Archive for November, 2010

We marched on Wednesday, we strike on Tuesday!

Monday, November 29th, 2010

Last Wednesday 100,000 students marched in protest all over the country with absolutely no encouragement from the NUS or any of the usual “student leaders”. That’s AMAZING. I helped to organise the Manchester demo, and we printed out leaflets for 800 – 5000 people turned up to march from every university and college in Manchester to the town hall (via Castlefields, as it turned out). But get this: three hours later, despite the best efforts of the police, 3000 people were still marching back down from the town hall to occupy a university building. Five hours later, 800 were still blocking the road outside MRI when the police charged us with horses (that number by a police sergeant’s reckoning). 800 people were the *remnant* of the demo.

It took nearly 8 hours from the beginning of We Will March Manchester for the police to finally disperse everyone: in the meantime we had blocked Oxford Road for most of that time, held demonstrations outside Castlefields, the town hall, University Place, the John Owens building and MRI, and been attacked by the police three times. For at least six hours of it, everything that happened was largely spontaneous, unplanned, and fuelled by pure anger. No-one, not unions, exec officers, the NUS, the Education Action Network, the National Coalition Against Cuts and Fees, has control over the student movement now. The politicians must be bricking it.

And the NUS has realised it can be with us or against us as well. Here is a video of Aaron Porter, NUS President sitting in the UCL occupation saying that the NUS has been “spineless” about supporting students and apologising for his “dithering”, which is very responsive of him:

The day of the vote on tuition fees is coming closer, and by all accounts, Nick Clegg is starting to have massive, epic kittens about what he is going to do. And who made that happen? We did.

If Nick Clegg votes to raise tuition fees to £9000, he faces losing his seat in the university constituency of Sheffield Hallam. Already students at the university have occupied a lecture theatre and sworn that if he votes for the rise, they will recall him using the legislation that is allegedly coming before parliament next year (though given who it will be used against, I doubt that law will face death by committee, in all likelihood). The protests, demonstrations and occupations can only grow.

If Nick Clegg keep his promise to vote against the tuition fee rise, his constituents will ate him slightly less but David Cameron will be very, very put out. Such a rebellion from a serving minister, let alone the leader of the minor coalition party makes for shakey confidence and a potential breakdown of the government itself. And setting aside the implosion of the government, the urtling downwards trajectory of the markets in the likelihood of such an event, and the annihilation of the Liberal Democrats entirely at the subsequent election, given the amount of effort Clegg has put into trying to convince people that he wants to lift the cap, if he does a second u-turn, he’s also going to look like a total doily.

And finally, Nick Clegg can agree to do what was negotiated for in the Coalition Agreement – he could abstain. His constituents will still be angry, but the current line “we lost the election, we can’t do everything we promised” washes a bit better. The problem is, with the Liberal Democrats abstaining and some Tory MPs planning to vote against the proposals (133 voted against the rise to £3000, and some will again), David Cameron can’t guarantee a majority in the vote, which means loss of confidence, potential destruction of government, drop in markets, annihilation of Liberal Democrats etc. And again, second u-turn = total doily.

So Nick Clegg finds himself in something of an impossible position. I don’t know about you, but I’m quite happy about that. And I am also just a little bit proud that I have done what I can to put him there, along with you and what must now be hundreds of thousands of other people who have written to their MPs, confronted politicians wherever they go, marched, lobbied, broken windows, and made it clear that we are fucking angry. What else should we do with politicians who spent years courting our votes with promises they threw out the window as soon as they saw their ministerial car?

The next national day of action is tomorrow. Tomorrow, the significant thing that happens will be happening. Tomorrow, I will be at 12pm outside University Place in Manchester to march again for my friends’ futures, and I hope that every Manchester student and resident will join us.

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The Negative Narrative: A Response to a Liberal Democrat

Monday, November 22nd, 2010

bron1917l The Negative Narrative: A Response to a Liberal Democrat

The Liberal Democrat blog Jazz Hands Serious Business recently published a fun article called “The Negative Narrative”, in which the author argued that the Liberal Democrats are currently being unfairly attacked. It seems that he and all his fellow Lib Dems who have kept the faith keep getting attacked by pretty much everyone they know, not because the Liberal Democrats have betrayed everything they previously stood for and allowed deadly policies to pass with resounding approval, but because of the prevailing media narrative that the Lib Dems are bad.

That naughty, naughty media, pointing out all those things the Lib Dems originally campaigned against, like tuition fee rises (advocated by Vince Cable, Liberal Democrat Minister for Business), VAT rises (approved by Nick Clegg, Liberal Democrat Deputy Prime Minister), building nuclear power stations (supported by Chris Huhne, Liberal Democrat Minister for Energy and Climate Change)… Why can’t the media go back to ignoring the Lib Dems completely between elections like they used to, so they can argue once again that their low poll ratings are due to that terrible media narrative which ignores them?

For heaven’s sake.

5196248750 c19dc51ed9 The Negative Narrative: A Response to a Liberal Democrat

More nonsense from this article includes:

“The compromises inherent in coalition, which we understood and were prepared for intellectually, are emotionally a lot harder to swallow.”

All the more so for not being compromises so much as total capitulation, I imagine. Let’s follow the train of development for the big thing at the moment, tuition fees:

Nick Clegg, in a video to NUS Conference, April 2010: “To raise tuition fees is wrong. … We will resist, vote against, campaign against, any lifting of that cap.”

Self-justifying comment from Vince Cable, November 2010: “We didn’t break a promise. We made a commitment in our manifesto, we didn’t win the election. We then entered into a coalition agreement, and it’s the coalition agreement that is binding upon us and which I’m trying to honour,” he said.[1]

Coalition agreement Point 8: “…if the government’s response to Lord Browne’s report is one that the Liberal Democrats cannot accept, then arrangement will be made to enable the Liberal Democrats to abstain.”[2]

Liberal Democrats official (still) Education Policy: “To get a degree, young people are saddled with thousands of pounds of debt when it is tough enough to get a job, get on the housing ladder and make ends meet. The Liberal Democrats are the only party which believes university education should be free and admissions based on ability not bank balance. We will scrap unfair tuition fees for all students taking their first degrees saving them nearly £10,000 each.”[3]

Self-destructive statement from Vince Cable to the House: “The Liberal Democrats consistently opposed graduate contributions.

But in this current economic climate that policy is simply no longer feasible. That is why I intend on behalf of the coalition to put specific proposals to the House to implement radical and progressive reforms to HE based on the Browne report.” “…we are considering a level of £7000.”[4]

Hmm.

“The sheer quantity of vitriol hurled at us, regardless of its low factual quality, is hard for us to deal with.”

…I’ll just leave that one there for you to think about the sheer amount of self-justification and self-pity contained within that sentence.

Ooh, a Youtube video pointing out that the Liberal Democrats are liars…

“It’s very tempting to just dismiss anybody “stupid” enough to abandon us because of the national tide, but I don’t think that’s fair.”

How very kind of JHSB to say so. But the uncomfortable fact, and I shall pull an exciting “fact” out here, is that 40,000 people have joined the Labour Party since May, and a third of them went over from the Lib Dems.[5][6] And I think to be even tempted to dismiss 13,000 people as “stupid” is just the teeniest bit arrogant, perhaps… I look forward to reading the next Focus newspaper dropping through my door about how I’m stupid and I just need to get my act together and vote Lib Dem again and everything will be alright, my friends won’t getting denied their care packages or finding themselves on mandatory litter-picking and school wall painting because they can’t get a job because George Osborne and Danny Alexander have just fired 500,000 people…

cgon99l The Negative Narrative: A Response to a Liberal Democrat

13,000 stupid voters just don't get it, see.

This entire post was originally a much shorter comment that I left in comments section of JHSB’s blogpost, but in a true liberal spirit, my comment has magically vanished for “moderation” and has not been seen again. I have therefore included it below instead.

“Personally, I’m sickened by people making political capital out of whipping up fear among poor, ill and disabled people when the details of the proposals haven’t even been published yet.”

“I don’t know if your Facebook feed is the same, but mine is currently filled with poor, sick and disabled friends who don’t need to know exactly where their services are going to be cut to know that they are going to suffer a poorer quality of life after the Lib Dems and the Tories are done. For many of them, the cuts are already coming: in York – the early intervention in psychosis team has lost 2 Community Psychiatric Nurses, 3 Health Care Assistants, and its only psychologist. It reduced hospital admissions by 80%. Those hospital admissions are not bed places being taken up by the fit and healthy, they are used by my friends with severe mental impairments. In Liverpool, a friend of a friend with chronic treatment-resistant schizophrenia has been told she must pay £70/week to use a day centre for 3 days a week (her only social contact). She’s been on benefits for years & has no way of paying.

My own mother is a council worker who has been sent an email by the Chief Executive saying that they are going to get rid of 40% of their jobs *next year* – she says that pretty much all services except statutory functions will be scrapped. That includes parks, daycare, local small business investment schemes…

I ran into a lady yesterday on Oxford Road doing street surveys who told me that she used to work from home doing telemarketing but the floor has fallen out of the market because of the cuts and for the first time in 30 years she’s been forced back onto the streets in winter to get work. And then I receive emails from Simon Hughes telling me that the government cuts have a “progressive face”.

liberal brain The Negative Narrative: A Response to a Liberal Democrat

Where did these people go? Come back!

I’m not making much political capital out of this, but neither are the Liberal Democrats. The Liberal Democrats are colluding in the destruction of the lives of thousands of people. Maybe the media narrative is being dominated by Tory newspapers who want to displace blame for the fact that their own readers are about to get screwed over. But the fact is, in a year’s time, when college students are having to drop out because they can’t get to school because their EMA has been removed, or hospital admissions double because social care for the elderly and disabled has been cut by 30% and people are unable to live independently, or the job market becomes even tougher because the 1.3 million people who are about to hit the dole are forced into 30 hour a week placements at £1.73/h that effectively do all the menial and filing jobs that they used to perform for pay (look, I has facts!), people aren’t going to be paying any attention whatsoever to the dominant media narrative, they’re going to be looking at their own lives and the lives of their friends and family and making a judgment on that.

And I don’t suppose that knowing that there’s going to be a referendum on AV, or people will be able to recall corrupt MPs, or that Royal Mail is going to be part-privatised (wtf, man?) is really going to make them cheerlead the Liberal Democrats much.

The Labour Party doesn’t have to whip up fear, people are *terrified* already. What policies would have to be announced before it was a compromise too far for you?”

As a closing point, in researching some of the facts contained in this article, I came across this sentiment from a Guardian reader:

“There’s no honour in voting through 10 Tory policies, to get 1 back in return.”

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Mephedrone 101 – Common Questions and Answers

Wednesday, November 17th, 2010

I get a reasonable amount of search engine traffic to my blog, and one of the most popular cluster of search terms that people search for is on mephedrone (the others being: cool charities, homosexuality and Bah’ai, homosexuality and Sikhism, Christopher Hitchens, and an endless variety of angsty questions about police raids.) None of the articles in which I have referred to mephedrone have really dealt with the issues that people were looking for, so I thought I would be quite helpful and post some of the more common questions with their common answers. :)

4mmc Mephedrone 101 Common Questions and Answers

Impounded illegal mephedrone

Can you still buy mephedrone online?

No, you cannot buy mephedrone online. The reason it used to be so easy to get hold of was because it was legal to manufacture, sell and possess. Mephedrone is illegal now in most Western countries, and consequently all websites that used to sell it openly have been shut down or are “down for maintenance”.

What shops sell mephedrone? Where can I buy mephedrone in Manchester or the UK?

No shop in the Western world will openly sell mephedrone. Mephedrone is now in the same class of illegal drugs as MDMA, cannabis, and ketamine, and is therefore obtained through the same channels.

How is mephedrone made? How was mephedrone produced?

The chemical details are here, but I suspect the latter question referred to the supply chain involved. Essentially factories in Asian countries, but particularly China, will produce any research chemical in industrial quantities on demand. As mephedrone was legal and had a phenomenal mark-up with no ramifications, certain entrepreneurial souls started up wholesaler websites and let people know they were around. And it went from there. You can read more about a dealer’s perspective here.

How much mephedrone should you take? What is the dosage of mephedrone? How can you increase the high of mephedrone?

Erowid has the answers to correct dosage and usage in its vault entry for mephedrone.

Is mephedrone MDMA? Can you turn mephedrone into MDMA? Can you buy mephedrone and get MDMA instead?

Mephedrone and MDMA are two closely related but completely different drugs. Mephedrone’s effects are less intense than that of MDMA, shorter-acting, and usage patterns tend to be similar to people who use ketamine or cannabis than LSD or heroin (i.e. smaller, more frequent hits that you can control, over drugs that once you take them, you are high until you come back down again). I am no chemist, but as far as I am aware, you cannot synthesise mephedrone into MDMA or vice versa. MDMA is in considerably higher demand than mephedrone and has a much higher profit margin, so the likelihood that you can buy mephedrone and actually be sold MDMA of any significant quality is pretty low.

Is mephedrone safe? Does mephedrone harm you? What is mephedrone being cut with? How does mephedrone kill you? Haven’t people died using mephedrone?

Taking pure mephedrone won’t kill you if you use it sensibly, but I wouldn’t say it was “safe”, no. It’s kinda hard to tell what the long-term health effects of mephedrone actually are because the government went and banned it before anyone could do any substantive research on the drug, but from what I’ve read, it appears to be corrosive. One user told a Guardian journalist that he left a spoon in a bag of mephedrone for 72 hours and when he came back, the spoon had been partially dissolved. So if you take a lot over a long period of time, your sinuses, oesophagus and lungs will not be very happy.

However, mephedrone doesn’t kill you in itself – like all stimulants, if you have pre-existing heart conditions, take a massive dose, or don’t take care of yourself while high by monitoring your water intake and body temperature, then you may well end up with serious health problems, be they heart attacks, heatstroke, dehydration, or anything else. This is not the fault of the drug. Almost all deaths that have been linked to mephedrone have involved polydrug use: i.e. mephedrone and alcohol, mephedrone and cocaine, etc. If you ingest two separate drugs, they will interact in ways that may be be better or worse for you (for example, MDMA and LSD apparently produces a trip that is signicantly intenser and more euphoric than either drug on its own – but cocaine and alcohol combine in your stomach to create a different drug which is potentially lethal) – if you are going to use drugs, do your research first and stay safe.

What other legal highs are there after mephedrone? What drugs are similar to mephedrone? What about ivory wave and mephedrone?

A number of legal research chemicals have been available online since mephedrone was banned, notably NRG-1 and ivory wave, but none has really taken hold – when drugs are still predominantly being referred to by their chemical names rather than their street names, only the psychonauts and the adventurous are really using them.

Mephedrone is not the same as ivory wave, NRG-1, or MDAT. No-one really knows what ivory wave is at the moment, because it hasn’t become widely available enough yet to be subject to proper sampling. However, a lot of ivory wave seems to contain MDPV, a cathinone that is similar to mephedrone but not quite. Ivory wave is currently legal, but doesn’t sound very nice on the system.

Mephedrone is a cathinone, so chemically it is similar to methylone, methadrone, and MDPV, which hold varying legality across the world. But to be honest, if you’re looking for a stimulant that’s similar to mephedrone and has decades of research into its long-term effects and safer usage, MDMA is going to be much healthier for you than unknown research chemicals.

500px Map of european countries where mephedrone is illegal.svg Mephedrone 101 Common Questions and Answers

Map of Europe showing countries where mephedrone is illegal, correct as of August 2010

Random search terms:

uk mephedrone post ban
– You can still get it in Britain, it’s just now £20 a gram and not very safe.

mephedrone class uk law
- In the UK, mephedrone is currently a Class B drug. Personal possession of mephedrone could get you three months in prison or a £2500 fine, and supply is six months in prison or a £5000 fine.

structure of mephedrone
- The chemical structure and synthesis of mephedrone is available on Wikipedia here. Here is an image:

Mephedrone 2D skeletal Mephedrone 101 Common Questions and Answers

Chemical Structure of Mephedrone

mephedrone precursor
- The main precursor to mephedrone is 4-methylpropiophenone, which as far as I am aware is still legal.

what was mephedrone designed for
- The drug was actually first synthesised in 1929, but rediscovered in 2003 by chemists looking to manufacture a “designer drug” that could get round existing drugs legislation. I’m not sure where the “plant food” thing came from. If you put mephedrone on your plants, they will die.

where has all the mephedrone gone?
- The majority of mephedrone production was in China; when mephedrone became incredibly popular, the Chinese government cracked down on the production of one of the precursors of mephedrone, and consequently the industrial quantities of mephedrone that used to float around have now disappeared. Because mephedrone is now illegal in much of the Western world, its production and supply has gone the way of other illegal drugs and it is consequently not being openly waved around in bags at house parties anymore.

which is more harmful mephedrone or cocaine
- We cannot know that until a lot more research is done into mephedrone, its long-term effects and its social harms. Chemically, mephedrone is probably worse for your body, but mephedrone has never induced the levels of aggressiveness and violence that cocaine produces in its users. We await more data.

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Some perspective on Millbank, the NUS, and its aftermath

Tuesday, November 16th, 2010

rogue+minority Some perspective on Millbank, the NUS, and its aftermath

The crowd just in the courtyard of the Tory Party HQ, another thousand were outside as well.

I’ve been a bit mean about the NUS and its hypocritical, lying, self-serving excuses for “leaders” lately, and I wanted to clarify some things. To coin a standard slimy politician phrase, let me be absolutely clear: we need a national co-ordinated student movement to campaign on behalf of students, to advocate for students, and to defend student interests. However, following the mass discontent after the National Demonstration on the 10th November the NUS is defending its own interests: if the NUS had stopped its demo because it didn’t want to be associated with criminal damage, yes, good. We don’t want people walking blindly into a potentially dangerous situation they didn’t consent to. But they didn’t just stop there: I reached the bridge by Millbank and walked straight into a line of NUS stewards who told me that the demo was over, that people had gotten into Tory Party HQ but that the police had arrived and it was all over. And that I should go get on my coach. Is that protecting the 2000 students who were still standing outside Millbank? Or is that lying because their party got pooped?

natioanl demo Some perspective on Millbank, the NUS, and its aftermath

Apt name, really, huh?

The NUS and its leaders have since been doing their utmost to denounce anyone who was at Millbank and to claim that their opinion is representative of everyone else who wasn’t there. But I have to ask, what evidence is there that that is even true? I wasn’t even at Millbank when it all started, I was way in the back with other students who never intended to go and smash up Tory Party windows. And they were all thrilled to bits when they heard what was happening. You don’t have to set fire to a placard yourself to be ok with other people doing so.

Do you think that students and lecturers oppose Millbank? Think again:

* Under-Fire Lecturers Hit Back In Protest Row (Sky News)

* Students’ vandalism ‘drop in the ocean’ – Sussex union (BBC)

* University of Manchester Student Union’s Statement – “We do not condone any acts of violence but we are not surprised that some students and young people fell they are simply not being heard through the formal channels of democracy and that their frustration has reached this point.”

* Millbank: Across the great divide (OUSU student paper)

* Students win praise from lecturers after rioting (Yorkshire Post)

Do you think that the media is universally against Millbank? Think again:

* Spending cuts – the fightback begins (The Guardian)

* Leading article: Fury about more than tuition fees (The Independent)

* Inside the Millbank Tower riots (The New Statesman)

* Stick-wielding Leftie yobs? Not the lovely boys I met at the pub (The *Daily Mail*)

And let us consider what the wonderful Paul O’Grady has to say:

Anecdotal and polling evidence suggests that public support remains high for what happened last Wednesday. Yes, it dropped; what do you expect when the media focus on fire extinguishers and believe our distinguished President when he says that a few extremists hijacked our protest (although, as my actual anarchist friends point out, no trouble-maker goes into a situation unmasked and bearing an NUS placard, as so many students on that day did)? I am absolutely certain those people will change their minds when their parents lose their pensions, their children lose their EMA, they lose their jobs and suddenly Iain Duncan Smith’s crackdown on “lazy and workshy” benefits claimants applies to them and reality just doesn’t accord with even the Daily Mail’s best efforts.

13.11.10 Martin Rowson on 005 Some perspective on Millbank, the NUS, and its aftermath

'What's a few broken windows to the violence being carried out on millions of people by the Tories?' - Clare Solomon, President of ULU.

My leftist comrades insist on “solidarity with students and workers” – usually I am sceptical of pretty much everything the left have to say, but on this occasion, they are right. We don’t have time for the NUS trying to consolidate its power and force everyone to campaign their way. I got myself blocked on Twitter by the Academic Affairs Officer of our union after she called Manchester occupiers last Thursday “idiots” and I wasn’t very complimentary in response. This incident should never have happened: if you disapprove of a campaigning tactic, don’t engage in it. If you think the tactic is damaging to the movement, say so. But calling students “despicable” and “idiots”? You’ve been in power too long, methinks.

The NUS campaign against its own members needs to stop. Lobby MPs, hold the nicey nicey stuff behind closed doors that individual unions can’t, but when students take to the streets and start venting their rage at what’s happening to education in this country, just say it’s not an NUS thing and keep talking about why we’re pissed off. That’s a nice, workable compromise, isn’t it? Raise some awahness, yah?

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Violence at the NUS/UCU National Demonstration

Thursday, November 11th, 2010

I am writing this after 20 hours of travel and protest but I wanted to get out some quick thoughts on the issue of violence at the demonstration yesterday. But take a look at the video above and tell me: does this look like a “tiny despicable minority ruining it for the others” to you? Or does it look like a thousand very pissed off students deciding that passively listening to Aaron Porter talk about “action” (as if he has any idea what that means) wasn’t enough of a message?

I made it into a pub about 3pm while in London for the NUS/UCU National Demonstration against education cuts to find out what was going on, to discover that the reason the march I had been on had stopped and then started to disperse was because a) there was a sit-in in Parliament Square, and b) student had stormed the Conservative Party HQ. Commentators repeatedly referred to “a few anarchists, not students”, being responsible, and Aaron Porter, president of the National Union of Students, accused a “small minority” of having “hijacked” the event and described the violence as “despicable”.

Ignoring the rather stupid implication that anarchists cannot be students, the fact is, however the media will spin it, maybe a couple of hundred broke into the building itself, but the reason they got away with it (the people arrested are people who stayed at Millbank well into the evening) is because of the thousands of protesters who surrounded the building and prevented the police from getting hold of them. At least 2000 people watched as people broke the windows of the Tory Party HQ and hung banners from the roof. And it would have been more if NUS stewards had not lined up at the end of the road and started lying to people that the Millbank protest had ended in an attempt to get them to go away.

I have been to a lot of protests and several that have turned violent, but this has to be one of the first where a small group of people started to engage in violent direct action and were immediately supported by *everyone* around them. I disapprove strongly of throwing fire extinguishers from rooftops, but direct action against buildings is as valid a method of protest as any other. The fact that so many people were prepared to engage in and support direct action should probably tell us all something about the potential scale of the movement that we are building, and just how powerful we can become.

And I think the message got through today that this is real, and we’re not going to go away, and people’s lives are going to be ruined by these cuts. Time to put some meaning into Mr. Porter’s dictum, “We will not stand for cuts”.

This is just the beginning.

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Letter to Student Direct regarding UMSU General Meetings

Monday, November 8th, 2010

Originally sent to Student Direct.

Dear Student Direct,

we broke a record for the number of policies passed last week at General Meeting, and some say we should be proud. However, the endless procedural motions to block debate and pass policy without any debate or scrutiny should cause us to consider our first General Meeting in 18 months as a matter for shame as well.

Several procedural motions to go straight to a vote were spoken against by speakers saying “Look, I have an opposition speech here, please hear me out”, so this is not a matter of passing “uncontentious motions”, as has been claimed.

Students don’t come to university to learn facts, they come to be challenged. If General Meetings are simply events where anyone can get their motions through without scrutiny or debate because they aren’t about Palestine, then we may as well get rid of them completely (and we will never reach quorum online if people want to get stuff through sheer apathy). There was a speaker who wanted to speak in favour of cuts – that’s amazing! What did he think? What was his response to our arguments? How would this make me consider how I know what I know? I don’t know, because General Meeting cut him off because it wasn’t “contentious”. And our right to listen, to be challenged, to think through what we believe and why we believe it, was denied.

Several exec members are justifying the way General Meeting was handled by rightly claiming that all procedures were constitutional. But last week was a travesty of democracy, and the fact that it was constitutional doesn’t in any way change the fact that it was wrong.

Yours faithfully,

Sarah McCulloch

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Letter regarding Arndale security staff bullying at the Vodafone demo

Tuesday, November 2nd, 2010

5135385020 a75d13e453 Letter regarding Arndale security staff bullying at the Vodafone demo

We like our tax bills to be paid, yes we do.

Sent to the Head of Security at the Arndale Centre.

“Dear Sir/Madam,

We are writing to you with regard to the conduct of one of your security staff members at the Vodafone demonstration on Saturday the 20th October. As she was not wearing a name badge, we cannot say what her name was, but we have attached a photograph [redacted - details as to where she is in the attached photo].

As we are sure you are aware, several people took the decision to demonstrate at a Vodafone store because of the £6 billion tax bill that Vodafone was let off by the government, in the same week as the Chancellor announced a £7 billion cut to the welfare budget. This is hugely unfair and will render thousands of people destitute, including many of those in work, and hundreds of thousands of people may lose their homes. We therefore felt it was important to hold a peaceful protest in order to express our outrage at this. We had an extremely positive response from the shoppers who passed by the demonstration, and many thanked us for drawing the issue to their attention. Indeed, some spontaneously joined us!

Early on during the demonstration, as security staff were still arriving, the staff member in question was overheard telling another member of staff who had just arrived that the demonstrators had been “shoving at the doors” of the shop and that security had had to hold people back. An impartial legal observer was present at the time and reported that he had not witnessed shoving from any of the parties involved. Contemporaneous notes are available to support this.

We concluded our demonstration at approximately 4pm. One of us (Sarah) then turned to the security member in question and politely asked if she had a Vodafone contract, as we had asked many people that day. This apparently provided her with the opening she’d wanted to rant about what a disgrace we were for depriving someone’s freedom of speech; it seemed someone who objected to the protest had been heckled by a different group who had attended. She claimed that this group had shoved the objector away from a microphone which was being used to address passers-by. At this point, Josie joined the conversation to object to the accusations of shoving, as there had been no physical contact involved (this will be confirmed by CCTV). The member of staff denied having accused anyone of shoving, despite the fact that we had both heard her say it moments before. She continued to say that our demonstration was “pathetic” and “sad” and that we didn’t have the right to protest because “half of you don’t pay taxes or have a job anyway”.

Josie asked what evidence she had that we were unemployed and how that had anything to do with our protest. The staff member then once more denied that she had said any such thing but continued on the same theme and said that our protest was “pathetic” again, because one protestor had received a fine for fly-posting earlier on in the day, and had no way of paying. We tried to ask whether she didn’t find it odd to be denouncing one of our protestors for being fined £50 he couldn’t pay and defending Vodafone getting away with an unpaid tax bill of £6 billion, but she merely continued to call us sad over and over again.

We pointed out that she was as likely to end up unemployed as anyone else, because with the cuts that have just been announced and the subsequent effect they are going to have on the economy and business, nobody’s job is safe; she informed us that “I don’t care, I’ve got a job for life”, because “there are some things which are certain in life, death, taxes, food and securing a building. This mall isn’t going anywhere, they can’t get rid of me.” She then began to ask us why we were still here, and began to make shooing gestures, saying, “go on, you’ve had your little protest, now just go away, go on, just go away”.

We are sure we needn’t point out how discourteous and unprofessional the behaviour of this security staff member was. While some of us may well have an extremely low income, the two of us have personally spent hundreds of pounds each in Arndale shops, as have most of our fellow protestors. Being treated like this by someone who emphasised repeatedly that she was one of your employees has discouraged us from wanting to visit particularly often in the future.

This letter of complaint has been published on SarahMcCulloch.com (8000 hits a month) and via various social networks including Sarah’s Twitter page which has 6700 followers. We would be most appreciative to receive a response detailing what steps you will take to deal with this most unfortunate smear on the reputation of the Arndale Centre; we would be happy to publish your response to the same audience.

We look forward to your reply.

Sarah McCulloch
Josie Czechowicz”

UPDATE – We have received a letter of acknowledgement:

“Dear Sarah,

We acknowledge receipt of your letter dated 1st November 2010 concerning an incident which took place on 20th October 2010.

We view this very seriously and will be undertaking a comprehensive investigation of all the facts concerned in this matter and will respond to you early next week.

Yours sincerely,

Glen Barkworth
General Manager”

Vodafone, we pay taxes, why don’t you?

Check out the campaign: http://ukuncut.wordpress.com
See also: Pay your taxes! Vodafone shop shut down in Manchester town centre

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Pay your taxes! Vodafone shop shut down in Manchester town centre

Monday, November 1st, 2010

I do enjoy going to protests that go right. And shutting down a Vodafone store last Saturday went very well.

In the same week that George Osborne announced to great applause from his back-benches the removal of £7 billion from benefits and the destruction of the welfare state, HMRC quietly dropped its attempts to force Vodafone to pay their outstanding tax bill of £6 billion. BILLION. £6,000,000,000. So at a time when George Osborne was commending his review to the House, which will result in deaths of hundreds, the destitution of thousands and the displacement of hundreds of thousands, as “bringing Britain back from the brink of bankruptcy”, Vodafone was forgiven a tax bill that would have rendered those cuts to welfare completely unnecessary.

Why? I couldn’t possibly speculate. I merely note that John Connors, a former senior official at Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs, moved to become Head of Tax for Vodafone in 2007, and since 2010 has been George Osborne’s adviser on corporation tax. I believe that such things in the third world are known as “corruption”, but of course such things never happen in 21st Century Britain.

5134786357 010feda17a Pay your taxes! Vodafone shop shut down in Manchester town centre

Andi is uber-angry about Vodafone stealing £6 billion in unpaid tax...

LOL. Of course they happen, and have happened. Fortunately this story has been sufficiently outrageous that even the average British citizen can’t quite believe that Vodafone has got away with paying the same amount from their profit margin that is now being taken from the hands of people who desperately need it in the name of “dealing with debt”. Spontaneous protesters shut down the flagship Vodafone store on Oxford Street last week and there was a subsequent call for sit-ins across the country at Vodafone stores last Saturday, the busiest shopping day of the week. 21 stores were shut down in places as diverse as London, Oxford, Worthing, Leeds, Sheffield, Edinburgh, Glasgow, and of course, Manchester.

5135384818 e0b7c131b7 Pay your taxes! Vodafone shop shut down in Manchester town centre

Vodafone do our work for us and shut the shop.

Given that the Manchester demo was organised at 9pm the night before, we managed a pretty respectable turnout. The Vodafone store had obviously had prior warning and was already closed and shuttered – but we still stood outside it for 4 hours, chanting and leafleting. The response from the public has been overwhelmingly positive: most were horrified at the amount of money involved and thanks us for demonstrating, several asked me what they could do to get involved, others announced they were going to switch from Vodafone immediately, and one or two spontaneously joined the protest. Sadly, we also had to deal with an Arndale security staff member who told us we were “pathetic” and “sad”, and that she didn’t care about the cuts because she had a “job for life” because “there are four things which are certain in life, death, taxes, food and securing a building”: I would add that another thing that is certain in life is “your line manager receiving a complaint letter if you are a obnoxious moron to me”. But besides that, it was a good day.

5135385020 a75d13e453 Pay your taxes! Vodafone shop shut down in Manchester town centre

We like our tax bills to be paid, yes we do.

It was, however, an isolated protest. Vodafone’s tax dodge has cost us £6 billion, but as I heard Graham Turner say at the Education Action Network the day after, Vodafone is only one company. Every billion the multinationals save from legal loopholes and negotiations with the government to cancel their debts is another billion stolen from the public services that are used and needed by all of us.

George Osborne’s “reforms” are going to effectively fire 1 million people, who won’t be able to access the benefits they need to support themselves because he’s removed those as well. If you don’t want to be one of them, I suggest you start organising.

Vodafone, we pay taxes, why don’t you?

Check out the campaign: http://ukuncut.wordpress.com

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