About a year ago, Nottingham's May Day events became the source of much controversy after Notts Trades Council decided to invite New Labour MP, Alan Meale. The decision to invite Meale, an MP whose role in Parliament seemed to have been to facilitate the war-mongering, authoritarian and anti-migrant policies of the Blair government, was strongly opposed before and during the event.



In the aftermat…

Autonomous Nottingham have decided not to release a collective statement about this year's Mayday, primarily because the individuals involved in the collective disagree with one another. We've discussed it at length amongst ourselves and whilst we agree that Alan Meale is a class enemy for the reasons we outlined in our joint statement with AFed, we have different opinions on the actions to stop h…

Below is our interpretation of what happened on May 5th this year and the political context in which it took place. By ‘our’ we mean that this is the agreed statement of the Nottingham group of the Anarchist Federation. We don’t claim to speak for all anarchists in Nottingham, although we stand together with them in much of our analysis below and took action alongside them, as well as non-ana…

This year Notts Trades Council decided to organise a march and rally for May Day. Amongst the expected representatives of trade unions and activist groups, their star speaker was to be Sir Alan Meale, Labour MP for Mansfield and loyal Blairite. This, unsurprisingly, caused a lot of controversy in the run up to the event. A march of a few hundred trade unionists, socialists and anarchists went from…