Lift The Siege 8 - Sidney Street

Jack The Ripper had been active in the last decade of the nineteenth century and part of the hysteria had wrapped itself up in virulent anti-immigrant feeling since Whitechapel and the neighbouring areas were heavily settled by Jewish refugees from Russian pogroms. This persisted into the new century and reached its apotheosis with the siege of Sidney Street in the first days of 1911. 

Many Jews were regarded as revolutionaries, anarchists and socialists and the Sidney Street gang of Latvians were dubbed as anarchists, whereas in all likelihood they were just armed robbers, who justified their thievery as expropriation of property. Interrupted during a night-time attempt to break into a jeweller’s shop, the gang shot and killed 3 unarmed policemen and also managed to fatally shoot their own leader in the struggle. The gang dispersed, but were gradually rounded up by the police following tip offs from the public. The last two suspects were holed up in a house at 100 Sidney Street in Stepney. A shoot-out ensued, but the police firearms were easily outgunned by those of the two gangsters and they requested, for the first time in London, the assistance of the army. 

Then Home Secretary Winston Churchill turned up to view proceedings and was jeered by the onlookers for the perception of a liberal immigration policy laid at his feet. This was also the first siege captured by news cameras, in this case the Pathé newsreel service. Eventually the two gangsters were killed as the house went up in smoke and claimed a final victim when one of its walls collapsed and crushed a fireman to death. Churchill’s proposed tough immigration bill was defeated as being against British values, while the other supposed gang members were all acquitted for lack of evidence to convict them. For such carnage, only the accidentally killed gang leader and the two in the house at Sidney Street were deemed responsible, despite eye witnesses that there were at least three teams involved in the robbery of the jewellers. 

As a final kick in the teeth to authorities, in 2008 the local council named two tower blocks after one of the minor gang members, a full two years before any commemoration of the fallen policemen and three years before a memorial to the fireman. Perhaps the area did house anarchist sentiments after all. 

*

"Three Dreams In The Key Of G" has three female voices in a state of siege. One a young mother in sectarian Northern Ireland, just after the Good Friday Peace Agreement has returned paramilitary fighters from both sides back into the domestic realm for an uneasy peace there. The second a Waco-like siege in Florida, as the FBI, DEA and ATF surround a compound full of women, which they see as a threat to all of mankind. The third is in laboratories all over the globe, the Human Genome is being besieged by scientists as they try and uncover its code for life. 

 The siege will be lifted 26/07/2018

Published by Dead Ink Books 

Available from Amazon and all good book shops in the UK

Lift The Siege #1 - The Siege Of Troy

Lift The Siege #2 - Waco

Lift The Siege # - Balcombe Street 

Lift the Siege #4 - Crusader Castles

Lift The Siege #5 - Stalingrad

Lift The Siege #6 - Operation Nifty Package (General Noriega)

Lift the Siege #7 - Siege Of Derry

What Election Campaigns Fail To Communicate

A Party Manifesto is a curious beast. It offers policies on almost every issue that effects a nation, or if not policies, a stated ideal. But no Party ever wins an election and then delivers every item. Also do supporters agree with every single policy outlined in a manifesto, especially given how broad a spectrum of political values and views the major parties represent within their membership.

This election more than others I can recall, has also seen that rather than the detail of a manifesto, the thrust of the campaigning is to associate your party with just one or two key values, or to associate the other lot with one or two key values; 'Tax and Spend' the Tories accuse Labour of. 'The Nasty Party of welfare cuts' Labour try and dub the Tories. It was curious how we had a phoney war beginning of the campaign, when we were drip-fed one policy a day by each party, because the manifestos weren't out. We had a 7-leader televised debate again before any had launched their manifestos. Manifestos seem to have become less and less significant. I wonder what the percentage of the voting population is that have read at least one manifesto? Tiny I would imagine.

In the past I have spoiled my ballot paper by writing 'None Of The Above' on my ballot paper. Mainly because there was no protest party I could vote for, since only the three main parties stood in my constituency and I simply couldn't support any of them with my vote. However recently other parties have started standing here (representing how these parties are standing right across the country). I voted Green in the last couple of ballots. I was intending to do so again this time round, when I noticed a twitter debate about one of their policies. They were proposing to limit artists' copyright to just 14 years after publication/performance. That is after just 14 years, the author ceases to own and control their work, but is free to view/perform for anybody. Currently copyright only ceases 70 years after the death of the artist. As a writer theoretically I'm affected by this. But since I only earn pin money from my work, losing control over my back catalogue wouldn't really affect me financially. But for artists whose income rests on their creations it would seriously affect their livelihoods. Plus copyright for 70 years after death allows the provision of a financial legacy as well as the artistic one for a couple of generations.

However, this policy as outlined here is completely ripped from its context. Whether you agree with them or not, the Greens are offering a genuinely radical vision of society. Labour may mouth platitudes about equality, but the Greens lay out a theory of change to enshrine this. They seek to remunerate all citizens equally, (a citizen salary if you will), which means getting away from the aspirational culture of job status, materialism, consumerism, all underpinned with conserving the rapidly depleting resources of the planet. If this has echoes of Communism to your ears, you're not far wrong; one of the things that ultimately brought down Soviet Russia was absenteeism and poor productivity in the workplace, because the workers were completely unmotivated. If a Doctor has to train for seven years to qualify, what is his incentive if he earns little more than a waiter?

The policy limiting copyright falls under this template for society. Private ownership is not community minded. Art should be accessible and available to all, for the enrichment of society as a whole. And this to my mind embodies the whole problem of the Green manifesto. They have to get across the whole vision and the rationale for it, so that releasing sound bite policies such as copyright just makes no sense. And it is so radical a vision, it is a huge undertaking to convey it to the populace at large. I have seen no evidence of this being undertaken. Possibly this is because the main conduits of press and media are not giving them much exposure as a minority party. But the message isn't getting out there, so they come across as looking like killjoys armed with a quiverful of policies attacking random social groups.

I mentioned that to some their vision for society may smack of Communism, but it also shares certain ideas from Anarchist theory. In my youth I read a lot of Anarchist texts and developed my own ideal for society. And in many ways it shared much of the Green vision, only I imagined it could only operate in a society in which work was minimised through automation, so that we dwelled in a leisure economy; free to spend our time socialising, making art, playing sport or just thinking and enacting ideas. In such a model, private production and ownership of art would make less sense if we were all at it. Therefore copyright might have had no real place. But the Green model still quite rightly assumes a working life for citizens (technology seems to have created longer working hours for us all through the drive of the market and fear of losing our jobs, rather than shorter ones), therefore the context for art does not change significantly from what it is now in a free market economy. The Greens pledge in the manifesto to invest heavily in the Arts, perhaps as a fillip to us artists cheesed off by losing ownership of our work in under a decade and a half. Therefore in a way they are not pursuing all that radical a version since they are still operating a capitalist system, just one with many limits and constraints.

So the bald statement of a limit on copyright turned off those in the artistic community who thought of voting Green this time round. The counter to that of it being a piece in a large jigsaw to radically transform society completely got lost because that larger vision has not been rolled out to the population in any significant way. But even when one takes the time to consider the whole picture proposed by the greens, I'm afraid they fall short and the copyright issue perfectly illustrates as to why. To my mind, their whole approach smacks of the influence of the Occupy movement. It's all very well holding discussion groups under canvas and batting around ideas, but unless on leaving those encampments you go and spread the word, they will not magically percolate into the mainstream. There is an exclusion and elitism about such an approach, that somehow if you don't join you don't get access to the key ideas to the magic kingdom. And while the Greens have knitted together many ideas into a coherent (if challengable) theory, not many of these ideas are actually new. that's what Occupy failed to see, as they imagined they were the first people to have such ideas and to be working on them in a uniquely creative way. I did my own work on this in my teens, since these ideas have been around for many decades. And still few in that camp have gone out to spread the word and preach the vision.

Sorry Greens, you've lost my vote even though temperamentally your vision is closest to my own. It took a bit of reading around the policy on copyright for me to reach this conclusion, rather than the threat to copyright itself. I've seen it argued that parties with no chance of getting into government don't really need a manifesto representing a raft of ideas they won't ever be called on to enact into law. This is debatable as through the exigencies of coalition government that we are likely to be faced with, smaller parties will actually have a shot at forming a government. But one thing is for sure, the Greens so want to transform society, the odd policy from their manifesto adopted here and there is not really what they are about. They of all parties DID need to produce a manifesto to lay out their wholesale vision. And it is the complete manifesto that ultimately sinks them in a way it doesn't for other parties who will blithely ignore or rescind great tranches of what they promise in their pages.

Why I'm Not Pre-occupied with the Occupy Protest

A protest against the iniquities of capitalism? Count me in ...

Only I hate camping, come out in hives when near religious institutions and well UK Occupy have got their tactics wrong haven't they?

The biggest problem is there is little they can offer up about their protest other than an ill-defined disgruntlement. Though they have garnered lots of media coverage, little of it engages with their purpose and few media outlets seem that interested in trying.

Already the counter-reformation has led to media obsessions with tents being revealed as uninhabited at night, through the use of (battlefield?) infra-red cameras and questioning whether office commuters are being tripped up on the way to work in the City in the morning. The agenda is being shunted into obscure sidings. Also, if you propound the lack of leaders and spokespersons as an organisational and political strength, it does make it hard to convey your viewpoint on serious TV news programmes.

The assembly of people under canvas say that they are debating and discussing ideas. Now this strikes me as a generational thing, because I have all my arguments against capitalism long marshalled over the years. (I've written fictional books to prove it!)But it's true that pace Thatcher and merrily continued by Blair and Brown, there has been a decreasing public space for debate among the demos, as collective and social institutions are eroded (libraries anyone?) and the Executive agglomerates more and more power to itself so that Prime Ministers can take the country into openly unpopular wars.

There really is nothing new under the sun, either about capitalism's opprobrium, or the lack of any credible economic system of organisation to replace it. There has been no new political or economic thought since John Maynard Keynes. Even the radical free marketers espousing Milton Friedman in the 1980s, were only rehashing John Bright And William Cobden's nineteenth century credo. Movements like UK Uncut and Occupy display wonderful creative organisational energy in the nature of their protest, but are completely stumped for offering up alternative systems to replace that which they're protesting.

If you were going to be both rigorous and spectacular with your approach to protest, then maybe rather than occupy a cathedral's walkup space and hit the concessions kiosk takings, maybe construct a simulacrum of the Houses Of Parliament and hold a genuine discussion of politics and constitution, which in the British case is actually to figure out what our 'invisible' constitution actually is and set it down and make it accessible for all. Symbolic and practical resistance and protest all in one. So far the only casualties of the protest have been some clergymen, as the Anglican Church is further rent down the middle by the spasming twitch of its radical rump suddenly getting a jolt. This from an institution beset by strife over gender and sexuality among its own priesthood.

But in fact we don't even need this symbolic form of protest I believe, since the means for change have already been laid, somewhat unwittingly by government themselves. Before I go on to suggest what this might be, I do commend the sentiment behind Occupy of talking and debating those areas of politics and finance that the worlds of Politics and Finance don't want us to discuss and have effectively kept us in the dark about these past 30 years. For me, a crucial precursor involves a politicisation and an education of the electorate and such debates and discussions, if there is an upswell, can only help contribute to such a process. (Hence Occupy can only be termed successful if people are inspired to go and raise these issues in their Parish councils and WI meetings and the like).

I think the government have opened up a whole can of worms with their online petitions and plebiscites. We've already had the disclosure of the details behind the Hillsborough disaster finally after 22 years of suppression of information, because the public managed to get sufficient numbers of signatures online to force the issue. There ought to come a time when people realise that rather than sign up in order to have the Parliamentary talking shop discuss a particular issue, we the people are perfectly capable of discussing it for ourselves and voting online, without recourse to craven representatives doing it on our behalf and defanging anything remotely threatening to the status quo. The will of the people directly transmitted to the Civil Service who would then expedite our actual needs.

Of course the politicians may look to withdraw online democracy if it proves too menacing to their livelihoods, but the genie is out the bottle on that one and any attempt to deny us service will make them appear as craven as Mubarek's attempts to hold on to power. And yes not every household has access to online technology (didn't Gordon Brown promise every household would be digitised by 2012 and not just its television services?). And no doubt there can be fraud and technological jerrymandering, but hey there are enough rotten boroughs up and down the realm already extant.

The two greatest barriers to this bloodless revolution, are our own will, (not grasping the nettle out of timidity or deference) AND our paucity of political education and awareness of the issues and a lack of commitment to take responsibility and get to understand the affairs of government - self-government in this case. So I do salute the faint stirrings of public debate offered by Occupy, even if they seem to be starting from a very low base. But only if such a will to debate and discuss and exchange ideas grows countrywide, can it possibly lead anywhere. But oh my, how radical a destination could it take us to?

with thanks to Alex Butterworth,Bibi van der Zee, Ted Vallance and Dan Hind for panel discussion hosted by Little Atoms that helped me order my thoughts above

What Price Artists?

In the third of my series of politics and culture, I want to offer a devil's advocate case for why no art form ought to be subsidised by funding from the public purse. It isn't necessarily what I believe, but it's a debate that in the light of economic recession and new technologies ought to be had. The Arts Council have been charged by the UK ConDem Government to cut its subsidy budget by 25%.

Okay Diablo, over to you:

When like all good libertarians you were reading Kropotkin and Proudhon, did you, as I did, imagine we'd all grow into a post-work, leisure economy? One in which our greatest export would be the arts, seeing as we would be free to practice and hone our creations all day, along with some sporting excellence for those who couldn't sit still at school. Well I certainly got that wrong and rather than giving up work, seems like we're going to be asked to labour for longer than ever in order to repair the shortfall in the nation's coffers.

In such an astringent economic climate, it is simply impossible for any arts body to ask for more public subsidy. But let's go even further in the national audit, why subsidise any art form at all? Possibly the UK's most successful art in commercial terms, is rock music. Yet of all art forms it probably receives the least in handouts. Wasn't it Mrs Thatcher who said the arts must pay their own way? Nonetheless, the taxpayer heavily funds Opera, Ballet, and about half of the National Theatre. Let's see them sink or swim under their own commercial efforts. Let's have the subsidised art galleries duke it out with the purely commercial ones.

But it's not fair I hear you chime. One is not comparing like with like. Bricks and mortar based art forms have far greater overheads than those art forms practised by individuals or small groups. Indeed and t'was ever thus. Within any organised society, art has always been associated with patronage, usually at the Court of the monarchs. By contrast, folk and popular art have always had to pay their own way, singing for your supper in taverns, or where ready-made crowds were gathered such as at executions and fairs, all the way through to the music hall, the jazz club and Tin Pan Alley. Just now the historical linkage with commerce seems to offer popular art the possibility of forging ahead of its laggardly, cost-bloated social superior.

Writers, singers, film and video makers and even certain visual arts can produce their art more readily and cheaply than ever before thanks to technology. But more significantly they can shape their own markets by directly selling to their audience and communicating with them online. The site-specific high arts of course struggle to do this. Virtual world and file sharing may just be shaping up as the prevailing market for the creative arts and if those classical forms mired in stasis cannot compete accordingly, then so be it. This is the pure market.

I'm not saying it's easy to tout your wares in what is a very crowded arts suk, but the means of production and distribution are now with the artists themselves. Most artists who build their careers online, are likely to be underpricing their wares at least initially in order to try and develop a fanbase. This raises questions as to just how do we as a society value our creative artists? If it's left to the market, then apart from the superstars at the top, then not terribly much. But again, QED when throwing that evaluation back on the current high arts we are still funding publicly. What does society see as the arts providing for its citizens? The high arts tend to be elitist, the low arts are seen as no less parochial. All sorts of theories abound as to the value added to the quality of life, an uplifting of the soul, the benefits of the aesthetic, the sublime and the cathartic. Mrs Thatcher didn't even believe in 'society', so where does that leave any of those theories? Love it or hate it, the internet bridges the atomised individual to the social network of the like-minded.

Art is at some level a medium of communication. From the creative imagination of the often absent artist (author, film director, choreographer, composer), to the receptive imagination of the audience. Let all art stand or fall on its ability to communicate thus. The successful pieces will speak to large audiences. The unsuccessful ones will slip beneath the waves. In doing so they will either pay their way or not. But that has to be the precise level playing field. No subsidy for any single art form. Put the onus back on us artists to reach out and find our audiences, communicate and move them. In this case the audience is always right. They vote with their fingers moving across mouse cursors, even if that is to order tickets for a site-specific event, rather than download a film.

So my challenge here is not solely to governments, but partly also to artists of which I count myself one. We are paid what society (the market) deems us worth. Again I'm saying it's far from easy to go out and find your market and then carve it out. But if you regard it as your calling, as a vocation, then you'll do what it takes won't you? No longer can an artist hide from his audience. Now we are all accountable.

To return to some political theory , may I suggest you read the below by Sergei Nechayev (if in your dim and distant youth you haven't already) and replace the word 'revolutionary' with 'artist' and 'revolution' with the word 'art'. Then, just then, we may get some worthwhile artistic production once again, that is neither resting on its subsidised laurels, nor wholly taken with its own delusions of originality. If the public want tradition, nostalgia, sentiment, they'll get traditional, nostagic and sentimental art; if they clamour for new ways of seeing, the market will provide.

"The revolutionary is a doomed man. He has no personal interests, no business affairs, no emotions, no attachments, no property and no name. Everything in him is wholly absorbed in the single thought and the single passion for revolution.

from “The Revolutionary Catechism”

Of course, an artist may not want to ditch his emotions entirely. Renders him far less likely to be able to connect with his fellow man. But the rest I believe holds up. Artists, forge your own value. Society is the market, is the size of your audience. Get talking with them.

- Devils' Advocate rests his case (The devil has all the best tunes)

Is art a vocation in the same way that nursing or teaching is seen as a calling and therefore viewed by governments as legitimately being lower paid because of the practitioners' commitment to their calling? Some other callings such as doctors, are not so shabbily paid. Who makes these judgements? But it is as the devil cites, very hard for arts practitioners to ask for more funding when other 'socially useful' realms are also going cap in hand. So what is an artist worth to their society?