Jade Goody supporter Mark McGowan has stated on his website today:

Supporters of Jade Goody are to meet up this Saturday 20th jan 2007 at 11am outside Bermondsey tube station where they will be voicing their support of Big Brother contestant Jade Goody. Effigy’s of Shilpa Shetty will be burned, in aprotest against allegations of racism, which the supporters of Jade Goody believe are totally unfounded.
Mark McGowan one of Saturdays event organisers said, ‘everyone in south London is behind Jade. i think what they are doing is wrong Jade is a good person and is in no way racist, we support Jade 100%, Shilpa Shetty is manipulative and is tricking everyone, she is the cause of all this trouble. We are going to burn the effigy’s in protest, Simon Ould another of our group is making them tonight. We want everyone from Bermondsey to turn out and show their support for Jade’

for more info

Name: Mark McGowan 07944533010

Email: chunkymark1974@yahoo.com

I really hope that no one shows up….These people are not doing this to support Jade, rather I would wager that these people are hungry for the media attention they are sure this will attract. Organiser Mark McGowan has very often demonstrated in weird and wonderful ways before.

Wikipedia reports:

He entered the headlines in 2004 whilst protesting about student debt. To achieve this he claimed to have rolled a peanut from London’s Goldsmiths College to 10 Downing Street using only his nose. He followed this up by sitting in a bathtub full of baked beans with chips up his nose and sausages around his head, claiming to be the defender of the full English breakfast. His next effort involved pulling a bus with his big toe in protest at London’s transport strategy. He has also cooked and eaten a fox to highlight the plight of “crackheads”.

In April 2005 McGowan once more gained publicity after being accused of ‘keying’ cars in a number of cities, a practice involving the scratching of cars using a key. This attracted the attention of the police, though McGowan defended his actions in a television interview on Channel 4 News by stating that his actions had become “compulsive-obsessive” and that “I [McGowan] suppose it’s like a social experiment testing why people do it.”

He was back in the news in July 2005 for his installation “The Running Tap”, where he left the water running in the backroom kitchen of a London gallery to protest leakage problems with London’s private water company, Thames Water. His installation wasted 9,200 gallons of water a day, and if left on for a full year as he intended, would have wasted 3.9 million gallons of water and cost $23,320. It was turned off several times by protesters of the protest. He turned the tap off for good on 29 July following threats of legal action from the water company.

From Boxing Day, 2005 to January 6, 2006, McGowan crawled on all fours from London Bridge to Canterbury Cathedral. He pulled 18 boxes of chocolates on strings attached to his arms and legs and carried a sign saying: “Could you love me?”. This is to highlight the loneliness felt by some around Christmas time.

In November 2006 McGowan performed Dead Soldier 2006, on New Street, Birmingham, where he lay down in the road dressed as a soldier for one week.

In January 2007 vegetarian McGowan tucked into a swan outside an art gallery in London’s East End. McGowan was protesting about the upper classes and the Queen.

This latest protest hardly sends out a positive message to ethnic minorities who already think that Britain is crawling with bigoted racists! Give it up Mark would you?