The day after any major demonstration always brings out the hungover “mostly peaceful, shame about the violent minority” mantra from the meeja-darling bloc. Whenever there’s an alternative popular movement that grips the national imagination, left-ish commentators and journalists fight whitened tooth and manicured nail for public alliance to this season’s worthy cause of resistance. Yet, when things become ever so spiky or unsightly, they are also the first to publicly sever connection with people who choose to vent their anger in more visceral ways.

The sight of burning barricades on the streets of London is too much for the press to resist and one of the biggest demonstrations since the Iraq war protest turns into riot porn for the newspaper columns and airwaves.

Many groups who organised actions at the March for the Alternative never take direct action beyond staging peaceful sit-ins. They challenge the norms of the A-to-B protest but never damage anything and always clean up after themselves.

Most of those who marched would never take their anger out on inanimate objects. Violence is an act of the few with an effect on the many. Regardless of where you stand on the “smash stuff up” divide, the spectacle is part of the whole. If anybody “ruined things for everybody”, it was the police with their wholesale arrests and wanton baton action.

Something out of the ordinary is happening – parts of Britain aren’t bothering to be so polite anymore. Sometimes, to make your voice heard, you have to speak softly and carry a big stick.

There are no “good” protesters and no “bad” protesters. The state sees anyone who publicly declares their dissent to its laws and policies as one thing – a threat. When a state is threatened, it sends its henchmen out to quell it. When 500,000 people take to the streets of London against public sector cuts that will affect each and every Briton, the henchmen are the police. And you – student or teacher, patient or nurse – are that threat. It matters little that you’re partying in Trafalgar square or throwing paint-filled eggs at Topshop on Oxford Street.

You can’t balance the violence of the oppressor with the violence of the oppressed. One leads to the other and violence isn’t always just a punch to the face or a brick through a window. When faced with the reality that each and every one of us will live more desperate lives, the smashed windows of a multinational or a hotel that can charge £4,000 a night matters little.

The coalition government sees no difference between a firefighter trying to hold on to his job and a student struggling to study. To try to make distinctions between a “peaceful” and a “violent” protester is inherently flawed. Dissent is a violent reaction. Saying “no” is resistance. To publicly condemn the “violent minority” is a betrayal of the cause you claim to fight for. David Cameron and NIck Clegg see no difference between protesters – and neither should you.

Westminster council say the damage to property is likely to total “tens of thousands” of pounds. More than 200 protesters were arrested, 149 have been charged and there were at least 50 reported injuries. Of the 4,500 police officers deployed on the 26 March demonstration, 31 were injured, with 11 officers requiring hospital treatment.

Although there are concerns that sporadic violence to property weakens strong arguments on the depth of spending cuts, we must remember that because cuts affect everybody, everybody is going to have a different reaction to them. Some may wish to fight back with local campaigns, others may wish to take more direct action. The point is to maintain a momentum, a united show of resistance, against a spectre that shadows us all.

The impunity with which this coalition is implementing cuts while bolstering the greed of the very businesses that got us into this mess is neither peaceful nor benign. So – many apologies to those who wish to distance themselves from the “violent minority”. But we’re in this together. You may not like having to share a boat, but it’s a lot better than drowning.
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This article was first published in the Guardian’s Comment is Free.

“Home” is the usual answer. A thoroughly unscientific straw poll of my friends concluded that most people are not looking forward to seeing family and watching crap TV. Some are utterly terrified, yet resigned to the idea of striking up awkward conversation with a brother-in-law trying to play footsie under the table. The one exception was a friend who had had a lot people die on him this year. There isn’t much family left to say hello to.

For the rest of us, have our parents implanted ho-ho-homing chips in our heads so we return to the nest at the customary time of giving? There’s something slightly backward about flocking to one’s parents for the holiday season. If there are fewer than 10 years between your current age and the last time you were legitimately a teenager, the annual parental flocking is fine. But if you’re over 30 and fancy yourself an independent human being, it’s time to cut the apron strings.

I’m not being a Scrooge: you shouldn’t negate the important things in life. But a lot of us feel obliged to spend the holiday season in the company of people we don’t want to be with. Woe betideyou if you cause a fuss by turning down the offer of dodgy jumpers, dry turkey and awkward dinner table silences by moaning about your job or recent pre-Christmas breakup.

Last Christmas, I spent what I think will be my last obligatory Yuletide with my partner’s family, one of whom turned to me and asked “Do your people celebrate Christmas?” My allegations of racism were met with “How dare you call me racist? My best friend as a child was a negro.” Cue choking gasps of horror round the dinner table. Gasps topped off with “There were West Indians at our wedding, you know.”

This year, to save me from tears, this Christmas I’m pitching in with friends – people I’ve spent the year in contact with and to whom I don’t have to explain myself.

In the consumer wonderland that is the customary time of giving, it’s easy to get sucked into buying presents for people you only speak to once a year. It forges an artificial sense of closeness with which to smite away the fact that you’ll be poor in January. So, just stay away. Gather your partners and friends and spend these days in the company of those you want to be with, and who want to be with you. Forge your own traditions and encourage everyone else to do the same.

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This article was first published on the Guardian’s Comment is Free, 24 December 2010.

Here are a couple questions I’ve had to answer recently…along with the answers.

Which TV programme has been the most innovative over the last year and why? * (Max 200 words)
Newswipe. Through the laconic sarcasm of Charlie Brooker, BBC4 have tapped into the sort of demographic that reads Private Eye, claims to have read Shakespeare and secretly dances to Baccara.
Brilliant in its use of news archive, it jump cuts its way through the haze. Most Britons have no clue that a good number of the reporters giving them their news gleaned their information from press releases, newswires, the BBC News website and Wikipedia. Ten minutes before broadcast. Fewer still know that some news presenters are little more than bedtime story readers who ply their trade with autocue – the clever questions they ask are bellowed down their ear by an anonymous gallery producer.
Newswipe unashamedly bares these truths. It’s Private Eye for telly.
Brooker’s editorial combs through the news and uses facts and deeds to trip The Man up. Televisual aikido.
Brooker takes us on a journey. On his sweaty sofa we see a man who is as baffled with how the world works as we are. The sort of chap you’d have on your pub quiz team.
It’s infuriatingly perceptive. Newswipe cuts through bullshit in a way that makes you think “I wish I said that.”

In your view, what should be the top priority in media policy for the new Culture Secretary? Why is it such a top priority? (Max 300 words)
Jeremy Hunt’s priority ought to be encouraging quality local content – not just formats that can be replicated and readily sold on to television markets around the world [talent show TV, I'm talking to you]. He’s stated in his keynote speech that he not only intends to push superfast broadband across the UK, but to accept Ofcom’s recommendation on reforming local media ownership rules. He will “significantly relax” rules to allow local newspapers to own local commercial radio stations and establish local TV stations.
A important idea that aims to strengthen “local communities”. He’s even hired an asset management firm to publish a report in the autumn. But Hunt forgets that the internet has remapped the idea of the local. It’s no longer a geographic measure, but an interest-based one.
“New York has six local TV stations, London has none,” Hunt says. But what can a local television station achieve that neighbourhood-centric blogs given more bandwidth or a newspaper tie-in can’t? The push to digital has already killed appointment to view television. Neighbourhood-centric and interest-based new media is where extra revenue should go because the content structure is already established. Blogs like Brockley Central already have a following. Trying to manufacture a local feel by allowing local newspapers to run mini media fiefdoms can only lead to the sort of contrived quality last seen on Ghanian talk shows shot on VHS.
The DCMS should press on with pushing for more local media, local TV stations, local radio, local everything. But if this government wants to “repair broken Britain” and encourage local communities to communicate, they should look beyond the box.

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But there’s an elephant in the museum. As you move from room to room laid out with videos and photographs by the likes of Walker Evans and Bruce Nauman, look up into the corners. What do you see? The Tate’s own CCTV. “When people go into a gallery, they expect to be watched. There’s a lot of expensive work here and it has to be protected,” said Simon Baker, Tate’s new curator of photography. Well, it obviously works for the French. By failing to directly address the security setup in the Tate Modern’s own halls, they’ve undermined what is otherwise a beautiful, intelligent and informed show. The Tate has accepted that we’re indifferent to living under the gaze of a Panopticon and is wholly complicit in it.

No one knows how many CCTV cameras there are in the UK. The best estimations put the number at 5m, or one camera for every 12 people. That’s 20% of the world’s CCTV cameras on a whingey North Sea island. It used to be that we were only six feet away from a rat. Now we’re only six feet away from a camera. This exhibition showcases everything from super-secret American military bases, aerial landscapes of the Kuwaiti oil fields after the first Gulf War to people dogging in cars. It shows the theft of privacy and questions the basic notion of privacy.

Early photographic subjects were ignorant as to what was happening to them. Faces of people in early albumen prints resembled deer in headlights, intrigued but unsure what that man behind a box with a cloth on his head was doing. Ignorance became acceptance as the power of the camera became a tool for the media and the state. We grew aware of the gaze. A photograph of the artist Edgar Degas leaving a pissoir echoes its way to a snap of Paris Hilton crying pathetically in the back of a police car on her way to jail. A surveillance photograph of militant suffragettes used by police in 1913 bears an uncanny resemblance to modern police spotter cards used to identify “potential troublemakers” at demonstrations.

Launching the show in London highlights and mocks our current indifference to surveillance. The Tate boasts of the show’s timeliness “due to the increasing availability and use of street surveillance and mobile phones”. It celebrates and attacks our voyeuristic culture.

If you feel dirty viewing Gilles Peress’s images of the Rwandan genocide, you should. If you’re captivated by Merry Alpern’s sneaked shots through a bordello’s window, brilliant. If you feel the horror in Jonathan Olley’s photo of a static oppression palace, the Gold Five Zero watchtower in South Armagh, good. You’re meant to be shocked, and you’re meant to think.

But where is Wikileaks’ Collateral Murder video? Curators say that it’s a testament to the strength of the show’s message that everyone who comes can think of other things that should also feature. Not having the most current and devastating piece of surveillance in the public domain in a show that purports to provide a “provocative perspective” on the “iconic and taboo” is negligent. This show is the closest the BP-sponsored Tate will come to being overtly political. They usually wait until an issue has become vanilla until they wield a sword of topical criticism.

The show is not so much timely, but backtimed. It uses history and reflection in the hope people will be clever enough to flesh out topical issues the Tate is too cowardly to tackle head-on. It is politicisation by proxy. Then again, the Tate is a bit slow. They only opened a modern art museum 10 years ago.

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This article was first published on the Guardian’s Comment Is Free, 28 May 2010 and subsequently republished on The Comment Factory.

Over 40,000 people had limbs amputated in field hospitals much like the one I worked in a couple of weeks after the quake. Medical emergency relief charity Merlin’s setup was in a disused tennis court in one of Port au Prince’s hardest hit areas, Delmas 33. My role was media coordinator, the press monkey charged with finding stories amongst the patients and doctors on site to raise Merlin’s profile. One of my ‘case studies’ was a gregarious 8-year-old girl called Dayana. With her was a woman called Nadije, 23. Not her mother, but a guardian whose story has been taking hold of my life.

Our meeting was unremarkable. She was the adult-ish figure behind the little girl I was getting to know so I could offer her story to interested journalists. I have frames of her in video I shot and in photographs I took. As I moved along the wards, she asked me for my email address. I gave her my business card and moved on. A month later, she emailed me with what I thought was a begging letter. My reply was “Sorry, I have no money to give but perhaps you would like to tell me your story.” What followed is a continuing exchange of emails and online chats – the reality of poverty told in the virtual ether.

Marcel Izard from the International Committee of the Red Cross says, “Rape is common for migrants and there are many refugee camps in the Dominican Republic where people living in them have been deported. It’s quite hard gauging numbers of Haitian refugees pouring into the DR. We mainly work in conflict zones so we don’t have an official programme to cope with this influx.”

Finding figures for Haitian refugees has been difficult. The US Coastguard only holds stats for those they find at sea – around 400 as of April 2010. Other NGOs and aid agencies say their statistics only reflect the real people they see on the ground because clocking illegal migration from a country that kept less than accurate census stats is like asking how long a piece of string is.

So with that blur of facts, figures, statistics – all the things that impress people who like Powerpoint presentations, I bring you the letter I received from Nadije. And her picture. It says more than anything I could help to collate – and more than anything you could help to understand about a natural disaster that’s shafted a people shafted by its own.

“Before 12 January, we all had dreams. I was always told that I could be somebody…for my family, my country. Now there are no more dreams. No future for us. The conditions in which I was living became so critical I could no longer bear them. There was no support.

One thing happened after another. I couldn’t find anything to eat. I had nothing to wear. The whole world sleeps under beautiful stars, but we young girls cannot because rapists lurk in the day to day. This is another disaster. I spoke with a French coordinator who worked for an NGO. I told him everything. He told me “Lady, let me be frank with you. I am here as a doctor. But I can speak to someone who knows more about aid and tell him your story. Your situation is very unfortunate but I’m afraid I can’t help you.”

So I spoke with this other man. Told him my life. I started crying. He said, “Don’t cry. There’s always tomorrow.”

I told him “I know there will be a tomorrow. But this is not my future. I will not have a chance to see my future because I have reached my end.” He said I shouldn’t lose hope because life is good. He asked, “What do you want to do with your life?” I said I wanted to continue with my studies. He noted this down. So…I got the same response of nothing. I’m always on the lookout to see if there’s anything new. But it is always the same.

One beautiful morning, I woke up with the idea of leaving my country to go to the Dominican Republic. I spent the day walking through the markets. I met a lady who gave me work washing dishes, washing everything. Just for something to eat and somewhere to sleep. I got to know some of the people in the area and they offered me more work. Cash in hand. One day, one of these people said he wanted to take me to Santo Domingo. I said yes. I thought he liked me and simply wanted to help me. So I thanked the lady I was working for and left.

What disappointed me deeply was that I was raped and beaten by three men. It is the most deathly pain I have ever known. Afterwards, I spent two days wandering, telling everybody I met my story. Like a blessing from God, I found a job as a maid at an apartment. I thought things were getting better for me. Then one morning, Hernandez, the husband of the woman who hired me offered me 100 pesos to fuck him. I refused. That evening, I didn’t know how to tell his wife that I no longer wanted to work there. So I threw myself out into the street.

So there we are. I might as well not exist. If I have a future, I dare not dream or imagine it. My life is completely destroyed. I know misery. Pain. Ignorance. I now know it all and I have survived it all. Please help me. Help me by any means. I have a life like everybody else. I want to study. I cannot be abandoned like this. I want to be someone in my life, for I know what is misery.

Thank you and all those who reach for the skies.”

Her first email was in Spanish. Subsequent ones have been in French. She wants to learn finance or journalism. Bilingual with a knack for turning a phrase, she’s clearly no idiot.

I have nothing but photos and the fading memory of a meeting to remind me that this woman is real. Naïve trust borne from her persistent communications about her day-to-day and a gut feeling to tell me she’s genuine. She’s also one of thousands – but she is still someone. What would you do?

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I’ve submitted this to the Guardian International Development Journalism Competition. The first time I’ve ever entered any sort of “hey look at me” shizzle. It won’t win.

It has also been selected out of over 1500 contributions for the first issue of 48hrmag and republished on The Comment Factory.

UPDATE: 48hrmag has won the Knight-Batten Innovation in Journalism award. [19 July 2010]

UPDATE: Contributors and readers to 48hrmag had two days to vote for the pieces they thought were best in Issue Zero. This was one of them. Thanks. [13 August 2010]

Sergeant Smellie, known to some activists at Tombstone Face for his uncanny resemblance to graveyard furniture, walked out of Westminster Magistrates Court with a smile last seen on OJ Simpson. Nicola Fisher, for reasons of her own, chose not to give evidence at the four-day trial.

“That’s him walking free then,” said an activist when Twitter announced that Ms Fisher was staying at her Brighton home instead of giving evidence at the trial. Having sold her story to a national newspaper for £26,000, she must’ve bought a fair dose of cowardice for that sum.

There’s no guarantee Smellie wouldn’t have walked free if the animal rights activist took the stand. But it might have helped. Instead, the trial was heavily laden with testimonies from Smellie’s police colleagues saying that Fisher was acting aggressively brandishing a juice box. The towering TSG officer was obviously defending himself against vegan rage.

Peter Smyth of the Metropolitan Police Federation said that “a ten second clip on You Tube doesn’t tell the whole story”. It tells enough. Delroy Smellie assaulted Nicola Fisher. And she had the bruises to prove it. The Met Police recruitment website says that the position of police officer is one of “responsibility and trust, given only to law-abiding people with proven character and integrity”.

Nicola Fisher has said that she balked at giving evidence because she did not want to be subjected to a defence cross-examination. That she was suffering from depression and lacked confidence in the abilities of the prosecution. So a lawyer hired to defend an ultraviolent thug in uniform may have to ask some difficult questions of a woman who was exercising her democratic right to protest. Diddums. If you’re not ready to defend your actions in a court of law when you’ve obviously been assaulted and wronged, don’t run off to the newspapers and sell your story. Don’t bring it to court to allow the police to make a mockery of the justice system by showing that intimidation does work. Don’t insult everyone else who backed you when you were crying injustice.

Since my own arrest, my healthy mistrust of the police has been strengthened by the ridiculous farce played out in the courts involving ordinary citizens. One year on from the G20 protests and the death of Ian Tomlinson, we are still no closer to a decision from the Crown Prosecution Service as to whether they’ll prosecute anyone for that death. Over a year on from the demonstrations that saw thousands of young Muslims vent their anger at Israel’s wanton murder of Palestinian civilians in Gaza, we hear of police actions against teenagers that parallel military raids.

The anger over Sergeant Delroy Smellie’s acquittal is two-pronged. The first prong goes to Smellie, the police and the courts that are opening the door for future assaults. Smellie, after a suspension from service following his charge, is now on back the streets protecting the people of London. The second goes to Nicola Fisher who should have given evidence against the man who assaulted her. Her spinelessness makes her the Clare Short of activists.

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This article was originally published in the The Guardian, 01 April 2010.

Over 50,000 members of the “I Only Fly to India” militia will descend on Copenhagen over the next week to demonstrate over a shopping list of demands longer than J-Lo’s rider. Attendees are an international who’s who of the best-branded campaign groups from Oxfam to Action Aid to superglue and D-lock specialists Plane Stupid. Lesser-known groups like Brazil’s Land Reform Movement will be there to boost everyone’s ethnic credentials.

Developed countries like the USA and the UK have pledged to cut carbon emissions (on their terms) by 2020 alongside developing nations like China and India cutting their carbon intensity (on someone else’s terms). The finer points over who does what by how much and who’s going to police 192 countries will also be debated.

A sore point has already come up with the leak to The Guardian of the ‘Danish text’ – a leaked draft agreement that gives rich nations more power, marginalises the UN’s role and abandons the Kyoto protocol. All the jaw jaw about making a difference to the world’s global temperature becomes hot air in the cold Copenhagen wind.

The feeling that a potentially powerful global movement is being hijacked by some very slick PR is keeping me away from Denmark. The talk around and within the conference seems to be an exercise in appearing to make a difference without actually changing a damn thing.

Initiatives like the 10:10 campaign (who recently accepted missile makers MBDA onto their scheme with the lines “Of course arms manufacturers can reduce their emissions by 10%. What they do with the rest of their time is a different matter, on which we couldn’t possibly comment”) ask individuals and companies to pledge to reduce their carbon emissions by 10% in 2010. I had a recent Twitter debate with one of their worker ants, @malchadwick, who failed to see the hypocrisy in cosying up with a firm whose business it is making things that kill people.

If it makes you feel better about yourself turning off a few lights and flushing the loo only for solids, just be aware that the bandwagon you’re joining broke down a long time ago and your cooperation is helping corporations wash their sins away in the green haze of a well-run publicity campaign.

This weekend and next week will see a range of so-called direct action protests. How direct and effective will sitting in a street getting water-cannoned be if you’re an Indian farmer considering suicide to get out of debt because your crops failed?

What’s needed is justice. Fair rights and fair pay for workers and bold international policing of commerce and corporate structures. Grass roots movements that tackle tangible goals, not semantic abstract concepts. Proper justice and action directed at those who use and exploit. Not branded climate justice and a spectacle only likely to achieve hypothermia.

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This article was originally published in The Guardian, 11 December 2009, and republished on The Comment Factory.

Despite the fact that photographs from the first day of the G20 protests in April 2009 show me astride an armoured personnel carrier in black bra and blue boiler suit with another woman straddling me in red stockings and lipstick heels, the Crown Prosecution Service has charged me and 10 others with impersonating police officers. We’ve been charged with two counts under Section 90 of the Police Act 1996 – the greater of which carries with it six months in prison.

Spot the Policeman

The vehicle, owned by anarchist pranksters the Space Hijackers, bore a number of fake CCTV cameras bolted onto its turret, a plastic pipe with holes in it for a gun and a bumper sticker that read “How Do You Like My Driving? 0800 F**K YOU”. It blared Wagner’s Ride of the Valkyries from a sound system. If you can show me a police force that does all that, I can show you a police force on acid.

“This is ridiculous, they’ll never press charges,” lawyers who attended to the arrested said on the day. Nearly six months and one court appearance later, the CPS is showing no signs of dropping what will be a four-day trial at the City of Westminster magistrates court in February. Eleven people, witnesses for the defence, witnesses for the prosecution, at least half a dozen legal representatives, the paperwork, the man hours, the expense – to what end? There were 27 prosecutions arising from the G20 protests. The rest include violent disorder, affray and setting fire to things at the Bank of England. The Space Hijackers and their tank sought to satirise the aggression stirred up by police ahead of the protests. Police said they expected violence and were “up for it”. It was April Fools’ day. And it was apparently the start of the “Summer of Rage“.

The case of the rather large Sergeant Delroy Smellie (quiet at the back please), charged with assaulting a rather small protester, Nicola Fisher, by smacking her across the face and whacking her with a baton, is representative of the 250 complaints received by the Independent Police Complaints Commission over police violence at the G20. Sure she was short and shouty, but you swat flies. Not women.

Events surrounding the death of Ian Tomlinson show police to be drunk with the illusion of their own powers. Even members of the Metropolitan Police Authority despair over how things are run. They have criticised police over not taking the issue of wearing ID numbers seriously enough. Apparently disciplining those caught without ID badges was unnecessary because they could fall off or officers could forget to put them on. Smellie was not wearing his numbers when he vented his rage at Fisher. That fuelled public anger over the overt disregard for the accountability that wearing ID badges would give. So since the G20, the Met has spent over £40,000 on force identification numbers for public order officers. A very expensive way of paying lipservice if police chiefs don’t consider wearing identification important.

There is a feeling that police chiefs and the CPS – run by director of public prosecutions Keir Starmer (formerly a defence lawyer with a long history of human rights cases) – have lost a sense of perspective. The Space Hijackers have a 10-year history of using comedy and theatre to highlight the hypocrisies and failing of the system. I was accepted as their embedded journalist to get a flavour of their version of protest.

Impersonating a police officer is a criminal offence. Murder is a criminal offence. Would you rather see your tax money go towards prosecuting 11 people up for poking fun at the police, or 11 murderers?

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This article originally appeared in the Guardian’s Comment Is Free section, 01 October 2009.