Fucking Waste of Money looks a bit like this:

They erected the picture on Thursday – the same day my erstwhile companjero, Sky News’ Niall Paterson, took these photos of the increasingly bizarre Peter Mandelson on the Labour campaign trail. [Thanks Niall...and apologies again re outing your campaign trail sleeping habits to Guido Fawkes].

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Pictures courtesy kennardphillipps and Niall Paterson. All rights reserved.

I did, however, catch up with a few old friends, make a couple new acquaintances and feigned coolness when spoken to.

And even managed to bang out a piece for Juxtapoz Magazine.

God I ache from being so cool

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.

It was at a party held in honour of a friends’ baby. The air mingled idealism with Afghan hash. And children – the spawn of the liberal. Some ran around naked, all were grotesquely cute and had names like Nova.

At parties like this, the conversation invariably turns to babies and pregnancies. I’m sure it’s lovely if you share that in common, but it’s aggravating if you don’t. I don’t want to discuss the finer points of breast pumps and nipple cream when I’d rather be turning my brain to jelly with vodka in the sunshine.

New mothers develop a statistic aptitude of a horse-racing announcer. And a propensity for stomach churning detail.

“Rosie has five teeth through. She’s 13 months. Came out 6 and 6 ounces.”

“Hector was nearly 8lbs. If I hadn’t done yoga, I’d’ve torn so much worse. My stomach muscles ripped as I got larger.”

“Do you have children?”

Then I got the Baby Fear. Was I writhing visibly? Yes. Images of a pregnant Leah – ankles swollen by excess weight, overstretched skin, the inability to see my own genitalia. I wasn’t glowing with expectant motherhood, I was Shamu the whale and I was unable to control my own bladder.

Fast-forward to the birth. Screaming, uninhibited pain. That stuff of life you’re meant to embrace as you curse your partner for having functioning sperm. I know it’s horrible. I’ve seen it on television. The noise. The blood. The swifting, clashing chaos.

I sought wiser advice.

“You can’t admit to hating children when you’re pregnant,” says a heavily-laden friend half-way through her first pregnancy. “But I can’t stand them. Friends who already have children offer them to you in case you want to ‘practise’.”

“You mean parents pimp out their kids?”

“Uh huh. Half-arsed cheap childcare I reckon. Hang on. I have to cross my legs when I sneeze in case I wee myself. Achoo!”

There’s a word for this. Tokophobia. The fear of childbirth.

Should the “up the bum, no babies” policy fall foul, around 43% of tokophobics opt for a Caesarean section. So if a living, breathing, crying object just over a foot long squeezing its way out of a passage the size of a cigarette lighter doesn’t tickle you, some dude in a white coat can slice you open and take it out. Like removing your groceries from a hatchback.

I’m not alone. After hearing how some mothers are sent home from delivery wards immediately after childbirth to allow a quick NHS turnaround, I know of many ladies who abhor the prospect of being treated like a heifer in an abattoir.

What bothers me is not the choice of having children. It’s being forced to have that choice. Childbirth isn’t the scent of optimism and the future or even the product of an animal breeding instinct. It’s a societal pressure to justify your womanhood. I get on with kids but have no overwhelming desire to go through the effort of having my own. Just because I think abortion is a valid option compared to being shanghaied into parenthood, that doesn’t mean I’m evil.

Young mothers, think on this. You don’t want to hear how talk of teething and breast-feeding bores me. I don’t want to hear about prams with full suspension or your third trimester effluence. Do we have a deal?

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This article was originally published in Who’s Jack Magazine, October 2009.

Miserable young lad who wrote a bit and coughed to death.

Keats House has been restored to its original 19th century decor and will house various artifacts such as the engagement ring he gave Fanny Brawne (the aforementioned girl next door with whom he had a less than amicable split). It will also house Keats’ life mask, prints, drawings and other poetic tat English Literature teachers can hum and haw to in deference.

Having lived in the Regency villa yards from Hampstead Heath between 1818-1820, he then set off for Rome, had his portrait done staring pensively askance with his chin on his hand, and died of tuberculosis at the age of 25.

The City of London has been responsible for the house since 1997. The restoration project involved the City’s London Metropolitan Archives team and a £424,000 grant from the Heritage Lottery Fund.

Michael Welbank, chairman of the City’s Hampstead Heath management committee, said: “The house and garden have been been beautifully restored to a living environment that John Keats would have recognised almost 200 years ago.”

Sure. Until you GoogleEarth the fucker. Or try to explain to him what electricity and a Dyson hand dryer is. Still, Welbank is confident that the house will be a “relevant and powerful landmark” and looks forward to “welcoming even more people from around the world”. Great. More Americans.

The house, which Keats shared with his friend Charles Armitage Brown, was last renovated in 1976.

I’m expecting deferential crowds rubbernecking over cordons. Not the “insight into Keats’ life and loves” the Heritage Lottery Fund’s Wesley Kerr is hoping for. After all, where’s the negative capability in that?

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Republished on the Who’s Jack Magazine Blog. All rights reserved.

“Press!”

The line of fluorescent yellow police officers pushed. A sea of bodies wavered, toppled, then crashed on the Kensington street.

“Angela!!!” I was holding on to the tripod. The camera and cameraman had long since vanished to another part of the steadily advancing police line. I grabbed Angela’s red-coated arm…she was slipping away into the maw of the Metropolitan Police. The police kept pushing. The protesters behind me were standing firm. Resisting. Sky News reporter Angela Corpe was folding in half as the police line forced forward. She was being trampled. I was being crushed. Anchoring myself to the tripod, I lifted her up with the aid of a man sporting a keffiyeh. We became entangled in a microphone cable as the pushing resumed. Somehow I managed to grab her handbag and the kit bag in the melee. Dragged her, the tripod, and the bags. More pushing. More forcing. More resisting. The protesters were screaming “shame on you” at the police.

“Move! Move!” screamed back the bellicose plods.
“I bloody well would if I had somewhere to move to,” was our response.

A pain to my head. Another to my leg. Coshed by our own tripod and kicked by who knows. Angela limps.
“You ok? Let’s get you out of here.”

We wind our way to the pavement near a hotel entrance. Gordon, our cameraman, finds us. He had his own story to tell. Squeezed between protesters and police. We start folding the tripod down. Tidying cables. Angela has lost her comms kit, the device that lets her communicate with the main control room in the newsroom for her live reports.
The phone rings. “Can we have you live at five minutes past five?” In twenty minutes.
“Er…yeah. It’s kicked off a bit here. Let us sort ourselves out ok?”
“Why don’t you fuck off and move?” yells a police officer. We make note of his ID number. He greets us with the politeness his colleagues gave us moments before.
***

Nearly 2,000 protesters calling for Israel to stop the aerial attacks on the Gaza Strip gathered at the gates of London’s Israeli Embassy on Kensington High Street. The day started off serenely, with around 150 people bearing banners, placards and a megaphone behind flimsy crash barriers. Sometime in the afternoon, the numbers swelled. The “big names” turned up…a Palestinian ambassador here, a fiery Member of Parliament there. The Neturei Karta, Orthodox Jews against Zionism, rocked up to show their support to a round of applause and the flash of cameras.

Then two men approached the gates of the road leading up to the Israeli Embassy and threw their shoes. A protest inspired, we think, by an Iraqi journalist and George W Bush. The first man was bundled off by the police. The second man made more a fuss and was floored by half a dozen officers. The swelling crowd over the road who were struggling to keep behind the barriers streamed forward…aghast…agape…angry. They quickly overwhelmed the meager police presence and occupied one of London’s busiest shopping roads on a weekend afternoon.

Muslims laid out prayer mats, families chanted slogans in English and Arabic. The demonstration, called a mere 24 hours before by groups from Stop the War to the Friends of Al Aqsa, was in full flow. Community leaders, MPs, former MPs, activists…all took turns on a megaphone stood atop street furniture near the embassy gates. Nobody could hear them but they served to keep the energy going.

They were calling for a cessation of Israeli airstrikes on Gaza – the ones that have killed nearly 300 people, injured more than double that. The ones that have sent Gaza’s hospitals into meltdown as they are running out of room to treat the hurt, store the dead. The ones that have sent a population where half rely on humanitarian aid to the unknown wastes of homelessness. They were joining voices from Iran to Lebanon to Turkey in proclaiming their anger at what’s often called “the situation”.

As I write, Hamas have just reported that Israeli aeroplanes have bombed the Islamic University in Gaza City. The airstrikes continue and through the miracle of modern technology, you can watch it live. I remember my one and only trip to the IUG. It was an oasis of a campus where you could amble along the promenade surrounded by students buzzing with the learning and the gossip of university life. The buildings were either whitewashed or a pinky stone that shone well in the Mediterranean sun. It was nice. And you could forget you were in the middle of Gaza City for a while.

“As long as Hamas controls Gaza, there is no hope for peace or the creation of a Palestinian state,” Israel’s Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni said. “We are determined, this is not a one day operation.” She agreed that the idea behind the initial attacks were a form of “shock and awe”. She maintains that they were pushed into these attacks due to the “constant bombardment” of Israeli targets by Gazan militants firing rockets into Israel’s heartland. And that they have allowed aid to enter…will allow aid to enter. Slowly. Hurt then heal. Bomb then balm.

Israel has called up some 6500 reservists. They are massing ground troops along the Gazan border. Its government says that they are not ruling out a ground incursion.

In an article by the Guardian’s Peter Beaumont he says that Israel has “supplied a rallying point”. That Gaza is something that can now be ranked with Deir Yassin. With Sabra and Shatila. A tangible massacre as opposed to the slow strangling of the world’s largest open air prison.

Angela Corpe’s comms kit, it transpires, is currently held at Kensington police station. At least ten people were arrested at the London demonstration. Countless others are massaging their injuries as the police camp out outside the Israeli Embassy for the night in readiness for another demonstration called for the next day. Israel holds all the cards. We are again watching which one they play.

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This article was first published on The Comment Factory on 29 December 2008. All rights reserved.