Oxford Social Struggles Newswire Archive

An empty industrial workshop in East Oxford has been squatted by a group planning to use it for community and social events, an organising base for local radicals and living space too. Read more >>

At the time of writing, there have been no riots in Oxford*. However, what's been going on over the last few days is clearly not just isolated local events. Here's a round up of what some Oxford-based bloggers have made of things …

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'The Continental' grocery store on Cowley Rd, East Oxford which was evicted by their landlords about 3 weeks ago has re-opened. Read more >>

Myself and various friends have received all sorts of misinformation today regarding the apparent rioting in Oxford, including riots in Cowley, riots on the Cowley Road, riots in Headington. This isn't quite the story so far as I can see. Read more >>

Activists, in the non-activist setting of the cinema, discussed direct action/civil disobedience before an audience who had just watched the film, Just Do It - it didn't change the world, but... Read more >>

A smallish, but lively crowd took the streets (OK, pavements!) of Oxford yesterday to protest against cuts to social care in a "March of the Uninvisibles". Read more >>

Lots (and lots) of stuff happening, as we wind up to the next really BIG Council meeting on the 21st. More reminders to come, but first, a BIG, BIG thank you to all the volunteers who distributed our response to Councillor Malik's highly misleading letter around Cowley Marsh over the last week. If you haven't already, please take time to look at the website and see the propaganda still being pushed out to the public, and our response.
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Are we happy with the officially sanctioned corporately sponsored festival in the park and paying to see commercial musicians? Don't we miss the localness and simple vibe of the Cowley Rd Carnival? If David Cameron wants us to have street parties, why don't we just have them?

Our carnival's been stolen ... let's steal it back! Read more >>

No Borders and refugee solidarity activists blockaded the Harmondsworth and Colnbrook immigration prisons, near Heathrow airport on 21 June to stop a mass deportation flight to Baghdad. About 70 Iraqi refugees, mostly Kurds, were due to be forcibly flown on a specially chartered flight from an undisclosed airport at 11pm. A last-minute court injunction forced the Home Office to call it off, so the blockaders decided to end their protest at 9pm, after making sure that the migration prisoners were safely off the buses. The action was an important step in escalating resistance to the deportation machine, in solidarity with the hunger strikers in Campsfield, the rioters in Brook House, the Yarlswood four, and all migration prisoners in their everyday struggle.

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Thousands of villagers outside Oxford are set lose all their evening buses from 6 June. Read more >>

Anti-deportation campaigners are blockading Colnbrook and Harmondsworth detention centres in a last-minute attempt to stop the forcible deportation of Iraqi refugees to Baghdad on a specially chartered flight scheduled to leave London this evening.

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Oxford-based Campbell Road Productions has partnered with the environmental campaign groups People & Planet and the UK Tar Sands Network to produce a documentary investigating the tar sands oil extraction project in Alberta, Canada. Read more >>

In the early hours of 15th June, the offices held by the Armed Forces at 35 St Giles since 1936 were targeted in an expression of independent anti-militarist direct action. Red paint, emblematic of the unneccesary deaths of innocents and servicemen and -women at home and across the world, was poured over the front door and steps in order to cause maximum inconvenience to those who make war possible while masquerading as members of the local community. This was done to impede as far as possible the continuation of business from that location. Read more >>

Public meeting against immigration controls, and for a new politics based on equality, solidarity and freedom of movement for all, organised by No One Is Illegal (UK). Speakers: Victoria Brittain, Rahila Gupta and Tracy Walsh. Read more >>

The Big Society Hospital returned to Oxford on Saturday as activists fro Oxford Save Our Services, Keep Our NHS Public, and several other groups converged on Cornmarket to highlight the disastrous implications of the NHS reforms & cuts. Would you let a Big Society volunteer operate on you? Read more >>

Oxford’s ivory tower may not often feel the tremors of a thousand students pushing through police lines to protest Vince Cable‘s (non) appearance at the Exam Schools in collusion with the marketisation of higher education in Britain. However, some students at Wadham College have, this past week, renewed a tradition (alive since 2008) of bringing radical ideas into the heart of the ‘dreaming spires’, with the aim of reviving that momentum experienced in the winter of 2010 against the cuts and the Tories’ wider programme of austerity and neoliberal reform. Read more >>

Every month a small group of campaigners gathers outside "Campsfield House", near Oxford. Inside, behind layers of tall, razor-wire fences, are 200 people imprisoned indefinitely for the "crime" of being poor, non-white, and foreign. Read more >>

I've been noticing short political rants in all sorts of interesting places around Oxford... I can only conclude squirrels are getting active against the cuts. Read more >>

Last Sunday OARC was host to two films that told the story of the Poll Tax riots that happened in Trafalgar Square in 1990. Read more >>

Last Saturday up to 500,000 people joined the TUC's March for the Alternative. Many hundreds, if not thousands, of other people protested against the Con-Dem cuts in different, spikier, ways. Here's my story and reflections. Read more >>