There’s lots to do, and plenty of people are in action, learning more every day about how it’s done.
First, how it’s not done: I think most people have worked out that our party-political system is – if not broken, certainly captured, and not doing what it says on the tin. It’s taking us a while though, to work out what to do about it.
My town voted Labour at the last election. “You have to vote Labour to get the Tories out,” they said. “The poor cannot be squeezed any further,” they said. “We can’t let the Tories carry on funding billionaires and the military industrial complex,” they said.
Well, here we are, ten months after the election, and our Labour MP has, in the last couple of weeks, put that argument right were it belongs – firstly by signing a letter urging the government to categorize weapons trading as an ‘ethical investment’, to trick people into funding the trade and secondly, a letter supporting Starmer’s resolution to raise money by squeezing the most vulnerable people in our society.
“Difficult choices,” they say – the standard Tory line. It’s supposed to make us think they’re wrestling with their consciences. What it actually means is, they’re a bit nervous about it because we might object. Damned right we do.
Racism and sexism
The weapons of choice for divide-and-rob politicians (when they aren’t blatantly attacking us with actual weapons) are racism and sexism. Those two are working overtime lately, with MPs on both sides of the house constantly feeding the idea that those strange, foreign people are violent and dangerous, for example…
…whilst their investments portfolios grow ever fatter, fed by arms trade activities that constantly fortify and prolong every military ‘conflict’ in the world. It’s a strategy that is lethal to all of us everywhere, and further embeds some people’s received belief that brown and/or foreign equals gun-wielding terrorist.
Our Labour MP has played her part in both these evils, first by joining the Labour chorus of October 7th fixated voices whenever the issue of Palestine comes up, and then by supporting investment in the military-industrial complex – by trickery and word-play, when all else fails.
All-party fail
So Labour’s not helping us – that’s why more people voted Green in the last election, thinking that was the way to get round the very-obviously corrupt main parties but – as it turns out, just like their more-or-less neoliberal German colleagues, the GPEW (Green Party of England and Wales) supports NATO – in other words, supports the military-industrial complex, and wherever they get into government – well, I got into all sorts of rows for calling them Thatcherite a few years back but when the German village of Luzferath was earmarked for demolition to make way for a new coal mine, you can guess which side Greta Thunberg was on – but would you have predicted that the German Greens would be standing against the climate activists, standing with the fossil-fuel mining company?
The Greens would say that’s them boxing clever, lining up with parties-in-power to get more Greens into government — but that’s where party-political madness comes from. The Greens are already lost to us.
Local democracy
The way out of this trap is to promote “bottom up” democracy – that is, a system whereby local, community-informed voices feed into regional then national politics, so that the real, practical policies affect all humans to feel every day such as housing, food security, health and education become the pressing items for government rather than that euphemism for arms traders, ‘national security’.
National politics, unchecked, will always plump for ‘national security’. This is not just different to human security, it is in categorical opposition to it.
There again, the Greens have proved themselves to be a part of the problem. In my town, on their watch, the first ever Green-led council sleep-walked into a county-level take-over, presumably planned by the control-freak Starmerites to catch us at a time when all the lefty activists – in fact anyone who gives a toss about humans – were already over-stretched by NHS and Palestine actions.
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Local interlude…
Hastings: We all have our own perspectives on the loss of our council but, I believe the fightback for local democracy, if we can get it together, will come either from Hastings Assembles…
… and/or from the Hastings Independents
Check out their statement on FB
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Back to the global-scale issue…
After the party
We as a nation have been in a state of turmoil for several years now, since the Corbyn movement was kicked into the long grass, and much time has been wasted (I suspect) whilst various leftist and environmentalist groups have pushed and pulled here and there, trying to get a new party together. The fact that that’s not going so well has tipped many into despair, with constant talk of being politically homeless. My answer to that has always been well, find another home. Political ‘homes’ are far cheaper and easier to come by than bricks-and-mortar homes.
Here’s a quick summary of some of the excellent new political homes people have found for their actions:
The Peace and Justice Project
Party-obsessed people have been doing a lot of grumbling about the fact that Corbyn and Co have delayed – or possibly given up on – the idea of starting a new party but, while they’ve been grumbling, the Peace and Justice Project have built a lot of non-party tools for change, the most recent of which is this book, which offers much to hope for and to work for, in its survey of various global fightbacks against the tyranny and belief-systems of the military industrial complex. If you’re still looking for direction/a new political home, get yourself a copy, and get thinking…
The women’s movement
I said above that the favoured weapons of neoliberalism are racism and sexism and as part of that, there have been a series of very well-funded attacks on women’s rights in recent years. The result, and a magnificent result it is in the UK, is a new (sometimes called ‘fourth wave’) women’s movement. I’m not just talking about the ‘gender critical’ movement, although that was a large part of it.
Click here to check out FiLiA’s response to Trump’s actions to put that idea in perspective
It was this new movement that led to FiLiA and others putting together a drive for feminist activism in trade unions, which has already had the tremendous pay-off of getting the WTUC to (finally!) grasp that ‘decrim’ is not a progressive, feminist way of dealing with the sex industry. If you’d like to be involved in that movement, sign up for the launch of the Trade Union Women’s Network.
…. or if combating the sex industry is your particular interest, check out, and join in with, the Nordic Model Now campaigners.
The #FreePalestine movement
It really didn’t start on 7th October – the breakout by the blockaded Gazan people that day was a last, desperate attempt of an entrapped and increasingly starved people to grab the attention of the world, and get help. It worked. Finally, everyone saw the merciless, murderous grip Israel has on Palestine, and those who looked hard enough learned that what’s been going on there is driven by the US and the UK, on behalf of – yes, It’s those weapons-and-surveillance companies again. And people who’ve come to understand that have now made Palestine the soul-and-centre of their political activism – both directly, because the humanitarian crisis Israel has created is insufferable and indirectly, because it’s clear that if those military operators and their servant-politicians get away with this batch of mega-war crimes, none of us will ever be safe. If you’d like to join this burgeoning movement, check out the PSC…
If none of those fit your personal priorities, there are a mass of peace-and-justice flavoured single-issue campaigns that are having beneficial affects – check out ACORN for housing action, or We Own It for transport, utilities and NHS, or go to your local community assembly group to see who’s doing what about what in your town. (If there isn’t one where you are, start one – it really is just local people setting up meetings, street-by-street — you don’t need special skills, and you certainly don’t need anyone’s permission!)
People’s assemblies
Some of the most successful transformatory peace-and-justice movements in world history have succeeded because they set up locally-driven, assembly-type movements parallel to unjust governments, linked up and let them grow, and then stepped in from the side when opportunity arose. So – the road may not be clear yet but there’s plenty we can be doing. I think building assemblies in the UK (I don’t mean the Unite-funded, People’s Assembly Against Austerity I mean genuinely, locally founded groups) is a good start. Whether or not they are the whole answer, they are an excellent way of getting more of us actively and effectively involved in the transformations that we need.
There is no doubt at all that they are the cure for the despair caused by being ‘politically homeless’.
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Kay Green 