United Kingdom Anarchoblogs

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The Disabled People's Direct Action Network (DAN) is once again taking action against Birmingham City Council (BCC) on Monday 14th September for the rights of disabled people in Birmingham and everywhere to life, liberty and the choice and control over our own lives that most non-disabled people take for granted, but which we can be denied at the whim of a local authority.

BCC promised to work with DAN towards establishing genuine independent living for disabled people in Birmingham after our last action in March (see report at http://www.indymedia.org.uk/en/2009/04/425854.html) won us a meeting with Peter Hay (Director of Health and Social Care) and other Council officials, but has not delivered on that promise, and 6 months later there has been no apparent change in BCC's treatment of disabled people.

Yesterday (30th August 2009), a disabled service user and DAN supporter, for whom members of Birmingham DAN had been advocating in the "social care" system, died in hospital in Birmingham following BCC's refusal, only a few weeks before, to provide him with any care or support to live independently.

Disabled people in Birmingham are still being refused assessments for direct payments to employ Personal Assistants (which is breaking the legal obligation of all Local Authorities under the 1990 Community Care Act), being told by social workers that they do not have any needs or being bullied by council officials into signing agreements they do not want to sign, simply to save the council money.

Other disabled people are still homeless, living in totally inaccessible housing, trapped against their will in nursing homes where they have no choice and control over their own lives, or living in total social isolation and disgustingly filthy conditions, not because of a lack of funding for accessible housing and social support services, but because of the absence of the political will to use council funding for those purposes.

How many more disabled people will have to die and how many more lives will be put at risk before BCC gives us our human rights?

The action on September 14th will start at 1pm and will be in Birmingham city centre. For further information contact Steve on 07931 421947 or soulrebel@riseup.net or Tom on 07816 275985 or tomcomdan@hotmail.co.uk.

Please forward this message to as many disabled people (or anyone else who you think may be interested in taking part in the action) as possible.

FREE OUR PEOPLE!

With local councils around the UK preparing to slash services in the midst of the economic crisis, this week saw the first occupation of council property. The action at the Sedgemoor Splash in Somerset may have been short-lived - lasting just twenty-one hours - but it will surely set an example for others over the coming months and years.The Tory-run council closed the pool this weekend, and

SoupContemporary Urban Centre, Greenland Street (20th - 30th August 2009)If ever there was a theme designed to get the best out of artists, it is surely how they respond to their immediate environment. After all, this is part of their essential task - to interact with their surroundings and bring ideas and feelings together to create something new for the appreciation of others. Unfortunately,

The 6 worst bosses of all time… However, Bryant and May couldn’t help but notice the other match companies were still making more money. What were they doing wrong? Clearly they weren’t abusing their employees enough… was there some kind of torture device they could be using? Maybe if they just let wild badgers run loose [...]

So, a couple of weeks ago i went on the first holiday that was "just" a holiday (as opposed to things like protest camps, conferences* or arts festivals) of my adult life - a week in a cottage in the Lake District with 3 friends - which got me revisiting this post, written approximately 2 years ago**...

* I'm probably going to post about Autscape 2009 - which i went to immediately after this holiday - next.

** Yes, i've been blogging for over 2 years (and completely missed both the first and second anniversaries of my blog)... and there are still things that i've been intending to write about on this blog for the whole of that time that i haven't got round to writing about. Also, it seems like my writing style has got a lot less accessible over those 2 years, which is a bit depressing.

Most of what i wrote then, i still agree with - particularly the bits about the school and university term/holiday system, which, i think, was meant to be the more major point - but re-reading the first part is interesting in the light of having actually been on what was, on the face of it, a very "typical British holiday" of the sort i was basically saying i had no interest in doing, and enjoyed it.

The big thing is, of course, that going on holiday as an adult with a group of friends is incredibly different from going on holiday as a child in a nuclear family - and, re-reading that old post, i'm struck by the apparent fact that, even 2 years ago, i had far more cultural baggage about couples and nuclear families as the "only acceptable" social units, which i've somehow managed to shed, if not totally then to a fairly large degree, in the intervening time. (This is possibly, in part, due to having read and thought quite a lot about polyamory - which one of my next few posts will hopefully be about - and other ways of achieving "family" that don't fit the nuclear-family model.) (However, in those 2 years, i still haven't got any closer to resolving my involuntary celibacy situation, which is a bit depressing, but a topic derail too far for this post.)

Sharing living space with 3 other people, even 3 people who i know well and with whom i've been friends for several years, was somewhat stressful (especially as i hadn't fully realised just how used to living alone i'd got after over a year of having my own flat - going back, even temporarily, into a "shared house" situation was somewhat jarring) - but one thing that really helped was knowing that the people i was with knew me well enough to understand that my difficulties in social processing were not deliberate attempts to be unfriendly or make things harder for others (very much unlike my parents on my childhood holidays!), and that the times i got upset (which were only minor, really) were about me, not them. Overall, while i had been hoping that there would perhaps have been some deeper conversations that would have consolidated the friendships in a more concrete way***, it was an enjoyable experience, and one that i'm alread thinking about planning to repeat, and maybe even establish as an annual "tradition", and 2 years ago i wouldn't have ever seen that as a possibility.

*** which reminds me of things about friendship and "family" relationships that i need to write about, but am not quite "together" enough in terms of finding the right kind of language to write about right now...

What was a bit frustrating was that i only really got to spend a day and a half doing what i really wanted to spend most of the holiday doing - hiking in the Lake District fells (for non-British readers, "fells" is a term for areas of high ground which straddles the boundary between "hills" and "mountains", which i don't think is used much outside of Britain, or possibly even outside of Northern England), which was largely because of the friends i was with being not quite as "into it" as i was, which means that i might have to find a slightly different combination of people to do it with next year. (This somewhat brings me back to the ethical issues i wrote about here, and still haven't got fully resolved in my head... but then, i am famous as the person who Has To Ethically Analyse Everything, even when it might not be all that useful to...)

Anyway, the bits of the landscape i did get to see were incredibly beautiful, so i felt like i should include a few of my photos here... but really couldn't pick few enough to reasonably put in a short blog post, so instead i'm just going to include a link to my gallery of the holiday at Atpic (a relatively little-known site which, however, i recommend to anyone who wants to put photo galleries online because, unlike better-known (and admittedly also shinier-looking) sites like Flickr, it lets you upload as many photos as you like without a limit on how many are viewable, and is free)...

Again, i suck at conclusions. Might have some more worthwhile things to say about the experience, but can't think of them right now. Hopefully, tho, i am going to be posting a bit more regularly (tho no promises!) over the next few weeks or so...

With the Vestas and Ssangyong occupations now a couple of weeks behind us, it's time to look at the prospects for future workplace struggles, both in the UK - where industrial capitalism began - and China - where it had been booming over recent decades until the economic collapse. In both cases, tensions have been building up for a long time, and look set to erupt on the surface in the very near

One of the more recent targeting of ‘undesirable foreigners’by the UK Border Agency  has hit the Celtic Crusaders rugby league club. The UKBA has ordered six players and their families out of the country by 7th September and banned them from the UK for 10 years. The players in question; team captain Jace Van Dijk, club record try scorer Tony [...]

Written and directed by Quentin Tarantino On general release from 19th August 2009Inglourious Basterds is an utterly preposterous mess of a film from Quentin Tarantino. Even at two and a half hours, it sorely misses some cut scenes. Until the final key moments, it lacks any real structure, and not in a cleverish, knowing kind of way. More like a not properly thought through way. Major characters

Have accepted a natural lapse in my August post frequency as evidence of a slow down on approach to my holiday and decided to close early. See you in September.

On Saturday 5th September at 2pm-5pm we will be hosting a Jumble Sale fund-raiser at the The Wyndham Street Centre in Riverside (map)‎. There will be clothes, books, CD’s, bric-a-brac, cakes and other goodies up for grabs. We might even get some live music for the afternoon! We encourage all those who want to come and grab a [...]