UK Uncut & Black Bloc – They All Look The Same To Me

Since the events of last Saturday, both the mainstream media and the police have sought to blur the lines of distinction between UK Uncut and the black bloc 'anarchists' that attacked the Ritz, Santander and Starbucks. A total of 201 arrests were made following Saturday’s march. Charges have been brought against 149 people, 138 of which were charged with aggravated trespass in connection with the Fortnum & Mason protest organised by UK Uncut.

New footage from the Guardian indicates that UK Uncut was deliberately targeted by police and this attempt to demonise UK Uncut and associate them with violent disturbances has been systematically reinforced by mainstream press and social networking sites. But why would the establishment seek to portray UK Uncut as violent ‘anarchists’? And why would the police choose to ignore violent behaviour in favour of arresting peaceful activists from a growing protest movement?

Well, on the face of it, UK Uncut is an easier and more manageable target – but that analysis is far too simple. We should instead ask who represents the greatest threat to the ‘establishment’?

In purely cosmetic terms, anarchists – with their penchant for smashing up expensive hotels and discharging paint bombs over high-end shops – are a fearsome threat to society. Their behaviour is sadistically iconic but, in truth, their actions alienate more than they attract and their activity is easily managed. But, my word, do they make for a good photo opportunity!

UK Uncut, on the other hand, represents a real and fundamental threat to the established order. The movement – fluid in its organisation and fiercely tech-savvy – has grown steadily since it was formed last year. Although not dogmatically political, their activity is distinctly class-based: they target organised capital or, more precisely, the tax-dodging classes – such as Vodafone, Top Shop or Boots – and their tactics are articulate, peaceful and original. Take, for example, the occupation of banks and the impromptu organisation of pop-up libraries or stand-up performance. Their thoughtful mobilisation – coupled with the resurrection of trade union activism – has had a profound effect on the established order and prompted this vicious backlash which hopes to gut the movement of activists and starve it of public support.

UK Uncut was targeted by police in an attempt to discredit them and encourage people to confuse peaceful demonstration against legitimate targets with violent vandalism. Anarchists were not targeted in the same way because their antics serve to fragment the labour movement by alienating potential support and providing a stick with which to beat the left. Characterising UK Uncut as thuggish criminals serves to undermine their sophisticated and peaceful activism.

The repression of UK Uncut has – at its very core – the class struggle and it shows that the antagonism between labour and capital is as strong as ever. UK Uncut has steadily been able to raise awareness of tax-dodging corporations and this has had a positive effect on raising the consciousness of British workers – but there was always going to be a backlash. On Monday it was announced that parliament is to investigate corporate tax avoidance – a formidable victory for the movement. Let’s hope it’s just the start.

Special Protest Report: March for the Alternative

The TUC had organised the 26 March demonstration months in advance. Everyone knew it would be big, but just how many people and which groups would turn up in central London on the day? Estimates of numbers vary between sources, but it was probably around 500,000. It definitely felt comparable to the demonstration against the Iraq war in 2003.

Victoria Embankment was already full of banners and placards by the time EoP arrived at 10:30am. We were pleased to join numerous trade unions, activists, public sector workers, unemployed, disabled people, and protestors. It was interesting to see the diversity of groups extended to women’s organisations, music and theatre unions, physiotherapists, and pensioners all marching alongside revolutionary and political parties.


We started marching just after 12pm. Trade union branches from around the country were represented in their delegations and many workers – from nurses to firemen – marched in uniform against the cuts.


Walking towards Westminster, we caught up with the teaching unions NASUWT and the NUT, protesting against cuts to education.


The route took us up Whitehall and past Downing Street where you could hear the crowd’s deafening boos. The march was apparently 4 miles long, so let’s hope Cameron heard our discontent for a good few hours.


Trafalgar Square was about half way along the route. People took the chance to rest, climb statues to protest, and a large Trojan horse circled Nelson’s Column.


From Piccadilly Circus, we moved along Picadilly – the home of Fortnum & Mason, several banks, and the Ritz. On our right, a stream of about 200 anarchists joined the protest. They seemed very well organised, and we caught sight of them causing havoc at branches of Santander, Starbucks and the Ritz. This was action distinctly separate from the main, peaceful march. We’ve included a photo below, but more can be found in our Facebook photo album.



Amongst a suddenly heavy police presence we reached Hyde Park at about 3:30pm. There were hundreds of thousands of people there already. Speakers at the rally included Ed Miliband, Brendan Barber, and Mehdi Hasan, who all praised the great turnout. We were told at 4:30 that people were still arriving - and information on Twitter suggested that the march still stretched back to Whitehall.



We left Hyde Park for a well-deserved tortilla down Oxford Street. We passed Oxford Circus, and the spectacle that was Topshop’s flagship store. It’s not the first time this store has been targeted by UKUncut, but it had certainly been hit harder than any previous occasion. The paint-splattered windows implied that it had been targeted by the anarchists who had previously attacked the Ritz, de Beers Jewellers and Starbucks. A wall of police was protecting the store, and it certainly wasn’t open for business. Even passing shoppers couldn’t help but take a photo. As I write, there are still reports that police are defending the store.

We participated in the main, peaceful, family-orientated march. We also caught a glimpse of the minority’s actions against businesses and the rich. It will be interesting how the Sunday papers will report the march tomorrow. Will they focus on the 500,000 or the 500?

Click here for our full photo album

Class war on fat people is too much to stomach

Obesity is increasing rapidly in the Western world. In the 1980s, approximately 40% of the UK population were overweight and less than 10% were obese. Now two-thirds of adults are overweight and more than a fifth are obese.

In the monumental book Spirit Level, Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett dedicate a fascinating chapter to exploring the causes behind this “obesity epidemic” and conclude that obesity levels tend to be lower in countries where income differences are smaller.

This plague of portliness has caused a major health crisis in the developed world as higher obesity levels has seen the ballooning of those suffering from heart disease, diabetes and various cancers. Increasing numbers of obese children will lead to lower life expectancy and place additional strain on an already underfunded and undervalued NHS. Furthermore, obesity further erodes psychological and mental well-being.

Historically, being fat has been associated with being rich. Rich people didn’t need to engage in manual labour and they could afford to gorge on various decadent delights. Conversely, the poor would work long, strenuous days and could afford, if anything, only the most basic food. Whilst the rich were often fat cats; the poor were more likely to be malnourished and suffer from debilitating disease.

As the Western world has moved to a post-industrial economy, however, obesity has changed its social distribution. For a variety of reasons – as laid out in Spirit Level – working-class people are now far more likely to be overweight than middle-class people.

This phenomena has been coupled with an overt and covert media assault on the corpulent classes. We have seen an explosion of voyeuristic television programmes laughing at a variety of (usually working-class) overweight subjects – Too Fat Too Young, The 34 Stone Teenager, Fat Club, Big Meets Bigger, The Biggest Loser, Can Fat Teens Hunt? – in a grotesque echo of the Victorian freak show. Tabloid newspapers, trashy magazines, the fashion industry and celeb culture fortify the maxim that thin is beautiful and fat is horrible. The ubiquitous media tells us that fat is wrong but, at the same time, the omnipresent advertising industry tells us to devour more and more unwholesome junk. Well you can't have your cake and eat it! Or maybe you can...

As Polly Toynbee notes, “fat is a class issue” – but this pervasive demonisation is much more subtle than overt class war and is compounded by the media’s desire to reduce everything to the lowest common denominator. Like an exquisite meal, everything the media regurgitates has to be easily digestible.

A prime example of this is the clever satire of Have I Got News For You relentlessly attacking John Prescott – one of the few working class members of Blair’s government – for being overweight. Prescott was never overtly mocked for being working class, but that was the underlying subtext – especially when scoffing at Prescott’s lack of lingual dexterity. The implicit implication is that politics is no place for people who haven’t had a public school or Oxbridge education. Indeed, the whole media feeding frenzy around fat people is thinly veiled class war and represents another way for the establishment to both profit from and undermine the working-class.