Workers' Liberty

Louise Gold spoke to Graham Thompson from Plane Stupid, whose recent action on the rooftop of the Houses of Parliament was widely reported.

Today's Evening Standard leads on the story of impending strike action by RMT and TSSA. The most interesting thing - other than the 'any publicity is good publicity' angle - is that even a right-wing rag like the Standard can not argue with the justness of the unions' demands. It just thinks that we shouldn't fight for them!

I HAVE been on many picket lines in my time, but until recently they have all taken place in the real world. 27 September saw the first ever strike and picket to take place in virtual reality.

Will Kate McCann become another Lindy Chamberlain? The only reasonable answer is that we have no way of even making an intelligent guess.

What follows is a diary, recorded day by day, of the week in 1997 when Britain seemed to go mad. - Sean Matgamna

A kind friend thought I would appreciate a look at OK! magazine. Not because I’m a celeb obsessive, of course, but because of the eight pages devoted to my erstwhile political sparring partner Derek Draper – the man who once threatened to get his cousins from Chorley to come and sort me out.

By Sacha Ismail

When it’s not busy attacking public sector workers’ miserable pensions as overly generous and telling us how easy life is for asylum-seekers, the favourite pastime of the foul Daily Express is bashing Britain’s Muslim population.

By Sacha Ismail

I'm not, shall we say, an avid reader of the Daily Express, but its frontpage headline today (Saturday 18 November) caught my eye. "Fury over halal Christmas dinner" shout big letters, over an article bizarrely devoted to a "story" about one school in Rotherham deciding to serve its children halal chicken rather than turkey.

Remember that story a few weeks back about how "Muslim louts" had vandalised a house in order to prevent returning squaddies from living there? It was one of a rash of disgracefully bigoted stories pointing an accusing finger at Muslims - and whipping up hatred against immigrants in general.

The Daily Mirror has launched a pathetic witch-hunt against public sector workers and against union reps. And apparently it does not see the irony in lambasting an engineer for being "overpaid" on the same front page that carries pictures of the genuinely and obscenely overpaid celebs who populated the National Television Awards.

By Sofie Buckland

Home Secretary John Reid has wasted no time in capitulating to the pressures of the tabloid press.

Last month News of the World "journalists" (according to their report which read more like fiction than fact) tricked 90 migrant workers into getting on board a bus with the promise of work. Acting like dog impounders, catching a bunch of strays, they drove them to an immigration detention centre, where "35 immigration officers swooped. Where each illegal was searched and placed in detention".

Its nothing to do with politics, but for anyone who's interested this is a link to a short film made by my son. Its not properly finished yet. The sound needs some work, and another one of his friends who has his own band is working on the music score.

BBC4’s “Lefties” series sparked some memories for Janine Booth

Back in the 1980s, I supplemented my student grant by writing for News On Sunday, the “left-wing” tabloid which is now usually referred to as “the ill-fated News On Sunday”.

And ill-fated it was, as documented by the BBC4 programme (shown on 26 February). It was born and died in the same year, 1987.

By Sacha Ismail

On Saturday 11 February I went to the Muslim Council of Britain demonstration in Trafalgar Square to have a look around, and then to the free speech protest organised by groups associated with the Worker-communist Party of Iraq, outside the BBC in White City.

To defend the rights of all individuals to be able to think freely, criticize, be able to use their imaginations, to have the right to freedom of speech, and of expression, join us in our protest in front of BBC TV station in London.

Praised for it (and probably pressurised) by the Blair-Brown government, the British press has unanimously refused to let its readers see the anti-Islamist cartoons in the row which fills its front pages. We do not believe that religious authorities should decide what can or can't be published, and so republish the cartoons.

The Evening Standard has run an extraordinary campaign of persecution against sacked Northern line driver Robert Rankin.

Talk about a rough ride in the press! You’d think we were planning mass murder, not fighting for staff and passenger safety.

The media, both print and screen, gave us a real battering during the station strikes.

Yesterday, I went to the Royal London Hospital in Whitechapel for an appointment with the consultant who is going to re-make my eyeball. He introduced me to another patient of his - a man with a similar eye injury, but who had suffered poor-quality surgery in his native Afghanistan.

By David Broder

The recent media furore over the “revelation” that Kate Moss uses cocaine is a cynical bid to undermine the model’s career and a show of totally feigned “moral outrage” at her behaviour.

Almost every day in Venezuela, Hugo Chavez interrupts programming on the nation’s TV networks to deliver speeches and to propagandise for his government — the stations have no choice but to transmit his broadcasts, which last up to three hours.

Laura Schwartz reviews "Victoria’s Big Fat Documentary", 21 July, BBC 1

New Labour, Heat magazine and Weightwatchers are all united in their enthusiastic support for losing weight. As a result, the quest for thinness has acquired an almost moral quality. Conversely, being over-weight is equated with greed, laziness and stupidity — with being a bad person. Victoria Wood’s Big Fat Documentary showed how this obsession with food, eating and dress-size has permeated our national and individual psyches.

Unions at the BBC — BECTU, NUJ and Amicus — are set to begin a ballot for strike action over massive cuts at the corporation.

At the beginning of March the BBC Director General announced 2,900 job losses. He also wants a 15% cut in departmental budgets. This will lead, say the unions, to thousands more job losses. Many more BBC programmes are to be “outsourced”, made by outside companies, whole sections of the BBC will be sold off.

Dave Morris and Helen Steel, aka the McLibel 2, won another round in their battle against the McDonald’s burger chain at the European Court on Tuesday 15 February.

by John O’Mahony

“The unspeakable in full pursuit of the uneatable” was how Oscar Wilde famously described fox-hunting. The unspeakable in full and ridiculous pursuit of the unteachable, describes the strange spectacle of the racist press and the racist Tory Party howling in pursuit of Mayor Ken Livingstone for comparing Evening Standard reporter Oliver Finegold, who happens to be Jewish, to a Nazi concentration camp guard.

1.7 million people watched the BBC2 screening of the award-winning Jerry Springer, The Opera on Saturday 8 January.

Prior to the broadcast, the BBC received 47,000 complaints from people organised by fundamentalist Christian groups who regard the musical as blasphemous.

George Galloway has won his libel case against the Daily Telegraph. The judge declared:

Robbing the rich? No way!

Conrad Black’s behaviour towards the shareholders of Hollinger International has outraged his capitalist peers.
The man who investigated Black’s looting of the Telegraph owners — to the tune of $400 million — is the former head of the New York Securities and Exchange Commission, Richard Breedon. For Breedon, turning a profit at the expense of the workers was fair enough. But robbing your shareholders to the extent that Black did was mind-boggling and a moral outrage.