Michael Dickinson | ukwatch.net

The Day I Bombed the House of Commons

Ellie Keen — Sat, 01 Mar 2008 14:26:45 +0000

The security of the House of Commons in London was breached again on Wednesday in a spectacular manner by the environmental protest group Plane Stupid, who scaled the roof of the parliament building and unfurled banners proclaiming "NO THIRD RUNWAY’. They were protesting about plans to build a third runway and sixth terminal at London’s Heathrow Airport, already the world’s busiest international airport. Earlier in the week a team of Greenpeace activists penetrated the security of the airport itself and draped a banner around the tail fin of an aircraft.

Of the Parliament roof protest, a spokesman for Plane Stupid said: "This is all about no third runway. The direct action movement knows we have got to take these protests to another level to get the government to listen."

Good luck to them, and it’s interesting to see that despite all the intense tightening of security in Britain today that it is still possible to pull off such a spectacular non-violent stunt.

It reminded me of a day back in the early 1980’s when I went to bomb the House of Commons.

Chaining my bicycle to the railings of Saint Mary’s Church, I crossed the road to join the queue waiting to gain admittance to the Houses of Parliament. It was long. I cursed myself for not getting there earlier. Perhaps the gallery would be too packed.

I might have known that the debate in progress would have attracted a big crowd.

It was an important sitting – a discussion on the American bombing of Libya, which would result in either the support or condemnation of Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher for allowing US bombers to take off from American bases in Britain to carry out a raid on Libya.

I joined the end of the line and began to wait as patiently as possible, erasing thoughts of what I was about to do as they came into my head. It was no good thinking about it—or what they would do with me afterwards. I must just do it. A totally premeditated act – and I was the agent to carry it out.

Besides, if I worried too much about it I might get nervous and arouse suspicion by my expression. There were plenty of police around, shepherding groups in through the portals and patrolling the queue with watchful eyes.

Assuming the innocent mien of a mere tourist eager to see a sitting of Parliament in progress, I began a vacuous chat with a young English couple ahead of me. They’d been promising themselves a visit to the Houses of Parliament for a long time, they said, but found it unfortunate that they’d chosen this particular day for it.

The brown suit and tie I wore added to the innocuous image I had assumed. The bombs were in a cigarette packet in my inner breast pocket.

To strengthen my resolve to commit the deed—just in case I should chicken out at the last moment – I began to think of the events that had brought me there, standing in line, waiting to bomb the House of Commons.

A few days earlier I had woken up, turned on my bedside radio, and been angered by the news I heard.

While I was sleeping, American planes had taken off from bases in England, flown half-way across the world, and bombed the city of Tripoli, with the full knowledge and permission of the British Prime Minister.

Civilian areas had been hit, including a hospital, and many people had been killed and injured – Colonel Gadaffi’s adopted daughter among the casualties.

As I listened to the new all morning torpor had vanished in a flash, and I lay there burning with anger at the outrage and hypocrisy – a blatant terrorist act against innocent civilians – sanctioned by a government which loudly decried the terrorism of others.

Jumping out of bed, I pulled on my clothes and cycled across town to the American Embassy in Grosvenor Square.

The police had already erected barricades along the pavement, and I took my place with a small handful of people who had already arrived. The crowd grew throughout the day and there were chants and shouts, but it wasn’t enough to cause more than an inconvenience to the staff and visitors who entered and left the embassy building.

One pretty young secretary, who flaunted out on her lunch break, disdainfully ignoring the demonstrators, had her blonde hair parted in the middle, one side falling down in a curvy wave over one eye.

"Oh look! It’s Veronica Lake!" I shouted. She suddenly stopped, turned and smiled—her secret identity recognized, but then frowned and flounced off away from these agitating enemies of America.

It didn’t seem enough to stand bawling insults from behind the barriers at embassy clerks, none of whom had had any say in the atrocity. There had to be a more explicit, more dramatic gesture of protest.

A couple of days later, when it was announced that Parliament was to hold a special debate on the bombing, the idea came to me.

I passed through the newly erected metal detector at the entrance to the House of Commons quite easily. The body-search by the copper revealed just a half empty packet of cigarettes. (Although he looked in the packet, he didn’t see the bombs, which were small and hidden underneath.)

Going upstairs to the Visitors Gallery, the young couple I’d befriended "oohed and ahhed" at the statues and murals that decorate the interior of the building.

Ushered into our seats along with the other visitors in the packed gallery, we gazed down at the chamber below where the politicians who ruled our country and made the decisions for us were (mostly) congratulating themselves and justifying the strike by the American warplanes. Mrs. Thatcher had vindicated herself and left a little earlier, unfortunately. I would have particularly liked her to have been there to witness my own particular revenge attack.

One old right-wing fart was on his feet waffling on about how the British Army should have stepped in to restore the King of Libya when he was deposed in the 1969 coup. I decided to waste no time. Reaching into my pocket I took out the cigarette packet, extracted the three bombs and threw them with all my might over balustrade into the chamber of politicians below, then sat back as if nothing at happened.

Almost immediately an usher strode down the aisle to our row; and mistaking the young couple for the perpetrators, gestured at them to follow him. Shocked and dumbstruck, they pointed at me, and the usher ordered me to come out.

I stalled, saying I was listening to the proceedings, but a threatening policeman appeared by the usher’s side, and I decided to go without more ado. I had done what I came for.

All heads in the packed gallery turned and stared as I was led away. Just as we exited, I had the pleasure of smelling a very nasty aroma wafting up from the floor of the Speaker’s Chamber.

"Why did you do it?", the copper asked. "I suppose you just wanted to cause a stink, right?" He escorted me to a room full of officers who wanted to know if I was a terrorist, but they soon realized I wasn’t dangerous.

I was informed that due to the recently laid carpet on the chamber floor, only one of my bombs had exploded, but that if any of the politicians had been hit by a missile, or their suits stained by the liquid, I should be prepared to face charges.

I was taken away and had the privilege of being held in the only tiny cell in the House of Commons for several hours while they decided what to do with me. A previous occupant, obviously another protester with a cause, had secretly stuck a ‘SUPPORT THE MINERS STRIKE!’ sticker on the inner doorframe, so undetected by the cops.

I was bored, but not particularly worried; because I was sure no charges would be brought against me. The embarrassment of the government at the defence of my action in court would have been too great—my own little stink-bombs an answer to their real ones, a protest at their unprovoked murder of innocent civilians in a foreign country.

I was released after midnight, when the sitting had finished and the politicians gone home, and officially informed by an officer that I was henceforth banned from visiting the House of Commons.

"So you won’t be back for a while?" enquired the copper who escorted me out of the building.

"Not until I return as President." I replied.

"D’you mean it?" he asked gravely.

I walked across the road, unchained my bike from the railings, and cycled away in the dark.

When I got home my flat mates asked why I was so late, and I told them.

"Whaat? Was that you?"

My bombing mission had been briefly mentioned on the ten o’clock TV news.

And this appeared in one of the national papers next day –

Police detained a man after two stink bombs were thrown from the public gallery of the Commons on to the floor of the chamber during the debate, despite tightened security at Westminster.

Michael Dickinson, whose artwork graces the covers of Dime’s Worth of Difference, Serpents in the Garden and Grand Theft Pentagon, lives in Istanbul. He can be contacted via his website http://yabanji.tripod.com/ or at: michaelyabanji@gmail.com

Blair's Conversion

Tim Holmes — Sun, 24 Jun 2007 14:08:02 +0000

On his last official overseas engagement, Britain’s Prime Minister Tony Blair will have an audience with Pope Benedict at the Vatican on Saturday, fuelling speculation about his imminent conversion to the Roman Catholic faith.

A regular attendant at mass over the last few years with devout Catholic wife Cherie and four church-baptized children, it’s been reported that Anglican Blair would have converted earlier, but becoming Britain’s first Catholic Prime Minister might have caused constitutional difficulties in advising the queen on the appointment of bishops for the Church of England, and in dealings with both sides in the Northern Ireland peace process. But once he steps down from office later this month, Tony can throw caution to the wind, and change his religion.

From the Protestant religion to the Catholic. But aren’t both supposed to be ‘Christian’? And what exactly does that word mean? Let’s suppose that it means someone who follows the teaching of the prophet Jesus, referred to in the New Testament as ‘Christ’, who called people to repent and prepare for the Kingdom of God. How does Blair stand as a Christian in those terms? Not very well, it has to be admitted.

One of the Old Testament commandments that Christ repeated was ‘Thou shalt not kill’. And yet, although Tony Blair has not actually put his own hand physically to the act of murder, (as far as I know), during his term in office as Britain’s Prime Minister he has been responsible for the violent painful deaths of hundreds of thousands of innocent men women and children in the Middle East, killed by so-called Christian soldiers sent to that country on his orders, using weapons explicitly manufactured by British arms companies with the sole purpose of killing and destroying.

‘Thou shalt not bear false witness’ means ‘don’t lie’ – another commandment blatantly broken by Blair, who used the excuse for the invasion of that country, that Iraq had stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction aimed at the West. There weren’t any. I think he knew. That makes him a liar.

Earlier this week English fashion designer Joseph Corre announced that he would be handing back the MBE recently awarded him:

“I have been chosen by an organisation headed by a prime minister who I find morally corrupt. Blair has been involved in organised lying, to the point where thousands of people including children have suffered death, detention and torture in Afghanistan and Iraq.”

How embarrassing for the PM! But true. A murderer and a liar.

‘You cannot serve God and Mammon’, said Jesus, but Mr. Blair is known to have traded favours for money a long way back. When he became a candidate for the leadership of the Labour Party in 1994, Gideon Meir, a senior official at the Israeli Embassy in London, introduced Tony to Michael Levy (an extremely wealthy Jewish businessmen). Levy agreed to help Blair to become leader of the party. With the help of four other Jewish businessmen (Sir Emmanuel Kaye, Sir Trevor Chinn, Maurice Hatter, and David Goldman) Levy provided Blair with £7m. This money paid for his campaign plus the running of his private office, and allowed Blair to become independent of Labour Party funding. Levy was awarded a lordship and became Blair’s special envoy to the Middle East, a position he plans to leave on the day the Prime Minister leaves office. It’s rumoured that President Bush will offer Blair a similar role for the so-called Quartet, overseeing Middle East peace work. Ironic, or what?

Above all, the teaching of Jesus was encapsulated in the phrase: “All things whatsoever ye would that men should do to you, do ye even so to them: for this is the law and the prophets.” Tony hasn’t done that. Jesus wasn’t talking about rewarding wealthy friends for favours rendered, but doing good and ministering to the poor and unfortunate until they are poor and unfortunate no more. Welfare. Commonwealth. These words once had meaning, just as ‘Prime Minister’ used to mean ‘First Helper of the People,” rather than corrupt corporation puppet.

“Do unto others as you would have them do unto you,” is really the core of the ‘Christianity’. Attacking other people and killing them, treating them as second-class citizens, exploiting them, robbing them, holding them in servitude and slavery and exploitation has nothing to do with the teaching of Jesus. And neither has the pomp and wealth and ostentation of the Roman Catholic Church which gave its blessing to the conquest, rape and pillage of the New World, to the subjugation and slavery of the poor in the old.

Blair is a clever hypocrite, and his Catholic Church of choice, headed by perhaps an even bigger exploiter and hypocritical manipulator than himself the Pope may convince some ignorant souls, but most of us see through his Tony phoniness.

As you chant your litany, Tony, amidst the incense and candles, remember the words of Jesus:

“Not everyone that sayeth unto me ‘Lord, Lord, shall enter into the kingdom of heaven; but he that doeth the will of my Father which is in heaven.”

Have you done that, Tony? Do you do that?

You may shortly discover that you have built your house on sand and great the fall of it!

Coming soon!

The Queen's Celebration - Slavery Without Regrets

Alex Doherty — Thu, 29 Mar 2007 19:41:48 +0000

“You should be ashamed!”

Great Britain’s Queen Elizabeth, and Prime Minister Tony Blair, among a congregation of 2000 attending the memorial service at London’s historic Westminster Abbey earlier this week to commemorate the 200th anniversary of the abolition of slavery, quickly glanced at their programmes.

According to the official schedule, which included speeches and readings from the writings of abolitionist William Wilberforce delivered by a succession of dignitaries and church leaders, the next item was to be a recitation of the Absolution prayers, but suddenly there’s this shouting black guy in a colorful African tunic out of his seat and storming up the central aisle towards where the Queen sat with her husband, Prince Philip, the Duke of Edinburgh, along with senior members of the government and their wives. This was an unrehearsed event in the ceremony. It was real.

“This service is a disgrace!” shouted the shaven-headed man. “It is an insult to Africa.”

Within almost 10 feet of them, and pointing, he ranted on: “You are the Queen and the Prime Minister—this is all wrong. You don’t have the decency, Mr Blair, to make an apology and the word sorry, and you, the Queen … “

Abbey ushers and security-men rushed forward to tackle him as he roared: “I’m a proud African. Men of God should be ashamed. We should not be here. This is a white man’s service—it is an insult to us. I want all the Christians who are Africans to walk out.”

Uniformed police entered the church and lent their force to drag the angry black away as he shouted and pointed at the icy-faced Queen. Outside he was handcuffed and arrested under Section 5 of the Public Order Act.

Journalists briefly managed to learn a little about the protestor before he was whisked off by armed police.

His name: Toyin Agbetu. Age: 39. As a founder of the African-British human rights organisation, Ligali, which campaigns against racial discrimination and fights for black people’s rights, Agbetu had obtained a media pass to attend the ceremony, which he decried.

“It was an insult to us. This is just a memorial for William Wilberforce. There was no mention in there of African freedom fighters. What about my ancestors? Where were the Africans talking about how they feel?

“The three major institutions involved in slavery – the monarchy, the government and the church – are all inside there, patting each other on the back,” he said. “No one has had the decency to say the word ‘Sorry’.”

The Royal Family and Government have both refused to follow the example of the Church of England and apologise publicly for their roles in the slave trade.

Agbetu’s protest was aimed at forcing the Queen and the Prime Minister to pronounce an official apology for Britain’s central role in the trade that enslaved as many as 20 million Africans in the colonies’ cotton, tobacco and sugar plantations for over three centuries. Blair has expressed instead a “deep sorrow and regret” for the suffering caused. And royal aides insist that the Queen was acknowledging her family’s role and the wrongs of past generations by simply attending the service.

Toyin Agbetu, however, demands that the Queen officially apologize for the monarchy’s role in supporting the slave trade, an industry upon which much of the wealth of the UK was built on.

“She has to say sorry,” he said. “Queen Elizabeth 1 commissioned John Hawkins, financed him, and funded him to go to my continent and enslave my people.” (In 1564 she loaned Hawkins her armed 700-ton ship, Jesus of Lubeck, as a slave vessel, made money from the investment, and knighted him for his efforts.)

Nick Hazelwood, in his book The Queen’s Slave Trader: John Hawkyns, Elizabeth and Trafficking in Human Souls, writes: “In their simplest form the Hawkins voyages were exercises in turning a quick profit: for the Queen, for himself, and for the group of rich London merchants and royal courtiers who had invested in the expedition.”

The Royal Family built much of its fortune on the slave trade. ‘The Royal African Company was a slaving company set up by the Stuart family and London merchants once the former retook the English throne in the English Restoration of 1660. It was led by James, Duke of York, Charles II’s brother.

Originally known as the Company of Royal Adventurers Trading to Africa, it was granted a monopoly over the English slave trade, by its charter issued in 1660. With the help of the army and navy it established trading posts on the West African coast, and it was responsible for seizing any rival English ships that were transporting slaves.

In the 1680s it was transporting about 5000 slaves per year. Many were branded with the letters ‘DY’ on the left buttock, after its chief, the Duke of York, who succeeded his brother on the throne in 1685, becoming James II. Other slaves were branded with the company’s initials, RAC, on their chests.

And both crown and parliament were involved in the 1713 Treaty of Utrecht, which granted Britain the exclusive right to sell African people into slavery in all of Spain’s American colonies. The ‘asiento’ was crucial because it broke the Spanish hold on the trade; England became, and remained, the world’s biggest slaver.

Queen Ann then awarded the right to the notorious South Sea Company, ‘forever’. Lord Harley, the Lord Chancellor was directly involved in the running of South Sea Company, as were several other members of government. The Company exported 75, 000 slaves from Africa between 1713 and 1739, shipping them thousands of miles via Liverpool and Bristol, tied like hogs, lying in their own excrement, then whipped and forced to work on plantations for generations, all for the benefit of the British economy.

The mortality rate of South Sea Company slave-ships was so high that in later years captains were allowed four slaves each, as an incentive to keep the their cargoes alive and healthy.

The Church of England also owned hundred of slaves, branded them like cattle on plantations in Barbados and, of course, made money off the evil. But the Church, unlike the Government and the Monarchy, has apologized and is studying what to do about reparations.

Fear that an official government statement of apology might fuel attempts to seek reparations from descendants of slaves seems to be the reason for Blair’s weak “regrets” rather than “apologies”.

And in response to a letter from a group of Rastafarians from Jamaica seeking reparation a few years ago, Queen Elizabeth II skirted the issue this way:

“Under the statue of the International Civil Court, acts of enslavement committed today do constitute crimes against humanity. But the historic slave trade was not a crime against humanity or contrary to international law at the time when the U.K. government condoned it.”

During the service, before the interruption, Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, spoke movingly.

“Slavery is not a regional problem in the human world; it is hideously persistent in our nations and cultures,” he told the Queen and her guests.

“We are born into a world already scarred by the internationalizing and industrializing of slavery … and our human inheritance is shadowed by it. We who are heirs of the slave-owning and slave-trading nations of the past have to face the fact that our historic prosperity was built in large part on this atrocity; those who are heirs of the communities ravaged by the slave trade know very well that much of their present suffering and struggling is the result of centuries of abuse. Today it is for us to face our history; the Atlantic trade was our contribution to this universal sinfulness.”

And he urged the congregation “to have the courage to face the legacies of slavery … (and) the courage to turn to each other and ask how, together, we are to make each other more free and more human.”

That sounds like a very good idea. So where do we start?

A start would be ending, NOW and FOREVER the obscene exploitation that still goes on in Africa. We can do nothing to alleviate the suffering of those who are long dead. Their best memorial would be for us all to demand the end of the poverty-driven slavery of this century. To be successful we have to examine how we in the west relate to third world peoples, particularly, but not only in Africa, where the current western hegemony is maintained, among other things, by crippling loans, and ‘strings attached “aid’, ‘unfair trade’, and the still continuing ‘propping up’ of tyrants that serve the western interests. It is conditions like these that largely give rise to child labour and sex slaves. Debt has to be cancelled – no ifs or buts, no cavilling, no arguments. That would be one way of giving back a little of what we stole.

Let’s abolish the monarchy rather than asking the queen to apologize for slavery. The monarchy has been responsible for the robbing and exploiting its ‘subjects’ since its conception, and there is much that it could apologize for. Let the queen resign instead. If we are to ‘make each other more free and human’, how can there be a monarch?

And as for the corrupt lying government—that must go too, or change, and we must establish a proper social democracy, putting people first, with deep structural changes aimed at making a better society, hand in hand with proper reparation. Then could begin the process of transforming the country and the world away from operating on the principle of personal greed, to principles of decency, equality and human values. This world was made a common store for all to share. Are we not all, whatever our color or race, men and women and brothers and sisters?

Michael Dickinson lives in Istanbul. He can be contacted through his Saatchi Gallery.

If I Had a Bell ...

Alex Doherty — Wed, 31 May 2006 17:38:17 +0000

“If I had a bell, I’d ring it in the morning,
I’d ring it in the evening,
All over this land.
I’d ring out danger;
I’d ring out warning…”

So go the words of the old protest song made popular by the likes of Peter, Paul and Mary and Trini Lopez back in the Sixties.

Brian Haw had a bell and he was ringing it out in Parliament Square last week when a trio of police officers took it away from him forcibly, “following orders from the Chief Inspector.” When 57 year old Haw complained that they had no right to take his property they said it would be returned to him in six minutes. They took it away in their car as Tony Blair rolled past in his through the gates of Parliament for Prime Minister’s Question Time.

The police explained later when they returned the bell that it had been taken to “prevent it from being used as a potential missile”. They apologized for the lack of the clapper and said they didn’t know where it had gone. The bell was silent.

Not so the bells of Westminster Abbey which peal out to celebrate Royal Weddings and the visits of foreign dignities. Neither those of Big Ben which announce every hour from the tower that looms over the House of Commons, Brian Haw’s almost personal alarm clock that has ticked and boomed for him on his one-man peace vigil on traffic island of Parliament Square for the last five years.

The round the clock vigil began in June 2001 to protest against the UN sanctions on Iraq which were causing such suffering to the children; then included the attack on Afganistan, followed by the invasion of Iraq and the bloody war staged by Bush and Blair.

For five years, through foul weather and fair, praise, (on a trip to London last year Cindy Sheehan dropped by to give support), and abuse (his nose broken three times in attacks by indignant opponents), constantly circled by traffic belching out its fumes, Brian Haw has camped there in Parliament Square with a graphic display of posters and banners depicting the terror and suffering caused by British policies, pictures of children maimed and killed and those born deformed as a result of the depleted uranium scattered by allied bombs, calling out through his megaphone to Members of Parliament as they enter and leave to repent and stop the war.

Most politicians find this constant reminder of their complicity in the catastrophe of Iraq embarrassing and irritating, (especially Tony) and over the years they have tried different ways to silence Mr. Haw and the sympathizers who come to join their voices in protest with his.

The Labour government imagined they’d come up with a foolproof method to get rid of him last April when they introduced a law banning any expression of opposition within a kilometer of Parliament.

Aimed particularly at Brian, even nicknamed Haw’s Law’, the Serious Organized Crime and Police Act of 2005’ permits police “to impose conditions on the holding of a demonstration so as to prevent hindrance to any person wishing to enter or leave the Palace of Westminster, hindrance of the proper operation of parliament, serious public disorder, serious damage to property, disruption to the life of the community, a security risk in any part of the designated area, and risk to safety of members of the public”.

At first Haw won a high court action to continue his protest, arguing that the law only applied to demonstrations that began after it came into force, but earlier this month the government won an appeal against a high court ruling, and Haw was forced to seek authorization from the police to continue his vigil. Under the new law, the Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police can dictate the location, timing, period, size, volume and spread of demonstrations. They gave permission for Haw to continue his protest, but on the provision that he limit the sprawling display of his placards facing the Parliament building to 3 metres in width.

Observance of this provision was not carried out speedily enough for the said police, and so in the very early hours of the morning last week, 78 officers arrived on the scene and pulled apart the display of government shame, dumping it, broken, crumpled and ripped in a big dumper container they’d brought for the purpose, along with most of Brian’s belongings, leaving him with just one placard.

On Tuesday May 30, Mr Haw must go to Bow Street magistrates’ court to answer charges that the refusal to remove his signs breached his licence to demonstrate.

To people who used to accuse him of being authoritarian, Tony Blair would say “Go and look at the placards of those camped outside Parliament, “meaning he considered himself a liberal leader, unafraid to face criticism and a supporter of free speech and expression. What do you say to people now, Tony?

Brian Haw mended the silent bell that the police returned to him and had been using it to ring out his warning of danger to the world again before the overkill police swooped and destroyed his peace camp. Perhaps it was even one of the possessions they tossed so casually into their container.

New Labour may win their case against Brian Haw and put a stop to his one-man Parliament Square demonstration, but by their action they only draw more attention to the draconian world of creeping fascism they are creating, and increase the shared sympathy, outrage and solidarity people around the world feel for big-hearted Haw, a hero of our time.

And let’s not forget the final chorus of that catchy old sing-along protest song:

“It’s the hammer of Justice,
It’s the bell of Freedom,
It’s a song about love between my brothers and my sisters
All over this world!”

We will prevail.

STOP PRESS!!! Today Tuesday 30th April Brian Haws entered a not guilty plea at Bow Street Magistrate’s Court in London. As his display of posters is now within the limits imposed by the police, he was granted unconditional bail until his next appearance at Bow Street on July 11. After the ten minute hearing his solicitor said he would fight the case claiming it was a breach of his human rights and an abuse of process.

“We are good people,” Haws told reporters outside the court “When you see what is being done to others in other countries because people want to get filthy rich, it is time for people to stand up and join us in Parliament Square.”

Michael Dickinson is an English teacher working in Istanbul.