Archive for Protests

Anti-terrorism police try to intimidate 12 year old youth club protest organiser

A 12 year old boy has been pulled out of class and interviewed by the police for organising a protest about the closure of his youth club outside David Cameron’s constituency office.

David Cameron

These kids is disrespectin’ me init?

The police told the boy that anti-terrorism police were investigating him and that he would be held responsible and arrested if there was any trouble at the protest. They also told him that anti-terrorism police would be watching his posts on Facebook and tried to talk him out of holding the protest.

The protest went ahead on Friday with 13 people and six police officers.

Trades Unions counter-protesting against EDL in Telford

The English Defence League are coming to Telford next weekend to protest in Wellington, motivated by the (alleged) muslim paedophile gang currently standing trail for grooming teenage girls.

Labour councillors have come out in opposition to the march and are getting behind Councillor Mike Ion’s campaign to deny the EDL their right to peaceful protest on the basis that he doesn’t agree with them, rather than concerns about them causing trouble.  Councillor Ion does, however, express concerns about violence erupting if fascist left wing thugs like UAF come out to hold their usual violent counter-protests.  Councillor Ion’s campaign has even attracted the support of the new leader of Telford & Wrekin Council, Kuldip Singh Sahota which doesn’t bode well for the next four years.

Now Shropshire & Telford Trades Union Council has organised a “unity” counter-protest to celebrate multiculturalism which will be held in another part of Wellington at the same time.  Most members of the vicious left wing fascist group, UAF, are union activists as well and will undoubtedly be out in force in Wellington to incite violence.

I have three questions about this counter-protest:

  1. What the fuck has this got to do with workers’ rights?  Trades unions are there to promote workers rights, not organise protests against activities that have nothing to do with workers rights.
  2. Is this kind of activity compatible with the constitution of the unions represented by the trade union council or the council itself?
  3. Have union members voted to support the action?

The EDL have a legal right to peaceful protest – it’s in the Human Rights Act.  Similarly, union members, UAF, Socialist Workers Party and other left wing fascists have a right to peacefully protest against them.  But trades unions?  If it’s not in their constitution then the organisers of the protest are acting ultra vires and are leaving themselves open to prosecution from any union member who opposes their action.

The left shows its true colours once again

201 people were arrested during the TUC’s protest in London on Saturday.  All 201 of them were still in custody today according to the BBC.

The protest was meant to be about opposing public sector cuts but as usually the case whenever you get more than a handful of left wingers, it descended into a riot with damage to both public and private property and attacks on the police.

Class war? First Class war more like.Sadly the left is pretty much economically illiterate which is why we have this boom and bust economic cycle where socialists get into government and bankrupt the country and then capitalists spend the next few years getting us out of trouble.  I’m generalising a bit by calling Labour socialists when they’re more accurately described as social democrats (with less emphasis on the “democrat” bit) and calling the Conservatives capitalist when they’re more accurately described as social market capitalists but they still adhere to socialist and capitalist ideologies.

The simple reality is that the UK is insolvent – more money is being spent than is being paid in taxes.  National debt is over a trillion pounds (£1,000,000,000,000) and will realistically never, ever be paid off.  The “cuts” that the economically illiterate left are opposing are reductions in the increase in spending, not real cuts.  But the “cuts” aren’t enough, we really have to cut spending in real terms and quite savagely.  This doesn’t have to result in swingeing cuts to services though, or at least not to essential services.  Spending on health and education can continue as it is or even increase.  Spending on roads and social care can continue as it is or even increase.  What we need is to start all over again with state income and expenditure.  There are so many taxes and public expenditures that it’s just a complete mess and countless billions are spent on merely administering this behemoth.  We need to go back to basics and simplify and cut back the whole public sector and tax system.

The tax handbook produced by HMRC every year which details all the tax rules is now over 10,000 pages long and comes in seven volumes.  Inordinate amounts of money are spent on administering the tax system and trying to find out whether people are evading tax, let alone trying to make them pay what they owe.  The tax credit system is the very worst of  a tax system that has been allowed to grow out of all proportion – in what alternate reality does it make sense to spend money collecting tax off people and them spend even more money giving it back to them rather than just not taxing them in the first place?  The tax system needs scrapping and starting again.

Public services also need cutting back.  There is too much bureaucracy in the public sector wasting money that should be spent delivering services.  You need management in the public sector just as much as you do in the private sector but you need management that can do things, not just talk about them and a lot less management is needed.  People are assets but they’re also liabilities – the private sector understands this better than the public sector which is why private sector organisations are a lot leaner than comparable public sector organisations.  The public sector needs to be run more like a charity (a proper charity, not one of the taxpayer-funded lobby groups that call themselves charities like Common Purpose or ASH) with a constant eye on value for money and an over-riding goal of providing services to people who need them.  Public sector organisations go too far one way or the other – they’re either run as profit-making companies or they spend money like it’s going out of fashion.

The left are wrong to be campaigning for no “cuts” and maintaining the status quo in the public sector.  The only way to keep spending at the current rate is to put up taxes and that’s not a sustainable way to run the economy because the economy needs people to have disposable income to stimulate growth and without growth you have recession and then you enter the economic doom cycle of people having less money to spend which send the economy deeper into recession.

So, back to Saturday’s protests.  What were they actually about?  It was supposed to be a march and rally against “cuts” organised by the Trades Union Congress (TUC) but I saw more banners and placards for completely irrelevant issues.  There were gay pride flags, religious placards, anti-capitalists, anarchists, banker-haters, CND flags, environmentalists, anti-Tory slogans, Palestinian flags, anti-Trident posters, “class war” placards, anti-tax avoidance posters and those are just the ones I remember seeing.  The TUC are claiming it as the biggest protest since the second world war but at the upper end of their 250-500k attendees (you can’t get much more vague than a 100% margin of error) it’s about the same as the 400k+ who descended on London to protest against the ban on fox hunting and all of those 400k were protesting against the hunting ban whereas a sizeable proportion of those in London yesterday were protesting about all sorts of things.

The TUC and the media tried to play down the violence and attacks on the police yesterday, saying it was a small group of about 125 people who weren’t there for the TUC protest.  As 201 people have been arrested so far, the 125 people is obviously wrong.  I will accept that the so-called anarchists (another form of socialism) weren’t there for the protest against the “cuts” but were there to cause trouble but you have to ask yourself why it is that they only ever turn up to left wing demonstrations and not, for instance, EDL marches?  The answer is that they are they are the true representatives of the views of the left, the only difference between one of the far left extremists attacking police officers and breaking into banks and businesses and the middle aged teachers and council workers and street football co-ordinators is that they have the balls to go out on the rampage.

I have often said that we need to be more like the French (how that sticks in my throat) and learn to protest better when we don’t get our own way but these people go too far.  The like of the EDL and the Countryside Alliance protested for change in policy, these “anarchists” are protesting against society.  I don’t want a communitarian society like these left wing nutjobs.  I want a society where things get made that I can buy, where stuff happens and I don’t have to worry about it and where I can come home and look at all the shiny things I’ve got and think “yes, it was worth going out to work for all this”.  If I wanted to live in a society where everyone ignored the law and things only worked when people could be bothered I’d move to France or Spain or Greece.

There is a certain amount of irony in these protests.  The unions paid for first class train tickets for their class war warriors and the cost of cleaning up and making good the damage caused by rampaging anti-“cuts” terrorists will take even more money away from the services they supposedly want to protect.  And the money companies like Top Shop, Santander and Fortnum & Mason’s spend cleaning up and repairing their buildings after they were attacked by people demanding they stop legally avoiding paying some of their taxes can be set off against their tax liabilities.  Well done lefties, way to score an own goal.

I am sick to death of the workshy, hypocritical left demanding more and more of my money to fund their addiction to the state and the state’s addiction to my money.  I want less tax, less government and more cuts.

London student protest pictures and videos

I caught the train down to London yesterday for the AGM of the Campaign for an English Parliament and ended up getting caught up in the student protests after they chose the exact moment the bus taking us from the station to Parliament Square was at the top of Parliament Street to make their way to the House of Commons forcing us to get off and walk alongside them!

The protesters were pretty good natured at first, smiling and pulling faces but then someone let off a firework and that seemed to be a signal for the troublemakers to start winding people up.  You could tell who the troublemakers were before they even did anything – dirty clothes, dreadlocks, hoodies, faces covered.

The CEP’s AGM was a couple of streets away so I popped back a few times to see what was going on and took a few photos and videos.