part 1
The Tories' ‘scatter-shot’ strategy has finally backfired on them and
will eventually send them running for the hills argues Jim Scott
Re-wind to 2013,
The Tories are nigh-on invincible!
Cameron and Osborne
are riding high on a wave of their own absolute power and are three years into
the biggest onslaught upon the fabric of our social structures that Britain has
ever seen.
After years of a
Blairite, Labour Government which oversaw the UK Government’s cosying up to big
business, effectively giving them free reign yet at the same time investing in
public services and dishing out easy credit to keep us all quiet. The
Conservatives had ridden into power on the back of the global economic crash
and they had begun work like there was no time to spare!
With everything
going in their favour, they didn’t mess about. Any criticism of their economic
austerity policies could be easily fended off by blaming the ‘still raw’
economic crash on Gordon Brown, and repeating their mantra that ‘there was no
money left’ gave them carte-blanche to set about fulfilling their program of
dismantling the state and carving up the spoils of UK assets to their friends,
donors and allies among the super wealthy few who circled like vultures around
the carcass of the UK public purse.
Everything was up
for grabs, so Osborne wheeled out a metaphorical Gatling gun, loaded it up and
began firing indiscriminately into the crowd, his new playground: the UK
economy.
Cameron and Osborne
knew, that our defences were down. With the failure of the 2003 Iraq
demonstrations to halt Blair’s illegal war in Iraq, morale was low among
activists and campaigners - or at least our belief that we could make our
voices heard was. Blair was hated enough because of Iraq but by drip feeding
the state with investment he had created enough comfort that a gradual
despondency and disenfranchisement with our political system had taken hold
among many, His ‘nothing to see here’ style of politics had created the perfect
storm for what was to come, and a country which in the eyes of the Tories, was
ready to be harvested.
Anyone who has
scratched at the surface of the so-called Conservative’s actual policies knows
that they are far from ‘conservative’ when it comes to our economy or our
ecology for that matter, quite the opposite, they are short-termists,
opportunists, they’ll take now and run later if it fuels the machine, the
wealthy elite that feeds them, that is them.
So as Osborne
continued to fire his Gatling Gun into the crowd he began hitting his targets
with wanton abandon. Royal Mail – sold, NHS – dismantling, underfunding and
privatisation, probation services – privatised, fracking sites – open for
business, welfare – slashed, tuition fees – raised. Hospitals, schools,
libraries – closed, cut or sold off. But on TTIP, Trident, new nuclear power
stations and mega prisons, they were going all-out! Throw in a bit of bombing
in Syria and the few activists who were combating all of this, on so many
platforms were so busy fire-fighting that they could barely keep up with
individual campaigns let alone set about creating a unified opposition to the
Tories' onslaught or their strategy to hit us in so many places that we
couldn’t possibly fight back!
As a rural activist
where I live in Pembrokeshire, 2013 was a very bleak year. I travelled down to
London to attend the inaugural conference of the People’s Assembly Against
Austerity because the one thing I did know was that we had to start organizing
and collectivising. But back home when I went to a local hospital closure
meeting, I was practically laughed out of the room when I mentioned austerity.
Health is devolved in Wales so it was all Welsh Labour’s fault apparently! I
networked with as many campaigns as I could, joined groups on social media who
were fighting cuts, privatisation, fracking, etc. This was helpful but
when I tried to disseminate our message onto wider public forums, again, I was
shouted down & ridiculed. The word ‘socialism’ had become a dirty word
in Britain and any talk of the need to collectivise and support the unions was
met with scorn and derision. “The unions!? Oh they ruined everything” I would
be told.
The Tories seemed
unstoppable, Theresa May, the then Home Secretary was busy at work
plotting and rolling out the most rancid of policies, all designed to erode our
civil liberties and our civil rights while at the same time propagating
anti-immigrant, racist, xenophobic narratives all fuelled by the growing
popularity of the far right UKIP. Most of our media seemed to have turned into
a direct channel for UKIP’s racist, ‘hate thy neighbour’ doctrine with
some bashing of disabled people who they branded as feckless and scroungers
thrown in for good measure. The recent revelations surrounding Windrush
epitomise the arrogance and contempt which the Tories (particularly May) held
for all of us at that time - and still do. They really could do whatever
they liked at that point, because there was nothing or no-one who could stop
them. Even if the Windrush scandal had broken back then the media was so drunk
on UKIP’s racist narrative that it would never have made the big story which it
has done today. They would have spun it in UKIP’s favour somehow, I very much
doubt we’d have seen any resignations like we’ve seen with Amber Rudd.
But the one thing
the Tories don’t ever take into consideration, mainly because they just can’t
see beyond their own insatiable greed and desire to demolish any traces of
equality, social justice or social conscience, and also because that arrogance
is so deeply ingrained in them, is that by deploying this scatter shot
strategy, they would, eventually hit so many of us and seed such a dystopian
environment for us all to live in, that they would create the very resistance
movement they thought they were so effectively stamping into the mud from
whence it had come!
Scroll on to 2015,
the General Election, Miliband’s hollow and lifeless, ‘austerity light’ Party
was effectively a rabbit caught in the headlines of neoliberalism and had
literally nowhere to run. Miliband's Labour had about as much drive for an
equal and just society as Cameron’s Tories had to become “the greenest
government ever”. Apathy among Labour supporters was tangible with the Greens,
Plaid and SNP offering the only genuine socialist alternatives at that point.
But churning away in the background, us activists and campaigners were
beginning to find our feet! Disabled People Against Cuts (DPAC) activists were
there on the front line barricading roads with their wheelchairs and invading
Parliament. Hospital groups like the Save Lewisham Hospital campaign had beaten
Hunt in court and were showing others how to fight back. People were beginning
to sit up and take notice, putting down their newspapers and instead turning to
the likes of The Canary, and the Artist Taxi Driver to get an alternative view
untainted by corporate & establishment bias of what was really going
on.
As activists, we
were still low in numbers but each day saw a gradual shift - new people,
new energy, and those of us who were campaigning hard could feel that the
cultural lag which had shielded the Tories until then was soon to catch up with
them. There were also many old time campaigners waiting in the wings to show us
the way and pass on their valuable activism tips and advice, and importantly,
their solidarity!
Another thing that
the Tories never had a hope of seeing coming was all the unintended
consequences that their austerity policies, cuts to public services and cuts to
council budgets would create. They assumed we’d all be too busy working several
zero-hours contract jobs or trying to fend off homelessness for our kids to
care or even notice that our communities were falling into the ground. They
obviously thought that we wouldn’t care if our neighbour, the nurse,
teacher or firefighter was having to turn to food banks in order to feed their
family. But we did notice, and we did care! Here in Pembrokeshire local
greening groups formed and began tending and planting council land that had
been left to go to ruin by a council with no funds. Community waste food cafés
opened, as did community fridges & community hubs…and all this in aid
of supporting each other and building community spirit and cohesion. In times
of such austerity even consumerism goes out of the window, people are forced to
re-use, re-purpose and re-cycle rather than spend the money they need for food
and bills on an unnecessary new settee! The Tories would never have dreamed in
a million years that their own policies would actually sow the seeds for a more
socially conscious and environmentally minded society!
They never banked
on us looking out for each other or collectivising, but that is exactly what we
did, because most of us do have humanity in our hearts and can recognise the
signs of unfairness, especially when it’s being rammed down our throats and our
kids can’t even afford to move out or go to university!
As someone who has
always favoured ‘creative activism’ in most of its forms but was finding that
our efforts to fight the Tories were being constrained by the limitations of
campaigning in a large rural county which was low on activists, I joined
forces with a couple of other people based in different parts of Wales and we
launched 'Stick It To The Tories': a not-for-profit sticker campaign
that would go on to distribute 170k anti Tory stickers and 10k badges in
under two years, that was one way that we felt a few of us could make a bigger
impact just working from laptops and a small print shop. By thinking outside
the box, we could achieve a lot, make the maximum impact with the minimum
effort and we didn’t even have to have meetings!
By 2016 our
demonstrations here in Pembrokeshire were starting to be noticed by the wider
public and local press, we held a demo aimed at pressurizing Stephen Crabb MP
to resign his Patronage of the local Mencap charity following his vote in
Parliament to cut ESA for disabled people by £30 per week. Our demo was
supported by DPAC and People’s Assembly at national level. I realised then that
although still small; around 40 protesters, our demo had been attended by
people from the progressive Parties and supported by activists from many
different campaigns and groups. We’d all got to know each other; we’d had to
because we were fighting on so many fronts. We had become networked and were
supporting each other’s struggles in solidarity.
Fast forward
through 2016; Jeremy Corbyn, Momentum, the EU referendum and to May’s
disastrous and ill-fated 2017 General Election, we were getting stronger by the
day. As an activist, I could feel the buzz on social media in the run up to the
General Election, and I knew that something had shifted. Many of my friends
were literally terrified of what a Tory landslide would mean to them, their
kids, their families. I tried to reassure them that I could feel that public
opinion had shifted, the level of activism and debate that was taking place in
support of Corbyn showed me that the Tories weren’t in for the outright victory
they had set out for. ‘Socialism’ was no longer a dirty word, it had
become something we were all striving for. Even that neighbour who shunned our
views a couple of years ago was coming round. Our collective voice had been not
only listened to but heard and was now being repeated!
We put a rally on
here in Pembrokeshire in October 2017 as part of ‘Un-seat Stephen Crabb’ day to
have another nibble at his now tiny 314 vote majority. The Canary covered the
story for us with a section reporting that it had been the biggest political
Rally in Haverfordwest since the Suffragettes’ movement! Then, more
recently we put on a Stop the War march following May’s bombing of Syria
and with just 3 days’ notice we mobilised 200 people onto the streets for our
demo. This may not sound like much, but believe me, if we’d tried that even two
years ago, we’d never have garnered such support as this! We’re now primed and
ready and growing in number by the day. The more activism we put on against the
Tories the more people want to support it and to get involved too.
Osborne and
Cameron’s Gatling gun approach to keeping us all down by hitting us all so
hard, so fast and whilst we were already down may have worked for a time, but
now they really have hit so many of us that they have themselves created the
mass resistance that will eventually topple them and hopefully take 30-40 years
of neoliberalism down with them.
Our job as
activists right now, is to build on this movement, now more than ever, we can
take them down, we can take them down hard, but we need to go keep organizing,
keep mobilising, keep pushing the snowball until we have grown it into the
unstoppable force that’s needed to finish them off!
part 2
Rural
activism – Tales from the sticks – ‘How we built the activist movement from
nothing in rural West Wales!’
From Pembrokeshire with love …and
solidarity!
In 2013 the
Tories under Cameron and Osborne had taken the country by storm. A few of us
travelled down to London for the inaugural conference of The People’s Assembly
and we soon founded our own local PA group here in Pembrokeshire with around 30
people attending our first meeting. Rob Griffiths came down for The People’s
Assembly and supported this first meeting, It all looked good, we would unite,
take on the Tories, our local MP Stephen Crabb and expose the vicious austerity
policies which were already causing wide-spread suffering among our
communities. A few of us even attended the People’s Assembly delegates
conference later that year and heard inspiring stories of how other People’s
Assembly groups around Britain were tackling the Tories head on; A delegate
from Norwich People’s Assembly told the meeting of how they were making sure to
greet all and any Tory ministers who ventured into their county with protests
and as he spoke, told us of how his Norfolk comrades were mobbing Iain Duncan
Smith who was visiting Norwich that day. Yes! We thought! This is the kind of
thing we will do in Pembrokeshire! Let’s get organised!
Sadly
though, it soon became apparent that activism in rural situations like here in
West Wales is a whole different story to that of places like Bristol, Norwich
and even Cardiff where activists are much more concentrated in numbers and
therefore can organise meetings and collectivise far more easily. Here in
Pembrokeshire, the will was certainly there, all 30 people who had attended our
first meeting were passionate and driven and desperate to stand up and fight
the Tories, but with people having to drive for an hour in each direction to
attend meetings and without an ‘existing’ activist base or network we found our
efforts thwarted by the realities of our jobs, lives and the rural spread of
our activists and before long our meetings had dwindled and we were forced to
stop holding meetings and to re-think our strategy.
Around a
year went by and with an upcoming general Election many of us put our efforts
into electoral campaigning, The local Green Party was founded and with
Miliband’s Labour offering only austerity lite many progressive types put
energy into campaigning for the Greens and Plaid Cymru etc.. but in 2015 this
ultimately lead to yet another Conservative victory and the promise of 5 more
years of misery for many under the Tories.
Behind the
scenes though, many of us had begun to get to know each other here in
Pembrokeshire and those of us who were determined to put up a vocal opposition
on the streets to the Tory’s dangerous policies had begun to be able to pick
each other out among the political crowd.
One thing
that was certain was that if we were going to make waves in a large rural
county like Pembrokeshire we were going to have to make some noise! We were
going to have to use every tool available to us to hit the Tories where it hurt
and we were going to have to be creative and imaginative with our activism. So
we started dreaming up campaigns that we could organise without the need for
everyone driving miles to meetings. Campaigns that we could run from laptops
and social media and utilising the local press. Importantly while we were
relatively low in numbers and very spread out, campaigns that would take the
‘minimum effort’ but have the ‘maximum impact’ a doctrine that I now think is
absolutely essential and key to the success of rural campaigning and, making
the most out of what you’ve got in a rural setting.
Throughout
the previous two years we had made sure to keep in touch with key organisers at
People’s Assembly national office, People like Sam Fairbairn and the then People’s
Assembly Co-chair Romayne Phoenix, I had also been lucky to have had an
auspicious chance meeting with Mark McGowen (The Artist Taxi Driver) at the
People’s Assembly conference back in 2013 and had made sure to keep in contact
with Mark too! Locally we had followed the national advice and contacted all
the local existing
campaigns and unions, we’d made ourselves known, even if we
weren’t putting on that much activism at that point. One of the groups we had
contacted was CND Cymru asking for campaign literature from CND that we could
take with us when we held street stalls, with brutal honesty this was to bulk
up our stall in terms of appearance and content! But of course we naturally
supported campaigns like CND Cymru anyway so was a natural fit for us. These
little acts of networking though can pay dividends. Jon from CND Cymru emailed
us back and offered us cheap printing for our campaign materials and invited us
to a ‘Drape the Drones’ event. Before long we’d got talking about an idea we
had for a ‘national anti-Tory sticker campaign’ that we’d had and ‘Stick It To
The Tories’ was born which would go on to distribute 170k anti Tory stickers
and 10k anti Tory badges across the whole of Britain in just 18 months.
Meanwhile we were also turning our attentions to Stephen Crabb at home and in
particular a campaign to try to force him to resign as ‘Patron’ of our local
Mencap group following his vote to cut ESA for Disabled people by £30 per week.
The key, we decided was going to me making waves and networking with as many
national campaigns and activists as possible in order to amplify whatever work
we were doing here in the sticks in rural West Wales.
So we set to
work! Before the launch of Stick It To The Tories we had contacted people like
John Rees, Lindsey German, Romayne Phoenix and Amelia Womack and twisted their
arms to persuade them to be official supporters of the campaign! We got in
touch with Disabled People Against Cuts (DPAC) and Black Activists Rising
Against Cuts (BARAC), both campaigns loved the idea and even agreed to work
with us on sticker designs for their own organisations. We got in touch with
Counterfire, The Morning Star and The Canary and managed to get all of them to
agree to publish promotional pieces’ covering our launch. We just had to hit
the ground running so we had to aim high! Another stroke of fortune saw Stephen
Crabb promoted to the toxic position of ‘DWP Secretary’ the same week we had
launched the petition for him to resign as Mencap Patron, so our petition went
from 2,000 to 10,000 over the weekend just in time for 9 am on the Monday
morning when he officially started work as the DWP secretary. The petition was
mentioned in all the national press so we jumped on this and organised a
demonstration outside his constituency office in Haverfordwest too. The
demonstration (in the rain!) was attended by a modest 40 or so protestors, but
this was fantastic for a demo in the sticks! And the seeds of a movement here
in Pembrokeshire had been born.
It’s not so
much that local PA groups need to be hassling the National campaigns or The
Canary for coverage of their events because let’s face it this might actually
end up being counterproductive. What am suggesting though is that existing
campaigns and alternative media outlets are almost guaranteed to be run by
likeminded, dedicated comrades who will help wherever they can and will always
support other progressive campaigns when they can. We took the slowly slowly
approach and made ourselves known to these key figures and organisations
hopefully without being too pushy! (ha!) but hey, if you don’t ask, you don’t
get and one thing that really is for sure is that you need a certain level of
determination and self-belief to be an effective campaigner or campaign group!
So with an
Artist Taxi Driver interview also in the Bag for the Stick It To The Tories
launch and the Canary, Morning Star and Counterfire promo articles things went
a little mental! Our website crashed in the first few hours and orders for our not-for-profit
anti-Tory stickers came in in numbers we just couldn’t believe! Three of us,
from laptops and a small print shop were making a difference to the National
narrative, a small difference maybe, but a difference none the less and it felt
good!
One other
obvious but hugely important campaign tool was Facebook and other Social media.
By joining every left wing / progressive Facebook ‘Group’ page we could find,
then sharing our new Sticker designs from our Facebook page to 100, sometimes
200 Facebook group we could way surpass the algorithms and do the leg work
ourselves! It’s a pain and I won’t say it doesn’t cause and repetitive strain
injuries but every new sticker we launched we would reach around 20,000 people
in just 24 hours by posting it to all these groups manually! It really does
work and is essential to make a small campaign achieve a ‘national reach’.
Later we’d
go on to distribute 70k stickers in just 12 weeks in the run up to Theresa
May’s ill-fated 2017 General Election with the help of another Canary piece and
back at home the movement was building, all attentions were turning to our now
largely disgraced Tory MP Stephen Crabb, We crowd funder £500 in just 24 hours
to raise funds for an elephant costume which we took to all of Stephen Crabb’s
election hustings as the ‘Tory Elephant in the room’ highlighting his voting
record and UK poverty statistics created by Tory austerity, Crabb was marred by
a sexting scandal but with a mere 314 vote majority following the General
Election still shamelessly hung on to power with a claw like grip! Maybe him
and May have been comparing notes! We had seriously affected Crabb’s vote share
though!!
Another
absolutely key factor in building the activist movement here was the all-encompassing
approach that we took to encouraging all and any who wanted to get involved to
join in and get stuck in.
One of the most gratifying parts of building an
activist movement is the amazing, inspiration and dedicated people we all meet
along the way. One of our group members is a guy called Bob, Bob has been on
the right side of a campaigning history for quite some time! Not only does he
bring to the collective an almost encyclopaedic knowledge of every revolution
that has taken place throughout history, he was involved in a demonstration
that saw Enoch Powel seek refuge in the basement of a University Campus back in
the late 60’s, and ensured that Powel never attempted to speak at a University Campus
again! It’s people like Bob, who have been doing this all their lives who
inspire us fresher faces as we come through and Bob often says; “The Movement
is about keeping the ideas alive!” From one generation to the next and one
activist to another it’s from each other and by sharing our ideas that we gain
strength. Not only that but it creates a kind of positive feedback loop, the
older and more hardened activists are encouraged by the fresh energy we bring
and we are in turn inspired by their dedication and experience of activism, so
each acts as positive feedback to the other. …And here in Pembrokeshire we really were
gaining in strength!
2016…And
along comes Corbyn, or to put it more accurately, considering Corbyn had been
steadfastly campaigning and supporting all the issues we stand for -for 40
years previously, along comes the vehicle for a national movement that can get
behind Corbyn in the form of an internal Labour Party leadership election. As
People’s Assembly activists we instantly recognised what this opportunity meant
and immediately got behind Corbyn, Here in Pembrokeshire even some long
standing ‘Old Labour’ members didn’t at first realize what was happening and
instead bought in to the myth that a ‘left wing’ labour Party would be
‘unelectable’, but the Tories had inadvertently put in the ground work themselves
and had created a mass movement ‘in waiting’! The work we had been doing here
as campaigners, even back when the word socialism was still a dirty word meant
that as a movement we were primed and ready. We had planted enough of the seeds
of a movement that with the influx of pro-Corbyn activists we could now take a
lunge into the Tory narrative and mobilise like never before out here -in the sticks -in rural Pembrokeshire.
Demo’s got
bigger and more well attended, where once a few of us had been fending off vile
right-wingers on Social media, now a new contingent of online debaters took
over the baton and freed up our time as key activists to organise! We held
Cross party meetings where all left of centre party reps agreed to unite
efforts against the Tory’s cruel and ideological austerity policies.
Some
Comrades from Momentum West Wales got in touch about putting on an #UnseatCrabb
event as part of Owen Jones’ UnSeat campaign so again we adopted the strategy
of ‘build it and they will come’ activism! We billed it as an event that would
be the biggest political rally Havefordwest had seen since the Suffragette’s’
movement and so it became! We had not one but two Canary
pieces covering the event! Bex Sumner (Canary UK editor) who lives
in West wales even attended the rally and covered it personally! We hosted a
people’s Assembly comedy night themed; ‘Stand Up Against Austerity’, Francesca
Martinez helped us find acts for the event, Chris Nineham from Stop the War came
all the way from London to speak at the Rally and host the comedy night, Mark
McGowen came and did a 20 minute stand up performance for us and many local
comedians came and performed It seemed everyone was supporting the day’s
activity! We took an 8 meter #CrabbMustGo banner on a tour of Haverfordwest’s
bridges and roadsides and hit social media by storm. Creative activism in
action, Minimum effort – maximum impact! It only took a team or five of us to
do the banner tour but we were seen on social media pages all over Britain!
And now…
progressive activists from across the political spectrum, Greens, Labour, Plaid
and non-Party affiliates are all working together, we’re networked and ready to
go at a moment’s notice. When May sent the bombs into Syria in April we
mobilized a 200 strong demo with just three days’ notice. Then just last
weekend following a disgusting incident of homophobic hate speech where some
fanatics were trying to hold a Transphobic hate meeting we joined forces with
the new Pembrokeshire LGBTQ+ group and got 100 people on to the streets of
Fishguard with just 24 hours’ notice, and we closed down that meeting! Filling
the local press with coverage of our demo, showing that as a County and as
activists we can now act and act quickly in the face of such discrimination.
We are going
to hold a ‘Rural Activism’ & ‘creative Activism’ training weekend in a few
weeks from now, we have activists from as far afield as Cardiff, Bristol and
London wanting to get involved and to support the event in solidarity. Maybe
this could even form the basis for a ‘Rural Activism’ training roadshow that
People’s Assembly or Counterfire could send around the country? One thing is
for sure, here in Pembrokeshire we have built a movement from out of nothing.
We can only get stronger, more unified and more organised as more and more
activists join forces with us. Getting Corbyn in to power is an important
objective, yes, we all want to see that and we’re all working towards it, but
getting Corbyn in to power will not be the end of the battle, it will, actually
signify the beginning and as a movement that is when we will be needed more
than ever before. As we have seen in recent weeks with the Anti-Semitism
campaign against Corbyn, the right wing within Labour will align with the
establishment will truly close ranks and will do anything they can to undermine
and destabilise a Corbyn Government. We have to keep building the movement like
never before, we don’t just need to be ready, we will need to be one step
ahead. The extra parliamentary movement is going to be vital, in fact;
essential in the uncertain times ahead if we are to keep making the gains that we
absolutely must make in order to restructure our society for the benefit of all
and bring down 40 years of neoliberalism.
Here in
Pembrokeshire we can promise that we will be doing our bit, and playing our
part in that struggle! So to all the activists out there in the Towns, big Cities
and out in the sticks like we are, we send greetings and solidarity from
Pembrokeshire with love!
Keep on
fighting, keep on building and mobilize like never before for the times ahead!
Jim Scott is a Rural Activist &
Campaigner.
ENDS.
Note to
editors;
Canary link
(above) https://www.thecanary.co/uk/2017/10/15/owen-jones-kickstarted-quiet-revolution-promising-sweep-country-video/
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