For those who don’t know the history of Manchester Mule (which to be honest, will probably be most of you) the idea came out of the G8 anti-capitalist protests in Gleneagles in 2005. Those who went to Scotland that year from Manchester largely organised themselves out of The Basement Social Centre on Lever Street, and this is where the first incarnation of ‘The Mule’ developed and took shape.

The Basement sadly closed in 2007 after severe flood damage caused by a fire in the building upstairs. Since then Manchester has sorely missed having a radical social centre – a place we can meet, talk, eat, organise, fundraise and generally get to know each other in a safe space which is ours. And as you all know, this is more important than ever at the moment.

After a lot of work from a few dedicated people, especially over the last few months, it looks like we may have one again in the relatively near future, but they need a bit of extra cash get off the ground. Here’s a message from the MCR Social Centre crew:

Right… We have a plan! We want a social centre, you need a social centre and Manchester lacks a social centre…

Some of us have been involved with various squatted social centre projects which have been amazing for us and hopefully those who’ve visited. The problem is not having a permanent space means we can only get on it part time. The community, the friendships and the love we have found could continue into infinity if… we raise some money.

Here goes, we have some start up capital which we have raised, we have a lot of crew who are up for it, but we need a way of raising some money fast so we can get into a place as soon as.

If anyone can lend us a pound or two, it would be massively appreciated… Think of it as an investment. We will have our own place, where we can get a cheap brew, some good vegan food, a locally brewed beer, some decent bands, a radical library, a place to organise, exhibit and find each other. Anything could happen… seriously.

We promise that your money will be spent on renting a place in Manchester as soon as we have the cash. If you share our vision and would like to see a place like this, follow this link, we need to raise around a thousand pounds, 50p, a quid, anything would be grand.

Come get involved, donate and let’s make this happen, we have a deadline (which ain’t long away!) so if you are able to donate, please do it soon. It sounds like a faff but it’s going to be well worth it. Honestly.

FOLLOW THE LINK BELOW TO DONATE!

http://www.manchestersocialcentre.org/donate

Thanks! MCR Social Centre

Who knows if we’d even exist if it wasn’t for The Basement, and all the people who put so much work into that wonderful place. There’s a lot of support, check out the Facebook event, and if you want to get involved, there will be jobs that need a-doing going up on their website in the next few days.

They’re legit, we promise, so go on, give ‘em a quid and help make it happen!

Edited and mostly written by Marc Hudson and Arwa Arburawa, Manchester Climate Monthly is once again providing all the frustrating, cynical and laboriously-researched local climate news you can handle, plus all the climate-goings-on to look out for in the city. Manchester Mule welcomes you back!

There’s plenty to get your teeth into in Issue 1, published last week. Check it out here.

They’ve got a Facebook page and a Twitter account too to keep up to date.

We’re still here by the way, and we’ve got plans and stories brewing…

Happy new year and hope you had a lovely Winterval and all. What’s that? You forgot to buy a Mule a present, well, why not give us a donation to keep the wolves at bay? Better late than never eh?

The dossier arose in response to an invitation from the House of Lords Communications Committee. The peers invited Clare to give live evidence on 11 October for their current inquiry into the future of investigative journalism. This dossier is being submitted to the committee today as an additional briefing paper.

The peers asked: what are the threats to journalism? Sambrook answers: the biggest threat to journalism and our democracy is official lying, and here is a narrow but deep sample of the way that officials communicate. “If the systematic mendacity recorded here is representative of the way government functions,” says Sambrook, “then our democracy is in serious trouble.”

Also giving evidence the same day was Ian Hislop. He helped the peers understand some basic distinctions, for example that hacking is not investigative journalism. He also made a striking point, for me at least, when asked to define investigative journalism. In part, he answered, it is saying the same true thing again and again and again and again until the penny drops. It is not just that Private Eye runs a story, its influence comes from repeating it over and over again.

Repeat the truth often enough…

There is an important lesson here. What matters is not revealing something that is wrong. The ice soon closes over. What matters – and what of course costs time and money – is continuous, informed, accurate repetition so that exposé of the wrongdoing will not go away. Hackgate can be seen as a classic vindication of this analysis. It did not just explode with the Milly Dowler revelation. Had the Guardian, or any other paper, run that story out of the blue, there would have been shock but no other consequences, certainly not the closure of the News of the World and the Leveson Inquiry. Without Nick Davies’s (who gave evidence alongside Sambrook) utterly dedicated (for years ignored) persistence and the Guardian’s commitment to him, there would have been no explosion.

Cartoon by Martin Rowson. Original artwork is being auctioned in support of End Child Detention Now

This led me to reflect on the impact of Clare Sambrook’s coverage of child detention. It was backed by a campaign: just over two years ago Clare and five friends working unpaid and unfunded launched End Child Detention Now (ECDN). OurKingdom was able to open its doors and let the campaign publish repeatedly and at will. We didn’t say, “Oh, we have already ‘covered’ that”. And boy did Clare and her ECDN colleagues invest their time. In the process OurKingdom learnt how to combine ‘investigative comment’ with openness. I had not fully understood the importance of repetition as part of effective exposure.

Sambrook’s dossier on official mendacity takes the argument a step further. For in the intense, relentless process of exposing the scandal of child detention another perhaps even greater scandal emerges. The British state and its civil service, which presents itself as an honest public service, is suborned. There is a clear pattern of persistent official lying used in defence of the punitive practice of arresting and detaining asylum-seeking families.

Official untruths

It is very important to understand that we are not talking about politicians being ‘economical with the truth’, or being misleading or downright lying — which everyone expects. It is not a matter of broken promises made on the stump to win votes. Clare Sambrook exposes repeated and systematic cover-up by officials, by civil servants employed by the taxpayer, of reputable medical evidence that children were being harmed. In the dossier she highlights attempts by officials to mislead ministers about the significance of safeguarding failures in a case of alleged child sex abuse at Yarl’s Wood, the UK Border Agency’s notorious Bedfordshire detention centre.

Urging a restoration of respect for information, Sambrook writes: “The role of government and local government press officers should be to serve the public with truth, not to serve ministers by spinning to the public.” To achieve this she suggests that “every press release and public statement issued by officials should be signed off by an official who takes responsibility for the accuracy of the information. It should be forbidden for civil servants to mislead Parliament or its committees, just as ministers are forbidden from so doing.”

The issue could hardly be more important if there is to be any trust in government.

At one point in the Committee hearings, committee chairman Lord Inglewood asked Ian Hislop and Guardian editor Alan Rusbridger: “Do you think there is masses of scandals out there that just never get revealed at all?” Hislop replied: “There is plenty that nobody knows anything about. Every time something turns up, I do not know about you, I say, ‘Good grief, I didn’t know that’.” I felt everyone in the room was reflecting on their secrets, little and perhaps not so little, for who knows? Baroness Fookes chipped in: “Like the perfect murder, we do not know about it.”

Indeed. But how much more perfect is it for everyone to know that the truth is being murdered while neither preventing nor reporting it.

Anthony Barnett

This article was originally published at Our Kingdom. The original featured artwork by Martin Rowson is being auctioned in support of End Child Detention Now

David Harvey at Occupy London / November 12, 2011 / International Day of Solidarity from Elaine Castillo on Vimeo.

Thanks to Elaine Castillo who has done a transcript on her website, which is copied in below.

“This is, this is absolutely fabulous, this is fantastic. I mean, you know, this is great——I couldn’t imagine that London could get like this! And you’re doing a really, really great job. And this is really, I think, going to change things——

“Because one of the things that I think we’re learning over the last few years actually and particularly over the last few months, is that it’s people—-on the street, in the squares—-that really matters, in the end. Because that’s the only political force we’ve got. They’ve got the money, they can buy politics, the can buy the media, they can buy anything they want. We don’t have that. The only thing we have is people. And a mass of people. And the more people mass on the street, the harder and harder it becomes for them to say, ‘Oh, no, your interests are not our interests.’

“And the other thing that needs to be established here is that, you know, we live in a world where people talk about the importance of public space. But most of the time the public is not allowed to be in that public space. What you’re showing is: people belong in this public space. And when we get in this public space, we can turn it from a public space into a commons. Into a political space. Where we can start to discuss and understand, and start to militate against the incredible, incredible concentrations of wealth and power.

“And we’ve been through something called a crisis, a crisis for whom? Actually, you look at the number of billionaires around the world, there are about 30% more billionaires now than there were three years ago. The crisis has been a way of assembling even more wealth in fewer and fewer hands. And the way in which it is done is to go after people who are the most vulnerable. That is, you extract wealth from those who can least afford to have that extraction visited on them.

“And at the same time, this crisis is one where the real questions are never being addressed. And the three big questions indeed I think to be addressed are these: firstly, there’s the question of global poverty. And it’s not only global poverty but it’s global inequality. And it’s not only inequality of wealth and inequality of income, but it’s the inequality of political power. That in fact, that wealth, that income, is being used to buy politics. And this of course this is a bit of an old tradition, I mean, in the United States, Mark Twain said of the US Congress, he said: ‘The United States always has the best Congress that money can buy.’

“And this is actually how politics has been evolving, over the last 30 years in particular. More and more money buys influence and buys political power. It also structures the media. Increasingly we find it dominates what’s going on inside of universities. It dominates our educational system, so that universities increasingly become places where all you learn is neoliberal ideology. Where all you learn is corporatist manegerial techniques. And those corporatist manegerial techniques are about actually how to squeeze more and more money out of those who can least afford it.

“Now, one of the ways in which people like to take on the question of global poverty is this. They say, Well, okay, we should have more and more NGOs, we should set up, you know, things and try to help people in poverty by doing this and doing that, you know, dividing blankets here and a bit of medical care there. Which is not all bad. But the problem, I try to say to people who are into that, the one thing you don’t seem to understand, is that you cannot solve the problem of global poverty without going after the accumulation of global wealth. And until you all leave your anti-poverty campaigns and you actually join the anti-wealth campaigns, nothing’s going to happen.

“I mean, I’m old enough to remember the anti-poverty rhetoric of the 1950s and I remember it in the 1960s, I remember it in the 1970s, and the 1980s—-and then we had the millenium goals, ‘We’re going to eliminate global poverty by 2015,’ and here we are, four years to go, and it’s much worse than it was. We hear it again and again and again. And the reason that happens is that the solution we are told that must be applied to solve global poverty is the very set of mechanisms that produce it. That is, free markets, free trade, free right on the part of capitalist class to exploit, to the hilt, everybody that they can get their hands on.

“Furthermore, it’s not only about exploiting labor. What is now going on is that we are finding more and more that accumulation of wealth is through the dispossesion of others’ wealth. I mean, the capitalist class doesn’t even know how to produce wealth anymore. What they are very good at is stealing. They’re good at robbery. they’re good at actually legalizing the extraction of wealth by all sorts of means. ‘Eminent domain’, ‘move populations out of here…’ And right now, worldwide, there is what we call a ‘land grab’ going on. That is, an attempt to color all of the resources of planet earth so that, actually, a small group of people effectively control all of the resources which allow social life to flourish. We cannot let that concentration of wealth continue. It has to be stopped. It has to be reversed.

“And how can it be reversed when we don’t have the money to buy politics, when we don’t have the money to buy the media, when we don’t have the money to dominate the television, when don’t have all the… how do we do it? Well, you’re showing ow you do it. You assemble in places like this. And you stay in places like this. You don’t say, We’re going to have a demonstration and then go home. No. You stay. You stay.

“And the fact that you’re staying is, I think, the most, one of the most significant political events that’s actually happened, over the last ten, fifteen, even fifty years. And I think that is absolutely why this is such a fabulous situation that you’ve created. You’re taking a public space, you’re turning it into a commons, and you’re saying, ‘Our intersts have to be heard, our voices have to be heard.’ And at this particular point, it doesn’t really matter exactly what you’re saying, the most important thing is that you are here, and you’re goddamn staying here.

“Now I suggested that one of the big problems in the world is global poverty, now that’s associated with something which I think is another aspect of our political situation. Capital works in such a way that it incurs certain costs in what it does. But what it also does is to try to shed those costs and make somebody else liable for them. And there are a whole bundle of costs which are associated with the reproduction of society. We talk about education, we talk about health care, we talk about basic human services, we talk about caring for the elderly, we talk about dealing with the problems that are created through alienation in terrible work environments, we talk about all of those issues. Well, the economists have a little word for this. They call it ‘externalities.’ And what’s meant by that is actually you take a cost which you should bear, but you get rid of it. You turn the cost into an externality that somebody has to pay for.

“Well, since Thatcher, there’s been a systematic assault, to try to turn more of the costs of social reproduction into externalities. Costs that capital will not bear. ‘You bear the cost of your own education, you bear the cost of your own health care. and if you get sick and you die, that’s your own fault. It’s not capital’s fault.’

“Now in the 1950s and 1960s, the state was forced by political circumstances to bear some of those costs and to tax capital, to bear some of those costs. But what Margaret Thatcher started to do was to say, ‘Look, we are actually not going to pay those costs anymore, they’re up to your wn personal responsibilties, it’s up to your own personal savings, it’s your own personal life and you have to take care of it, and if you don’t take care of it and get into trouble, that’s your problem.’

“Now that was what Thatcher launched, and actually there’s a pattern that goes on here. Everybody thought when Thatcher was gone—-got rid of Major as well—-that things would change. No! We got Tony Blair. And what did Blair do, he deepened what was going on. Blair started to introduce the top-up fees at universities, Blair is the one who started to push this Thatcherite agenda even further. And right now what we’ve got is a situation where the Thatcherite agenda is with us even though she is long gone.

“And this is a global problem. I mean, I was in Chile recently, fabulous situation in Chile, I hope you can establish links with then. The students there have occupied all of the public universities. And mind you, they’re not moving! They’re not going anywhere and they’ve been doing it for four or five months. Quite a few of the high schools ae actually occupied. And what they’re saying is this: ‘Pinochet privatized all of the educational system; when Pinochet went and we got social democracy, we got rid of the dictatorship, we imagined that things would change. They didn’t change; in fact, they’ve got worse. So what we have to do is to end that process that Pinochet started.’ This is what they’re saying.

“And we have to end what Thatcher started, and reverse it entirely. In other words, what we have to have is a political program to end the whole Thatcher era because it has not ended at all, and what we see with the current conservatives right now is that they want to make it even more Thatcherite than Thatcher.

“That this, if you like, what the political task is. To force capital to bear all of those costs that it doesn’t want to bear. It should take care of education. We should have a free decent education for everybody. And it should be an equal quality education; none of this nonsense about, If you go live in this suburb, you get decent education and if you live in the inner city, you get crap. No. We should actually equalize educational opportunity everywhere. And the same occurs with questions of health care. The same thing happens with all of the forms of social services; they have to be revolutionized. They have to be actually transformed in such a way that they’re not run through some abstract bureaucracy but they’re run on a popular kind of basis. In other words, what we want is not simply the restablishment of some bureaucratic welfare state, what we want is the restoration of the right to decent health care, decent caring, and for that to actually be then rendered on a popular basis. It is, if you like, popular assemblies that should decide about hospital populations, it’s things of that sort that need to be dealt with in a much more democratic kind of way.

“The other huge problem there is globally is the problem of environmental degradation. Again, capital does not want to bear those coists. It says basically, well, if islands go underwater because of global warming and sea levels rise, let other people bother with the costs. Not us. So again, it’s a matter of real costs which are visited upon people, all around the world—-indigenous populations in particualr are being very hard hurt by all of this. These costs have to be brought back and capital has to be forced to pay those costs. But they’re not going to do it voluntarily; they’re only going to do it if they’re forced to. And they’re going to be forced by political process, and they’re going to be forced by political oposition.

“So those it seems to me are the two big global issues that we face, and it’s going to take a global movement to deal with them. And what we see is a global movement emerging. I mean, there have been elements of it that have been working for a long tme, you have things like, groups like the landless peasant group in Brazil; fantastic movement. You have the Chilean students who have been militating along these lines now for some for or five years. Let’s give a shout for the Chilean students…

“We have a Maoist insurrection in Central India, which is portrayed as a very cruel and horrible kind of thing, but it turns out if you read Arundhati Roy, or something like that, these are people who are really struggling, just to say alive, in the circumstance where they’re constantly being attacked by the political power and the police power of the state apparatus. And the same would be true in countries like Bolivia, where you see indigenous populations mobilizing, and they’ve mobilized in very very strong kinds of ways. So all around the world there is a growing sense that the system which has been constructed does not and cannot work, and furthermore it must not be allowed to work any further.

“And there is, to me anyway, one of the big final problems, which is that capital is always about growth. You see the newspapers, and what are they saying, they say, ‘Oh, there’s a crisis, we have no growth.’ And people only stop talking about criss when we get three percent growth minimum. Which means that this form of society we live in is actually given over to compound growth forever. Three percent compound growth forever. Now think of that for a moment. Three percent compound growth on all the resources that we consume. Three percent compound growth on all the money which we accumulate. When capital was about what was happening in Manchester and Birmingham, and that kind of thing in say 1820, three percent compound growth for a long time looked okay. I mean, there were all these areas of the world that hadn’t been conquered by capital yet, you know, Asia, China in particular, there were plenty of places to go.

“So where does the three percent growth come from now? The whole world is saturated, saturated with consumer goods, saturated with that growth. And what has to happen is we have to start to think about the move towards about a zero growth economy. and as we think about that, we have to understand very clearly that that is a non-capitalist economy. That is a non-capitalist economy for a very simple reason that capital is about accumulation, it’s about growth.

“And what we’re moving to right now is a situation of low growth, but continuous capital accumulation by that small group that controls most of the resources. And so three percent growth is going on for them, and their rates of remuneration continue to rise. I mean, I thought it was obscene and wrote violently about it back in 2003, when the leading hedge fund managers around New York City in one year received 250 million dollars of personal compensation just for themsemlves, I thought that was grossly and absolutely unethical. And then in the middle of the crisis just two years ago, the top five hedge fund owners in New York received, in personal remuneration, three billion dollars each in one year.

“Now what my students say to me is, ‘How do you become one of those?’

“And I say, ‘Well, you know, you can go try, but they’ve got it all locked up, there’s no way you’re gonna get it; the only way you can get a piece of that action is to make sure you reclaim it back.’

“Now when you look at the structure, when you say, look at the bonuses, the billions of bonuses——”

(microphone shorts out briefly)

“…yeah, bonuses, you know, the thing that struck me about that, the very year they were receiving something like, in Wall Street they were getting something like, 40 billion dollars in bonuses in one year. In that very same year about 2 million people lost their houses to foreclosure. And what that meant was, there was actually a transfer of wealth going on. Because all of those houses, may of which were illegally foreclosed, were actually, then, that wealth was flowing up to the coffers of the bankers. This is what I mean by predatory practices, this is what I mean by stealing. The capitalist class doesn’t actually work anymore; it uses the financial system to steal.

“Now one of the things that occurs to me, and I think this is significant, is to start thinking about how to organize political movements that actually have a big impact. And I want to give you just a couple of examples in recent years of political movements that have had a big impact in the short term and have some long term lessons to teach us.

“One movement I’ll mention first is the immigrant rights movement of 2006 in the United States. There was at that time a proposal to criminalize all illegal aliens. Now this is a very terrible thing to propose. And what happened was, the response was, immigrant workers, many of them illegal, decided they were not going to go to work. And when they decided that, collectively, suddenly what we saw was: cities stopped. Los Angeles closed down. Chicago closed down. New York almost closed down, San Franciscoo almost closed own. And many other places, companies seeing what was happening, particularly those employing illegal workers, just decided they weren’t going to open their doors anyway, there was no point.

“Now what this showed was a tremendous show of force. A tremendous show of force. We can close whole cities down. And actually when you start to look at it, you see that in closing the city down, you can actually stop capital accumulation.

“We saw an unfortunate example of that in the wake of 9/11 in New York City. The city was shut down, you couldn’t pass through the bridges, you couldn’t use the tunnels, you couldn’t move, and that went on for about two or three days. And then all of a sudden people realized if this went on for much longer, this was the end of capitalism. So the mayor came on and said, For god’s sakes, get out your credit cards and start shopping. For god’s sake, get in to the restaurants and go to the Broadway shows and just go back, you know, and… enjoy the… the… the ‘situation.’

“So what you need, what is clear, is that if you stop the movement of capital, and it’s very easy to do—-cities are very vulnerable, the food chain into New York City, if you disrupt that, this is a major catastrophe. And there’s a tremendous amount of political power. So one of the thing that we have to think about is how to organize political actions in the city that actually have an impact upon how the city works. And as you do that, start to use that as a threat because we need to mobilize in such a way that we can genuinely threaten major commercial and financial interests.

“And one of the other examples I would mention would be a city like Cochabamba in Bolivia or El Alto in Bolivia. I mean, El Alto, essentially, the whole city went on strike. And it brought down two presidents. And because it brought down two presidents, it meant that Evo Morales could get elected.

“So yes, indeed, bring down David Cameron, how are you going to do that? But there’s a problem with that, which is you would like to think if you bring down David Cameron, there would be someone on the other side who would do what you want to see done, but there’s not. So what we need to do is to start to build a political force that forces someone on the other side to do what you are asking for. Which is: move away from this gross inequality of wealth, take care of the environmental dilemmas, and do something radically different to end Thatcherism. That is what we have to do. Clean it out, clean it out, start all over again. Start all over again, how do we do that? Well, you have to start from the bottom up. And this is again something that’s very significant here, that this movement is not guided by some ideology from the top down, it’s guided from the bottom up and that is crucial.

“Because until we know how to create democracy at the local level and then build that democracy into configurations that remain democratic right to the top, then we will not be able to implement a program. We will see good ideas co-opted by capital. And that is one of the most serious difficulties of any political movenent; you come up with good ideas, and then they co-opt them for their own purposes. No.

“Just going back to the immigrant rights movment, the interesting thing about it was the way it got demobilized was actually dividing immigrants from other low-paid workers. And in particular it pointed to the immigrants, who were mainly Hispanics, and the right wing had this enormous propaganda campaign in which it said that basically: ‘Unemployment in the African American community is due to Latin American immigration.’ It divided. It divided. And because it divided, it ruled.

“So one of the things that it seems to me that’s terrific about these assemblies, is that it seems to me there is a spirit that says, ‘Even though we are very different and have different ideas, we will not be divided. Furthermore, not only will we not be divided, but we will not be diverted.’

“Because the way in which they operate is generally to create some sort of argument that kind of says, ‘Well, you’re really talking about the wrong thing, why don’t you worry about this over here, rather than worry about that over there.’ In other words, there are tremendous attemps in the media and elsewhere to divert you from what it is you want to do. Tremendous attempts will be fostered to divide you.

“And it will be hard sometimes. I mean, I’ve been in political movements where it’s hard not to be divided. It’s hard to stick with your own position and at the same time compromise with others who have very different positions. These are not easy things to do. But if you set yourself the rule: I will not be diverted, I will not, we will not be divided. Then it seems to me, you have a long way to go and in fact you’re gonna have a terrific impact upon the political climate of this country.

“So these, it seems to me, are some of the issues that I would want to bring to the table. I left New York about four days before they occupied wall street so I haven’t actually been to Wall Street yet, this is my first time to one of these meetings. And I think this is absolutely great, and I think when I get back I’m gonna get to try to get together with the Wall Street folk as well. And what I’m sure they would want me to say to you is: Keep the struggle going. Keep going. The struggle continues, as they say. Keep it going. And that is the crucial question: that we have to be persistent, as well as undiverted and undivided.

“So I’m going to stop here because I want to have more of a conversation and get kind of responses from what you think, and how you think, because I want to take some ideas back with me to the United States when I get there and perhaps also when I return to Argentina, try to have some conversations there. Because this movement is not just about London. You’re in the heart of the beast, the belly of the beast. And your job is to give the beast stomachache.

“But the more stomachache they get, the more grouchy they’re likely to get. So you have to understand that that is likely to happen. And then you have to stiffen your resolve. This is going to be a long haul for all of this, I think, and so I congratulate you on what you’ve done. This is a marvelous kind of site, I think it’s a marvelous initiative that you’ve taken, and I think that, like I say, this is going to change politics in a very fundamental way. And keep at it, keep at it, keep at it.”

A day of workshops with the editors and writers of Manchester’s independent media project

11am – 5pm Saturday 19 November at Kora (formerly Saki Bar), 2 Wilmslow Road, M14 5TP - £10 including lunch

Our workshops are run by Manchester Mule’s editorial collective who bring with them a diverse range of experience. This training will be covering the basics but will be useful for anyone working in the media.

Workshops will include:

- Media Literacy

- Writing Techniques

- Research Methods for Investigative Journalism

- Community Reporting

For more details and to reserve your place email editor@manchestermule.com. Your place will be confirmed once payment is received. Places are limited, so please book early. Apologies, but the venue is not accessible on this occasion.

Medical Justice, Amnesty International and the Medical Foundation for the Care of Victims of Torture — now called Freedom from Torture — have reported on research that shows brutal physical violence and traumatized and ill-treated children. The UK Border Agency (UKBA), responsible for removals, has from time to time claimed to improve their systems, but the abuses continue, as this month’s reports by HM Inspector of Prisons, Nick Hardwick, confirm.

Reporting on private escort removals to Jamaica and Nigeria, Hardwick found, “a shamefully unprofessional and derogatory attitude”, the use of unnecessary force and restraint, and “highly offensive and sometimes racist language”.

The way failed asylum seekers are handled before their eventual removal has been cause for concern for many years. One huge barrier to achieving a humane regime in detention centres is that the UKBA hires private contractors — such as SERCO and G4S — to do the job. One might argue that they are an equivalent of bailiffs and are there only to execute what has been ordered by the courts, but they should not be accountable only to themselves – or to the UKBA. The mandate of the UKBA is to remove failed asylum seekers. As long as the contractors demonstrate to the UKBA some semblance of success in removing refugees that is deemed self-satisfactory — the end justifies the means.

Leading human rights organisations including Medical Justice and Amnesty International have issued repeated warnings about the conditions in UK detention centres but these have been effectively ignored. There is no properly independent monitor to record and investigate allegations. Two particular concerns are the use of excessive force in removals — as in the case of Jimmy Mubenga — and dawn raids, which traumatise children, and have a profound effect on adults too. There is cause for acute concern too about how sexual orientation is determined and the consequences of returning people to countries where they are likely to be persecuted.

The right-wing press keeps up the pressure about how this country has been ‘swamped’ by immigrants, so the UKBA has an important role to play in getting rid of everyone whose immigration claim has been deemed to fail, at any cost. This disregards the fact that any ‘immigration problem’ is largely created by the influx of low-paid workers from the newer EU members, not by the dwindling number of asylum seekers.

Let us look at it this way. Imagine if British citizens were brutalized and denied medical treatment so they succumbed to chronic diseases like heart attacks while in detention; or children were detained awaiting removal for months without any explanation being given at the airports in Myanmar; or the US port authorities transported British citizens who were accused of stealing information accompanied by vicious barking dogs on loose dog-leads, the whole country would be making an outcry. This is exactly what happens to citizens of other nations whose immigration applications have been refused by the UK authorities and are who are being detained before removal by merciless private contractors whose primary duty is to their shareholders.

Such problems have been long recognized by those who care for human rights, but rarely acknowledged with any degree of commitment by the relevant authorities. While the UKBA has a carefully formulated guide to complaints procedures for the benefit of its staff, these procedures are conducted by UKBA’s own Professional Standards Unit, not by any sort of independent body, such as the Independent Police Complaints Commission (IPCC).

Where official monitoring of removals has taken place, as in a Nick Hardwick’s reports, it is clear that the behaviour and attitudes of the private contractors’ personnel leaves much to be desired. Abuses still occur even when removals are relatively transparent to the public.

It is easy to produce a ‘shopping list’ of desirable improvements to the current set-up. First, the removal of asylum seekers should not be a source of private profit: in Germany, this is handled by the Federal Police. Second, there should be independent monitoring of all removals, at the airports, including a presence airside, which is where the worst abuses occur. Guidelines for the care of detained asylum seekers in the 11 regional detention centres need to be properly followed, especially those concerned with medical care and the well-being of children. Training for personnel responsible for removals should be improved, and subject not just to Home Office approval of programmes, but to properly-monitored official accreditation of the people being trained.

The lessons not only of high-profile cases but also of those less well-publicised, but which run through the reports by Medical Justice, Amnesty and others, should be taken on board by the authorities, and acted on. Britain is, allegedly, a civilized country. It’s about time we started to behave that way.

Tindyebwa Agaba

This article was first published here by Open Democracy

Tindyebwa Agaba holds a BA in Politics and International Relations from Exeter University and an MA in Human Rights Law from SOAS (the School of Oriental and African Studies). A former child refugee, he is starting a social entrepreneurship movement to help ex-combatants become more productive in their respective African societies.

The Prime Minister, he of the “hug a hoodie” fame, was quick to brand the riots “mindless” while speaking of the “immorality” in the minds of those committing the violence. The view from the ivory tower that is Westminster on council estates in places such as Tottenham or Salford probably creates the impression that packs of feral youths roam the streets without conscience and for the most part it did seem that many of those involved lacked the ability to express a purpose or belief in what they were doing, at least one that didn’t make a nice soundbite for the Daily Mail. But there was a language to this violence that, although communicated differently to the winter protests, shared similarities. It was the language of a group of people who had been ignored and sidelined by all other means of political and social communication.

Groups of students can organise a protest, speak eloquently and at length about their financial straights, and even shout members of their number down when they do anything to jeopardise the impression of their reasonable nature (for instance the “stop throwing shit” chant of Millbank Tower fame). Sound clips of an eight-year-old from Salford being interviewed minus any sort of face covering, brazenly telling the camera that he wouldn’t get caught looting because the police wouldn’t find him, and if they did it would only be his first offence, circulated on the internet – supposed proof of the idiocy and callousness of those involved. It might be stupid to brag on TV while on your way to commit a crime, but the feeling that you won’t get caught or worry if you do is far more understandable when you think of how the poorest people in society are increasingly invisible in it. For instance, the ‘Big Society’ idea of us all helping each other out to provide public services is aimed squarely at the middle classes. Those with enough cash don’t require such help as they can provide it for their own, and those at the bottom of the ladder are expected to fend for themselves.

If anyone from these places obtains the gaze of the public eye it is so they may be demonised or pointed at in the Jeremy Kyle freak show as people that are fundamentally incapable. Never less than in the environment of government spending cuts, adults from the poorest estates are portrayed as scroungers and cheats and their children a threat to teachers, social order and themselves (especially if recent comments by that great social reformer, Mr Tony Blair, are to be believed). Those in poverty have been denied a public language and a gateway to express their own needs, because the rest of society wants to view them as “chavs” that can’t manage any social activities beyond those of Wayne and Waynetta Slob. The apex of this is the view that single mothers are the root cause of this problem, following the idea that just as they must be lacking in control of their reproductive systems so too must they be unable to discipline their children. If the contrast between the two riots wasn’t already proof that the English class system is alive, well and judgmental, then the responses to them makes it an iron-clad fact.

The ‘us’ and ‘them’, ‘ours’ and ‘theirs’ language was out in force and nowhere more prevalent than in the “I Love MCR” campaign that sprung up with its meeting point outside that most beloved of social institutions: the Phillip-Green owned Market Street branch of Miss Selfridge. Never mind that witnesses saw the police corralling rioting adolescents towards the independent shops of the Northern Quarter whose insurance was very unlikely to cover the damage done: the way to “fight back” against this is apparently to band together against the rioters and carry on shopping. Manchester City Council made public transport free for a day last weekend to encourage more residents to overcome their fears and flow back into the city centre to shop. The language of the violence of the riots was communicated in a fairly unabashedly capitalist way, targeting prominent symbols of low-level luxury that are consistently denied to those rioting. It was political and it was a message, but the solution to it is unlikely to be found in the tills of Market Street.

Finally, a key division needs to be made between rioters and looters. Burning down a building in your locality is designed to endanger people. Opportunistic stealing is thinking that you won’t get caught, not communicating a message that you don’t care about society because it certainly doesn’t care about you. Banding these two groups together in order to further marginalise them and equip them nicely for a life of crime by serving them with lengthy prison sentences won’t reform anyone, it will just deepen their need to make their presence felt through more unconventional means. As the cuts bite, this will not be the last of the revolts by those that society wishes to ignore, especially if the trend for tribally painting them as voiceless outsiders continues. This is not about patronisingly trying to “give voice” to a group of people who are demographically different from the student protestors, but about the need to end the middle class, keep-calm-and-carry-on-shopping response that has prevailed since.

Ruth Michaelson

Ruth’s first blog, On Violence, can be read here

Staff at pre-1992 universities will not officially be out on strike this coming Thursday, as they are on a different pension scheme than the former polytechnics. The University and College Union (UCU) are currently balloting for industrial action in the autumn over the USS scheme – under which pre-1992 institutions operate – which also faces attack.

Some members of UCU at least have told MULE they are quite annoyed not to be out with their colleagues on June 30. Staff at the University of Leeds are being asked to strike unofficially – to call in sick, take a day’s leave and encourage others to do the same – and join their fellow members on the picket lines. To those who say “But it’s not our strike…” The writers of The Sausage Factory argue:

1) It is colleagues in your/our union, the UCU, who are on strike at Leeds Met. Attacks on them are attacks on us all. Institutional boundaries should not be used to divide us.

2) Although the strike has been called officially over pensions, it should be taken up as a generalised fight-back against government cuts and the assault that is underway against social housing, healthcare, social care, childcare, museums, swimming pools, public toilets, rape crisis centres, domestic violence shelters and all areas of social life. The strike is just one part of resistance against the sustained degradation of collective life that we are seeing unfold.

Though the article is aimed primarily at those at the University of Leeds, we clearly have a similar situation in Manchester. While teaching staff at MMU will be out on the picket lines this coming Thursday, those at the University of Manchester won’t, but should maybe take note.

They also have something to say on the role and effectiveness of strikes more generally:

A strike is not a protest. In a protest, you make your voice heard and speak ‘truth to power’, as if truth were some magic word. But voices can be silenced and a protest can be ignored. Worse still, by confronting power, in asking for something to be different, the powerful are legitimised. After all, dissent was permitted, in its bounded moment. Democracy was done.

A strike is more than a register of discontent. It goes beyond mere expression of opinion. It is a refusal. A refusal to comply, to be pushed around, to submit to authority. A refusal to perform our daily dance. And a strike is much more than a refusal.

A strike is more than a refusal because it is a recognition of our power. We recognize our power because without the university’s workers – staff and students alike - there is no university. But it is still more than that, because we do not only want to refuse, to say no, but to build something new.

There is a contemporary adage that ‘strikes don’t work’. It’s true that the tightening of union laws and have limited unions’ abilities to act. It’s true that there has been a powerful campaign to signify unions as outmoded, anti-modern and antiprogress. Yet the withdrawal of labour remains one of the most effective ways to challenge employers and the government, particularly in the current context of attacks on social justice, distribution of wealth and the erosion of shared public goods.

There’s more to it, and rest of the piece can be found here. The Sausage Factory is produced and disseminated by the Really Open University in Leeds.

On 15 June 1996 an approximately 3,300lb bomb was detonated in a white van on Corporation Street, an hour and a half after a call was made to Granada TV Studios. The blast injured 212 people and caused an estimated £700m worth of damage. 670 businesses were put out of action, and 200,000 sq ft of retail and 300,000 sq ft of office space were destroyed.

The popular narrative tells how ‘Manchester’ then pulled together the way only Manchester could. The business press waxes lyrical about how Manchester’s wise and visionary leaders grasped the opportunity with both hands, transforming the city into the wonderful place it has supposedly become for everyone.

It was good then to read something a little more considered, among what was times was frankly quite nauseating and self-intersted boosterism masquerading as commentary (though the pages of the last week’s Greater Manchester Business Week did provide some interesting insight into the heads of a few of the city’s most influential men).

Kevin Ward’s blog post on cities@manchester, ‘Explosive urbanism: fifteen years after 15/6′, gave the situation much-needed context and not just from the perspective of the city’s political and business leaders. Ward is Professor of Human Geography at the University of Manchester. He co-edited the book City of Revolution: Restructuring Manchester back in 2002. Over 10 years on it probably remains the most comprehensive collection on the city’s post-industrial ‘renaissance’ (and includes a whole chapter on the bomb’s legacy), so he knows what he’s talking about and is worth listening to:

New builds were emerging, as the price of land in the centre and to the south of the city continued to rise sharply. Gentrification was at full throttle. The ‘Northern Quarter’, adjacent to the centre, and the ‘Gay Village’ to the south were being constructed as sites of cosmopolitanism and difference, open and tolerant and ripe for marketing and exploitation.

However, the centre had largely fallen behind in the city’s regeneration/gentrification:

No sooner had the dust settled – literally – than plans were afoot to undertake a significant redevelopment of the retail core of the city… the Council successfully packaged the post-Bomb redevelopment as an opportunity to radically overhaul the city centre, allowing them to pursue a narrow and aggressive consumption-driven agenda.

The city centre is a very different place, one which is increasingly ‘public’ in quite superficial ways, heavily policed, exclusive and “emblematic of a new ‘authoritarianism and control’ according to Anna Minton“ (also a good read and a very interesting topic in itself). That model of property and consumption obviously came crashing down in 2008:

The over-supply of apartments that had accrued in the preceding decade left the city centre housing market horribly exposed as the economic winds of change blew through the city during 2008 and 2009. Many apartments simply could not be sold and a series of incomplete building sites remain testament to how quickly capital can flow out of a city. When the sums don’t add up, capital cuts its losses and runs.

The whole post is worth a read, but the final two paragraphs asked the most pertinent questions:

Whether the city centre model pursued so vigorously by an alliance of the City Council and various representatives of capital is robust and resilient enough to survive the next couple of years is a moot point. On a number of indicators those in Manchester are set to get a whole lot poorer. With more public sector employment cuts on the horizon and a private sector that is just about muddling through the omens are not good. And remember, this is already a city that is one of the poorest in the UK. Perhaps that is to miss the point however? Maybe the City Centre we have is not for the citizens of the city. Somewhere along the line it was wrestled away from us and we did not even notice. The Council together with a number of other stakeholders placed all their bets on a particular sector of the economy, a decision which raises questions about the Centre’s very sustainability.

The Centre seems to be for those who come from elsewhere, those who can continue to engage in one form of conspicuous consumption or another. For sure the city centre remains busy. Are people spending enough money though? Perhaps out of the next couple of years will emerge a realization that there should be more to a city centre than consumption? A rebalancing to the debate might open up the possibility for a reinsertion of ‘the public’ into the city, as problematic as that term remains. We live in hope.

The cities@manchester blog has been up and running for a few months, providing an entry point into urban research going on at UoM. There has been some engaging stuff on the site recently, and it’s concise, easily digestible and free. They’re on Facebook and Twitter, and worth checking out.

The Carbon Co-op is based on the idea that working together as streets, neighbourhoods and communities, people are better able to equip themselves with the kit necessary to significantly reduce household energy bills and carbon emissions. If one person wants to fit solar panels on their roof they might be paying £10,000-£15,000, but if the whole street fits them costs can come down by as much as 50%. We’re looking at all helping communities buy all kinds of equipment from energy monitors to external insulation, as well as fitting them in our own.

The project started a few years ago when a small group of us came together with similar ideas. I was living in Hulme and thinking about the transition from a fossil fuel economy to a de-centralised, renewable energy system. It stuck me that unless we were careful we would simply replicate the existing system with private sector, corporate interests owning and gaining benefit from our energy supply. Could there be a way that communities such as Hulme could collectively own and generate income from the energy produced in their area?

I teamed up with Nick Dodd and Charlie Baker of local firm URBED Co-op. Nick had been looking at ways to decarbonise urban and city areas, Charlie was in the process of retro-fitting his house and keen on creating a co-operative mechanism for encouraging more people to follow suit. We were all inspired by the co-operative model which allows members to own and control resources. It offers a democratic means of control and a way of ensuring profit and assets aren’t privatised and lost to the community. Co-operatives came about in the nineteenth century as a way of dealing with food security issues, in the twenty first century they are an ideal model for tackling energy security issues.

In the three years the project’s been active, we’ve secured a bit of funding and run some pilot projects to test our ideas and find out what works and what doesn’t. With the help of Kindling Trust we ran a series of workshops around Manchester where we brought people together who lived in the same street and looked at how they use energy now and how they might reduce it. It was amazing to see people start working together, sharing knowledge and information, showing each other how to hook up an energy monitor for example. People also start to look at their collective resources, they might identify a patch of waste ground that could be used to grow vegetables or start thinking about how they use transport, there’s all sorts of spin offs beyond energy and bills.

During that time we’ve also been able to distribute free energy monitors that allow people to view their emissions via the web, we’ve also run a Community Renewables Finance School where community organisations interested in establishing small scale hydro or wind turbines could get to grips with funding and finance issues.

We’re now at the stage of establishing the co-operative and we’ve devised a way of investing in renewables that will allow us to also retro-fit some homes. We feel renewables are sometimes seen as THE way to become more green but actually whole house insulation, double glazing and boilers are far more effective. We’re going to use a community share scheme to finance renewable installations such as solar but instead of amassing the profits from the energy generated we’ll use it to fund these, more boring retro-fit work.

We’re currently looking for founder members of the co-op, for people to host solar panels and ‘early adopters’ who want to retro fit their homes. If you want to find out more sign up here. We’re also bidding for a share of £500,000 as part of the EnergyShare competition and you can help us out with that here.