You're only as good as your next campaign

The Barnet march against cuts and privatisation passed off peacefully on Sunday. (Honest, the broken window at the HQ of Finchley and Golders Green Conservatives was nothing to do with us.)

Estimates for the number of people on the march from Finchley Central tube to the Arts Depot in north Finchley range from 600 to 2,000. I don't know how many people were on it, but even the lower end of the range would please me.

It's been hard work, and the Barnet Alliance, the anti-cuts group that organised the march, will get together on Tuesday evening to analyse our achievement. I think the effort was worth it; it is clear, however, that at this stage, people mobilise who are most directly affected by the cuts.

It doesn't mean that there is not a wide belief that the cuts are bad, privatisation is bad. Because there is. It just means that people need persuading of the value of coming out on a cold morning to what for many will be an unfamiliar part of the borough - unless, that is, they are already at the very sharp end of the cuts. (Don't think I'm being negative, I'm not; I'm trying to be clear-headed.)

I am uploading a lot of photos to my Flickr site. More tomorrow, but here's a sample.

I hope that everyone who has worked on the march enjoyed the experience. I know you didn't do it to please me! But thanks anyway to: everyone who marched today; everyone who distributed Our Barnet or leaflets in the last few weeks, and Tweeted, Facebooked, and otherwise told other people about it; and Barnet Alliance stalwarts (have we existed long enough to have stalwarts?). Thanks to Helen who was the MC all day long, John and Kevin for pushing those bloomin' coffins, Maggi whose car boot is perpetually full of campaign paraphernalia, and all the young people involved who prove that political activism will be alive and well in Barnet for many years to come.

Thanks to Roger for putting together and putting on a great programme of music, and to the wonderful musicians who played for us. (Thanks, also, to Mike Gee for his own unique personal musical contribution to the day.)

Arts and museum cuts - a suitable response?

On the day the bankers stuck two fingers up to the nation there was a good post on the Guardian culture blog about Barnet council locking Arts Depot protesters out of the North London Business Park on Monday.

Journalist Charlotte Higgins contrasts the dismal fate of the arts in Barnet and the UK with the feteing of Damien Hirst's latest abomination:

a human baby skull cast in platinum and encrusted with 8,128 pavé-set perfect diamonds, 7,105 natural fancy pink diamonds and 1,023 white diamonds.

Meanwhile, back on planet hoi polloi, Higgins tells us that as well as potentially losing its £194,000 Barnet council funding, the Arts Depot could lose grants worth £130,000 from London Councils. Arts Depot director Nigel Cutting is reported saying:

"If [the cut] goes through, Barnet will be one of the largest councils in the country to spend nothing on the arts. A local authority area with twice the population of Oxford at least deserves a degree of arts provision."

View the consultation document that outlines the Arts Depot cut here. You have until 17 January to let Barnet know what you think of it via the survey.

The consultation on the proposal, effectively, to close Barnet Museum and Church Farmhouse Museum is also running till 17 January. Access it here. Again there is a survey to complete.

Flash communities good, flash mobs bad

Rumour reaches us (an email, actually) that the planned Arts Depot flash mob was shut out of North London Business Park this afternoon. Nope, they couldn't even get near the Barnet council offices to demonstrate their opposition to proposed cuts in their council grant.

Barnet council, who have recently embraced a new adventure in social media called the Pledge Bank (PledgeBank, probably) went all humourless on the artistic types from the Arts Depot. That, I suspect, is only going to make them more determined - and Barnet Council more ridiculous.

I can't find PledgeBank on the web yet, but there is an interesting article on Conservative Home quoting council leader Lynne Hillan on how the PledgeBank fits with promoting the Big Society (BigSociety, surely). The comments are entertaining, as you might expect.

Hillan says:

Increasingly local government will be a deal: “We will provide a half a ton of grit if you agree to spread it”. There is a real engagement challenge here - often these groups will not be the usual suspects. They will be “flash communities” of short duration, forming to complete an activity - such as clearing snow or tackling local environmental damage.

Flash communities good, flash mobs bad. You read it here first.

Arts Depot flashmob this Monday - tweet that, Barnet!

The way they go on about the joys of social media, you would think that the Tory administration at Barnet council had invented Facebook. In fact, as most residents know to their cost, most Barnet Tories would have trouble tying their own shoelaces.

The Arts Depot, whose grant the council is threatening to cut, leaving the only professional arts venue in Barnet with 11% less funding, are hoisting Barnet Tories with their own petard (historical term, which someone at Barnet or Church Farmhouse Museums could explain to us). They have organised a flash mob at North London Business Park, where the council has most of its offices, this coming Monday 10 January.

I thought a flash mob was supposed to be a surprise event, sprung on the unwary, but never mind. It's such a schlepp to NLBP you do need to give people plenty of notice to get there. Just so long as they don't expect council leader Lynne Hillan to stick around to see it. Here are some more details:

Sssshhhh - FLASHMOB on Monday!

Monday 10 January, 4.30pm, meet outside Building 4 entrance at North London Business Park N11 1NP. Help artsdepot respond to the proposed cut of all core funding with effect from April with a silent vigil. You don’t need to bring anything with you but YOU. Any questions on Monday, call 07952 048574.

He knows when you've been good or bad... Join our lobby of Barnet council tonight

In the last couple of years Barnet council has become notorious throughout the land, with splashes in most of the national papers regarding its misdoings. But there is something somehow epoch-defining about its new found notoriety in the theatrical world's journal The Stage.

The Stage is championing the cause of the Arts Depot, threatened with having its council funding removed. The Stage did a feature on this on 6 December. Now Barnet is quite simply, its codeword for bogeyman, stage villain... In an account published on 13 December of a visit made to the theatre, the Stage reports:

“Are you on the nice list or the naughty list?” asks one of Santa’s little helpers as we enter the auditorium.

No prizes for guessing which one Barnet Council heads at the moment after its cheery festive proposal to cut all core funding to the only professional arts venue in the borough.

If you, along with the Stage, abhor Barnet council's proposal to cut the Arts Depot's budget, plus a myriad other services that make living in Barnet tolerably pleasant, please come to the lobby outside Hendon Town Hall tonight from 6-7pm.

I must warn you: I very much doubt we will be allowed inside. There is only room for 25 of yer actual residents in the public gallery of the council chamber. I have emailed the council and asked for an overflow room to be opened but I have had no reply, which I shall take as a "no".

So from 7pm, while the Tory - and possibly the Lib Dem - councillors are voting through a cuts budget of £54 million over three years coupled with a half-baked and expensive scheme to privatise large chunks of our public services, we will be obliged to go the Claddagh Ring to eat, drink and listen to free musical entertainment.

We have some tough fights ahead. Let's have fun tonight!

Barnet sixth formers' lively demo

Here's a fuzzy picture of Alexander Clayman, the organiser of this evening's sixth formers' march. He is the one with the megaphone, addressing some of the crowd of about 200 Barnet sixth formers outside the Arts Depot, North Finchley, before they marched to Finchley and Golders Green Conservative HQ to hand in a petition against tuition fee rises. (Thank you to the person who took and shared the pic!)

It was a great demo, a real achievement for a group of young people who only had a small amount of help and advice from a small number of adults. It was a privilege to help steward it.

There was a fair amount of snide comment before the demo from some quarters. These were the insulting suggestions made:

(1) Alex was merely put up to it by the local Labour Party. To which I say: Alex is a member of the LP but all that tells me is that he is interested in politics and he isn't a Conservative, neither of which is a crime. To disparage Alex is to disparage all the angry young people who responded to his initiative!

(2) The young people were going to stage a riot and smash up Finchley and Golders Green Tory party HQ. To which I say: they were never going to do that; the organiser was clear he didn't want any trouble and the young people didn't need to do that to make their political point.

(3) The young people were the dupes of the trades council. To which I say: we were approached to help organise some stewards and we were proud to do that. If we couldn't do that to help our young people, who are being dumped on massively, we wouldn't be worth much.

There is a national day of protest against the tuition fee rises and education cuts next week on Wednesday 24 November. There will be some sort of demonstration in central London; Trafalgar Square is given as a focus at noon. We might be about to see our own student uprising in Britain! Well, you never know... Some more lively protesting on tonight's model would be a good step in that direction.

Find out more about student protest at the website of the National Campaign Against Fees and Cuts.