simon mann: the toff gets off

Simon Mann - a person who'd fit any decent working definition of 'international terrorist' - has been pardoned and released from jail in Equatorial Guinea, 16 months into a 34 year sentence for his attempted coup in the oil-rich nation.

To recap,

Neo-colonialist mercenary leader Mann was caught with a planeload of weapons and ex-apartheid South African special forces on their way to stage a coup in Equatorial Guinea...

Mann certainly wasn't going there on any humanitarian mission. As with his previous campaigns, it was about clearing out one group so a grateful government - irrespective of its attitude to human rights - would bestow lucrative mineral rights upon him.

For a more detailed account of the activities of Mann and his friends around the world, check out my article Simon Mann: A Very English Killer.

During his trial in Equatorial Guinea, Mann sang like the proverbial canary and implicated 'Sir' Mark Thatcher (who pleaded guilty to involvement in a South African court) and plot-chief Ely Calil.

On his release, Mann said

I am very anxious that Calil, Thatcher and one or two of the others, should face justice.

I'm relishing the thought of it happening - oh please let plot-funder Jeffrey Archer have another spell in jail - but I cannot muster any faith that it'll come to pass. The establishment insulates its members well.

Indeed, this was shown in Mann's favour by Guernsey courts' refusal to allow the Equatorial Guinea government access to Mann's account records and safe deposit boxes, despite strong evidence that these contain hard and damning evidence of the plot.

Meanwhile, a vicious mercenary is now free to enjoy his millionaire's lifestyle and work on his book deal and film options.

sacrilege

The phenomenon of the one-hit wonder is often talked of in terms that imply they had only a single moment of talent, as if commercial success is somehow a measure of creative worth. Sometimes that's true but often it's not.

Poor old Jeff Beck. He spends years being one of the foremost guitarists of his generation, fusing white backbeat pop-rock with real searing blues, yet what's the only track of his that everyone knows? Hi Ho Silver Lining.

Other one-hit wonders leave you amazed that anyone wanted to listen to anything they ever did in the first place. In the 1980s there was a swathe of blokey guys with guitars, the sort of sub-Bryan Adamsers who were clearly surrounded by an entourage of coked-up yesmen telling them they were some kind of Springsteen.

One of these was Rick Springfield. If you're 40ish in the UK, you may vaguely remember his only half-hit here, Jessie's Girl.

For those of you who don't, and indeed those of you who do but could do with a reminder about why you have no clear memory, here's the video. It's a great piece of unintentional comedy, just look at how this negligible tosser takes himself soooo seriously.



And if that was where we could leave him, well, what's the harm? I'll tell you the fucking harm. To explain the damage and my personal grudge, let's go on another one almost-hit wonder detour.

The Church are one of my favourite bands ever. For thirty years they've been making music of great beauty, mystery and intelligence, generating luscious opiate warmth yet with a tremendously potent sense of undefined unease and longing. Rich, soulful, beautiful.

In the late 1980s they had their fifteen minutes with a single called Under The Milky Way. Mercifully for them, their albatross-song isn't a Silver Liningesque anomalous novelty, it's actually pretty representative of their work.

If you're American you probably know it, but in Europe nobody has really heard of it unless they were into what we then called Alternative Music. I get genuinely surprised when I mention The Church to anyone and there's any kind of recognition at all. In the last couple of years there's been some sharper folks that at least know the song thanks to its use in Donnie Darko.

But anyway, Rick fucking Springfield. He just won't let it lie, he still makes albums, and guess what he's applied his one dimensional croak to?



And that's not actually the bad news. The song's had a sort of pincer movement performed on it.

We live in an age where any decent song is rapidly reduced to being just a corporate shill. Advertising, the most evil concept ever, debases anything you love in order to make you buy things you don't need from people you don't like.

The Cure's Pictures of You sells computer printers ('these pictures of you, I almost believe that they're real' - geddit? See what they did there?).

Stuart Maconie said of Frank Wilson's supreme northern soul belter Do I Love You (Indeed I Do)

If you want to know what the magic of Northern Soul is, get yourself a copy... and allow yourself to be swept away by its life-affirming, luminous, lump-in-the-throat beauty and effervescence.

As far as I'm concerned, there is no ailment or depression so profound and weighty that two and a half minutes in the company of this fabulous tune won't lift and banish.

These days it's the soundtrack for fried chicken adverts.

And of course, everything you ever cared about, from The Jam's harsh description of urban deprivation Town Called Malice, to Nick Drake's magical gossamer Pink Moon to Led Zeppelin's frenzied Rock n Roll, sells fucking cars.

Here's the new ad for the Lincoln MKT.



I'm off to put my head in the oven.

anti-coal on a roll

I can’t understand why there aren’t rings of young people blocking bulldozers and preventing them from constructing coal-fired power plants

- Al Gore

Good point, but why wait for the new-build? As Richard Bernard said a week ago outside Ratcliffe on Soar power station as a thousand people attacked the fences

With Kingsnorth now shelved the time is for us to look at existing coal-fired power stations and say that coal has no future, fossil fuels have no future, it's time to close them down.

And as Kingsnorth settles in the sidelines, it's also time for other prospective builders to step into the firing line and see that every attempt to build new stations will come with a bumper pack of activists.

At 4.30am today protesters occupied Npower's flagship coal station in the UK, Didcot in Oxfordshire. Splitting into two groups - one shutting down the coal conveyor belts, another scaling the chimneys and abseiling inside so they can't be used - they say they have supplies to last them 'weeks, not days'.

One of them explained

N-Power, the company that runs this power station, is now the foremost advocate for new coal in the country. They want to build 30 new coal power stations in Britain and Europe. They expect to get planning permission for Hunterston in the next few weeks. We’re saying to them that we won’t leave until they cancel all their plans for new coal.

Hunterston - like Kingsnorth, at a site where an old station's being decommissioned - lost its major investor only a week after Eon announced the Kingsnorth climbdown. The owners, the Peel Group, say they'll press ahead anyway, possibly with money from Royal Bank of Scotland.

Meanwhile, the fact that RBS is now in public ownership means that, as Mark Thomas pointed out, they should be compliant with the government's stated carbon objectives, and ditch their £16bn of carbon-extractive investments. Indeed, a bunch of NGOs are in the High Court right now trying to force that to happen.

But today's action isn't just at Didcot. It's been a very active day for the coal-focused domestic extremists elsewhere too.

As Npower's station forcibly powered down this morning, up at Shipley in Derbyshire protesters occupied an opencast coal mine producing coal for - it's them again - Ratcliffe on Soar power station.

Meanwhile at Mainshill in Scotland, where there's an ongoing protest camp defending woodland under threat from a proposed opencast coal mine, access roads were barricaded and people locked on, ensuring no logging work can be done.

The changes we need are only going to happen if we force them to. The burgeoning climate justice movement glows with bright potential, but time is short. Those activists Npower are going to get sick of? That's you, that is.

And this coming weekend there's a weekend of info, action and whatnot at Mainshill.

everyone move to leeds

David Cameron may bang on about Broken Britain, but there's clearly an oasis of Dock Greenesque peace and social harmony in West Yorkshire.

There is a complete absence of domestic violence, street robbery, rape, large scale tax evasion and drunk driving in Leeds. There is scarcely a dropped fag butt and no standing around looking shifty or visible flouting of building regulations. We can be certain of this.

Why else would their local CID take the time to call at houses this afternoon just to let the residents know that the police think some people at the address were planning on going on the Great Climate Swoop protest tomorrow?

When detectives are telling you that some of your friends might be going to go somewhere in another constabulary where some people might be engaging in peaceful direct action, surely they've already solved all the reported crime, polished all the Chief Constable's silver buttons, sharpened all the pencils, done the lotto syndicate and all that day's crosswords and are now just gormlessly drumming their fingers on their impeccably tidy desks dreaming up stuff up to do.

kingsnorth is cancelled

Despite the government's enthusiasm for a third runway at Heathrow, it's reported that Heathrow's owners have decided not to build it.

When the government said it would give the go ahead to the runway, I thought it might make it harder for them to say yes to the new coal power station at Kingsnorth. It didn't occur to me that, like BAA with Heathrow, E.On might lead the way themselves.

Tonight, Kingsnorth was effectively cancelled by E.On.

The decision by E.ON marks an end to one of the most bitterly fought environmental campaigns in British history. The admission, which emerged after an unplanned and off-the-cuff remark from one of the company’s German officials, will be greeted with delight by environmentalists

Too right it will.

"This development is extremely good news for the climate and in a stroke significantly reduces the chances of an unabated Kingsnorth plant ever being built," said Greenpeace executive director John Sauven.

"The case for new coal is crumbling, with even E.ON now accepting it's not currently economic to build new plants. The huge diverse coalition of people who have campaigned against Kingsnorth because of the threat it posed to the climate should take heart that emissions from new coal are now even less likely in Britain."

He added: "Ed Miliband [the environment secretary] now has a golden opportunity to rule out all emissions from new coal as a sign of Britain's leadership before the key Copenhagen climate meeting. With E.ON's announcement he's now got an open goal."

storks on a lamp post

george orwell titled

Not, of course that Orwell was titled in the ennobled sense of the word. He made clear that he had no time for that sort of thing, and as the establishment of the day was decades away from trying to garner any Cool Britannia relevance by giving honours to edgy people, they were unlikely to have offered him it in any case. Governments of the 1930s didn't suffer anything like the Benjamin Zephaniah OBE debacle.

I have a deep love of George Orwell's writing. His shining clarity of mind, his articulate bluntness, his fearless radical perspective, the way that most sentences of his journalism seem like they start with a silent, 'oh for fuck's sake, any idiot can see that...'.

The early novels are interesting, and there is much of his social analysis and commentary in ones like Coming Up for Air and Keep The Aspidistra Flying, but it's his non-fiction that really dings my bell, especially the essays and journalism.

It wasn't written for posterity but to make a clear topical point and it's that freshness and fire - so familiar to us in an age of broadcast media and blogging - that makes it really shine.

Additionally, he was a highly educated person who turned his attention not only to the highbrow topics but also to then-ignored areas, pioneering what we'd now call cultural criticism. His essays on boys comics and The Art of Donald McGill (about the norms and implications of scenes depicted in saucy seaside postcards) get the same incisive thought and illuminating opinion as his writing on Gissing.

So on the occasions when I've been asked where someone should start with Orwell, I recommend an anthology of his essays. But it recently occurred to me that there is a side of his writing that's pretty rubbish. His titles.

Early books have, at best, drab and uninspiring ones like A Clergyman's Daughter, Down and Out In Paris and London or Burmese Days. The title of his reportage of the Spanish Civil War, Homage to Catalonia, is pretty odd when you think about it. Indeed, there's a letter from Orwell to his publishers conceding that he couldn't think of a title and at least that choice lets them put something on the cover.

The only ones that seem smart, intriguing and clever are Keep The Aspidistra Flying and The Road to Wigan Pier.

Even late on, Animal Farm is another dull and functional one, whilst 1984 is such a potent book that any number of evocative superior titles readily suggest themselves in place of the peculiarly vague one he actually chose.

At least he did better picking a name for himself. He was born Eric Arthur Blair, and seemingly chose a pseudonym so he wouldn't be too closely associated with what he felt was his awful first book, the superb Down and Out In Paris and London. (I know someone who worked in a bookshop who was once asked for George Orwell's 'Dining Out in Paris and London', a very different image).

After rejecting publishing it under the name X, he had a shortlist of H. Lewis Allways (surely ludicrously stuffy even in the early 1930s), Kenneth Miles, PS Burton and George Orwell. Imagine if we were having to refer to Allwaysian ideas.

Worse still, imagine if he'd been proud of Down and Out in Paris and London and kept his legal name.

Britain has a quarter of the world's CCTV cameras. We have a government trying to get us used to ID culture by encouraging the absurd Challenge 25 policy for buying alcohol. It amounts to us blithely sleepwalking into, er, a Blairite nightmare.

god hates amputees

For Christians, prayer is an important part of communicating with God and asking for help. Some of them are quite happy to have Pray At The Pump meetings in American filling stations, and they take credit for the lowering of gasoline prices.

Lots of Christian churches, not just the far-out ones, have healing services. Even more commonly, Christians pray to God to heal sicknesses in people they care about.

Leaving aside the arrogance of presuming that God doesn't know what he's doing and shouldn't have let anyone be ill, I'm more interested in another issue it raises.

Many Christians really believe in God's power to heal the sick, and a sizeable proportion of them believe they've seen it work. So why doesn't he ever heal any amputees? I've been searching the interweb for answers.

amputees don't need to be healed. removing the limb is often what saves a persons life. People are born missing limbs and live content successful lives. Why should we be " healed" when prosthetics and other devices allow us to live successfully.

I know a lot of amputees and none of them have prayed for their limbs to grow back. If anything when I lost my leg my family prayed that it would come off taking the cancer with it.

Yes, amputation can save their life, as it did with the cancer sufferer who wrote that reply. Which brings us not only on to why God would let them get cancer, but why he can't get the cancer cured without the need for amputation.

Yep, we now have prosthetics. But that only applies to a minority of amputees even today. What about the ones not rich enough to buy those, or all those who lived before the advent of prosthetic limbs, why didn't God help them a bit more?

Even if there were universal access to prosthetics, it's rather like the Alf Garnett line about God being benevolent by blessing the poor-sighted with two ears and a nose so they could wear glasses.

The idea that all amputees are having lives just as good as if they had all their limbs - well, excuse me while I rush off to get my legs taken off then. Praise the lord and pass the landmines.

There's a Christian who guesses

perhaps God doesn’t restore lost limbs (or other body parts) for the very reason He doesn’t raise people from the dead – it’s not time (yet)... The raising of the dead and the restoring of limbs (whether for those who lost them due to injury or birth defect) is for the resurrection.

I don't think we're looking for the exact same leg to be stuck back on, surely growing a new one would do. Certainly the resurrection of the long-dead is a hell of a thing to achieve, but as living people can readily and automatically regenerate blood, skin, hair, fingernails, bone and many other bodily tissues, there's no reason why it couldn't come from the living body of an amputee.

Another Christian suggests

Perhaps God chooses not to convince the world of his existence through acts of power

Not only does God bang on in both testaments with exhortations to prayer and his power to answer them, but, for fucks sake; sending the messiah! Having that messiah go round publicly healing the sick, then raising that messiah from the dead! If that's not a show of power - and specifically medical miracles - what is?

Our man also suggests that perhaps

he reveals miracles to those who already believe, and to those who disbelieve he never reveals more than they are able to explain away

Are we saying no true believer amputee has asked for a limb back? Or are we saying that it's happened but they've kept quiet about it?

In which case, why have so many other miraculously cured people been very vocal about their good fortune and used it as leverage to try to make suffering humans turn to the lord? He only ever cures blabbermouthed blind people and secretive amputees?

Then I found whydoesgodhateamputees.com. As well as having a page patiently, clearly and convincingly covering all the arguments about amputees and why it leads us to the conclusion that god is imaginary, it's part of godisimaginary.com, perhaps the best anti-monotheistic place I've ever come across. It doesn't just lob bricks from outside, it takes the stated beliefs, the bits of bible we get quoted, and then walks us through all the reasons why they don't make any sense at all.

There's something wonderful about setting out to uncover an idea only to find that somebody's done it with greater clarity than you could ever have managed.

climate camp vs newbury

I'm sat here on Blackheath, site of Wat Tyler's rabble-rousing for the Peasants Revolt, among the roused rabble of the Camp For Climate Action, ready for the pedants revolt.

This afternoon I bumped into an old comrade from the Newbury Bypass and we inevitably compared the two events.

The Climate Camp, like Newbury, is composed of a disproportionate number of young adults, especially students. Indeed, yesterday I had a journalist trying to get the old gimmers like me to grumble about it.

Personally, I've no prejudice against being educated, and given the fact that students are the most likely to have the summer free and least likely to be shackled by mortgage and family commitments, it's not surprising they are here in force. The protests against the Vietnam War and in Tianenmen Square were led by students. I don't think that invalidated them in the least.

But anyway, this young demographic have no memory of the older struggles, and many talk of Newbury in the way we old 'uns speak of Paris 68. It's easy to get all rose tinted along with them, but me and Tot Hill veteran Martin just thought about it properly. There is nothing we can remember about Newbury that Climate Camp doesn't blow out of the frigging water.

There are complaints that Climate Camp's politics are diluted, that it's become a liberal lobbying group awash in NGOs and reformist ideas. Yet Newbury was actively supplied by Greenpeace, supported by many Friends of The Earth groups, and both NGOs often felt like they were entitled to speak on behalf of the campaign. There were nimbyists, conservative conservationists, those who just talked of other ways to move the absurd quantity of traffic instead of having any thought-through systemic critique. Climate Camp draws the demarcation much more clearly and speaks for itself a lot louder.

All radical movements we venerate had their woolly end. This doesn't mean we should ignore it, but it does mean that their presence isn't indicative of an all-encompassing woolliness. Check your suffragette, civil rights or anti-nuclear history, they all had it. The Climate Camp remains overtly radical. The first thing you see coming up the hill or going past on the 380 bus is the entrance banner saying Capitalism IS Crisis.



The programme of workshops and discussions shows the position as against the growth economy. The influx of newbies - half the people at the opening plenary hadn't been to a previous Climate Camp - means many have to be walked through the ideas to join it up, but the enthusiasm for that perspective is startling.

Last night I was in a mass meeting of over 500 people talking about economics beyond capitalism, who understand that not only is there no way the climate crisis can be tackled while capitalism is intact but that as well as immediate action we need to be thinking about the broader abstract cultural issues. And not in a stuffy drywank way that thinks economics is something for economists any more than we believe politics is just for politicians.

The Camp has involved itself with those irritant backbench Labour rebel MPs and the LibDems keen on civil rights, but that hasn't necessitated any move to their parliamentary freemarket politics. At Newbury we fought alongside titled tories, fox hunters, all manner of fuckheads who we'd give stick to on any other day of the week.

At Newbury the police totally decided their own agenda. Here, we have them on the back foot, kept off site despite their threats and desires. Newbury had a huge contingent of those who felt that if we only talked to the police as human beings they'd somehow not defend the forces of destruction. Those at Climate Camp who haven't had experience of the police often feel that way too, but it's easy to disabuse them of the notion and, as a site and group, there is no way the Climate Camp would behave like that.

Climate Camp out-media the police, indeed they are as savvy as people can be with the mainstream media, way more sussed and successful than Newbury, normalising radical perspectives in a far more effective way.

There is a total absence of the dippy new-age bullshit that saturated Newbury. People chanting at trees to ensure they couldn't be cut down and that sort of gubbins. Climate Camp may be idealists, but they're realistic and practical ones. My favourite kind.

And they're not just practical in the application of ideology but in the most obvious sense. The ability to equip everyone with the kit needed to allow the real work of talking, thinking, networking and planning to happen is amazing. They tipped a fully working eco-village illegally and secretly into a field in a few hours.

At Newbury we tolerated all manner of brew-crew lairy fuckers. We had no idea how to include them and get them to be a co-operative element of the campaign, nor any idea how to exclude the tiny number of irredeemably disruptive people. Climate Camp stops most of that bother before it even starts, and the Tranquility team sort out much of what does happen, and even then the process is so collectively and democratically understood that often people don't call in the experts but sort it out themselves.

And part of the reason we put up with those munters was the fact that they would dependably be there, and we needed the numbers. The idea of thousands of people coming together, of a movement pulling in hundreds of new people every time a big event happens, was simply unthinkable.

To put them in the middle of the Met's home turf, retain control and get on with the real business of educating, agitating and motivating one another for action - not as a single focus but an ongoing culture of action - would have been an insane joke. The sheer weight of numbers is gobsmacking.

It's never in the bag, all movements make mistakes and all movements need continual vigilance and tweaking if they're not to be co-opted or diluted or burned out. But on those fronts and all the others listed above, Climate Camp is the real deal.

It's not that they're some sort of great guru overachievers pulling it out of a hat. It's the culmination of a lot of lessons learned from sites and campaigns over the last 20 years, and indeed Newbury was part of that experimentation and refinement process. It is clearly on the current front end of all that and its awareness and creativity are immense. It has, as Newbury did, that feeling that this isn't something these people are doing but something they are, that this is a rolling network rather than an event.

Newbury was an amazing campaign, an inspiration to others around the world and a radicalising force for a huge number of people. At the time it felt fractious but righteous, chaotic and dicey but cool as fuck to be in the middle of. Climate Camp is all that and more.

climate camp's cross-dressing cops

The police are very much on the backfoot now they're widely believed to be over-reactive, intimidating and violent.

Half of UK adults think that policing of environmental protests is too heavy handed or involves too many officers, according to a YouGov poll of over 2,000 people conducted on behalf of Christian Aid.

Of those surveyed, 18% said they were put off joining protests in future because of their fears about how demonstrations are handled and 33% said that filming protesters is an invasion of privacy.

In response, the police are engaging in - to use a Mandelsonism - an attempt at political cross-dressing. Police say they'll be using 'community style' policing at this week's Climate Camp in London.

Chris Allinson, head of central operations at the Metropolitan Police, said around 500 officers will be needed everyday to police the camp.

Which community gets one officer for every two or three civilians? The only one I can think of is prison.

“Every cop on an event is a cop who is not one the streets policing London,” he added.

Couldn't have put it better myself. Aren't there any incidences of mugging, domestic violence or child abuse in London that might be worthy of their attention?

And even as he talks his cuddly community policing guff, Assistant Commissioner Allison refuses to rule out kettling.

All this comes as the Climate Camp activists suing the police for the G20 reveal that police notebooks admit punching protesters in the face and smacking them with the edges of shields, and in the week where the Home Office said the police could be issued with a new higher-powered taser, the weapon used to threaten sleeping climate camp protesters in April. They're going to have to work harder if they be convincing in their new teddy bear persona.

Why are the Camp having to sue? When there is such clear evidence of assault why are the officers who beat people not disciplined, sacked and publicly prosecuted? Why is the officer who planned and ordered the attacks at the G20 not named and imprisoned?

This closing of ranks is proof that the new touchy-feely stuff is just crass window dressing. If they turn on the charm to the media then people will think it's all OK now, and they can avoid any real reform and get back to intimidation and breaking heads.

So, unconvinced that the police's Twitter account marks any change in principles, Climate Camp responded with an open letter to the police, and for good measure made it into a wry pisstakey infomercial.