thatchersorphan wrote:seeingclearly wrote:gilsey wrote:I just noticed yesterday that there was a political discussion before the election on a facebook group I belong to, one person who lives in the midlands was clearly put off Labour by the 'scary SNP' story. It was interesting to me because I couldn't/can't understand that line at all. Maybe because I live in the northeast and visit Scotland regularly?
What were we supposed to be frightened of?
Them lifting their kilts? But seriously the propaganda was there, did you not see the nasty little animation of Ed dancing to Salmonds tune? It really got passed around a lot. And then that was followed up with specific anti SNP propaganda on specially printed wrappers for free newspapers on the last few pre-election days, in Tory marginals. Seemed stupid and insignificant that animation, but was quite a trigger, I reckon.
I wonder if it is a north thing, because the up north people I speak to would have preferred labour to work with the snp rather than with the tories. For some labour refusing to work with the snp EVEN IF it let the tories in was worse.
Alternatively it may be a politically aware thing, meaning scaremongering snp stories didn't have the same effect on us. Sadly it looks like we may be depending on the snp (who were hardly in the forefront (or even the middle) of the fight against atos) to actually oppose this govt as labour seem to be supporting the tories enough on welfare to give the tories narrative credence.
If anyone has the ear of labour please have a read of
https://twitter.com/RednorthUK" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false; for how labour are still alienating what were its core voters, even before we were disabled (and before Blair).
I don't know if you I can see it as simplistically as thinking in terms of what 'side' would have preferred Labour to do what. To put this in a way in which I might be able to communicate better with you, we ALL would have preferred to get rid of the Tories altogether, but then again you suggest that refusing to work with the SNP was somehow worse. I don't get that, and I'm not from the north or the south, I'm from bang inbetween and everyone seems to forget we exist at all! Ed didn't rule out working with the SNP, he rule out a pre-election formal agreement, and perhaps also any formal agreement, but he didn't rule out working together. But it was always read as that.
I've been looking a lot at what people do, how they react and trying to fathom out what's actually going on, because it's not all that clear, it's very odd, for one thing that we had a nation that was pretty easy going and not too rabidly divided except on a few issues of a non-political nature. And for sure people had grievances, some long standing but on the whole we were functioning well, till 2010. You'd be forgiven, if you were a total stranger to these shores, if you thought we were a nation on its way to civil war. Which I think, no one really wants. This I believe is because we have been inoculated with something very toxic, let's call it a blame virus, so we don't call it something yet more divisive. Because we've got to stop the blaming if we want to sort out this mess.
I've no doubt that anyone can do or be this virus thing, if they so want, but also feel that some just are incurable, it'll take something big to turn it back. If you really and truly want to know what I'm getting at go and find 1864 on iPlayer. Then ask about all this stuff. Because to me it's a similar kind of madness, only we are rallying round many different banners instead of one. The only person I could see in the political or activist world who did not do this was Ed Miliband. Through years of really dreadful media and government vilification, the worst I've seen anywhere, he refused to engage with that, and instead had a laugh at himself. I'm still amazed that the public, and the ladies group didn't get this, that he was keeping quite a lot of things from falling apart. If there's one thing I'll find it very hard to do again is ever be out in the everyday ordinariness of Britain and feel safe among strangers, because today I don't know who might be my friend or my enemy, and it's that I'm trying to convey here, that this is what we are now, and Labour had an incredibly tough time because instead of being seen as just another party among those who stand against the Tories, it has been seen as the enemy too, and worse as a traitor, ft he party that failed to protect us. But is that really true? They didn't bring about the crash, nor did they generate the long term plans the Tories very clearly set in place years before reaching office. So Labour was a party full of humans beings, good ones bad ones indifferent ones, struggling a bit with coming to terms with its own roots and adjusting to a new reality. You will find this will happen to the SNP too, probably a lot sooner than they expect because it's my experience that this happens to all political parties, the fervour dies away, and the ideology becomes stale. So what we are left with as citizens is the democratic process, which like everyone is not perfect, but it protects us and if we inhabit it properly it serves us fairly well. We've not been doing that, nobody has, we've failed to look after it, and this is the result. But to blame it on Labour is bonkers. The lists that we've revisited today have proved that.
I'm going to come out a little here, I was quite involved in my local Occupy, helped support it along with many many others. Thatchersorphan, you may know a little about the events of 2011, if you don't my apologies. Many people were attracted to this new movement, lots of long term activists on a whole range of things, among others, some of whom were very new to taking any kind of action at all. Ordinary decent people who wanted to make a difference.
So what happened to all that energy? In my city we had the longest occupation of all, it was good, and was there all winter for homeless people and the odd missing person turned up there too. It was a good learning experience too. But it never came with just that, it came with conspiracy theories, people who set out to undermine it, and a lot more besides some of which is too distressing to revisit. And everywhere the same things happened, not just here but other countries as well. So I'll never ever look a movement in the same way either. It was like a micro experiment of what we are seeing now. That's tge nearest I can describe it. Because it's a collective experience.
When we had been whittled down to really just a handful, we discussed it one day, and wound up with one common thought which really I can only express one way, 'What the ****was all that about? What was it for?'. And that's not to deny that there are now many good linked networks of people across not just Britain, but internationally as well, who are peacefully getting on with good things, and learning how to be better citizens of this world, because that happened to, but we had to face up to the fact that there were some very negative aspects to it, that there were something's seeded into society that were very far from healthy in a democracy.
I'm just going to describe two. Because this might be getting dull to read.
One was a notion that somehow anyone could govern a country, it was easy to do. That you could dispense with it altogether, with no work put in, no interim provision. Just that, we don't need politics.
Which I felt a bit of a travesty really, because you do need structures, you can't just rely on an absence of everything and expect things to remain stable. But there were people on fire with this, and they couldn't really organise anything between them. In spite of all their 'we don't need leader' it was exactly those kind of people who were ensuring that people were safe, that things got done, that it didn't descend into chaos. After a while a lot of those people faded away, or moved on, all the people doing the boring stuff, leaving only the ones everyone saw in some way as charismatic. Some of whom were good, and some bloody awful, tbh. The whole premise of this leaderless, structure less stuff was like a kind of twisted version of true anarchism, which is more about individuals shedding the trappings of political thinking and setting up communities that work, like the place in Spain. I can't remember how to spell it, marinaleda, something like that. Fantastic place where I'd love to be. Whatever. What we were seeing was definitely not ideal in any way, because really we had a fantastic little camp, which everyone loved, but which a few people were working their butts off to maintain. Other camps had a much worse fate really, and all of them came under physical violent attack. Mostly at night.
The other, much nastier in concept and in reality, was the idea that a people could be guilty of being traitors to a cause. This was was very prevalent, not just in the real world but on all sorts of media as well. Here and abroad. It happened to a greater or lesser degree everywhere, it was doctrinal. This movement that people had come to voluntarily wanting to help make the world better, had this at its heart. Very sobering it was, and a big learning experience.
The funny thing is I date the real social changes back to 2012. And you may think I'm fanciful with that, but I'm not. Or I don't think I am. More I'm rather sad about it. anyone who followed any of the sad ends to both Wall Street and London might have got an inkling of this. The whole waggle handed headless chicken nature of it also had a lot of other stuff going on. It certainly occupied the protest movements in a wholly futile way.
At this point in time the best I've seen come out of it came from the vaguest link to the disability movement, who were barely represented outside of people dealing with addiction and mental health issues. It really did attract a lot of rather fragile people, and it made some of the strongest fragile and uncertain. And really the disability movement was not at all like occupy, for one thing it was an already mature movement, and sprang out of genuine oppression. It predated all of occupy by many years, and really it's maturity shows.
A positive for me was some great environmental stuff and a connection I'm now unable to really do anything with, but love anyway, permaculture. Good good stuff. For me a very fragile connection to a life once lived in the country and close to nature.
There's lots more, because any one of the almost dominant memes we've seen injected into our society was present in a full blown form. Im not saying such thing were not,present in wider society, but people came fully loaded, the younger they were the worse it was, and they came with an outrageous and arrogant ignorance, so I guess I don't need to define it more than that.
An example of this was the potential a transaction tax had as a solution to the things they were supposed to be protesting about I duly turned up with plenty of stuff supplied readily by the Robin Hood Tax people, on Robin Hood day, which was a serious attempt to help educate the public about the crisis and how there were solutions that they could take to their MPs and to their friends. for people to discuss with the hundreds of people who came to talk with protesters every day, after all poeple were protesting the bankers stuff, weren't they?
Well I'll leave that up to anyone reading to decide that. Let's just say not single person had ever heard of it, or expressed the slightest bit of interest, and the conversation was more illuminati than illuminating.
I Don't think there was much interest in public protest outside the already converted in England after that, with the student protests and the riots it made a trio of events the public didn't want to repeat, and in the meantime trade union marches and other quite serious attempts to raise some sense of awareness that things were going badly wrong got systematically hidden from view.and everywhere the spring movements faltered and fell as they imploded from being hollowed out and replaced with lesser people, because the fact is the good people who weren't the stars tired of the failure to do anything meaningful, and went home, to be replaced by very different people. Though the single interest protests gained some momentum. I think people needed someplace to go. And they did, into housing, and fracking and much more tangible things. Scotland was different of course, because they had a cause.
I think my day of recognition of the true awfulness of what it had become was a day when a group of young protesters enacted a bizarre scene, they were taking it in turns to run up to a homeless black guy baiting him and when he showed impatience with this rushed off in mock fear. After a couple of rounds of this I challenged them, and they said 'we can do what we want, it's a free country'.
We stopped it eventually, but not before the guy went into meltdown and roared at them, I shan't say what they called him, anyway there were a lot more of them than us, but they had turned up daily from almost the beginning.
I guess I've tried to capture a feel of that time. When it started we felt like free people, and by the time it ended we didn't. I watched the end of the London protest on TV, it was sad in the extreme. The protesters what was left of them had agreed to assemble in a specific place, but were moved on, they fragmented into groups and dissolved into the almost dawn light. The police had the whole area thoroughly hosed down, and it looked immeasurably bleak.
