I love those bags you get given at conferences. As a trade union and a Labour Party officer a few years ago, I became a gleeful picker up of pens, badges, note books and above all, what I insist on calling book-bags, because when I wasn’t doing political conferences I was doing book fairs. Those bags were just the right size and shape for running around with books and document folders, not to mention picking up more pens, notebooks and badges as you go (until about 5 years ago, when the world got meaner and the bags got smaller and thinner).

They also often carry useful messages. I framed one once, and it graced my kitchen wall for ages.

Unsavoury bags

Sometimes, you get given bags you wouldn’t be seen dead with, but that’s no problem because those can be made into something else. My peg bag is made out of the last bit of the last leg of a pair of worn-out jeans which joined forces with an (argh! something horrible like) Barclays Bank emblazoned bag I was given at a local ‘women’s business conference’. 

One thing those bags do need though, is pockets. It’s a cliché but true, feminism demands pockets. That’s why whenever I’m given a bag with a startlingly off message, it is probably destined to be cut into two or three pockets to sew into bags with better messages printed on them.

(If this is a new idea to you, and you are tempted, make sure you sew those pockets in at least halfway down the bag, in a way that they’re not easy-pickings for thieves (they’re also less likely to pull the bag out of shape if they’re lower down and off-centre.)

Anyway, last night, I pulled out one of those bags to make pockets for a new one with a message I like.

As I was cutting it up, my mind wandered back to the day I’d been given it. I used to be a fringe activist, but then I briefly joined the Green Party (to make a point, when the BBC said the GP didn’t have enough members to deserve a party-political broadcast). I stayed there for a bit, but then that Labour leadership contest was announced, and we all thought ‘ooh’.

About twenty minutes later, I was a Labour CLP officer, and found myself at a campaign meeting in Brighton, led by Anneliese Dodds. The Labour Party felt very big, strange, and mainstream to me but everyone said Dodds was ‘really nice’ and ‘a feminist’, so I thought it might be a gathering I could get along with but things very quickly went strange. Most of the attendees were Brighton members, making plans to campaign for Dodds’ re-election as an MEP – remember them? – That’s why the jolly useful bag I came home with said (amongst other things) that Anneliese Dodds was ‘the South East’s voice in Europe’.

The moment where it went strange was when we were looking over the campaign policy documents and those god-awful World Trade Agreements came up. Labour was officially in favour of the one we were currently being threatened with, and one of the Brighton members said she was going to have trouble plugging an agreement that put our NHS at risk of commercial buy-ins.

Dodds viewed this as a discussion point, and said ‘how about suggesting that it would be less harmful if Labour were managing it than if the Tories were.’

There was some grumbling. The Brighton members clearly weren’t happy they could carry this idea on the doorstep. ‘Well,’ suggested Dodds, still in discursive workshop mode, ‘how about we try and make a joke of it?’

That didn’t go down too well with the members, either.

Feminist?

It was rather a chaotic day, as Dodds’ events always were because she would bring her kids with her, then not give them enough attention. This is not feminism, it’s attention seeking. If you seriously want to bring your kids to work, organise some proper child-care, so other women can, too.

Nice?

And that was when I realised that the ‘nice’ MPs in the mainstream parties, even the ‘radical’ ones, were merely trying to look as though they were on the side of the people. There were a few exceptions, especially during the Corbyn years – Laura Pidcock was a marvel when she was in the House, Zara Sultana slipped through the net somehow, and I think Andy McDonald and Jon Trickett are still surviving in there but other than them, who could you really trust…?

Don’t get me wrong, I daresay Dodds is as nice as any of them. This isn’t a personal take down, it’s an example based on one memory, of my experience of mainstream politics. I could never bring myself to use the Dodds bag. Happy to say it is now safely invisible, serving as pockets in my latest acquisition, whilst my dig in the bag of bags for material brought out some crumpled and forgotten wonders I’ve been given in recent years, which I’m now going to iron and bring back into visible service.

They all come from meetings or conferences where I saw, and participated in, some useful politics but notably, none of them have anything whatsoever to do with MPs or party politics and that’s the inspiration I got from messing about with my old bags this weekend, and it’s why I’m writing this blog. People talk a lot about ‘speaking truth to power’, but someone very wise (was it Chomsky?) said recently that what we really need to be doing now is speaking truth to each other.

Here’s activist extraordinaire Gill Knight, displaying my all-time favourite political bag.

Party politics is a sham. Our politicians are beyond redemption. Palestine has proved that to us. Whilst the politicians in some countries are gradually coming around to taking a stand against genocide, our politicians in the UK are still meekly following the lines delivered by those in the USA or else, Dodds-style, are responding to our horror at what’s happening in Gaza by trying to sound a bit sympathetic without actually challenging their hand-me-down party policy.

A better, more honest politics

That simply will not do. We need better politicians. The ones we have are beyond redemption. They were not honest about the Corbyn movement, or the danger to our NHS. They will never be honest about the war industry, and the extent of their dependency on US approval (which is why they can’t be honest about Israel / Palestine). What we do about that is what we need to be talking about.

Fretting about splitting the vote is a distraction. Saying we need to get the Tories out is a distraction. Trying to work out which mainstream politicians sound ‘nice’ is a distraction. They all need replacing – well, almost all of them – and the way to do that is not to yell at them, but to talk to other people – until we reach everyone who hasn’t realised yet how utterly, irredeemably dishonest our politicians are – yes, the Labour ones, even the Green ones, even the SNP ones. Please keep talking (and using those bags!) until everyone really gets it, until there are enough of us demanding something better than politicians who sound nice at election time.

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Kay

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