Saturday, November 25, 2006

Gangster politics

Last night was quite windy. From inside my sleeping bag I could see autumn leaves flying down the street. One even flew under the rucksack that serves as my pillow. There was also some rain here and there – tiny drops fell for a few seconds on my face. I was still sweating inside my sleeping bag due to my cold, but this time I took off my coat and slept much better.

Bravehost, a leading web hosting provider, is still giving us trouble. They suspended our NAC website on 15 November, only to put it back the next day after I emailed them for an explanation. According to them, it was a problem with their servers! They have now introduced the letter "o" just before their ads at the bottom of all our pages. It looks like it is a fault of the person who designed the website (me). I will email them again tomorrow.

Things in the library Idea Store Whitechapel got better after I blogged about them (21 November), but only lasted a day. Staff still chat away at the help desk about 5 metres away from where I work about their religious beliefs, their plans for the weekend, their job, etc. The computer beside me can rarely be booked by us – it's that popular. Among the people that use it (all Muslim, with the exception of a few Spanish), some murder the keyboard, others talk over the phone, sometimes they even come in groups of two and three, all wanting to use the computer almost at the same time. At the moment I have beside me a young Muslim woman – she has been on the computer three hours – hitting the keyboard so hard I'm surprised nobody has complained to a member of staff.

The area we are in, Tower Hamlets, has the highest Muslim population in the country, 36.4%. This library, it seems, employs 95% Muslims and most of floor 1 contains Islamic books. I haven't found one single book on secularism, atheism or even humanism.

I was quite affected when I learnt that Alexander Litvinenko – secret agent turned fierce critic of Russia's President Vladimir Putin – died in hospital here on 23 November. Somehow I thought he was going to recover and become a big embarrassment for the Russian President. The fact that Putin thought he could get away with it is pretty revealing. He actually thought a diplomatic incident between Russia and the UK preferable to the prospect of Litvinenko spilling beans. Could Litvinenko's investigation of the murder of Russian journalist Anna Politkovskaya on 7 October have had anything to do with it?

The former foreign minister of the Chechen government in exile in the UK was a visitor to Litivinenko's bedside. He accused the Kremlin of exporting "gangster politics" to London. Surely we could accuse the British government of gangster politics in relation to us? It seems running a network of those abused by church doesn't get you killed, yet with the level of surveillance we are under, and the all too obvious destructive intent of the Metropolitan Police towards us, it doesn't seem we're that far off.

London Mayor Ken Livingstone joined multi-faith speakers at the Methodist Central Hall on 20 November to defend freedom of religious expression. I wonder if the Mayor would be as sympathetic to the cause of those who consider themselves abused by church, be they right-to-die campaigners, gays, stem cell research supporters, or even non-religious people who consider their rights subordinated to those of the religious.