The Edge Fund Get-Together,

THE EDGE FUND GLASGOW LAUNCH www.edgefund.org.uk

SATURDAY 6TH APRIL - AFRICAN CARIBBEAN NETWORK CENTRE, 66 – 68 OSBORNE STREET, GLASGOW G1 5QH 7 – 10pm

ARE YOU A COMMUNITY ACTIVIST, ARTIST OR PERFORMER RAISING YOUR VOICE FOR JUSTICE?

• Are you and your community facing injustice or discrimination?
• Do you want to raise your voice and transform society? 
• Do you find you are treated differently to others because of your class, disability, gender, race, nationality, religion, sexuality or other factors?
• Do you want to do something about it?

Welcome 2013 with revolutionary fervour at THE EDGE FUND GLASGOW LAUNCH PARTY 

Edge Fund activists are looking for artists, activists, performers and community organisers to make the Glasgow launch night amazing.  The Edge Fund is a really good sign of things to come. There are so many amazing people out there who can benefit. We want to showcase the biggest talents from the roaring belly of resistance on our streets and in our communities. Please do email over any links / suggestions ASAP to edgecommunity@riseup.net - Check out the Edge Fund launch in London here - more videos and footage here

 

PROGRAMME - 

• 7.00 – 7.30 performances – why we need to build community power .. the issues alive in Glasgow.
• 7.30 – 8.00 small group feedback
• 8.00 – 8.15 – Q and A 
• 8.15- 8.45 - Soulful music - chillax- connect shout outs to different crews, organisations and groups in the building, in case people wish to make connections and network.

EDGE FUND INFORMATION 

There is a new fund that can support you. If you are experiencing injustice and have your own ideas about how you can stop it happening or have an idea about how we can create a society where everyone is treated equally, please get in touch. It could be a new idea or one you have already put into action. It could be about jobs, housing, benefits, education, crime, access to public services, the environment or anything else that affects your daily life. EDGE FUND is a group of people from different backgrounds who decide together how the money should be given out. Within our group are both people who give and receive money.We are looking for people to jto join us, especially those most affected by inequality and injustice.  

If you have an idea for a project and need some money and support to develop it or make it happen, or would like to get involved in another way please call Sophie on 07767126915 or email edgefund@riseup.net. More information is on our website www.edgefund.org.uk

Here's just some of the amazing contributors performing on the night ......

• Cathy McCormack - long term anti-poverty campaigner from Easterhouse Glasgow, author of ‘The Wee Yellow Butterfly’ and radio presenter of the 'The War against the Poor in Britain' series 
• Rosie Kane - Comedian and former MSP performing parts of her new show!
• Galgael who provide a space that serves as something of a safe harbour for those whose lives have been battered by storms such as worklessness, depression or addiction 
• The Glasgow Sex Worker Open University (SWOU) - a project created by and for sex workers. SWOU's aim is to empower our community through workshops, debates, actions and art projects as well as fighting against our criminalisation 
• The African Caribbean Network who promote the inclusion of African and Caribbean residents as equal and valued members of their communities 
• Camcorder Guerrillas are a Glasgow community-based, voluntary collective of professional filmmakers, artists and activists, working together to make and showcase documentaries for those concerned with human rights, welfare and social justice initiatives 

AND BEFOREHAND .. LET FREEDOM RING TRAINING – READING OUR REALITY IN 2013 - SATURDAY 6TH APRIL - AFRICAN CARIBBEAN NETWORK CENTRE, 66 – 68 OSBORNE STREET, GLASGOW G1 5QH – 4 – 6pm

Let Freedom Ring! - from South Africa comes the UK launch of Training for Transformation in 2013 - “The greatest weapon in the hand of the oppressor is the mind of the oppressed.” ― Steve Biko www.theglassishalffull.co.uk 

PLEASE NOTE THERE ARE LIMITED SPACES FOR THE TRAINING (4PM – 6PM) – MAXIMUM 20 SPACES – please respond ASAP to letfreedomring@theglassishalffull.co.uk. It is Free!

ann arky's home.

Bread and Roses.

       A poem a day for the month of April. This one was taken from the article Bread and Roses on the Free Your Voice site:

         



As we come marching, marching in the beauty of the day,
A million darkened kitchens, a thousand mill lofts gray,
Are touched with all the radiance that a sudden sun discloses,
For the people hear us singing: “Bread and roses! Bread and roses!”
As we come marching, marching, we battle too for men,
For they are women’s children, and we mother them again.
Our lives shall not be sweated from birth until life closes;
Hearts starve as well as bodies; give us bread, but give us roses!
As we come marching, marching, unnumbered women dead
Go crying through our singing their ancient cry for bread.
Small art and love and beauty their drudging spirits knew.
Yes, it is bread we fight for — but we fight for roses, too!
As we come marching, marching, we bring the greater days.
The rising of the women means the rising of the race.
No more the drudge and idler — ten that toil where one reposes,
Poem by James Oppenheim

ann arky's home.

Liars and Hypocrites in High Places.

     It would be nice to see Iain Duncan Smith eat shit or openly back out. £53 a week is less than his income for a quarter of a day, not counting all the wee perks that go with being one of the in boys of the Westminster Houses of Hypocrisy and Corruption Club.

 

Yesterday in response to welfare reforms, Iain Duncan Smith said that he could live on £53 per week. Dom is calling on him to prove his claim.

177081 Signatures

Sign the Petition

Iain Duncan Smith: Iain Duncan Smith to live on £53 a week.

Started by: Dom,

     This petition calls for Iain Duncan Smith, the current Work and Pensions Secretary, to prove his claim of being able to live on £7.57 a day, or £53 a week.

     On Monday's Today Programme David Bennett, a market trader, said that after his housing benefit had been cut, he lives on £53 per week. The next interviewee was Work and Pensions Secretary Iain Duncan Smith, who was defending the changes. The interviewer then asked him if he could live on this amount. He replied: "If I had to, I would."

     This petition calls on Iain Duncan Smith to live on this budget for at least one year. This would help realise the conservative party`s current mantra that "We are all in this together".

     This would mean a 97% reduction in his current income, which is £1,581.02 a week or £225 a day after tax* [Source: The Telegraph]

Please join me.

Click here to sign Dom's petition, "Iain Duncan Smith: Iain Duncan Smith to live on £53 a week.".

You can also check out other popular petitions on Change.org by clicking here.

ann arky's home.

The Illusion of Democracy Difts Off Like Smoke in The Breeze.

       Conditions in Greece are deplorable for the ordinary people, thanks to the financial mafia and the Troika having "saved" them, but for immigrants the conditions are made much worse by the constant persecution by the state apparatus and by the violence from the fascists of Golden Dawn. Vicious attacks on immigrants by this fascist organisation go unhindered as the police turn a blind eye, they are also subject to brutal treatment by the police. Now it seems that the Greek state is in collusion with the Turkish state to return political refugees to Turkey, some having fled Turkey ten or more years ago and are now settled in Greece with families and friends. 

     In the recent weeks, Turkish and Kurdish political refugees in Greece are faced with constant prosecutions (arrests, searches at their homes, detentions when they protest in front of the Turkish Embassy). Turkey is activating several extradiction signals, even for refugees who have been in Greece for over a decade, and whose asylum requests are still pending due to the substantially inefficient system of asylum granting.

Read the full article HERE:

       As the days pass the illusion of democracy in Europe drifts off like smoke in a breeze. Governments openly co-operate with the financial mafia in looting the public purse, human rights are violated on a daily basis, and the corporate world at an ever increasing pace, takes control of all public space.

      It doesn't have to be this way, there are alternatives, capitalism is not the only game in town. There is a war going on at the moment, it is one class against another. The corporate financial class is looting and plundering the assets of the ordinary people, who as a class, have the power to reshape our world to a better place for all. Our class make and distribute everything in this world, their class dictate what we make and how we distribute it. Why do we let them, we don't need them, they need us. It is our sweat blood and tears that keep the parasites in their marble halls, while we go cold and hungry, why do we continue to do so?

ann arky's home.

I'm Proud.

       It Appears that April is National Poetry Writing Month, the idea is that you have to come up with a poem a day. I don't know if you should write one a day, which is a tall order if your a busy buddie, or just come up with one a day from somewhere. I'm also not sure if it is just an American thing. I suppose I should have done more research. However, no country should have a monopoly of such a wonderful idea. So where are all your beautiful little verses?

I'M PROUD.

I’m proud of my people, proud to be one of them,

that great mass on society’s bottom rung.

Those who, with coal-dust under their nails

in their eyes, in their lungs

claw at the earths entrails.

Their brothers,

cement in their hair

in their mouth, in their ears,

oil ingrained in their fingers,

on their face.

Sisters, glistening with sweat

midst the ceaseless noise of machines

that throw out shirts, shoes, toys, carpets

for other people.

Those with soil and sweat stuck to their skin

smelling of the earth, feeding the multitude,

grinding out their lives in a harsh pitiless system

weighted down

with a sack load of half-dead dreams,

sometimes brought to their knees

by a tidal wave of despair,

never defeated,

groping in the dark to find tomorrow,

keeping hope alive;

they amaze me.

Somehow, from somewhere

in this cold, cruel

unforgiving scheme of things

they find love for their children.

Not a teaspoonful, not a cupful,

but buckets full, to bathe them in,

to pour over them.

They seem to know

that one day this world will be ours

and to take care of it

we will need those who have been loved.

ann arky's home.

Cyprus, Parasites Gambling Casino.

       So the political elite of Cyprus have come up with a wonderful plan to save the south half of the Island. After the financial Mafia confined the ordinary citizens to the pit of poverty with the plundering of their bank accounts, the local political parasites come up with the idea that to encourage gambling casinos to mushroom on the island would save the day, so to this end they are granting them tax breaks. Think of it as a gambling paradise for the rich parasites to sun themselves by day, and fritter away their millions in the evening. Of course the ordinary citizens of the island who have been mugged and robbed by the financial Mafia will only see this transformation through a plate glass window, or as cheap labour, serving coffee and sweeping the floors etc., how wonderful for the locals. Once again the rich have come running to the rescue, turning up to employ them at the minimum wage or less, to pander to the parasites every wish. A millionaires holiday camp built and run on the cheap labour of a mugged population. Isn't capitalism wonderful!!

ann arky's home.

Sweets That Leave a Bitter Taste in Your Mouth.

       Sweet tasting, but leaves a bitter taste in your mouth. A call for solidarity from Labour Start:

      Chances are you've never heard of Mondelez.  But you know the company. Mondelez is the new name for Kraft, one of the world's largest food companies. They make Oreo cookies, Ritz crackers, Philadelphia cream cheese, Toblerone, Green & Blacks, and Cadbury chocolates -- familiar brands around the world.

      The company says it exists to “create delicious moments of joy for our consumers, employees and communities around the world.” Actually, its record on workers' rights is somewhat less than stellar.

       According to the IUF -- the global union federation representing food workers -- union leaders in Egypt and Tunisia have been unjustly fired in the performance of their duties and a worker was fired after losing his thumb in an accident in the factory in Alexandria. The IUF has asked Mondelez CEO Irene Rosenfeld for a meeting to discuss this.

But she's refusing to even talk about the issues.

       I realize that it's still a holiday weekend for many of you, but please take a moment to join me in sending a clear message to Ms. Rosenfeld demanding that she engage with the IUF, rectify the human rights abuses at her company, and reinstate all unjustly fired workers.

Click here to send off your message.

Thank you -- and have a great Easter and Passover.

Eric Lee

P.S. Want to know more about the Mondelez workers and their fight for justice?  Visit the new Screamdelez website.

ann arky's home.

Workers Know Your History, Francisco Ascaso Abadia.

      April first, all fools day, but it also marks another anniversary. April, 1, 1901, in Spain, Francisco Ascaso Abadía was born. Though his life was short, it was one of struggle, serving the cause of the ordinary people. He died on the first day of conflict of the Spanish civil war in Barcelona, (The following is from The International Encyclopedia of Revolution and Protest) An important figure in both the Spanish anarchosyndicalist Confederación Nacional del Trabajo (National Labor Confederation, CNT) and the Federación Anarquista Ibérica (Iberian Anarchist Federation, FAI) from 1922 until his death, Ascaso Abadía is associated with Buenaventura Durruti and Juan García Oliver , fellow members of the group Solidarity (Los Solidarios, later Nosotros [We]), who were together nicknamed “the three musketeers.” Imprisoned in 1923 for the assassination of Zaragoza's archbishop, Ascaso escaped, joining Durruti in France and traveling to the Americas. They returned to Europe by April 1926, and by 1931 Ascaso was back in Spain as one of the leading radicals of the movement. Deported to Africa in 1932, he returned with enhanced prestige, battling moderate forces both as an editor of Solidaridad Obrera (Workers' Solidarity) and as secretary of the Catalan CNT during 1934–5. Critical of the policies of the Asturian CNT, he opposed alliances with political organizations. Ascaso supported the formation of armed militia from CNT members and was at the forefront of the street battles in the 1936 Spanish Revolution; he died on July 20 during the struggle for Barcelona's Atarazanas Barracks. SEE ALSO: Abad de Santillán, Diego (1897–1983); Anarchism, Spain; Anarchosyndicalism; Asturias Uprising, October 1934 ; Confederación Nacional del Trabajo (CNT). 

                            

ann arky's home.

The New European Pension Credits!!!

       The horror of deprivation that exists in Greece since they were "saved" by the financial Mafia, (the Troika) doesn't get much coverage in that babbling Brook of bullshit, the media, but it is still there and likely to get worse. With the events over the last few weeks in Cyprus, where the Troika again stepped in to "save" them, we can expect the same pattern to emerge. You can take it that the "economy" in Cyprus has totally gone down the tubes. Who cares about the people, we saved the bank, or did we? Now the CEO of the third largest bank in Italy, thought to be the oldest bank in the world, has just announced that recently billions of Euro, have flown out of the banks vaults and he has no idea how much is left there. It is beginning to be come very obvious that the big money feels it can no longer trust the banksters, why should we? By the way, this bank has been bailed-out twice already, but that doesn't seem to have solved the problem.

      It is only a matter of time before the Greek standard of living becomes the norm across most of Europe, there can be no doubt that at the moment the ordinary people of Greece and Cyprus are in a race to the gutter, thanks to the help from the financial Mafia. Unless the people of Europe call a halt to this insanity of sacrificing people at the altar of finance, the cancer of poverty and deprivation will eat its way through Italy, Spain, Portugal and Ireland and with these countries mired in poverty, what chance for the rest of Europe to maintain its present miserable and precarious standard of living?

   Another very poignant photo from Teacher Dude's Grill & BBQ. Though taken in Greece, it could be coming to a city near you, soon, very soon.

Greek pensioner scavenging among rubbish on a Saturday afternoon, just before the city's central market closes for the weekend.

Some other Teacher Dude's photos of Greek pensioners survival methods.

ann arky's home.

An Anarchist At Heart.

 

     Kahil Gibran was not a proclaimed anarchist, but like all honest people, he was an anarchist at heart. His poetry speaks of a universality, a common bond between all people, as one of his favourite quotes makes clear, "I am not a politician, nor do I wish to become one" and "Spare me the political events and power struggles, as the whole earth is my homeland and all men are my fellow countrymen". Where ever he stands on the political spectrum, enjoy his poetry.

Your children are not your children.
They are the sons and daughters of Life’s longing for itself.
They come through you but not from you,
And though they are with you yet they belong not to you.

You give them your love but not your thoughts,
For they have their own thoughts.
You may house their bodies but not their souls,
For their souls dwell in the house of tomorrow,
which you cannot visit, not even in your dreams.
You may strive to be like them, but seek not to make them like you.
For life goes not backward nor tarries with yesterday.
You are the bows from which your children as living arrows are sent forth.

Kahlil Gibran (January 6, 1883 – April 10, 1931)

ann arky's home.

 

Glasgow Anti-bedroom Tax Demo and Photos.

     Glasgow's march and protest on Saturday, against the bedroom tax, was well attended and a very colourful and pleasant affair. The full spectrum of ages were represented, which is always a good sign, it means that the young are up for the struggle as well as the old die-hards. The pleasant atmosphere probably concealed the real anger felt by the majority of the people of this country against this continued assault against their living standards. It also concealed the disgust and in some cases downright hatred for the politicians and the financial mafia that rule this country. A cabal of millionaires who rule and shape this country to benefit their own wealthy class. They know it is class war, it is time we reacted in similar fashion.

      This kind of large turnout on a holiday weekend, before the brutal "austerity" cuts really start to kick in, is an indication of what has yet to come  when the real pain of this vicious policy of plundering the public purse gets into full swing.

      Sweeping changes to benefits will affect both workers and the unemployed as the Coalition’s ideology is brutally enforced. At present we have ATOS snatching disability allowance away from the sick and vulnerable. 

       From April 1st. the bedroom tax will be rolled out across the country.  The bedroom tax isn’t a tax in the real sense, but it hits you just as hard,  it’s a reduction in the amount of housing benefit that certain families will be able to claim. If you claim housing benefit and, for what ever reason, you have one or more spare bedrooms, you will be faced with a cut in the amount of benefit you receive.  A 14% cut for one spare room, and 25% cut if you have two spare rooms. It is estimated that well on the way to a million tenants will be adversely affected.

  

     Your idea of a spare room and that of our mansion living millionaire masters, will be somewhat different. Children under the age of 16 of the same gender, like it or not, are expected to share a room, while children under 10, irrespective of gender, are supposed to share the same room. What this translates as, is that we peasants, should not be expected to give our kids a room each, that sort of treatment is meant for the mansion class. For you and I, cuts in benefits, poorer living conditions, all because the bankers and bond merchants don't want to lose the money the gambled.

     As you go into this struggle, remember the rent strikes of 1915, and the poll tax of 1980/90's both resounding victories for the ordinary people of this country, both achieved by numbers and solidarity. The millionaire class can never win against the united will of the ordinary people.

ann arky's home.

Glasgow's Bedroom Tax, Day of Action.

     Time to show your anger at the millionaires booting the poor, the sick and the vulnerable.

Bedroom tax day of Day of Action

Saturday, March, 30, 2013.

Glasgow Green, 11:30.

      Let's make this the ConDem's poll tax moment.

     It is worth repeating what it is about the Bedroom Tax that we are protesting against:

   “The under occupancy penalty, does exactly what it is supposed to, it penalises. The Bedroom Tax penalises 660,000 households, and a total of nearly 2 million men, women and children are affected. According to the government’s own figures, 63% of those penalised are disabled. Nearly one quarter of those penalised are lone parents. Neither of these groups of people deserves to be punished for the Global Financial Crash in 2008. Other people affected by the Bedroom Tax include married people fleeing abusive households.

ann arky's home.

 

Which is Safest, a Bank or a Box Under the Bed.

      I keep pumping out the message that what is happening in Greece, is on its way here via Spain, Portugal, Italy and Ireland, and now we can add Cyprus. Remember that first directive from the financial Mafia, that savings in Cyprus would be cut by up to 10%. It was thrown out by all the local politicians, so they could go back to Brussels supposedly to "discuss" the matter again, giving them and there millionaire circle of parasites time to get there money out before they came back and accepted the second and same demand, by the financial Mafia. Only this time it was rumoured that it would be 40% of savings stolen. Now the figure is going to 80% snatched from your account. Everybody is saying that is a one and only savings plunder of this type by the financial Mafia. How wrong could you be, it seems that this type of theft has been discussed by all the players in the financial Mafia club, from the US, to UK and even sunny New Zealand. It will, I have no doubt, be rolled out across all those countries that are summoned to the altar of the Trioka and told to seek a bailout. Then perhaps it could be used to supplement the "austerity" measures to encourage those mythical "green shoots of recovery". All for our benefit of course!!

      In this type of "democracy" these big decisions that can shatter the lives of millions are made in secret, by faceless suits, in sumptuous rooms in marble halls, all done and dusted away from prying eyes. Make no mistake about it, the economy in Cyprus is finished, all small and medium business will go bust, poverty and deprivation will be the norm for the unfortunate ordinary people of the sunny Mediterranean island. It will be decades of poverty and suffering for all the ordinary people, of course they can take comfort in the fact that their misery and deprivation is saving the country. Can somebody explain to me what the "country" is, if it is not its people? In true and honest language, the ordinary people are being sacrificed to save the billionaires from taking a hit on their gambling losses. We are dealing with desperate conmen, gangsters, thugs.

    This from Seeking Alpha:

     Confiscating the customer deposits in Cyprus banks, it seems, was not a one-off, desperate idea of a few eurozone "troika" officials scrambling to salvage their balance sheets. A joint paper by the U.S. Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation and the Bank of England dated Dec. 10, 2012, shows that these plans have been long in the making; that they originated with the G20 Financial Stability Board in Basel, Switzerland (discussed earlier here); and that the result will be to deliver clear title to the banks of depositor funds.

New Zealand has a similar directive, discussed in my last article here, indicating that this isn't just an emergency measure for troubled eurozone countries. New Zealand's Voxy reported on March 19:

The National Government [is] pushing a Cyprus-style solution to bank failure in New Zealand, which will see small depositors lose some of their savings to fund big bank bailouts...
Open Bank Resolution (OBR) is Finance Minister Bill English's favored option dealing with a major bank failure. If a bank fails under OBR, all depositors will have their savings reduced overnight to fund the bank's bailout.

Read the full article HERE:

      Well now you know what they discuss at those G20 parasite get-togethers.

ann arky's home.

Circled "A" Radio, Iain McKay, part 2.

        A few weeks ago I posted Circle A's radio broadcast  of an interview with Glasgow's own Iain McKay, here is part 2 of that interview. We all know the present system exploits many of us for the benefit of the few – but how else can humans organise society for mutual benefit in a sustainable and ethical manner? This show poses questions to the knowlegdable Iain McKay, contributor to countless radical publications and editor of “Anarchist FAQ”, who discusses possible methods for anarchist inspired societal and economic organisation while providing some pretty compelling reasons for doing so!

    Enjoy Circled "A" Radio, No75, Iain McKay part 2:

ann arky's home.

A Dying Beast Can Be Dangerous.

        Cyprus is the latest European casualty in the decline of capitalism, it will not be the last, sadly the capitalist beast will not die quietly, before its final death throes, it will create a lot more damage and misery, a dying beast can be very dangerous. The living standards of the ordinary people will continue to decline to even more deplorable levels, as capitalism tries to extract a blood transfusion from the public purse. The magic wizards of the economists club will continue to spout theories for growth and predictions of green shoots, meanwhile you and I go down the tubes, waiting for that pie-in-the-sky. How far we sink will depend not on a wonderful capitalist recovery, but on what action we take to speed the demise of this cruel, unjust, exploitative, insane, greed driven system. Forget the welfare state system administered by the puppets of the corporate world, which will always be at the the mercy of the vagaries and needs and greed of the capitalists that pull the financial strings. We have to create outside the system, along the lines of communities, mutual aid and co-operation. Workers control and self-management is the only road to a society free from exploitation. All the crap about being impoverished, being necessary and for our own benefit, is no more than propaganda to try to keep you quiet and subservient while you are being screwed. The last thing they want is for the people to take matters into their own hands and shape the society in which they want to live. It is a matter of take what you get, or create what you want. Communities, communes, workers control, direct democracy, a world freed from the greed driven madness and the suicide of capitalism.

    The following is an extract from an article in the latest, The Commune:

     With an economics based upon a subjective notion of value – marginal utility – neither the Keynesians, nor the neo-liberal economists could see that value cannot be printed. With the dot.com bubble followed by a property bubble, debt ratios in the West reached record levels. The sub-prime mortgage market in the US kicked off the credit-crunch of 2007 & the outright panic of late 2008 when the collapse of Lehman Brothers threatened the whole financial system. Banks got nationalised. Banks had their bad debts bought by the government. Governments bought back their debt from the banks, long-term as well as short-term debt, & so stopped credit money from collapsing. Taxpayers are now picking up the bill in the form of ‘austerity’: cuts to government spending & a new, more intense phase of ‘rolling back the frontiers of the state’. Because of the crisis of overproduction (too much produced relative to what the market can afford to buy sustainably) capitalism can no longer even pretend to offer humanity improved living standards. Across the globe workers are suffering. Final-pension salaries are no longer ‘affordable’. Graduates are unemployed, saddled with debt & with little prospect of having the same standard of living enjoyed by their parents. Others are ‘written-off’ whilst still at school as ‘no-hopers’ & are expected to become invisible, not to riot as many did in England in the summer of 2011. The politicians’ expenses scandal in Britain has damaged the façade of so-called ‘representative democracy’. They are increasingly hated along with the bankers. The capitalist media has also taken a knock with the phone-hacking scandal & the collusion of senior police officers at London’s Metropolitan police with Rupert Murdoch’s News International has been revealed. There is little trust left.

Read the full article HERE:

ann arky's home.

Direct Action Gets The Goods.

       As it becomes more obvious by the day that we, the ordinary people, are going to have to fight if we want to even hold on to what standard of living we have, let alone try to improve it, the use of solidarity and direct action will be the most potent tool we have. In this we can learn from the past, it has all been done before, we have been in this struggle for centuries. Sometimes it might look like it is a done deal and we have lost, but as this short piece from the recent past shows, we can always win, if the determination, solidarity and the will to take direct action is carried through. We must learn the lessons of the past, this is going to be a long and bitter struggle.

      From Castlemilk, a housing scheme in Glasgow, from the past, a show of determined direct action wins the day, as told by one who was involved:

       I tell it all as if it was a day but it was actually maybe 6 months or a year of struggle.

      Campaign in Castlemilk, A group of tenants had been told that the Council are going to build a car park in their back greens. The back greens being the area in which they hung out their washing and where the kids played in safety. The people in the area were all against it and they had actually got a petition together, taken it up to the Labour club, and handed it into the Labour Club and low and behold the Labour Club lost the petition they said later, or they claimed they lost it. And therefore the peoples’ thing could not be taken any further. So by luck one of the tenants bumped into one of us and he told us about the situation.The work was about to begin in the back greens. They had knocked down a couple of the gable ends to allow bull dozers to get through into the backs. And they were going to start digging up the drying greens and the kids play areas to build this car park.

       And basically the people says to us ‘do you think there’s anything we can do about this. Nobody in the area wants this. Everybody is absolutely against the idea. We have petitioned the Labour Party through the Labour Club – they lost the petition that we handed in – and can it be stopped? ’.

      I gave the answer that I always give people that ask me that question and I answered ‘How determined are you?’ And they said they were absolutely determined about it so I asked them to get a couple of the families together, we went up and saw them, and we talked to them. We being a group of local community activists in Castlemilk, myself and a couple of the others were anarchists, some of the others had no political affiliation, there might have been one or two people in the Labour party, or some kinda left wing groups or whatever but generally I would describe the whole feeling of the thing as kinda anarchistic.

We went up and seen the people. We suggested to them that they get another petition together – no because there any value in getting a petition - but jist to give us an opportunity to go back round everybody again , talk to them on their doorstep, and ask them if they were still prepared to do something about it. We did that the next day , it was only a quad , a really small area, everybody agreed that they were against it. So we went up to the Labour Club, we said that we had another petition, but we weren’t giving it them in or whatever, and we wanted something done about it. We asked to see somebody – they refused to let us see anybody, so we went back down the road and we made our plans for the next day.

       The next day the bulldozers came and we decided just to block the whole entrance to the back greens, refused to allow the bulldozers through. And I went up and I spoke to the guy that was driving the bulldozer and explained the situation to him and as usual when you speak to other working class people they generally see the point, I will have to phone my gaffer, well that’s exactly what we want you to do, and he phoned his gaffer and he phoned his gaffer and he phoned his gaffer and before too long we had all the relevant people down at the site and that ultimately they sent for the council. When the councillors arrived ( I don’t know if it was that day) but some point in the thing, the councillors arrived in a limo, and so it went from a situation where the councillors refused to see the people but because of the direct action that we took they had to eventually come to us to see us in person. And within a very short space of time they saw that we weren’t going to allow them to build a car park in the back green and they had to cancel the whole thing.

So it was an outright victory for the people.

S. R.; and these are publicity photos?

        This is a wee exhibition that the tenants done at the time. After the victory we done these sheets and people put in their comments and pictures, newspaper cuttings, explaining how we halted the car park and we actually used these in other struggles by putting these up and we explained to people that this is how you can take things on and win the situation.

List of the material

Sheets that you can put up on walls hand made posters.

A wee folder of all the newspaper coverage at the time

People writing poems about it

Pictures taken at the time by Charlie Fisher non resident photographer (who helped with the community newspaper Castlemilk Today)

Dept of housing official papers

Minutes of the council meetings

MP letters from Westminster Teddy Taylor

And letters from Glasgow District council

Copy of petition 2 not handed in because previous one lost.

      Initially the people went to the Labour Councillors which is the obvious way to deal with the situation. They went to them, handed in a petition to the Labour Club who basically ignored them and said they lost the petition so the Labour Councillors basically refused to take up their issue for them and they were quite happy to allow it to go ahead. And because they were able to come to us the people that lived there, we advised them on how to deal with the situation and we were there with them and we managed to stop it completely and the backs were all reinstated.

Impact

     Some of the people in the campaign for the most were delighted at the victory, it was something that they thought they could not achieve in view of the fact that they had already started the work so not only did they stop the thing but they actually retrieved the thing from the ashes so to speak. I think a lot of people felt a great sense of empowerment, and certainly some were involved in other campaigns after that.

   The list of materials described above, along with many others, can be found in the John Cooper Collection listed in the Spirit of Revolt site. We hope in the near future, to have them displayed in the collection as images, along with many others.

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