Andy Roberts

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  Cut red meat intake and don’t eat ham, say cancer researchers

  http://distributedresearch.net/blog/2011/05/23/cut-red-meat-intake-and-dont-eat-ham-say-cancer-researchers

  World Cancer Research Fund advises people to limit consumption of beef, pork and lamb and avoid processed meatThis article titled “Cut red meat intake and don’t eat ham, say cancer researchers” was written by Denis Campbell, health correspondent, for The Guardian on Sunday 22nd May 2011 23.06 UTCCancer experts have issued a fresh warning about eating red and processed meat after “the most authoritative report” on the subject blamed them for causing the disease.The World Cancer Research Fund (WCRF) is advising people to limit their intake of red meats such as beef, pork and lamb, and to avoid processed meat such as ham and salami altogether. “Convincing evidence” that both types of meat increase the risk of bowel cancer means people should think seriously about reducing how much they eat, it recommends.The charity kickstarted a global debate in 2007 when it published a study which identified meat as a risk factor for a number of different forms of cancer.WCRF-funded scientists at Imperial College London led by Dr Teresa Norat studied 263 research papers that have come out since then looking at the role of diet, weight and physical activity in bowel cancer. An independent panel of leading cancer experts then reviewed their conclusions. “For red and processed meat, findings of 10 new studies were added to the 14 analysed as part of the 2007 report. The panel confirmed that there is convincing evidence that both red and processed meat increase bowel cancer risk,” said the report .“WCRF recommends that people limit consumption to 500g (cooked weight) of red meat a week – roughly the equivalent of five or six medium portions of roast beef, lamb or pork – and avoid processed meat,” it added. About 36,000 Britons a develop bowel cancer every year, and some 16,500 die from it. It is the UK’s second biggest cancer killer after lung cancer.About 17,000 cases a year (43%) could be prevented if people ate less meat and more fibre, drank less, maintained a healthy weight and kept active, the WCRF says.Its 850-page report, releasedon Monday, is “the most authoritative ever report of bowel cancer risk”, cancer prevention experts claim.Professor Alan Jackson of Southampton University, the chair of the WCRF’s continuous update project expert panel, said: “On meat, the clear message that comes out of our report is that red and processed meat increase risk of bowel cancer and that people who want to reduce their risk should consider cutting down the amount they eat.”Growing concern about red and processed meat prompted the government in February to advise consumers for the first time to consider cutting down. That came after the Scientific Advisory Committee on Nutrition (SACN), experts who advise the government, examined the evidence on the subject. It decided that those meats probably increase the risk of bowel cancer.People who eat 90g or more a day should cut down to the UK average of 70g, SACN recommended. It advised having smaller portions or eating those meats less often. A 70g serving could be three slices of ham, a lamb chop or two standard beef burgers.WCRF’s review has also firmed up from “probable” to “convincing” its view of the protection against bowel cancer afforded by eating foods containing fibre, such as wholegrains, pulses, fruit and vegetables.Milk, garlic and dietary supplements containing calcium also “probably” reduce the risk, the expert panel concluded.But farmers’ leaders denounced the WCRF’s new report and accused it of deliberately choosing the first day of National Vegetarian Week to publish it in order to maximise publicity for conclusions which the charity first reached years ago.Chris Lamb, a spokesman for BPEX and EBLEX, which represents England’s pig, beef and lamb farmers, said: “Average consumption has been in or around 500g a week for a few years. The vast majority of consumers aren’t exceeding this and don’t have to worry about [this]“, he said.The risks identified by the WCRF were unchanged, he stressed.Lamb argued it was unfair for the WCRF to highlight meat as a contributory cause of bowel cancer when the main risk was to people who are generally unhealthy, for example by consuming too much food, alcohol or fizzy drink.“They aren’t assisting consumers. Consumers eat and enjoy meat as part of a balanced diet, and meat plays a valuable part in that balanced diet”, said Lamb. “If you eat or drink anything in excess it’s a danger. Therefore, if you can pick on meat in order to get headlines, then you aren’t actually helping consumers.”Professor Dame Sally Davies, the chief medical officer for England, said red meat can form part of a healthy, balanced diet. “It is a good source of protein and vitamins and minerals, such as iron, selenium, zinc and B vitamins,” she said, “but people who eat a lot of red and processed meat should consider cutting down. The occasional steak or extra few slices of lamb is fine but regularly eating a lot could increase your risk of bowel cancer.”Bowel Cancer UK chief executive Deborah Alsina said: “The report significantly adds to the available evidence into the increased risk of bowel cancer from eating too much red and processed meat; and strengthens the evidence of how eating food with fibre in it protects people against the disease.Hazel Nunn, a senior health information officer at Cancer Research UK, said: “With barbeque season just round the corner, this is a timely reminder that how much alcohol you drink, how active you are, your weight, and how much red and processed meat and fibre you eat can all have a bearing on your risk of bowel cancer.”• Growing numbers of lung cancer patients are having life-saving operations thanks to advances in surgical techniques. The proportion of patients with the disease who undergo surgery has risen from one in 11 in 2005 to one in seven last year, according to a study by the NHS Information Centre. Lung cancer kills more people than any other form of cancer. guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010Published via the Guardian News Feed plugin for WordPress.Thanks for subscribing to Andy Roberts blogCut red meat intake and don’t eat ham, say cancer researchersRelated posts:Alcohol to blame for 13,000 cancer cases a year in UKTurkey Ham?World Development Report: Why no mention of Paris?

  

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  May 23 2011, 4:36am | Comments »

• I posted to distributedresearch.net

  Is the Olympics skills legacy on track?

  http://distributedresearch.net/blog/2011/05/05/is-the-olympics-skills-legacy-on-track

  Voluntary sector organisations in the capital have expressed concerns about local peoples’ ability to secure jobs during and after the London 2012 Olympic Games

  This article titled “Is the Olympics skills legacy on track?” was written by Dave Hill, for guardian.co.uk on Thursday 5th May 2011 15.59 UTC I’ve been doing a bit of homework for a forthcoming Guardian podcast and found two things I’d like to share. First, the fun thing. That was from last September. The Games Makers programme is now at the selection phase, with successful applicants being measured up for different roles. But what will it contribute to the long term regeneration of East London which is, of course, the ultimate objective of the great Olympics adventure? How about the complementary London Ambassadors scheme and the Personal Best initiative, which was designed to prepare the long-term unemployed for securing some of the Games’s 70,000 volunteer roles and beyond that “encourage 20,000 people into work”? What about local peoples’ hopes of securing the new jobs in the pipeline at Stratford City? This brings me to the second thing. It’s less fun than Eddie Izzard but still deserves your attention. In February, the London Assembly’s economic development committee heard from guests who are closely involved with ensuring that East Londoners are equipped not only to take advantage of the employment and skills opportunities that the Games will provide, but also to use them to secure jobs and careers in the regeneration years to come. I’ve picked out a few quotes from the transcript of the meeting. First, a word of warning from Jonny Boux, the head of employment and training at the East London charity Community Links: [This] is a once in a lifetime opportunity for people in East London and I think there is a real danger that the focus, in terms of sustainability and longer term opportunity is lost…our experience tends to be, we are hearing a lot around the wonderful short-term opportunities…and the fact that people may find work for a month, but there are no guarantees beyond that.

  Next up, Kerry Tweed, Director of Greater London Volunteering on the Personal Best scheme: The problem is that Personal Best is effectively finished now in London. I have not heard about any evaluation or any further work that might be possible to do with the around 4,000 people who have been through the programme to work with the training that they have been provided with to work with employers to see how that is transferable for them, to offer further support and training to move the participants closer towards work. The last stats that I had from Personal Best was that actually the biggest outcome for␣most people was they went on to further volunteering. Clearly, they need a bit more time to develop their skills, their confidence and their employability.

  Committee chair Len Duvall asked about “barriers that may prevent long-term unemployed Londoners taking advantage of the Games Time opportunity.” Jonny Boux answered first: One of the main barriers is a lack of skills, particularly around some things you need for particular jobs, and also life skills is an important factor. One of the things that, particularly, our long-term unemployed people face is often a difficulty around reliability and low confidence. There is often a lack of motivation as well; it is what we call, broadly, life skills. Then, I guess, multiple barriers which can be anything from major housing issues to difficult family circumstances and financial pressures. Many people we support are heavily in debt.

  Then, Lindsey Donoghue the Employment Manager of the Bromley-by-Bow Centre said: I would echo everything that Jonny said. Obviously some of the roles are quite short-term and that is an issue for some people in terms of them having been on benefits for quite a long time and feeling comfortable on those or perhaps feeling that coming off them might be a risk and feeling unwilling to do so for a short period of time. Also, doing roles like that they would need to arrange things like childcare; a lot of the people that we work with are parents. So, again, a short time role is difficult for them because they need to arrange childcare for that. Something that we have seen in our community is␣a␣sense of, “Well, it’s␣not really for me”. We have perhaps seen a limited number of people go into roles in the Olympics so far and because of that people sort of feel, “Well, maybe it is happening separately to me or it is not something that is necessarily part of our community”.

  And here’s quite a striking speech by Roger Taylor, Director of the Olympic Host Boroughs Unit. If you asked anybody in the host boroughs what they felt about legacy, they would say that there is an ever-present danger that legacy becomes conflated exclusively with what happens during the Games and what happens on the comparatively limited, although very important, opportunities that will follow on on the Olympic Park. We feel it is terribly important to constantly remind somebody of what the bid promise was: the most enduring legacy of the Olympics will be the regeneration of an entire community for the direct benefit of everyone who lives there, and also to link that with the sheer scale of the opportunity that inner East London has within its grasp over the next 20 years. We are not just talking about the Olympic Park, we are not just talking about Westfield and Stratford City, although we think that is actually a pretty successful model largely down to people like Newham and Westfield themselves. We are also talking about the already-given planning approval effectively to double the size of Canary Wharf, and the very, very significant developments that we still expect to take place in the Royal docks and on the Woolwich and Greenwich waterfronts. Essentially, if anything I think the Mayor’s promise about 70,000 jobs is an understatement of what over the next 20 years is likely to be an opportunity in East London. The question then is whether or not we have got a sufficiently strong and clear vision to be able to ensure how that opportunity relates to the people in the communities in East London. I think that is where the really challenging questions lie.

  On this evidence, I’d say that there’s plenty of work still to be done if a really impressive skills and employment legacy is to be delivered for East London in particular. Something for the Mayor to get a good, firm grip on.

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  Related posts:Iran claims London 2012 Olympics logo spells ‘Zion’ London’s 2012 Olympics must be a ‘regeneration games’ London 2012 Olympics countdown clock stops

  

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  May 5 2011, 12:56pm | Comments »

• I posted to distributedresearch.net

  Health agency issues Olympics emergency warning

  http://distributedresearch.net/blog/2011/05/05/health-agency-issues-olympics-emergency-warning

  Health Protection Agency says upheaval caused by its abolition could pose ‘extreme risks’ during the London 2012 Olympic Games

  This article titled “Health agency issues Olympics emergency warning” was written by James Meikle and Owen Gibson, for The Guardian on Thursday 5th May 2011 16.30 UTC The NHS’s main public health body says its planned abolition weeks before the 2012 Olympics could compromise emergency responses if there are serious incidents at the games. The Health Protection Agency (HPA) warns the upheaval generated by huge organisational changes across the health service could pose extreme risks when Britain hosts the world’s biggest sporting event next summer. There is “high potential” for funds aimed at protecting the public at the event to be cut, it says. In the past, the risk to public health at the Olympics has come from incidents as diverse as food poisoning and terrorism. The agency is responsible for disease control and monitoring as well as scientific and public health advice during emergencies. Its responsibilities are to be absorbed within the Department of Health. Other authorities which tackle such crises are also in turmoil, with staff leaving primary care trusts well before they are abolished in 2013, while local councils are being hit by spending cuts. Labour has demanded the shakeup should “at the very least” be put on hold until after the London Olympics. Diane Abbott, the shadow health minister, said: “David Cameron seems to be prioritising driving through his NHS reorganisation above public safety during the Olympics. “For this Tory-led government to push our public health services into a state of chaos and abolish the current agency right before London 2012, with people from all over the world arriving in London, and the eyes of the entire world on Britain, is nothing short of a disgrace.” The revelation of the HPA’s concern over the Tories’ NHS plans comes as public health professionals fear their voice is being ignored, even during the government’s two-month listening exercise. They have no members on the Future Forum group overseeing the exercise, headed by GP Steve Field. The timetable for the shakeup has already been hit by the break in the progress of legislation – meaning the first changes are now scheduled for July 2012, the month in which the games begin, instead of April. That shift has led the HPA to say the risk of “compromising” national emergency responses during the Olympics is now even higher than when it first raised the issue in its official response to the shakeup in March. It warned then that there might be “considerable risks to the national capability to launch multi-agency responses to incidents and emergencies”. The agency said the planned changes would create “considerable uncertainty” and “preparation for, and response to, incidents arising in association with the Olympic and Paralypmic Games will be compromised” unless an appropriate structure replaced the current one. In a statement to the Guardian, the agency said: “Deferring the changes to July 2012 would increase the risk. We have made the Department of Health aware of our views concerning the risks in delaying.” It said a small number of its 3,850 staff had already left, citing concerns about the independence of their work and advice if they were moved to the health department. The HPA’s March document states that the move could also undermine wider public and professional confidence. Abbott said: “It is time that this government listened to public health professionals. Alarm bells are now ringing within the Health Protection Agency, local authorities and also local primary care trusts, and increasingly there will also be concern amongst the public. “We have worked hard to bring the Olympic Games to Britain. It should be a time in which we showcase what Britain is about to the rest of the world. The priority should be public safety and ensuring that we are prepared to respond robustly to major incidents and emergencies.” Lindsey Davies, former national director of pandemic influenza preparedness at the Department of Health who is president of the Faculty of Public Health, said: “The entire public health community has grave concerns about the potential risks from the timing of the changes.” Although there have been few major health scares linked to past Olympics, there was a terror attack at the 1972 Munich Olympics and a bombing which killed two people in Atlanta in 1996. A stomach bug struck competitors at the Commonwealth Games in Delhi last year. The agency says the games will raise the risk of diseases spreading due to the influx of international visitors and from mass gatherings in restricted spaces during the games. Early identification will help reduce the risk of widespread exposure and minimise the impact on visitors as well as local communities. Other concerns include heatstroke among crowds. About 300,000 people a day are expected to be in the Olympic Park during the height of the games. The Department of Health said it was working to ensure “business continuity” was maintained during the transition. A team had been established to ensure the the ministry and the NHS is able “to respond to major emergencies continues to be robust and to ensure the requirements of the 2012 Olympic and Paralympic Games are met. Work is under way to test how the proposed new systems would function during the 2012 Games. This work will focus and strengthen safety at the 2012 Games”. It is understood Olympics organisers are aware of the concerns but have not been directly involved in discussions. Thousands of athletes begin arriving in Britain for training camps in the UK in June 2012. The Olympic village opens in mid-July and the games run from 27 July to 12 August 2012. The Paralympics run from the end of August into September. A total of 17,000 athletes and officials from about 200 countries will stay in the village on the Olympic Park, in east London. In total, more than 10,500 athletes will compete in 26 sports based in various venues around the capital and beyond. Sailing will be based in Weymouth and the Olympic football tournament will be played in various grounds around the country. According to the detailed transport plan released last month, the busiest day of the games – Saturday 4 August – will see 700,000 ticket holders moving around London to watch sessions at 11 venues. In all, 8.8m tickets are available for the Games, with 6.6m on sale to the general public. About 20,000 broadcast and print journalists will also descend on London.

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  May 5 2011, 12:51pm | Comments »

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  Supermarkets kill free markets as well as our communities

  http://distributedresearch.net/blog/2011/05/03/supermarkets-kill-free-markets-as-well-as-our-communities

  Across the country local shops have been wiped out by supermarkets.

  This article titled “Supermarkets kill free markets as well as our communities” was written by Peter Wilby, for The Guardian on Tuesday 3rd May 2011 20.00 UTC A few weeks ago our last local butcher closed. When we moved to this suburban Essex town 40 years ago, it had six specialist shops selling fresh meat. The last independent greengrocer disappeared nearly two decades ago. Happily, we still have an independent baker close by, and even a fishmonger a brisk 25-minute walk away. But for how long? Across the country the small retailer is being wiped out. In the whole of Britain there are fewer than 1,000 specialist fishmongers, 7,000 butchers and 4,000 greengrocers, and barely 3,000 independent bakeries. In all these categories, the number of specialists has fallen by 90% since the 1950s, and at least 40% in the last decade alone. They have been driven out by supermarkets, which now sell 97% of our food, with four chains accounting for 76%. Next to the motor car, nothing else has so radically changed the look and texture of our environment over the last half-century – creating what the New Economics Foundation calls “clone-town Britain” where every high street has the same shops. Until now politicians have had almost nothing to say about it. However, last Sunday the Labour leader, Ed Miliband, was asked about the “Tesco-isation” of high streets – a subject prompted by two riots in Bristol over a Tesco store – and said: “I think that is an issue, yes, and it is something that we’re looking at.” Hardly a rallying cry, but an encouraging change from the standard political response, endorsed by the Competition Commission in 2008, that consumers like the low prices, range of goods and quality offered by supermarkets. An advance too from Labour’s position in Scotland: in February it helped defeat the SNP minority government’s proposal to impose a “supermarket tax” on retail premises worth £750,000 or more. Even the “good for consumers” defence of the big stores requires scrutiny. Supermarkets may offer mangoes and kiwi fruit as a blessed relief to generations who recall the surly greengrocer grunting “no demand for it” when asked for anything out of the ordinary. But the option to buy locally grown produce is increasingly closed off; many varieties of English fruit disappeared long ago. Supermarkets stock food not for its taste, but for its longevity and appearance. Conventional economists count numbers, assuming that a huge increase in toilet roll colours represents an unqualified gain to the consumer. They neglect more subtle dimensions of choice. The central issue, however, is whether “what the consumer wants” should close down the argument. What people want as consumers may not be what they want as householders, community members, producers, employees or entrepreneurs. The loss of small shops drains a locality’s economic and social capital. Money spent in independent retail outlets tends to stay in the community, providing work for local lawyers and accountants, plumbers and decorators, window cleaners and builders. US research finds that every $100 spent at a local store generates 60% more local economic activity than $100 spent in a chain store down the road. It also finds that, after the arrival of a big supermarket, participation in local charities, churches, campaign groups and even voting declines sharply. As Jane Jacobs argued in The Death and Life of Great American Cities (1960), communities are created by myriad small daily encounters: getting cooking tips from the greengrocer, hearing about a job from the butcher, recommending a good plumber at the bakery, exchanging opinions in the pub. “The sum of such casual, public contact at the local level,” wrote Jacobs, “…is a feeling for the public identity of people, a web of public respect and trust.” Supermarkets minimise human contact in the interests of efficiency and convenience, most recently by introducing self-service lanes for payment. As one critic put it, they “cut the threads that hold an engaged community together”. Such issues should concern the right as much as the left: indeed, the most hard-hitting recent report on supermarkets came from ResPublica, the “red Tory” thinktank, and points out that only 12% of Britons hold business assets – and that, when monopoly goes unchecked and a sector of the economy is in effect closed to new entrants (as the grocery sector largely is), we start to “practise capitalism without capitalists”. Becoming a small retailer once allowed an ordinary working man or woman, and particularly an Asian migrant, to aspire – often after redundancy – to independence, self-reliance and upward social mobility. Moreover, supermarkets have become not only a monopoly, giving consumers a diminishing choice of food outlets, but also a monopsony, giving suppliers little choice of buyers for their produce. They have used this power ruthlessly, forcing down prices and increasingly dictating to suppliers what they produce, where they produce it and how they package it. The casualty rate for small producers, unable to survive on the supermarkets’ terms, is almost as great as for small shops. The effect on wages and working conditions in the food industry is well known, but the effect on what is supposed to be a free market is less often considered. Eastern European regimes, dictating from remote, central offices who could grow how much of what, were once regarded with horror. Even western governments were denounced when they adopted industrial policies to choose “winners” and “losers”. Tesco does that every day, and its suppliers have as little recourse to legal or political redress as a Soviet peasant.

  The supermarkets are classic examples of what has been called the tyranny of small choices. Any rational individual will buy most of his or her food and household goods from a big store because prices are lower, choice greater, quality more consistent, and service speedier. I may have the time and money to tour smaller shops. My neighbour, while recognising he may get something better from a specialist retailer, may judge that it will not be so reliably better (for my parents’ generation, supermarkets were liberators from the risks of mouldy cheddar and maggoty apples) as to justify the extra cost and time. Neither of us will take much account of community cohesion or local employment, still less of the dangers of monopoly and monopsony. This is where we should look to politicians for a larger view. They need not confront supermarkets directly, which clearly terrifies them. But they can partially re-create, and preserve what is left of, the independent retail sector through, for example, tax concessions; a community right to take over or find buyers for threatened businesses; and enhanced powers for local councils to protect retail competitiveness. This is an issue – straddling political and ideological boundaries and putting flesh on the abstractions of communities, big societies and social mobility – that Miliband and the Labour leadership, encouraged by the stirrings in Bristol, should seize.

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  May 3 2011, 5:17pm | Comments »

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  Popularity of fish pedicures fuels health and animal welfare concerns

  http://distributedresearch.net/blog/2011/05/01/popularity-of-fish-pedicures-animal-welfare

  Fish pedicure Ban in a dozen US states prompts British scientists to investigate risk posed by treatment amid animal welfare concerns. Have you tried a fish pedicure? What happens to the fish afterwards?

  This article titled “Popularity of fish pedicures fuels health and animal welfare concerns” was written by Tracy McVeigh, for The Observer on Saturday 30th April 2011 23.05 UTC One of the fastest-growing beauty treatments in Britain, fish pedicures – during which tiny toothless carp smooth down feet by eating dead skin – has come under new scrutiny from health experts and animal rights campaigners. The number of UK outlets offering pedicures with Garra rufa – fish that lift off hard skin and, through an enzyme in their saliva, diathanol, are thought to heal conditions such as psoriasis and eczema – is growing rapidly. As the craze catches on, beauty salons are already starting to move on to full body immersion tanks. But even for those who can get past the “ick” factor, the treatment is not without controversy. Following the decision by more than a dozen states in the US to ban the pedicures over fears they could spread infections and disease, scientists from the Health Protection Agency have begun an investigation into potential risks. A spokesperson for the agency said that, while it did not expect to be enforcing a ban in the UK and believed the risk of catching an infection from a fish foot spa to be “very small”, it was looking at publishing guidelines for the public. “The HPA and Health Protection Scotland are currently unaware of any cases of infection associated with the use of fish spa pedicures in the UK,” the spokesperson said. “However, following a number of inquiries to the HPA from local environmental health officers, the HPA, Health Protection Scotland and the Health and Safety Laboratory are currently examining the most up-to-date evidence and will publish practical advice to help both salons and the public to minimise any possible risk in due course.” Animal rights groups have also voiced alarm over the conditions in which the fish are kept. “We do have concerns about the welfare of any fish involved in this practice,” a spokeswoman for the RSPCA told the Observer. “Fish are covered by the Animal Welfare Act. They need a stable environment, with the correct water quality and temperature range. Sudden changes in temperature should be avoided as they can severely compromise welfare and even kill the animals. Water quality is of paramount importance in maintaining healthy fish. Having people bathe in the water with the fish is likely to affect quality, particularly if they are wearing any lotions or other toiletries that could leach into the water. Similarly, chemicals used to disinfect tanks and to clean patients’ feet beforehand would have to be non-toxic to the fish.” The practice of using Garra rufa fish – often called “doctor fish” – to heal skin dates back over 400 years in their native southern Turkish river basins. Turkey’s government has now made the Garra rufa a protected species over concerns about over-exploitation by spas, which has led to some outlets in the US using the chin chin, which masquerades as a Garra rufa but doesn’t do the job as well and often dies in the process. In the UK the business is booming, helped by the cheap cost of setting up. At least three companies run franchise operations for fish pedicures and several dozen online offer complete kits for a Garra rufa business. One firm, Appy Feet, has opened 21 stores throughout the UK with double that planned. “Appy Feet is extremely popular with both sexes and all age groups and the interest continues to grow. It is not just people trying the treatment for the novelty factor, many of the customers are regulars who come for a treatment around one to two times a month,” said a spokeswoman, who added that the welfare of the fish was high on their agenda. BEASTLY BEAUTY

  Bull semen A moisturing hair treatment is on offer at a London salon that uses the sperm of Angus bulls.

  Ox bone-marrow shampoo Exactly what it says on the bottle. From Brazil.

  Nightingale droppings Salons in Japan and New York offer the so-called Geisha facial as a cleanser. Victoria Beckham is allegedly a fan.

  Snail slime Farmers in Chile raising snails for the French market discovered secretions gave them smooth and soft hands. They now produce an ooze-filled hand cream.

  Snake venom Several face creams contain a protein that is a replica of the venom produced by the temple viper, claimed by some to have the same face-freezing effects as Botox.

  Leech Therapy Used for centuries to treat disease and still used in medicine, the slimy parasites now appear in a “detox” spa in Austria beloved of celebrities such as Demi Moore.

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  May 1 2011, 7:23am | Comments »

• I posted to distributedresearch.net

  A misplaced May Day dream for the masses

  http://distributedresearch.net/blog/2011/04/29/a-misplaced-may-day-dream-for-the-masses

  May Day by John Sommerfield describes a society on the edge. The parallels with today are obvious – but it’s the differences that make it worth reading.

  This article titled “A misplaced May Day dream for the masses” was written by Sam Jordison, for guardian.co.uk on Friday 29th April 2011 14.15 UTC It might have associations with people in funny clothes performing arcane rites and with Oxford students getting smashed off their gourds, but most us don’t think about Tories when we think about May Day. As several union leaders have already pointed out, the party’s current desire to replace May Day with Trafalgar Day (supposedly to “lengthen the holiday season”) is not practical so much as ideological. May Day might feel like a natural part of the calendar – but it has only been marked by a bank holiday since 1978, introduced by a Labour government to mark international workers’ day. And that, of course, is why the rightwingers don’t like it. They’d like it even less if they picked up the book that I’ve just been reading: May Day by John Sommerfield. This was written in 1936, but has just been reissued, with excellent timing, by London Books. It describes a society on the edge. The rich are getting richer and the poor are paying for it. The authorities clamp down on protest with the cynical use of force. Someone on a march is killed in an “accident”. The success of a march leads someone to comment: “I don’t think there’ll be so much damned squeamish argument against arming the police.” The parallels with our current troubles are obvious – but it’s the differences that make May Day worth reading. Sommerfield describes a few days in the lives of dozens of different characters across London, showing them at work, at play, down the pub, in bed, making love, feeling regret the day after, giving birth, dying, plotting to overthrow the bosses, plotting to undermine the workers. It’s a broad, ambitious sweep, but it’s all heading in the same direction: the inevitability of a general strike and the exultant victory of the Communist point of view. By the time Sommerfield was writing, Stalin had embarked on one of the biggest murder sprees in human history, but Sommerfield pants for Soviet Britain. So much so that he frequently loses all restraint:

  “Then into this sudden pool of quiet splintered an alien voice, a hoarse shout of ‘Workers, all out on May Day. Demonstrate for a free Soviet Britain!’ … This rang in a million ears. Eyes remembered the chalked slogans on walls and pavements. The slogans, the rain of leaflets, the shouts and songs of demonstrators echoed in a million minds.” He also gushes:

  “The printing presses were spinning themselves dizzy. There had never been so many leaflets before. They fell like rain, they were scattered like machine gun bullets.” Sommerfield loved his leaflets. He was also absolute in his convictions. For him there are two races in the world – rich and poor and that is where all conflict will lie. “Soon a lot more people will be having to take sides,” he wrote. They did indeed – but not in the way he thought. They would be fighting against fascism, not for “Soviet Britain”. There are plenty of things to be said in the book’s favour, particularly in the ambitious way he looks into so many lives around London, explores their living conditions, and lays bare their pleasures and pains. There’s also plenty more to be said against his writing which veers from the ridiculous to the not-too-bad and never really gets close to the sublime. Yet it’s as an attempt at social realism that it is most fascinating – and most flawed. In 1984 Sommerfield wrote a new forward for the book acknowledging how few favours time had done for his “1930s Communist romanticism”, but also said he hoped the book could be read as “an historical novel – worth reading, now, I hope, in relation to our own times.” To an extent it can. But I read it more as a reflection on a lost past and an exercise in folly. Possibly, it is harsh to judge Sommerfield’s May Day, for getting things so spectacularly wrong. It’s a novel, after all. It deals in fiction, not fact. But then again, while I was reading May Day, I couldn’t help thinking of F Scott Fitzgerald’s novella with the same title. It’s just one mark of Fitzgerald’s genius that his reflections on the day – although written in 1920 – still apply. The protests he describes seem hopeless, futile, distorted by absurd mobs on both sides: “all crowds have to howl”. The rich are oblivious at best, unforgiving and condescending the rest of the time. The tragedies he depicts are universal – but also painfully personal. His lead, Gordon Sterett, is a penniless, struggling artist who has never found his feet since returning from the First World War, but who has found booze and bad company. He is drowning in the tide of history, but his problems are more individual than any Sommerfield manages to describe. He is more real. So too is the world around him. The clothes are smarter, the dancing is more formal and the drinks sound more exotic. No one has a smart phone and radicals print their views on paper. Otherwise, Fitzgerald could be writing about today – or forever. His despair and defeat for the small man rings far more true than Sommerfield’s misplaced dream for the masses. May Day is a crushed dream. It makes the Tory vendetta against the holiday seem even more than usually petty.

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  April 29 2011, 9:47am | Comments »

• I posted to distributedresearch.net

  Jemima Kiss: How I kicked my digital habit

  http://distributedresearch.net/blog/2011/04/25/jemima-kiss-how-i-kicked-my-digital-habit

  Twitter, Facebook, emails, and voicemail – we are overwhelmed by digital data, is it time to rebel against information overload? I wondered whe Jemima Kiss had gone too. But of course, managing the information overload IS your job.

  This article titled “Jemima Kiss: How I kicked my digital habit” was written by Jemima Kiss, for The Observer on Saturday 23rd April 2011 23.05 UTC We were brushing through wet grass in the early morning when we saw it – a flash of white drifting behind a small patch of trees, backlit by the sun. Crouching down next to my small son, we watched the unmistakable shape of a barn owl until he disappeared into the wood. The look on my son’s face was part of a brief moment of magic, the kind of memory that we live for. Ordinarily, my next thought would have been to pull out my phone and take a photo, send a tweet or record a video. Connecting is something I do unconsciously now. Tweeting is like breathing and photos and video have documented nearly every day of my 21-month-old son’s life. The meaningful merged with the mundane, all dutifully and habitually recorded – my enjoyment split between that technological impulse and the more delicate human need to be in the moment. This is how we live. That weekend, however, our whole family – my partner, my son and I – were offline. Swallowtail Hill Farm, in Rye, East Sussex, is a pretty soft option when it comes to a digital detox; a charming small farm with a diverting collection of animals and four vintage tractors. Camping was an easy option for an offline experiment, but there wasn’t much choice outside that for a UK break. High-end hotels in the US are now promoting their offline credentials, from boutique luxury to remote donkey trekking, but the UK has some catching up to do. Anyway, blessed with two days of good weather and some delicious local food, I barely even noticed I wasn’t online. What I did notice was my partner, Will. If my worst digital habit is incessant tweeting, his is allowing his phone to be the single most disruptive thing in our relationship. Country walks, dinner, bathing our son – no moment is safe from the seemingly irresistible ringing, vibrating, nagging phone that demands – and wins – his attention when he should be enjoying the moment with us. Any objections of mine are swiftly defended by explaining the importance of dealing with that email/text/voicemail now, though it never seems anything that couldn’t wait half an hour. I take equal responsibility for our connectopia – magnetically drawn, as I am, to any screen that can feed my addiction.

  We handed our phones in at the gate. The only interruption during lunch was from two woodpeckers and the entertainment during dinner by the fire was our own conversation. There was a moment when Will was distracted by a buzzing sensation and reached for his phone, before realising it was a bee. Without our phones, we had no idea what the time was. I reached for my phone when I wondered about local property prices and whether it is normal to see a barn owl during the day. And those moments when Artley, my son, was leaning out of the steam train window, having his bath outdoors under a woodburner-powered shower and being read his bedtime story in front of an open fire, I’ve had to try and commit to my own fallible memory. Breaking away from my connected life, I could feel how the compulsion, the divided attention, the multitasking has permeated my way of being. Early adopters, the heavy technology users who throw themselves at every new device and service, will admit to an uncontrollable impulse to check email, tweets or Facebook. Researchers have called this “variable interval reinforcement schedule”; we have in effect been trained into digital message addiction because the most exciting rewards are unpredictable. We’re no better than slot-machine addicts. The hustle we develop as we struggle to keep up with the pace of digital information has produced a restless, anxious way of engaging with the world. Desperate for efficiency, this seeps into our physical lives; I feel compelled to tidy while on the phone, to fold the washing while brushing my teeth. No single task has my undivided attention. A study by the University of California, San Francisco, last week concluded that constant multi-tasking gradually erodes short-term memory. And interruptions are a massive problem, taking anything up to 20 times the length of the interruption to recover. For those of us compelled to check email every few minutes, that revelation explains where the day goes. As consumer web technologies mature, so too does our desire to understand the impact they are having on our lives. Few books on digital dystopia are more resonant than Hamlet’s BlackBerry, an imaginative and thoughtful book that explores philosophical reaction to new technologies throughout time and the lessons we should have learnt from those. The author, former Washington Post journalist William Powers, is, like me, a true believer in the power and potential of digital technologies, but concludes that we need a little discipline to restore control over our unsettling, hyper-connected lives. “The more we connect, the more our thoughts lean outward,” he writes. “There’s a preoccupation with what’s going on ‘out there’ in the bustling otherworld, rather than ‘in here’ with yourself and those right around you. What was once exterior and faraway is now easily accessible and this carries a sense of obligation or duty.” That feeling that we should be reaching out, or be available to be reached out to, is tied to the self-affirmation the internet provides. “In less-connected times, human beings were forced to shape their own interior sense of identity and worth.” Powers offers practical solutions, including advocating the use of paper as a more efficient way of organising our thoughts. The theory of “embodied interaction” asserts that physical objects free our minds to think because our hands and fingers can do much of the work, unlike screens where our brains are constantly in demand. The eponymous technology he describes in his book is an intriguing Elizabethan version of a PDA, pocket-sized notebooks with pages coated in an erasable, plaster-like material. “Writing tables”, as they were known, were used for note-taking and checklists. While we can’t be sure Shakespeare used one, we’re shown that Hamlet was a keen user of the latest screen technology. “Yea, from the table of my memory,” Hamlet reflects, after meeting the ghost of his dead father. I’ll wipe away all trivial fond records All saws of books, all forms, all pressures past, That youth and observation copied there Hamlet wants to clear his life of all the superficial detritus so that he can focus exclusively on avenging the death of his father. The development of print culture was adding to the tumult of life in Elizabethan England, just as we are overwhelmed with the explosion of always-on digital information today. Exploring Seneca’s “spa of the mind” as a way of escaping the commotion of a busy city, Powers explains that the constant demands of being overwhelmingly connected need to be balanced out by reintroducing a little disconnectedness. That’s exactly what Powers did at home, banning the internet at weekends. It took six months for the family to adjust. “Because we were now away from our connectedness on a regular basis, we grasped its utility and value more fully … There was an atmospheric change in our minds, a shift to a slower, less restless, more relaxed way of thinking. We could just be in one place, doing one particular thing, and enjoy it.”

  At home, my concern about our digital addiction is most acute when I catch my son looking at me while I’m checking a screen. It’s reinforcing how much more important the screen is than him, as if I’m teaching him that obeying these machines is what he needs to do. Our fireside conversation that night, against a backdrop of a moonlit wood, was about Hamlet’s BlackBerry and what Powers calls the “vanishing family trick”, when a seemingly sociable family would gradually dissolve away to screens in different corners of the house. It’s a familiar story. “What’s lost in the process is so valuable, it can’t be quantified,” Powers despairs. “Isn’t this what we live for – time spent with other people, those moments that can’t be translated into ones and zeros and replicated on a screen? I sometimes felt as if love itself, or the acts of the heart and mind that constitute love, were being leached out of the house by our screens.” As we left the farm, the real work began, trying to resolve our new promise of balancing work and home life by introducing phone-free zones and offline days. Best of all, when the farmer handed back our phones, we didn’t have a missed call or message between us.

  Jemima, Will & Artley stayed at Swallowtail Hill Farm, 01275 395447; canopyandstars.co.uk

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  April 25 2011, 10:45am | Comments »

• I posted to distributedresearch.net

  Olympic Park: name that neighbourhood

  http://distributedresearch.net/blog/2011/04/19/olympic-park-name-that-neighbourhood

  Some sort of competition for naming the five Olympic villages for the London 2012 Olympic games in Stratford East London.

  This article titled “Olympic Park: name that neighbourhood” was written by Dave Hill, for guardian.co.uk on Tuesday 19th April 2011 09.47 UTC The Olympic Park Legacy Company recently made known four of the entries to its competition to name the five residential areas the park will eventually contain. It says the four are a sample of the “hundreds” it has received, and quite an instructive sample it is. I’m guessing that the suggestion of Plastic Fantastic is aimed at Area 3 and a historical reference to the development of early forms of plastic in the old chemical industry area of Hackney Wick, where dry cleaning too was pioneered. But who would rush to reside in a place called that? Would it assist estate agents in their noble task of wooing purchasers of the mixture of flats and family homes destined to rise alongside the Lea Navigation Canal? Stylish modern living in, ah, Plastic Fantastic? The OPLC’s Duncan Innes anticipates it being “quite a funky little area,” with “lots of arty people living there,” perhaps because the new local industry is galleries. From the commercial point of view, I’d be looking for bog standard pretentiousness in that case. Leaside Quarter? Wick Modern? Old Laundry? The three other suggested names released are Little Athens and Redgravia, whose Olympic inspirations, though ingenious, are perhaps a bit too obvious, and Dog and Bike, which to me sounds like a pub and only a pub. Still, I suppose the efforts made public were chosen to give clues and motivation to other potential competitors rather than on the basis of quality, and they do concentrate the mind on the complexities of the task. It needs to be tackled seriously. The organisers reserve the right to reject all contenders if they don’t think they’re up to scratch and impose their own instead. Should the five neighbourhoods’ names be Games-connected or reflect local history? They can’t really be both. If Games-connected, should they have a British or an international flavour? If localist, how local? And if history is to be the guide, whose history should take priority? That last is, of course, a political question and there was more than a whiff of politics about the decision to elongate the park’s name to the Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park. Would such eager deference to royalty have happened under a Labour government and Labour London Mayor? The very Conservative Boris Johnson is plainly pleased with the monarchical association, and it is one that could in theory be extended to the neighbourhood names, giving the whole area a thematic unity. Charles Environs? Middleton Village? On the other hand, perhaps Boris’s predecessor, who played such a big part in securing the Games for the capital, should have a neighbourhood named after him to recognise his contribution? Alas, Kenton and Kensington have already been taken. I’d been interested to hear your suggestions for Olympic Park neighbourhood names, and I’m sure the OPLC would too. Full details of its competition and the five neighbourhoods are here and the BBC, a partner in the enterprise, provides further helpful information here and here. I’ll be away on holiday when this post goes live, which means I’m unlikely to respond to comments. However, I’m sure there will be more to say on this subject before the competition’s closing date of May 18.

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  April 19 2011, 6:36am | Comments »

• I posted to distributedresearch.net

  Alcohol to blame for 13,000 cancer cases a year in UK

  http://distributedresearch.net/blog/2011/04/08/alcohol-to-blame-for-13000-cancer-cases-a-year-in-uk

  Here it is, the research results that could well launch the beginning of drinking being regarded in much the same way as smoking. Are you going to stop drinking or greatly cut back now, or will you carry on enjoying alcohol in whatever passes for moderation and blissful denial?

  This article titled “Alcohol to blame for 13,000 cancer cases a year in UK” was written by Sarah Boseley, health editor, for The Guardian on Thursday 7th April 2011 23.01 UTC At least 13,000 cancers in the UK every year are the result of people’s drinking habits, according to one of the largest studies ever carried out into diet and cancer. The research, carried out across eight European countries including the UK, has found that thousands of cancers could be prevented if men had the equivalent of no more than two drinks a day and women had no more than one. Nearly half of the alcohol-related cancers in the UK – nearly 6,000 – were related to the mouth and throat. Alcohol is a key cause of cancer of the mouth, oesophagus, voicebox and pharynx. But alcohol also causes more than 3,000 colorectal cancers and about 2,500 breast cancers every year, according to Cancer Research UK, which cofunded the study. The full extent of the damage is revealed by the Epic study (European prospective investigation into cancer and nutrition), which is monitoring the links between diet and cancer in the UK, France, Italy, Spain, the Netherlands, Greece, Germany and Denmark. It finds that 10% of men’s cancers and 3% of women’s cancers in western Europe are caused by drinking. Doctors and health groups are already concerned about the rise in liver disease. The British Liver Trust said the study should trigger a Europe-wide effort at preventing alcohol-related harm. “Once again we are seeing the impact alcohol can have in all areas of health,” said the trust’s campaigns manager, Sarah Matthews. “While alcohol damage is often linked to the liver, this study highlights the impact alcohol has on the rest of the organs in the body. “The results are not a surprise as we feel we haven’t touched the tip of the iceberg in preventing alcohol health harms in the UK. Substantive measures, such as setting a minimum pricing at an effective level, have been ignored and we continue to employ a half-hearted attempt in protecting the health of society. This study should form the basis of EU action to tackle the four Ps of alcohol marketing – price, promotion, placement and product. Only then will we see a change in how alcohol is viewed and consumed.” The study looked at the past and present drinking habits of nearly 364,000 men and women, mostly aged between 35 and 70 at the time of recruitment in the mid-1990s. They completed a detailed questionnaire on diet and lifestyle when they joined the study. Alcohol consumption was measured by specific questions on the amount, frequency and type of drink. The study, published by the British Medical Journal, found that thousands of cancers could have been avoided if people had consumed no more than one drink a day for women or two for men. In 2008, current and former alcohol consumption by men was responsible for about 57,600 cases of cancer of the upper digestive tract, colorectum and liver in Denmark, Greece, Germany, Italy, Spain, and Britain. More than half of these cases (33,000) were caused by drinking more than two alcoholic drinks per day. There were about 21,500 cases of cancer of the upper digestive tract, liver, colorectum and breast in women in the eight countries in 2008, the study found. Most – 17,400 cases, or 80% – were due to consumption of more than one drink of beer, wine or spirits a day, the researchers say. Madlen Schütze, first author of the study and epidemiologist at the German Institute of Human Nutrition in Potsdam-Rehbrücke, said: “Many cancer cases could have been avoided if alcohol consumption is limited to two drinks per day in men and one drink per day in women, which are the recommendations of many health organisations. And even more cancer cases would be prevented if people reduced their alcohol intake to below recommended guidelines or stopped drinking alcohol at all.” Naomi Allen, a Cancer Research UK-funded epidemiologist based at Oxford University, who was involved with the Epic study, said: “This research supports existing evidence that alcohol causes cancer and that the risk increases even with drinking moderate amounts.” She added that alcohol was probably causing even more cancers than the research suggests. “The results from this study reflect the impact of people’s drinking habits about 10 years ago,” she said.

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  April 8 2011, 7:32am | Comments »

• I posted to distributedresearch.net

  UK Uncut accuses police of politically motivated arrests

  http://distributedresearch.net/blog/2011/04/02/uk-uncut-accuses-police-of-politically-motivated-arrests

  The UK Uncut Campaign group are claiming that the police are trying to disband it following arrests at Fortnum and Mason sit-in.

  This article titled “UK Uncut accuses police of politically motivated arrests” was written by Mark Townsend, for The Observer on Saturday 2nd April 2011 20.44 UTC Protest group UK Uncut signalled its intention to continue occupying high street stores as police released images of individuals wanted in connection with violent disorder. A spokesman for the tax avoidance campaigners insisted they would not be cowed, despite concerns that the Met is intent on disabling the group’s command structure and has “politically targeted” its ringleaders. The Met has charged 138 people – practically the movement’s entire leadership – with aggravated trespass after a UK Uncut occupation of Fortnum & Mason in central London during the anti-cuts march. A meeting of UK Uncut supporters heard that those charged have had their phones confiscated. The mobiles contain details of the group’s secure networks and email accounts used to mobilise and organise its actions. The group believes the decision to charge all those inside Fortnum & Mason was an attempt by police to crush the movement. Only two of its chief ringleaders were outside the store at the time. “Practically the entire UK Uncut was inside, but it’s definitely not the end of that tactic because most people can see that this is political policing,” said the spokesman. The group is baffled why Scotland Yard, which rejects claims of politically motivated policing, decided to charge its members while previous peaceful occupations had seen officers take no action. Video evidence reveals a senior police officer assuring protesters on the day that they would not be detained upon leaving the store. Meanwhile, Scotland Yard has released 18 images of protesters, unconnected to UK Uncut, that they are keen to identify in the wake of the disorder. The investigation, Operation Brontide, is expected to publicise more images, mainly from CCTV. The Met is eager to disrupt those engaged in “black bloc” tactics, and is believed to have footage showing anarchists removing black clothing, bandanas and scarves before changing into civilian gear to evade detection. Detective chief superintendent Matthew Horne, leading Operation Brontide, said: “A significant minority came to London to cause violence and damage. There is an extensive operation to identify these people.” Fresh claims of politically motivated policing have also surfaced in a report alleging that officers prevented Muslims from attending counter demonstrations against a major English Defence League rally. Leicester constabulary operated a policy of stopping elements of the Muslim community protesting against the EDL during a high-profile march in the city last October, according to the Network for Police Monitoring (Netpol). It said that the force attempted to dissuade Muslims through mosques and schools from protesting against the EDL demonstration at an authorised protest by Unite Against Fascism (UAF) on the same day, and issued leaflets advising that young people could be picked up and held in “safe areas”. Val Swain of Netpol said: “This is a strategy that we have seen up and down the country, and it appears to have been sanctioned at the highest levels. “The way in which the police are interfering in communities to deter people from organising and participating in lawful, legitimate protest is deeply disturbing. It is not for the police to decide which sectors of society are allowed to protest and which are not.” Saqib Deshmukh, a youth worker in the East Midlands, said it appeared that officers were willing to facilitate the EDL’s right to protest at the expense of the Muslim community, adding: “Certain groups of people are being denied the right to protest. It seems that the government is far more worried about the mobilisation of Muslim people than they are about the EDL.” Police in Lancashire adopted another tactic, imposing a limit of 3,000 on both an EDL march and one by counter-demonstrators in Blackburn to reduce the possibility of violence. The report by Netpol claims the reaction by Leicester constabulary could breach articles 10 and 11, the freedom of assembly and expression, of the European convention on human rights. It also reveals widespread disquiet over why the EDL was allowed to congregate in city centre pubs before the march and move close to Muslim areas. One community worker described their treatment as a “policy of appeasement”. The Leicester force has previously stated that it adopted polices to reduce the risk of public disorder and that it engaged with the Muslim community and acted in its interests.

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  April 2 2011, 4:17pm | Comments »

• I posted to distributedresearch.net

  ‘Black bloc’ anarchists behind anti-cuts rampage reject thuggery claims

  http://distributedresearch.net/blog/2011/04/01/black-bloc-anarchists-behind-anti-cuts-rampage-reject-thuggery-claims

  Masked protesters called ‘Black Bloc’ from the Anarchist section of London protestors say their ranks have swollen to 1,500 and include social workers and nurses.

  This article titled “‘Black bloc’ anarchists behind anti-cuts rampage reject thuggery claims” was written by Robert Booth and Marc Vallée, for The Guardian on Friday 1st April 2011 17.36 UTC They dressed in black, masked their faces and flew red and black flags as if they were a revolutionary army, but anarchists who smashed up shops, banks and hotels during last Saturday’s anti-cuts protests in London have dismissed government allegations they are “mindless thugs”. Amid growing public anxiety about the actions of the so-called black bloc, the home secretary, Theresa May, this week threatened pre-emptive police action while Kit Malthouse, London’s deputy mayor, branded them “fascist agitators”. But unmasked and talking to the Guardian, anarchists involved in last weekend’s violence claimed their direct action tactics were going viral. They said they were legitimate representatives of the public’s concern about public sector cuts and their ranks had swollen to an estimated 1,500, boosted by student first-timers. The black bloc tactic involves masked militants moving in tight units cordoned by flags, vandalising symbolic property and sometimes attacking police. The group created chaos in central London’s busiest shopping area last weekend, seizing attention from about half a million peaceful anti-cuts protesters on a Trades Union Congress-organised march and terrifying onlookers. Anarchists attacked the Ritz hotel, smashed the windows of banks, fought with police officers and vandalised police vans. There were 201 arrests (mostly non-violent protesters at Fortnum & Mason) and at least 84 people were injured including 31 police officers, 12 of whom required hospital treatment for minor injuries. One activist admitted criminal gangs and small numbers of football hooligans were among those who adopted the approach. But the anarchists stressed that those in the black bloc last weekend included graduates, social workers, students, the unemployed, militant feminists and mental health nurses. The anarchists who agreed to talk also revealed their own deeper motivations: anger at family poverty as they grew up, the exhilarating sense of belonging they found in the black bloc, and longstanding grudges against the police. All of them said the failure of the peaceful anti-Iraq war march to overturn government policy was formative in their decision to turn to aggression and violence over the cuts. “We realised that political change in this country isn’t predicated on being right and winning a debate,” said Peter Wright, a twentysomething teacher who was in the black bloc with the South London Solidarity Federation, “which seeks to destroy capitalism and the state”. “You have to force your agenda. The slogan on Saturday was to make the country ungovernable,” he said. On Saturday, some anti-cuts activists plan to occupy Trafalgar Square and have asked anarchists to attend even though the opprobrium they drew after the march has sparked a debate inside the movement about whether their tactics are self-defeating. Nevertheless, with the royal wedding and May Day around the corner police are braced for more unrest. “We are not in any way setting out to terrorise the public. We are the public,” said Robert James, a smartly turned-out unemployed anarchist in his mid-20s. “We should do our utmost to ensure no one is harmed, but we can’t guarantee that people will not be shaken up by scenes of disorder … We are not calling for political reform or changes to the tax system. We are sending a clear message to capitalism that we can’t be bargained with. There is no reform. We only seek your abolition.” Jason Sands, 32, a graduate and local authority IT worker in south London and black bloc veteran, said the ranks of anarchists appeared to be “growing in confidence, skill and numbers”. He said there had been an influx of students galvanised by last year’s violence at the Conservative party headquarters in Millbank Tower during anti-tuition fees protests and by police tactics used against conventional demonstrators such as kettling. “It feels good to be part of it,” Sands said. “You are in a group of people who have a shared outlook which you don’t always feel in normal life. It can feel exhilarating running down a street and moving as a group. It is an atmosphere of resistance, not of chaos. You could get hurt or arrested so you have a combination of fear and adrenaline and a sense that this is the moment to act because it could all end shortly. There’s an intensity to the moment. It is not just about breaking things. It is manifesting your politics and personal feeling in the street.” He said some anarchist protesters only turned up if there was going to be a black bloc, finding it “boring” otherwise. Both Sands and James traced their anarchism to their experience of growing up relatively poor in the 1990s. “I have been going on protests since my parents took me on CND marches and anti-poll tax protests,” said Sands. “I realised kids from other families had more stuff and bigger houses but the most acute thing was the poll tax.” After university he found marches in London too “institutionalised” and became involved in violent action abroad, taking part in anti-G8 action in Rostock, Germany, in 2007, during which the offices of Caterpillar, the bulldozer company, were firebombed. James said he was radicalised when he saw his working-class family fall behind during the consumer and debt boom. “People growing up in the 1990s experienced capitalism moving away from the production of goods towards finance capitalism and the movement of debt,” he said. “Social mobility was everything but was quite difficult to attain. We achieved that through consumption and financed it through debt. Those who weren’t able to do that, especially as children, found themselves becoming the collateral damage of the consumer war.” He later went on anti-war marches and found himself feeling “utter contempt” for the state. “You would be incredibly surprised by the demographic that uses black bloc tactics, in terms of age, gender, occupation,” James said. “The media like to paint a picture of hooligans and thugs, mindless men on the rampage. It is simply not true. There are women and probably transgender people too. Some of the scariest-looking anarchists work in jobs like social care and mental health. It doesn’t come from a thuggish place.” The anarchists named in this article insisted on using pseudonyms.

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  April 1 2011, 4:30pm | Comments »

• I posted to distributedresearch.net

  Tapping into online communities can help councils engage with citizens

  http://distributedresearch.net/blog/2011/03/28/tapping-into-online-communities-can-help-councils-engage-with-citizens

  Be it on Twitter, Facebook or Linked In, online communities are dominating the conversation and government just needs to get out of the way.

  This article titled “Tapping into online communities can help councils engage with citizens” was written by Louise Kidney, for guardian.co.uk on Monday 28th March 2011 08.00 UTC Of all the rumours floating around local government this year, my favourite is that the localism bill introduction in the House of Commons was delayed because nobody could agree on the definition of “community”.   A lot of people are interested in defining community at the moment, not just the coalition. The RSA is currently running a project examining the notion of a connected community in real space within the New Cross Gate area – mapping how people interrelate in their everyday lives whether through membership of special interest groups or in gyms. Facebook recently mapped their entire user base and how they interrelate – creating an image that reveals humanity’s need both to connect but also to migrate in all its global glory.   We are fascinated with community. Mapping existing connections within a community might seem pointless, until you consider that this might be where the proof of the pudding is for a multicultural society. The truth is, until you ask the question and map a community, how it exists currently and came to be that way, you cannot find the reason or motivation for the cohesion that exists within it, nor transfer that anywhere else. Until you identify who goes to which mosque but also the gym next to it, and identify that that person who attends both is a hub and an influencer, how can you know who the people are who you should be targeting to attend your local neighbourhood meetings? If you engage with the influencers, your message will be passed by word of mouth – but you must identify them first.   Even Facebook, a community in a digital space – or rather a collision of a series of friendship circles and communities all interacting and merging – has influencers. Most people, according to research, have about 150 people listed as friends on Facebook – but some have more, and they are the people who we assume cross over groups – the people who link groups, the people who work a room with ease at parties who transfer those networking skills across to the digital world. Again, if you want to get a digital community on board, get them behind your message, or, for example, behind your community clean up – identify the digital influencer in the geographical location you are targeting.   Communities can be enormously useful, and these are just a few examples of how. But how do you identify a community that you can’t see – one which exists in a space which allegedly has no borders? And how do you quantify the value of a digital community, surely it’s just a load of people sitting around chatting?   Not quite. Wikipedia defines a virtual community as ‘a social network of individuals who interact through specific media, potentially crossing geographic and political boundaries in order to pursue mutual interests or goals.’ Sometimes it’s obvious that these communities exist online – take a look at any Facebook page on a common interest issue, be that a local issue or a band, and you will see there is a community – a collection of individuals with a commonality. But those links are not always so defined – local government has a community but that community sprawls across many digital networks, from the Communities of Practice to Twitter on the #localgov tag.   There is a small article buried as a reference in the Wikipedia article on virtual community. PBS Teachers, an educators’ community over in the US, published a report on understanding the impact of online communities on civic engagement. The figures speak for themselves. 65% of online community members have involvement in civic affairs since becoming members, 44% are more involved in social activism. Instead of frantic typing and little else, it seems that becoming part of a community empowers and motivates people to transfer the feeling of belonging to a community into the real world to effect real, tangible community driven change.   The lesson here, perhaps, is that just because something is digital does not mean it has no value in real world. It appears to act as an enabler, and for the RSA and others as an identifier, not an inhibitor.   Louise Kidney works in the communications team at Blackburn with Darwen borough council and blogs at ashinyworld.blogspot.com   This content is brought to you by Guardian Professional. Join the local government network for more like this direct to your inbox.

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  March 28 2011, 4:08pm | Comments »

• I posted to distributedresearch.net

  Firstbuy could lock young homebuyers into falling property market

  http://distributedresearch.net/blog/2011/03/27/firstbuy-could-lock-young-homebuyers-into-falling-property-market

  George Osborne‘s Firstbuy scheme, designed to help cash-strapped first-time property buyers could end up just subsidising the building industry.

  This article titled “Firstbuy could lock young homebuyers into falling property market” was written by Heather Stewart, for The Observer on Sunday 27th March 2011 00.06 UTC Campaigners are warning that George Osborne’s “Firstbuy” scheme to help cash-strapped young voters onto the property ladder is a subsidy for housebuilders that could lock vulnerable buyers into a falling market. The £250m scheme, under which homebuyers with a 5% deposit will be able to borrow a further 20% of the price of a new home from the government and housebuilders, was one of the few giveaways in the chancellor’s second budget last Wednesday. But the independent Office for Budget Responsibility expects house prices to fall by 2.3% this year, and grow by just 0.1% the year after, and many analysts are expecting sharper declines. Appearing before MPs at the cross-party Treasury select committee on Friday, Jonathan Portes, director of the National Institute for Economic and Social Research, criticised the chancellor’s scheme, saying “the main financial impact of giving help to first-time buyers is to pump extra money into the demand side and boost house prices. That’s the last thing future first-time buyers or the economy as a whole needs.” Osborne’s plan is very similar to “HomeBuy Direct,” a scheme introduced under Labour. Matt Griffith, of the pressure group Pricedout, said, “the experience of HomeBuy Direct has also been that it put too much power in the hands of the developers – who were often bringing forward the least sellable properties for inclusion in the scheme and selling at above market prices.” Matt Griffith, of the pressure group PricedOut, says some of the homeowners who took advantage of Labour’s similar scheme have been trapped in properties where prices fell substantially as the housing bubble burst. Asked whether the new scheme could also leave homebuyers lumbered, with depreciating new-build properties, a Treasury spokeswoman said: “I don’t think that level of detail is fixed yet.” The scheme will be operated under the auspices of the department for communities and local government. Paris-based think-tank the Organisation for Co-operation and Development, whose vote of confidence in the UK economy was cited by Osborne, urged the government to impose a tax on the value of all properties, to discourage speculation and tame the boom bust housing market.

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  March 27 2011, 1:16pm | Comments »

• I posted to distributedresearch.net

  Protest march against coalition cuts expected to attract 300,000

  http://distributedresearch.net/blog/2011/03/26/protest-march-against-coalition-cuts-expected-to-attract-300000

  Police braced for high numbers of political demonstrators and protestors in London with 800 coaches and at least 10 trains chartered from around the UK

  This article titled “Protest march against coalition cuts expected to attract 300,000″ was written by Polly Curtis, Matthew Taylor and Vikram Dodd, for The Guardian on Saturday 26th March 2011 00.52 UTC More than a quarter of a million protesters against public sector cuts are expected to flood central London today in the biggest political demonstration for nearly a decade. Police sources, normally cautious about estimating numbers, said last night they were braced for up to 300,000 people to join the march – far higher than previous forecasts from TUC organisers. More than 800 coaches and at least 10 trains have been chartered to bring people to the capital from as far afield as Cornwall and Inverness. The Metropolitan police, under fire for their use of kettling in previous protests, said “a small but significant minority” plan to hijack the march to stage violent attacks. Organisers, however, insist it will be a peaceful family event. Union members are expected be joined by a broad coalition, from pensioners to doctors, families and first-time protesters to football supporters and anarchists. Ed Miliband said the government was dragging the country back to the “rotten” 1980s. Labour is calling today’s event the “march of the mainstream”. The opposition leader will address the rally – his biggest audience ever – in Hyde Park to set out Labour’s alternative to the cuts, accusing the government of fomenting the “politics of division” not seen since Margaret Thatcher’s 1980s. His remarks are reinforced by a Guardian/ICM poll that shows the public divided over the cuts. Of 1,014 people questioned this week, 35% believe the cuts go too far, 28% say they strike the right balance and 29% say they don’t go far enough; 8% don’t know. Two other polls put the balance more strongly against cuts. A YouGov survey for Unison found that 56% believe the cuts are too harsh and a ComRes poll for ITV showed that two-thirds think the government should reconsider its planned spending cuts programme. Just one in five disagree with that view. The TUC organisers of the event said they had organised a family-friendly demonstration with brass, jazz and Bollywood bands. But with unofficial feeder marches, sit-down protests and a takeover of Trafalgar Square planned, there was increasing nervousness that acts of peaceful civil disobedience could lead to stand-offs with police and outbursts of violence. Shami Chakrabarti, director of Liberty, which is providing 100 legal observers along the route to monitor the scenes, said she had been heartened by advance co-operation between the TUC and police, but added: “Events around in the world show the precious nature of peaceful dissent guaranteed by our Human Rights Act. This fundamental freedom was hard won and is still much envied elsewhere. It must not be jeopardised either by over-zealous policing or anyone looking for trouble.” Miliband said in a speech in Nottingham: “I thought the politics of the 1980s were rotten because they divided our country. I fear that this government is practising the politics of division.” He argued that the government’s policies divided rich against poor, public sector workers against private sector workers and north against south. “These aren’t the voices of people marginal to our country but the voices of the mainstream majority in our country and that’s why I’ll be addressing the rally tomorrow,” he said. He had been told not to join the march because of safety concerns. The Tories called on Miliband and the TUC leader, Brendan Barber, to take responsibility for any disruption on the march. Michael Fallon, deputy chairman of the Conservative party, said: “Under Ed Miliband, Labour are abandoning the centre ground, retreating into their comfort zone of left-wing protest and cosying up to the unions.” Barber will tell the rally that no part of the public realm is protected from the cuts, highlighting the proposals to radically change the NHS. “Today let us say [to David Cameron]: we will not let you destroy what has taken generations to build,” he will say. The bulk of the march will be made up of trade unionists, with virtually all of the TUC’s 55 affiliated unions represented. Also among the marchers will be a coachload of mothers and toddlers from Hampshire demonstrating against the closure of Sure Start centres in the county. Catherine Ovenden, 31, said the decision to cut the service would have a devastating impact on families. “So many people rely on these centres and we are going to lose a third of them,” she said . The demonstration is timed to mark the new financial year next week, when many of the cuts kick in. Research by the Fabian Society suggests that taken with the wider tax and benefit reforms announced since the election, this week’s budget would in fact force large number of working families into tax, instead of lifting them out as the coalition has claimed. Tens of thousands of the lowest-income families will lose around 6% of their net income in the next year because of the government’s tax and benefit changes with the bulk of the cuts kicking in next week, the analysis by the Fabian Society shows. From next week the childcare element of the tax credit system will be reduced from 80% to 70% of qualifying families’ nursery bills. A family with one child and one earner earning up to £23,000 will lose between 5.7% and 6.4% of their net income, compared with last year. This would cost such a family with an income of £6,000 £1,362 a year and a family on £23,000 £1,710 a year.

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  March 26 2011, 9:01am | Comments »

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  If you earn less than the average wage, you’re not middle class. It’s all a scam

  http://distributedresearch.net/blog/2011/03/26/if-you-earn-less-than-the-average-wage-youre-not-middle-class-its-all-a-scam

  I don’t know what class will be protesting today – squeezed, strugglers.  But will they resist the fiction that class no long matters? If you earn less than the average wage, you’re not middle class. It’s all a scam.

  This article titled “If you earn less than the average wage, you’re not middle class. It’s all a scam” was written by Suzanne Moore, for The Guardian on Saturday 26th March 2011 09.00 UTC My cafetiere is pink. Shocking pink. I am shocked myself, as I reckon now I must be the most middle-class person ever to have lived. For this is one of the ways we now reckon class. According to pollsters. So disturbed was I that I checked its make. Boden? Aaaah! No, Bodum, and I need glasses. This is not product placement by the way, I am simply trying to place myself in class terms. If class is now deemed to be about what one consumes as opposed to being about what one produces, I might as well put it out there: my coffee maker. Judge me not by my ancestors, but by my penchant for vividly coloured kitchenware. Posher friends, or at least some people who claim to know about food, scoff at my cafetiere and say I should make coffee in those proper French metal things, and they are probably right and they shall inherit the land. I won’t inherit the land, nor, I imagine, will the classes who drink instant coffee. They probably don’t deserve to. I mean, have they no aspirations, these non-real-coffee-drinking low-lifes? They are probably the same type of people whose children don’t read 50 books a year, I bet. Really, there is no hope. Seven out of 10 people now define themselves as middle class, so we may just look up or down on the three who don’t. Presumably they just tick the box marked “non–dom” or “can’t be arsed”. Who is to know? But really there is more to it than cappuccinos. I am shocked at the bloodless coup that has been achieved here. As social mobility has faltered over the last 20 years, we have the majority of people “self-certifying” as middle class. Certified is the right word, if you ask me. Delusions of grandeur are one thing. Delusions of being middle class when you earn less than the average income, and are indeed struggling, may suggest the class war is not going that well. It’s really difficult maintaining a class war when everyone says that they are on the same side. And believe me, I try. I hate to argue with Lady Gaga (deeply middle class) but I wasn’t Born This Way. I was born another way and got on and got out somehow. My cohort is probably the last generation to achieve real social mobility. And if you now look at the studies, despite the myth constantly repeated, it’s not grammar schools that made the difference. To change one’s class position leaves one in a kind of no-man’s land, unable to share the nostalgia for the good old working classes, but always willing and able to rubbish one’s new milieu. Much about working-class life is deathly dull and about anaesthetising oneself into numbing stupidity. The nobility of manual work was a necessary fiction. No man would live half their lives underground if they had another choice. No woman now happily gets up in the middle of the night and leaves her children to go and clean office floors. What has happened is that the main political parties cottoned on to the idea of aspiration being a vote-winner exactly at the same time when those aspirations could not be met for many in a globalised economy. Home-owning, self-reliance, a decent job for life, nice holidays, a taste for authenticity and real “experiences” came to define us. What we bought, rather than what we produced, became our core identity. As any fule kno, or OK, any old Marxist, this is not what social class actually means. This is reducing class to the trivia of etiquette and consumer power. The reality has been that as we produce fewer and fewer goods, our patterns of employment have become more haphazard and confused across the class spectrum. People on incredibly low wages are still required to look smart, present immaculate CVs and be respectful, even when on hideously short-term contracts. This may make them “feel” middle class. Alongside this, every politician has tried to wrap us up in some warm, fuzzy blanket of uniform classlessness. Last year Gordon Brown was promising that Labour would create “more middle-class jobs than ever”, and would also represent “the mainstream majority”. What on earth did this mean? Is it any more true than Osborne’s more obvious lie, “We’re all in this together”? The coercion of smooth, achievable middle classness was brought about under New Labour. Triangulation, remember, meant there need be no more class conflict or fights between workers and bosses. We were just floating in a perfectly harmonious world where things could only get better. The real working class remained problematic, and the workless morphed into what we now call the underclass. When Charles Murray started using that word in the mid-90s we reeled. The poor were not just people, he said, who didn’t have money, they were also morally impoverished. Now we use that word and others like it all the time: Chavs, “urban”, people from estates. Look at these people and their vulgar desire for instant gratification. Even instant coffee. Middle-class “values”, on the other hand, mean what? Some idea of restraint, of naturally knowing what’s good and being prepared to work for it. And, er, having a Ford Focus. If you don’t mind being defined by vote-hungry politicians or people who want to sell you stuff, then go for it! But I am sorry to say that when you are earning less than the average wage, even though your work may be sedentary rather than manual, don’t kid yourself, people. This is a massive scam, this horrible mutation of all into some homogenised vision of middle-classness. The old word for it was hegemony. Which, I can see, is as about as fashionable as class war. But when Gramsci described a culture in which the ruling class “persuades” the lower classes to accept its values, he could have had little idea of how parties of “the left” would also bring this about. But the rush for the centre ground means just that. The old collectivities of unions or the bonds of manual work have given way to individual fear and loathing in the workplace. Technology means outsourcing, and has been a liberation for some, but for others it means total loss of autonomy, and a working life that is under constant observation. The problem now is that mere aspiration, middle-class or not, is not enough. As if it ever was. The much-derided aspiration of the young – to become famous without necessarily having any talent – is no less nutty than many current political aspirations. We are to have growth without investment. Daft. We are all to stand tall and proud while we lop off the limbs of the public sector. Crazy. I don’t know what class of people will be protesting today. They may well be squeezed. Strugglers, downsizers. Or not from any of these marketing categories. They may simply be registering the fact that their individual interests are actually not those of the ruling class. Some may think they are middle class, and some indeed may be. Whether they resist the fiction that class no longer matters is surely much more significant than how they drink their coffee. For these new decaffeinated, tepid definitions of class are nothing like the real thing. And certainly not for the likes of us.

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  March 26 2011, 8:48am | Comments »

• I posted to distributedresearch.net

  March for the alternative – live updates

  http://distributedresearch.net/blog/2011/03/26/march-for-the-alternative-%E2%80%93%C2%A0live-updates

  More than 250,000 people are expected to march against the governing coalition’s cuts. Protesters gather in London in the biggest demo for eight years. Organisers warn against infiltration by police provacateurs.

  This article titled “March for the alternative – live updates” was written by David Batty and Rowenna Davis, for guardian.co.uk on Saturday 26th March 2011 10.01 UTC

  1.15pm: Tom Wills, a student journalist based in Brighton, has posted a set of photos from the march on Flickr, which give a sense of the mass turnout.

  1.10pm: EastLondonLines, a news website run by the journalism department of Goldsmiths, has posted this Twitpic, which shows the protesters marching past police lines near Parliament.

  1.04pm: Paul Lewis has sent through an update, describing the wide range of groups who have joined today’s protest. “Standing here watching hundreds of thousands of people stream past, you get a real sense of the broad coalition against the government. I noted down every banner that past through over a couple of minutes. “Somerset Teachers Association, Vulnerable Chinese Migrants Association, Society of Radiographers, Prison Officers Association, Don’t Cut Out The Disabled, Southend On Sea Unison Branch, Ipswich Labour Party, Cut Trident, Nurses Uncut, Met Police Group PCS Union, Calderdale Division of the NUT, Chelsea Anti Cuts Alliance, Colchester NHS SOS, South Ribble Children, The Bohemian Storm is Rising, Parents Alliance of Community Schools, Isle of Wight Uncut.”

  1.02pm: Matthew Taylor says thousands of people are still joining the march, with the total number estimated at around 400,000. “I am now on a footbridge overlooking the Embankment and people have been streaming underneath us for about an hour. People are queuing as far back as I a can see and tens of thousands more are still arriving from side streets. Organisers are suggesting there could be as many as 400,000 here today. That is impossible to verify at this stage. But it is clear that this is a very big demo.”

  1.00pm: While this photo from Mary shows crowds gathering at Embankment.

  12.58pm: This photo by Mary Hamilton pokes fun at undercover police officers – whose activities have recently been investigated by the Guardian.

  12.45pm: Journalist Mary Hamilton – aka newsmary – has been posting photos of the march on Twitpic.

  12.35pm: The Public and Commercial Services Union has set up its own live blog of the march.

  12.30pm: Here’s a map of the march route

  12.20pm: PA news agency has been speaking to some of the protesters: Peter Keats, 54, from Lowestoft, Suffolk, who works for Jobcentre Plus, said: “We’re toasting the success as so many people have turned out. The press were saying 100,000 people but I think we have far exceeded that. I’m hoping for half a million. I’m hoping the government will start to listen with this many out. “Personally, I think it’s wrong the way we are hitting the poor. I’m not so much worried about myself but the customers I deal with are vulnerable and I’m worried about them and I’m worried about the kids of this country.” Alan Dowling, 40, who works for the UK Border Agency in Sheffield, said: “The other day the immigration minister was on TV saying we need to do more. How are we going to do more enforcement when we are cutting enforcement officers?”

  12.17pm: Len McCluskey, general secretary of Unite, estimates there are half a million people taking part in the protest. He told PA: “This is an absolutely incredible turnout and display of anger which the government will have to take notice of.” Hundreds of police officers lined up outside parliament behind metal barriers as the marchers passed by and moved down Whitehall.

  12.09pm: Matthew Taylor, who has been following the education feeder march, has now joined the main protest. In this audio report, he says the main march dwarfs the scale of the education protest: “The student block has suddenly become much quieter than it was now they see the scale of the TUC march.”

  11.58am: Paul Lewis is on the Golden Jubilee Bridge near the Embankment, overlooking the march. He says the turnout is huge, stretching from the Houses of Parliament to St Paul’s Cathedral. He says the atmosphere is good natured. The only scuffle he’s seen was a protester heckling the shadow chancellor, Ed Balls.

  10.49am: My colleague Matthew Taylor is with the education feeder march, which set off from the University of London in Mallet Street, Bloomsbury, around 20 minutes ago. Groups of Scottish students who set off at 11pm last night are leading the chanting. Student organisers had said ‘more than 10000′ people would meet here but so far there are probably month more than 2000 – although more are arriving all the time. Students and lecturers are being joined by various activist groups and so far the mood is vocal but pretty good natured. We’re at Russell Square now. There’s a small police presence. The police and the organisers don’t seem clear on the route but we’re on our way down to join the main march.

  10.34am: My colleague Paul Lewis has just sent in his thoughts about the potential for trouble between protesters and the police. “I don’t think anyone doubts that the main march will be in large part good natured and peaceful. Most protesters will spend several hours marching through London, seeing little more than the placards in front of them, and finish with sandwiches in Hyde Park. But that isn’t to say there won’t be pockets of trouble, and if past experiences are anything to go by they could flare into some quite nasty confrontations with police. “Flashpoints could come when a handful of unofficial feeder marches, coming from across the capital, plan to join the main march. Will police let them? Many of the seasoned activists – those police like to call ‘trouble-makers’ – are likely to be on these fringe processions (watch out for delegations gathering right now in Kennington Park, Camden and Mallet Street) and the instinct of police, who at times exhibit an almost medieval vision of crowd psychology, is often to prevent groups mixing. That would spell trouble. “The other likely hotspots will be Oxford Street at 2pm, where UK Uncuts plan to close down shops, and Trafalgar Square late in the afternoon, which there are plans to occupy. Both of these locations, and others we don’t yet know about, are likely to be magnets for those intending to peel off from the slow procession through London in search of “direct action”. Coping sensibly with all these splinters from the main march will be a policing nightmare for Scotland Yard. It all comes down to how much coercion police use. Stop people from walking where they want and sparks fly.”

  10.29am: Here’s some more comments from union leaders ahead of the march. Dave Prentis, general secretary of Unison, will tell the demonstrators that every time the government votes through more cuts, they should hear the “angry voices” of public sector workers losing their jobs. He also warned it faced being wiped out in May’s elections. “Every day when they discuss squeezing NHS budgets I want them to remember the nurses here on the march, the paramedics – workers who keep our NHS going. Workers who see every day the effect of the cuts on patients who are having vital pain-relieving operations cut or delayed. “Workers who worry about patient care suffering, because job cuts mean there are not enough staff on the ward. NHS workers and the public fearful that the Health and Social Care Bill will mean the break-up of the NHS – the end of our much loved health service as we know it. A new dawn of privatisation for the Tories’ friends in big business. “Every month when a library closes, a care home shuts its doors, or services for struggling young people are withdrawn, I want them to feel the fear, and anger of the people who have come here today from every part of the UK to vent their frustration and to stand up for a fairer future.” Matt Wrack, general secretary of the Fire Brigades Union, said: “Cameron and Clegg have launched a war on working people and today’s demonstration is the start of the fightback. They expect us to suffer tax increases, pay cuts, unemployment and devastation of our pensions to pay for the crisis their friends in the City caused. They should expect the fight of their lives.” Len McCluskey, leader of Unite, said those taking part in the march were the “tip of the iceberg” because millions were opposed to the cuts. “There is growing anger, which will build and build as the impact of the cuts take effect.”

  10.13am: Labour politicians will join the march and party leader Ed Miliband will address the rally in Hyde Park. He will use the speech to set out Labour’s alternative to the cuts and to accuse the coalition of fomenting the “politics of division” not seen since the “rotten” Thatcher era. Labour is calling the demonstration the “march of the mainstream”. But Gove told the Today programme there were “really big dangers” for Miliband in addressing the rally at the end of the march. “One is that people will say ‘You are calling for a plan B from the government, you don’t even have a plan A. More than that, you are associating yourself with a march which could, I’m afraid, move from being family event into being something darker.”

  10.10am: Education secretary Michael Gove said today that he recognised the public concerns about the planned cuts. But he insisted that the government would not be deflected from its strategy. He told the BBC Radio 4 Today programme: “Of course people will feel a sense of disquiet, in some cases anger, at what they see happening, but the difficulty we have as the government inheriting a terrible economic mess, is that we have to take steps to bring the public finances back into balance.”

  10.02am: Barber will tell today’s rally that there is an alternative to the “brutal” spending cuts. Ahead of the march, he accused the coalition government of threatening the NHS and destroying communities with the scale of the job cuts. “No part of our public realm is to be protected. And don’t believe it when ministers say that the NHS is safe in their hands. With over 50,000 job cuts already in the pipeline – nurses, doctors, physios, midwives – in the name of so-called efficiency savings of £20 billion, the NHS as we know it, is already in intensive care. “With David Cameron talking about selling it off to any willing provider out to make a profit, the NHS is facing the gravest threat in its history. “Today let us say to him: we will not let you destroy what has taken generations to build. Let’s be brutally clear about these brutal cuts. They’re going to cost jobs on a huge scale – adding to the misery of the 2.5 million people already on the dole. “They’re going to hammer crucial services that bind our communities together, and they’re going to hit the poorest and the most vulnerable hardest. Anyone who tells you different is a bare-faced liar. “The government claims there is no alternative, but there is. Let’s keep people in work and get our economy growing. Let’s get tax revenues flowing and tackle the tax cheats, and let’s have a Robin Hood Tax on the banks, so they pay us back for the mess they caused.”

  9.45am: A Guardian/ICM poll published today shows that the public are divided over the cuts, while two other polls last night put the balance more strongly against cuts. The Guardian/ICM poll of 1,014 found that 35% believe the cuts go too far, 28% think they strike the right balance and 29% think they don’t go far enough; 8% don’t know. A YouGov survey for Unison found that 56% believe the cuts are too harsh and a ComRes poll for ITV showed that two-thirds think the government should reconsider its planned spending cuts programme. Just one in five disagreed with that view. Speaking ahead of the march, TUC general secretary Brendan Barber said of the Unison survey: “I’m sure that many of our critics will try to write us off today as a minority, vested interest. This poll nails that lie. “The thousands coming to London from across the country will be speaking for their communities when they call for a plan B that saves vital services, gets the jobless back to work and tackles the deficit through growth and fair tax.”

  9.15am: Good morning and welcome to the Guardian’s live coverage of the mass protest in London against the coalition government’s public sector cuts. Around 300,000 people are expected to join the March for the Alternative organised by the TUC, the biggest union-organised event for over 20 years and the largest in the country since the protest against the Iraq war in 2003. More than 800 coaches and 10 trains have been chartered to bring people to the capital from as far afield as Cornwall and Inverness. Union members are expected to be joined by a broad coalition, from pensioners to doctors, families and first-time protesters, to football supporters and anarchists. My colleague Matthew Taylor has written a guide to all the organisations – both official and unofficial – who will be taking part. The Metropolitan Police believe a small minority will try to hijack the anti-cuts march to stage violent attacks on property and the police. The TUC organisers of the event say they have organised a family-friendly demonstration with brass, jazz and Bollywood bands. But there are concerns that unofficial feeder marches, sit-down protests and a takeover of Trafalgar Square could turn from peaceful civil disobedience into stand-offs with the police. The march assembles on the Embankment from 11am but it will still be leaving at 2pm and possibly even later. The TUC has drawn up a set of tips for those planning to join the march. The protest will culminate in a rally in Hyde Park. Guardian reporters Matthew Taylor and Paul Lewis will be out on the streets covering the protest as it happens. If you’re at the demo and want to send me any comments – or share any pictures, audio clips and videos – you can contact me either on david.batty@guardian.co.uk or on Twitter – @David_Batty

  guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 Published via the Guardian News Feed plugin for WordPress.

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  March 26 2011, 8:38am | Comments »

• I posted to distributedresearch.net

  Who will live in the Olympic Park homes?

  http://distributedresearch.net/blog/2011/03/23/who-will-live-in-the-olympic-park-homes

  Dave Hill wonders if  the Olympic Park‘s post-Games vision really can be translated into reality.

  This article titled “Who will live in the Olympic Park homes?” was written by Dave Hill, for guardian.co.uk on Tuesday 22nd March 2011 10.39 UTC First, lap up a projection of the Olympic Park’s future. That’s the Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park, to give it it’s full handle – a place of graceful living in stylish family homes amid world class sporting facilities, giant visitor attractions and rather large butterflies. Behold. Appetising, isn’t it? Speaking at the unveiling of the revised park masterplan last October, Boris Johnson declared: Not since Georgian England has London seen such an ambitious and comprehensive vision for a new district. Our plans seek to combine the classical best of this city with the greatest benefits of modern urban living. But who will actually live in this promised paradise? How many of its inhabitants will be drawn from that rather large pool of Londoners on low or even average incomes who find the bulk of the capital’s housing stock beyond their means? There are signs that the percentage could be rather small. The masterplan makes provision for only 35 percent of the 11,000 homes the park is anticipated to eventually contain being “affordable”. And that term “affordable” is a stretchy one. It accommodates everything from homes let by housing associations for subsidised “social rents” to “intermediate” range properties that households with quite large, middle-class earnings can part-purchase through schemes designed to help people onto London’s ludicrously steep housing ladder. Soon “affordable” will demonstrate still greater elasticity. Next month Mayor Johnson will bring into effect his First Steps policy programme, making “intermediate” schemes available to family households with incomes as high as £74,000 a year – rather more than a member of parliament is paid – compared with the present £60,000. (See policy 1.2C on page 22 of his London Housing Strategy). Meanwhile, the government is preparing to bring in what it calls its new “affordable rent” model, which will underpin the finances of housing associations. This will require the introduction of housing association rents at a level of “up to 80% of gross market rents” in the area concerned – a figure far higher than the highest at present. At last week’s London Assembly plenary Margaret Ford, the Olympic Park Legacy Company’s chair, candidly acknowledged that she and colleagues were still trying to work through its implications for their housing plans. These could be far-reaching, especially in light of the government’s forthcoming capping of housing and other welfare benefits. Rents set at 80 percent of local private sector levels look likely to be beyond the reach of many families in the greatest need of the sorts of homes Boris and OPLC want to see built in large numbers on the park. Is that what London’s Mayor wants? You can read much more about that ideal future of the park on the OPLC’s website. It will have its own, brand new postcode – London E20 – and bear the hopes of many that it will succeed where so many regeneration schemes have failed in the past. Although its completion is a long way off, the process of translating that “comprehensive vision” into reality is already underway. More than half of the 2,800 future homes presently comprising the athletes’ Olympic Village have already been sold with nine developers shortlisted to buy the rest. Bids have been invited to build the first 800 post-Games homes in one of the five new neighbourhoods set out in the masterplan. Will the end results resemble those vibrant, mixed communities of regeneration cliche or a rather less attractive legacy – one that benefits the affluent and wealthy investors from which ordinary working and struggling Londoners are all but priced out?

  guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 Published via the Guardian News Feed plugin for WordPress.

  Thanks for subscribing to Andy Roberts blogWho will live in the Olympic Park homes?

  Related posts:2012 Olympic Park: after the Games London Orbit Tower Rises at Olympic Park The Orbit Tower, Olympic Park Stratford East London 2012

  

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  March 23 2011, 3:09pm | Comments »

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