Rob Ray
Articles by East Anglia-based anarcho-syndicalist, journalist, ginger and editor of Freedom newspaper, Rob Ray.
Initial impressions: Royal Mail Strike
Reports coming in from picket lines suggest a solid response from postal workers, with near 100% turnout in Bromley By Bow and Nine Elms, London, few in at Bristol and similarly tiny numbers crossing lines at Middlesborough.
Photographers have been down at Mount Pleasant and Bromley by Bow sorting offices, where they report good spirits from the strikers despite the early start and very few people crossing the picket lines.
The anarchist International
This thread got me thinking yesterday about how little decent information exists on the IWA — the biggest anarchist project of all time.
Having had a think about it, I decided to go back to the Wikipedia article which I'd had a go at a couple of years ago, which other than the exceedingly small IWA site itself, is the first thing to come up on a search.
Fools and their "gold-plated" pensions
Public sector workers have been fools. No more so than private sector workers, for sure, but it has been a breathtaking level of foolishness across the board which has led to the imminent extinction of the entire concept of final salary pensions*.
First they came for the staff of the weakest private sector companies
Then they came for the strong
Impressions on the commute
For the last three months I've been spending a good portion of my time in commute-land, a rattling, faded bastion of middle-class conservatism and low-level lebensraum crammed into the 08.30 from Norwich to London.
Hopefully, this is soon to come to a blessed end and I can start waking up in a London bed, with London traffic and London impoliteness to look forward to as I make the jump from Suffolk buh to City cynic. Which makes this a good time to have a think about exactly what I learned on the trip down.
I think first and foremost I learned that commuting is a practice best reserved for the world's middle-management, as punishment for the shit they subsequently impose on the rest of us.
Propagandist - what the papers said about anarchism and G20
In the absence of a realistic threat to the status quo from Islamic fundamentalists, the state has tentatively been trying to paint anarchists as a parallel and growing internal threat to the nation.
Despite minimal evidence, the conjecture of the police that a major anarchist atrocity is inevitable has been taken almost verbatim by the mainstream media and was pushed even further during the G20, with several ludicrous stories appearing about what the movement might get up to appearing.
Rob Ray picks some of the best for Freedom.
Daily Mail
Not, for once, the most hysterical voice around – an honour which must go to the Evening Standard. However their suggestion that activists ‘pelted police with bottles as they tried to save a dying protester’, echoed uncritically from the police report by every other major paper, was among the most vicious libels to appear.
Acpo chief, you're one low-expectation-having motherf*cker.
A quote piece by the Times from Sir Ken Jones, head of the Association of Chief Police Officers reminded me of Chris Rock's most famous, and funny skit.
Sir Ken was responding to a lightweight rebuke over protest policing tactics from the under-fire "Independent" Police Complaints Commission when he remarked: "I saw some of the footage last week of whole groups of officers being hemmed in. Nobody wants to talk about that now. Those officers behaved really well, they acted with restraint.”
Not-so-fat cats: How the rich got thin
I came across an interesting Daily Mail article today (yes it does happen occasionally), which says that fat women are unfairly excluded from top jobs. Now the idea that sexism exists in the workplace, particularly at higher levels, is a bit of a no-brainer, but it got me thinking...
In amongst the statistics from the survey used for this piece came a couple of interesting notes:
Quote:
Up to 61 per cent of top male bosses were found to be overweight, which is higher than the U.S. average of 41 per cent among similarly aged men.
Anarchist literature and distribution
Distribution of anarchist literature has been a major difficulty for decades, and recent improvements to a range of products has repeatedly been held back by this fact. what can we do about it?
Having a soft spot for the anarcho-punk magazine Now or Never!, I listened avidly today to an interview between Resonance FM anarchist talk show host Ian Bone and the magazine's editors, Tug and Harry K.
Neo-liberals don't die, they just amortise
There has been a lot of talk on the left, and even in the mainstream media, about how neo-liberalism is dead or dying as the recession burns a hole through their theorists' tissue of lies. Not a bit of it. If anything, privatisation and the robbing of the working class is accelerating.
While calm waves lap against the shingle of Felixstowe's pretty little beachfront, giant ships tower over the horizon, headed to every corner of the world and back again. Watching them glide from one side of the sea to another seems unreal, as though they belong to another world, the vast container port they've been visiting just an alien outpost tacked onto the end of a semi-retired resort.
Interview with a disillusioned UK ex-full-time union official
‘RPG’ is an anarchist who worked for trade unions from 1986 until the spring of 2007. He talks to Freedom about the lessons he learned
How did you originally get into union work?
