Things to make and do

Here comes a link-post of interesting and worthwhile things, cross-posted from my personal blog. (As such, a couple of points are only locally relevant; sorry about that.)

• Project V (#ProjV on Twitter) is a campaign to get people to realise the impact that denying Disability Living Allowance (DLA) to those who need it would have, organised by The Broken of Britain. It was designed to coincide with the end of the consultation on reform of DLA, on the 14th February, but the consultation has now been extended until the 18th. You can read contributors' tweet-length stories here. What you can do to help (from here):

Whatever the reason, we now have 4 more days of the DLA Reform consultation so let us use it well. Write, e,mail, and send a Valentine to your MPs, MSPs and AMs, asking them to oppose DLA reform, tweet your story at #ProjV, and use the extra time well!

• Meanwhile in Cambridge, the city council are planning to close the ground-floor, accessible public toilets in Lion Yard shopping centre on very shaky grounds, moving them to smaller and less accessible quarters on the first floor. Apparently they will be debating the subject on Thursday (tomorrow), thanks to the Cambridge Forum for Disabled People's work to raise the profile of the issue. If you're in Cambridge, please do read the text of their leaflet send off a quick email to the council asking them to reconsider (directions at link)!
• More Cambridge-based stuff: the launch event for the brilliant Think Outside The Box campaign is happening on the 24th February. Details:

  Think Outside The Box Launch, Thursday 24th February, 7:30pm, Cavonius Centre, in the Stephen Hawking Building, Caius' Harvey Court site off West Road.

  The Think Outside The Box Campaign has been launched! It started with the simple idea of not forcing people into the boxes of 'male' and 'female' and now has a range of recommendations which challenge many day-to-day ways in which society tries to force us all into the gender binary. The Campaign focuses on access for and awareness of non-binary-gendered people (including gender queer, polygendered, bigendered, agendered, androgynous people) but the benefits are far wider for anyone who doesn't want to have to constantly declare a binary gender. To find out more see the website at www.lgbt.cusu.cam.ac.uk/think.

  We're having a launch meeting, come along to find out about the campaign, ask questions about the reasons behind the campaign or discuss plans for the future, both local and national. There'll be an introduction for people new to the issues and then a discussion so bring your questions, your ideas, your concerns and your enthusiasm and help us get this campaign going both in Cambridge and outside.

• Via Saranga (see her post for more information), please support the Norwich Eating Disorders Association and the Abortion Support Network, both of which do vital work but are being threatened by lack of funds.
• Moving to the international, The Godmothers is a way to get involved with helping the UN's new women's agency. I've seen links to it in a few places but The F-Word blog (naturally -- how I love it) has a good write-up here. From the front page of The Godmothers' website:

Worldwide more than 60 million girls have been forced into early marriage. Of the 780 million people who can't read, 510 million are female. Women work two thirds of the world's working hours but earn just 10% of the income.

The new UN women's agency could put a stop to all this. But to fulfil its promise it needs your help.

They are currently inviting people to take part in their first action, calling on parliamentarians to sign an Early Day Motion calling for proper funding for UN Women.

• I haven't actually read this article yet (ho ho, I thought posting some links would be quick and it's taken most of the evening), but here is one of my favourite bloggers, Merrick Godhaven, debating Philippe Duhamel on the question: Is property damage in protest justified?
• If anyone has read through this whole list -- and maybe sent a few emails -- you deserve a reward. Here's some really beautiful art: a billboard replaced by a swingset for two.

Quick Link: How to Organise a Demonstration

I thought readers here might be interested in Carrie Supple's article for The F-Word: How to organise a demonstration:

In this case study, Carrie Supple explains how she and Louise Morris organised a protest to support Sudanese journalist Lubna Hussein - and how you can use the same techniques to organise a demo for your campaign too.

Guerrilla Gardening

Life in modern Britain is often described as a series of dissociations. People have become estranged from public spaces, which have become the preserve of private business, of crime or of state surveillance supposedly in response to that crime. They have lost connection with their communities and with the origins of their food.

I can't offer a panacea that will fix all of these problems, but I have found a way to work against them: guerrilla gardening.

Guerrilla gardening takes place all over the world, and gardeners see their work in many lights: purely as art, or to press for reconsideration of land rights; to build communities and reclaim public space for the public; for the effect of beauty, humour or surprise; to provide fresh food for local people or even work towards self-sufficiency; or sometimes as part of a larger protest. At the London May Day protests in 2000, for example, Reclaim the Streets "repurposed [Parliament Square] as a gardening area, with rockeries, a village pond and tress and plants."

This afternoon, I met up with the Cambridge Guerrilla Gardeners group, who state on their Facebook group:

We want to make Cambridge beautiful (and maybe even vegetable producing). We're always looking for new people to help out and new places to plant things - join up or get in touch : )

A small corner of land by a busy intersection of roads, otherwise neglected and ignored, is now a beautifully haphazard collection of foxgloves, roses, onions, cabbages, swedes and poppies: it's a certain improvement.

For information and inspiration on guerrilla gardening, Guerilla Gardening.org is essential. Local groups abound and can be found by a quick web search. All you really need to get started with this grubby, hopeful movement, though, is a few seeds and a forgotten patch of dirt somewhere in your local area.

Police Violence and Protesting

By this point, two weeks after Ian Tomlinson's death at the G20 protests in London, on the 1st of April, most people in the country have probably already seen the video above. In it, Tomlinson is hit on the leg with a baton by a policeman, whose face is covered. He is then shoved to the floor and lands heavily. The video only came to light because Ian Tomlinson died of a heart attack shortly after it was taken. According to other witnesses, he had already been assaulted by police as he tried to get home.

Since Tomlinson's death, many other photographs, videos and stories of police violence have come out. The Guardian has been especially active in chronicling these - see here for a list of protesters' experiences. See here for a catalogue of videos of police charging photographers, batons raised; allowing a dog to bite a protester; hitting a protester across the face and in the leg; and more. The video I found the most frightening was this one (unfortunately it can't be embedded). A front of yellow-jacketed riot police, three or four deep, push into a crowd of Climate Camp protesters in Bishopsgate, hitting out with shields and batons. The people hold their hands in the air, but they can't retreat - there's nowhere to go. "This is not a riot," they chant. This was a peaceful action but they are being treated like an advancing army.

The G20 protests were a huge event, with 20,000 people from many disparate groups turning out for the more family-friendly march on Saturday the 28th March. On the 1st of April, four separate protests had been planned, including a Stop the War Coalition march and the Climate Camp.

The police and media had been warning for weeks beforehand that the protests would be violent, which had probably scared off a lot of potential demonstrators. On the day itself, there was barely any of the expected wanton destruction. At the empty branch of RBS where some attendees smashed windows, they were outnumbered by photographers. Nonetheless, the riot officers used to police the event, and the treatment protestors received from them, was proportionate to the threat the police had claimed to expect.

In Britain, the public has a right to take part in protests and demonstrations, and part of the police's role in such events is to safeguard that. The police are also allowed to use violence in their duties only if it is necessary and proportionate. The growing mass of documentary evidence of the G20 protests shows many incidents where both of these principles were let go into the wind. Police treated protesters as unqualified enemies.

The Independent Police Complaints Commission is conducting investigations into the Ian Tomlinson case, as well as the case of the female protestor who was filmed being hit in the face and leg, but there have already been doubts about the way they are handling it. When relatives of the victims of the Hillsborough disaster are still fighting for justice twenty years later, it might be justified to wonder how long it will take for the truth about these protests to shake out.

All this will serve to further discourage moderate citizens who are concerned about the issues of the day (climate change, capitalism, social justice or anything else) from joining demonstrations about them. This means me and probably you, as a reader of this blog. Violence will happen at the demonstrations anyway - either from the people who go to them determined to start some, or in response to police techniques like kettling - and the media will seize upon it as newsworthy. In the end, we are done out of our right to make a loud and public statement against injustice.

This blog is called Not Powerless, so I want to finish up by offering some ideas for what to do.

• I think we should refuse to be frightened away from the right to protest. Do go!
• If you do go to demonstrations, though, stay away from frontlines if you can, bring water and maybe a bottle to pee in in case you get kettled for hours on end (it's better than going up against a wall) - and a camera.
• Write to your MP: about Ian Tomlinson, about the police behaviour at G20, about climate change and the issues that matter to you. Using WriteToThem it is quick and easy.

Merrick at bristling badger has written a lot about this, including this article at Head Heritage, Police Kettling: the Shadow of Death.