(Thanks to Lynne, Sue and Felix for the photos)
How do you carry a big bag of tricks (board markers and suchlike) and two plastic lawn chairs a mile through a crowded High Street to the seafront? Two belts, that’s how. Threaded through the backs of the chairs so you can swing them onto your shoulder and stop their legs interfering with yours. Walking down the steps to the seafront, I met a chap coming the other way carrying chairs… Well – I smiled and shrugged (ow! Chairs!) and said, it’s National Chair Carrying Day.
Okay, I admit I’m delaying because I don’t know how to start this piece. How about this way…
The only interesting thing about this general election is that it’s focused the feeling so many of us have that no-one we consider worth voting for is going to win it.
A bunch of us met up a few weeks ago, to try to address the dilemma. – How can it be that our media, our newspapers and most of our politicians are approaching this election pretending that we’re all rapt, anxious to know whether Sunak or Starmer will be returned to number ten.
What makes it even worse is that discussing it on social media, as so many of us do, can leave you thinking the world is full of people who’d far rather win an argument – even if only by being the most persistently abusive one of the bunch – is far more important than finding a solution.
How can it be that it’s only out here, where real lives keep hitting walls, that we’re saying but what about the homeless, what about the poverty and drudgery that goes on and on, what about the climate crisis, what about our schools and our NHS and our social services disappearing into profiteers’ hands? What about the heart-breaking, mind-shredding, god-awful situation in Gaza, and the attendant awfulness that most of our Westminster politicians have made themselves and, by implication all of us, complicit in the war crimes that have played out in two-minute videos in front of our eyes?
And between and before and during and always – the bills, so help us, the bills! Water companies, transport companies, food industry billionaires, health and insurance companies are fleecing us, year on year pushing more of us into poverty and desperation, and it is so painfully, blindingly obvious that neither Sunak nor Starmer is offering a genuine answer to any of our problems.
The meeting
Agenda item one: what is this thing we are organizing?
There were three organizers’ meetings. Actual meetings, not zooms. Meanwhile on social media, people kept asking who was organizing it. Organizers were anyone who fancied turning up to an organizers’ meeting. Most of us went home with a job to do — be it leafleting, checking out insurance, digging out those rolls of paper you think you might own, or writing press releases.
The first hour of the first meeting was like a game of blind man’s buff – maybe 20-30 of us – mostly people who, in previous elections, would have known exactly what to do. We would have been out running canvas teams or stalls or hustings by now, our colours firmly nailed to the mast of one candidate or another but this time – when we talked of getting behind the best candidate on offer, or of putting up our own candidate, we could not even enthuse ourselves, let alone anyone else — but there was a third idea…
Hastings needs to talk
Labour’s going to win this election, and they’re going to go on trying to persuade us that what they want to do is what we need. How about if we ignore them, ignore their hustingses, but have a public assembly — bring together as much of Hastings as we can, not to listen to politicians, not even to talk to politicians, but to talk to each other: to listen, and to start framing a decisive manifesto of what Hastings, Hastings as in us, the people, actually want and need, and how we might go about getting those things.
If you’ve ever tried running an event, you’ll know that it’s a bit crazy to try and organize and publicize and pay for a big meeting in a week or two, in the run up to an election. It seems even crazier, in such volatile times, to invite anyone and everyone to a meeting with no detailed agenda. We just agreed a few rules: election candidates can come – it’s a public meeting, anyone can come – but no canvassing or leaflet distributing (there would be a table outside where people could leave campaign materials for viewing). No idea or topic is vetoed, but no abusive language, no personal attacks. Look for agreement and understanding rather than stressing over disagreements. That’s how you find your way to what everyone actually needs. Once we know that, we can discuss what we might do together to make that happen.
e-talking, me-talking and conversation
What we didn’t want was the kinds of going-nowhere scraps we were seeing on social media anywhere politics was discussed. In fact, the Facebook event page for the meeting, when it went up, generated quite a few of those, where we got told our meeting was ‘just a talk-shop’, ‘a waste of time’, ‘a recipe for disaster’. One woman even wrote a whole essay in a local group about how she’d met one of the organizers on the beach and didn’t get along with them, so she didn’t think anyone should go to the assembly.
What we didn’t want was people giving ‘me me me’ speeches, trying to sell themselves to us as the answer, or people telling us what we should or should not talk about.
What we did want was a variety of people coming together to talk, to listen and to think.
Crazy, but it worked. It really must have been what people wanted.
The Assembly
It was wildly over-subscribed. A last-minute email asked that anyone who could, should bring a couple of extra chairs, because if all the sign-ups turned up, we would to have to seat overspill people outside under a couple of hastily borrowed gazebos.
After a bit of kerfuffle over chairs and suchlike, and how to get started, we had a roomful of people sat round in groups of six with the obligatory big bits of paper and marker pens and you know what happened next? Two hours whistled by, and like everyone I talked to afterwards, I was reminded that a town really is just a bunch of people with remarkably similar needs and concerns (I listed some of them near the start of this article) and, when you sit down randomly with people who aren’t necessarily your kind of people, you tend to hear different approaches to those issues. People got to discussing what they’d done about this and that, action groups they were members of, others that might be formed. Ideas were born, and our next projects began to open up before us.
Various people teamed up, ideas were kick-started, and quite a few of us went home thinking that we need more of the people in our town to join in and discuss their needs, and get together with others who are doing something about those problems, or people that could, or would do something, if they had a team around them. How do we do that? How about running some more meetings, in different parts of town?
A ring of chairs
Social media may be going to the dogs. Politicians and TV presenters may tell you that there are ‘controversial’, ‘volatile’, ‘toxic’ differences in our society but – whilst newspapers, television and social media can divide and polarize, it’s amazing how a ring of chairs can engage, enthuse and unite.
And next…?
I don’t know yet – that’s up to everyone, but don’t ever let anyone tell you getting together to talk things over is pointless. Whoever wins the election on July 4th, I don’t think they’re going to solve many of our problems. In fact, I think it’s likely they’ll make most of them worse but I’m not in despair – I’m thinking about the Collective that got together nationally to support all those independent candidates – they aren’t going to go away after the election are they? Whether lots of them or just one or none of them win, they’re going to be teaming up and talking about what to do next, aren’t they? Just like I think Hastings will be.
I can’t wait to see what happens next, and I don’t mean who wins the election….
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Cheers,
Kay
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Kay Green 