Fright Weekend

It's almost Halloween so this seems appropriate - John De Lancie (Star Trek's Q) with a very cool version of Edgar Allen Poe's The Raven.

Tomorrow I'll be in Brighton, arriving just in time for the march called by the local Stop The Cuts Coalition against the plans of the diabolical Michael Myers-like George Osborne, as well as direct action against the sinister tax-dodgers Vodafone. Then its down to the Druids Arms in the evening for a few drinks, to see off my friends Ken and Lizette before the leave the country for jobs in Europe. If you've ever been to the Druids, you'll know what I mean: the horror, the horror...

Trade Award Brings Newham Council Excess To Wider Audience

Finally, the mainstream media has picked up on the fact that London's most deprived borough has spent £18.7m on the cost of the design and décor at the council's offices at Newham Dockside. As we already know, the local authority, which is about to embark on a swathe of cuts in public services, also runs the most expensive council festival in London and, with the Newham Mag, has a fortnightly rag that costs more than any other in the capital.

It's just a shame it has taken an London regional award by a trade body dedicated to "best practice in all aspects of the office sector" for this news to finally reach a wider audience!

From the BBC News website

Cost of giving Newham Council the 'wow factor'
By Ed Davey BBC News, London

London's most expensive council-funded festival, offices with the "wow factor" costing £18.7m and an in-house newspaper costing more than £500,000 a year.

As local authorities digest a 26% funding cut, BBC London examines the outlay in one of the UK's most deprived boroughs.

One critic said the offices resembled a "five star hotel or West End nightclub"

With its reflective floor and designer bird's nest light fittings, Newham Council's new back office looks impressive.

Last week's spending review ushered in an age of austerity for local authorities, ordered to make 7.1% savings annually for four years.

But at Newham Council staff are celebrating winning a top award from the British Council for Offices.

Judges called it an "outstanding transformational workplace environment", saying the "innovative, lively and colourful design contributed to a dynamic environment".

Daniel Windor, of interior designers Sheppard Robson, who carried out the work, said: "You have to have the 'wow factor' in that environment. You need to give it a bit of sparkle or it will fall flat."

More here

Mickey Fenn on Fighting the Fascists

From a BBC Open Space programme from 1992, the much missed Newham anti-fascist activist and dockworker Mickey Fenn talks about the 1970s, when the most militant elements of the Socialist Workers Party and the Anti-Nazi League formed fighting ’squads’ to physically confront the fascists. The squads, which were later disowned by the leadership of the SWP, were the forerunners of Anti Fascist Action.

Just Wages - The Fairest Cut Of All

Someone asked me today whether I am opposed to all cuts and the answer is of course: no. Cutting Trident would undoubtedly cost jobs in the defence industry but the £20 billion cost of its replacement is indefensible when the alternative is making the poorest and most vulnerable pay for the biggest part of the deficit, the cost of bailing out the banking sector - unless your real reason for spending cuts is an ideological desire to destroy the welfare state. But at a local level, the one cut I would welcome is to the salaries of senior council staff.

The practice of massive salaries at senior levels of local government is the result of introducing private sector values into public sector management, with pay pressure at the top of the public sector originating completely from the inexorable increase in pay at the top of the private sector. The outcome has been the abandonment of any notion of 'public service', with 'boomerang bosses' leaping from one local authority to another, the delivery of decent services secondary to securing the latest rung upwards on the career ladder, all fuelled by the ludicrous notion that a huge salary is necessary to recruit "the best people". If Trident's costs are indefensible, so too is paying £240,000 for a chief executive in one of the poorest boroughs in the country like Newham, or many hundreds of thousands more for its senior management team (the exact figures have mysteriously been removed from Newham council's website).

In opposing cuts, we always need to argue for a more democratic, more accountable local state rather than simply defending the status quo. One simple first step would be to support the introduction of a system of just wages.

Currently around 80% of us earn less than £35,000 a year, well below the sums paid to senior council staff. As the Equality Trust as shown, wide income gaps lead to more unequal societies and worse outcomes for every member of society, contributing to social problems from crime to mental illness. A local government 'just wage' system would mean that the gap between the highest and lowest paid workers should be no more than a ratio of 1:5. This would act as a brake on excessive senior pay in local government, as a salary of £100,000 at the top would require the lowest paid to receive £20,000, but it would also increase wages at the lowest levels by creating a more equitable pay structure.

Moreover, if local authorities were to take a lead in introducing just wages, it would provide ammunition to start pressing the private sector, where the fat cat mentality was born, to explain its own executive excess.

Those who oppose cuts understand that the public sector we defend is far from perfect - importing private sector practices has, over the years and under Labour's 'reforms', distanced services from the people they are intended to serve. But the scale of the cuts are so great that their impact will be felt by everyone and that means the worst elements of private sector entryism, like massive income inequality within local government, must end immediately.

It's time to make the 'boomerang boss' with a fat wage seem like an embarrassing anachronism.

Photographing Newham

I've been meaning to get this particular project started for ages and have finally created a set on Flickr devoted to photos taken around Newham.

The idea is to gradually add to it over the next 12 months and to include... well, basically anything that catches my eye (interesting buildings, landscapes and places that are likely to disappear very soon are favourites). There are a couple of contrasting new pictures below: the first taken in West Ham Park this morning and the second showing one of the storage towers at the British Bakeries factory in Forest Gate,

Now - can someone help me to legally get inside the derelict bus garage on Green Street? I'm really not in a fit state to be clambering over gates at the moment!

Census 2011 - Who Reads Your Responses?

Next year, we’ll all have another opportunity to list our religion as ‘Jedi’, as envelopes marked with a big purple C start dropping through people’s letterboxes in time for Census Day on Sunday 27 March 2011. This is the date when the personal details of all usual residents and any visitors staying the night must be included in a 32 page questionnaire.

Last year, the borough of Newham was one of three places chosen for dress rehearsals for the 2011 Census and results were far from impressive. According to an evaluation by the Office of National Statistics [PDF], only 28% of the households selected in Newham returned forms, compared to 48% in Lancaster and 49% in Anglesey. The ONS concluded, however, that “the majority of non-responders did not return their questionnaire because the rehearsal was voluntary”. Next year, those who fail to return their questionnaire face a possible £1000 fine (although in 2001, only 38 people were actually fined).

The evaluation goes on to say that “despite breaches of government security publicised widely in the media, it appears that worries about the confidentiality of information given are relatively low” at 12% of a survey of 994 non-responders. However, according to a fairly obscure article by Nigel Hawkes of the pressure group Straight Statistics that was buried in yesterday’s Independent, more people are likely to start worrying about what happens to their personal information as we get nearer to next year’s Census - and with good cause.

Privacy is supposedly guaranteed under the Census Acts of 1920 and 1990 but according to Hawkes, the Statistics and Registration Act introduced in 2007 can force the ONS to hand over individual data for non-statistical purposes to the European Union, the police or MI5. Circumstances where confidentiality can be breached include “a criminal investigation or criminal proceedings” – including those taking place outside the UK – and that inevitable catch-all, “the interests of national security”. Hawkes suggests, quite rightly, that “even non-criminals may hesitate to provide data which, as the law stands, could be demanded by any police force in the world”.

As I mentioned back in 2007, allaying our suspicions is hardly helped by the knowledge that the Census' main contractor is a US arms company, Lockheed Martin, which provides intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance services for the Department of Defense and other US government agencies. Nor is there a lack of precedent for the security services having access to census data. Cambridge historian Christopher Andrew's authorised history of MI5, The Defence of the Realm, says (on page 48) that the 1911 Census returns were:

“used to record the particulars of all male aliens aged eighteen and above of eight nationalities (in particular Germans and Austrians) living in areas which would be closed to aliens in wartime. Information on aliens taken from the Census was then circulated for checking to chief constables, who were also asked to take note of those on the Register [of Aliens] in their areas."

When filling in next year’s Census form, what you include may therefore not be quite as private as the Office for National Statistics claims. Potentially, for every adult in a household, the police and security services can read answers to detailed questions such the name of your employer, your qualifications, how well you can speak English, how many passports you hold and, if you are a migrant, your date of arrival and how long you intend to stay in the UK.

For people in comfortable, white, middle-class areas, this may not present much of a concern. But in places like Newham, where people feel they are targeted because they are Muslim, or Arab (a new ethnic category in 2011), or Pakistani or a migrant, there is rather more to carefully consider than whether to jokingly add ‘Jedi’ to the question about your religious beliefs. Many who have escaped from oppressive states around the world to this part of London have found British state agencies are far from models of tolerance, objectivity and anti-discrimination. Is it any wonder, then, that the response here to the Census is therefore so poor?

At Today's London Anarchist Bookfair

So it was off this morning to Queen May College in Mile End for the London Anarchist Bookfair, an annual event as unchanging as the seasons. As always, it had the mix of bookstalls, t-shirts sellers, hawkers of pirate DVDs and loads of tiny-print pamphlets with obscure titles, along with lectures and workshops on everything from anarchism in Croatia to setting up a co-op.

The big draw was evidently Michael Albert, the American activist and co-editor of Z Magazine, whose session Life After Capitalism was an introduction to his ideas about participatory economics (parecon). Unfortunately, it was so popular that I couldn't get in. I did manage to catch the Fitwatch workshop, which was as interesting and informative as ever but also revealed the level of self-absorption within what even the police have come to call 'the protest community'. There was far too great a focus on the possibility of infiltration of protest groups by undercover police (perhaps not completely surprising, considering the revelation only two days ago that a well known activist called Mark Stone was secretly an Met copper). There wasn't enough time, however, for debate on the alarming implications for anyone, 'protest community' member or first time demonstrator, of intrusive surveillance by the different police units responsible for 'domestic extremism'.

The other event I made it to, at the request of ur32daurt in Sheffield, was Ian Bone and Martin Wright’s preposterously titled "Annual Address to the Movement". This was the chance for Bone, always an entertaining speaker, to don the mantle of cider-fuelled political commissar and berate the entire anarchist 'movement' for its inaction and ineffectiveness (a completely fair and valid accusation, depending of course on who is making it). He then announced that the Whitechapel Anarchist Group, buoyed by their burst of activism back in June against the possible appearance of the English Defence League in Tower Hamlets, will stand in elections in 2012 for the London Assembly seat currently held by Labour's John Biggs and that covers Barking & Dagenham, City of London, Newham and Tower Hamlets.

Like previous comedy candidacies offered by the likes of Screaming Lord Sutch, the WAGs have no chance or expectation of winning. With Martin Wright as their candidate, more pub bore to Bone's bar room wit, with no apparent message other than the old Class War standard of 'bash the rich', with an incredibly narrow view of east London's working class (basically, pub goers who look like WAG members) and with a tiny number of supporters, they'll lose their deposit spectacularly. Still, Bone was kind enough to give the thumbs up to the Save Wanstead Flats campaign in his oration. So that's nice.

I finally managed to pick up a copy of Beating the Fascists, the Red Action version of the history of Anti-Fascist Action. I guess everyone who was involved in anti-fascism campaigns in the late 80s and early 90s will have done what my friend Cilius and I both did today - flick through to find mentions of people we know. I see Newham councillor Unmesh Desai, now Executive Member for Crime and Anti-Social Behaviour, is certainly in the book - and I suspect that this part of his past is probably something he'd prefer not to see in print. I'll write up a review as soon as I've had a chance to read it.

'Take Back Wanstead Flats' on 21 November

On Sunday 21st November, the Save Wanstead Flats campaign plans to use wooden stakes and tape to mark out the boundaries of the proposed police base on the Flats, in order to show just how much space it will swallow up in 2012.

Maps or drawings can never make as much sense to local residents as seeing its massive size for themselves but campaigners would prefer not to wait until construction starts and it’s too late to stop these plans.

As you can see from the publicity, the message behind this action also harkens back to the historical opposition by local people to enclosure of the Flats. We hope people will see this as an opportunity to come along and celebrate in their own way our right to enjoy our open spaces – although it is late November, so we do recommend that people wrap up warmly!

Download: A4 PDF flyer | A3 PDF poster

BBC's Nick Robinson Catches Diva Fever

Hilarious - unsubtle Tory sympathiser and BBC journo Nick Robinson manages to lose it (or 'loose' it, as the YouTube contributor who posted this online manages to suggest) with an anti-war protester after a live broadcast during yesterday's Six O'Clock News. The Guardian describes it as another example of Diva Fever and Robinson has admitted on his blog that he acted like an unprofessional twat.

PVE In Newham - Where Has The Money Gone?

On 4 November at one of the community centres run by the charity I work for, a Muslim community-based network called Islamic Circles has organised a Question Time time event entitled PVE in Newham - £2 million missing & unaccounted for?

Islamic Circles has invited two Minsters, Baroness Warsi and Andrew Stunell from the Department for Communities and Local Government, to discuss what happened to nearly £2 million of public money given to Newham council under the Prevent and CONTEST programmes to tackle "violent extremism". The group makes this extraordinary allegation:

There is now growing evidence from individual public investigations of rampant corruption within the Council and their wonderfully transparent and accountable decision makers. Examples of excellent usage of money to prevent acts of terrorism include:

• Employing relatives of councillors to attend "English language classes".
  
  
• So-called "advisory" consultancy payments for former spooks and Met Police officers which bill into the thousands.
  
  
• Instead of English and Maths, we have undue patronising focus on "GCSE Islamic Studies"

Every Newham councillor - plus the Dear Leader Sir Robin Wales - has been invited to attend, although the chances of any of them turning up are practically zero.

However, the event is open to the public, Muslim and non-Muslim alike, from 6.45 to 8.30 on Thursday 4th November at the Froud Centre, 1 Toronto Avenue, off Romford Road, London, E12 5JF.

It should be a fascinating evening!