Picture credit: BBC News

Of course, it’s still too early to say right now at the time of writing how this will pan out, but so far the signs are at least positive; the caretaker military administration have promised open elections as soon as practicable, they’ve promised to abide by all the existing treaties which are in effect (which is hopefully a good sign for the Israel-Palestine process), they after all chose not to suppress the protests in the first place, and, following Tunisia’s starting of what might prove to be a Middle East domino effect, protests are now starting in Algeria.

But what can we learn ourselves from the events of the last three weeks?

Most of all, we learn perhaps the most important thing, that (broadly) peaceful protest, even in the face of a 30-year oppressive regime, can work – that ultimately, even when the regime is backed up by tanks, helicopter gunships, and fighter jets, the people really do reign supreme; if the people can be arsed. When a million people turned up to march on parliament in 2003 intent on stopping our government from going to war in Iraq, we turned up, we shouted at the bricks and waved our banners, and we went home. Subsequent protests about various issues in Britain have had similar effects – a lot of people have turned up, shouted, waved flags, thrown bricks, and buggered off home. In contrast, in Egypt a million people turned up in Tahrir Square and stayed there. They stayed there and refused to go home until their demands were met – and they knew that their demands were righteous, and those who could have stopped the protests in a stroke, the army, also knew their demands were righteous. Rather than act as agents of the oppressive state, the army remembered what their first and overriding priority is – to defend the nation. The People held their nerve, and The People ultimately won.

We also learn that effective protests are ones which are owned by The People, not by professional agitators. The message for us in the UK is clear – Socialist Worker, you’re not welcome. Whenever you and your crowd turn up to a protest, all you do is poison it. You have no interest in creating a fair and just society, your sole interest is in replacing one unfair and unjust system with another unfair and unjust system. Whenever you and your ilk turn up to a protest, you’re there with violence and mayhem as the goal, not the means of last resort. It’s because of the likes of you that modern protests are accompanied by an equally obnoxious response by those tasked to police them. So go home, and don’t come back until you’re prepared to camp out in the cold for three weeks.

What can our government (and by that I do not restrict myself to those who happen to be living in Downing Street this week) learn from the Egyptian protest?

How might they respond to a three week occupation of Trafalgar Square by a million people?

One of the reasons why is summed up neatly by Laurie Penny in her article ‘Inside the Whitehall Kettle‘:

I didn’t understand quite how bad things had become in this country until I saw armed cops being deployed against schoolchildren in the middle of Whitehall. [my emphasis] These young people joined the protest to defend their right to learn, but in the kettle they are quickly coming to realise that their civil liberties are of less consequence to this government than they had ever imagined. The term ‘kettle’ is rather apt, given that penning already-outraged people into a small space tends to make tempers boil and give the police an excuse to turn up the heat, and it doesn’t take long for that to happen. When they understand that are being prevented from marching to parliament by three lines of cops and a wall of riot vans, the kids at the front of the protest begin to moan. “It’s ridiculous that they won’t let us march,” says Melissa, 15, who has never been in trouble before. “We can’t even vote yet, we should be allowed to have our say.”

When talking about democracy, it’s usually understood to be basically just about the vote we have every year / every four or five years, in which we select our politicians to run our cities and our country, and the lucky few actually get the politician of their choice representing them.

Democracy is about more than just voting in elections, though – democracy is about participating fully (or at least to the best of one’s ability and interest) in civic life; jury service is an essential act of democracy, as is serving on the bench as a magistrate. It’s a common complaint of younger people that the magistrates are all a bunch of posh old duffers – but actually, the pool of magistrates in any given city is supposed to be representative of the population of that city, be it young, gay, black, single parent, whatever. So why not give an application a go?

But I digress. The other important pillar of a fully democratic society is the right to protest. In a democratic society, the Government is not the master of The People, it’s the servant of The People. And – vis the magistrate point – the Law is also not the master, but the servant. Where the Government and the Law are out of step with the will of the People, the People have a duty to make their views known through the medium of protest.

Cuddly liberal types generally tend to baulk at the idea of protest (except when the topic of protest is something they have a personal interest in), preferring instead to advise people to write strongly worded letters to their MPs, being horrified at the idea of other people breaking the law. But actually, important as writing a strongly worded letter to one’s MP is, no bad law ever got repealed by the power of green ink. That law which Henry VIII instigated mandating every adult male to do an hour’s archery practice every Sunday morning? It was people breaking it which eventually got it repealed. More pertinently, that law which made every adult pay a flat fee in order to have the right to even exist in this country (aka the Poll Tax) – it wasn’t people writing letters to their MPs which got it repealed – it was people, in mass numbers, in the first instance refusing to pay it, and ultimately the People turning up to a mass protest in Trafalgar Square to make their views unavoidably heard.

Over the last 25 years, there have been a number of laws – and amendments to laws – introduced which have further and further curtailed the right to protest; in fact, those laws in their letter are actually so restricting that the Public Order Act 1986 technically makes it a criminal offence for a group of more than six people to walk down the street together. It’s a testament to the high ethical standards our police forces (much maligned, with good reason, in the 1980s) have maintained that, by and large, they’ve wilfully refused to make use of powers they’ve had at their disposal.

But in the last couple of years there has been a much uglier undercurrent around protests developed where police and mindless anarchists alike have each upped the ante, with the result being that reasonable protests are emasculated at birth by the appearance of the riot squad, and what should have been a reasonable protest has been needlessly turned into a riot because that’s the only way the protesters have been left as the way to get their voices heard.

And as Laurie Penny says, when the same policing techniques that are used against a bunch of anarchist G8 rioters are used against a bunch of schoolchildren, you know there’s something gone badly wrong. And something needs to be done.

An emergency notice has been served on an illegal gypsy camp, which was set up at the weekend on greenbelt land in Meriden. It is believed the travellers had purchased the plot of land from a landowner but did not have permission to build on the site.

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Travellers bulldozing a field in a peaceful Solihull village to create a caravan site have been ordered to stop work by the authorities. Angry residents set up a road block with farming trucks stopping lorries taking building materials to the site.

This is not, as is often the case, travellers just moving onto a piece of common land and setting up, or even a case of them moving on to somebody else’s land without permission. This piece of land, they have legally bought.

Admittedly, they haven’t got planning permission to set up a camp on the land – intending instead to try to gain retrospective planning permission part way through the work. This is of course still illegal – but is a common practice carried out by big time developers and small time homeowners for their rear extensions alike. Overwhelmingly, when applied for, retrospective planning permission is granted.

But in this case, planning permission for the travellers’ site probably won’t be granted – even though it probably would have been for a block of nice little boxes on the hillside flats for rich people. And had it been flats for rich people, the people of Meriden almost certainly wouldn’t have turned out in force to block the road.

Why?

Because racism against travellers is the one remaining socially acceptable form of racism. Not only is it acceptable, it’s almost mandatory. Call somebody a nigger, wop, or paki and you’ll be quite rightly castigated for it. Call them a gypo or a pikey and your friends will laugh approvingly; take somebody to task for using the word gypo and they’ll tell you not to be so sensitive, that it’s Political Correctness Gone Mad(tm).

Now it’s true that many illegal traveller encampments need an awful lot of clearing up when they are eventually evicted. It’s also true that they shouldn’t move in illegally in the first place.

But if councils met their obligations to provide a certain number of travellers’ sites in the first place, there would be less of a problem of ‘illegal’ encampments. And ultimately, if you treat people like pariahs, then like pariahs they will behave.

So when can we see the end of this last socially acceptable form of racism?

“A tribunal is considering how much the MoD must pay a female soldier after she won her case against the Army for sexual and racial discrimination. Tilern DeBique, 28, was disciplined after not appearing on parade because she had to look after her daughter”.

To my mind, this incident gives a completely bad name to the whole concept of the right to work free from discrimination, and just plays into the hands of the foaming Daily Mail readers who like nothing more than to scream ‘it’s political correctness gone mad’ at every opportunity.

The question of the appropriateness of a single mother being a serving soldier in the armed forces – even as a signals technician rather than somebody required to actually shoot people – required to be on call to be deployed to an active combat zone is a whole discussion of itself.

It’s also a fair comment to pose that if the Ministry of Defence is going to actively engage in recruiting overseas, then it needs to make sure it can properly accommodate the overall needs of its recruits.

But as to being disciplined for being late for parade due to being unable to organise childcare at short notice; this is not a normal office environment we’re talking about here – any normal job, it would be a harsh uncaring employer indeed which didn’t offer understanding and flexibility.

But the armed forces are not normal office environments; when you are just about to be deployed to a warzone, you can’t say ‘sorry I’m late, traffic was murder and my childminder let me down’. And the whole point of the way military discipline works is you treat every single day as if you are about to be deployed. You also don’t have a right to not have a nasty howwid drill sergeant say nasty howwid things to you – if you can’t take that kind of environment, then the army isn’t really for you.

In this instance, the army disciplined her (note, didn’t dismiss her), and offered her alternative employment as an option if she felt life in the army was incompatible with being a single mother. Instead she opted to leave and pursue a discrimination case against the MoD, facing a possible payout of of the order of £100,000.

“BT has said it will cut about 15,000 jobs this year, mostly in the UK, and has reported an annual loss of £134m. The firm also said it had cut 15,000 jobs in the past year, which was 5,000 more than had been expected”.

The BT spokesman said they hoped to remove the positions through natural wastage and voluntary redundancies, rather than through compulsory redundancies. How caring that sounds. Though it transpires that although BT is not planning on compulsory redundancies, it instead has a compulsory redeployment programme, where highly skilled engineers are removed from the job they have spent years training (and even more years becoming accomplished) to do, and given the option of either voluntarily being redeployed to a call centre, or voluntarily being made compulsorily redundant.

But that wasn’t what I was going to talk about.

What’s not mentioned in the BBC News article, but was mentioned in the radio coverage of the story, was that the anticipation was that most of the jobs to be shed would be the temporary staff, working through agencies. He said it in the tone of voice indicating “so that’s alright, then”, going on to say that they wanted to reward their permanent staff for their loyalty in being permanent staff.

I wonder how many of the temporary staff who are apparently disloyal because they’re not permanent have been working there for over 12 months? Disloyal for foregoing sickness pay, pension contribution, paid bank holidays, and any number of other benefits which permanent staff receive and are denied to temporary staff – no matter how long either have worked for the company.

And apart from a few people working in highly lucrative I.T. consultancy roles, being a temporary member of staff is not the route to riches it is commonly thought to be – it’s took a change in the law to force employers to pay temporary staff as much as their permanent colleagues doing the same work – though the employers themselves still end up paying more for temps because of the agency’s cut.

Workplace unions are also notoriously bad at standing up for temporary staff – usually their attitude is protect the permanent workers at all cost, and see the temps as worse than scabs crossing a picket line.

So it’s quite convenient when such as BT announce redundancies, proudly proclaiming “we’ll restrict the sackings to the agency workers” – they manage to make themselves sound caring on the radio, the unions stay relatively quiet, & 15,000 more people next month will be wondering how they’ll pay their rent / mortgage / food bills.

But that’s OK – after all, they’re only temps.

Amnesty International UK Campaigns Director Tim Hancock said:

‘The Chinese authorities have broken the promises they made when they were granted the Olympics seven years ago. They told the world that the Olympics would help bring human rights to China, but the government continues to persecute and punish those who speak out for human rights ahead of the Games.

‘The Olympic values have been betrayed by the Chinese government. They must release all imprisoned peaceful activists, allow foreign and national journalists to report freely and make further progress towards the elimination of the death penalty – or risk permanently sullying the legacy of the Olympics.’

Amnesty International’s report ‘The Olympics Countdown: Broken Promises’ evaluates the performance of the Chinese authorities in four areas related to the core values of the Olympics: persecution of human rights activists, detention without trial, censorship and the death penalty”.

Unlike most of my friends of the left-liberal persuation, I’m not automatically against the principle of ASBOs – there’s no denying that there are some people who make the lives of other people a misery through behaviour which isn’t actually illegal, and there should be a mechanism for dealing with them which has more legal weight than a stern talking to. If the mechanism is being abused in its implementation, that’s another issue.

But what this new ‘initiative’, branded as ‘Foetal ASBOs’ by the media, is planning on doing is looking at parents, and deciding in advance that their children are ‘bound to’ grow up as problem children – before they’ve even been born. Some people have branded the idea as verging on genetic determinism.

Back in the old days of usenet, it was always considered bad form to compare somebody, or an idea, to Hitler – basically it meant the discussion had run out of useful things to be said. In this instance, I think a comparison with the behaviour of the Nazi regime in 20th century Germany is not too wide of the mark.

Last Tuesday evening from Spar I bought a box of Stowell’s Tempranillo (a light red wine, for those not in the know). I got it to the boat, poured a glass, and it turned out to be quite disgusting – a bottle of it I might have forced myself to drink, but a whole 3 litre box costing £18, I draw the line at; I’m not that much of an alcoholic. As well as being disgusting, in the glass it was cloudier than New Brighton beach on a wet sunday morning, and left a sediment in the glass worse than the Severn Trent sewage reprocessing plant. I’ve poured better home-brew down the sink.

Last Sunday afternoon I bought from Sainsbury’s supermarket in Selly Oak a bottle of chocolate schnapps (amongst other things). When I got home I went to open the bottle (a screw-top affair), and half the bottle came off along with the lid. Soon in the booze department, luck has been lacking this week.

This morning I took the box of wine back to Spar (when explaining the problem to the person behind the counter, one of the responses was “what’s sediment?”), and discovered in the process that it had a Best Before End date of July 2005. When the manager came out from the back of the shop he asked if I had the receipt – my answer was, naturally, “no, sorry – after all, do you keep the receipt for every bottle of wine you buy?”, and I pointed out that it was over a year past the BBE date. The manager said that without the receipt there was nothing he could do, so a bit of a discussion followed in which I mentioned the magic words “Trading Standards”, and he eventually went into the back room to look through the whole of Tuesday evening’s receipts to find the sale for the box of wine, and after 20 minutes came back having found the evidence of the sale (during which time I’d discovered another box of the same wine still for sale, also out of date) and grudgingly agreed to a refund.

This evening I took the bottle of schnapps back to Sainsbury’s, was asked if I had the receipt, and again my answer was, naturally, “no, sorry – after all, do you keep the receipt for every bottle of wine you buy?”.

“Good point, fair enough” was the reply – and the person behind the counter instantly went to the till and pulled out a refund in cash to give to me, without any further discussion.

Now, the man from Sainsbury’s could quite easily have argued with me on the grounds that, after all, from his point of view I could have broken the bottle myself accidently and tried to pass it off as faulty. So why did the man from Spar, when there was clear proof and evidence that the actual product wasn’t fit for sale, that it was out of date, and that there were more goods still for sale also out of date, decide to make an issue of it? And eventually lose the deal, waste half an hour of mine, his, and his assistant’s time, and leave a customer with a bad impression of the shop.

‘But’, I hear you say, ‘what about corporate social responsibility? We all know how evil and anti-competitive The Borg is, whereas those nice people at Apple all eat organic food, donate lots to charity, and don’t wear leather or wool’.

Erm, yes. What’s not very widely known is that Apple co-founder and head Steve Jobs is also a major shareholder and board member of Disney, themselves not exactly Snow White when it comes to being cuddly bunnies in the corporate environment.

And now there’s this story today, revealing that some workers in the Chinese plant which manufactures the iPod regularly work longer than 60-hour weeks. Apple were quoted as finding that excessive, and taking steps to enforce a ‘normal’ 60-hour week.

Excuse me? A 60-hour week normal??? I’m glad I don’t work for Apple!

“LONG-serving workers at Birmingham chocolate giant Cadbury are being rejected – because the company claims they cannot spell. Dozens of so-called ‘temporary’ staff, who have been employed at the Bournville factory for up to 14 years, were forced to sit literacy and numeracy tests and told not to return to their jobs if they failed”.

Basically, this story was about how Cadbury’s recently sacked a whole raft of ‘temporary’ (some of whom had been working there ‘temporarily’ for 14 years) staff for not being sufficiently literate or numerate; they were all forced to sit literacy tests, and those who failed the tests told not to bother coming back to work.

The excuse given by Cadbury’s for this was ‘health and safety’ – apparently not being able to spell antidisestablishmentarianism and be able to calculate in one’s head the square root of 51 constitutes a health and safety risk in the modern confectionary industry. Whether this is the case or not, compare the behaviour of the modern Cadbury corporation with the beliefs and actions of its pioneers, George & Richard Cadbury. As well as the whole innovation of setting up the factory-in-a-garden and the building of Bournville Village in the first place, they were also prominent in the Adult School Movement, whereby workers were given paid time off twice a week to attend night school classes to improve their, erm, literacy and numeracy, and also allowed to study other subjects at the Day Continuation School (sited in what is now part of UCE BIAD, next to the Quaker meeting house).

I think this behaviour is worth a boycott of their products. It’s a shame really that doesn’t leave much left for a correct-thinking leftist liberal such as myself to eat in the chocolate department, what with also boycotting Nestl� and all for their socially irresponsible corporate behaviour. Looks like I’ll just be left with Green & Black’s.