REPORT FROM BRIXTON ACADEMY

Hope lives on and on
(Friday 02 May 2008)
LIVE: Rock Against Racism/Hope Not Hate 2008
Brixton Academy, London

JAMES TWEEDIE gets into the spirit of things at Hope Not Hate's anti-fascist barnstormer.

Rock Against Racism organiser Geoff Martin reckons that he's "one lucky bastard" to have worked in politics and the music biz, although it hasn't done his hairline any good.

He certainly knows how to combine music and politics, as tonight's anti-fascist barnstormer amply attests.

There's a fantastic atmosphere, like a pub gig attended by all your mates. The crowd is just as diverse as Sunday's Love Music Hate Racism festival in Victoria Park. Young and old, boys and girls, black and white trade unionists, Trots and tankies are all united in the common purpose of having fun and smashing the BNP tonight.

Teenage reggae-punks The Thirst kick off to an almost empty house at the cavernous Brixton Academy, which is a shame as they're very good.

"Brixton's finest," as co-compere and Rock Against Racism veteran Tom Robinson calls them, aren't at all bothered by their sound echoing round the hall or the handful of half-hearted dancers down the front. Watch out for this lot in the sweatboxes, where they promise to be lethal.

Hairy old punk folkers The Levellers follow, drum tight and full of energy. They slow it down and acoustic it up on The Boatman, assisted by didgeridoo player Stephen Boakes. who wears a kilt, clown make-up and feather boa.

The crazed didger sticks around for One Way, appropriately running about the stage like AC/DC guitarist Angus Young.

Maybe the swelling crowd is getting better lubricated, but Carry Me sees the craic in the pit in canny fettle at last. As singer Mark Chadwick asks, "Who says political music is dead?"

The place is packed to the rafters by the time Misty In Roots take the stage. Veterans of the 1979 anti-National Front protests in their home town of Southall, Misty play old-school reggae with no bullshit.

Their classic sound fills the huge theatre with ease, washing over the masses like a warm wave, their Morricone-esque brass trio wailing and lamenting atop the pumping rhythm section.

They sing of African liberation and institutional racism, with vocalist Walford Townsend (below left) saying: "They had to wait until a black youth was killed before they found that racism was an institution."

Electro-country bluesters Alabama 3 hit the stage in a burst of strobes and glares of pure white back-light. Their ambient psycho-billy gets the crowd moving right away.

Co-singer Devlin Love is in fine voice tonight, like a post-pop Edith Piaf.

The band hit the audience's wavelength on singalong number U Don't Danse 2 Tekno Anymore, after which it's a long rollercoaster ride home for these natural successors to Primal Scream, that band of my distant youth.

Alabama 3's super-duper light show and lack of audience banter make it all a bit more impersonal than it should be on a night like this, but a good time is still had by all.

The stage starts to resemble Parliament - of the funkadelic variety - as the world and his mum join in on closer Shoot Me Up.

Robinson lets us go with the order to "kick the BNP's backside." Hope Not Hate in 2008 - right on!

30 years on from vicky park

RAR


When I was in my early teens the height of our aspiration was to be a “face” on the shed end at Stamford Bridge – to be cool and hard as best you could in a stripy tank top and a pair of high-waste Oxford bags.

A few months before I picked up a copy of the first Clash single I’d been thrown out of the away end at Fulham for being an obnoxious little git. I was fourteen and I thought I was Jack the Lad.

So why this trip down the memory lane of my adolescence? Simple. An event thirty years ago, not that long after I’d picked up, and learnt off by heart, The Clash by the Clash, turned my life around and changed me into the political activist that I still am.

Rock Against Racism. The Anti-Nazi League and the march from Trafalgar Square to Victoria Park on the 30th April 1978.

I have hazy memories of the day itself but the sense of collective spirit and energy still flows through me – that and the realisation that you could do something political and have fun doing it with people of your same age group. The mind blowing days in dusty Labour Halls wading line by line through minutes and apologies for absence were yet to come.

I’d gone to Vicky Park first off to see the Clash but I was well aware of the politics of the event. If you were a young punk, bunking the tube and train into town to gigs in 77 and 78 , you knew all about the NF and the British Movement.

One night I narrowly escaped getting beaten to a pulp by the BM leader guard on the platform of Chalk Farm tube after a Generation X gig at the Roundhouse. I was also there the infamous night the fascists took over a Clash gig at Crawley leisure centre where random violence stalked the hall and even the support band – the aptly-named Suicide – got a serious kicking.

I work with a lot of young bands now and when I explain to them what it was like going to a punk gig in the late 70’s, early 80’s, when it was pound to a penny that there’d be a serious ruck, they look at me in disbelief.

So I had the ultimate respect for the girls and geezers who’d launched RAR just when we needed it most and I still think that their biggest achievement was Vicky Park and I can only tip my hat to the sheer bottle they had in pulling off such and extraordinary event.

You see, most of the people there were young – or very young. I’d never been on a march before. Mark Steel tells the story of how he pitched up thinking that you literally had to march in military formation.

And it was a seriously long march right through the East End which thirty years ago was a fascist strong hold at least on the streets and in some of main boozers. We followed a flat bed truck where one of my favourite bands, the Members, must have played the same set half a dozen times – only stopping for a beer and a fag and to top up the generator with diesel.

When we finally reached the park we caught the end of X Ray Spex. We saw Steel Pulse, and if I owe no other debt to the Clash and RAR it was turning me on to reggae.

Then the Clash came on – you could hardly hear a thing as the massed crowd surged backwards and forwards. Tom Robinson rightfully closed the show – the bloke who had not only led from the front against the racists but who forced many of us to rethink our own ingrained homophobia.

If I had such a thing as a moral compass I would like to think that due North would be RAR in Vicky Park in 78. I went to loads of other Rock Against Racism and political gigs but that one event was special, not only to me but to loads of other people I meet in politics, trade unionism, the music industry and the media.

I’m one lucky bastard because I now work in all those fields – something that I wouldn’t have believed possible when I was sitting in the careers office in the summer of 78.

But before I get all misty eyed we have to remind ourselves that the threat of the far right getting serious political representation right here and now is more real than it was when the NF were strutting the streets. The fateful timing of the Vicky Park anniversary, the eve of the London elections, is a warning shot from somewhere.

So yes we need to celebrate our political and cultural heritage but not before we’ve done the hard work first.

HOPE NOT HATE/RAR LATEST....

THE LEVELLERS JOIN LINE UP FOR ROCK AGAINST RACISM ANNIVERSARY SHOW
Fresh from their packed out show at the Brixton Academy this weekend, The Levellers have confirmed today that they will be returning to the venue on Wednesday the 30th April for the Rock Against Racism Victoria Park Anniversary show.

The Levellers will join long-time anti-racist campaigners the Alabama 3 and reggae legends and RAR stalwarts Misty in Roots along with The Thirst and Tom Robinson whose band headlined at Vicky Park. Veteran socialist and Glastonbury Left Field favourite Tony Benn , who spoke at the RAR Carnival 30 years ago, will also be hitting the stage.

The 30th of April is also the eve of the crucial London elections which are being heavily targeted by the BNP and the Brixton Academy show will be the culmination of a national Hope Not Hate campaign supported by the UK’s major trade unions, anti-racist campaigns and the Daily Mirror.

Tony Benn, who will be rallying the crowd at Brixton in a final push against the far-right in London, said:

“Popular culture is a very important part of the fight against fascism and we need the broadest based campaign possible. That’s why I’ll be at Brixton Academy on the 30th April.

We must never let the racists win by default and making anti-fascism something that people can actually enjoy helps enormously. You realise that you’re not on your own and that gives us the confidence to challenge the BNP.

When you get to my age you realise that every generation has to fight the same battles and I am pleased to be able to help in any way I can.”

BRIEFING LATEST - MIND YER FINGERS!

So where do you start on the non-doms business?

I had the dubious pleasure of debating this issue with some knob from the accountancy firm Grant Thornton on the Jeremy Vine Show. The gist of his argument was that if the Government didn’t allow billionaire gangsters to continue to take the piss out of British taxpayers then they would decamp to Monaco or the Virgin Islands. Not only that, but they would pull all their UK investments and blow a dirty great hole straight through the middle of our economy.

And so with their fifth columnist Digby Brown operating behind government lines to destabilise what was in the first place a pathetically weedy approach to extracting anything out of the non-doms, Alistaire Darling ran for the hills in terror.

Let’s be clear, the whinging from the super-rich in defence of the culture of corporate welfare is the ultimate insult to pensioners, the low paid and everyone in the public services who has been told that they must accept a below inflation pay increase to help bail out the government and to keep the vintage Krug flowing in the boardrooms and in the private suites of the Park Lane Hilton.

It was Mandleson who said that New Labour was relaxed about people getting “filthy rich” – so relaxed that they are happy to exempt them from the basic tax requirements that apply to everyone else.

If Greek shipping magnates can get an immediate result by holding a gun to the head of the Government aren’t we getting a message here? Staff on the hospital wards, in the town halls and in the dole offices can’t upsticks and head off to Bermuda but collectively they can make the government feel a damn site more uncomfortable than the perma-tanned gangsters of the non-dom scroungers club.


And here’s a lesson in the perils of PFI. Take a trip to the edges of south east London to the Princess Royal University Hospital in Bromley – but take care if you do.

The Bromley Hospitals NHS Trust has the biggest debts of any health body in the country at just a shade under £100 million – small change to a non-dom but enough to leave hospital services across outer South East London effectively bankrupt.

And why are they in this mess? Simple, debt charges at the PRU associated with carrying the costs of the private companies who built it. This is a brand new hospital but a recent Health Commission flying visit literally found blood up the walls.

London Health Emergency have called for a public inquiry into the financial mess at the Princess Royal and a full investigation into whether or not the desperate efforts to pay off the private sector investors have compromised patient care. We refuse to believe that the two are unrelated.

We always warned that it would take a while for the real impact on health budgets of the flawed PFI hospital building schemes to unravel – there is growing evidence that the chickens are now coming home to roost and they’re bringing the turkeys the geese and the ducks with them. Don’t be under any illusions of the long-term consequences of the dash to PFI public sector capital projects – there’s a long way to go yet.


Many thanks to everyone whose bought tickets for the Hope Not Hate/ Rock Against Racism event at the Brixton Academy on Wednesday the 30th April – the exact 30th Anniversary of the Victoria Park Anti-Nazi League carnival and the eve of the crucial London elections.

Where else would you get to see Alabama 3, the legendary Misty in Roots, Tom Robinson and Tony Benn on the same bill? We can also promise you some very special guests. Get your tickets now for a one-off event which will be the culmination of the London campaign this spring.

RAR CLUB NIGHT ROCKS BRIXTON

The launch of the RAR/HOPE NOT HATE club night at Brixton Jamm on friday 8th Feb was a stunning success.

The club was packed out with music fans and press fired up for the usual RAR mix of pop and politics and for some of us old-timers it was a lovely trip down memory lane so it was a pleasure to have Jerry Dammers from the Specials and Skegsy from the Ruts on hand to reminise about the good old days and to compare the visible signs of middle age.

Essex lads the Marlers got us underway followed by the Mentalists who proved once again that the judges on Channel Fours Mobile Act Unsigned know nothing.

Then the Krak did their stuff and proved what a wise move it was for the Militant Entertainment lable to sign them up - they will be massive and between successive toe-tappers of the highest order they sent out an anti-bnp message to the growing crowd.

Local heros the Thirst showed why they are tipped by the NME to be massive this year - Pete Doherty made it down but due to a hold up at the studio in Wandsworth wasn't able to do a tune but we all appreciated his support for this important night.

And so we headed into the small hours with the Others. The lost bass player was eventually located and the place went nuts with beer sloshed about, a stage invasion and general mayhem. Dominic Masters did the honours with an expletive laced tirade against the fascists. Top work Dom

Dammers DJ'd the main bar and I stumbled off out into the south london night with me voice hoarse, me knees aching and a little bit Guinnessed up but happy that we'd done Red Saunders and the RAR legacy proud.

RAR BRIXTON SHOW

briefing column - don't touch that dial!

When I was a councillor in Merton back in the eighties, a young Tory member accused me of having been a leading light in the Winter of Discontent locally. Her name was Teresa May and she was totally wrong.Far from organising picket rotas, during the winter of 78/79 I was hanging around the gates of the girls school on my Fizzy, thrashing a punk rock electric guitar down the youth club and trying to convince my parents that I was actually working really hard on my O levels.

It wasn’t until a year or two later that I took my first steps on the road of industrial militancy in the pay disputes in the NHS that swiftly followed the election of the Thatcher government. That’s where and when I learnt the truths and the myths of the Winter of Discontent.

An old communist porter, Jack Hensman, now sadly no longer with us, instilled in met that the victory of Thatcher was nothing to do with the uprising of low paid public service workers and was everything to do with a Labour government which chose to make the people doing the dirtiest jobs pay for an economic crisis not of their making. We had nothing to be ashamed of.

Thatcher recognised the power of organised blue collar workers and bust us apart with her privatisation policy but that’s another story.

They say that those who fail to learn the lessons of the past are doomed to repeat the mistakes of the past and that’s the path that Brown and his cabinet have embarked on with their aim of screwing down public sector pay for the foreseeable future in the face of the economic turbulence about to engulf them.

This is suicidal stuff. A government that can’t piece together the hard facts of life of escalating fuel bills, transport costs and the basic essentials of keeping a roof over your head and food on the table is on a one way ticket to Palookaville. When Cabinet ministers can’t remember whether or not a hundred grand passed in and out of their trousers the contempt and derision in the dole offices, the town halls and on the wards is surely going to turn round and bite you on the arse at the ballot box.

Few things underscore the disconnected nature of the Brown regime than the sight of David Beckham at Downing Street being unveiled as a special envoy. A talentless, one trick pony scooping tens of millions from stupid Americans on a scale that even puts

· Meanwhile, back in the real world….

The nonsense of the government’s NHS funding regime has been exposed at the Henderson Hospital just up the road from me and a unit that I used to represent as a NUPE official.

The Henderson is a specialist national unit providing ground-breaking services for people with complex mental health problems and has a worldwide reputation for innovation. Exactly the sort of service that the NHS ought to be proud of.

If the South West London and St Georges mental health trust and NHS London get their way the Henderson will be closed at the end of March, a victim of an NHS funding system which takes no recognition of the importance of nationally funded specialist services.

This is a flaw in the system and one that the Government has to step in and sort out before 60 years of pioneering work at the Henderson is sacrificed to keep the accountants and the bureaucrats happy.

A judicial review on behalf of the patients at the Henderson is being put together and you can help the campaign, To sign the petition go to http://petitions.pm.gov.uk/SaveHenderson/

Please help this important campaign.

· And on the road to rock and roll….

The events to mark the 30th anniversary of the Rock Against Racism Vicky Park Carnival this April are well under way as you can see from the ad below – get your tickets now.

And Jail Guitar Doors is ripping along with the support of a whole stack of artists, the POA and others and a great new Strummer shirt is available from www.philosophyfootball.com with the proceeds to Jail Guitar Doors.

RAR - HOPE NOT HATE - 3Oth ANNIVERSARY

NEW STRUMMER SHIRT FOR JAIL GUITAR DOORS

Here's a great new Strummer shirt from my compadres at Philosophy Football. A healthy chunk of the sale price goes to Jail Guitar Doors - putting guitars into prisons in memory of Joe.

www.philosophyfootball.com

MEANEST HOSPITAL IN BRITAIN

CAMPAIGNERS AWARD "MEANEST HOSPITAL IN BRITAIN" TITLE FOR 2007


Campaigners today announced the winners of the Meanest Hospital in Britain title for 2007 with the award going to the Epsom and St Helier NHS Trust in South London.

Epsom and St Helier landed the title for repeated acts of stinginess throughout the year but their winning effort came from the decision to remove one in three lightbulbs back in February 2007. The Trust also scrapped hot meals for patients at lunchtime, asked staff to do their own cleaning in some areas and attempted to ban the issuing of pyjamas and nighties. Epsom and St Helier also boasts one of the highest hourly rates for car parking in the country.

Epsom and St Helier had to beat off stiff competition and the runners up this year are the Maidstone and Tunbridge Wells Trust. Maidstone was plunged into the worst NHS scandal in many years back in October when a report revealed that 90 patients had died from a C Diff outbreak. The Trust was caught out trying to smuggle Chief Executive Rose Gibb out through the back door with a massive pay off - a move later blocked by the Government.

However, only a few months earlier Rose Gibb has asked nurses and other staff to come in and work for free on their days off and to give up their annual leave to help the hospital managers balance the books. Just a few days after issuing the memo Gibb departed on a family holiday to Lanzarote.

Other contenders in this years Meanest Hospital award were:

* Royal Hampshire County Hospital - fingered in a major report on food hygiene standards and put on special measures with six-monthly inspections.

* Southampton University Hospital - top of the league for hospital car parking profiteering with an annual take of £2.414 million followed closely by Cambridge University Hospitals at £2.263 million.

* Derby Hospitals NHS Trust - planning to downgrade and cut the wages of 100 nurses and 70 health care assistants as part of a "re-organisation".

* The Department of Health and the Government - a special mentioning for their efforts to "stage" the NHS pay award this year to squeeze a few extra quid out of the pay packets of nurses and the rest of the health care team.

Geoff Martin, Health Emergency Head of Campaigns, said:

"Millions of pounds is being wasted in the NHS on bureaucrats and management consultants who charge us a fortune to come up with barmy, penny piching measures like removing light bulbs and asking nurses to work for nothing. Front line care and basic standards are compromised while the men in suits with their clipboards patrol the wards cooking up dangerous, cash-saving scams.

Health Emergency will continue to shine a light into the murky corners on NHS finance and management throughout 2008 and any Trust who thinks that they can get away with hacking away at the fabric of the National Health Service would be wise to think again."