This is a guest post by Matt Mahon

Commissioner Bernard Hogan-Howe of the Met – played excellently on Monday by Iain Glen, fresh from the set of HBO’s Game of Thrones – was supposed to explain his ‘total policing’ policy at LSE on Monday. In fact, he flannelled for half an hour about the challenges facing the force, then quite comfortably fielded a mixture of questions. On the one hand, fawning entreaties for him to explain just how it is he copes with the self-same challenges that he had just defined, and on the other, increasingly hostile attacks, and later chants, from students and anti-racism activists. The most powerful of these came when Hogan-Howe was skirting around a question about deaths in police custody, and disparate sections of the audience began spontaneously naming some of the three hundred and thirty-three dead. Given that the subject of the session was ostensibly to discuss total policing, though, Hogan-Howe did a remarkably good job of saying very little in many words.

It’s clear that events of this type are spectacles in the purest sense. The aim of the talk wasn’t to advance any debate that might emerge, or even the content of the lecture that Hogan-Howe gave. Instead, the event itself is what mattered: a veneer of academic respectability is given to the Met, and to BHH himself, by the fact that he can appear to be engaging in such a conversation. His talk was a mixture of down-home wisdom and flat-out contradiction, though those questions which weren’t anodyne or purely polemic exposed some interestingly large gaps in Hogan-Howe’s own understanding of policing in London: for instance, he doesn’t seem to have a desire to explore the disproportionality of stop-and-search further than to ‘explain’ it by pointing out that more stops take place in BME areas. But beginning debate like this isn’t the point of the event, when there’s such apparent disconnect between the rhetoric at the top of the Met and the realities of public order and inner-city policing.

Hogan-Howe likened total policing to Johan Cruyff’s total football; everyone can fill everyone else’s positions. But as one questioner noted, the immediate implication of total policing is high barriers at protests and a massive increase in the ability of officers on the street to decide exactly how the law should be enforced. Public order policing at the moment is heading in two directions: firstly, an increase in the ability of officers on the street to determine exactly how the law is applied. The state of exception, the moment in which particular police officers are able to determine the law, has been particularised and extended with new police powers – as in the case of the imposition of section 60 orders, the ban on face coverings and the restrictions on protest materials outside the agreed route of a march. Secondly, there is an increasing tendency for officers to be placed in situations where the instructions that come down to them from on high force a logic of escalation on to situations.

This mixture of increased power and increased institutional pressures – and the ever more apparent inseparability of police policy from the demands of government of the day – makes it clear that Monday’s talk could never represent a forum for a genuine discussion of total policing. I could go further: Any explanation of total policing from the top cannot encapsulate what it may mean for activists and black youth whose relationship with the police is much less mediated by such rhetoric. Hogan-Howe may represent a nicer face of the Met, but he does not speak for them, or to us.

A podcast of the talk will be available here in the next few days.

On the Monday just passed which saw the heaviest rioting, I was getting something to eat from my local Chinese takeaway in Ealing Broadway when 40 masked and armed youths ran passed me towards the shopping centre. It was 8pm and I was relatively surprised to see the riots spread to the now baptised “leafy and affluent” Ealing. I shouldn’t have been, though. The concentration here is on the various reactions to the riots as I think they proved to be a valuable mirror for all of us to peer in to, as well offering my own rudimentary take in due process.

Speaking for myself: I have lived in the Ealing borough all my life and know the area very well, including the council estates which are often ignored and are on the fringes of the community. I can’t describe my experience here as entirely pleasant, as I have been involved in attempted muggings, fights, and all sorts of violence growing up. My feelings can be best described as sadness for seeing it the way I did the day after the riot, especially upon hearing of the tragic death of 68 year old Richard Mannington Bowes, and a rather tentative understanding for why the violence and vandalism occurred. This previously invisible segment of our society, here in Ealing and elsewhere, should not be treated as a storm that flew overhead and has now thankfully dissipated. The riots were only a natural phenomenon in the sense that the socially exclusive society we live in ushered in their inevitability.

David Cameron returned from holiday recently and issued a “fight back”, almost declaring an intrastate war on those he branded the “sick” and undesirable. “We have seen the worst of Britain, now I believe we have seen some of the best of Britain”, he beamed afterwards when commending those who came out cheerfully with their brooms to clean up the mess. These are the “true” citizens, he said. Ultimately, the sick attitude of the rioters, according to Cameron, can be explained thus: “Their rights outweigh their responsibilities, and act as if there are no consequences.” This is from a man who leads the House of Commons – a place largely populated by those who have lied, been bribed by selling their influence to corporate interests, and pilfered from the public purse, relenting only when caught.

The police are said to have no political leanings, and their actions are completely restricted to upholding an supposedly impartial law. The rioters are said to be mindless thugs looking for loot and a laugh. Such narrow concepts are satisfying for a deluded observer, but human beings are infinitely more complex than whatever singular roles you ascribe to them. The political elite have depicted these two entities as such to have a monopoly on any potentially damaging socio-political commentary. The partitioning of society into units deprived of political content, as these two have been, is a manoeuver to clear the arena of destabilising ideas. These ideas will undoubtedly rock the boat and interfere with the transition to a more authoritarian neoliberalism.

The fact that we as human beings create order means it cannot contain us completely in our efforts to continuously improve it.

So, expecting retorts and plenty of furrowed brows about how I managed to get from stealing a TV to the decadent nature of our social (mal)structuring (as many bloggers I’ve noticed have fallen victim to), I will say that these rioters are but a symptom of the disease, and in no way do I endorse the chaos and destruction committed as the answer to our problems. Similarly, mindlessness on such scale is all but impossible in our golden age of information. Considering how many people were involved in the riots (with over 1,500 arrests made so far), it would be foolish to pin any one reason, good or bad, to the 5 day saga.

Some commentators prefer to slander sympathetic commentary as misguided and detached, and obviously confuse sympathy with curiosity. Agency is key here, they claim, and the rioters must have known what they were doing, right and wrong, etc. I am not disputing that – but in the haze of their self-gratifying spiels, they do not identify the fact that consequences don’t seem to matter anymore, especially if you hear day in and day out of the massive robberies occurring in our society, the aforementioned corrupt and unpunished politicians, the banks, and the deep and targeted cuts. You have EMA scrapped while banks are bailed out for unaccountable millions. You don’t have to be a professor of economics to have an opinion about this – this is the nature of the state right now: it is calculated, socially, legally and economically biased, and primarily looks after the wealth “creators” (or rather, accumulators).

The argument for deprivation stands up if you broaden the terms of deprivation and look at the legal and political capital these alienated youths will never benefit from.

An anthropologist named John Hartung calls religion a “blueprint for in-group morality”. Modern day consumerism is much the same, and its tenets are selfishness, greed, and affirmation through material and ideological power over others. The in-groups are determined by your wealth and connections, and of course, your options. In a society where our social status is primarily assessed by what we have and wear and where we therapeutically shop, these largely “disqualified consumers” have rebelled against the laws of consumerism itself, of property, of the ironically called “free market”. It is free insofar as the ones who have the means to indulge in soporific consumption can feel momentarily liberated from the oppressive norm. It is said to really know a system, you have to experience it from the bottom up without the hallucinogenics associated with climbing a socio-economic tier or two. Many of us can’t fully appreciate this regardless of our imaginations, including myself, but we’re quick to think we do. I concede there is a lot of symbolism here, but I make no apology for it: I did help clean Ealing Broadway up, but that’s just the start of the aftermath – all experience, personal or otherwise, would be nothing without reflection afterwards.

As human beings, we gravitate towards communal bonding to survive, share and prosper together. Yet, we are bombarded with almost mocking, ludicrously arrogant and divisive adverts such as Apple’s recent offering: “If you don’t have an iPhone, well, you don’t have an iPhone”. When someone religiously buys into the ideology of the big brands, they are hailed as heroes by corporations, infinitely more valuable than their average consumer and rewarded as such. They have gone beyond being merely persuaded to consume into a sainthood defined by unflinching devotion to the consumption. The ugly consequences of this is that you will have those who have become so detached with the concept of labour, they’re prone to potentially treating all property with alienated disgust – a relationship of love and hate develops with the product or brand.

With shops putting the wartime slogan “Keep Calm and Carry On” in their repaired windows, it can be said the atmosphere in our society is one becoming defined by oppositional themes. Bullingdon Boys Dave and George relish this. The locus of our experience here is revealed by the vitriol and almost genocidal anger many felt towards the rioters. For a lot of people (and I mean a lot), the compulsion was to indulge in retributive impulses and thereby unite in adversity. However, this time, it isn’t a foreign aggressor as is popular during more modern scheduled wartime, it is your much maligned and forgotten about neighbour. If order can only be maintained through the identification of a common enemy, foreign or otherwise, there are deep structural problems in society.

I believe there is a reason why the rioters didn’t burn Westminster, go to Canary Wharf and assault the suits who ghost in and out of their money-making citadels: in times of famine (in this case, ideological famine or, rather more coyly, an alienation from one’s food source), cannibalism often increases and you lash out at those closest to you rather than attempt to articulate the distress in a globally appreciated way. This is not relegating the agency of rioters at all, in fact, it is quite the opposite. They did not abstract themselves away from their own immediate living conditions. Sometimes by acting as if there were no consequences, much to the detriment of those around you, an honest communication of how one really feels is revealed.

The riots have illuminated very uncomfortable facts in our society which have resulted in tragic deaths, whether you are a “true” citizen, “false” citizen, the thing in itself – how abstract should I go here? Moral appraisals aside, we need to think carefully not only about what is really going on “out there”, but what is going on regarding our own dispositions and aspirations. Aspiration without means usually results in vandalism and violence, and a community without cohesion is a crumbling and doomed community.

Two prospective building sites in London are, I think, totemic of our current economic climate. The Heygate Estate and the Broadgate Estate, though very different, show two sides of the same coin.

The Heygate Estate in Elephant and Castle, South East London, was completed just over 30 years ago. Now, however, it has been completely boarded up, the doors and windows locked with metal from the inside out. Of 1800 units which used to house over 3000 people, there are now only 8 residents left. The rest have been dispersed throughout London, having been offered generally unfair compensation, and shunted to Zone 4, away from their communities, family and friends.

The Heygate Estate

The reason for the prospective demolition is that as the city expands, Elephant and Castle has been deemed a prime area for business development and regeneration. It’s an old story, and one to which we have perhaps become far too familiar. The Elephant Amenity Network, the local community group, has been fighting the ‘regeneration’ plans with counter planning, campaigning to save the trees and green spaces in the area, and trying to put pressure on both the council and the architects.

Part of the way Southwark has got away with this is by abandoning the Heygate residents for longer than it seems. About 10-15 years ago, maintenance work on the site slowed to a halt, as the council let the buildings run into so much disrepair that the estate became a favourite for film crews wanting to capture ‘gritty urban life’ in the metropolis. But this was a purposeful dilapidation, which allowed the council to label a large working class community as criminal and innately impoverished.

Southwark Council then adopted a masterplan for transforming the area in 2004. Since then the main task has been finding investors and emptying the buildings. However, it has now been revealed that it could be another 5 years before any work is done on the site. Due to the recession and the slow pace of planning permissions these 1800 homes near to central London are simply going to remain standing and empty.

There are of course possibilities for temporary use. Guardian resident agencies like Camelot might be brought in, essentially outsourcing security work to an increasingly precarious workforce in London, desperate for cheap rents and shorter commutes. Alternatively, there’s the artsy option of Meanwhile, a fairly new organisation which sets up artists with temporary work and exhibition spaces.

But these schemes have two big downsides. While they do provide some temporary spaces for those who want them, they are also used to ‘protect’ buildings against squatters, a residential group who are being increasingly targeted by the Conservatives and the right wing press. Secondly, neither scheme deals with the general problem of housing in the capital. The simple fact is that the Heygate estate should not be used to meet a temporary space problem. The energy, time and materials invested into it in the 1970s was to meet a need then for residential space in the city, and that space is still needed.

Meanwhile, on the other side of the city centre, bankers and right-wing commentators are up in arms about the potential listing of the Broadgate Estate as a heritage site. The Broadgate Estate has no housing; it doesn’t meet any immediate need of the majority of the city’s residents, but instead is a complex of banks, businesses and office space with a central ice rink and shopping area. Why would it possibly be listed as a heritage site? Well, its innovative design, heralded at the time as an architectural jewel in the city’s complex of squares and high-rises, was only finished in 1985. Now, however, the owner British Land has a better idea for the site: headquarters for the banking giant, UBS.

the Broadgate 'Estate'

UBS apparently wants to move its headquarters from Switzerland to London because the Swiss tax regulations are getting just a bit too strict. Let’s play that again: the tax regulations in London are actually seen as lenient in comparison to those of Switzerland, the economy of which is almost entirely based on creating a political environment suitable to banking. Faced with being refused the space for its new shiny home, the kleptocrats of the Corporation of London are now crying ‘red tape! red tape!’ to anyone who will hear them, hoping to gain some points from sympathetic reactionaries and free marketeers.

What strikes me as so monumentally absurd about both the Heygate and Broadgate proposed demolitions is the extraordinary waste involved. While the Broadgate boasts of its advanced recycling schemes, and Southwark Council is piloting a food-waste program, the demolition of the buildings would signify that all the energy and resources expended on their initial construction comes to naught.

And of course, the two schemes are connected by the still-going-strong debt economy in the UK. The reasons for developing Elephant and Castle is simply to raise property prices, and with his leverage yet more credit for further expansion in the financial sector. The reflation of the debt economy is underway.

This construction project has nothing to do with meeting a need: the new ‘knuckle duster’ building right next to the Heygate, Strata, boasts of its sustainability. But its combined heat and power system, and its fancy iconic wind turbines, are mere decoration when compared with the massive loss of energy and sustainability that happens in a building that’s not even half full. The Gherkin remained similarly empty for years (I don’t know how it is now), and I have little hope for the Shard, the building which has already eclipsed the Strata Tower for the odd title of ‘tallest building in Southwark’.

the Strata Tower (aka the knuckle duster)

The turbines of the Strata Tower, which cause too much noise and vibration to actually be used in the building, hover over the Heygate Estate as a homage to green capitalism, and an icon of current attempts at debt reflation. But how long would a business development in Southwark last, if even the the 1980s business campus at Broadgate is deemed outdated and expendable to the irrational ravings of the city’s high capitalists?

So there we have it, an ecology of debt. Attacks on unions and a debt-economy built on cheap oil have caused mass unemployment, and a sizeable migration of workers towards London in search of jobs. I imagine that many of the fought over jobs will be low paid, ununionised construction work, commuting in from distant suburbs and demolishing and rebuilding sky scrapers for big business while thousands of homes next door remain empty.

When explaining the Conservative vision of the ‘Big Society’ to the public, Cameron and co. have always emphasised the role to be played by the voluntary sector (after all, most people would agree that charities are generally a good thing). The state, they claim, often ‘crowds out’ other non-government organisations that are better suited to the task of providing social services. Moreover, the state often does this in an impersonal, alienating way; Francis Maude talks about the ‘We are the State, you are the citizen’ mentality of the bureaucrat that the Big Society is meant to end. The picture that emerges is one of closely-knit communities all chipping in while Leviathan keeps its distance. Lovely.

Too bad we now know that private firms, not voluntary groups, are in line for most of the contracts to run public services in place of the government. The Independent’s 20p counterpart I (or ‘the I’, whatever we’re meant to call it) reports that:

“Private firms Serco, Sodexo and Mitie have been chosen as preferred bidders to run the Community Payback scheme for offenders, with no voluntary groups on the shortlist…Only two voluntary bodies are among 35 groups to qualify to bid for welfare-to-work contracts worth £2bn.”

There’s a word for this: privatisation.

Far more worrying is the plan by the American firm LSSI to manage public libraries in several local authorities. Libraries are inherently unprofitable (the reason they’re public in the first place) and to make the difference it has been suggested that libraries could open coffee shops and introduce self-scanning technology, a prospect that minsters have said they are “relaxed” about. So, rather than having spaces held in common by a community, the Big Society intends to liberate us by providing garish, overpriced coffee shops with under-staffed book-lending appendages attached.

We really are dealing with people who know the price of everything and the value of nothing. A public library to them is just a possible venue for another bloody Starbucks; social housing is a real estate opportunity gone to waste; ancient woodland is just so much potential lumber. Luckily the British public isn’t putting up with it (most identified Cameron’s vision as a cover for spending cuts in a recent poll.) Let’s hope the ‘Big Society’ will be for Cameron what ‘Back to Basics’ became for John Major – a Tory joke.

Nine years after Oldham burned in horrific race-riots, we’re finally getting round to the only workable solution to racial segregation. The report into the incident concluded that de facto segregation in the community was a root cause of the incident, and a more recent report stated that “Segregation and divisions between Oldham’s communities is still deeply entrenched”. Now, two schools – one 90+% white, one 90+% asian – are to be merged next month in a dramatic effort to ease racial tension in an area in which proximity is no guarantee of community.

This is the subject of a Newsnight series entitled ‘Crossing the Line’, and the report aired last night shows something quite revealing about race relations in some parts of our country. (You can watch it here, if you can sit through ten minutes of thick northern accents).

In the report we meet Jean as she drops her thirteen year old daughter, Hannah, off to drama club (which requries a commute through the predominantly asian part of the town). Jean admits that she feels ‘uncomfortable’ doing this, even for a few minutes when shielded in a large metal box on wheels. ‘In Oldham there isn’t a community anymore’, she says.

Hannah’s views are a bit more strident. “People have been saying that they’re going to build better houses for asians an’ that, immigrants an’ that. It’s like they can just come into the country and get treated like they’re kings and queens…and we get treated like we’re nothing”.

This is a common view, especially, it seems, among the young. Said one boy from the majority-white school, ‘Over there, it’s like totally different; it’s, like, Muslim culture’. The feelings are returned, certainly, and the animosity of the ‘other’ side forms the worldview of the very young. One asian girl, about ten, said simply, ‘They don’t like us asians’. Impressions formed the in the minds of the young can hard to dislodge.

These impressions can only be maintained with extreme seperateness. (Remember, the BNP performs best in areas with little or no immigration).

There have been concerns that the students to be integrated are too old, and that the project will backfire. These concerns I won’t address. What I would like to focus on is the vacuous little objection always raised whenever a humane policy is proposed. The accusation is that the government is just engaging in ‘Social Engineering’

Let’s examine this twaddle.

It might seem to make sense at first. The governemt – cynically, we can presume – is engaging in policies to force certain people in society into different positions etc. (‘Ticking boxes’ one person called it in the above case.) It does this to produce certain politically correct goals, and in callous disregard for the people involved.

Picture it: There he is, the faceless, ‘rationalising’ bureaucrat, manipulating people against their will to satisfy some politically expedient goal, and to make liberals and vegetarians feel better.

Do people realise what they’re saying when they make these kinds of hollow objections, use these hollow words? Society is not a ‘natural’ thing. It is based on human institutions and human agreements which we can control. If we deem equality to be a good thing, we can implement policies to encourage equality; just as we can pursue policies to produce more millionaires. Each produces dramatic social consequences. The abolition of slavery and the enfranchisement of women could be described in this manner, but would we call them ‘social engineering’? We should never tolerate the idea that social relations are the outcome of human nature; more often than not they are the result of some design.

So the definition I’ve come to is this:

Social Engineering: Humane policies with which I disagree, and to which I have no morally acceptable objection.

This cry of ‘Social Engineering!’ carries with it, I think, a rather depressing worldview in which we cannot attempt to change society for the better without government failure and ill effect. Nonsense – society should be ours to engineer.

Let’s hope for the success of this schools program, and look forward to the communities of Oldham coming together in the light of day to see their common humanity. And from that glorious point on they can address their real problem: the fact that they live in Oldham.

This year I decided to spend May Day out on the streets. Here’s some thoughts on how it all went:

1. Kid Stalinists
Diasporic Communist parties marching with images of Stalin don’t really count as Stalinists. Many of those who turn up for the march are children brought along by their parents and community leaders, dressed up to the nines in berets, hammer and sickle tunics, red head scarves, the lot. They march down the road holding flags high, singing Kurdish chants, and English chants in Kurdish and Ecuadorean accents. They grow up with a hammer and sickle on the wall and a picture of uncle Joe. No, I don’t support Stalinism, but really neither do they – he’s just a fading trace of a communal past. More important to them are the framed photos of imprisoned insurgents the children carry at the front of the demo. It’s rare that we can see the diasporic communities in London parading their colours, and even rarer when those colours are explicitly of struggle and social change.

photo courtesy of Amelia Gregory

2. Meltdown
While the Clerkenwell Green to Trafalgar Square march was coming to an end the Election May Day Meltdown was setting up, with the ‘four horse of the apocalypse’ (four street puppets dragging effigies of Cleggers, Gordo, Dave and Griffin) converging at Parliament Square. Last year at the G20, despite all the organisational failings (a pre-occupation with media sensationalism, an obsession with carnival and irony), the Meltdown worked: thousands of people came out on the streets. This year, the Meltdown crew mobilised again, trying to pull people into Parliament Square, but only getting a few hundred (though there is now a semi-permanent peace camp on the green).

3. Theatre
Ironically, or perhaps appropriately, it’s the Endtime thing over and over again, the end of the world constantly appearing in the streets, giant puppets of the four horsemen of the apocalypse and all. But it is fun to come up with all these ideas, and rebellious fun is important. If you haven’t been to a meeting where people come up with these kind of plans, you should go.

[Scene: a squat-chic basement somewhere in Shoreditch. Enter three dissident fools]
Anarchist: Maybe there could be lots of bunting!
Hippy: Yeah, and a dragon!
Clown: The belly of the Beast!
Hippy: And we could put the bunting around the beast -
Anarchist: And the Beast would be Gordon Brown!
Clown: Yeah, and we’ll cover him in flags…
[They all wiggle their hands]

4. Squares
Of course, the communist parties stuck around in Trafalgar Square for the old speeches and rallying points. In previous May Days there’s been more link up, but it was quite clear that Parliament Square was for the the boys in black and the flower people. I find this interesting: Trafalgar Square, a space which has been *made* political by constant protest, was for the socialists. The green outside Parliament was for the non-lobbying, non-reformist anarchists revolutionaries.

5. Streets
As ever, the police came to the rescue. Just as things were starting to mellow into an alright but not particularly interesting summer picnic, the Met decided to open up the road between the green and Parliament, which they’d previously blocked off. As soon as the cars were half-way down the road, in came the hoods and the megaphone: ‘Who’s Streets? Our Streets!’ And so we got to have our protests, our confrontation, our sit down, and some gridlock. At least until the rain kicked in.

photo courtesy of Amelia Gregory

6. History
In the end, it’s worth bearing in mind that the political situation of Saturday was an extraordinary convergence of factors: International Workers’ Day; a coming General Strike in Greece; mass recession; an election; the spectre of an Etonian Tory government; questioning of the electoral process in the media; ongoing wars and war-mongering; an oil spill; a volcanic eruption taking out the air-industry… And yet here we all are, and the revolution didn’t happen, and it wasn’t a May Day to go down in history. History doesn’t make itself happen, and street theatre doesn’t make history. But I really wish it did. Maybe next time we could have a hundred polar bears in black block costume, and  the four horse of the apocalypse meeting up with a giant puppet of Stalin…

This week I want to write about three things: a film I watched (Milk), one protest I did go to (the Party at the Pumps) and another I didn’t (the Big Gay Flash Mob). What ties these things together is the idea of an activist community.

Harvey Milk was the first openly gay elected politician in the States. Having never done anything political before (except vote Republican), at the age of 40 he moved to San Francisco with his new partner, and opened a camera shop. To cut a long story short, the shop became the centre of the gay community in San Francisco, and Harvey became the spokesperson for that community. From boycotts co-organised with the Teamsters, to bringing thousands of gay men onto the streets to demand proper gay rights, the gay community became a movement, and that movement became an electorate.

Harvey was elected, kept fighting, and was eventually assassinated. The excellent film about his life which came out last year is gripping viewing and really should be watched. What got me thinking is the sequence that Harvey and his team made from community, to movement, to electorate. The gay community is a really good example of this: yesterday there was the Big Gay Flash Mob, really quite a good action, highlighting the Tories’ mugwumping over gay rights. While I really wouldn’t want anyone to think it’s okay to vote Tory if they were to have an acceptable gay rights policy, it’s generally a good thing that there’s the ability to call a big, vocal protest at short notice over such an important issue.

The nice pic used for the Big Gay Flashmob fbook group. But who exactly are our masked vigiliantes?

However, on Saturday a friend and I went to the ‘Party at the Pumps’, a very different activist community. In fact, that’s mainly what the community is: one made up of people who believe that activism works. As we got out at Oxford Circus tube station, we looked through the crowds of shoppers, sunglasses on and big square designer bags by their sides, to find the other activists. Pushing through, we looked over everyone’s heads and eventually saw the dreads and beards, the little flags and face paint that says ‘this way for mischief.’

Everyone was gathered at the four different pedestrian corners of Oxford Circus, though there was a fair bit of to-ing and fro-ing across the new diagonal crossing. As reclaiming the streets goes, it’s not exactly fighting the system, but it’s pretty liberating if you’ve always been a Londoner and remember going through this every Summer.

Anyway, at 1.30pm on the dot flag-holders started blowing their whistles and everyone piled down into the underground, away from the hustle of shopping central, dreadlocks, poi, fold-up bikes and all. We swarmed down the tube, filling the escalators, making a racket, stuffing ourselves onto the trains (police in tow, of course). At Shepherd’s Bush, the whistles started going off again, and we all piled out of the tube, skirting round the passageways, following the flag-leaders, until escalators climbed and oyster cards beeping, we got out, turned the corner and all ran towards the BP petrol station in sight.

pic by amelia of ameliasmagazine.com

BP are considering going full throttle into extracting oil from the Canadian tar sands, the most destructive and polluting project on the planet. So, in the run up to the BP shareholders’ AGM on Thursday, various eco-protest groups thought we’d try and send BP a message of what we think about their consistent desire to put profit before workers, indigenous rights groups and impending catastrophic climate change.

We occupied the forecourt, and it seems the convenience store owner decided to close-up for the day – which actually wasn’t necessary; I dare say he could’ve sold a fair few beers to us (although it’s good that smoking was kept to a minimum). There were all the good markers of climate activism: samba bands, banner drops, stickers, subvertising, ceilidhs, rebel clowns (even though Jacob seems to think we don’t have such things). We danced, sang, stickered, leafleted everyone around, whether walking past, lounging in the sun or joining in the dance. But when people came to join in, who were they joining?

It’s a strange thing that for the last decade or so, the loudest ‘activist’ network hasn’t explicitly identified itself, or rather, where it comes from. The alter-globalisation movement, the ‘movement of movements’, doesn’t have a resounding socio-economic or legal status with which it campaigns. The gay community, trade unionists, feminists – all of these, to different extents, work towards a world in which not only their campaigns are unnecessary, but they’re communities themselves become absent as a distinguishable unit.

The activist community protests for others, the so-called ‘ethical politics.’ But what I can’t get out of my head is the fact that Harvey Milk, while him and those around him built a movement, could always know exactly who and what they’re community was. As the climate movement flounders post-Copenhagen, it would be good to really come out of the closet and say who we are.

Tomorrow Alex Salmond is due to present a White Paper to the Scottish Parliament, setting out plans for a referendum on Scotland’s constitutional position. Independence isn’t going to be the only possibility it suggests, (there’s also going to be an option for what Nick Robinson refers to as ‘independence-lite’ – giving the Scottish Executive powers over everything bar ‘defence, foreign policy and macroeconomics’) but obviously full-blown independence is the choice favoured by Salmond and his party.

Image: Scottish Government/flickr

Robinson claims that Scottish public opinion is against Salmond (Wikipedia’s a bit less sure), but suggests – very plausibly – that if (when) the Tories win the general election in 2010, this could well change. ‘The election of an old Etonian English Tory prime minister who will be said to have no Scottish mandate’, as Robinson puts it, probably won’t be popular North of the border, and this in turn might push Labour and the Lib Dems into being a bit more sympathetic to the cause.

So, independence for Scotland is a serious possibility, though perhaps some way short of probable. But why bother? And why is it so often assumed that there’s something inherently good and democratic about devolution (whether it be for Scotland, Wales, or Ireland) and/or independence? I can definitely see the case for national self-determination when a larger nation is clearly oppressing the smaller one with which it’s in political union – the case for Tibetan independence is pretty clearcut (even if  life under the Dalai Lama before the Chinese invasion was pretty bad too), and history is littered with any number of other independence campaigns worthy of sympathy for this reason – those in pretty much all the former colonial possessions of the European powers during the 20^th Century, for a start. Much the same could have been said about Scotland in the days of Edward I or the Highland clearances, but now? I don’t think so. English domination of Scotland nowadays is pretty much restricted to the tourist invasion of the Edinburgh Fringe.

The SNP’s arguments for independence seem mainly to rest on the premise that Scotland is a ‘nation’, in some sense separate from the rest of the UK, and that therefore it should be allowed to run its own affairs. I’ve always been a bit hazy on how a ‘nation’ is even defined, let alone what their significance is (and two years’ study of political philosophy hasn’t really left me any the wiser). However, the basic idea seems to be that there’s something special which unites the inhabitants of Scotland in a way which doesn’t tie them to the rest of the UK. Well, what? A shared history? Well, that rules out those Scots who are recent immigrants (and their children). Shared values? Like what? Are there really any uniquely Scottish values? How about a shared culture? A pretty vague notion, (is someone who can trace their Scottish family back 500 years magically not really Scottish if they prefer cricket to shinty and think Rabbie Burns is boring?) and sails alarmingly close to BNP territory. Not that I think the SNP are bigoted, but it seems hard to arrive at a definition of ‘nation’ that doesn’t end up sounding unsettlingly exclusive. The whole idea of ‘nations’ or ‘peoples’ having a politically significant identity over and above that of their individual citizens is one I find quite troubling. That it’s an ostensibly liberal idea (as in Rawls’ Law of Peoples, for example) troubles me even more.

And as for Nick Robinson’s point about Cameron potentially becoming Prime Minister with no Scottish mandate, so what? It is possible that the Conservatives might end up with no seats in Scotland after the next election. They do already have one MP, and they’re surely far more likely to win seats than lose them on present form, but upsets do happen. But even if there was such an upset, and Scotland became a Tory-free zone, so what? I fail to see why it follows from there being no MPs of a particular party in a given geographical area that that party therefore has ‘no mandate’ in that area. Winning a general election gives you a mandate to govern the whole country, not just the bits that voted for you. That’s kind of how democracy works. I can certainly sympathise with feeling disenfranchised if your party of choice doesn’t get elected – I’d probably have been calling for London to declare independence in the days of Thatcher and the Livingstone-led GLC if it hadn’t been for the fact that the former abolished the latter a few months before I was born – but the fact that a reaction like this is understandable doesn’t make it right. Labour doesn’t currently have much of a mandate in the Home Counties, but that doesn’t magically mean there’s a good case for the region to declare an independent Republic of Surrey.

To be fair to it, the SNP does have a number of sensible policies, listed in that link to their site two paragraphs up: increased investment in renewable energy, adherence to international law, increasing development aid to the UN target of 0.7% . But an independent Scotland doing all those things wouldn’t stop the rest of the UK, let alone the rest of the world, from polluting the planet, participating in illegal wars or neglecting their obligations to the global poor. Assuming that what the SNP really wants is a habitable planet made up of law-abiding states with comfortably-off citizens, (as opposed to a mere smug sense of self-satisfaction that at least Scotland is doing its – in the grand scheme of things, probably fairly insignificant – bit) it’s hard to see how Scotland striking out on its own will be very effective. The SNP would probably be better served trying to raise consciousness of and building grassroots support for these issues, across the UK and internationally. And if you want to persuade other nations, the UK has far more clout, even within the EU, than an independent Scotland would.

Just to make clear, I’m not actually opposed to Scottish independence; I just don’t see the point, or find the arguments for it very convincing. If there really is a huge clamour for independence, fine. But don’t pretend it’s upholding some fundamental moral principle; it isn’t.

For all of you unionists out there, there’s an interesting-looking free conference on in London this Saturday called by SOAS UCU, SOAS Unison, and SOAS Students’ Union.

“Hands off my Workmate Conference
School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London
Saturday 17th October 2009
10am to 5.30pm

On the 12th June this year, the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) was raided by UK Border Agency officers, resulting in the arrest, detention and deportation of 9 members of the SOAS cleaning staff. The SOAS campus trade unions believe that ISS (the cleaning contractor) was involved in organising this immigration raid, which followed a vigorous and successful campaign led by SOAS cleaners to win union representation and the London Living Wage.

The use of immigration checks against migrant workers who organise trade unions is becoming more frequent, with similar raids on the London Underground and at a number of City firms. Attacks on migrants are gathering pace, with trade unionists in hospitals, colleges and local services also increasingly asked to take on the functions of immigration officers.

SOAS UNISON, SOAS UCU and SOAS Students’ Union have called a conference to take place on the 17th October 2009 at SOAS based on the theme ‘Hands of my Workmate’.

It is hoped that this conference will highlight the precarious working conditions of migrant workers in Britain today and be a campaigning base to build the broadest based unity in defence of migrant workers and in opposition to immigration controls in workplaces, colleges, schools, hospitals, etc.

It is intended that the conference will take the form of a series of seminars and practical workshops followed by a general plenary, at which we will formally launch the ‘Hands off my Workmate’ initiative (and ‘hands off my student’, ‘hands off my patient’), what is hoped will be a broad based tool kit designed to build opposition to immigration controls in workplaces, colleges, schools and hospitals.”

Speakers include: Jeremy Corbyn MP I Jean Lambert MEP I Prof Gilbert Achcar I Migrant Rights Network I Clara Osagiede, RMT I Sandy Nicoll, SOAS UNISON I UNITE Justice for Cleaners Campaign I Prof Alex Callincos I RMT I Sasha Callaghan, UCU NEC I Rita Chada, RAMFEL I NUT I CWU I NUJ I Elane Heffernan, Hands off My Workmate I Prof Jane Hardy I Bloomsbury Living Wage Campaign I Habib Rahman, JCWI I Latin American Workers Association I Kate Boothby, National Coalitin of Anti-Deportation Campaigns I Dr Subir Sinha I Dr Paru Raman I Prof Phil Marfleet.

All the info you could ever want about the conference is on http://handsoffmyworkmate.blogspot.com/ so check it out. It looks like it should be a good day.

It’s extremely easy to criticise the politics of cultural products if you don’t agree with absolutely everything they say. If you consider your understanding to be more nuanced, it is very easy to say that a book, a film, or an article doesn’t go far enough. The point is that not every great film is like a glass slipper to each Cinderella viewer, but regardless of this fact these sorts of cultural products can be hugely valuable in changing consciousness and changing the world. It feels a bit silly to preface my review of The Age of Stupid with this, but I am all too wary that whilst I am writing a relatively critical review, I see this film as extremely important, and something that really should be disseminated as widely as possible. Or as Ken Livingstone has put it “Every single person in the country should be forcibly sat down on a chair and made to watch this film.”

The film is set in 2055, in a world in which almost all life has ended on earth. Pete Postlethwaite stars as an archivist, who looks back to the early 2000s, seeing how we got to a state in which the environment caused the collapse of civilisation. He follows a number of stories from different continents around the world ranging from a mountain guide in Chamonix watching glaciers melt, to an entrepreneur setting up a budget airline in India. The main political focus is on inaction and how we (the Western viewers) can do more to cut carbon emissions, and ultimately on how we must lobby in advance of the meeting on climate change in Copenhagen at the end of the year, which will decide on an international strategy on carbon emissions for the coming 15 years.

There are some powerful arguments here, and the film attempts as best as possible to be scientifically accurate, or at least as scientifically accurate as one can be with these sorts of projections. Real changes are shown, along with some of the realities of abject poverty and misery caused by both the use of oil and the industry that maintains its production. The message is loud and clear: if we do not act now, it will be too late.

The problems come, then, in the political messages of the film, or rather what is lacking in the political messages. We are told over and over again that the problem is consumption. Consumption on a scale we’ve never seen before. Consumption so large that it somehow alone makes people poor. Only once is capitalism ever mentioned, and the film-makers are far happier to rely on the rhetoric of consumerism. The problem is, though, that what makes people poor is categorically not in the field of consumption. Yes, over many decades this may be the case, when we exhaust the world’s resources, but there is a fork in the argument: why is it that when we are producing more than ever, when we are pumping trillions of pounds into the market that people are still poor. The point is that poverty is completely inadequately explained by consumerism, and that we need to look at production. A little is said of the so-called curse of resources, but this is never explained in any depth.

I can understand why the makers of the film stay away from this – add a bit of Marxist economics to your environmentalism and your world leaders are less likely to accept it. The trouble is that in ignoring this important debate the arguments for how we can transform the world, and avert crisis, disappear. If we found a clean way to run capitalism (that’s environmentally clean, of course, capitalism is never morally clean), then it is perfectly possible that global poverty would be worse rather than better. Well I mean people would be poor rather than dead, but we can’t be accepting this as a solution.

The film concludes with an argument for people to live in a way that is as close to carbon-neutral as possible. This suggestion seems aimed solely at the Western middle-classes. No advice is offered to, say, the Chinese about how despite rampant growth improving living conditions they should probably curb it a little. In fact there is no challenge to the consciousness of people in the developing world, which ultimately is about them demanding better quality of life, and often this isn’t a very green process (although it has been sometimes – I think back to Chico Mendes and the struggles of the rubber-tappers in Acre in the 1980s.) We can all do our own little bit, but in reality the redistribution of carbon emissions can only happen alongside the redistribution of wealth. Quality of life is not simply relative, and cutting standards of living in the West will ultimately not help people in the most oppressed regions of the world feel better about how they are forced to live.

Despite these difficulties, and the rather fluffy economics of the film, it remains important. We must act now, and the Age of Stupid is proposing a way forward. It’s a shame that the dissemination of the film is not as wide as it could be – I can only assume that there are rights issues that stop it being put up on Google Video or similar. Needless to say, there’s information about the campaign and screenings on www.ageofstupid.net and I encourage you all to watch the film, and show it to others too.