Monthly Archives: June 2017

Enough is Enough

It’s time for the British to go French. I know, I know. They’re arrogant, they’re rude, they don’t like it when you try to speak their language. But here’s the thing. They don’t put up with any crap. Sorry, merde.
French people are really defensive of their way of life. It’s easy to be critical of French lorry drivers when you’re queuing at Calais and they’ve shut down the roads because they want a pay rise. And it’s a pain to be stuck at the airport when French air traffic controllers are striking for better work conditions. But these are the consequences of people standing up for what they believe in and I, for one, think it’s worth the rest of us putting up with a little discomfort to support them. After all, perhaps next time, it will be  us who needs THEIR support.

How is this relevant in Britain at the moment? Well, it’s time to say, to quote our vainglorious leader: “Enough is enough!”

Remember when the referendum vote – that slim, barely noticeable majority – got turned into “the will of the people?”. It’s not so long ago. That vote for Britain to leave the European Union got hijacked into a “hard Brexit” where Britain left not only the European Union, but the single market, the protection of European laws, a respected and (relatively) stable economy and perhaps most stinging, the status of a country respected the world over as sane and tolerant. Now the Tory party are trying to do it again. The minuscule lead they have managed to maintain after an election campaign foisted on an unsuspecting nation and opposition party was designed to get a blanket mandate for all sorts of damaging policies. The dismantling of the NHS to be speeded up. The disintegration of the education system manoeuvred through increased examinations, more private schools and university tuition fees. The undermining of the police force. The shoring up of the wealthy elite with tax cuts, loopholes. And the erosion of privacy laws which protect society from human rights abuses. And how we got to this place is becoming clearer and clearer. The ideological and information systems by which people set their moral compass are rigged. The billionaires who own our newspapers, corporations and who sit on the boards of hospitals, schools and religious institutions have set the dial in their favour. We the people are effectively being screwed and we are finally waking up to the fact.

The thing about consciousness is that once it is raised, it is difficult to put it back in the box. Apartheid, Ghandi’s India, women’s liberation, the Arab Spring. Once the people have that awareness, it’s only a matter of time before it is expressed. Whether it is a slow or quick revolution depends a lot on the conditions. What freedoms are in place. How draconian is the oppression. In Britain, we have been given an opportunity. A window into a world free from austerity, oppression and divisiveness. That window is the Labour movement under Jeremy Corbyn. In just two months, he has turned a country sick with fear and anger into a country filled with hope and aspiration. He has ignited imaginations and that may be his most important gift. He has helped us see how a better future might come about.
While the US still struggles to find valid reasons to remove Trump, Britain has the chance to remove May before she makes her coalition of chaos. The union with the DUP is ill advised, not only because of their militant right wing ideologies ( anti-abortion, anti-gay rights) but also because it contravenes the hard-won Good Friday Agreement. This alliance is the height of cynicism and a desperate attempt to hold on the power. They are trying to tell us that once again it is the “will of the people”, but we’re not falling for it again.
Are we?

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The Revolution is not being Televised

I haven’t used this site for party political campaigning before, being somewhat of the opinion that ‘whoever you vote for, the government always wins’, but with the 2017 General Election, the UK is experiencing nothing short of a revolution and that’s pretty exciting stuff! The massive sea-change of support backing Jeremy Corbyn and the Labour Party has not been seen in British politics since 1945, the year that Clement Attlee’s Labour Party achieved a 12% swing against Winston Churchill’s Conservatives to gain a mandate for post-war reforms. These post-war reforms included the creation of the National Health Service, which guaranteed free health care for everyone. How fitting, then, that one of Corbyn’s strongest election pledges has been to reverse the privatisation of the NHS that has been accelerated under the present Tory government and is set, if they are elected, to continue under advice from the Naylor Review.

nhs

It would be wrong to suggest that this revolution has been bloodless. The terror attacks perpetrated over the past year have left a nation stunned and heartbroken and in this, I include the murder of Jo Cox. While the mainstream media glossed over this latter atrocity as the actions of a single lunatic, other murders have been railed against with the shrill indignancy of a country whose values are under siege. But the truth is, our shared values have been under attack from within, from cynical, greedy and violently racist political leaders and these murders are being used to justify the erosion of our human rights.

Living in the Future is not an overtly political project, but the values which underpin ideas of community and environmental care are undoubtedly left wing. What’s more, Living in the Future was born out of Undercurrents – a not-for-profit organisation which rose out of the public unrest under Margaret Thatcher’s Conservative policies. At that time, it was the protests against road building and the poll tax which were ignored by right wing media. Now it is the left wing opposition itself which has been ignored. As Gill Scott-Heron predicted, the revolution is not being televised.

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The Revolution will not be Televised

As a student and teacher of media studies, I have spent a lifetime arguing that there is no such thing as objectivity. That the ideologies drummed into us at home and school, by he church and other influencers, seep into our words and actions, not least as journalists. But the deliberate slanting of mainstream journalism against policies of peace and social care as put forward by Jeremy Corbyn has been nothing short of lying. And not only by the right wing tabloids, but disappointingly, by the so-called left wing Guardian newspaper as well. In a society where the gap between rich and poor is propped up by Conservative policies, with tax cuts for the wealthy and companies evading payments though they benefit both from the people and the  infrastructure of the country, it’s not hard to see why a vote for the Tories is a vote to maintain the status quo.
And at a time when depression, mental illness and loneliness spread like epidemics in our world. At a time when the earth needs us to stop pillaging her bounty and start giving back, at a time when climate change threatens our very survival on this planet, we can no longer afford to appease the rich. We can no longer allow hate and division to prevail. We have to find a way to work together.
In our most recent film, Deep Listening, we explore how intentional communities, in harmony with ancient aboriginal ways, practice a quiet way of being with themselves, with the land, and with each other. This way involves us hearing the profound messages needed for healing. Healing of ourselves, of the earth and of our communities.

We need to listen to each other.

It’s not a coincidence that Jeremy Corbyn, his values and principles miraculously intact after many years in politics, expounds these very practices and aims to bring them into his government. If ever we needed someone who understand how to listen, we need it now. It won’t solve everything, of course, our system is undoubtedly broken and needs urgent attention, but if you are in the UK, it’s time to perform an act of revolution and to vote Labour on June 9th.

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Vote Labour on June 9th

Note : Re: “For the Many, not the Few”

Thanks to Steve Coogan for clarifying the source of the Labour Party election slogan. In this poem, the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley is speaking about non-violent direct action.

Written on the occasion of the Peterloo Massacre, Manchester 1819, Shelley begins his poem with the powerful images of the unjust forms of authority of his time “God, and King, and Law” – and he then imagines the stirrings of a radically new form of social action: “Let a great assembly be, of the fearless, of the free”. The crowd at this gathering is met by armed soldiers, but the protesters do not raise an arm against their assailants:

“Stand ye calm and resolute,
Like a forest close and mute,
With folded arms and looks which are
Weapons of unvanquished war.

And if then the tyrants dare,
Let them ride among you there;
Slash, and stab, and maim and hew;
What they like, that let them do.

With folded arms and steady eyes,
And little fear, and less surprise,
Look upon them as they slay,
Till their rage has died away:

Then they will return with shame,
To the place from which they came,
And the blood thus shed will speak
In hot blushes on their cheek:

Rise, like lions after slumber
In unvanquishable number!
Shake your chains to earth like dew
Which in sleep had fallen on you:
Ye are many—they are few!”


Note on the note…

(Shelley’s poetry sometimes had only an underground readership during his day, but his poetic achievements are widely recognized today, and his advanced political and social thought impacted the Chartist and other movements in England, and reach down to the present day. Shelley’s theories of economics and morality, for example, had a profound influence on Karl Marx; his early—perhaps first—writings on nonviolent resistance influenced both Leo Tolstoy and Mahatma Gandhi.) Wikipedia.

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