Many thanks to everyone who’s been so encouraging about my new book, Digital Revolutions: Activism in the internet age. I’m really chuffed to see it in the shops at last!

Following the book’s publication, I’m writing a series of articles about related themes that will run on the New Internationalist website over the next few weeks. The first one concerns online petitions, whether they can be effective and how they become popular. It focuses on the recent petition urging Iain Duncan Smith, the UK’s Work and Pensions Secretary, to live on £53 per week. You can read the article here. Your thoughts are welcome!

My new book, Digital Revolutions: Activism in the internet age, has now been published by New Internationalist.

The book looks at recent global movements – including Occupy, the Slutwalks, the Arab Spring,  Uncut and the Indignados – along with other cases of recent activism such as the Spartacus Report, Pussy Riot and Boycott Workfare. As well as exploring these movements more generally, my book asks particular questions about the role of the internet. The focus is on interviews with activists and stories of campaigns more than on outside analyses.

The book is £9.99 and is stocked by a number of bookshops; it’s in several branches of Waterstone’s. You can buy it online from the publisher – £9.99 for the paperback and only £3.99 for the e-book.

If you’re looking for a discount on the paperback – you can get one without supporting the tax-dodgers at Amazon! You can buy it for £7.49 from Word Power Books, an independent online bookseller, or £7.99 from the Guardian bookshop.

If you read the book, it would be great to hear your thoughts. You can email me at symonhill@gmail.com, or leave your comments below.

I was two years old when Margaret Thatcher came to power, and thirteen when she resigned.

Thatcher’s policies led to mass unemployment, leaving my father on the dole for much of my childhood. I started secondary school the year that Section 28 was brought in, banning schools from presenting same-sex relationships as legitimate. When my father became disabled, I watched him having to go through absurd levels of testing and bureaucracy to receive benefits. People living nearby bought their council houses as Thatcher sold them off, setting working class people against each other and replacing collective aspiration for a better community with personal aspirations to own more stuff. I watched my parents worrying about paying the poll tax, trying to work out their finances at the kitchen table as I walked up to bed.

The rule of Thatcher: I saw it all and I hated it all.

Then that was that wonderful day in 1990 when my classmate ran into the classroom and shouted “Thatcher’s resigned!”. At the end of the day, the teacher was in such a celebratory mood that he let us go home early.

But I’m not celebrating today. It would be vile to celebrate anybody’s death and those who do so are lowering themselves to the same level as the supporters of the death and destruction which Thatcher so enthusiastically handed out.

Thatcher was a human being, made, like you and me, in the image of God – however much the image was distorted. She, like you and me, was capable of repentance and redemption. She will be held to account by a higher and better authority than the Today programme or even the general electorate. So will the rest of us.

There is another reason not to celebrate Thatcher’s death. She did not carry out those foul policies on her own. She was able to do what she did because others went along with her. I’m talking not only about her cabinet and party, or even those who voted for her. We all bear some responsibility for the state of society. We are all responsible for making it better.

Today, Thatcher is dead but Thatcherism is alive and well and living in Downing Street. Cameron and Osborne are pursuing policies of which Thatcher could only dream. She died just as disability benefits were being slashed and taxes were cut for the super-rich. She would have been delighted.

I’m more concerned with the death of Thatcherism than the death of Thatcher. At the moment, that seems a long way off. So today, with all the reminiscing and obituary programmes, I’m remembering the campaign against the poll tax. It was the first political campaign that I closely followed and supported. It taught me that people can change things from below, and that change can – sometimes – come suddenly.

So today, let’s be all the more determined to resist this government and the vicious Thatcherite class war that ministers are waging in the interests of the rich. I hope and pray that the day will come when the only way in which children experience Thatcherism is when they study it in history lessons. 

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My new book, Digital Revolutions: Activism in the internet age, can be ordered from the publisher by clicking here, priced £9.99.

According to today’s Daily Mail, I should be feeling insulted this morning. “What an insult to Christians!” declares its front page.

The Mail is angry with the Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC) for issuing advice that suggests that the religions and consciences of all people, and not only Christians, should be respected in the workplace.

Sometimes, the Mail has claimed (with little evidence) that Christians are being marginalised. This is not the issue now. Today, the Mail is explicitly objecting to the notion that non-Christians should be respected as much as Christians.

The Daily Mail has campaigned in favour of Christians being allowed to wear crosses at work and was pleased when this right was upheld in court. Today, the paper declared in outraged tones, “After crucifixes are allowed at work, human rights quango tells firms: Give vegans and pagans special treatment too.”

The EHRC is saying no such thing. Recognising the right of Pagans to wear religious symbols is not “special treatment”; it is equal treatment. As a Christian, I want to express my faith and follow my conscience, not as a matter of “special treatment” but as a right enjoyed by all people.

The Mail article, by political correspondent Jason Groves, declares that “Even atheists should have their beliefs respected according to the new guidance”. Is the Mail arguing that atheists should have fewer rights than others? I hope that most people, whatever their views on religion, would find this suggestion appalling.

The paper seems particularly angry about the suggestion that “lifestyle choices”, such as vegetarianism, veganism and environmentalism, should be respected alongside people with “deeply held spiritual beliefs”.

For many people, such principles are more then “lifestyle choices”. They are, indeed, deeply held beliefs. For some, they are also spiritual. My environmental commitments are strongly linked to my Christian belief that the world is not simply there for the wealthiest humans to use for their own ends. I know several Christian vegans whose veganism is inspired by their interpretation of Christianity. I do not share that interpretation, but I understand where it comes from.

For all their regular claims about Christians being marginalised, it is clear that the Daily Mail don’t want equality for Christians. They want privileges. Such an idea should be abhorrent for people seeking to follow Jesus Christ. Jesus did not teach his followers to claim privileges for himself that they deny to others. He urged them to love their neighbours as themselves – and that means all neighbours, not only Christians. Jesus lived his life in solidarity with people on the margins of society and was killed as a result.

I am not insulted when people whose faith I do not share are accorded the same rights as me. I am insulted when the Daily Mail tries to co-opt my religion to promote prejudice and inequality.

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My new book, Digital Revolutions: Activism in the internet age, can be ordered from the publisher, New Internationalist, by clicking here.

This week, I completed a survey on the BBC website to discover which class I belong to. In reality, I don’t have much doubt about which class I belong to, so I was really discovering more about the people who designed the survey than I was about myself.

Over the last few days, there’s been a brief flurry of media interest in new research that suggests there are now seven classes in Britain. The survey was based on this idea. It declared me to be part of the “precariat”. This is odd, because even on the survey’s own terms, I didn’t seem to meet the criteria for it. It may be because I’m self-employed.

Then again, the questions were so bizarre that I doubt  many of the findings are likely to be useful at all. I wasn’t asked what work I do, but was asked what work my friends do. This varies considerably. I was asked what I enjoyed in terms of entertainment. For these researchers, it seems that class is not about money and power, but about whether you go to the theatre.

Of course, such things might be an indicator of how much disposable income you have. But the cultural associations of a particular activity often have little to do with the income needed for it. Just think of the cost of going to a Premier League football match.

Associating class with culture and recreation gives the impression that class is some sort of lifestyle choice rather than something structural. This sort of attitude makes it easier for some people to dismiss the whole notion of class. Examples include Jill Kirby of the right-wing Centre for Policy Studies, who appeared on the Today programme to argue that “class has eroded almost completely”.

I was disappointed that nobody on the programme asked her to explain how it is that the majority of finance directors, QCs and senior journalists went to fee-paying schools, even though 93% of people in the UK are educated at state schools. The Prime Minister, Deputy Prime Minister, Chancellor of the Exchequer, Mayor of London and Archbishop of Canterbury all went to some of the most expensive schools in the country, which between them educate less than one percent of the UK population. How can anyone argue that this is a country without class?

Another argument that is often heard is that “we are all middle class now”. Those people who go straight from Eton to Oxford to well-paid jobs in investment banks are certainly not middle class. Nor are the million people working in supermarkets and the even greater number working in call centres, many of whom are on zero-hours contracts with little legal protection and far less job security than in the “traditional” working class jobs they have replaced.

I’ve seen class from various angles. My father was a manual worker and I grew up on a council estate. Studying in Oxford, I realised that the “middle class” people – the sons and daughters of teachers and junior managers – had far more in common with me than they did with those who had been to fee-paying schools. Indeed, even people who had been to the less expensive private schools were at a considerable distance from the old Etonians. The big difference was clearly between the people from the “top” schools and the rest of us.

Of course, someone on a middle income who also has a fulfilling and flexible job is likely to have more power over their life than someone on a low income with a demeaning job. I’m not suggesting that there are no nuances or sub-divisions. But let’s not use this as an excuse to mask the reality of the most important distinction. As the Occupy movement has put it, this is between the “one percent” and the “ninety-nine percent”.

Some people point to the blurring of the boundary between the middle and working class as evidence that class does not matter. They say that it shows that people such as Karl Marx were wrong. However, you have only to read Chapter One of The Communist Manifesto to discover that a blurring between the middle and working class is just what Marx predicted. He argued that the increasingly important division was between a tiny number of very rich people and everyone else.

This should not come as any surprise in Britain today – or, indeed, in most of the world. The poor and people in the middle are being told to pay for an economic crisis caused by a system that served the rich. The poorest are suffering the most, with swingeing benefits coming into force only days before the Centre for Policy Studies claimed that class had been eroded. People on middle, as well as low, incomes are facing job losses and pension cuts, just as the NHS is part-privatised, university fees are trebled and local services destroyed at every turn. 

People who object to all this have been accused by David Cameron and George Osborne of waging “class war”. It is Cameron and Osborne who are waging class war. They have slashed taxes for the rich, defended millionaire bonuses and turned a blind eye to corporate tax-dodging at the same time as taking a slash-and-burn approach to public services. The Conservative Party are continuing with their three-hundred-year tradition of promoting the interests of the wealthy. Surveys that define class by tastes in music are not going to help us to resist them.

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My new  book, Digital Revolutions: Activism in the internet age, can be ordered by clicking here.