Sex...

Now I have got your attention, I want to write about Conservative communications minister, Ed Vaizey, who has announced the governments intentions to “lean on” broadband internet providers to block internet content - not because the content is illegal, but because the government doesn’t like it very much.

OK, so at the moment he’s talking about internet pornography, stating that he wants ISP’s to consider blocking by default all access to the mucky stuff by anyone who doesn’t “opt in” to receive it (and dropping fairly ominous hints about the contents of an upcoming communications bill if they don’t) but believe me this is the thin end of a very fat wedge.

Just to make things absolutely clear, most internet providers already have stringent measures in place to block access to anything that is illegal, and quite rightly so! They also already offer comprehensive means for parents to control what their children can and cannot look at whilst online, and I have no argument with that either. If they wanted to spend public money on a serious campaign to educate parents who don’t already know how to make sure their kids are safe when online, that is perfectly fine by me. If they wanted to introduce measures to child protection legislation, stating that parents who don’t take appropriate measures to block their kids from accessing adult content are guilty of negligence, I probably wouldn’t argue with that either! Hell, if they wanted to stop Christine Aguillera shaking her boobies on children’s TV, sorry, I mean the X-Factor; they’d quite possibly have a fair point.

But to say that a grown adult has to sign on to some kind of special register, just so they can look at pictures of naked men and women having sex on the internet, is absolutely ludicrous and sets a very dangerous precedent indeed.

Think about all the other content that breaks no laws, but the government may like to have their own list of everyone who wants to access it anyway, just so they know who they are. Footage of police officers beating up suspects in the cells, or dragging profoundly disabled men out of their wheelchairs on student protests, perhaps? People using the internet to organise demonstrations about illegal wars or high profile tax-dodgers, maybe? Recent months have shown us just how powerful a tool for sharing information and enabling legitimate protest the internet actually is, they have also shown us why governments around the world have manifold reasons for wanting to control what people can and cannot do online.

If this government was serious about protecting children, they would not be slashing the education budget and making hundreds of social workers redundant. It just goes to show that when they talk about the perils of “Big Government”, what they really mean is they don’t want to regulate the banks or what big business can do to the general public, but have every intention of continuing the crack-down on civil liberties and free speech, like the Victorian censors who locked the treasures of the newly excavated Pompeii away in a secret museum, just because they were quite...well...rude!

90% of British homes get their internet from just six companies, BT, Virgin, Talk Talk, BSkyB, Orange and 02, so if you wanted to oppose the government’s plans on this one the obvious choice would be to boycott any firm that capitulates to pressure from Vaizey. Sadly I think that’s quite unlikely to happen. So perhaps all we can do is wait for the inevitable to happen, when some anonymous hacker or disgruntled customer service advisor gains access to the database, obtains a list of all the government ministers who have opted in to watch a bit of the old hardcore in the comfort of their own home...and sends it to WikiLeaks.

And then laugh our fucking arses off!

But by then we might be laughing on the other side of our face, because they'll probably have blocked WikiLeaks too!

It's Pay Day!

It has been said, that only two things in life are certain, death and taxes. But the fact is that ever since the invention of taxes, several millennia ago in ancient Mesopotamia, a whole caste of people have been dedicating their lives, generation after generation, century after century down through the ages, to figuring out more and more ingenious ways to avoid paying them.

By now, they’ve gotten pretty damn good at it indeed, and if you can afford to hire them there’s a very good chance they can save you a not-small-at –all fortune. They’re like the A-Team for rich fuckers, only easier to find.

So it should come as no surprise at all, that even in this age of austerity, when vital public services are being slashed like teenagers in a film with lots of roman numerals in its title, and VAT (which everyone pays at exactly the same rate, whether they earn minimum wage or take home the kind of pay that would make a premiership footballer turn green) is being increased to 20%, that rich fuckers are paying less tax than ever before. And sometimes it’s not even a case of the government saying that rich individuals and corporations don’t have to pay tax (although of course they do say that quite a lot), it’s more a case of them saying you should pay this much tax, and then turning a blind eye when they just...don’t!

It’s not even called tax evasion, which is illegal, it’s called tax avoidance and if you can afford to get away with it, it’s perfectly fine. It is estimated that there are currently £126 billion in unpaid taxes owed to the United Kingdom, and that in the next four years another £100 billion will be added to the pile.

Vodafone recently dodged a bill for £7 billion, HSBC Bank dodged £2 billion, Sir Phillip Green, who owns the Arcadia Group including high street brands like Top Shop, BHS and Dorothy Perkins and (incidentally) advised the ConDem coalition government on making cuts from public services, recently avoided paying £285 million in tax to the public coffers. The banking sector, which has received £850 million in bail-outs from the tax payer, is expected to pay just £2.5 million in tax. How has the government responded to this mega-swindle? By slashing the budget for Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs and putting thousands of tax inspectors, whose job it is to make sure people are paying what they should, out of work. So it really is not hard to see whose side this government (of multi-millionaires) is really on.

Fear not, for into the breach have stepped UK Uncut, and the Big Society Revenue and Customs department. For the past month or so, a widely distributed group, coordinated through Twitter and Facebook, have been taking on the corporate tax dodgers on their own battlefield of choice, the British high street.

They turn up in large groups equipped with placards, loud hailers and explanatory pamphlets, they gather at selected stores, occupy them, explain to all of their customers exactly how much of a bunch of scoundrels the people they are about to give their money to actually are. And in the best tradition of the civilly disobedient down the years, their tactics have been non-violent. Armed only with a bloody good argument, and the means of making sure they can hang around long enough to make it, (often by the simple expedient of superglue-ing themselves to something or occupying the roof) they have closed down some of the country’s biggest brand names flagship stores, in the busiest shopping weeks of the year. Today (Saturday 18^th December) they have staged their biggest day of action to date, PAYDAY, with over 55 separate protests held in shopping centres and high streets up and down the country, occupying outlets of Top Shop, Vodafone, HSBC, Boots, M&S, Barclays, BHS and Miss Selfridge, and managing to close down more shops than the worst winter weather in 30 odd years.

As their protest has been entirely non-violent, you probably won’t have seen much reference to it on the news (great way to incentivise peaceful protest guys!), although bizarrely enough their most positive coverage currently seems to be coming from the Daily Mail (link, begrudgingly, included). I have also included a link to video from the Brighton protest today where Santa Claus himself was finally and forcibly detached from the window of BHS and arrested by some (extremely cold looking) police officers.

If you think it’s just a little bit sick, that tax on bread and milk is going up, and spending on services to help the poorest and most vulnerable in society is being hacked down, all on the pretext that we are broke, whilst a government of the rich is allowing the rich to avoid paying billions in tax, check it out and get involved.

http://twitter.com/ukuncut

http://www.facebook.com/ukuncut

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hs7qvsdA2Jo&feature=player_embedded

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1339844/Topshop-boss-Sir-Philip-Green-enjoys-Barbados-holiday-despite-tax-protests.html?ito=feeds-newsxml

The Big Society Student Grant

I have to admit to feeling just a little bit sorry for the Liberal Democrats.

Not THAT sorry of course, after all they have enabled the Tories to return as a governing party in British Politics, but they are perhaps mitigating some of the worst excesses that a Conservative party with an outright majority would have perpetrated. For instance the Tories wanted tuition fees with no upper limit, allowing colleges and universities to charge as much as they wanted. I said at the time of the last election that I would have been quite happy with a LabLib coalition, keeping the Tories from asset stripping Britain whilst reigning in some of Labour’s more fascistic tendencies, especially in terms of civil liberties, and I do still stand by that.

Nick Clegg is clearly damaged goods now, and as the weak point in the coalition I’m not going to stop anyone from giving him a good verbal kicking for doing a complete about face on a key election promise, just so long as people don’t think, come the next election, that it was those horrible Liberals who wanted to use a crisis in the banking system as an excuse to roll back decades of social progress, so let’s all vote Tory. A goodly number of Lib Dem MP’s actually voted against the coalition government on Thursday, reducing its majority from 84 to just 21 in the first reading of the tuition fees bill, and the bill is currently being debated in the House of Lords where Liberal peers also have many reservations about the plans. At any rate, the Lords can only delay the rise in fees from being approved, so tuition fees of up to nine thousand pounds per year are now a reality.

And lots of people are, quite understandably, very unhappy with this. Thousands of them took to the streets on Thursday (09/12/10) to voice their displeasure leading to predictable scenes of mounted police charging, stones being thrown and “kettles” full of angry students boiling over, to the equally predictable sound of hysterics from the news media. Headlines filled with howls of outrage at injured police officers and a royal Rolls Royce splattered with paint, confusing vandalism with violence, are only now being slightly tempered by reports of the cerebral palsy sufferer Jody McIntyre being dragged out of his wheelchair by police, and of student demonstrator Alfie Meadows who needed emergency brain surgery after being hit on the head by police whilst trying to leave a kettle.

The fact is that people do still have a right to protest, despite the best efforts of recent governments. To get around this annoying fact, the authorities use policing tactics that are calculated to create the scenes we have seen in recent weeks.

First you take a large crowd of angry people who believe they actually have a right to walk down the streets of their country and make their voices heard. The vast majority of these people are ordinary level headed people intent on a peaceful demonstration of their displeasure, with a minority of radicals amongst them of course. Then you surround them with hordes of armed, armoured and mounted police who inform them that while they do of course have the right to protest, they had better to do it right here, not there, not there, and definitely not over there, so settle down and don’t cause any fuss.

Then you turn up the heat.

As anyone who has been in police kettle will know, it is extremely frustrating to be told that you cannot go where you want to go, simply because a handful of other people may try and smash a few windows. People become angry, frustrated and bored, cold and hungry and ultimately disappointed at what little their so called right to protest actually amounts to, tempers become frayed, push meets shove and before you know it someone has thrown a rock, the police horses have charged and instead of a few nutters in amongst a crowd of peaceful protesters, you now have thousands of pissed off students requiring a vent for their collective spleen. Then you film it and present it as evidence of why the right to protest should be further curtailed, and why the police should not be restrained in their approach to dealing with these hooligans.

I believe the government has lately been taking advice on the use of water cannons from police in Northern Ireland, which will be nice, especially if we get a hot summer next year.

So it seems we need an alternative form of protest, one that will not lead to anyone getting their brains smashed in or trampled by a police horse, and does not get you unfairly labelled as a mindless yob. As we are also going to need a new way of helping young people afford to go to university, perhaps we should combine the two?

I call it the Big Society Student Grant, and it works like this: first you borrow as much money as you need to finance your education, whether that is a three year bachelor’s degree or seven years of medical training. Then you study really, really hard and graduate with the best education that money can buy.

Now, you will have to organise and communicate amongst yourselves to arrange this next bit, because no one is going to help you, but you are all in it together...that is what makes it the Big Society right? So you say to yourselves, we are young; we have no assets, no houses, no savings and no jobs. We have thirty, forty, maybe even fifty thousand pounds worth of debt each. What can we possibly do?

Well, you can declare yourselves bankrupt, tens of thousands of you, en-masse, and tell them to go screw for the money!

Student loans are underwritten by the government, so they pay off the fees for your tuition as they should have done in the first place; you get six years worth of bad credit but you wipe your debt out, you won’t be able to get a mortgage in that time, but as house prices mean you’re going to be living at home with mum and dad until you’re thirty anyway, big fucking deal!

Its a peaceful solution, and one I feel must be given real consideration if the government insist on pricing all but the richest students out of higher education.

And The Truth Shall Make Ye Fret

Candid views of world leaders, the US uses its Diplomats to spy on the UN and other countries, the Israelis and the Saudis both wanted America to bomb Iran in 2010, Vladimir Putin is Batman, David Cameron and George Osborne are “lightweights” and “Thatcher’s Children”, Russia is run by the mafia, China is losing patience with North Korea, Pakistan is sponsoring terrorist organisations and is suspected of leaking nuclear material, the UK co-operated with the US in helping them evade the most difficult questions in the Chilcot enquiry into the Iraq war and in avoiding the ban on the use of cluster bombs...

For those who may have missed it, perhaps because they have suffered a brain trauma and have been in a coma for the past week, the latest release from WikiLeaks hit the fan on Sunday night and governments, institutions and high profile individuals world-wide are now quite heavily splattered in its contents. This release, following hot on the heels of the Afghan war diaries and Iraqi War Log, features over a quarter of a million diplomatic cables, confidential communications leaked from 250 US Embassies around the globe, which reveal the secret workings of the United States relationship with the rest of the world.

Understandably enough, the Americans are not at all impressed at having their dirty linen aired in public. Parallels have been drawn between the WikiLeaks release and the September 11^th attacks. Peter King, a Congressman for New York wasted no time in calling upon the Attorney General to have WikiLeaks designated as a terrorist organisation, Secretary of State Hilary Clinton described the release as an “attack on the international community”, Republican presidential nominee hopefuls Sarah Palin and Mike Huckabee called for WikiLeaks director Julian Assange to be “hunted down” and for the source of the leaked documents to be tried for treason and executed, there have been calls for Assange to be assassinated, employees of the US State Department have been instructed not to read WikiLeaks, US newspapers have been accused of colluding with their government to censor the leaked documents as presented to the public, while President Obama is busily re-writing the Espionage Act in a desperate attempt to find something with which Assange can be charged.

Meanwhile, those with a taste for conspiracy theory, from President Ahmadinejad of Iran to the 9/11 Truth brigade have dismissed the leaks as CIA/Mossad/Illuminati psychological warfare. Obviously!

The British press split fairly evenly between those describing the release as a major threat to international security (the BBC, ITN, Sky News, Daily Telegraph and Daily Mail) and those less hysterical commentators who saw it as a huge embarrassment to the United States, and to anyone else who has been named and shamed in the release (The Guardian, The Times, The Independent). Either way, the mainstream media have all been quite happily digging through the cables as they have been released, falling over themselves to report on each juicy revelation as it breaks, whilst simultaneously attacking and condemning WikiLeaks, presumably for showing them how to do their job.

Whether for or against, most people agree that the implications of what WikiLeaks has done are staggering. Revolutionary, in fact! Many have argued that International relations as we know it, cannot continue in a world where sensitive diplomatic negotiations can be made available to the global public at the click of a mouse.

My feeling on this is that, like it or not, they are going to have to get used it. The Official Secrets Act, and its equivalents around the world, has become the latest victim of a genuine technological revolution - the invention of the internet.

The Obscene Publications Act was the first to bite the dust, made irrelevant by the deluge of pornography freely available online. Next to come under attack were the laws governing intellectual property and copyright, and anyone who has downloaded a movie or shared their music collection online for free, has been participating in a war against the private ownership of information, a war most reliable commentators agree that the music, movie and publishing industry are eventually destined to lose.

With the launch of WikiLeaks in 2006, a new front has been opened in the war, and this time it’s political.

There have always been whistle-blowers, those who leak secret information that they are privy to, not to gain tactical advantage over an enemy, not to make a ton of money, but because they believe it to be in the public interest. Without whistle-blowers within the tobacco industry, how many more years would have passed before the public became fully aware of the detrimental effects of smoking? The internet is perhaps the single most powerful tool that humanity has developed so far, and in the hands of the whistle-blower, the truth can finally run all the way around the world before the censors have even got their boots on.

This is a truth that the governments of the world are going to have to adapt to, and quickly; the question is how will they react? Will they move towards greater transparency and openness in government, as the current American and British Governments at least promised to do whilst running for office, or will they try and turn the whole world into China?

My suspicion is that, if the fight over digital rights management is anything to go by, they will most probably try the latter, implementing increasingly draconian and totalitarian measures to curb the free availability of information, there is a Cyber security bill currently simmering away in the background of the US legislature that allegedly provides for a kill switch, the ability to turn the internet off.

The war of the geeks is ON, and personally, I think it’s about time.

We know that in recent years we have been told some absolute whoppers by our Governments, I wish for instance that there had been a WikiLeaks in 2002 and 2003, when the case for the war in Iraq was being made. We also know that our Governments have been obsessed with holding us under an ever increasing level of scrutiny, our emails can be read, our telephone calls can be monitored, we can be forced to pass through naked body scanners at airports, there was the recent push for a national ID card scheme with an accompanying database, and the British people are now amongst the most spied upon population on the planet with over 4.3 million security cameras watching our every move. In such an environment, I think it is only fair that we hold our Governments under an equivalent level of surveillance, and WikiLeaks may just fit the bill.

So don’t believe for a second that you have heard the last from WikiLeaks, and if you were thinking that the American Government have been taking a disproportionate amount of the flack don’t worry, in a recent interview with Forbes Magazine Julian Assange revealed that their next major release, due sometime in the new year, will focus on the private sector, on a major American bank in particular, and with everything that has happened in the world of international finance lately - it promises to be juicy!