Free speech American style

This video is flabbergasting. I became aware of it from Marxsite. It shows Andrew Meyers, a University of Florida student getting tasered for asking John Kerry too many awkward questions. It illustrates quite neatly the point made in SR’s Savage Capitalism about how one of the spinoffs the new imperialism is [...]

Successful Palestine Demonstration in London

Today’s demonstration marking the 40th anniversary of the Six Day War organised by Enough! was much bigger than last year’s Palestine demo which barely filled a forlorn, damp corner of Trafalgar Square. I’ll let you judge the numbers for yourself from the video. My guess is 5-6000.
The composition of the demo was unusual. My judgement [...]

Strangers into citizens demo - contradictory in a bad way

Someone is going to be in big trouble after this demonstration. On a superficial level it was well organised and coordinated. The speakers turned up. Trafalgar Square was booked. The police had been told. But someone had forgotten to say their prayers asking their god for good weather. It was the wettest day in London [...]

North East London ESOL demo

This was a seriously impressive demonstration. It was organised by the University and College Union in defence of free English teaching for speakers of other languages. It would almost make you think that some unions, or to be more precise, some union members remember how to organise lively, militant and popular campaigns.
A Tower Hamlets feeder [...]

London Stop the War Demonstration and the best banner ever

Anti-war demonstrations seem to bring out a peculiar type of creativity in some of the participants. As you can see from the photos The Non-Aligned Lefty Cat Lovers for Peace have produced the most wonderful banner ever seen. Here one feels is an organisation with a future. More details can be found here.
On [...]

Immigrants’ rights demo

Here’s some footage of the demo earlier today in London. The RMT had the best contigent of the lot. I’d guess there were about 1000 people in total on it, a mixture of the far left, Social Forum types and various organisations.
During a dull moment at work I made the mistake of looking at [...]

Manchester Stop the War Demonstration

The last time I went to Manchester was just after Friedrich Engels published his book about the place and it was every bit as squalid as he described it. So the Stop the War Coalition demonstration yesterday at the Labour Party conference was an opportunity to re-visit the place to see what had changed. However [...]

Manchester die in

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Manchester die in, originally uploaded by Liam9.
By this point I was very grateful for a chance to sit down but you wouldn’t have fancied doing it in the rain.

Lebanon demonstration in London

In the 1980s the RUC went through a phase of attacking the funerals of IRA volunteers. I came up with a plan which involved shooting a RUC man, finding out where he would be buried and putting a bomb that would detonate when the coffin was put in the grave. For reasons that still don’t [...]

Mayday London 2006

This year’s Mayday march seemed to be the largest in a while and certainly had more union banners. Some of them show the contradictory nature of class consciousness. There was a great turnout from the RMT. As usual the Turkish stalinists put on a magnificent show and don’t look for a moment as if they [...]