Archive for 2012|Yearly archive page

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Westminster’s War On Disabled Workers

In Rory MacKinnon on April 28, 2012 at 12:00 am

[First printed in The Morning Star, 28/04/2012]

“It’s not a day centre,” Ray Dearman booms. “I had a bloody hard job.”

The former forklift driver is close to tears, but the small crowd of disability campaigners and trade unionists cheer him on: “Our people rely on working in Remploy factories because they’re treated with respect.”

Dearman would know. He was cut loose after twelve years when the state-owned enterprise’s Brixton factory shut up shop in 2008. He says he hasn’t been the same since.

Between rising unemployment and employers’ prejudices against his learning disability, his career in the four years since has consisted of a single three-week work experience scheme at Asda.

Meanwhile the dehumanising nature of long-term unemployment has brought on bouts of suicidal depression, he says: at one point a decorator’s firm offered him 1p a day to deliver their rubbish to the local tip.

“Since December I’ve been told to write poetry. But that’s not a job. Remploy was a job and I was proud of it.”

Ray Dearman’s job is long gone. But thousands of workers just like him face the same bleak future under Con-Dem plans to close the country’s entire network of Remploy centres over the next two years.

Read the rest of this entry »

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Invisible Children: Public Awareness, Private Intelligence

In Rory MacKinnon on March 16, 2012 at 5:00 pm

[A piece fleshing out my previous post — first printed in The Morning Star, 17/03/2012].

When Invisible Children’s Stop Kony 2012 campaign exploded onto the internet last week, it was just a matter of hours before critiques of every colour followed suit. [You can read Invisible Children's counterpoints here.]

The Californian not-for-profit’s slick viral video recounted their efforts to convince the US government to send US forces into central Africa to depose the Lord’s Resistance Army general Joseph Kony — arguably the world’s most infamous wielder of child soldiers.

But African bloggers and journalists decried the video’s depiction of Africans as “victims lacking agency, voice, will or power”, while international relations experts warned of its overly simplistic narrative: the LRA left Northern Uganda six years ago and is reportedly on the wane; meanwhile re-igniting the conflict would necessarily mean fighting and killing the very same children the Stop Kony campaign sought to protect.

Still others cast a wary eye over Invisible Children’s own operations: A self-described “advocacy and awareness organization”, just 37 percent of its budget went to programmes in Africa compared to 43 percent spent on ‘awareness’ — projects like last week’s video. It appeared Invisible Children had never been externally audited, and for some reason had an offshore account in the Cayman Islands.

But the Morning Star can reveal a previously unknown wing of the organisation here in Britain — with ties to an international private intelligence agency. Read the rest of this entry »

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I Just Traced Invisible Children Back To Watergate

In Rory MacKinnon on March 15, 2012 at 5:41 am

It’s a provocative headline, but I’m entirely serious when I say that at least one Invisible Children staffer has ties to a multinational private intelligence agency. Skip to the bottom if you like, but please read it.

I was pretty busy with one thing and another last week so I didn’t get a chance to chime in on Invisible Children’s incredibly sus Kony 2012 campaign. If you miraculously haven’t heard anything about it, you can start with the excellent riposte at Visible Children, then some Actual African People, then the DSG’s heirs apparent at Demand Nothing.

As you’ll see one of the things that’s now coming out is the organisation’s … unorthodox approach to budgeting, with more money going to ‘awareness programs’ than actual operations in Africa. And unusually among non-profits, they seem to have an offshore account in the Cayman Islands.

Well, I finally got around to digging locally (with a tip from a friend) and found there’s an Invisible Children in the UK too — company no. 06679805, first incorporated in 2008. Its directors are Robert Bailey, Margie Dilenberg, Ben Keesey, James McMurtry, Laren Poole, Jason Russell – all staff listed on the US non-profit’s website – and one David Kelly DePauw Young, a UK resident. Read the rest of this entry »

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Occupy’s Object Lessons: Why The Camps Were Critical

In Rory MacKinnon on March 6, 2012 at 1:54 am
Protesters stand on a fort of furniture and shelving, challenging a police operation to remove them.

Photo by freelance journalist Stacey Knott.

[First published in the Morning Star, 02/03/2012.]

And because he was of the same craft, he abode with them, and wrought: for by their occupation they were tentmakers. — Acts 18:3

“OCCUPIED 137 DAYS, CLEARED IN 137 MINUTES” blared Wednesday’s Evening Standard as cleaning crews quite literally scrubbed Occupy London Stock Exchange from existence.

The capital’s exiled activists have refused to be cowed, rallying at their sole remaining camp in nearby Finsbury Square. But the loss of St Paul’s Square is only the latest in a string of setbacks: with a grim inevitability, the movement has been ceding ground since December. The repossession of public spaces has been a key image for the movement, with more than 20 outdoor sites across Britain at its height — but four months on, Nottingham, Norwich, Kent and Finsbury Square are all that remain.

The refrain among critics and commentariat alike is that the camps have outlived their relevance — as if the centuries-old predations of capital vanished the moment Miliband and Cameron parroted identical platitudes about ‘responsibility’.

But even the campers themselves have been divided on the issue: even as the eviction was underway, defender Pedro Lima told me they had “spent enough time with the 1 percent”. The week before, regular spokesman Ronan McNern had lamented their legal battles as “a major energy drain — sometimes you just want to get back to the cause itself.”

But a look back at the battle over St Paul’s shows the conflict has, if anything, only served to highlight Occupy’s discontent with the status quo. Read the rest of this entry »

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Some Things I Meant To Say Re: Occupy & The Riots

In Rory MacKinnon on January 3, 2012 at 1:57 pm

Kiwi Summer on Radio New Zealand National

[A ridiculously long postscript to my interview with Radio New Zealand's Kiwi Summer (listen here)]

I love radio, but every time I do a spot I always come away kicking myself because there’s a million more points or stats or clarifications overlooked without which I’m convinced I’ll sound like a blithering idiot. Luckily Charlotte and Sonia of Radio New Zealand’s Kiwi Summer have kindly offered to repost this on their Facebook page so I can completely undermine the point of a radio interview with a massive wall of text. So let’s get cracking.

Occupy & The August Riots Are Rooted In Dispossession
While Occupy and other protest groups have been frequently portrayed in media as a public menace, even the most right-wing media outlets have been wary of associating them with the ‘feral youth’ narrative that immediately sprang up in the wake of the summer’s week-long riots. Many Occupy activists I’ve spoken to have outright rejected any notion of common ground: we are Peaceful Protesters with Placards; they were just Violent Looters. Certainly there’s almost no demographic overlap — and there is an ethnic component to this which is delicate but vital — but it seems blindingly clear to me as an outsider at least that both Occupy and the riots could only have burst upon the country in the way they did because of a backdrop of political disenfranchisement and massive social deprivation. Read the rest of this entry »

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