Olympic Resistance – lessons to learn

As Britain’s 2012 summer Olympic budget gets ever bigger, and we face an ever greater financial bail out for it using public (our!) money, and whilst private contractors get fat on profits from so-called Olympic regeneration, and politicians preen themselves in front of the cameras, here comes news and lessons to learn from Vancouver’s 2010 Winter Olympics opposition:

Prisoner support – cafe and film night in Easton

Bristol ABC cafe & film night – A legacy of torture & an introduction to insurrection

Cops out of control (whats new?) and the legacy of Blair Peach

The sudden media obsession with police misbehaviour, since the G20 protests and death of Ian Tomlinson, may lead you to think that the cops are normally very nice people who only help old ladies across roads and catch naughty youths stealing apples. In fact the cops have a very long, and to them proud, history of brutality and repression.

Some have raised the similarities between Tomlinson’s death and that of Blair Peach back in April 1979. Beyond the brutal deaths themsleves however, there are other reasons for those new to police violence to look back to Peach and the related histories of the late 70’s and early 80’s. In the interests of relevant history, and popular education, we therefore reprint below an article ‘The Political Legacy of Blair Peach’, published as a ‘comment’ piece on the Institute of Race Relations website on 23 April 2009.