Well done Hastings part 2

Picking your enemy at random is stupid but directing people’s anger onto your victims is downright criminal.

Wednesday was great – Hastings came out in huge numbers to prevent trouble on our streets. It worked brilliantly. Trouble turned up, here and there in twos and fours, saw us, said “nah, there’s f**** hundreds of them,” ceased to be trouble and, probably, went home.

Well done Hastings

I loved the song – We are black, white, Muslims and we’re Jews, and we sang it again on Saturday, at the anti-racism rally.

Trouble is, it’s getting called an “anti-racist rally”. That may sound like a small thing but, when I get involved in a political struggle, I need to be absolutely sure that it’s one that is promoting good ideas – such as strong communities and everyone getting fed and housed and educated properly (the quick way of saying all that is “socialism”); equally, I need to be absolutely sure that it’s against bad ideas – such as racism, sexism, militarism, capitalism — but not against individuals — be they refugees or misguided locals. That’s what right-wing politicians do.

So, let’s be anti-racism, not anti-racist. This is a story about trying to keep on the right side of that line.

A Very Important Mug of Tea

When I was a kid, in the last century, a very small, only-child kid bouncing off the walls in a very big family in Moss Side, my cousins and their mates used to go “Paki-bashing” on a Saturday night. It was part and parcel of the territorial, football type stuff back then. Football has reformed itself now, but the rest of that stuff is still there, a trap for young blokes who haven’t found a place or a life for themselves.

One night, one of my cousins or one of their mates, out on the razz, smashed his way into the kitchen of an Indian restaurant and came face to face with a very large, muscle-bound chef, holding a very heavy frying pan, two-handed and ready. It wasn’t the chef that ended up in hospital, and it wasn’t the bloody mess he made of the lad’s forehead that stopped our lads behaving that way (I don’t blame the chef at all – of course I don’t – he had a business and a family to defend – what was he expected to do?)

But after our lad came home from the hospital, I was the little-un who was sent up to his room with a mug of tea for him and, although everyone downstairs was laughing and saying he was an idiot, they managed to say it in a way that preserved the sense of heroics, and little-un that I was, I felt very proud to be the bringer of tea.

The frying-pan-to-the-head treatment didn’t stop my cousins and their mates. What stopped them was growing up, getting jobs, getting girl-friends, having kids. In short, getting a life, coming to realise, as I did too, as I grew up, what works and what doesn’t, and how childish it is to pick your enemies at random when you feel thwarted. One of those lads ended up owning a chip shop. That has to be a good thing, doesn’t it? Shop owners do not like riots and disorder. Windows get broken, and it’s bad for trade.

The trouble is, for young people growing up in the world we are living in now, nothing works. It’s next to impossible for some youngsters to get a decent job, get a house, bring up a family – everything that would help them get a foothold has been taken away, to help billionaires get ever-richer.

I understand that feeling my family had – that we need some fightback going on. It’s not the worst sin in the world, to join the wrong fightback — if only there had been someone there to offer up a better, kinder variety of fightback.

Three months

I guess my dad ‘made good’ in the end. He became a probation officer in middle life, after a spell as a mature student at Sheffield uni. He told me about the problem with labelling people. When some of my friends joined the anti-Nazi League, he didn’t like it. He said it sounded as though it was against some people who ‘are’ Nazis. He preferred people to say ‘anti-fascism’, but they rarely do.

He also told me you can guarantee that if someone spends more than three months in prison, then whatever they did or didn’t have before, it’d all be gone. They’d most likely come out with no home, no job, no girlfriend – probably no friends. In fact, they’d be lonely and alienated, excellent recruitment fodder for ‘the far right’.

Not just the biggest gang

The reason I loved Wednesday so much is that we all came out to say “no”, and we said it, just like any mother or sister or brother would have done, and it worked. It worked so much better than leaving it to “the authorities”, which may well have ended in people being sent to prison to become criminals.

I didn’t like it though, when the chant was “smash the fascists down”.

We’ve found out that Hastings does not have a big problem with fascism and we should be very pleased. Pleased, but on guard, ready to come out again in big enough numbers to say “no” when necessary, like a father or a brother or a friend would, but let’s not call our lads “fascists”. Don’t threaten to “smash” them. It just sounds like the kind of challenge you used to get at the football. It’d make the lads go away in hopes of finding a bigger gang to come back with. We need to find opportunities to talk to them, to undo what the likes of Rishi Sunak have done to them.

This is perfect…

Ex serviceman points the finger in exactly the right direction, and explains

On Saturday, one of the speakers used the Corbyn movement slogan against our lads, saying “we are many, they are few”. Please don’t – they are us, and we are the movement that needs to inspire them. That slogan is supposed to be used against the bankers, the billionaires, the establishment politicians like Sunak and Starmer who want to go on trying to “stop small boats” whilst putting our lads in prison, along with the Just Stop Oil activists and yes, if they could get away with it, the anti-war and the #FreePalestine activists, who are part of our anti-austerity movement, who are us too – the 99%, the people.

Hastings PSC stall — The Palestine Solidarity stall right where it should be – alongside the anti-racism rally

Let’s not persuade ourselves we have enemies amongst us. Let’s continue to gather, in our thousands, in our millions, and saying “no” to racism and violence, here and around the world. Let’s keep talking to everyone until everyone understands who the enemy actually is – just ask, who closed the community centres and the libraries? Who wrecked the economy? Who gave our schools and our hospitals to big businesses? Who sends young people out with guns and tanks, to kill other people’s kids? Who stole our politics, and gave everything to the profiteers? Let’s stop them, because we are the many – we need to reach those of us who haven’t figured out who the enemy is. Say “no” to violence, racism and of course, fascism but we need to be very careful to say it in a way that doesn’t make enemies of our people.

Once again,