The WTO's privatisation agenda comes home to roost in one of London's poorest boroughs, but local voices can be heard calling...

Community activists in Hackney are fighting vested interests and a deafening press silence in an attempt to stop the debt-ridden and notoriously corrupt council from destroying the fabric of the borough.
The council is selling off hundreds of properties in response to government demands to sort out its finances. They range from houses and flats to community centres, playgrounds and green spaces, nurseries and shops. A school was also originally included on the list, but was withdrawn after the council discovered they had no right to sell it.
The properties on sale are expected to be snapped up by developers keen to cash in on Hackney's ongoing gentrification, while the local community will lose vital services.
Cuts are also being made in other areas ­ attacks on council workers' pay and conditions have been intense, with pay cuts of up to £1500 per year and reductions in overtime, shift allowances and flexibility payments.

So how do we get out of this mess?
Hackney serves as an experimental laboratory for the New Labour agenda of privatising local government services. Central government argues that privatisation is the only solution to notorious corruption and mismanagement. But privatisation has not served the people of Hackney any better than bureaucratic rule. We all remember the disastrous privatisation of Housing Benefits Services under ITNET, which cost the council taxpayer over £25 million and many private sector residents their homes.
We have no nostalgia for the bad old days of bureaucratic state control. What we need, as workers and as local people, is direct control over how resources are allocated and how services are provided in our community. It is not about electing Socialists or other representatives to put pressure on the government to assign more funds. We need to develop new ways to relate to each other, in order to challenge a capitalist system that puts the greed of a few above the well-being of our communities and planet. We need to take direct action on the ground to stop the powerful enrich themselves at our expense.

Grassroots action against the cuts
The campaign against the cuts and sell-offs is gathering pace. Activists began by squatting an empty shop and setting up a spoof estate agent with information on the properties being sold off. This was followed, on 12th October, by an occupation of the offices of Nelson Bakewell, the real estate agent dealing with the sales, calling for them to withdraw all Hackney Council properties from the auction on the 15th.
The auction went ahead, but with paranoid-level security and a lively demo outside. Inside, the auction was disrupted by local residents. The disruption focused on the sale of Atherden Road Nursery, which was closed earlier this year, occupied and re-opened first by protesting parents (Hackney is currently short of around 1,000 nursery places) and then by other locals who turnied it into a community centre.
When the bidding finally started, the price was pushed up wildly by two campaigners bidding against each other. However, once the auctioneers twigged they nevertheless accepted the highest genuine bid (considerably higher than the site had been expected to fetch).

Morale down the tube
Meanwhile, council gardeners and estate cleaners objected to the cuts in wages and jobs by staging a one-day wildcat strike on October 12th, coinciding with the occupation of Nelson Bakewell estate agents. One worker said, 'People don't know how much they're earning or how long they're going to have a job,' ­ hardly surprising that morale's down the tube, then. The same worker said there was a feeling that Hackney want to run an experiment in having a council with no in-house services.
In the coming months there will be strikes and actions by Hackney workers and there will be occupations and protests by Hackney Community Groups. We need to act together to support each other. The struggle here in Hackney is one part of a struggle of people and communities around the world against the privatisation and enclosure of communal resources.

Contact: Hackney not for Sale!
Email: hackneynot4sale@yahoo.com
Tel: 07950 539 254
Hackney Indymedia subsection: http://uk.indymedia.org/

• 9 November: Day of local actions against Privatisation whilst the WTO meets in Qatar.
  Join us at the Town Hall Square 12.30pm.
• 13 December: Action at next Nelson Bakewell auction where more Hackney community buildings will be sold off.
  Contact hackneynot4sale@yahoo.com

A Hackney Community Conference is planned for the new year ­ contact Unison on 020 8985 7134.

Taken in part from http://www.corporatewatch.org.uk/

Refusing collection
Brighton bin workers show the way in the fight against privatised services.
In the week between the 11th and the 15th of June a workers' struggle of a kind not experienced in the UK for a long time took place in the refuse collection depot in Brighton. The bin workers took collective action and occupied the depot after being sacked for refusing newly imposed work routines brought in by the private firm taking over the refuse collection contract in Brighton and Hove. After 4 days in occupation of the depot, the workers managed to win their struggle and to force the Council to terminate the private contract, while re-instating all the workers who had been sacked.
The response of the bin workers shows how it is possible to fight privatisation and the new 'flexible' low-wage temp work economy that we are always being told is 'inevitable'. By forming alliances with local anti-capitalist activists, using direct action, sabotage and not being afraid to break the law, the bin workers won all their major demands in a mere 4 days. And they got paid for the time they spent occupying their own depot!

This piece is based on an article in the forthcoming issue of Undercurrent magazine.
Email: undercurrent00@yahoo.co.uk

pranksters impersonate wto rep
Since November 1999 a pseudo-official World Trade Organisation web site - http://www.gatt.org/ - created by the anonymous masters of the political prank and parody (r)TMark - has been extraordinarily successful in duping conference organisers and mainstream media, into inviting fake WTO spokespeople to address them. Last year a group of slow-thinking Austrian lawyers stumbled on the gatt.org site and wanted Mike Moore head of the WTO to come pep up their meeting in Salzburg. "Mike Moore" declined, but sent two substitutes ­ later revealed to be the "Yes Men" the impostors' umbrella group. (theyesmen.org) who stood before the unwitting lawyers to explain a vast but rather shocking program for the extension of free trade. Earlier this year the Anti-WTO impostors struck again, delivering a lecture about the wonders of slavery, the stupidity of Gandhi, and the supremacy of free trade to an enthusiastic crowd of scientists, engineers, and marketing professionals--all of whom thought they were watching a slick official WTO representative, at the "Textiles of the Future" conference in Tampere, Finland.
The 150 experts heard one Hank Hardy Unruh explain that Gandhi's "self-sufficiency" movement was entirely misguided, because it centred around protectionism, and that Lincoln, by outlawing slavery, had criminally interfered with the trade freedom of the South, as well as with slavery's own freedom to develop naturally. Had slavery never been abolished, Unruh said, today's much cheaper system of sweatshops would have eventually replaced it anyhow; following this free-market logic to the end, Unruh declared the Civil War just a big waste of money.
Finally, to applause from the highly educated audience, Unruh's business suit was ripped off to reveal a golden leotard with a three-foot-long phallus. The purpose of the "Management Leisure Suit", he explained, was to allow managers, no matter where they were, to monitor their distant, impoverished workforces and to administer shocks to encourage productivity--assuring that no "Gandhi-type situation" develop again.
"If a group of Ph.D.s cheers at such crudely crazy things, just because it's the WTO saying them, what else can the WTO get away with?" said Andy Bichlbaum of the Yes Men, During the protests in Genoa this July , a "yes man" popped up again, this time on a major TV network show about protest's effect on the market. Passing as a representative of the WTO, this time speaking live from Paris, he spoke about how protesters ideas are based too much in reality and that the WTO knew Free Trade was working because they had read the theory, some of which he proudly stated was written in the 18th Century, he then went on to praise the privatisation of education which "will naturally eliminate "unproductive" thinkers from the high-school classroom, a long-term solution to the problem of protest."
Reeling from the pranksters successes the WTO has now published a warning on the front page of its official web site "Warning: Fake WTO web site - http://www.gatt.org - deceitful and a nuisance to serious users", meanwhile the yes men are laughing all the way to the bank.