Hick-ery, Dick-ery, Bloc.

On Saturday, 26 March, half a million people marched through London to show their opposition to the savage, ideological cuts being imposed by the Tories, held up by Clegg and his band of merry men, (whose idea of a Robin Hood tax seems also to be to rob from the poor and give to the rich, while in the background, Caroline Spelman puts Sherwood Forest on e-bay).

People from all walks of life were there, people I know, either personally, or online,of all ages, across the whole community, people whose sole aim was that they wanted to demonstrate, peacefully and in a dignified manner, that these cuts in services and funding, affecting the poorest and those least able to manage, were "not in their name".

Unfortunately, none of that got on the news. The news media are often lazy, sometimes stupid, they have a "slot" to fill, and the VT gets edited to fit the time available. All of this is common knowledge.

And so, predictably, on the news on Saturday and all over the print media at the weekend, the story was dominated not by the vast, peaceful, dignified majority, but by two linked, but essentially separate activities - the occupation of Fortnum and Mason's by UK Uncut, and the actions of the so-called "anarchists", all 400 or so of them out of a crowd of half a million, who make up the organisation "Black Bloc".

It was very naive of UK Uncut, to have scheduled an action to take place in the context of this march. In the past, I have admired and applauded their cheeky, non-violent inventiveness in highlighting the part which big companies avoiding tax and shirking their responsibilities plays in the large black hole in Britain's balance sheet. But by doing what they did on a day when anyone with half an amoeba inside their skull must have known that it would be kicking off, they have scored a spectacular own goal, compounded by the feeble performance of their spokesperson on Newsnight on 28 March in failing to condemn the violence. Idiots. It plays right into the hands of the establishment, who now have the brush of anarchy and violence with which to tar UK Uncut. They have set their campaign back years. If they had only had the sense to occupy Fortnums the day after the demo, they would still have hung on the coat tails of the publicity, but the story would then have been the contrast between their peaceful demo and the violence of the previous day.

The "anarchists" of course, are, like the poor, always with us. They tag along at every demo, sticking it to the man by breaking the windows of a bus shelter. Freedom for Tooting, what did the Romans ever do for us? They are beyond satire, and, being bone from the neck up, impervious to it. But they are not that dumb, they have spotted how successful UK Uncut has been at organising and recruiting, and they have now "written" an open letter to them, offering their "support". Well, if you wanted a perfect example of an attempted reverse takeover by a wolf in sheep's clothing, there you have it. I hope UK Uncut have the sense to tell them to sod off.

I could rant for hours about what idiots these people are, but I will leave that for another day. Instead, here's an extract from a post on one of their forums from a trade unionist who was actually on the march, and took the time to register in order to tell them exactly what he thought.

It was a demo. It was supposed to set an agenda and make the public aware that we're not going to accept the cuts. It wasn't a revolutionary moment.

Those red'n'black lot (why do they all dress the same, its weird, like some cult) 'joined' the march at various points (Piccadilly mainly) and made gigantic pricks of themselves by such predictable and irrelevant acts of violence that were utterly meaningless in the bigger picture. Throwing paint and smoke bombs at the Ritz does absolutely zero to further any revolutionary aim.

What it did do however was enable the media to focus on the violence and avoid the issues in question. And, yes, they would have covered it well without the violence. The media have been all over the unions and TUC who organised the march for weeks in advance of this. But now they're ignoring us in the trade union movement and giving all the attention to the perpetrators of violence.

What the actions of the various show offs, self-obssessed and selfish bellends that decided to play revolution for the day managed to achieve was to directly support the objectives of the media. And to detract from the social movement against this government.

Oh and they also managed to scare the shit out of some familes and kids that got caught in the crush outside Fortnums in the process.

Well done. I hope they are very proud of themselves

Says it all, really.

Animal Wrongs

In all of the hoo-hah over the inauguration of Barack Obama, and the continued fall-out of Israel’s war crimes and atrocities in Gaza, the media in the UK hardly mentioned the sentencing of the SHAC activists, the people from the Stop Huntingdon Animal Cruelty web site who were jailed for various terms between four and eleven years.

Heather Nicholson was jailed for eleven years. Gregg and Natasha Avery for nine years apiece. Gavin Medd-Hall for eight years; Daniel Wadham, five years; Gervals Selby and Dan Amos, four years each.

Now, you can well argue that these people were behind a vicious campaign against individual staff members of Huntingdon Life Sciences and its suppliers and sub-contractors. (Though, as a side-bar, some of the defendants claimed that they only pleaded “guilty” because they knew they wouldn’t get a fair trial anyway.) But even so, even if they were guilty of every last jot and syllable of the prosecution’s case, you have to also ask yourself: are these prison sentences just and proportionate?

According to the sentencing guidelines for manslaughter published by the Department of Justice, a review of 50 reported Court of Appeal sentence appeals between January 1990 and July 2004 showed that out of 50 cases, only two received sentences of more than ten years for manslaughter and the commonest sentence band was between three and five years. So how have we arrived at a situation where a handful of animal activists are given harsher sentences for letter-writing, demos, and general harassment than if they had committed manslaughter? Of course, you may feel that it is the manslaughter sentence which is too light, while the “SHAC 7” got what they deserved. That is, however, a different argument, and if you want tougher sentences all round, what are you going to use for prisons, since all the existing ones are fit to bust?

Returning to the disparity in the sentencing, I doubt that the judge sentenced the SHAC 7 to the terms he did as the first step in a nationwide campaign for stiffer sentences. The whole ethos of the trial, right from the start, right from the decision to charge them with conspiracy to blackmail, seems to have been motivated by just one aim: to teach these pesky activists a lesson. The judge even mentioned, in his summing up, balancing the right to protest with HLS’s “right to conduct animal experiments”. The inference we must inevitably draw from that is that it’s OK to protest, as long as you don’t become too effective at it. And there is no doubt that SHAC and its various hangers-on and adherents have been a thorn in the side of HLS.

But anyone hoping that this is the end of the matter is sadly mistaken. By his heavy-handed, disproportionate, that’ll-learn-them sentencing, the judge has handed SHAC an enormous boost. Already events have been held in support of the SHAC 7 and more will undoubtedly follow, as a whole raft of previously moderate people like me are motivated by the sheer injustice of the sentences to take part in the campaign to free them. It is the same process by which previously moderate Muslims become radicalised by seeing attacks on people of their faith in Iraq and in Gaza. Let us hope it does not have the same outcomes.

And the sentencing of the SHAC 7 will fail for another reason. Because, as with so much other state-sponsored repression, it only treats the symptom, not the disease. Why is no-one asking what failures in the democratic process led the SHAC organisation to take direct action in the first place? Many of us voted Labour in 1997 because we thought we were going to get a Royal Commission on Vivisection. Twelve years later, we are still waiting, and in the meantime the government has shown itself willing to act as the backer of last resort not only for HLS but also for the new Animal Experiments Laboratory in Oxford. The only significant Act in favour of animal welfare in twelve years of Labour rule has been the ban on fox-hunting, and even then Blair had to be virtually anaesthetised to get it through Parliament, and it has been policed and enforced half-heartedly ever since.

Is it any wonder, then, that SHAC take the view that it is morally indefensible to sit and wait decades for politicians to take action, and do nothing while animals in laboratories continue to suffer and die? You may not agree with their conclusions or their actions, but you would have to have the intellect of a breeze-block not to see how the situation has come about.

I believe (and therefore it is Bolshy Party Policy) that there are viable alternatives to animal experiments and all that stops their being developed, overall, is the lack of political will, and the fact that money and funding favours the status quo. Who in the scientific community is going to risk their research grant, their nice car, their house in the leafy suburbs of Oxford or Cambridge, by going out on a limb against animal testing?

If we want a truly just society, then justice must not only be done, it must be seen to be done. It would be a just outcome if the sentences of the SHAC 7 were reduced or rescinded on appeal, and it would be even more just if we were finally allowed the Royal Commission which we have so long been denied.

Small footnote: since I originally posted this, Mel Broughton, who was accused of conspiring to firebomb the new animal research labs at Oxford University, was sentenced to 10 years on 13 February at Oxford Crown Court. Convicted mainly on the links between improvised devices which failed to explode, and his DNA profile, Mel Broughton was the founder of the group Speak, which consistently demonstrated against the new labs and which used similar tasctics to those employed by SHAC against Huntingdon. The bomb which did go off caused £14,000 of damage.
If Mel Broughton was guilty, then however sympathetic one may feel to his motives, nevertheless he should be punished, because no one can be bigger than the law. But in return for our respect for the law the legal system and the establishment, as with the cases of the SHAC7, must ensure that sentences passed are proportionate and are not seen as punitive collective punishment, because otherwise a whole new set of activists will be incentivised by the thought that they have nothing to lose.

Sitting on Defence

Well, I had better make a start on the Bolshy Manifesto somewhere, and it might as well be Defence of the Realm, given that today is Remembrance Day and on the way to the Lakes on Sunday we saw a World War II Dakota complete with authentic paint job, flying over the M62. Unless it was a hallucination of course.

I am not, technically, a pacifist. I wish I was. I have to say, though, that my desire and admiration for the British way of life is such that I can foresee a situation where, if the invaders were at the gates, I would be there, lined up alongside such of my countrymen who were prepared to stop them invading. Not that I would be any practical use but, as a moral relativist, I have to concede there are times when, if for instance another Hitler came along and could not be stopped by any other means, then you might, in extreme circumstances, have to resort to violence.

Unfortunately, this also then implies the need for professional armed forces to defend the country, and all that this entails. And, in an uncertain world, where the idiots in charge of our foreign policy have been wedged so far up Bush’s chuff they haven’t seen daylight for years, we’ve now made a lot of enemies. Which is why, unfortunately, reluctantly (see how those words recur like a tolling bell), we’ve got to replace Trident. I know, I can hear the howls from here. And it ties us in to the Americans. I know, I know. (I’m assuming a slippery operator like Blair made Trident help a condition of being America’s “Blind Ally” this last few years, and if he didn’t, he’s a bloody fool.)

In the question of Trident, I find myself reflecting that it’s like the situation where ideally, you would like to go to the shops but you are actually stuck up to your ankles in an unfamiliar peat bog in the middle of nowhere, it’s getting dark and it’s coming on to rain, you’ve got no torch and you’ve lost your map. Ideally, given the choice, you wouldn’t start from here.

So it is with Trident. Ideally, the Bolshy Party wouldn’t start from here, but given that, by slavishly following the Primrose Path of dalliance promoted by Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld, we’ve now made ourselves the target for every hothead east of the Euphrates with an AK-47 (and quite a lot west of the Euphrates as well), it seems we have no choice. Great legacy, George, Tony, thanks a lot.

However, this doesn’t mean we want to go exporting aggression. It’s perfectly possible to be proud of England without feeling then obliged to invade France (or Iraq). I can see (sort of) an intellectual justification for invading Afghanistan, given that it was a hotbed of fanaticism, but someone should have a) asked the question – what is it about the USA that these people hate so much that they are willing to fly planes into buildings and kill themselves in the process? and b) someone should have taken Bush aside and told him that western armies have very poor track records of invading and subduing Afghanistan, ever since the North-West Frontier wars of the nineteenth century.

Another justification for invading Afghanistan was the plight of Muslim women under the Taleban. Yes, this was pretty dire, but is it possible to coerce an entire religion, especially in a situation where the most militant fringe of it has gained political power by force, into making 600 years of progress in half-a-dozen? Islam and Islamic scholars kept the flame of knowledge alive in the Middle Ages, providing the vital link back to Classical Greek and Roman thought and texts that fuelled Western Europe’s Renaissance. Yet militant Islam is still stuck in the 1100s, when it comes to the place of women, especially. But you can’t bomb someone forward to civilisation, you can only bomb them back to the Stone Age.

So, for these reasons, it’s Bolshy Party Policy to withdraw straightaway from the American-induced adventurism in Iraq. Their mistake, their mess, they can stay and clear it up if they still want the oil, which they will do, even under Obama, I predict. There will be US involvement in Iraq for generations yet, military bases and military “advisers”, private security firms (mercenaries or contractors, depending on who you talk to) and joint exercises.

We would use the men, weapons and materiel freed up by the withdrawal from Iraq to ease the strain on the UK contingent in Afghanistan, while planning a phased withdrawal from there, too. The women will have to be helped by other means – by intellectually challenging the bankrupt assertions of the Taleban and their questionable spiritual authority.

The possession of professional armed services doesn’t mean, either, that you have to use them for fighting. Every year there are scores of disasters, natural or otherwise, around the world which require specialist logistical expertise in relief efforts. Even in the UK, when we get the by now regular floods each summer as a result of climate change. I look forward to the day when the Army, Navy and Air Force have largely morphed into a sort of global logistics and rescue service – a bit like International Rescue but with fewer "strings" attached. A plane can be used to drop food aid instead of bombs. A temporary bridge can allow food convoys to cross a swollen river, rather than tanks.

The Bolshy Party believes that it is perfectly possible to be proud of the achievement and expertise of our nation’s armed forces without that translating over into a sort of gung-ho Little Englander patriotism that sees its mission in the world as being to teach Johnny Foreigner what’s what, keep him in his place, and give him a bloody nose.

The only justifiable intervention outside of the UK, apart from humanitarian aid, should be in the pursuit of international law and justice, and this should be carried out rigorously, without fear or favour, if it is to be done at all, and certainly not done with a sort of lip service attitude, only in areas where it suits the broad aims of US foreign policy.

Soldiers are probably the last people who want to go to war:

Soldiers who wanna be heroes
Number practically zero
But there are millions
Who want to be civilians

- that old protest song from the Vietnam era of the 1960s has it more or less right. So, in those circumstances, we at the Bolshy Party do not consider that if you wear your poppy on Poppy Day, for instance, you are automatically glorifying war. We see it, on the contrary, commemorating all of the countless millions of ordinary blokes and women who didn’t particularly want to go to war, who were quite happy where they were, thanks very much, but who, when the call came, put down their spades, their scythes, their tools, their pens and marched to meet the challenges.

There are different reasons for remembering the dead of the two different wars. For the dead of the First World War, men such as Harry Fenwick and William Evans, we remember the waste and the futility, the sadness of all those millions of unfulfilled lives. For the dead of the Second World War, at least on the Allies’ side, those emotions are also mingled with a kind of thanks for stopping Hitler – or stopping the Hitler war fascist machine. For the dead on the German side, again, there is only sorrow at unfulfilled lives. And of course, potentially the most tragic waste of that conflict, the millions of innocent civilians who were killed, wounded or displaced, some of the consquences of which we still feel today, in the Arab-Israeli standoff.

So to sum up, the policy of the Bolshy Part on defence is: we’ve got to start from where we are, not where we’d like to be, and the longing we feel for where we’d like to be is irrelevant in that context. We’ve got to extract our troops from the two areas in the world where at present all they are doing is providing targets for fanatics. Ideally, in Afghanistan, if we can improve the lot of women by continuing to challenge militant Islam intellectually, if we can cut off the Taleban’s funding by buying up the opium crop and turning it into diamorphine for the NHS, there are still things we can do to pull out the troops without leaving the Afghans in the lurch.

We’re stuck with Trident’s replacement, but that doesn’t mean that we have to go looking for excuses to lose it. It’s a deterrent.

Finally, let’s not also forget that the government gets an easier ride thanks to the efforts of the British Legion and other people who deal with the welfare of veterans. You can say this about many charities. The government gets off lightly in many areas where they should be spending money wisely because goodhearted people who recognise a need for action, get stuck in and sort it out. I’ve written about this dilemma before, in the context of overseas aid.The problem is, if the charities go on strike, it isn't the government that gets hurt by that, it's the people or cause the charity was trying to assist, but no, we should never let our politicians get away with short-changing the people who fought their battles for them.

And it’s possible to be proud of our armed forces without indulging in gung-ho patriotism, and it would be possible to be even more proud of them if we succeed in turning their planes into ploughshares. And if you wear a poppy, it doesn’t make you a war-monger – just the opposite, in fact.