"Why Misogynists Make Great Informants"

"In January 2009, activists in Austin, Texas, learned that one of their own, a white activist named Brandon Darby, had infiltrated groups protesting the Republican National Convention (RNC) as an FBI informant. Darby later admitted to wearing recording devices at planning meetings and during the convention. He testified on behalf of the government in the February 2009 trial of two Texas activists who were arrested at the RNC on charges of making and possessing Molotov cocktails, after Darby encouraged them to do so..."

A very interesting and important article from Make/Shift magazine. Read the full piece here.

Creative Co-operatives

The Creative Co-ops website I was commissioned to copywrite by Co-operatives UK is finally up, after a few technical blips. It includes a collection of information and case studies on the benefits of co-operation for creative workers - writers, artists, musicians, web designers, actors, journalists etc etc etc. Not featured, because I only found them today, are a very cute Glossop-based co-op of textile geeks called Moot Fibre Arts Co-op. They're having a garden party at Glossop Labour Club this Sunday...

Cheerleading and other social enterprises

In the last month or so I've been doing some case study interviewing and copywriting for TogetherWorks, the social enterprise network for Greater Manchester. Damien Mahoney's set of 5 short case study films are now available on YouTube, and my favourite is without doubt the fabulous Manchester Diamonds Cheerleading Community Enterprise Company...

Urban Research, urban refurb, urban renewal

So, interesting (maybe, to someone out there) bits and bobs going on around my corner of South Manchester at the moment...

Went to the Urban Research Collective launch at Zion Arts on Wednesday. A very interesting new CIC which aims to try and drag left-wing researchers like muggins kicking and screaming into the activist arena - whether via its own projects or letting other people use it as a fundraising vehicle or networking tool. I love researching, and I'm much more comfortable producing stuff that other people can then go and do things with. But I'm looking forward to working with these guys and being prodded out of my comfort zone.



My office at Openspace is currently a building site - hence the pictures. But it will give our tenant-managed workspace co-op more room to rent out and a meeting room. Images nicked from my colleague Jonathan Atkinson. I'm not sure why Polyp seems to be doing Bill & Ben imitations in the second one... oh, and we got a plug from Ed Mayo the other day, so the marketing team should be happy.

The genius Marc Roberts and my lovely husband have their cartoon masterpiece, the Great Climate Slamdown, on the New Internationalist website. Will Copenhagen bring us a settlement on climate change which will save the world? Will it fuck. Will trogging off there to run around being chased by riot police achieve much beyond some nice activist bonding experiences? I refer you to my previous comment. Ho hum. Hopefully certain of my friends won't notice that and hate me for it...

Information seems to be slowly spilling out of the Council about the proposed regeneration of the area of Moss Side adjacent to the doomed bus (formerly tram) station on Princess Parkway and Claremont Rd to the south and north respectively, and between Princess Parkway and my allotment patch on Caythorpe St to the east and west. At one time it looked like everybody was getting compulsory purchased and shifted out for a major demolition job, but I think the recession had squished that plan (to the annoyance of at least one friend living in the middle of a semi-derelict street, as the housing associations with properties round there moved their tenants out months or even years ago, creating at least the beginnings of a wasteland of rats, rubbish and temporary druggie squats). Instead many of the old 2-bed Victorian terraced houses will be knocked through to create homes more in keeping with the needs of Moss Side's families. Sadly, though, Bishop Bilsborough Primary School is still in the path of the bulldozers, despite being recently squatted for an alternative arts festival. It's a lovely building and could have been a great location for some kind of community centre (something we're a bit short of in Moss Side if you don't count various religious buildings and the hideous Powerhouse, although there's still the West Indian centre).

Oh, and with marketing ahoy on the Gaza book, I've also finally finished the bloody Leila Khaled biography. A considerable relief, to say the least, and I'm looking forward to slowly re-emerging into the sunlight (just in time for it to disappear beneath a wintry horizon) and start attempting to re-engage with my social life. I'm sure I had one, once. The post-book holiday in Brighton, while pleasant, wasn't the relaxing experience it was meant to be - it seemed to involved inordinate amounts of work and the idea for Book Number Three popped into my head, almost fully-formed. But that's as much as I'm saying about that - if I let the idea out of my head before it's all written down properly it might go all liquidy and spill out of my ears or something. So watch this space.

Gizza lift!

An appeal for help from News From Nowhere, the wonderful women's co-operative bookshop in Liverpool:

News From Nowhere’s lift has broken down and will cost £4000 to repair! This will be very hard for us to find from our regular income. The lift serves our 5-storey building and users include our tenants, elderly & disabled visitors to the 2nd floor Methodists and Liverpool Social Centre in the Basement.
We had a wonderful response to our Appeal earlier in the year – we raised £10,000 for our running costs, which has put us on a much more even keel. And the building is now fully tenanted which will help over the longer-term.
If you are one of those who supported us, THANK YOU! We don’t wish to impose on you further, but if you missed the boat or can pass this on to others, then this is your chance to support Liverpool’s Radical Bookshop.
We are looking for 40 people to loan us £100 each (anything larger or smaller also gratefully received)
This can be as an INTEREST-FREE CASH LOAN to be repaid over the next 2 years. (We can repay some, but not all, earlier.) Or as a CREDIT LOAN – to be reclaimed as books from December onwards – save now for those Xmas/Hanukkah/Solstice presents!
Many thanks from News From Nowhere Collective
96 Bold St, Liverpool, L1 4HY 0151 708 7270 nfn@newsfromnowhere.org.uk

P.S. The best support, of course, is to keep buying your books (& other goodies – world music CDs, DVDs, Cards, Calendars, Diaries, Crafts etc) from us!

My First Book Cover and Openspace launches its documentary films

Nearly a month since I posted anything on here, so this is just a quick one to keep my hand in until I come back up for air after finishing an edition of Enterprising, the social enterprise magazine for Greater Manchester and a product report on Toys for the Christmas edition Ethical Consumer magazine.
The main thing I've been up to over recent months is helping Sharyn to edit her amazing blogs from Gaza into a book for Pluto Press. We now have a draft of the cover, which I got very excited about even if it feels very wrong that I should be deriving excitement from a book about something so grim. But I guess that's the bind of writing about this kind of thing... anyway, this image is a draft of the cover; the real one will have my name in smaller letters (at my request).
Secondly I need to give a little plug to the co-operative documentation film launch at my home-from-home at Openspace this evening. The press release is below, including links to Damien Mahoney's films...

Openspace launches Co-operative documentation film series

This evening, Wednesday 9th September, Openspace workspace co-operative, based in Hulme, Manchester, will launch the series of five short films by Damien Mahoney which document the founding and development of this successful social enterprise.

The films will be showcased at an event at Openspace this evening, to an invited audience of social and creative entrepreneurs and co-operators. Featuring in-depth interviews with founding and early members of the co-operative including eco web specialists Finn Lewis and Luke Geaney, social entrepreneur Jonathan Atkinson, gender consultant Hannah Berry and cartoonist Paul 'Polyp' Fitzgerald, the films will be introduced by Openspace's newest member, illustrator Ben Tallon.

Openspace's model, which provides affordable co-operatively managed workspace for ethical and creative freelancers and small businesses and freelancers, has bucked recessionary trends and attracted a full complement of tenants. A grant from the Co-operative Fund is due to be invested in refurbishment work on Openspace's offices, which will include a major extension.

Notes:

Last-minute requests to attend the launch should be made to Jonathan Atkinson at jonathan [at] lowwintersun.info or to the Openspace office on 0161 209 9930. Space is limited so please do get in touch before coming. Directions can be found at: http://www.openspace.coop/location

Openspace is a co-operative co-working project, offering cheap, flexible office space in a creative, friendly atmosphere. “We are all freelancers and small businesses who were sick of working out of our bedrooms and spare rooms. We created an office where we could work, meet clients and be around other nice people. Because we run the space ourselves we get cheap rent and to be our own landlord. We work for good people doing creative community or environmental work.” Openspace is also part of the second-tier Work For Change co-operative, http://www.work.change.coop/. More information on Openspace can be found at http://www.openspace.coop/

The full range of Damien Mahoney's videos documenting the vision and processes behind the establishment of Openspace can be found at: http://www.youtube.com/user/OpenSpaceCoop

Openspace Co-operative members currently include:
Ben and Ink
Ecobee and Ecohost Co-ops
Entreprenurses
The GAP Unit
lowwintersun
Polyp
Sarah Irving
Streamengine

Non-co-operative-member tenants include:
Columbidae Conservation
Helen Clifton – freelance journalist
Pow Wow Eco Arts
Proper Job Theatre Company

Nice things, for once

At the risk of spoiling my great track record of depressing posts, here are a couple of positive initiatives which made me smile.
The first is the Kufiyeh Project, an American initiative to promote kufiyehs generally (or at least, proper ones, not the overpriced 'anti-war scarves' sold without a trace of irony in Marks & Sparks and Urban Outfitters). It's been set up to sell the products of one of the few remaining factories in the West Bank producing kufiyehs, the Hirbawi workshop in Hebron, which Olive Co-op has been sourcing its kufiyehs from for some time. They make the lovely multicoloured ones as well as the traditional black & white.
The second is a little webpage by the Jerusalem Media and Communication Centre, which is simply a list of nicely-written, simple Palestinian recipes. A good resource since Sahtain, a lovely Palestinian cookbook which I have a copy of, has now gone out of print, according to the guys at the Educational Bookshop on Salah ed-Din Street. The JMCC page is great though, and I do particularly like the recipe for Shakshoukeh, which should apparently be served with 'warm Palestinian.' Yummm... ;-)

Co-ops rant!

The last couple of weeks have had some ups and downs for the co-ops/social enterprise chunk of my life and work.
On one hand, there's been the brilliant news, which I'd heard about months ago but finally happened, that Zaytoun's fairly traded (organic, extra virgin) Palestinian olive oil has received full Fairtrade Foundation accreditation and is now therefore the first olive oil to bear the widely-recognised Fairtrade logo (a French/Moroccan outfit is also looking to get certified but it's unlikely their product will be in the shops until at least the end of this year). This is of course fantastic news for the Palestinian farmers' co-ops producing the oil, for Zaytoun and Equal Exchange who have worked so hard to market the oil and get accreditation, and for pioneers like Olive Co-op who have been selling it for the last 5 years.
On the flipside, I've had some depressing encounters with the hierarchies of the co-operative and social enterprise sectors as well.
These have largely taken the shape of trying to disentangle the jargon-laden, increasingly corporate bullshit churned out by some of the 'support agencies' and 'representative bodies' out there. Some of the stuff I've had to try and comprehend this week has been totally impenetrable, even to me, and I did social theory classes at MA level, so I've worked my way through a lot of totally opaque and atrociously written crap before.
The social enterprise support sector just seems to be more and more a gravy train for white men in suits to get nicely-paid jobs telling people with no money and tiny businesses in a credit crunch about how to be entrepreneurs, while being firmly locked into a bureaucratic mindset and fat-cat mentality themselves.
My other gripe is with some of the PR leeches who lurk round the edges of the sector. Without naming names, I thought I had managed to find someone sensible within a co-operative sector organisation who was willing to enter into a bit of debate about whether the expansion of co-ops in a recession was, willy-nilly, a good thing. Now, I've spent nearly 10 years working in co-ops, am still a member of one, and have a considerable commitment to the sector. I certainly have no interest in doing a hatchet job on them.
But I'm finding increasing amounts of credit crunch propaganda - from 'support' and 'advice' organisations whose main function is to suck up government funding like vast cash-Hoovers, and not from actual people running actual enterprises in what might be termed the 'real' world – about how bloody marvellous co-ops are, how they are the stable, sustainable soft-capitalist economic model that encourages responsible economic behaviour and would have bolstered the economy against the current crisis.
So, when the person I thought I was getting somewhere with went off on leave, I got handed over to the organisation's PR consultants instead, and any notion of realistic, sensible, real-world debate vanished, and I got yet another bit of pointless flannel attributed to the organisation's ennobled Chair, about how wonderful co-ops are and how they are the Way, the Truth and the Light.
And I'm sorry, but this does the sector no good at all. A failing enterprise is a failing enterprise, and while being a co-op might make companies more economically and socially sustainable, this is only true if they have real markets and decent marketing and good internal controls.
To promote the idea that anyone, anywhere, wanting to do anything somehow can just by being a social enterprise is totally irresponsible. Firstly it has the ability to create a lot of pissed off, skint people if their businesses do fail. Secondly in creating those people it has a massive potential to 'tarnish the brand,' devaluing the idea of social enterprise and co-ops and making them synonymous with dud enterprises. And thirdly damaging people who should never have been persuaded by ivory-tower consultants that they should run businesses in the first place.

Journalistic bollocks

All very insignificant, this, but a good illustration of how inaccurate some journalists can be, and how a couple of poorly checked facts can replicate themselves...
Several years ago I interviewed a UNISON rep and psychiatric nurse called Karen Reissman about NHS privatisation, for the TogetherWorks magazine Enterprising. The article ended up as one of the excuses Karen's former employers used to sack her, since few employers are enlightened enough to want active, politicised union reps on their staff.
Unsurprisingly, this attracted a certain amount of press coverage, including from press industry publications like the Press Gazette. So when Karen settled her claim out of court during her employment tribunal, there was a certain amount of followup. This included this article by Dominic Ponsford, written using material from the PA Mediapoint agency added to by the Press Gazette. Now, this article is peppered with inaccuracies. The ones I can comment on are that he calls the magazine 'Inside Enterprise' and states that it is no longer running - when in fact there have been a number of issues of it since the Karen Reissman affair, and I'm putting together a new one at the moment. It also claims that the article was a feature on social enterprise, which is in fact the subject of the entire magazine.
A reply from the PA's Legal Editor emphasises that it was not their agency piece which included the mistakes - so I guess they were added by Dominic Ponsford at the Press Gazette.
Now, I'm not saying that these errors are particularly significant in themselves. But I am interested in what it says about poor standards of fact checking. Especially since agencies and industry publications like the Press Gazette are generally regarded as pretty reliable, which means that if anyone, for instance, ever decided to write a history of Karen's struggle, they would probably go first to these kind of sources, and get misled and sidetracked.
I'm also curious as to why the Press Gazette has removed my completely anodyne correcting comments to their web version of the article - aren't they prepared to admit they've printed an incorrect piece?

Pubs, politics and Palestine

With lots in the news at the moment about pubs closing due to the recession, I was extremely pleased this week to find a great pub which combines proper beer with genuine community spirit.
The Blue Bell, on Barlow Road in Levenshulme, doesn't look terrifically prepossessing from the outside. It's one of those big pub buildings which all too often nowadays have plastic signs proclaiming steak dinners for £3.99 or burgers for less - conjuring up images of hideous livestock conditions and inedible meat. Inside it's presentable but nothing special, with a certain amount of the kind of faux-traditional chintziness which dominates so much pub decor.
I'd been lured to the Blue Bell after having, in a rash moment of helpfulness, offered to answer questions about co-operatives and social enterprises at a public meeting of people wanting to form a co-op to save their local shop, the Village Stores. So I didn't even get as far as the bar before I was sitting down and fielding queries.
Then I noticed the beermats, which proclaimed that this was a Samuel Smith's pub. This, to me, is always a good thing, as even in the most hideous depths of central London it tends to herald good beer, reasonably priced. Sam Smith's, based in Tadcaster, is still an independent brewery and produces a full range of ales, milds and lagers, including an organic lager. And the plural of mild is advisedly used – rarely, it brews both a light and dark mild, and that is a rare and wonderful thing nowadays. The full range is Vegan Society approved and the company's tied pubs have stocked Fairtrade orange juice for some years – ie before it became a hugely successful marketing bandwagon.
But my reasons for being all excited about the Blue Bell don't stop with its beer. Licensees Mark and Mary Dunn seem to be genuinely committed to being part of and improving their local community. The room we used for the meeting for the putative co-op was provided free, as it is for a number of other organisations – from swimmers' groups to tenants' associations – during the rest of the week. Mark himself sat in on the meeting, and seemed keen to make sure that the street's excellent local shop was maintained somehow.
The descendant of market traders, Mark is bringing his interest in Manchester's history of local food production to bear on his community activities. He and other residents are planning a People's Orchard, planted with regional fruit tree varieties – and he is well able to list the kind of apples he wants to see promoted, varieties like Jonathan which have distinctive flavours and textures, instead of the bland offerings in British supermarkets.
The Blue Bell also has a wild patch out the back, where there are logs for hedgehogs to hibernate in and native flowers growing. And every year, the pub presents any children who want to enter its Garden Competition with a tub and some money to buy plants and seeds from Village Stores, and at the end of the summer the best mini-gardens win prizes. As Mark says, “it keeps them out of trouble and gives them a real sense of achievement.”

On other topics, the students occupying a building at Manchester University in solidarity with the people of Gaza are still there, a fantastic array of banners still adorning the front of the Simon Building and a great range of film showings, Dabke dance workshops and Fairtrade Palestinian olive oil launches taking place in the occupied space.
In Gaza, my friend Sharyn has moved from working with ambulances and medics to accompanying farmers into their fields where, it is hoped, the presence of internationals will allow them to harvest their crops – vital for the income of so many families and communities – without the worst excesses of Israeli military brutality. To date, results have been mixed, and despite the presence of ISMers several farmers harvesting parsley and other crops have been injured and killed by Israeli soldiers shooting at them.
On the climate change front, efforts to put together a 'Call to Real Action' in response to Manchester City Council's laughable 'Call to Action' effort continue apace, drawing in a wide range of people increasingly concerned about the lack of any real constructive activity on the subject.
And the interviews Marc and I gave to the Observer and the Mail on the subject of not having kids, which spawned a host of invitations to do more interviews, appear on the radio and feature in documentaries, has come back to haunt us yet again. Some freelancer called Britt has being trying to get in touch for an interview, pitching an article to the Guardian which – she rather misguidedly tried to reassure me – would also feature Teri 'I had an abortion for the planet' Vernelli, the other interviewee from the Mail article. The unusual thing about this Britt woman, who appears to work for IPC Media when she's not freelancing for the Grauniad, has been her persistence, sending me several emails, but more annoyingly harassing my former employers at Ethical Consumer and Togetherworks social enterprise network, where I'm a director, for my sins.