I found several newspaper articles and more blogs listing the protests planned for Labour conference, and looking through them ignited a cascade of startling thoughts. Most reporters, mainstream and indie alike, thought there were two important protests – the one about Labour Women’s Conference being only for women (a situation which the Trade Union leadership largely read as ‘anti-trans’) and the one about arms sales, specifically UK complicity in genocide in Palestine.
The Solidarity protest
What’s weird about the Trade Unions’ ‘solidarity’ demo is that what they are actually demonstrating is solidarity with trans rights activists against Labour Party women.
What’s weird is that so many political activists see this as ‘the trans issue’. When I signed up, it was a women’s rights and child-safeguarding issue.
What’s weird is that, like my town this weekend, so many people will walk with that baby-pink, powder-blue flag amongst them, thinking ‘sure, why not, be nice to trans people’ and simply not realise that what those TU leaders and the rest of them are actually fighting for when they say ‘trans rights’ is not ‘be nice to trans people’, it is the right to force women to accept males in anything they do, the right to keep ‘transitioning’ children with puberty blockers, and the right to force everyone to treat those kids as the opposite sex forever, whatever the consequences.
Fortunately, the vast majority of the population of this country have no wish to be unkind to trans people (who after all, already have legal rights and protections) and equally fortunately, most people have no intention of destroying women’s services or harming kids. Those TUs and MPs are merely demonstrating their own irrelevance.
The genocide protest
What’s weird about the anti-genocide protests is that this Labour government is seriously treating anti-genocide actions by UK citizens as terrorism, arresting protesters, and twisting our legal system to breaking point to try and present them as criminals.
Fortunately, the vast majority of the people in this country will not tolerate the slaughter of civilians and, once they see past government smokescreens and understand what’s happening, will protest it.
All those arrests merely demonstrate the government’s irrelevance.
More startling than either of those issues though is that many of the writers only write about one of them, as if it’s the only issue in the world, and don’t seem to know about each other’s protests. Is that a consequence of doing your politics in Whatsapp groups? What’s weirder still is that I don’t think any of them have mentioned the other other protest…
The other other protest
This has been the year of the Public Emergency Briefings. This was the year that it finally got through to most people that most people are genuinely worried about the government’s apparent unconcern about the climate crisis. This was the year that the government gave itself a serious report about the threats to us from the climate crisis, but refused to brief us about it.
Click here to visit the National Emergency Briefing website.
Ed Miliband appears to be saying he doesn’t want to address the nation about it until he’s thought up a positive spin on it.
For now, he’s talking to EU leaders about it, but not talking to us. So I read all those articles about the protests at Labour Conference, desperately looking for the climate crisis ones. Surely they must be there! Eventually, I found one or two smallish ones on the XR calendar of events …
click here for XR calendar in full
… because obviously, no-one who takes climate crisis seriously is considering new fossil fuel projects such as Rosebank but – surely, surely imminent climate breakdown, exacerbated by new oil-drilling, turbo-charged by ecocidal military action in Western Asia, Eastern Europe and Africa, all that, and our government’s refusal to be honest with us about any of it, is our biggest, most urgent issue – isn’t it? Well, isn’t it?
What about data-centres, and the threat from AI?
Is the Labour Party worried about poverty, the housing crisis, pensions or war? AI? Palantir hoovering up our NHS data? The rest of us certainly are. Does that matter to Labour Party people? Not much, it seems.
The protests I didn’t see listed anywhere speak volumes about the irrelevance of party politics.
The irrelevance of party politics
Party politics really is not where things are happening, that’s clear enough. It is important to protest Labour’s party conference I guess, because Labour is, currently, the government. We should think about the fact that the utterly irrelevant protest this article started with (TU leaders and MPs complaining about Labour Women’s Conference being for women) was largely an internal one — MPs and TU leaders protesting about what Labour members are doing.
The one that far more ordinary citizens took part in was the anti-genocide one outside — because most of us are doing our politics outside parties now and, across the country, the number of people who are distressed by the slaughter of Palestinians, and seriously worried about rising militarism and climate breakdown, the number of communities holding their own climate crisis talks, ‘get Palantir out of our NHS’ protests, and other local campaigns, is growing exponentially.
We just need to remember, at all those lively, relevant, local meetings and actions we’re going to, to do some thinking about how to replace our lousy, irrelevant, exclusively self-serving government.
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