Manchester, Wednesday 8 December 2010.

To be updated.

On the way to the Manchester occupation, I meet:

Tas, 34, a slate-mine worker at Blaenau Ffestiniog. We start chatting because he has a beautiful, friendly ten-month-old keltie-dog with him – a point of considerable mutual interest. We’re also the only two people at the tiny, freezing Frodsham train station and we’re both trying to find out when and if the next train is due. So, we try to find out by asking each other. Tas and Jay the dog are on their way home to Warrington and I’m heading to Manchester to talk to students who are occupying the university’s Roscoe building.

Tas is thin and pale, has broken, dark-coloured teeth and a small constellation tattooed across his right cheekbone. His face looks a bit red on it in the cold. Mine is also freaking: it’s mostly frozen but my nose is throbbing. It turns out that neither of us knows if a train is going to turn up, or if departure announcements/cancellation news ever make it to Frodders, so we move onto the recession via the dog.

Tas’ story is that he takes the dog for all-day walks in the hills around here on his days off – partly because he loves the dog and wants to do the right thing by him, but partly because he can’t afford to do anything else. He had to take a big pay cut last year to help keep his company afloat. His £11k sometimes-admin-worker sometimes-mine-worker salary was cut to £9k, which he says he accepted because senior management took a cut as well and ‘because I would do anything to keep my job. There’s nothing else in this area. Jobs are dead.’ So. He gave up his car and his holidays and spends all his spare time on the dog. This shows. One look at the dog makes me want to break out in applause – the dog is bright-eyed and lean, with a gleaming hair-job that looks better-organised than Samantha Cameron’s.

Tas is pleased to hear I’m on my way to see students. He thinks the protest bug will spread, no matter how government tries to douse it. Winter is already very cold in this part of the nation and things will get too hard too soon. Tas is particularly worried about Osborne’s plans for housing benefit, no matter that they might be delayed. An annual salary of £9k isn’t enough for optimism. He lives in fear of losing his job. He’d take a pay cut again.

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The University of Manchester occupation is taking place in a vertiginously steep lecture theatre, which I fall into, rather than enter. The room is brightly-lit and the people smart and welcoming. There’s a certain tension in faces: the government votes on tuition fees tomorrow and the mainstream line – at the time of writing, at least – seems to be that the government will take it, albeit narrowly. There are also the logistics of getting big groups of Manchester protestors to London tomorrow in time to hear the vote.

Continue reading →

It’ll come as no surprise that a game old bird like me is down with East Acton youth.

I found out that fighting political rapper Lowkey was speaking at a small Hammersmith meeting this week from the 17-year-old son of an East Acton friend. This kid finds Lowkey thrilling. I do too, even though I should be past it. He looks very good, which always helps, and he writes the sort of anti-American, anti-imperialist lyric that a young Iraqi with a big mouth could feasibly disappear for. Certainly, East Acton youths get their collars felt for less. The 17-year-old kid and his friends are stopped by coppers all of the time.

Anyway. Here is the man himself in Hammersmith this week, bigging up militant protest and praising students who engage in it (to no small applause). Yoof love him, as well they might. He’s one of the few people on their circuit at the moment who is making any sense.

He even makes sense to an old girl like me. I like a man who deals in simple equations. And the youth equation is simple: there are no jobs for young people and they’re being priced out of education. Little wonder that they’re keen to rumble – apart from anything else, they’re probably bored out of their minds. I thought the same thing when I watched plunging fire extinguishers and Millbank window-smashing last week. I mean, really – what else do people expect? Personally, I couldn’t give a damn about the rights and wrongs of kicking in windows. Kicking in windows is not the point. The point is that the next generation has nothing to do and no money to do it with. Pity that point didn’t get as much coverage as the fire extinguisher.

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again – this would be a very good time to legalise pot.

In praise of militant protest, then:

and the second part. He is eloquent, all right.

I posted on Sunday about my plans to stop shopping with retailers whose senior managers publicly champion George Osborne’s cruel, ideologically-driven spending cuts.

I thought that post would go the way of most women-and-shopping stories (and indeed of women-and-anything stories), but things went better than that. Thousands of people turned up to read and rightwingers went into tailspin – two very good reasons to push on.

The chance to hit pro-cuts businesses where they’ll feel it is the other good reason to push on. Consumer boycotts can be effective, especially in an online age where reputation control is painful for corporates.

Only ten days after business leaders signed a Telegraph letter backing Osborne’s cuts, consumers are redefining their notions of ethical business on the local scene. Ethical business cannot, by definition, cheerlead a widely-criticised cuts programme that threatens jobs, economic recovery and retail and local commerce. Companies with brandnames that become synonymous with unethical business have good reason to feel the fear.

Ethical consumer groups point to – with considerable justification – a proud history of successful buyer pressure.  Centuries-old anti-slavery sugar boycotts, the anti-fur trade campaigns of recent decades, consumer boycotts of battery-farmed animals and eggs – ultimately, all had profound effects on public perception and corporate reputation. A sulky corporate response goes down like a cup of the cold proverbial in the viral era. Continue reading →

Last week, 35 deluded business leaders wrote to the Telegraph to praise George Osborne’s cruel spending review.

I’m joining those who have decide to boycott every single company that those business leaders represent.

There are two reasons for this:

1) The first is that leaders on the list take us for suckers – a trait I rarely care for in people I spend my money with.

They wrote:

“There is no reason to think that the pace of consolidation envisaged in the Budget will undermine the recovery. The private sector should be more than capable of generating additional jobs to replace those lost in the public sector, and the redeployment of people to more productive activities will improve economic performance, so generating more employment opportunities.”

The letter authors decided the advantages of signing the letter meant more than being straight with their customer base.

And they weren’t straight with their customers at all. Liberal Conspiracy was leaked a private email that clearly demonstrated that people on the list had no confidence whatsoever in the nation’s ‘improved economic performance’ or the ‘generation of more employment opportunities’ of which their Telegraph letter spoke. Osama Saeed had the names of those who, when not flying pro-cuts and pro-government flags, were laying thousands of people off and/or telling grim tales about the realities of lie of the fiscal land.

It also seemed that many of the 35 had reasons for cheerleading Osborne’s mad plans – reasons that spoke of vested, rather than national, interests. Arup has just been awarded a major rail contract by the government. Another outstanding piece of Liberal Conspiracy work told us that BT’s government contracts had just been renewed and deals done on government contracts with Microsoft and AVEVA.

2) I do my best to spend my money with ethical businesses.

Companies that support the CSR are failed corporate citizens. They back an ideological programme of cuts that will throw thousands out of work and onto the mercy of a welfare system that itself will barely exist. In private, they have no suggestions for growth. In public, they’re collaborators who run a strong second line in denial. I would no more spend my money with them than I would with companies that beat t-shirts out of child workers in Bangladesh. Continue reading →