Was it something I said?

The summer holidays are over and with it the sound of screaming kids enjoying the last days of any real freedom they will ever know, until Halloween that is.

For the most part my summer was spent inside an office doing mundane tasks; Australian comedian Steve Hughes calls this 'working maximum hours for minimum wage'.  Never one to feel too hard done by I decided to take my nephews to an old haunt I frequented many a time as a youngling with my Grandfather, Hunstanton. It was relatively close by with the changeable weather in mind and good enough for their first visit to an English seaside.

An early rise was compounded by a bit of late night research and the sudden realisation I hadn't sorted out a lunch for my better half, who being a coeliac (allergy to wheat and gluten) makes it hard to find somewhere to eat out without having first checked out the eateries. The last time I checked it was fish and chips and not a lot more.

The journey was uneventful, I had the pleasure of my eldest nephews company, who requested the mandatory 'air in the night' by Phil Collins to kick start the journey. With a captive audience I decided to broaden his musical horizon and wean him off JLS and reacquaint him with Bob Marley, Nirvana, Queens of the Stone Age, Eric Clapton and Led Zeppelin. He was not impressed. 

When we arrived it was clear to see not much had changed in the 14 or 15 years since I last visited the town. The old car park seemed to have the same old vans parked in it, with the same faces walking around the same market. We headed down to the sea straight off and I watched as the ever entertaining youngest of my nephews chased the waves for the first time.

The waves were not in the same league as those of Bells Beach but it was fun for the younglings.

The elder stateswoman of the group wanted to have breakfast before heading down to Old Hunstanton so we elected to find the old cafe we had always gone to for a cup of tea and some toast; I still have vivid memories of hearing the news there that Ayrton Senna had died at Imola in 1994, sat with my juice. Moving up the hill the old cafe was nowhere to be seen, it had gone, but another promising little family place was situated across the road so we gave it a chance and took a look at the menu.

As my family filed in through the door I noticed a young family already sat in the corner with their breakfast fresh on the table, a man with his girlfriend and 2 children. He was no older than me and his partner a few years younger perhaps, he had his top off and was covered head to toe in tattoos. Having had one or two myself in the past I am a fan of good art work on a human canvas, but this man was sporting St George's Cross, a British Bull dog and 'Made in England' on his leg.

My family deliberated at the till on what to eat and I turned to wait outside, the atmosphere seemed to get a little tense.

I do not think my family had particularly noticed but an uncomfortable feeling over came me and within a couple of minutes the young family were hurrying out of the cafe. Was it something I said? Was there a sign I had missed that said 'no blacks, no Irish?' No, but it is something I have experienced on more than one occasion in the past, I imagine they must have truly believed whatever they had read in the Daily Mail that week. As a child I remember occasions where people would stare at my mother for having a child considered 'half caste' and later of 'mixed race or heritage' but had never thought anything more about it since then until I saw the reaction to my nephews, their mother and I.

Why should I have, are we not all of mixed heritage? After all this is the 21st century...

What were our crimes I wondered? Other than my sister sporting the Hijab and myself a wild, Hendrix-Esq Afro? Nothing, other than not being white in a country that now, in some ways, views Muslims and Islam the way some people used to view Black people and Jews.

These are strained times for all of us regardless of our cultural upbringing, the only real difference between any one of us. The cold war has been replaced by the war on terror and putting with it a whole new section of the worlds population in the cross hairs of people that feed and are fed on fear. It is this very fear that will no doubt lead my nephews, and many other children of a similar age, into a new era of hate that no one will be truly able to explain the reason for why, other than 'they just do'.

I wish I had asked the gentleman why he felt the need to take his family out of the cafe but at the time I felt he was not the sort to debate and held the door for him as they shuffled past. I missed an opportunity to offer a positive experience to him and his family of people that are different in some ways, yet alike in so many ways more.

It left me wondering whether this is how it will always be, with my nephews blissfully unaware of the animosity and mistrust in the world around them until it hits them in the face, perhaps quite literally as it did with me, with this man, his children and others like them growing up to fear, needlessly, someone based purely on the fact that their bodies have a little more melanin than them or that their way of showing their faith to God differs?

We are shaped by our environments but I am an optimist, reformed and hope for a better world, one that will eventually learn to see through the propaganda and hype played out to us by the media and lead to us embracing each other as a common species, not as individual races.

All the world's a stage

Unless you have been on a visit to another planet or stuck somewhere in the the outback without a 3G connection you will know that the London Olympics has been underway for the past 2 and a bit weeks.

What would be amazing is if the athletes told the corporations where to go

From the moment Danny Boyle's opening ceremony finished until the final curtain today, August 12th, the majority of the UK has remained transfixed by the drama unfolding in the Olympic theatre of dreams. 

What awaits everyone the day after is a more sombre affair: the recession or as some are now calling it, the 21st century depression.

The Olympics has been something I have pretty much boycotted since Sydney 2000; Athens 2004 was tainted for me by drugs offenders, Beijing 2008 by human rights oppression by the Chinese authorities and their refusal to accept Tibet as a sovereign state and London 2012, a chance in a life time to witness an event this big at home marred by a terror state military presence and surface to air missiles being placed on peoples apartments in the name of safety and security. 

Despite all this, during London 2012 I have still found the earth minutes to sit down and watch David Rudisha, the 800m legend, Usain Bolt and his meteoric brilliance and Mo Farah. What it has reinforced in my mind however is the power of distraction that is television, the social conditioning box. This happened coincide with a period of time flying a desk at work, working 9-5. It has dawned on me just how well the system works for everyone except us.

This is my first blog since July 22nd, in that time plenty has happened both to me and around me to write or type until my fingers bled. War criminal Tony Blair is back working for Labour, no doubt hoping the majority of the country have forgotten about his blood thirsty ways (not me Tone). Israel continue to apply pressure on the 'good people of free nations' to side with them in a war against Iran and Syria is a basket case of civil unrest and blood shed that has led to the UK government handing the unknown rebels funding, but not arms. In the actual Olympics themselves there was of course Danny Boyle's much divisive opening ceremony and of course there was the shameless plug by the BBC during the sprint finals on Nazi eugenics, the legacy of 'super slaves' from Jamaica and why black people dominate sprinting, but that however is a story for another day, and lets not talk about the Euro Millions lottery that just so happened to roll over every week the Olympics were happening. Who runs the lottery anyway? 

Tomorrow will see us awaken to the chorus of 'Olympic Legacy' where Cameron has pledged to fund athletes up until Rio 2016 with the same backing that they have received since securing the London 2012 bid in 2005. This will be led by Lord Sebastien Coe, who has been dodging the question about removing Dow Chemicals from the Olympic Sponsor list following their involvement in the Bhopal disaster 27 years ago, in the build up to the games this year. I for one tried to email him regarding this only to find his email was bouncing back the thousands of people bombarding him on behalf of Amnesty International. 

Tomorrow however is still several hours away and the social conditioning box cannot let us go too long without being distracted in case we start to work out how badly the system has thrown us overboard. 

So it was to my shock and horror that on the radio this afternoon on the way home I heard the first football result of the season; the final scores of the Community Shield. This must also mean that X-factor cannot be far away with yet another insipid Christmas number one that has no heart, soul or meaning and more young girls will be flaunting flesh or advocating being beaten by their boyfriends. 

The power of the social conditioning box should not be underestimated; it is hopes and dreams that they sell to us through the television, that we will all one day be movie gods or rock stars, but we won't.

If you are right, you have the right to fight

Language: under and over estimated in equal proportions, the use of it everyday to define, refine and confine sections of the community depending on the users capability or understanding. Two words used a considerable amount at the minute are militant and protester, usually in the same sentence.

From the free online dictionary:

Militant: to be vigorously active and aggressive, especially in support of a cause: militant reformers.
Protester: an expression or declaration of an objection, disapproval, or dissent, often in opposition to something a person is powerless to prevent or avoid: a protest against increased taxation.

Or from the Oxford dictionary;

Militant: favouring confrontational or violent methods in support of a political or social cause.
Protester: a person who publicly demonstrates opposition to something; a demonstrator.

These are the words that management and the media use everyday to describe working class people who are fighting for their basic rights to a livable wage and safe working conditions. Words that are unfair in their use that serve only to alienate and separate those standing up and speaking out from the rest of the working class who may well have resigned themselves to their own fate and scare any potential fence sitters away from joining a picket line, march or rally.

To stand up for what is right does not make you militant, it makes you passionate. To be passionate about a cause is not wrong.

To know you are right gives you the right to fight and this is exactly what people such as the Essex Fire Brigades Union members are doing, the cuts being faced by Essex fire crews affect the safety of every man, woman and child living in Essex. The cuts being pushed through in Essex are not for savings, they are of an ideological nature, this in itself is a very dangerous ethos for any fire authority to operate by because, ultimately, cuts costs lives. The budget for Essex Fire Service has increased from £70m to £77m, with reserves that went up from £4m to £12m, yet the management continue to plunder the service with devastating and needless cuts. In the 36 months since the initial dispute started there have been 160 firefighters lost.

The people of Essex that are standing up rightfully against these sweeping and savage cuts are also having the very essence of their human rights eroded by a totalitarian dictatorship who have imposed restrictions on their right to freedom of expression. It is a psychological war of oppression that would not be out of place in 1930's Germany. This is a problem shared in the wider community, something I feel becoming ever more present across all our daily lives with the creep of fascism spreading through society.

It is the elephant in the room nobody wants to talk about, the George Orwell state is upon us.

Outside Essex County Council - No more cuts

Essex to their credit have stood together in the face of some vociferous adversity from senior management. From body cameras being employed to spy on firefighters to CCTV being installed on community owned fire stations at the tax payers expense! Even police escort off stations on strike dates and fear of discipline and reprisal for daring to use words on a fire station that you can use in everyday life outside those very walls. The strike in Essex is a local dispute but it has national importance for us all, not just in the fire service but across all workers in the UK suffering in these times of austerity. Unions need to up their game by supporting each other both visibly at rallies and picket lines to financially aiding those people taking the decisions to withdraw their labour. This is not a decision made lightly. The show of unity and strength in Essex is something we should use to launch our own fight backs and we too must support them however we can.

Never have truer words been spoken

Whilst it is sad that workers across the country have felt that in order to be heard and have a chance of defending their working conditions they must take the challenging steps of strike action, let us not forget that this all comes against the back drop of billions of pounds of our money being spent on buying machines that deliver nothing but death, destruction and misery to countless souls around the globe. News just this week that the new stealth bomber being delivered to the UK is to be at a cool £100m for each jet, we can afford to wage illegal wars but not ensure we can retire in comfort after a life of service.

The march and rally in Essex was a resounding success but more can be and must be done if we are to continue this fight against ill judged idealism.

The people united will never be divided

The boiling frog theory: throw a frog into a pan of hot water and he will jump out, put him into a pan of cold water and gradually turn up the heat and he will not sense the danger, he will sit there and perish.

This is the scenario today facing the public sector across the country.

Bit by bit public services are being eroded, department by department, until they are gone, privatised to be run for a profit by people that may not have our best interests at heart. These are classic divide and conquer tactics for the government and their pay masters who rely on the knowledge that (generally speaking) we will not stand up and speak out if something does not directly affect us. hey know a power grab will result in a violent kick back by the people but by picking us off one by one we will not see the bigger picture and react only when it is too late.

The result will be services that are nothing but a shell of their former selves.

The Independent today featured an article called 'how the coalition carved up the NHS' and was well worth reading. Key points it highlighted were the fact that the Tories viewed "choice, competition and a greater willingness to make use of the private sector" as the best way to improve the performance of the NHS; it goes on to say "the existing NHS executive was to be abolished and in its place a new economic regulator charged with proofing competition across the service, any willing provider as to be allowed to supply NHS care at NHS prices".

This is all well and good but as with all services that are privatised you get neither choice nor competition, prices increase steadily and then exponentially. Think train fares that happened to go up by 6% on average this year followed by the usual comments about how the increased fares will go to improving services, I guess we can live in hope.

What is more likely to happen with the NHS is that the vultures will circle and descend upon trusts across the country and fees will remain steady, for a while, but then costs will gradually increase with a number of excuses being reeled out for why and it will have happened steadily, over a period of time and the people will forget to ask what has changed?

Privatisation is a disease spreading through all public services, from vital services being outsourced such as training centres and workshops in the fire and rescue service, to entire police forces looking to privatise in some parts of the country. 

These profiteering pirates will serve only to line their pockets, not serve the people in their time of need.

The cuts agendas, the pensions lies and privatisation are all part of a bigger plan to chip away and fragment the public sector. The NHS, though the largest, is but one part of the public sector being  attacked that provide vital services to us all, with bi-weekly bin collections becoming a more regular occurrence, fewer street cleaners, fewer teachers to help shape our future generations bright minds, fewer firefighters and fewer police to arrest the banking terrorists mainly responsible for the economic crisis engulfing the world.

The need to stand up and speak out for each other is not a new concept but it is one that has become less obvious in recent times, our strength is our unity and by showing unity amongst all people within the public sector and to the very people they serve, the fight becomes a stronger one. This fight is not between each other but against the government, their paymasters and the banking terrorists. 

I shall finish with this play on words of a famous poem by Pastor Martin Niemoller:

"First they came for the Socialist,

but I did not speak out because I was not a Socialist.

Then they came for the Trade Unionist,

but I did not speak out because I was not a Trade Unionist.

Then they came for the Muslims,

but I did not speak out because I was not a Muslim.

Then they came for me,

and there was no one left to speak for me"

12 years and still roaming free

The British Grand Prix, scene of many a late night camp fire sing alongs at Camp Gallagher.

Since the ripe old age of 14 I have attended all but one of the Silverstone Formula 1 Grand Prix, with 12 of these coming by way of 4 days and 3 nights camping. In this time I have yet to put my hand in my pocket for overzealous teenage gate keepers looking to pocket a few quid and hand the rest to farmers, who I imagine have a similar tax arrangement as Jimmy Carr.

Now at the age of 29 (and old man time creeping up on me) the novelty of walking for miles on end around the area, looking for holes in fences, gates to climb or ditches to scurry through or leap over has worn as thin as Alan Shearers hair line. This year was even more off putting as carrying an injured shoulder left me with neither the gumption, nor the ability, to climb anything I could not swing my leg over.

After much deliberation (and an hour of walking in the only sun I thought I was going to see for the weekend) we stopped for a couple of pints at the village pub whilst everyone else had long given up and paid their camping fee and were now setting up. As the sun beat down my friend and I decided to bite the bullet and pay the £50 for a bit of grass, 5 toilets and 2 shower cubicles. On our slow walk to the main gate we were still debating whether we should offer the teenage gate keepers £20 quid in their pockets in exchange for letting two out of shape and out of ideas old boys in to the camp site.

Luck it seems was on our side.

As we made our way up the long drive way to the entrance a convoy of 4x4's toeing caravans sped past us and joined the back of what was an already long line of eager petrol heads, so we strolled up to and through the gate without stopping.

Success was ours and all it took was a little patience...except we were in the wrong field and separated from Camp Gallagher by some impenetrable fencing.

With defeat snatched from the jaws of victory we turned on a dime and back out of the entrance and headed towards the correct gate. I could only put our mistake down to heat exhaustion, exasperated by the Corona consumption on the village pub wall.

Our excuses were set, in through the gate we went but it must have been a change of shift. An actor on his phone was all that stood between us and the mud bath awaiting us. He did not even give us a second look, such was the importance of his call. We were in and it was almost time for dinner. In the 2 hours it took us to get in the boys had already set up.

Every cloud has a silver lining.

The face of cuts to all our services

Fire and rescue services across the country are battling against cuts to front line services, being pursued at an increasingly aggressive and alarming rate.

Essex forms part of a region locally with Bedfordshire, Hertfordshire, Norfolk, Suffolk and Cambridgeshire fire and rescue services. Each one of these are facing or have under gone cuts to the frontline services with varying degrees of severity.

In recent action Essex voted overwhelmingly, 71% from a 75% return rate, to upscale their dispute to full strike. A decision not taken lightly but as a response to the total disregard for consultation and negotiation required by management over the aggressive cuts being pushed through resulting in a disregard for the safety of crews and members of the public in the communities they live and serve in.

It was a last resort and something no firefighter ever wants to do.

Brentwood station walk out.

Essex are not asking for more. This dispute is not about better pay or pensions, they are fighting to stand still, maintaining the current number of stations, fire engines and firefighters to crew these engines safely and protect the communities they live in and serve. In the case of the fire service, cuts cost lives.

Last week at the Fire Brigades Union (FBU) conference, Hertfordshire FBU Chair Derek Macleod announced that “Hertfordshire would not be crossing the boarder” in response to fire calls in Essex on any of the initial 5 dates announced, something that would severely affect fire cover in Hertfordshire if asked to do so. The first of which is to take place on June 28^th.  They also pledged £5000 to the Essex hardship fund.

Hertfordshire face new ‘super’ stations called super day crewing that effectively see the return of the Victorian working days of a 96-hour working week, firefighters are expected to live on station for the duration. A 20% increase in a firefighters wage has been offered, but in reality this equates to a pay cut when compared to the hourly rate for being on duty this length of time. All this in addition to station down grading and job cuts.

Bedfordshire recently underwent a shift change resulting in crews working for 24 consecutive hours. The cuts agenda in Bedfordshire has seen the down grading of Toddington fire station from wholetime (full time) to retained (part time) plus a reduction in 36 wholetime posts being lost through ‘natural wastage’ (retirement). Natural wastage is the term being used up and down the country to avoid compulsory redundancy; however they are the jobs of the children born tomorrow that are lost forever.

Cambridgeshire FBU delegate Cameron Matthews reported how they are facing a new restrictive shift system fundamentally reducing their ability to take leave, something that will hit hard firefighters with young families. There is the prospect of losing 40 wholetime posts out of a current 180, 2 retained fire stations, 5 fire engines and 4 out of 5 special appliances. Some redundancies will be compulsory.

Cambridgeshire FBU members polled their local communities and found that 97% of 5000 people asked, are in favour of the fight to protect their service from the cuts attacks.

Paradoxically, whilst the government and local managers push through these savage cuts, they expect the same firefighters to take on additional tasks and responsibilities that fall way outside their remit, with no extra reward and fewer personnel and resources to do so, all in the name of resilience.

As Cameron Matthews stated “we still have life in us and our service matters to us, its time to make them hear us”. Our moment is now.

Double dip closures.

When the recession started in 2008 people remarked how quickly the high street in Dunstable was affected with a number of shops closing. Now in 2012 the grip of the recession is plain for all to see in Luton.

Whilst on the face of it the sight of the Mall and the new shop front would lead you to believe everything is OK, the inside paints a different picture. Rows of empty units and quiet aisles are the generic theme.

Familiar sight in the Mall

Over recent weeks and months a number of units in the Mall have closed or become outlet stores, so following the announcement that Clinton Cards was closing some 350 nationally, I decided to count up the number of units shut in the Mall itself. Currently there are 14 empty units with 3 more due to close including Luton's own Clinton Cards store.

Clinton Cards bids farewell

One area flourishing are coffee shops with there now being 6 in the Mall. We can always find time and money to sit and talk about the recession over a cup of tea or coffee; at least we have the Jubilee to raise our spirits.