Members of Global Justice Cambridge took part in two demos for Buy Nothing Day, 24 November 2023. The demos were small but successful — one with placards and singing in front of Amazon’s Cambridge office, one on the city’s pedestrianised Burleigh Street with other groups marking Buy Nothing Day.

While we were getting our act together for the Amazon one, we were approached by the site custodian, who asked what our intentions were. We told him we’d be staying outside and singing. “Any chance of a good Christmas carol?” he asked. In fact the tune we sang to is from an old French carol, but we don’t know if he was there to hear it.

Burleigh Street involved an extraordinary slow procession through the Grafton Centre, led by members of the Red Rebel Brigade (who dress in that colour for such occasions). Their protests are silent and very dignified. We think they’d have made some impact on us if we’d been mere spectators, and we hope shoppers felt the same.

We didn’t attempt to sing during their part of the proceedings, but we gave the Amazon song a couple of times before and after, while we were out in the sun.

The words were these:

THE AMAZON SONG

 (tune ‘Besançon’ https://bit.ly/3G2JjhT )

Amazon, pay your workers right,

have things safe on every site,

have the unions organising,

jobs as jobs, with no disguising.

People, today’s Buy Nothing Day —

come and let’s make Amazon pay.

Amazon, pay your tax in full,

where you work, and pull no wool.

End your games of profit-shifting

and tax havens’ legal grifting.

People, today’s Buy Nothing Day —

come and let’s make Amazon pay.

Amazon, cool the world that burns,

take less from it as it turns,

open Just Transition trial,

fund no climate change denial.

People, today’s Buy Nothing Day —

come and let’s make Amazon pay.

Aidan Baker

CC BY 2.0

If singing on some other day of the year, end each stanza with

People, each day’s a boycott day —

that’s how we make Amazon pay.

… was the scorching title of an event held at the School of Oriental and African Studies in London on 25 March. For some idea of what it was like, here is the opening plenary:

and here is the closing plenary:

with Nick Shaxson’s words on the upside of competition.

See also this blog summary of the message, with its downloadable copy of the booklet Monopoly capitalism — what is it and how do we fight it? For the workshops in between those plenary sessions — well, I made a transcribble of my notes from those I attended, and here it is. But the booklet will give you a better idea.

Workshop: Make big tech small again

• Parminder Jeet Singh

• Garfield Hylton

Garfield Hylton is a union activist at Amazon’s Coventry warehouse.

QQ

How make narrative clear?

How break up Amazon?

What about end of Amazon?

How break up layers?

Parminder Jeet Singh: No other way to deal w. problem. Break-up is rqd. How? Cf. India’s local networks in 5 cities. Platform companies should be registered as a different kind of company.

Uber drivers can withdraw their data from Uber.

Google in politics: one US pres candidate said if Google can do it govt shd not do it.

Garfield Hylton: Amazon will sack an IT worker as costlier than warehouse workers.

Amazon’s increasing automation hugely reduces the workforce.

Parminder Jeet Singh: Amazon workers create 2 kinds of value: shipping of things, and data.

QQ

How break up Twitter &c?

How rethink advertising rules?

How consider break-up of Amazon web sces?

Garfield Hylton: GMB sees public contacts as affording leverage.

Amazon not actually that good with IT.

Everything in Amazon is temporary.

Parminder Jeet Singh: Not necessarily a good thing. Cloud firms should not do other things besides cloud.

Workshop: Dismantling big pharma’s money machine

• Nick Dearden

• Julia Kosgei

Q: What about China?

Julia Kosgei supports open science.

Nick Dearden: vaxxes made by Chinese TNCs played a contradictory role. Chin at first distributed in Global South rather than vaxx their own people.

China at first less keen on IP — then more so.

Don’t see them as angels.

What we must now do is push model of mRNA hub — genuinely transformative.

QQ

What campaign priorities?

Isn’t competition a problem rather than a solution?

How far from R&D distribution is wide enough for you to ignore northern power?

Nick Dearden: Priority of mRNA. This reverse engineering is a good thing.

Priority of getting Labour to a gd policy position — such as it had in 2019!

Role of regulation and public ownership is important. Competition needs these [in order?] to be useful.

SA govt shocked to find SA treated as a poor country.

Julia Kosgei pushes a Sept event

QQ

Wd Southern find of North-relevant drug be a game-changer?

BRICS — how far is that a solution?

What blocks NIH marketing itself?

Julia Kosgei: 2021 scientists sought treatment for [?]. But it was blocked.

Nick Dearden: Small firms get taken over. Pandemic changed the scaleback of producction by drug companies (not the part of the operation that was the most profitable. China is not 100% anti-colonial.

QQ

Has the anti-vaxx row muddied the waters?

What about BRICS+?

What impact of power moving east?

Julia Kosgei was hard to follow.

Nick Dearden: Govts don’t have much of a clue. Nick excited to see US change — & hopes other govts will have to respond. Hope not based on govts’ gd intentions.

Anti-vaxx sentiment is a problem, yes. Pharma industry is the biggest problem in anti-vaxx.

Aidan, Ursula and Elisabeth at the Cherry Hinton stall for Fairtrade Fortnight. Picture by Clare Sansom

Our contribution to Fairtrade Fortnight was two stalls — one in Trumpington Meadows on 6 March, one in Cherry Hinton three days later. Thanks to Ursula and Elisabeth who were the main movers and shapers of these things, and to the Co-op and Sainsbury’s for donating goods we could display and offer as samples.

And we had leaflets, posters, a quiz and a QR code to the Fairtrade Foundation site. The stalls taught us how much point there was to all this. A lot of the people we engaged with didn’t know much  about Fairtrade.

But they stopped to talk, which was good of them given the weather. You may get some idea of the weather from the photo, and the clothing of the participants, and the presence of the gazebo, and the reflections on the pavement.

One particularly interesting encounter was with a restaurateur from Castle Hill, who resolved to look out for Fairtrade ingredients!

In November and December we teamed up with the Climate Justice Coalition and Friends of the Earth Cambridge, who kindly let us take a song to their stalls, and indeed joined in singing it. Thanks to both groups for this.

CJC’s stall was on Burleigh Street on Sunday 20 November, and the stall by Cambridge Friends of the Earth was at the Mill Road Winter Fair on Saturday 3 December.

The song arises from Debt Justice’s petition on the cost-of-living crisis, more or less.  The tune is William Croft’s splendid melody ‘St Anne‘, often used for the hymn ‘O God, our help in ages past’.

THE ENERGY DEBT SONG

O government, the cost of gas
and electricity
soars in your power.  We pray you slash
the bills for energy.

Your people’s debts for heat and light
grow darker through your reign.
We pray you write them off today
and see us thrive again.

Pray insulate the nation’s homes
and cheapen keeping warm.
Pray own the firms whose profits cast
these shadows to our harm.

In Cambridge, our share in today’s Loss and Damage action was a song, based on the demands of the Loss and Damage petition.  The song was at both ends of an hour spent gathering signatures for the petition and giving out leaflets about it.

THE LOSS AND DAMAGE SONG

(tune ‘Personent hodie’)

Climate change and its wounds —
what the world needs is funds,
funds of billions of pounds,
more than just a bandage,
more than I can manage.
Come COP27,
work to make things even,
put those pounds on the grounds,
mending loss and damage.

Let’s make sure our UK
is among those that pay.
We have dirtied our day
with our years’ pollution.
Here’s a resolution —
match the ash, ash, ash
pounds with cash, cash, cash.
It’s a wash, and a bash
at a best solution.

Should this nation pay more
when its people are poor?
Let the burden be for
dirty corporations.
Wipe them with taxations!
Tax ’em hard, hard, hard,
double-starred, starred, starred —
make their guilt and their gains
climate reparations.

Aidan Baker

CC BY-SA 2.0

And here’s the video of us singing, kindly filmed for us by Emma Collison and uploaded with her permission.

Global Justice Now is holding a day of action against corporate courts on Saturday 21 May.  Our bit of the action in Cambridge will be a campaign stall on Rectory Terrace, Cherry Hinton High Street (between Tesco Express and the junction with Chelwood Road), 10:00-12:00.  We had a stall in the same place, and for the same cause, last September.

That action was successful in its own terms.  We gave out leaflets and engaged people in conversation.  But corporate courts are still a thing, and still enabling large firms to take legal action against any climate measures by governments.

Since Global Justice Now started campaigning on this, there’s been success on two of the demands.  The UK has dropped corporate courts from the bilateral trade deals it’s been negotiating with Australia and Canada.

The present petition calls for the UK to exit the Energy Charter Treaty and not join the Trans-Pacific Partnership. The Energy Charter Treaty (signed in 1991) is an investment deal between more than 50 countries, focused specifically on the energy sector.  The Trans-Pacific Partnership is a deal involving states around the Pacific rim.

Corporate courts are among the provisions of both deals.

Italy has pulled out of the Energy Charter Treaty, and several other European countries are also considering exiting.

Let’s see how much pressure we can put on the UK Government to do the same!