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End violence against women

Sue Talbot has been threatened with a £10,000 fine for writing an article about male violence. She tells her story.


19/03/2021

The murder of Sarah Everard, a 33-year-old woman walking home along main roads in London, throws into sharp relief the continuing reality of sexual harassment and abuse and, ultimately, the possibility of murder, faced by every woman, every day of our lives. It happens everywhere: at work or socially as “banter”; at home in the rising incidences of domestic violence; in flats, “health clubs”, in palaces and alleyways as victims of trafficking from men of all classes. It also happens on the streets, by opportunistic abusers who could be anyone from a passing pre-teen, a drunk, or a member of the diplomatic protection corps.

In 1973, as a 15-year-old schoolgirl, waiting for my bus in genteel Lytham-St Anne’s, a man muttered horrible words to me. As children, we girls learned to avoid a local sweet shop, where “that man lifts you up to look at your knickers”; baffled and embarrassed I avoided my elderly next door neighbour on the bus who took it upon himself to berate me, age 12, for “the effect [I had] on men”. These are only the least of my experiences; I really do understand how frightening it is to be a girl, a young woman, and an adult woman— for these experiences don’t stop with advancing age.

I reached adulthood in the late 1970s at the time of the “Yorkshire Ripper,” but also at the time of mass feminist protests. Inspired by the equal pay strikes of women Ford workers and the Grunwick women (Asian women, memorably supported by Yorkshire miners) by protests against Miss World in 1970, we campaigned for abortion rights, for equal pay, for maternity pay, for employment rights, against domestic violence, against racism, for the right to refuge from domestic violence, for the housing rights of women fleeing violence, for LGBT rights. We supported the Miners’ Great Strike whilst arguing with them that their sexism undermined united working-class fightback against the bosses.

Decade after decade, women have been told that we should not wear short skirts or tight jeans; that we should “stay at home after dark”, “walk in pairs”, “stay sober”, “take the safe route”. We’re told that we ”asked for it”, that “it” doesn’t happen to “respectable women”, and conversely that sex workers “can’t be raped”. Sarah Everard, a professional woman in her 30s, was walking home, sober, dressed in loose trousers and an anorak at 21:00h on a main road. And yet a man felt entitled to kidnap and kill her.

In south Leeds, where I live, opponents of a Managed Zone of sex work, demand “more police on the streets”, but it appears that it was a policeman who killed Sarah Everard. So the issue isn’t police presence or absence. And it isn’t what women wear or don’t wear. It isn’t how we walk, whether we’re drunk or sober, whether we wear high heels, tight jeans, flat shoes or trousers, whether we are “respectable women” or sex workers. The issue appears to be an ingrained attitude among some, too many, men who think women of any age, any shape, and any class are “fair game” and that sexual harassment and abuse of women is just fine.

Like thousands of other women, I was outraged when police first attempted to ban the vigils called to honour the memory of Sarah Everard. Hearing of plans for a local, socially distanced and masked vigil, I wrote an article for a local news site, expressing these sentiments and telling readers about the event. I said I’d be attending, that no woman is “fair game”. There is no excuse for male violence against women. No excuse for rape or sexual assault. No excuse for sexual abuse. No excuse for physical or verbal sexual harassment. Banter is not funny.

Overnight, the Courts delivered an ambiguous judgment and local RTS groups began to back down, telling protestors to stay at home and protest online. The Leeds demo was replaced by an online vigil. But we don’t reclaim streets and the night by going online the moment the police and government challenge the right to protest. We reclaim by being on the streets. Look at Hong Kong. Look at Myanmar.

Home is the most dangerous place for women: 118 women in the UK have been killed during lockdown this year alone, and you don’t reclaim the streets by staying at home. We cannot “end male violence” by cowering in our homes WHERE MOST MALE VIOLENCE HAPPENS!

In Clapham Common in London, thousands peacefully attended the vigil for Sarah Everard. Despite media claims that people observing the vigil caused trouble, the real trouble came from the police wading in and disrespecting the lived experience and repressed grief of women who were blamed.

Meanwhile, in Leeds, I was woken on the following morning by a visit from the police who “advised” me that under the Coronavirus Act I was liable to be perceived to be an organiser of an illegal demonstration and to be fined £10,000. He conceded, however, that it was legal for me to take my 1-hour state-sanctioned exercise in the park where the vigil was to have been held, at 18:00h, and to speak – socially distanced – to anyone I met there. There were to be “no speeches” though. So that’s what I did, and so did 20 other people from our small area of Leeds, laying tributes in memory of Sarah and all the women killed by an institutionally sexist society.

Three days after the vigils, the British government voted in favour of the Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Bill. The bill would give cops the power to block protests that cause “serious disruption” to an organisation or have a “relevant impact” on people nearby. These vague clauses give the cops a green light to stop any action that has an effect – and it’s clear that protests such as ours will be targeted.

We should not live our lives in fear, for a life lived in fear is a life half-lived. I refuse to live in fear.

Greece: Repression, resistance and a hunger strike

A combination of police repression and Covid-19 has provoked strikes and demonstrations which threaten the Greek government


18/03/2021

Last weekend (March 13-14), thousands of Greeks gathered in the main squares of the neighborhoods of Athens and other cities with one main focus point: Stop police repression! The slogan “Πονάω” (it hurts) is a free translation of “I can’t breathe”. The protests were called by grassroots organizations of the radical and anti-capitalist left and found broad support at the localities, in some occasions they were even called just via social media! All were peaceful, militant and political and sent a strong message to the right wing government of New Democracy (ND) and PM Kyriakos Mitsotakis, that his strategy of using the pandemic to repress civil rights is not tolerated any more. The slogan “Down with New Democracy” was heard all over the country.

A calendar of protests

These mobilizations did not fall from the sky. They are the culmination of resistance to the attacks of ND and, for the first time since the start of the pandemic one year ago, they seem to bring different movements together and cause damage not just to the image of Hellenic Police, but also to the prestige of the government and its ability to go on with its policies.

The spark for calling the weekend’s protests was one (more) incident of police brutality, which took place last Sunday at the square of Nea Smyrni in Athens, after policemen attacked and leveled a family with 300 € fines for simply drinking their coffee sat on a bench! Passers-by defended the family, only to be beaten with iron bars and arrested, while the media were claiming that “policemen were attacked by a mob of 30 people in Nea Smyrni”!

Following an impromptu protest on Sunday evening, Tuesday saw an organized massive demonstration of more than 10.000 marching around the streets of the neighborhood. At the end of the protest and using the injury of a policeman as a pretext, the notorious riot police special forces (MAT) unleashed a violent pursuit through the streets, beat and arrested dozens of young people. Some face now charges of attempted homicide.

One day earlier, the 8th of March was a successful day of strike and work stoppages for women’s rights and demonstrations took place in the city center, reinforced by the Greek #metoo moment, young people, feminist groups and left organizations.

One day later, on Wednesday morning, thousands of students and teachers took the streets to protest against the reactionary reforms that the government has just voted. The most provocative is the establishment of special police units in campuses, to impose “law and order”, which is allegedly lost in Greek universities.

This is a symbolic as well as substantial gesture. Greek universities have historically been bastions of resistance and left-wing thought and action. The fall of the military junta which ruled the country from 1967 until 1974 started with the uprising of the Technical University (Polytechnio) on the 17th November 1973. After regime change, campuses have been police – free, offering a sort of political asylum to citizens.

This principle was banned by ND, together with a bunch of neoliberal reforms, such as the introduction of private higher education and binding university studies with big business. The reforms provoked massive student demonstrations and squats, they braved repression by MAT, but were so massive, that finally broke the government bans on public gatherings in the context of covid -19 measures. They are repeated almost every week since early February.

Finally, on Thursday afternoon, one more massive demonstration took place outside the parliament, calling for defending democratic rights and in solidarity with the hunger strike of life imprisoned Dimitris Koufontinas.

Mass struggle and individual terrorism

Koufontinas had been second in rank and hitman of the defunct urban guerilla group “17 November”. He went on hunger strike for 66 days to protest the government’s refusal to his just demand to serve prison in Korydallos, at the special section for members of terrorist groups. This is a case which under different circumstances may have nothing to do with the mass movements, as 17 November, even at its most influential days would always act as an agent of the people and was never connected with rank and file struggles. However, at this political timing, Koufontinas’s call found a resonance not narrowly in anarchist groups, but in wider audiences, human rights groups, even sections of the center right expressed their wish for a fair handling of his case.

17 November was dismantled in 2002 after an explosion that exposed one of its cadres, Savvas Xiros. Shortly after, Koufondinas turned himself voluntarily to the police, undertaking the political responsibility for the actions of the group, including 22 executions of (in)famous politicians, of which he had conducted 11. Among the targets were officers of the military regime who had been torturing political prisoners, British and U.S. embassies military attaches, capitalists and politicians. The brother in law of Kyriakos Mitsotakis was one of the latter.

The government therefore had personal motives to want to smash him, but it was more than this: For the narrow minded think-tanks of New Democracy, Koufontinas represents mistakenly not a particular political practice, but the entire Left. By smashing him, they fantasized themselves and their more conservative voters that they can impose law and order, which had promised to do and also marginalize the Left. They caused the opposite: Sympathy for Koufontinas and deep concern for sustaining the democratic rights in the country.

The Hellenic League for human rights, Amnesty International, observatories and socialist lawyers managed to raise the issue, not on the ground of any sort of political agreement with terrorism, but on the case of human rights to be defended when arbitrarily and revengefully denied. At the end of the day, people made comparisons with Bobby Sands and the Irish freedom fighters in British jails in 1981! This dynamic is connected with the resistance to the government and the state and constitutes the real alternative to the undemocratic methods of ND.

The government of New Democracy has failed completely

Last June Greece exited the first wave of Covid-19 with low number of casualties. The main reason is that the vast majority of the population respected willingly the lockdown measures, demanding though that the government would keep its promises for strengthening the National Health System and support the people who had been redundant, or even lost their jobs during the Covid crises. On the contrary, Mitsotakis’s government arrogantly concluded that they had the consensus to impose any policies they and their friends, the Greek capitalists wished. They counted on tourism, the country’s “heavy industry” for a recovery of the economy and failed to deliver to the working class.

The result was that by the arrival of the second wave in October, the country was still completely unprepared, but this time the virus was in. Despite stricter and occasionally ridiculously hard lockdown restrictions (e.g. a curfew at 21.00 on weekdays and on 18.00 in weekends), this time infections and deaths are soaring (4 digit numbers daily), the sparse ICU units are all full, the economy is in a deep slump (10% at least), thousands of jobs have been lost and working people in redundancy have to survive on a mere 530 € subsidy per month.

Discontent has been rising and several sectors have been striking despite restrictions. The response of the government was more repression: They banned all public meetings and encouraged the policemen to issue fines and arrest citizens, allegedly for failing to meet the measures. People are squeezed inside crowded metro wagons to go to work, while the government spokespersons insist that this is ok, but sitting on a park bench is infectious, and so is laughing and speaking loudly!

All these failings constitute the ground on which anger is building up and, although ND controls all mainstream media and injects more and more state money to them, resistance keeps growing. Social media have provided an alternative to the lies and cover-ups of the media, as activists publicize through them not only criticism and opinions, but also facts and proves of police brutality, like in the events in Nea Smyrni.

Mitsotakis attacked publicly the use of social media as one-sided, but he and his family would soon be exposed by the following incident which leaked through social media: A video outside the house of parliament shows a police driver serving in the security of Dora Bakoyannis (sister of Mitsotakis) behind the wheel of a car that collided with a motorcycle on Friday March 12, leaving the 23-year-old rider brain dead at the hospital. For 48 hours, mainstream media were silent, until the leaked video became viral, showing that, not only did the driver abandon the victim unconscious, but also traffic police at the location intimidated protesting passers-by and sent them away. Dora Bakoyiannis tried to make up for the awfulness, but only after the events had gone around the country. Patience for the government is being exhausted and more and more people are infuriated.

The only good news for ND is that Koufontinas ended the 66 day hunger strike on March 14, but it’s doubtful whether the government can rejoice on this. On the contrary, he made his legal demand visible, so his lawyers speak of a clear ethical and political victory over ND. I would add that it was a good timing that his just cause managed to merge with the on-going political battles.

Most importantly, the long struggle goes on inside Greek society, trade unions, universities, neighborhoods. On the 17th and 18th of March, hospital workers are on strike once more, students are still in mobilization and on the 20th we take the streets together with immigrants and refugees against the racist policies of the government.

No more compromises

Founded by a Black feminist and led by grassroots activists, a new party is challenging the Dutch establishment


17/03/2021

I have never been as excited for a general election as I am for the one this year, and many other members of minority groups in the Netherlands feel the same way. Finally, we see a chance for a voice in parliament that will truly advocate for us.

In the Netherlands, we have a multi-party system, which usually means that no single party can get a parliamentary majority by itself. Instead, parties have to form coalitions to get to the threshold of 75 seats of a total of 150 seats. There are several benefits to a multi-party system, the most obvious one being that it is virtually impossible for one party to rule a country without regard for other parties’ interests. Making compromises – or, as the Dutch call it, ‘polderen’ – is an essential part of the multi-party system. Yet, for all their apparent differences, these parties all prioritise the welfare and comfort of those already closest to power, while the concerns and interests of those who are unrepresented / under-represented are sacrificed. This paves the way for highly racist, Islamophobic, and queerphobic policies to be pushed, with little to no interference.

The most recent example of policies that target those who are already marginalized is the ,racist child welfare scandal. Mark Rutte, the prime minister, and his government claim to have taken responsibility for the racist child welfare scandal by resigning. However, the obvious reason for their resignation two months before the elections is that none of the parties involved (which includes parties on the left) want this scandal hanging over their heads during election season.

To make matters even worse, the prime minister’s party, VVD (The Peoples’ Party for Freedom and Democracy), promises in their campaign to create a blacklist, of ‘fraudulent individuals’. Rather than addressing the exposed injustice, this will entrench the racism that helped cause it. Fun fact: the same prime minister, who has been ‘leading’ the country for the past 10 years, has been ,convicted of ethnically profiling Dutch-Somalis in 2007, back when he was the secretary of state for social services. In the last 10 years, Dutch policies, especially those targeting migrants and refugees, have also become even more inhumane. The way the Dutch system treats LGBTQIA+ asylum seekers has cost people their lives. The most recent victim is ,Angel, whose suicide was a direct result of the way she was treated by this system.

In theory, under the multi-party system, any new party that wins enough votes during the elections can get a seat, or seats, in parliament. In reality, the number of hoops a party has to jump through just to get on the ballot makes things very difficult for new parties. In the past twenty years, only eight new parties have been elected into parliament, two of which have since disbanded. Seven of them were founded and led by white people. And most of these new parties are on the radical far-right. Some are even openly fascist and follow Nazi ideology.

Then comes ,Bij1, a grassroots party, founded and led by Sylvana Simons, a Black feminist. Bij1 has no institutional support, is unapologetically anti-racist, addresses structural and institutional injustice, and is not afraid to call a Nazi a Nazi. In conversation with feminist writer ,Sophia Seawell, Simons said about Bij1: ,“We’re an activist party. It’s not that we’re a political party that sometimes joins a demonstration; it’s the other way around. We are activists who have joined forces to become political”.

Bij1 wants to immediately increase the minimum wage to 14 Euro, appoint a minister specifically to battle racism and other structural injustices, introduce free national healthcare funded by taxing the wealthy, declare climate change a national emergency and make the Netherlands carbon-neutral by 2030, dissolve FRONTEX (The European Border and Coast Guard Agency) and begin payment by the Netherlands of colonial reparations.

To say that the white supremacist, capitalist, patriarchal system in the Netherlands is stacked against a party such as Bij1 would be a gross understatement. In spite of all of this, Bij1 managed to win one seat during the local Amsterdam elections of 2018. And in the past 2 years, Bij1 has been a true advocate in the Amsterdam municipality, for those who have been made voiceless by the system.

During its short time in office, Bij1 has made significant material policy changes as well as passed significant motions showing its commitment to change. Some examples are: policy decisions must always consider the impact on the climate, vacant real estate owned by the city must be put to cultural and social use, and streets named after colonial figures will have visible signs stating any atrocities associated with them. Other measures have directly supported single parents, trans people, sex workers, and vulnerable children and students. Because of Amsterdam Bij1, I realised even more how massive the systemic issues of injustice are in my city, which is hailed as ‘the most liberal city in the Netherlands’.

But finally, with Bij1 on the ballot in all 20 electoral districts of the Netherlands, I don’t have to vote for a white liberal party that pretends during election season to care about those who are pushed to the margins of society. These parties use people from those communities as tokens and put them in unelectable low positions on their candidate lists, only to forget about them as soon as they are in office. Finally, there can, and I believe will be a voice in the Dutch parliament to advocate for those in our society hit the hardest by right-wing and inhumane policies, which have only worsened in the past 10 years.

Bij1 in the Dutch parliament will have an impact not only on Dutch politics but on those all across Europe, since European countries like Germany and France also have a multi-party system and grassroots parties such as Die ,Urbane Partei. I firmly believe a party like Bij1 getting elected into Dutch parliament will debunk the commonly accepted narrative that electability for a left-wing party means ‘not being too radical’. The alarming success of the radical right shows how misguided this is.

Am I saying that Bij1 is the perfect political party? No, because there is no such thing and it is important to stay critical. But Bij1 is a party that stands out, compared to any party in the current Dutch political climate, especially on the left. Where most parties on the left are moving towards the center, Bij1 firmly and proudly stands all the way to the left. And that is what we need right now.

Racism and Anti-racism in the Netherlands

Addendum

Some months after he wrote this article, Axmed Maxamed made the following observation:

“As the writer of this article I’d like to add an addendum that sheds a different light on the values of the party leaders, which I now know contradicts my writing of earlier this year. Here is a short post about this.”

Axmed Maxamed is a Queer Diasporic Somali activist, organizer and music nerd. Axmed was born in Xamar, Somalia where he spent his early years until his family had to flee during the civil war and ended up in the Netherlands. He spent his formative years in Breda in the south of the Netherlands until he moved to Amsterdam. In Amsterdam Axmed co-founded ,Dance with Pride, a queer initiative which aims to re-unify dance music with its queer roots and has been raisning money for and awareness around grass roots queer initiatives, with the fund-raiser parties and sales of the Dance with Pride T-shirts. He co-curated the music compilation ,Place: The Netherlands which raises funds for and awareness around LGBTQIA+ refugees in the Netherlands. Axmed also co-organises the ,first Somali LGBTQIA+ gatherings in the Netherlands. In addition to that Axmed is involved in other queer initiatives, with focus on QTBPOC. And together with Ladan Maandeeq, Axmed started working on ‘Queer Somali Pasts and Presents: A Storytelling and Archival Research’ which will focus on the lives of Queer Somalis in the diaspora and Somalia, both in the present day and the past. Axmed addresses ,systemic inequalities in Dutch society and in the underground dance music scene, which pave the way for harmful practices such as ,cultural appropriation and the white washing of Black music.

When the state is responsible for a woman’s death, you do not ask for permission to protest

Sarah Everard’s death in London and the problem with white liberal feminism


Sarah Everard was a 33-year-old white woman who was walking home on the evening of 3 March, and who was last seen on CCTV around 9.30pm on a fairly well-lit road in Clapham, South London. She did not make it home that night. Her body was found a week later in a forest near Deal (in Kent, southeastern England), some 80km south of Britain’s capital. The main suspect in her case is a serving police officer, who has now been charged with her kidnapping and murder. Deal is where the police officer lives.

The grief that Sarah Everard’s family and friends must be feeling is unimaginable. Knowing that the person charged with her death is a serving police officer, who finished his shift just an hour before she was last seen, is enraging. Seeing that the narratives are being co-opted by white girl-boss feminism and the feminism that centres the innocence of white women, is a cause for despair.

A lot of the focus in recent days has been on the fact that Sarah Everard was just walking home. She called her boyfriend, she wore bright clothing, walked on a main road, and it wasn’t that late. She did all the right things, all the things that make you feel a little safer walking back home in the dark by yourself, but that you know are – ultimately – insufficient against someone determined to do you harm.

This is all true. No woman or gender non-conforming person should feel scared to walk home. The reason we do is based on experiences we all push to the back of our minds. Considering that a recent study has shown 97% of women aged 18-24 in the UK have been sexually harassed, and anecdotal evidence suggests that not only is this true, but also that many of us haven’t ever mentioned many of these incidents to other people, it is not difficult to draw the conclusion that we have accepted this as our lived reality and that we make daily allowances as to what kind of behaviour we see as not ‘a big deal’.

From an early age we are told to adjust our behaviour to mitigate the risk of harm we face simply existing in the world and many of us feel lucky that our experience was ‘only’ what it was. When cases such as this one blow-up in mainstream media, it makes us replay many of the things that have happened to us in the past, over and over, in our heads.

My initial reaction to Sarah Everard’s murder was fear. For myself, for the safety of those close to me who live just down the road from where Sarah was last seen, for the safety of all women and gender non-conforming people. And this is only about safety in public spaces – what about in our homes, where most gender-based violence takes place?

My next reaction was rage. The person charged with Sarah’s murder is a serving police officer, who, just a week earlier, was reported for indecent exposure in a South London McDonald’s. These two incidents are not unrelated. The fact that, unsurprisingly, no action was taken following the indecent exposure of a serving police officer, and a week later he was charged with the kidnapping and murder of a woman, is the focal point of this situation. Gender-based violence and state violence are one and the same. This police officer felt he was above the law – and that’s because he was.

Men, on the whole, believe they are above the law when it comes to gender-based violence. In the UK only 1.4% of all reported cases of rape end in conviction, effectively decriminalising it. Many victims do not even bother reporting, knowing that it will not lead anywhere, and may well lead to more violence directed at them, especially if their abuser is a person closely known (as most are). I will not be going into the debates around #notallmen here, but know that #notallmen has a similar stench to #alllivesmatter.

The biggest problem, as I see it, with the narratives that have dominated the past week is exemplified by what happened around the vigil on Clapham Common. A totally new initiative, Reclaim These Streets, was founded just to organise the vigil, planned to take place on the evening of Saturday 13 March. Wanting to do something and doing something about it, is commendable.

Here it is important to note that the Coronavirus Act in the UK effectively bans protests due to their threat to public health, and organisers get threatened with £10,000 fines. This is what happened to the Reclaim These Streets organisers and they called off the gathering on Clapham Common, and instead called for a doorstep vigil – asked for people to light candles on their doorsteps in memory of Sarah Everard.

An activist collective, Sisters Uncut, called for people to attend the South London vigil anyway [1]. Sisters Uncut is a collective led by women of colour, which has been active in the field of domestic and sexual violence for years. What happened at the vigil is now known to anybody who has seen the news – the royal PR machine went into overdrive by sending Kate Middleton to attend the vigil, secretly and yet without a mask (are royals immune to COVID?) so she would definitely be recognised, and the moment it got dark the police kettled those gathered, arrested four women, and manhandled many others. To those surprised the police did this: the police do not care about the photos because their power does not come from the public – it comes from the state.

What happened the next day is typical of many feminist debates. The most shared photo was of a white woman pinned to the ground by several police officers. ‘It was a vigil, not a protest’ and ‘it was just women and flowers’ made the rounds on social media. It was shocking to many white liberal feminists to see one of their own in this situation. This narrative is not only hugely hurtful to Black people and People of Colour, who have been experiencing and talking about police brutality for ever (it was just last summer where this same police force rammed horses into Black Lives Matter protesters in Central London), it also has hugely problematic undertones. It suggests that there is a ‘good’ way to protest and a ‘bad’ way to protest. The ‘good’ way is when protests are organised by white professional campaigners, who would have ensured it did not ‘come to this’, who would have got permission from the police, who would have made it all pretty and sanitised and instagrammable. The ‘bad’ way is a spontaneous protest organised by marginalised communities, where there are links made between the death of an individual and the system which not only allowed it to happen, but also benefitted from it happening. This, first of all, takes away from the fact that Black communities have organised vigils and other forms of remembrance for victims of state and gender-based violence, and paints movements such as BLM as ‘woke extremists’ and ‘riots’ – putting the onus of violence on those resisting and not on the state. Second of all, there is no difference between a vigil and a protest when a person died at the hands of an agent of the state.

Framing Sarah Everard’s death as one that was enabled by a patriarchal system is not taking away from the pain has caused. It does the opposite. The police work for the state, and they are tasked with upholding its values and ideology – which are the patriarchy, capitalism, and white supremacy (which are all sides of the same coin). They do this, systematically, by exerting violence on communities that resist the oppression they experience at the hand of these ideologies. This is why we say All Cops Are Bastards.

Taking it down to the narrative of the individual ‘rotten apple’ forgets that it is the system that empowered the perpetrator to do this. This is not just a ‘one-off’ – this is systemic. This is why the indecent exposure incident and the kidnapping and murder are related. It is the same system that empowers men to do things that start with cat-calling and not taking no for an answer, and in extreme cases ends with femicide.

It is, therefore, all the more disappointing (albeit not surprising) to see the Reclaim These Streets organisers giving interviews on mainstream media, not crediting Sisters Uncut with the task of organising and with having ensured the safety and legal support of attendees. What we are seeing instead is them sitting down with Cressida Dick, the head of the Met Police, and saying that it would be a disservice to make her resign since she is the first woman to hold the role. Girl-boss feminism at its finest.

What they are essentially also saying is that had they been allowed to organise the vigil as they planned, it would have been safe and the event would not have resulted in police brutality, as it would have just been a vigil, not a protest. They, the respectable professionals, would have done a better job than the rowdy (read: experienced) grassroots activists. On top of this, they have not publicly declared whether the now half a million pounds they raised would be going towards the fines of those arrested in Clapham, or where that money would be going at all. Where is the solidarity? Or is it only some women’s lives they care about?

Reports from those on the ground say that solidarity was very much present on the ground, both at Clapham Common, and a day later in Parliament Square. That this wasn’t just a white women’s protest and that it’s not a white women’s issue. Marginalised communities see this, despite the fact that the same media coverage and public outrage wasn’t afforded to Blessing Olusegun, who was found dead on a beach in East Sussex (southeastern England) last September, or Nicole Smallman and Bibaa Henry, who were found dead in a North London park last June. Blessing’s case was deemed ‘non-suspicious’ by police and dropped, and in the case of Nicole and Bibaa, eight police officers are currently under investigation for taking photos next to the sisters’ dead bodies and sharing them with their friends on WhatsApp. The state enacts violence both directly, through policy brutality and incarceration, but also through the systemic deprivation and dehumanisation of communities whose oppression upholds the system as it is, and such events show what low regard the state and its agents have for the lives of those from marginalised communitites.

The protests – led by Sisters Uncut – are continuing. They are currently focusing on the police and Home Secretary Priti Patel’s Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Bill (popularly called the Police Crackdown Bill) which was voted on in Westminster in the evening of 16 March. This is an extension to the curbing of the right to protest under the Coronavirus Act bill and it would effectively make demonstrations illegal. Protests that cause a ‘serious annoyance’ to ‘a section of the public’ could lead to ten years’ imprisonment.

The Labour Party leadership originally said they would abstain, but the protests put enough pressure on the party to ultimately vote against it. It still went through its second reading with a majority. The bill is not yet law as there are some more steps in the UK’s parliamentary procedure. Activist groups have declared the protests will continue. It should also be mentioned here that the Tory government shamelesslysuggested protecting women by placing undercover cops in nightclubs, and police officers continued to intimidate protesters during demonstrations outside parliament led by Sisters Uncut. This is not a battle that will be easily won.

It is not surprising that it took the death of a middle-class white woman to spark this sort of reaction. It is also not surprising that so soon afterwards there is a divide in opinions as to how to proceed and how to frame it. Sarah Everard’s murder lies at the meeting point of gender-based violence, state violence, intersectionality and the right to protest during a pandemic (and always). The answer should be obvious, but to many it isn’t: you do not ask for permission to protest, and the police is not our friend.

Read the Sisters Uncut response to Boris Johnson’s statement here.

Hanna Grześkiewicz is the joint speaker of the LINKE Berlin Internationals group

Footnote

1 There were also other vigils that happened in London and across the UK. Some were moved online, some were not, such as the North London vigil led by the Women’s Strike Assembly.

“Every Day We Do Not Strike, Patients Are at Risk”

Fighting Covid and defending the National Health Service. Interview with the nurse who was fined £10,000 for organising a socially distanced protest


16/03/2021

Interview with Karen Reissmann

 

Karen Reissmann is a long-standing socialist, a member of the Socialist Worker’s Party in the UK, and a nurse from Manchester. She is on public sector union Unison’s National Executive Committee (but is speaking here in a personal capacity). In March 2021, Karen was fined £10,000 for organising a protest over the government’s NHS pay offer of 1%. In 2007 she was victimised at work for speaking out and organising against cuts and privatisation. Questions by Phil Butland

How has Covid affected health workers?

It’s been awful. We have not had the right PPE (personal protective equipment), some of it was up to 6 years out of date, there was no acceptance that Covid was airborne, so we still have just paper masks to use most of the time. Well over 850 health workers have died, 10,000s were extremely ill and many still are suffering with Long-Covid. These workers were disproportionately Black, Asian and Minority Ethnic (BAME). 93% of doctors who died, and 74% of nurses, were BAME.

We have all made huge changes, we have worked long hours to fill the ever-growing gaps. We are exhausted and overwhelmed. Health workers are used to people dying, but not in the quantity that we have seen in the last year and not our own colleagues. Many health workers have developed mental health problems such as panic attacks, depression and Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder.

Britain seems to have vaccinated more people than, say, Germany. Is this a great achievement of Boris Johnson?

This is a great achievement of the National Health Service (NHS). Many contracts related to Covid have been given to private companies, which have completely failed to deliver. Our Test and Trace service that cost £37 billion is a complete failure, run by Serco and headed by the partner of a Tory MP. Vaccination research was funded by the government in our universities and the administration has been done by the local doctors in the NHS. That’s why it succeeded.

Health workers in the UK have just been awarded a 1% pay rise. How has the public reacted?

Health workers and the public are furious. The whole country clapped for us and we appreciated it from ordinary people. But when Boris Johnson and Rishi Sunak clapped in Downing Street, people were cynical. It turns out we were right to be.

Is the money there to fund a pay rise? Doesn’t more money for nurses mean less for everyone else?

Not only did they offer 1% but they told us we should be grateful for this, after the year we have had, as some people are getting nothing! We don’t want any worker to get nothing. We all deserve a pay rise. They can afford a pay rise for everyone.

The government wasted £37 billion on a Test and Trace that does not work. This on its own would pay for a 15% pay rise for all NHS workers for 25 YEARS. Yes they can afford it but are choosing – not to tax the rich, not to tax profits over £250,000; but to continue to bailout business with grants, to replace Trident nuclear weapons (£120 billion) and build a new high-speed rail line (£100 billion+) and say there is nothing left for us!

They want us to blame each other. We need to stand together for a proper pay rise for all. Just like the banking crisis. We did not cause it, and we should not be made to pay.

You were just given a £10,000 fine for organising a demonstration for more pay for nurses. Why was the reaction so harsh?

Because the UK government has just had a year where 130,000 people died, the worst record per head of population in the world – disproportionately killing Black, poor, older and disabled people. They produced a budget that enriched the rich and impoverished the poor. People all over the UK are angry.

The UK government are desperate to stop protest, which they know could take off like wild-fire. Fining me for a perfectly safe, fully risk-assessed protest was to try and stop other people protesting. We now have the Police, Crime and Sentencing Bill going through parliament, which aims to allow the police to ban any protest that is having an impact! Even if the protest consists of one person.

They fear the collective action of working class people. Just look at their awful repression of women on a vigil for a woman allegedly murdered by a police officer. The women there were demanding an end to violence against women, and were attacked by male police officers. There is a battle for the right to protest, with the government using Covid as cover and people are beginning to see this.

British nurses are contemplating strike action. Wouldn’t this just endanger patients who are already vulnerable?

Every day we do NOT strike, patients are at risk – 170,000 beds have been lost in the last 10 years; 100,000 unfilled job vacancies; 4 million people on waiting lists for operations. Not one ounce of slack in the system. We need a government that will show a financial commitment to the NHS and to its staff. Otherwise more exhausted staff will leave and more patients will be at risk. We need to get rid of a government that continues its murderous policies. Strike action by NHS workers is the start of that.

British friends tell me that the opposition to Johnson’s government is now being led by people like you and the footballer Marcus Rashford. What has happened to Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour Party?

Keir Starmer, who thinks 1% is not enough but thinks 2.1% is. Who initially wanted to abstain on the new Police Bill, who criticised Johnson for not reopening schools sooner even though scientists said this would lead to 30-50,000 more deaths, who is more interested in persuading big business that the Labour Party is on their side again. The only people he is good at attacking are the left in his own party. That’s why genuine footballers who knew poverty and are not afraid to say so, have such a huge following and can stand up for poorer people when Labour does not bother.

What can people in Berlin do to support you and to fight for a decent wage for health workers?

You can offer solidarity, and you have done this. Workers across the world have common interests. But you can also fight your own government attacks, show people in the UK it is possible to fight, inspire us, and join our battle against capitalist governments whose priority always will be profit not people.