Patrick Rolfe, 1987-2011

I'm feeling sad today, since Patrick Rolfe, a young man I knew, died last night. He had a rare type of stomach cancer, and had been ill for a few months. Friends had expected him to survive but he went downhill suddenly.

I met him in 2009 during that peculiar episode in my life I call Vestas. Patrick and some other idealistic young people went and persuaded some of the workers at a wind turbine blade factory on the Isle of Wight to occupy the factory rather than meekly accept job losses when the Vestas company decided to close it down. I was roped in to run the 'Save Vestas' blog and it dominated my life for a good few months in 2009.

It was a pretty famous event at the time; the Guardian sold a lot of advertising space to Vestas on the back of it, as the company tried to persuade the country that they were public spirited really, not just in renewable energy for profit and government subsidies. It was about the time of the financial crash, and we hoped that the campaigning Vestas workers would inspire other sacked workers not automatically to join the dole queue but to fight for their jobs.

As well as being active in the radical environmental movement, Patrick campaigned against cuts at Sussex University; he was temporarily suspended for helping to organise an occupation there. He had just begun a PhD at Leeds University when he became ill; the topic was how windfarms can sometimes cause ecological harm, how to mitigate the harm, and how to involve communities in decision-making that might help them to embrace windfarms.

I remember Patrick above all as a very positive person. When you met him he would bowl up to you, fling down his bag, and be ready to get stuck in to whatever was going on. He was only 24 when he died and I know his good friends are going to miss him a lot, as will everyone who met him.

Oh, that Hutton!

I've been out of it for a few days, so when I heard that mumble-mumble Hutton had been appointed to chair a government inquiry into the cost of public sector pensions, and that John Prescott had called him a traitor for it, I thought "fair comment". I thought they meant Will Hutton; that nice, liberal, social democratic journalist, and I was a bit puzzled that he should take such a job. In fact, of course, they meant the former Labour minister John Hutton, whose existence I have completely overlooked.

At the risk of repeating a libel, I thought I'd post here the opinion of the website Argyll News on the appointment of John Hutton to the job of f***ing over, sorry, reforming public sector pensions.

The particular beef that Argyll News has with Hutton is the subsidy Hutton gave to Vestas wind turbine company which induced it to move production from Argyll to the Isle of Wight, but it's also true to say that they just don't like him:

Pensions review: the problem with Labour’s John Hutton

Tuesday, 22nd June, 2010

The row over former Labour minister John Hutton doing the Pensions Review for the coalition Government has overlooked the fact that he is – John Hutton.

That’s the problem.

Calling him a ‘collaborator’ is unreconstructed tribalism.

Thinking about who he is is more to the point.

Hutton is an egotistical, opportunist careerist who has successfully sold his self-valuation in defiance of the evidence.

He was the obvious Labour figure to ask to get involved because his single interest is John Hutton. Standing down at the election because he had no desire to be in opposition, this puts him back in the headlines in a paid job.

Whatever he recommends in the pensions situation will never weigh with him in the balance with his self-interest.

Cross-party collaboration is what the public want to see. But John Hutton?

This is the man who ‘paid’ Vestas a British government subsidy to leave Campbeltown in Argyll and go to the Isle of Wight. (Not, thanks to Jim Mather, that Argyll didn’t do very much better with the energetic Skykon.)

And this is the man who, in his brief stint as Defence Secretary refused – in the face of serious new evidence - to grant an independent inquiry into the 1994 Chinook crash on the Mull of Kintyre.

Wikipedia adds to our picture the information that when he went to Oxford, Hutton joined the Conservative, Liberal and Labour Associations - very ecumenical. He was a close associate of Tony Blair. He once told the BBC anonymously that Gordon Brown would be a "fucking disaster" as prime minister - he got that right, then.

Finally,

In June 2010 it was announced that Hutton would join the board of US nuclear power company Hyperion Power Generation. The Advisory Committee on Business Appointments stipulated that he should not lobby his former department for 12 months.

Sounds like he knows - and cares - a lot about pensions.

The campaigning year in pictures - and it's not over yet!

I decided to submit a picture to the labour photo of the year contest (strictly amateur!) organised by LabourStart. I thought I must have something from the Vestas dispute (see last pic) - when I looked through I remembered what a busy year it's been! I'm posting a few snaps here from the period from last December - the first Future Shape lobby of the council. If you like any of them, please let me know which because I can only submit one pic to the contest and need help choosing. Thank you.

In the full glare of... police, camera, action

Have just returned from the Isle of Wight where Vestas moved their blades. That wasn't supposed to happen! Well, you can't win them all.

I don't know how many police have filmed me today, too many. I also made the mistake of saying I am a journalist, so then they wanted my NUJ number and to know who I work for, whether I 'follow protests' (no, but I've organised a few in my time).

I don't do much in the NUJ, but I should do more. There is a whole debate there about what is a journalist. I do earn my living from journalism, and could earn a lot more if I did more of the lucrative stuff and less unpaid work covering protests. My aim is to get paid for this work, but that seldom comes off.

Proper journalists, as far as the police are concerned, stand only where the police tell them to stand, take their pictures with big, expensive company cameras, submit expense forms for all out-of-pocket expenses, rather than spending their own money, and, of course, are 'neutral', ie, not emotionally involved with what they are writing about/photographing.

No one is neutral! Worrying mainly about your career, and only writing about what is safe and respectable might keep the police happy but this is not being neutral, this is highly political. The difference is that it is in tune with the dominant political ideas in society.

I hope I can finally work out how to get pictures off my crappy camera phone because I have some great shots of the massive police operation it took to get Vestas blades out today, snapped from the shrubs on the shoreline, where I stood my ground, to the consternation of the Hampshire Constabulary, refusing to go and stand in the press pen.

They couldn't stop me, because I was on a public footpath, but they do have plenty of pictures of me to make sure I don't step out of line in the future.

Day of righteousness part 2: Save Vestas blog

Barnet's trade union bloggers can teach Barnet council a thing or two about using social media to get their message across and communicate with 'constituents'. Tigmoo.co.uk, the network for UK union blogs and bloggers, has announced its top 25 union blogs for 2009.

The site run by Barnet Unison is at number 24 and the SaveVestas blog which I have helped to run for the three months it has existed is at number 4.

There are two reasons why SaveVestas has done so well - (1) a lot of work has gone into it, and not just mine - there is a small team of us contributing in different ways; (2) it reflects an important campaign which has had a big impact on the labour and environmental movements, and certainly on the Isle of Wight.

In short, lessons for Mike Freer to help him with his lamentable 'Leader Listens' blog:
(1) blogs don't write themselves;
(2) blogs need a reason to exist beyond simply showing that the blogger - in this case, Barnet council's leader - has a blog.

The campaign on the Isle of Wight is not over yet. So I shall continue to be just part-time on this my own blog, but hopefully for not much longer!