Thoughts for VE Day…

If a business-led PR company were running the government…

… making a big show of leaders as suffering heroes with little blond children would be more important than solving an actual problem.

… statements made today would rely upon you having forgotten statements made last week.

… workers’ holidays such as May Day would be replaced by big patriotic days commemorating wars.

… calls for proper pay and working conditions would be drowned out by big ‘let’s all cheer on the working heroes’ campaigns.

… paying grants to relatives of dead key-workers would be preferred to paying live key-workers properly.

… an initial trial of getting everyone to stay at home would be quickly scaled down if giving kids time off school and adults time off work resulted in their thinking about their situation and beginning to take action.

Please don’t stop thinking

When the government asks you to remember war heroes, please really do remember people like Harry Patch and Harry Lesley Smith – and when the government tells you you can’t have any money because we spent it all on the virus, please remember that…

Not good at business

… the government continued in its economic fecklessness, among other bungles, losing millions in buying in vast numbers of tests that proved ineffective, and being taken for a ride over a vast consignment of not-safe PPE.

Not short of money

The government found bail-outs for companies of the Richard Branson kind, that pay no tax, and have already cost us billions, and Tescoes, who spent their grant money on shareholder bonuses, but couldn’t pay their workers decently.

Remember what we learned during lockdown – What our vulnerabilities are – how easily we can be stripped of access to food, money, housing,  access to doctors, dentists, opticians and audiology, access to friends and family. Remember how blasé the government can be about deaths by number (“we may lose some loved ones sooner than we might wish”).

Remember who was vulnerable – your granny, our key workers, people too sick to work, who the government see only as a demand for pensions and social care, people who are inconvenient to the government.

Remember what we liked about the lockdown – clean air, safe roads, time to think, talking to people online…

Decide who to trust

Don’t trust the media, don’t trust business funded political parties (I think that means all of them).

Talk to people you do trust. Get to know more people, and build your network of friends you trust. While you can’t meet up, e-meet, email, telephone or write letters.

Try the People’s Assembly movement

or

Don’t Leave, Organise

or

Join a union

or

Acorn

or just ask around amongst your friends and on social media, and organise yourselves locally.

as always:

We are many,

they are few.

If enough of us

really come to understand that,

we all win.