts, labour, lewisham, metropolitian police, protest, public sector workers, tories

Monday, November 29, 2010

Protesters storm Lewisham council meeting on cuts posted by Richard Seymour

Follow 'hangbitch' on Twitter for more, but I understand that protesters have entered Lewisham Town Hall and let off gas cans, disrupting a meeting on £60m of cuts. Riot cops turned up and started beating demonstrators outside, and now people are fighting with the riot police: "Jesus, people are going for the police, they're fighting back." I used to live in Lewisham, and it's a very working class, multi-racial area of south-east London. It also has a hideous Labour mayor and administration dedicated to imposing cuts. Mayor Steve Bullock has referred to anti-cuts protesters as "fucking idiots". Given such a combination, it's no surprise that things are kicking off here. Apparently, the protesters are saying they were inspired by the students. Watch this space - it's just a beginning.

ps: also see Socialist Worker's coverage.

Labels: austerity, cuts, labour, lewisham, local councils, metropolitian police, riots, tories

Saturday, April 03, 2010

Police crackdown on protesters posted by Richard Seymour

Newsnight on the case of Jake Smith and the Gaza protests:

Labels: gaza, islamophobia, Israel, metropolitian police, muslims, police brutality, protest, zionism

Sunday, January 31, 2010

Race and crime reporting posted by Richard Seymour

I haven't written anything for the last few days because, to use a shopworn colloquialism, I have been swamped with work. Writing, mostly - I have a lot of new shit coming your way, so if you have somehow neglected to purchase and peruse Liberal Defence, you're about to get way behind in your reading. Anyway, I wanted to mention something. A while back, when Rod Liddle averred that young African-Carribean men were responsible for the overwhelming majority of violent crime in the capital, he had a host of reactionary defenders. They asserted that the statistics bore out his argument, (they did not), and that he was the real anti-racist because he was dealing with a serious issue without allowing it to be siezed upon by racists (this is easily refuted by having a quick look at the comments underneath the offending post, and subsequent efforts). Liddle was simply recasting an argument that has been a racist commonplace since significant numbers of Commonwealth immigrants arrived in the United Kingdom in the 1950s. (See Paul Gilroy's There Ain't No Black in the Union Jack for a detailed account of this.) The statistics are just so much fungible matter for the prosecution's rigged case.

One of the points I made at the time was that there are complexities in the construction, classification, reporting and prosecution of crimes that are simply ignored in the angry diatribes of the ageing white men who largely populate the commentariat. Official statistics tend to show that non-white people are over-represented in arrests, prosecutions and convictions in a number of crime categories. This is a million miles away from saying that young African-Carribean men are responsible for the "overwhelming majority" of rapes, robberies, gun crimes, etc. And there were some anti-racist bloggers who suggested that lots of defineable groups are over-represented in crime statistics - young people, poorer people, etc. Sociological commentary has tended to attribute the overrepresentation of black people in some crime categories to their overrepresentation among the poorest of the working class, the unemployed, etc.

That is a reasonable approach, in that it refutes the relevance of 'race' or some essentialised 'culture' in such debates. But it does also assume that the statistics are reliable, essentially accurate, and unlikely to be skewed in a way that is 'racially-laden'. And that assumption is not a safe one. The government occasionally gathers information about this sort of subject, though it is only selectively publicised. And the Home Affairs Select Committee did produce a report in May 2007, after a lengthy inquiry, that is worth digesting. This is the report. There is some intricate analysis, as well as a measure of arse-covering advocacy for the police. It is a study of black over-representation in certain crime categories, and while it sought to buttress the then Blair government's narrative concerning a crisis in black communities, its caveats are extremely interesting. Note what it says about the government's own findings with respect to the distribution of criminal behaviour among different ethnic groups:

Evidence from the Home Office's Offending, Crime and Justice survey suggests white young people and those of mixed ethnic origin are more likely to report offending behaviour than young males in other ethnic groups, including black young people.[26] The findings from Home Office self-report surveys have been remarkably similar over time.[27] The most recent sweep of the survey found white males aged from 10-25 were "far more likely" to have committed an offence within the last year than young males in other ethnic groups (28% compared with a range of 12% to 19% for other ethnic groups).[28] The survey found that once young black people committed an offence, they were more likely to come to the attention of the police.

In fact, it should be said that even if they hadn't committed an offense, young black people were more likely to come to the attention of the police. Black people of all ages were three times more likely to be arrested, and six times more likely to be stopped and searched, by police. They are less likely to be given bail, or let off with a caution. And they are more likely to receive the most punitive sentences. There is more, of course, and I am sceptical of the broader thrust and conclusions of the report. But the above raises the question: even if Liddle's claims were close to accurate, even if they weren't manufactured on the basis of a half-remembered Daily Mail article, what would the statistics be evidence of? The Home Office's findings, quoted above, indicate that they would at least partially be evidence of the extent of racist discrimination by the institutions of criminal justice. In other words, the very evidence that the state continues to oppress ethnic minorities, not least young black men, is what would be being used to damn them.

Labels: blair, crime, knife crime, media, metropolitian police, police, racism, tough on crime