Go to Liverpool and you will see the clinical future that awaits Preston town centre, where coffee shops, over priced clothes and department stores will own our streets. Their vision the Tithebarn destruction of Preston to become another clone like the other town and city centres in the country. Really things are being lost as the developers see no value in them; flea markets and community spaces that do not make them money.

The latest community space that faces being bought up with a compulsory purchase order is Jalgos Sports and Social Club in Preston. The club had been told over the last 2 years it was safe, but now the boundaries have changed and the planners want to build the new bus station on top of the ground where the club is.

The community has come out and said they will fight this attack on the centre. There has been the usually actions of petitions, talking to MPs, Preston and Blackpool councillors, writing letters to various people; is not going to work when the parties the MPs and councillors are part of all openly support the project!?

It will take people to stand up to the developers; to take direct action, which has proven to work in the past, as in the example of saving the Warehouse (of chaining themselves to stop the bulldozers knocking the building down). This is needed, by everyone; community support, online presence, stalls in the streets, rallies for people to get behind and find out what is happening, how they can help and get involved so we can’t be ignored… if not another community space will be lost.

Community leader Jean Lindsey urged everyone to take an active role in ensuring the societies survive.

She said: “Let’s stand up and be counted. It’s about keeping our culture. We are here and won’t let you forget us.

All we’re asking for is your support. All we want is a helping hand.”

If you want to help Jalgos Sports and Social Club here are the contact details:

Jalgos Sports and Social Club
Rose Street
PR1 3XY
01772 556109

Nguzo Saba Centre
16-18 Derby St
PR1 1DT
01772 883733

They were aiming from the beginning to be the subversive alternative party.

They used slogans like ‘ Arbeit ist scheiße ( work is shit) and Meine Stimme für den Müll! (My vote for the trash!) in the elections.

And granted, the APPD members relised quite early that they have to yield to the pressure by traditional anarchists who do not vote and distance themselves from the classical definition of anarchy ( thus Pogo Anarchism).

Could there be something we can learn from the Anarchist Pogo Party in Germany in Preston? And…

(Hal, aka Kebabpunk’s full article found in Freedom vol 70 No 1 )(06/06/09)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anarchist_Pogo_Party_of_Germany

Your Politics Are Boring As Fuck
by Nadia C.
Face it, your politics are boring as fuck.
You know it’s true. Otherwise, why does everyone cringe when you say the word? Why has attendance at your anarcho-communist theory discussion group meetings fallen to an all-time low? Why has the oppressed proletariat not come to its senses and joined you in your fight for world liberation?
Perhaps, after years of struggling to educate them about their victimhood, you have come to blame them for their condition. They must want to be ground under the heel of capitalist imperialism; otherwise, why do they show no interest in your political causes? Why haven’t they joined you yet in chaining yourself to mahogany furniture, chanting slogans at carefully planned and orchestrated protests, and frequenting anarchist bookshops? Why haven’t they sat down and learned all the terminology necessary for a genuine understanding of the complexities of Marxist economic theory?
The truth is, your politics are boring to them because they really are irrelevant. They know that your antiquated styles of protest—your marches, hand held signs, and gatherings—are now powerless to effect real change because they have become such a predictable part of the status quo. They know that your post-Marxist jargon is off-putting because it really is a language of mere academic dispute, not a weapon capable of undermining systems of control. They know that your infighting, your splinter groups and endless quarrels over ephemeral theories can never effect any real change in the world they experience from day to day. They know that no matter who is in office, what laws are on the books, what “ism”s the intellectuals march under, the content of their lives will remain the same. They—we—know that our boredom is proof that these “politics” are not the key to any real transformation of life. For our lives are boring enough already!
And you know it too. For how many of you is politics a responsibility? Something you engage in because you feel you should, when in your heart of hearts there are a million things you would rather be doing? Your volunteer work—is it your most favorite pastime, or do you do it out of a sense of obligation? Why do you think it is so hard to motivate others to volunteer as you do? Could it be that it is, above all, a feeling of guilt that drives you to fulfill your “duty” to be politically active? Perhaps you spice up your “work” by trying (consciously or not) to get in trouble with the authorities, to get arrested: not because it will practically serve your cause, but to make things more exciting, to recapture a little of the romance of turbulent times now long past. Have you ever felt that you were participating in a ritual, a long-established tradition of fringe protest, that really serves only to strengthen the position of the mainstream? Have you ever secretly longed to escape from the stagnation and boredom of your political “responsibilities”?
It’s no wonder that no one has joined you in your political endeavors. Perhaps you tell yourself that it’s tough, thankless work, but somebody’s got to do it. The answer is, well, NO.
You actually do us all a real disservice with your tiresome, tedious politics. For in fact, there is nothing more important than politics. NOT the politics of American “democracy” and law, of who is elected state legislator to sign the same bills and perpetuate the same system. Not the politics of the “I got involved with the radical left because I enjoy quibbling over trivial details and writing rhetorically about an unreachable utopia” anarchist. Not the politics of any leader or ideology that demands that you make sacrifices for “the cause.” But the politics of our everyday lives. When you separate politics from the immediate, everyday experiences of individual men and women, it becomes completely irrelevant. Indeed, it becomes the private domain of wealthy, comfortable intellectuals, who can trouble themselves with such dreary, theoretical things. When you involve yourself in politics out of a sense of obligation, and make political action into a dull responsibility rather than an exciting game that is worthwhile for its own sake, you scare away people whose lives are already far too dull for any more tedium. When you make politics into a lifeless thing, a joyless thing, a dreadful responsibility, it becomes just another weight upon people, rather than a means to lift weight from people. And thus you ruin the idea of politics for the people to whom it should be most important. For everyone has a stake in considering their lives, in asking themselves what they want out of life and how they can get it. But you make politics look to them like a miserable, self-referential, pointless middle class/bohemian game, a game with no relevance to the real lives they are living out.
What should be political? Whether we enjoy what we do to get food and shelter. Whether we feel like our daily interactions with our friends, neighbors, and coworkers are fulfilling. Whether we have the opportunity to live each day the way we desire to. And “politics” should consist not of merely discussing these questions, but of acting directly to improve our lives in the immediate present. Acting in a way that is itself entertaining, exciting, joyous—because political action that is tedious, tiresome, and oppressive can only perpetuate tedium, fatigue, and oppression in our lives. No more time should be wasted debating over issues that will be irrelevant when we must go to work again the next day. No more predictable ritual protests that the authorities know all too well how to deal with; no more boring ritual protests which will not sound like a thrilling way to spend a Saturday afternoon to potential volunteers—clearly, those won’t get us anywhere. Never again shall we “sacrifice ourselves for the cause.” For we ourselves, happiness in our own lives and the lives of our fellows, must be our cause!
After we make politics relevant and exciting, the rest will follow. But from a dreary, merely theoretical and/or ritualized politics, nothing valuable can follow. This is not to say that we should show no interest in the welfare of humans, animals, or ecosystems that do not contact us directly in our day to day existence. But the foundation of our politics must be concrete: it must be immediate, it must be obvious to everyone why it is worth the effort, it must be fun in itself. How can we do positive things for others if we ourselves do not enjoy our own lives?
To make this concrete for a moment: an afternoon of collecting food from businesses that would have thrown it away and serving it to hungry people and people who are tired of working to pay for food—that is good political action, but only if you enjoy it. If you do it with your friends, if you meet new friends while you’re doing it, if you fall in love or trade funny stories or just feel proud to have helped a woman by easing her financial needs, that’s good political action. On the other hand, if you spend the afternoon typing an angry letter to an obscure leftist tabloid objecting to a columnist’s use of the term “anarcho-syndicalist,” that’s not going to accomplish shit, and you know it.
Perhaps it is time for a new word for “politics,” since you have made such a swear word out of the old one. For no one should be put off when we talk about acting together to improve our lives. And so we present to you our demands, which are non-negotiable, and must be met as soon as possible—because we’re not going to live forever, are we?
1. Make politics relevant to our everyday experience of life again. The farther away the object of our political concern, the less it will mean to us, the less real and pressing it will seem to us, and the more wearisome politics will be.
2. All political activity must be joyous and exciting in itself. You cannot escape from dreariness with more dreariness.
3. To accomplish those first two steps, entirely new political approaches and methods must be created. The old ones are outdated, outmoded. Perhaps they were NEVER any good, and that’s why our world is the way it is now.
4. Enjoy yourselves! There is never any excuse for being bored . . . or boring!
Join us in making the “revolution” a game; a game played for the highest stakes of all, but a joyous, carefree game nonetheless!
CrimethInc. Workers’ Collective Trans-Cyberian Consulate 3.1,

http://www.rfi.fr/actuen/articles/113/article_3786.asp

France
Police move homeless in tents from central Paris
Article published on the 2009-05-16 Latest update 2009-05-16 15:21 TU

On Friday evening, the French group The Children of Don Quichotte (Les enfants de Don Quichotte) set up about a hundred green tents on the right bank of the Seine in central Paris.

The aim of the tent installation was both to house some of Paris’s homeless and also to send a message about their plight. The group organises tented housing for Paris’s homeless in visible areas around the city.

They had announced a tent installation on the city’s Place de la Concorde, at the foot of the Champs Elysées, but the temporary housing was actually installed a few hundred metres away on the edges of the Seine.

About a dozen homeless people turned up on Friday night with clothes and sleeping bags to spend the night in the improvised shelter. The tents were in place around 6.30pm and at 9pm hot soup was served by another group.

At half ten police arrived and removed the homeless people, returned their belongings and piled up the tents. The police operation was over by half eleven without incident but one of the heads of The Children of Don Quichotte, Augustin Legrand, said the removal of the tents could cost up to 3,500 euros.

By midnight, everyone had left.

The removal of the tents was criticised by France’s New Anticapitalist Party (Nouveau Parti Anticapitaliste, NPA) which on Saturday called on the government to enforce laws that demand certain percentages of social housing in each municipality.

It said the government needed to build the “million of homes needed”.

Date: 28 May 2009 By Mark Hookham http://www.lep.co.uk/news/MP-admits-claiming-for-two.5310174.jp

Mark Hendrick paid back almost £7,000 after he claimed mortgage interest payments for BOTH his Preston and London homes on his taxpayer-funded expenses. The Preston MP is likely to be pitched into the centre of a political storm after making the disclosure to the Lancashire Evening Post. He revealed that between April 2007 and March 2008 he overclaimed £6,850.52 in mortgage interest payments on his second home allowance. Mr Hendrick had previously been paying two separate mortgages for a flat in Swiss Cottage, London, which he designated his second home, and his main home in Fulwood, Preston.

However, in March 2007 he remortgaged and took out a single loan with a building society for around £320,000 which was secured against his Preston home but covered both of the properties. A month later he “flipped” his second home designation to his constituency home. Between April 2007 and March 2008 he claimed a total of £15,324.52 in mortgage interest payments on his expenses.

In July of last year he wrote to the Commons Fees Office to “seek clarification” on his complex arrangement. However, when the Fees Office examined his previous mortgage payments on the Preston property, it ruled that he had been overpaid and should have only actually claimed £8,474 from the public purse in 2007/2008. Mr Hendrick then repaid the difference. The Labour MP said that a letter from the fees office made clear that his method for claiming mortgage interest on expenses was deemed to be “in order” and gave him the greenlight to continue with it. Mr Hendrick again overclaimed for mortgage interest payments during the last financial year. Between April 2008 and March 2009 he claimed £5,510 but should have claimed £4,560.83. The MP, who is currently abroad, has promised to pay back a further £949.17 of taxpayers’ money when he returns to Westminster next week. He told the Evening Post: “The arrangement that I have got was explained in detail to the Fees Office. There has been an exchange of correspondence throughout. “At the end of each financial year I have always settled up with the Fees Office to ensure that the exact, correct amount of mortgage is paid.” He insists that he now only has one mortgage secured against one home – although he concedes that the loan is to “cover the redemption of both mortgages”. The MP said that both his local party chairman and other Labour figures know about his arrangements. He said: “I sought clarification on this. I raised it with the Fees Office. No-one pulled me up on this. I took it to them. This was nearly a year before the Daily Telegraph broke the story.”

Preston Coun Carl Crompton, who is also the Labour chairman for the party’s Preston constituency group said: “He has come clean as far as I am concerned and done the honourable thing. “The CLP (constituency Labour party) will ask questions if they think there’s been intentional misdeeds and will ask Mark questions. He doesn’t get an easy ride. “As an MP in Preston, Mark has worked extremely hard and I can’t fault him. We’ll come to the next CLP meeting (on Thursday, June 18) when he will be asked to explain this and it will then be up to the members.”

Judges ruled that specialist ­surveillance units from the Metropolitan police had breached the human rights of Andrew Wood, an arms trade campaigner, when they photographed him and stored the pictures on a police database.

One judge said there were ­unresolved civil liberties questions about the way images were taken and retained in “the modern surveillance society”. Lord ­Justice Dyson said there were “very serious human rights issues which arise when the state obtains and retains the images of persons who have committed no offence and are not suspected of having ­committed any offence”.

The judgment is a blow to the Met, which has been criticised over the way it polices protests since last month’s G20 ­demonstrations and the death of Ian Tomlinson.

Tonight, human rights lawyers said the ruling could force police to delete thousands of images of protesters stored on their database unless they have grounds for suspecting them of criminal activity.

Anna Mazzola, of the solicitors Hickman & Rose, said: “The judgment of the court of appeal should act as a stark ­warning to the Metropolitan police that the ­circumstances in which they can justify taking and retaining photographs of ­members of the public who have ­committed no crime is highly circumscribed.”

The case went before the high court last year when judges ruled against Wood. But yesterday two of the three judges ruled in his favour, saying there had been a ­”disproportionate interference in the human right to privacy”.

Dyson said: “The retention by the police of photographs taken of persons who have not committed an offence, and who are not even suspected of having committed an offence, is always a serious matter. The only justification advanced by the police for retaining the photographs for more than a few days after the meeting was the possibility that the appellant might attend and commit an offence … that justification does not bear scrutiny.”

Lord Collins added that the substantial police presence which confronted the arms campaigners had a “chilling effect” on people who had been lawfully ­protesting. A third dissenting judge said the Met had acted reasonably.

The judgment does not ban specialist police cameramen, known as forward intelligence teams, but it does mean the long-term retention of their pictures must be justified on a case-by-case basis.

This week it was announced Barclays and four other large investors dropped all shares in Huntingdon Life Sciences (HLS), Europe’s largest and most exposed vivisection laboratory. LSR stock owned by institutional shareholders has now fallen to 12%, placing HLS $4 million below the NYSE minimum listing standard for market value (the only stock exchange listing the company, a major target in the campaign to close HLS).

Following a legal challenge against the CEO’s proposal to purchase all of the outstanding LSR stock, an intense global campaign and recent repression against SHAC in Birmingham, a total of 797,284 shares have now been sold. Barclays Global Investors, Barclays Plc, Hartford Investment Management Company, Rice Hall James and Associates LLC, Bank of New York Mellon and Wells Fargo sold all their shares, of which over 400,000 were held by previously largest shareholder Barclays.

Barclays campaign: Global (Videos) | London | Direct action | SHAC topic page

Since HLS’ largest investors dumped all shares in July 2008 (1 | 2), Barclays have attracted hundreds of protests in London, Hampshire, Birmingham, Cambridge, Yorkshire, Tamworth, Manchester, Coventry, Carlisle, Luton, Worcester, Liverpool, Durham, Dublin, Glasgow, Europe and home demos against executives in the US. Furthermore, Animal Liberation Front (ALF) and anonymous activists claimed over thirty sabotage actions across the UK including dozens of cashpoints glued, banks painted and a home visit for Barclays Chairman in Hampshire.

HLS are currently £72 million in debt, with their 1st quarter revenue for 2009 down 24% from 2008, causing managing director Brain Cass this year to admit “…the outlook remains uncertain”. SHAC called for supporters to “…make sure it stays that way and smash HLS for good!”

An Introduction: Stop Huntingdon Animal Cruelty (SHAC)

Huntingdon Life Sciences (HLS) are in the business of poisoning healthy animals to death. They are a contract testing operation that tests products for others. They have three sites two in the UK and one in the US. Five hundred animals are put to death every day by HLS, killing tens of thousands of horses, cats, dogs, primates, rabbits, hamsters, rats, mice and fish amongst others each year.

SHAC was set with the sole aim of closing HLS down. The campaign was set up at the end of 1999 by a group of activists who had successfully closed down Consort kennels and Hillgrove cat farm. Both campaigns ended with the businesses closing down and hundreds of animals being safely rehomed instead of tortured in labs.

Shareholders, stockbrokers, market makers, suppliers and clients have all dumped HLS, including the world’s largest companies; all four main high street banks in the UK, the world’s largest financial institution, the world’s second largest bank and the world’s largest insurance broker. Huntingdon are $72 million dollars in debt with NO commercial bank and insurance company anywhere in the world prepared to deal with them.

HLS’ key weakness is their finances and by throwing the spotlight on those funding their abuse campaigners across the globe have managed to bring HLS to the brink of financial collapse. Throughout the campaign activists have made financial history as one by one major corporations have yielded to protester power and severed their links with the failing company.

Campaigners use evidence obtained in seven undercover investigations at their different laboratories in the UK and USA where HLS workers have been caught on film punching puppies in the face, simulating sex with animals in their care, cutting open primates while they are still alive and falsifying experiments to get products on the market. HLS workers have even been caught drunk at work and dealing drugs at the labs.

Huntingdon Life Sciences have a criminal record from a British court of law for breaking the Companies’ Act. They are the only UK laboratory to ever have their licence revoked by the government.

Manchester picked for ID card trials
Post offices, pharmacies and photo shops to offer application processing services
Rosalie Marshall, vnunet.com, 06 May 2009
Home secretary Jacqui Smith announced today that the ID card rollout is on schedule, and that the first cards will be released to residents of Manchester this autumn.

The government intends to release the cards gradually to ensure that UK retailers and service providers have the necessary equipment in place to deal with take-up, such as chip and Pin readers.

Our next steps will be for other cities to follow Manchester's lead before full national coverage from 2012, said Smith.
Local residents wanting to apply for a card have been told to sign up on the government's Directgov web site, which will inform users when the cards become available in their area.
The Home Office is planning to allow post offices, high street pharmacies and photographic shops to offer application processing services. The organisations will be given equipment that will record fingerprints and take photographs.

However, security experts have warned that such a move would put individuals' data at risk.
Post offices, pharmacies and shops are certainly convenient places to apply for a card, but the public will need to be convinced of their security credentials before handing over their personal details for processing, said Jamie Cowper, European director of marketing at data protection firm PGP Corporation.
Identity cards are already in use by foreign nationals to show that they have the right to work in the UK, and the Home Office said that plans are underway to ensure that 75,000 are issued for this purpose by November.

Young people will also be able to start using the cards before the rest of the population, starting from 2010.

IBM will run biometrics database while CSC will deliver new passport and ID card application systems
Tom Young, Computing, 07 Apr 2009
Home secretary Jacqui Smith has announced that IBM and CSC have won £650m-worth of contracts to deliver IT systems to support the controversial identity cards scheme.
IBM has been awarded a £265m deal to build the biometrics database to support ID cards and passports, while CSC has been given a £385m deal to upgrade the application and enrolment system.
Smith said the UK passport will be made even more secure against fraud by the improvements.

ID cards and passports with fingerprint and facial biometrics will provide a safe and secure way of protecting personal details and proving identity she said.

CSC will provide a new system for processing applications for both passports and ID cards including the ability for people to apply online, improved background checking systems, and new IT and telephony systems for the Identity and Passport Service.
The contract replaces a number of existing agreements with Siemens, Atos, Sagem and others.

Foreign nationals are already being issued with ID cards and from the autumn staff working airside at Manchester and London City airports will be issued with cards as part of the first phase of the rollout to UK citizens.

From 2011 the government will introduce passports and voluntary ID cards with chips containing biometrics that will be checked against the IBM database.

In August 2008 Thales UK was awarded an £18m, three-year contract to deliver the first ID cards to airside workers and volunteers starting in autumn this year.

The Identity and Passport Service's told the BBC that the agency is talking to the financial services industry about the addition of chip and PIN to the cards. Adding chips would mean the cards could be used at ATMs in the future.