MEDIA_ACTIVIST JAY BAKER

Sunday, March 21, 2010

Survival of the Fittest?

"Make poverty history." We've heard that a lot. Then the economic crisis hit, and such concepts got conveniently put on the back-burner by powerful people. It hit, and it hit hard, but some of us weren't really surprised; in fact, we'd been warning people about it for quite a while.

As I've said before, you can't remove workers' rights in the workplace, and then ship the rest of the jobs overseas to increase profits and put the poor the furthest behind the rich they've been in forty years...without giving them access to credit (debt). And you can't keep filling the bottom of the barrel with debt without the bottom breaking open and everything falling out from under you.

The media quickly worked to refer to the crisis as the Credit CrunchTM, as though an unavoidable natural phenomenon, and a cereal you have to swallow down and go about your daily business. As is common by intellectual capitalists and Social Darwinists, while they tried to apply laws of nature onto society and politics, referring to the whole thing as a freak of nature, they also kept talking about the "survival of the fittest."

In my homeland, Great Britain, the government moved fast to bail-out the banks who had suddenly found themselves on the brink of destruction. The media drew attention to it, but the focus of their stories were not questioning the bail-outs themselves, but the behaviour of the bankers who were getting bonuses and posting profits in the aftermath - the only scenario where someone was given a raise for doing a bad job! What the media failed to do was question the bailout itself. Hardly anyone did. Funny, huh?

I know what you're thinking, "Well, the banks had to be rescued, because without them our economy might completely collapse, right?" Well, yeah, maybe. But when we talk about "banks," are we talking about the role banks play in our economy, or specific banks - run by corporations? Interestingly, when these corporations - these businesses - failed, suddenly the Social Darwinists weren't using the phrase "survival of the fittest" so much anymore. They weren't cheering for the dying dire banks to be destroyed through a natural selection process of elimination. Even though Metro, Virgin, and even Tesco had suddenly emerged ready to "step up to the plate" as the next line of banks to meet the demand, these older banks - these businesses, remember - were being bailed-out by their buddies in power: Labour, Tory, Same Old Story.

Yeah, the Tories can't comment, for sure - they are, after all, the ones who so loved the Social Darwinist approach to economics by the likes of Milton Friedman that they began massive deregulation of the financial sector years ago, giving the bankers free rein to run amok, with no concern for the disastrous possibilities...because those at the bottom of the barrel will take the brunt of the blow when they're all crushed and "crunched." The bankers - and maybe even the politicians who gave them license - committed financial terrorism on the population, and, as financial pundit Max Keiser suggests, ought to be prosecuted in the Hague.

But the banks have been bailed-out - to the tune of over £1.5 trillion! And why? Well, sure, the likes of RBS have been largely taken under public control, but we still have no say in where their profits are invested (in their case, towards environmental destruction and human rights abuses). And it's still £1.5 trillion we're talking about here!

What else might they have done with that £1.5 trillion? Well, I guess, as my mother always said since I was a kid, we have to "look at the cause, and not the cure." In other words, we ought to be pro-active, not merely reactive. So, will people in poverty without any widespread long-term stable job prospects still seek access to credit? Heck, yeah! Of course they will. That's not going to change unless the whole system changes; until corporations are taxed properly and operate properly, and money is more equally distributed so that people aren't homeless or hungry while rich white men are clinking their champagne glasses together on yachts paid for by overblown bonuses.

Yep, British citizens all across the country are in debt. And while they're in such a bad situation - just as with the poor countries in the developing world indebted to the International Monetary Fund and World Bank - the most decent, humane thing to do, if possible, would be to clear their debts; scrap it all.

But to bail-out the people instead of the banks would cost a lot of money, right? Yeah, there are a lot of citizens in Britain who are bogged-down in debt thanks to loans and mortgages and credit cards. It'd take a lot of money to re-set them all back to zero and liberate the entire population! It'd take a lot of money indeed. In fact, the debt of all citizens in the United Kingdom amounts to...wait for it...£1.5 trillion.

That's right. With the amount of money the politicians - the elite - unilaterally decided to use to bail-out their buddies in the financial sector most of them wanted deregulated, all the debts of all the people in the entire country could have been completely scrapped; gone; ka-put! And you, me, and each and every one of us would be debt-free, overnight. Can you imagine the change felt across the country? Can you imagine the people that would liberate? Citizens going to their jobs free from worry about repaying their debts. No more calls from the bullying collection agencies. No more payments on your mortgage. No more County Court Judgments. Everything you possess, truly owned by you.

It could have happened - with the £1.5 trillion the politicians decided to give to those few banking businesses instead, and now say that those private sector companies have cost the treasury so much money that all the poor people in the country - still, in fact, worrying about their debts - will see their public services slashed as well. A double-whammy! They're taking public money and giving it to private companies. So let's call it what it is: reverse socialism; taking from the poor (the taxpayers) and giving it to the rich (the banking businesses).

Of course, the media and politicians are still telling us that it needed to be done; that the financial sector is so very crucial to our country, and its economy. Is it? Is it really? Let's look at the area in which I work, for example. Media? Pah, pretty trivial stuff, right? Well, aside from the fact that money that could have been invested in cultural industries in communities all across Britain for weeks, months, and even years went instead towards some kind of two-week show in London called "the Olympics," the cultural industry itself is massively undervalued by those in power. But is it comparable to the mighty financial sector? Let's look at the facts.

The financial sector employs about 1million people and accounts for 8% of the GDP. That's fairly significant, right? But the cultural sector employs 1.3million people for 5% of the GDP! Wow...pretty close, huh? Yet the cultural sector is experiencing huge cuts, not just for the Olympics, but for the sake of it, while the financial sector, the failed sector, is gifted £1.5 trillion! (And don't even get me started on social audits that show the benefits culture gives to the people.) Can you imagine a cultural company - such as mine, SilenceBreaker Media - asking the government to be "bailed-out" because I'd badly managed it and run it into the ground (as did the board of directors of my last company after I'd left that)? They'd say "too bad...that's survival of the fittest."

Strangely, everything the Social Darwinists said to excuse their massive dominance and exploitation over the people is no longer applicable to themselves. When their buddies are in trouble, they're bailed out. When it's us in trouble, we get a big "FU." They have had us brought to our knees since the 1980s, when they closed our industries and deregulated those of their buddies. The last thing we should be doing while we're down on our knees is looking up and worshipping them and their business interests. We should be hitting them in their bollocks. We should be hitting them where it hurts. We should be changing the flow of capital.

Make affluence history.

- Jay Baker; South Yorkshire, England

Jay Baker's brand-new book is Pissing in the Mainstream. You can read a compilation of his best blogs from the past several years, and a few exclusives, in the book Soon To Be Banned: Musings of a Media Activist, available here.

Labels: bailout, banks, Conservative Party, intellectual capitalism, Margaret Thatcher, New Labour

Monday, March 1, 2010

Overthrowing the Underclass

As you may know, not long ago I was living in Canada, the second-largest country in the world. But long before I moved to Canada from Britain, the UK had sent its colonialism there, where it was embraced; cherished. It was with angst that I arrived there, then - carrying the same angst that all Anglos do when recent history reminds us of the atrocities of our ancestors. But it's true that the colonialism was taken to heart - not overseas, but at home; internally. And yet this is rarely realised.

Often largely due to Canada's favourite historical figure, groundbreaking socialist Tommy Douglas, the nation's international image seems to have become one of a "classless" and/or socialist society while defining its identity by simply reinforcing its differences from its notorious neighbours to the south. This all came about while millions of Canadians grew up in fear of conflict between the United States itself and the Soviet Union, with terrifying Cold War visions of nuclear missiles flying back and forth overhead. The world, in turn, had nothing but affection for Canada.

It was in the United States that I lived briefly following my engagement to a nurse there who, funnily enough, I met in Toronto, Ontario. The accents and highways and suburban sprawl were similar, but these were just superficialities, with a gulf separating Canadian and American fundamental ideals.

However, the trip that cemented my own affection for the country of Canada came after that, when I was earning almost $100,000 a year, and paid for myself and my girlfriend at the time to go on vacation in Vancouver, British Columbia. I'd never seen such an amazing place: in a single day, you can go from walking a suspension bridge over the Capilano, amongst the rainforests, along snow-covered mountains, on a ferry, across sandy beaches, to walking between skyscrapers en route to bustling cafes - making the city one of the most desirable destinations in the world for those who can afford it. Of course, this comes at a cost; you can't have rich without poor.

But I wanted to go there again; my girlfriend didn't. It was representative of the growing differences between us as she attended university and I craved other outlets beyond Britain. After an amicable parting, I went back again, and my life was changed, meeting the Ontarian woman who would become my wife.

When you arrive in Southern Ontario, you find yourself in the most Anglocised area of the entire country, with town names like London, Windsor, and Scarborough. In Brantford, you may catch a glimpse into the secret shame of the country by discovering the appalling living conditions of the Six Nations people there, on the Grand River. It was an eye-opener for me, for sure. To find somewhere more relatable, this Sheffield lad headed to the steel city of Hamilton, only to find that it, too, had seen its workers laid-off and the industrial jobs few and far between. If you travel along Highway 6, you'll see many weird and wonderful sights, from giant model dinosaurs to fences made from bicycles to abandoned tractors and other things seemingly sprung from a Tim Burton film. My then-wife vowed to make a photographic exhibition project about it - it really does have to be seen to be believed.

But that's not the only part of the country that's like something from Bizarro World; I've said before that all those smiles and reassurances of socialism conceal something sinister, and the unease I felt on Highway 6 was warranted. Moving to Canada is fine if you have money - and without a visa, mine had soon run out. My wife and I would soon separate, and only hours later it was further up Highway 6, in Guelph, that my dear close personal friend Lenna Titizian and I would see Naomi Klein speak about Canada's worrying trends, at a New Democratic Party rally, and have her sign her book, The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism (the kind of capitalism that was, in fact, taking over Canada, too). I had worked with Klein's colleagues in Toronto, such as those from Ontario's Coalition for Social Justice.

And such movements were needed. Canada, too, was becoming post-industrial, thanks to the North American Free Trade Agreement actually opening the gates for a flow of labour trickling down all the way to the sweatshops of Mexico. This was something I actively opposed whilst living in the city of Kitchener, in the region of Waterloo. It was there I conceived SilenceBreaker Media - though (fortunately) its limited success there allowed it to grow into something much more innovative and feasibly sustainable back in Britain. Despite claims to the contrary, I held several workshops, events, and successfully won funding for the proposed company in Kitchener, in spite of Conservative Prime Minister Stephen Harper and his minority yet militant right-wing government slashing funding for the creative industries, too. It was ol' Steve that offered a lame apology to the Natives after it emerged there had been genocide committed against them on Canadian soil via "residential schools" throughout most of the 20th century.

Funnily enough, while Harper's government were tightening belts and cutting arts funding, they were able to find money for the Winter Olympics, sweeping the disgusting mistreatment of native people under the rug, just as Australia did when they too played host to the International Olympic Committee (while China used the Olympics to mask its attack on civil liberties).

I flew back to the Old World by plane with an empty seat beside me, having been asked by airline staff why my traveling partner - my wife - wasn't with me as booked. I didn't know the reason, and still don't know to this day. We'd been put through a lot of pressure by people determined to see us fail: bitter obsessives who stuck the knife in my back as soon as I turned around to leave Britain for a while (as I was no longer a meal-ticket for many, they influenced a shut-down of my UK company in order to seize its assets). We were to fly back there together, to develop collaboration on a documentary I'd been asked to make, titled Overthrowing the Underclass, and begin a reconciliation; a reconciliation inexplicably abandoned by my wife, and a collaboration killed.

But it was on that long flight that I also had time to reflect on my time there, in a country where its natives - be they First Nations or otherwise - are each systematically overthrown by avarice and exploitation, chewed up and spat out to make way for the next economic policy in the interests of the elite few represented by Stephen Harper.

I had discovered Canada as another kind of pioneer, finding an uglier layer beneath the progressive front: a Canada of unemployment, poverty, prejudice, and of peoples in need of unity to fight for the land they all share.

What happened next? Well, Kitchener was finding itself the destination dumping ground for homeless people being sent there to cleanse neighbouring up-market Waterloo, a city which - like Canada as a whole - was continuing its crucial branding, in its own case as "Top Intelligent Community" and home of the Blackberry loved by right-wingers. Meanwhile, the wife I was sadly divorcing thrived on that prestige - running high-brow amateur events, sending a clear message to the government that they apparently didn't require funding, while calling herself "working class," daughter of a school principal who grew up in one of the largest domestic houses I have ever been in. My current partner, who was born and bred in the Soviet Union, the first largest country in the world, shakes her head at these pampered people supporting separatism and internal issues when there are "bigger, more important problems" they should be united on.

Obviously, the Canadians don't truly know the class system. But at this rate, they will. Sadly, they will know it all too well. Their country isn't quite what they like to think it is.

As John Lennon sang, "You think you're so clever and classless and free, but you're still f*cking peasants as far as I can see."

- Jay Baker; South Yorkshire, England

Jay Baker's brand-new book is Pissing in the Mainstream. You can read a compilation of his best blogs from the past several years, and a few exclusives, in the book Soon To Be Banned: Musings of a Media Activist, available here.

Labels: Canada, intellectual capitalism, Naomi Klein, Olympics, Soviet Union, Stephen Harper

Saturday, June 2, 2007

Kid Kidnappings and Big Brother

Reality - it's a funny word. I mean, what is reality?

Now I'm not being all pretentious here, sitting in a room with a bunch of people trying to make one another feel inferior by quoting from books and going "Well it's frightfully post-modern, dah-ling." Ah, I've never gone in for that kind of intellectual capitalism, after all. Pretentious? Who's pretending? No, I'm seriously asking, here: what is "reality"?! Well? I ask because I keep seeing these peculiar programs called "reality" shows - on the few occasions when I do actually watch that little brainwashing device called television.

We've had The Simple Life, with good-for-nothing jailbird Paris Hilton; Temptation Island, where attached people were put on an island to test their loyalty and tempt their loins; The Osbournes, about an infamous family whose lives were very different to our humdrum existence; Pop Idol, where members of the public badly sang cover songs in the hopes of being the latest manufactured pop tart; Hogan Knows Best, which followed the jacked-up, orange-tinged has-been Hulk Hogan; and, most famous of all, Big Brother, which involved, as Billy Connelly put it, "people sitting in a house watching people sitting in a house!" There are many, many more. The latter had a celebrity version which became best known for Bollywood star Shilpa Shetty subjected to racist abuse at the hands of "housemate" Jade Goody (who had become famous for...well, being famous - since she stole the show on the original version of Big Brother in 2002; she didn't even win).

The Shilpa Shetty-Jade Goody controversy was started by a strange incident where - at the same time nobody made much of a fuss over ballet dancer Simone Clarke moving in more middle class circles whilst joining the Nazi BNP group - Jade verbally attacked Shilpa for being a star out-of-touch with the working class Indian and Pakistani population of Britain. It's likely that producers behind the show placed the stars together knowing that, sooner or later, buttons would be pushed between Shilpa, a sensitive and articulate actor and model with wealth, and Jade, a working class mutton-dressed-as-lamb who probably thought she was open-minded about race simply because she had...a "coloured telly."

Celebrity Big Brother producers also edited-out of the time-delay "live" broadcast none other than firebrand politician George Galloway's anti-war comments being supported by his fellow contestants - as Prime Minister Tony Blair was continuing to send troops into the Middle East, where hundreds of thousands of men, women, and children have been mass murdered.

So what is this "reality" they speak of? Press coverage of Madeleine McCann - the British toddler kidnapped from a hotel room in Portugal whilst her middle class parents had left her in bed to go out on the town and drink fine wine - largely took priority over Iraq, Tony Blair's resignation, climate change, and even made headlines overseas. Heck, as pointed out by my partner (who happens to be the best mother there can be, to her two children), with this much heat on them, the abductors are increasingly inclined to just "off" the poor little kid.

But around 77,000 kids go missing in Britain every year, yet the mainstream media rammed this story down our throats so much that I was waiting for our man Billy Connelly to speak the unspeakable and scream - as he did with the videos of Iraq hostage Kenneth Bigley - "Don't you wish they'd just get on with it?!"

Sick, you say? That's sick, huh? Wow. The spectrum of sickness has changed completely, and the criteria seems upside-down, in a world where the McCann parents' progress is the top news story. Then they left their kids behind again - yet this time in the company of adults - whilst they went to visit the Pope. Whoo, the Pope! Maybe they expected he might have their kid; perhaps they thought little Maddy might emerge from beneath his robe or something, I don't know. But it might even be fair to indeed wish they'd just get on with it; we're told the harrowing ordeal of these poor pathetic parents, their daily anguish made into another form of reality programming for us to watch, whilst knowing what the likely outcome will be, our morbid curiosity keeping us buying the newspapers and switching the channels. We're watching this - not, I suppose, our own children, who then become potential fodder for another "reality" news saga in the process.

TV is the placebo of a population. This story of a kidnapped toddler, this "news," does not affect any single one of us. It has been latched onto with as much passion - and has as much relevance - as the "Free Deirdre" campaign when the Coronation Street character was imprisoned; the absolutely pathetic and sad Sun paper keeping that in the "news," too. In fact, we had more control over what happened to Deirdre than we do with Madeleine.

Now here's the revelation for you. Are you ready for it? Okay then: the true reason for the emphasis on such stories as the McCann ordeal that make us feel helpless is...wait for it, now...the helplessness itself! Ha, ha!

Yep, it's perfect for the powers that be; from war criminal politicians like Tony Blair to tax-avoiding media moguls like Rupert Murdoch. Why? Because it's something we can do absolutely nothing about - except stay tuned, buy the papers, fear our neighbours, hate those Portuguese bastards, and purchase products for some retail therapy. That's it! That's the real reason, right there! Sorry to give it away, folks, but studying and working in the media for so long has this strange way of, you know, giving me an insight to these kinds of things - being in the belly of the beast, you might call it.

But hey, you can just go ahead and call it cynicism. That's what The Sun wants you to believe, it's what Sky want you to believe; that empire of Rupert Murdoch - New Labour donor and MySpace owner. Let's all just go back to scouring the many MySpace mirror-shot photos for hours on end and uploading our Find Maddy pictures. Let's all go back to sleep, and dream of all the entire world's problems being solved by the discovery of one missing child; let's dream of being Paris Hilton who, unlike Jade Goody, was born into wealth and is therefore forever untouchable, with a life so privileged even her prison sentence is comfortable.

Speaking of prisons, you know what? Maybe I'll accept defeat and play along. So stay with me here - I have a great idea for a reality show of my own! It's called "Guantanamo Baywatch"! It's simple: The producers snatch unsuspecting taxi drivers with dark skin from cities such as Leicester, and take them on a rendition flight trip of a lifetime - to sunny Cuba! "Ooooh, ahhhh!" That's right, viewers! Once there, they're forced to do funny outdoor activities, shackled, and even tortured. This is drama! Which wimp will crack first and say they're an Al Qaeda terrorist just to make it all stop? Who gets voted off the show, leading to death by firing squad? Ooh, it's exciting stuff! The torture can include such things as being forced to stand for hours on end, sleep deprivation...and the playing of Christina Aguilera CDs! (This could even include a merchandising tie-in with her albums, too, wow) The show can also feature a Donald Trump-type star-power presence in the form of another Donald: Rumsfeld, who, when personally approving torture methods at Abu Ghraib prison, actually stated, "I stand for eight to ten hours a day. Why is standing only limited to four hours?" Hey, now that's a guy who'd be tough on any apprentice. Get that man on TV and make him a star along with the rest of the wretched refuse!

Hmm. On second thought, I'm not so sure this reality show idea of mine would work, you know. Yeah, it's a little too close to, well...reality! And things like rendition flights, torture, and even war itself kind of require us to switch off the TV and do something about it, huh. Guess we're stuck with Madeleine McCann and Big Brother. All under the watchful eye of big brother itself, as, sedated by the bollocks in the media, we slowly sleepwalk into a surveillance society...

- Jay Baker; Sheffield, England

Labels: BNP, intellectual capitalism, Iraq, New Labour, Rupert Murdoch, Tony Blair

Thursday, April 28, 2005

Dose Looney Lefties

Warner Brothers recently announced changes to their Looney Tunes characters: Bugs Bunny is no more, instead replaced by Buzz Bunny, star of Loonatics! It's been a controversial move, with many die-hard fans protesting. But, you've got to admit, sometimes an overhaul is needed.

Given the obvious anti-fascist nature of my work, I've worked with the Left a lot. I've known quite a few organizations, political parties and pressure groups, and I've actually made friends through them. But above all, I learned why they weren't getting anywhere...

One of the friends I made was a kid called Simon. I'd helped his organization on a few campaigns, and we became kind of close, even on a social level, to the point where he'd meet up with my then-girlfriend for a drink or two. Nonetheless, months later, after I refused to become a card-carrying fully paid-up member, he basically stopped being my friend! When I recently bumped into him on a demonstration in - of all places - London, he made it clear he didn't want to talk with me. I told him about my work, and all he said in response was "Well, films are fine but unfortunately it's not enough to change the world." Excuse me? What world has he been living in? Art has been changing the way we live for decades, even centuries. But I guess his point was "join us, or you and all you do is regarded as worthless." Yet when you do join them, instead of using each individual's unique capabilities for campaigns - like a lot of European organizations do - they just have you as one of the numbers selling papers on a street corner. No wonder people still see them as Stalinists! They are in this way perpetuating the perception of those "pinko-commie" robots.

Their propaganda and paraphernalia itself, though, is what really makes the hairs on the back of my neck stand on end in embarrassment for them. Much of it still features communist symbolism when talking about the "Fifth International" and such. They propose the "emancipation of the proletariat," which, let's face it, means nothing to the layperson in the street who's likely to think they mean, "When Dubya's on the ranch suffering from verbal constipation, he plays with his lariat." And all that talk of violent revolution tends to put people off..."comrades."

It might sound naïve and clichéd, but it is accurate that the Left are too splintered. Whilst the Right will get together on all the things that matter (look at the way the Tories and New Labour together voted for an attack on Iraq), even when the vast majority of their manifestos coincide with other organizations, the Lefties just won't join with them. They'll make bold political gestures like Workers Power walking out of a Socialist Alliance conference and quitting a movement over something like one paragraph in a paper, all the while criticizing organizations for spending too much time talking about whether a pamphlet ought to be red, or black (hey, why not both?)

Seriously, though, I always thought that if the Left combined their efforts, they could create a real force, based on all the things our country needs, and all the things they have in common (peace, unions, equal rights, widespread re-nationalization, etc). More people have to join together, now, not walk away in bigotry. The movement needs them. With the likes of the BNP, now is not the time to be unshakably devoted to our own single position, but to get it together and get together to stop the fascists from gaining power. Nonetheless, many of the Lefties, often called "communists," instead play what I call intellectual capitalism, sitting in pubs wearing anoraks, debating on the Russian revolution and Ernesto "Che" Guevara and nit-picking at one another to prove themselves as the academics many of them are. Others, like the Socialist Workers Party, have even scuppered social forums in cities like Sheffield because of it posing a threat to their own "revolutionary" image, yet at the same time praising the success of the social forums in Europe! But imagine these talking shops instead being used to creatively come up with a campaign to counter-act the presence of the BNP in poor areas, or, say, provide for the disabled or elderly or sick or homeless whilst also offering them information, or maybe to just go and protest!

Protests aren't enough, though. We live in a democracy; we're given one chance every four or five years to choose our government. Yet Lefties tend not to vote, which again allows the BNP to gain power. And when they do vote, they too often do so tactically. As an example, not only did the Socialist Workers Party until the last couple of years tell everyone to keep voting New Labour to keep the Tories out, but one open meeting I went to by Workers Power was called due to a by-election result, and they spent at least an hour or two talking also about why we have to again vote in New Labour to keep the Tories out! What? New Labour are the Tories, you loons! You argue over petty things, but you're clearly on the same page when you're urging people to vote for the bad guys! Eesh. And if you're doing that, then just come clean and admit you're doing it because of some kind of Marxist belief that things must get worse before they can get better (in which case we might as well all vote Bush, Blair, Berlusconi, and Balkenende...or just start to crack open each other's heads and feast on the goo inside).

But if we really want to keep the right-wing parties out of power, maybe we have to vote a step to the left of what we have now. Ah, but of course Lefties see the Liberal Democrats as evil and Charles Kennedy as the Devil. Why? Because they've emerged as a legitimate threat to the Big Two, something these Lefties were never in recent history able to do. At least that's a party that refuses to try and outgun the opposition on immigration control, instead welcoming immigrants who boost our economy. And yes, of course, the economy is important to the Liberal Democrats, naturally, because they're capitalist businessmen too, but at least Kennedy was there at the history-making demonstration on February 15th, 2003. Sure, they buckled under pressure after the attack on Iraq commenced, but they were supporting the troops more than anything else, and this is still a party that is for the trade unions, against tuition fees, against council tax, and in favour of local income tax. These are good solid sensible policies we're all fighting for, so if we have to vote "strategically," it makes sense for us to vote Lib Dem. I mean, if these Lefties justify Americans voting Democrat to keep the Republicans out - ignoring Ralph Nader - then they have to acknowledge the Liberal Democrats as an equally legitimate alternative to the New Labour-Conservative alliance over here (and, hey, voting for the capitalist politicians never bothered them before!)

Whether it be in the United States or Great Britain, you either keep on voting strategically and vote for the Democrats over there and the Liberal Democrats over here, or you stop playing intellectual capitalism, get together, and create a faction that can potentially pose a threat to the Right. RESPECT calls itself a "coalition." That's because it's comprised of: The Socialist Workers Party...

That's it: RESPECT is comprised of just the Socialist Workers Party! Ha, ha! You might say it's the mother of all coalitions!

Nonetheless, RESPECT (which stands for Respect, Equality, Socialism, Peace, Environment, Community, and Trade Unionism - hmm, maybe it ought to be RESPECT-U) has come close to changing the voting habits of this voting veteran! (Okay okay, so I've only voted in the last two general elections, the only ones where I was old enough to do so)

But yeah, Respect have been appealing to me, and I know Maxine Bowler, the Sheffield Central candidate; a really good person, with good ideals. I'll be honest, as much as I'm aware of the fact they still tend to pee in the same pot as the others, in both 1997 and 2001 I voted for none other than the Liberal Democrats. And it wasn't a strategic vote, either - I had no other choice, because the Left left me with no other choice. They themselves as a collective became symbolic of capitalism itself: so many options, but so little choice, with all the products the same. When everyone else asked me what the difference was between the various other Lefty parties standing in their area, I'd tell them there was none; they were all basically the same, but too pathetic to admit it, and sort themselves out.

I don't particularly care whether people vote tactically for the Liberal Democrats to solidify their position as The Opposition to the corrupt coalition of New Labour and Tories, or if they vote purely on principle for Respect or the Greens and tolerate more foreseeable years of New Labour and Tories first, while putting stronger moral issues on the political agenda for whoever becomes our government. The most important thing is stopping the Nazi BNP. We can debate the best option between Lib Dems and the others later (you see, I believe in compromise for the greater good!)

But please, Lefties, drop the communist symbolism and the radical babble - it tends to scare away people in the street. Stop the talking shops full of intellectual capitalism and put all your little differences aside and unite, and start kicking arse. And leave me alone when I talk about voting for the Liberal Democrats again, because you've all advocated voting for something far worse in the past. Because in spite of everything I've just said, you're all still the most smart, principled, peaceful people on the planet. I just wish you'd get off your arses and show it. And I don't mean standing on a cold street corner selling your papers and aggressively trying to recruit members, while people react only to point and laugh...at "Dose Looney Lefties."

That's all, folks!

- Jay Baker; Sheffield, England

Labels: BNP, Che, February 15th, intellectual capitalism, Liberal Democrats, New Labour, Ralph Nader, Respect, Socialist Alliance, Socialist Workers Party, Stalinism, Workers Power

Subscribe to
Posts [Atom]