Junior Murvin has died but the story of Police and Thieves lives on

The Jamaican reggae singer, who died on Monday, bequeathed us an anthem whose indictment of policing still rings true

When Superintendent Leroy Logan stepped down as the highest-ranking African-Caribbean officer in the Met this summer, he entertained his retirement party guests with his rendition of Junior Murvin's Police and Thieves. The irony was not lost on myself and others present. The tune is iconic. Even among coppers. Despite its critique of the profession.

Having said that, many reggae lovers will struggle to identify the song's singer, Junior Murvin, who died on Monday in relative obscurity compared with the global success of his reggae anthem.

The tune was the soundtrack to the Notting Hill carnival in the summer it was released, 1976. The perfect groove for a hot and sticky August bank holiday on the streets of west London. Eerily, the record had been pumping out of sound systems and shebeens in London W10 and W11 postcodes in the days and hours before the community tensions of the time erupted in an all-out battle between (predominantly) black youth and the (predominantly) white police on the streets of Ladbroke Grove. Everywhere you went for the following few weeks – parties, blues dances and even university student unions – the tune was being rinsed out like it was the pick of the pops.

Every young rebel seemed to have a copy. Joe Strummer and his bandmates included. Even though John Peel had been playing Murvin for months, it was the Clash's version on their debut album that would turn the song into a punk anthem. Strummer told me he preferred Murvin's original. It was one of his favourite records.

So too, it seemed, for anyone who had a beef with the police throughout the rest of the 70s and 80s and maybe right through to the 90s. It even charted – four years later, in 1980 – and Murvin obligingly took the militant road to Top of the Pops. The following year it was the theme to the Brixton riots and subsequently to much of the social unrest during Margaret Thatcher's premiership.

Its comparison of police with thieves and any other criminals "scaring the nation" was written for the politically manipulated war zone that was Kingston, Jamaica, at the time – where you were as frightened of the constabulary as you were of the gunmen – but was subtle enough to resonate in these shores where the Dixon of Dock Green image of the obliging copper was being eroded by the image of uniformed thugs jumping out of black mariahs. What we didn't get at the time was that the "police" and the "thieves" were the emissaries of the politicians who ran the system.

But somewhere along the way its meaning started to fade and it became a party song rather than an indictment of the forces of law and order. Somewhere along the way it became OK for an outgoing Met superintendent to spoof it.

Everybody now knows, of course, that the old bill's antagonism towards black men never went away and that institutional racism is alive and well in the police force. But a new generation wasn't interested in dancing away its anger to one of the most seductive reggae songs you'll ever hear. It's too subtle for those weaned on NWA's cut-to-the-chase Fuck Tha Police.

Today, when it comes to cops and daylight robbers, there are no passing "anthems". Only the monstrous anger of direct action as we witnessed in the 2011 riots, a response to the police killing of Mark Duggan. In the Tottenham area where I live and in the areas I pass through – Harlesden, Brixton, Peckham, Hackney, Moss Side and other "hoods" – nobody is chanting the "downfall of Babylon" any more. But it doesn't mean they're not still angry with the belief that the police can kill a black man in broad daylight without consequences, and at being stopped and searched many more times than their white mates, and that the whole racist system compels half of young black men to languish on the dole. They're not stupid. They know who the "police" are and they know who the "thieves" are. They get it. They're just not voicing their frustrations through a pop song.

Written by Dotun Adebayo and first published at The Guardian

Margaret Thatcher – A Class Warrior For The Rich

A huge amount is being written in the mainstream media about the former Tory Prime Minister, Margaret Thatcher, who died on Monday morning, most of it sycophantic rubbish, but worse still, there is also a concerted attempt to rewrite history, preferring instead a story which is reminiscent of a Greek myth or Kim Jong-Il’s golfing exploits (seven holes in one out of eighteen, the first time he picked up a golf club).

I do feel that I’m entitled to have my two pence worth on her time in office, as I was seventeen when she was elected as Prime Minister in 1979, and she blighted my life as a young man in the north of England, forcing me to move south in a search for some kind of future. I was young and well enough educated and could afford to up everything and move, which wasn’t the case for everyone, despite Norman Tebbit’s exhortations to the unemployed to do just that. But all the same, I felt compelled to leave my community, just to have a chance of getting a job and making a life for myself.

The story painted in the media of the late 1970’s is of a country ‘on its knees’, in need of a strong leader to make the nation great and proud (again), ‘held ransom’ by over mighty trade union ‘barons’, with runaway inflation, rising unemployment, inefficient state owned industries draining the public purse and consequently high rates of taxation. A deeply divided once great nation crippled by the evil doctrine of socialism.

Instead, we needed a fresh approach, becoming fashionable at the time through figures such Milton Friedman and others at the Chicago Business School, where unions were tamed, public industries and services privatised, income tax cut (mostly for the wealthy), and ‘red tape’ was cut, which in turn would free up entrepreneurs to create wealth which would ‘trickle down’ to the little people in due course.

That was the rhetoric, at least, in practice we had mass unemployment in the industrial heartlands of the north of England, Scotland and Wales with the closure of most of the state owned heavy industries, (this had the added advantage of reducing the membership and the power of the unions), cuts in welfare benefits, a cut in income tax (mostly for the wealthy) but a sharp increase in indirect taxes (hitting the poorest proportionately most), which led to an equally sharp increase in inflation, and a giveaway (mostly to the wealthy) of the public utilities in privatisation and share issues. The financial services sector was deregulated, the so called ‘Big Bang’, leading to many risky and questionable practices being made legal. The employment market was made ‘flexible’.

Perhaps Thatcher’s most cunning idea was the ‘Right to Buy’ policy of encouraging tenants to buy their public housing at up 50% discount, which was extremely popular with a section of these tenants (those in the best houses, in the best areas), and effectively divided the working class between the ‘aspirational’ and the ‘losers’. People with mortgages were also less likely to go on strike too, so, so much the better. Classic divide and rule.     

Some areas of the country have still not recovered from Thatcher’s neo liberal policies, which have largely been maintained and taken further, under successive governments, most shamefully, a Labour government included. But from the viewpoint of recent history, we can see that Margaret Thatcher’s legacy is that she sowed the seeds of the present recession, from the housing crisis to the financial crisis, from the large amounts being spent on benefits rather than more productive investment, to the huge increase in wealth inequality. It all started in 1979.

The period from the end of World War 2 to 1979 saw a narrowing of the gap between the rich and the rest (fairly modest, but still), whereas post 1979 this gap has increased hugely, nationally and internationally too. And this is Thatcher’s true place in history, a warrior for the outraged establishment elite. She fought a class war on behalf of a world elite that had seen their wealth decrease in the post war years, to the advantage of the rest of us. Welfare states were demolished and income taxes for the rich reduced in the most audacious thievery from the people imaginable.

Margaret Thatcher was not a national heroine; she was a sort of Robin Hood in reverse. She was a very effective hench-woman for the ruling classes worldwide, so if she is to have some fancy funeral parade, then those whose dirty work she did, should send her off in a privatised cavalcade, rather than add insult to injury for the majority of British people by making us pay for her procession.      

The above video/song is Shipbuilding by Robert Wyatt.    

The English Civil War, Republicanism and Green Socialism

In these days of royal jubilee celebrations, my mind has turned towards thinking about republicanism in this country. We did have a de facto republic in England (and Scotland, Wales and Ireland) for ten years between 1649 and 1659, after the English Civil War(s) ended, and up until the Restoration of King Charles II in 1660. His father King Charles I was executed for high treason by Parliamentary forces in 1649 after years of dispute and then war with Parliamentary supporters.

These times must have been incredibly exciting politically with debates going on about the future governance of the country, the most famous of which were the Putney Debates at St Mary’s Church near Putney bridge in south west London. A group emerged who became known as The Levellers, with their support drawn mainly from rank and file soldiers in the Parliamentary army, although they had support amongst the people, particularly in the City of London where one of third of the population signed a petition supporting them.

They set out their demands in An Agreement of the People which espoused a republican and democratic agenda, calling for voting rights for most men and for Parliament to be elected every two years, for religious freedom, and for an end to imprisonment for debt. The heads of the army had other ideas though and wanted the King to approve of some improvements in social justice. In the end Leveller leaders were arrested and some executed by the ruling army elite.

One sub sect of the Leveller’s was the Diggers, or True Levellers, who not only called for an extension in the voting franchise and extended liberties, but who actually took pre figurative direct action in setting up collective communities on common land, ploughing the land to grow crops to share amongst the cooperative, hence the name Diggers. Like all thinking in those days, it was based upon the Bible, and a Quaker interpretation of the text.

The Diggers set up a small number of settlements on common land mainly in southern England, but probably numbered only a couple of thousand people in total. The most famous settlement was at St George’s Hill in Weybridge in Surrey. It was all pretty radical stuff at the time, but looking back their demands were typically English and conservative. At the time, over one third of the country was common land, and gave plenty of room for their experiment, of the other nearly two thirds of enclosed land, they were happy to leave with its ‘owners’. They also renounced all violence and petitioned Parliament to protect their communities.

Parliament didn’t pay much attention to the situation and local land owners, who must have feared that they wouldn’t be able to attract workers onto their land to work, used the local courts and armed thugs to evict the Diggers from their blossoming ecosocialist communities, and there the experiment ended.

The Restoration of Charles II saw the beginning of the wholesale enclosure of much of what was left of the common land, as the establishment could see the threat of allowing people to live communally like this would undermine their wealth and privilege.

And so it goes on today. I have met people in Tanzania who farm common land clearings in the forest illegally, and spoken to fishermen in Senegal, whose families have fished sustainably for centuries and are now threatened with starvation by factory fishing boats from Europe, Japan and Russia, over fishing their commons for profits at home and internationally.

So, whilst all this royalist rubbish is going on in the coming days, let’s instead reflect on our English radical tradition and how that interconnects with the political challenges we have today.

There is a republican protest by City Hall in London, where you can jeer the Queen as she sails up the Thames, if you should so wish. Details here.

The above video/song is ‘English Civil War’ by The Clash.

God Save the Queen, the Fascist Regime

With the Queen’s diamond Jubilee fast approaching, the UK media has gone into overdrive with lavish praise of our monarch’s selfless devotion to duty and public service etc etc. The BBC always goes into a somewhat comic routine, of reporting any news of the royal family in hushed tones, as though raising one’s voice to even normal levels of acoustics when describing Her Majesty and family, is the very height of vulgarity.

 The Guardian even reports on a survey where 69% of Britons say that the country would be worse off without the monarchy. Of course, depending on what the exact question is and how it is asked will often get you the answer that you are looking for, with only 22% of people thinking we would be better off. These results do surprise me little though, as when the recent royal marriage was taking place between Prince William and Kate Middleton, there was only the odd isolated union flag or bunting where I live in north London. It seemed to me that no one was really very interested in the event, though they were happy to spend the extra bank holiday in supermarkets, pubs and DIY stores.

Again we have been granted an extra day’s bank holiday, which when it is combined with the delayed late spring bank holiday and the weekend, forms a four day block of celebration from 2nd June to 5th June. No doubt people are happy to have an extra day off and will again find ways of using the time, without taking more than a cursory interest in the Jubilee itself.

I remember the Queen’s silver Jubilee in 1977, and proudly displaying my ‘Stuff the Jubilee’ badge, much to the shock of many people I came into contact with, who mostly labelled me a communist, which I suppose wasn’t too far from the truth. And who can forget the hit song ‘God Save the Queen’ by the Sex Pistols from the same year (featured above)? A brilliantly vibrant piss take of our rather dreary national anthem. The BBC banned the song from being played on Radio 1, by far the most influential radio station at the time for selling records, which of course increased its appeal, and it went straight to number 1.

I must confess, I have obtained a ‘Stuff the Jubilee’ badge again, but don’t expect wearing it will illicit anything like the opprobrium it did in 1977. People don’t just seem to identify with the monarchy in the same deep rooted way they used to. For example, virtually the whole nation would watch the Queen’s Christmas address in those days, but now what proportion of the population watches it? Probably less than half, by some way.

I think the present Queen holds some measure of respect amongst her subjects, mainly because she has been around for so long, and to be fair, hasn’t done anything majorly embarrassing to the nation, unlike other members of ‘The Firm’. But surely, this is the least we can expect, from someone who in return has led a life of luxury at the tax payer’s expense? It would be an appropriate response to the austerity agenda of the present for the Queen to have a celebration on the cheap, but oh no, millions of pounds will be wasted on this event. The authorities are even stealing the Sex Pistols idea, and sailing the monarch up and down the Thames on a boat.

So, will we have a republic anytime soon? Well, not until Queen Elizabeth’s reign is over to be sure. The same Guardian survey mentioned above though, does indicate that her likely successor Prince Charles has nothing like as much support as his mother amongst the public. Given his meddling in politics and lobbying of ministers, which we are not allowed to see the full details of, since the royal household is exempted from the provisions of the Freedom of Information Act, he may become even more unpopular. Unfortunately, that window may not be open for very long, as the Queen looks to have a good few years left in her yet, and the crown may pass quite quickly on to the next generation, and so conjure up the people’s ambivalence once again.

If only Cromwell hadn’t fucked it up, banning dancing and all that, we may now never be rid of them.

Rapper's for the NHS

Topical rap by NxtGen about the perilous future of the NHS under the ConDem government.

Good that the younger generation appreciates the threat to and values the NHS, which was founded over sixty years ago. I was reminded when speaking to an older person recently of the situation before the NHS was formed, when if you had to go to a doctor, you needed to have the money to pay for it.

A situation quite unthinkable nowadays, or is it?

NxtGen's facebook page is here.

The Unemployed Blamed for Rising Unemployment

A day after it was announced that unemployment had risen by 44,000 to just under 2.5 million, or 7.9% of the workforce (rising to over 20% for 18 to 24 year olds), the government has launched its Welfare Reform bill plan, with the mantra ‘make work pay’. The plan aims to amalgamate several benefits into a new ‘universal benefit’, although it is not entirely clear which benefits, or how exactly the new benefit will operate.

Plans to reduce Housing Benefit by 10% for those claiming Jobseekers Allowance (JSA) for over twelve months, which I reported here on this blog, have been scrapped though, and the government insists that no one will be worse off under the new arrangements. I think this is a highly dubious claim, but it is difficult to prove one way or the other at this stage, with details of the changes being too vague to make accurate calculations.

One definite proposal is that those ‘refusing to work’ face a maximum three-year loss of benefits, although how people are meant to survive in this event is less clear, but I think we can expect an increase in crime as one of the consequences. This particular proposal, which will no doubt attract plenty of popularist support, with phrases like ‘workshy’ and ‘scroungers’ doing the rounds, is not as black and white as it is being portrayed.

I worked on a short term (15 month) contract at Jobcentreplus which expired just before Christmas last year, which took in the Labour government and now ConDem government regimes, so I am well placed to compare the two administration’s approaches to unemployment.

Under Labour, the service was largely target, rather than customer focused, but the targets were mainly based around getting people off JSA and back into work. They did though arm the Jobcentre Advisors with some tools to help people get into work. Things like work focused training courses at local colleges were available, free of charge to claimants, and a daily lunch allowance for those who undertook ‘work trial’ opportunities with employers. There was also a discretionary fund which could be used to pay for things like security badges for those wanting to work in security, which is a minimum requirement for work in that sector.

Under the ConDem government, all of the advisor’s tools were systematically taken away, to the point that I felt there was very little I could offer clients in the way of positive help. The target for getting people into work was incredibly abolished, but new targets, of taking people’s benefit off them for not trying hard enough to find work, were introduced. We were encouraged to find jobs that clients could do, and print them off for them. Then we were told to check whether they had applied for these jobs, and if they hadn’t, they were to be referred for ‘not actively seeking employment’, and ran the risk of having their benefit stopped for a maximum then of two years. There might be good reasons why the person didn’t apply for a particular job, maybe when they thought about it when they got home, they reflected that they didn’t have the skills or experience for the job, but that wasn’t an acceptable excuse.

The regime became much more negatively sanctions focused, rather than positively helping claimants, all stick and no carrot under the ConDems. It sounds as though the regime is about to get more brutal, at a time when the government’s own policies are to blame for the lack of job opportunities, not those claiming JSA. At the same time this government is reducing tax inspectors and increasing benefit fraud investigators, although vastly more is lost to the public purse in tax evasion than in benefit fraud.

Same old story I’m afraid, make the rich richer, and the poor poorer. The nasty party are back in government.

The video/song above is ‘One in Ten’ by 1980’s UK reggae band UB40.

Arrogance, Ignorance and Greed

This video song is by UK folk band Show of Hands, and is about our old friends the bankers. The lyrics are reproduced below:

All I wanted was a home
And a roof over our heads
Somewhere we could call our own
Feel safer in our beds

There was a storm of money raining down
It only touched the ground
With a loan I took I can’t repay
And the crock of gold you found

At every trough you stopped to feed
With your Arrogance, your Ignorance and Greed.

I never was a cautious man
I spend more than I’m paid
But those with something put aside
Are the ones that you betrayed

With your bonuses and expenses
You shovelled down your throat
Now you bit the hand that fed you
Dear God I hope you choke

At every trough you stopped to feed
With your Arrogance, your Ignorance and Greed.

You're on your yacht, we’re on our knees
Through your Arrogance, your Ignorance and Greed.

Toxics springs you tapped and sold,
Poisoned every watering hole
Your probity, you exchanged for gold

Working man stands in line
The market sets his price
No feather bed, no golden egg
No one pays him twice

So where's your thrift, your caution
Your honest sound advice
You know you dealt yourself a winning hand
And loaded every dice

At every trough you stopped to feed
With your Arrogance, your Ignorance and Greed.

I pray one day we’ll soon be free
From your absolute indifference
Your avarice, incompetence
Your Arrogance, your Ignorance and your Greed.

Anti Cuts Music Video, Liar Liar

This is a fabulous video/song from Captain Ska (twitter page here). It feels like we are back in the 1980’s, Ska and reggae bands making political songs, Specials, The Beat, UB40 etc.

Let’s hope that the people do indeed rise up and stop these terrible cuts which will impact on the poorest in our society.