“Kier Starmer is a wanker,” the far-right rally chants.
“Kier Starmer is a wanker,” the counter-protesters reply. And there’s moment of unity in which this all makes a bit of sense.
I was on flag watch last week, cycling around Essex and driving to football matches, and the good news is that festooned lampposts and spraypainted mini roundabouts remain relatively rare in this part of the world, mainly centred around the flashpoints that you’d expect.
In the main, I believe, the flags, the lampposts, the roundabouts, and so on are the work of the far-right, of activists who are genuinely racist, Islamophobic and the rest, but not the work of the likes of the majority of people who attended Tommy Robinson’s demonstration in London just over a week ago, keen to declare that they’re not far-right, that they’re not all of the above, despite being at an event organised by people who are overtly just that.
What they are is scared. They’re scared, they’re angry, and they’re lashing out. Their living standards have fallen, taking their children’s prospects with them, and their future is predicted to contain nothing more than the same, while war appears closer than at any time in a generation, and nobody is listening to them. So they’re taking refuge in identity – English, white, working class – and taking umbrage with a government, with a political system, that they see as valuing everything that isn’t those things. They’re not racist towards their neighbours but they think that immigration is the biggest problem facing the country right now, they love their gay friends but they think that equality has gone too far, and even if their Englishness isn’t wrapped up in greatness and empire, it at least equates being English as being good, as being better than this.
And while confronting fascists remains a must, just telling people that they’re wrong about their identity, that they’re wrong about the impact of immigration on their lives, that they’re wrong about equality, doesn’t get us very far. Because feelings trump facts, because “the people of this country have had enough of experts”, because the lies don’t matter if they support how you feel about things.
Can music change the world? Billy Bragg gives a qualified no. Woody Guthrie and Joe Hill may well have said yes, and I might too. The best songs, the best songwriters, tell stories. Stories that show rather than tell, and if we want to ask people to reconsider their identity, their position, if we want to change how they feel, then we need to show them, not just tell them.
And so should politics.
Imagine a nationally co-ordinated, grassroots socialist party, let’s call them Your Party, who use some of their membership subscriptions to directly improve the lives of people in communities suffering at the hands of successive governments’ policies, maybe by reopening a library or a community centre or supporting a homelessness scheme that got people off the streets and into permanent accommodation. Starting small but doing something every month. Imagine them being able to say, look what we can do with the limited funds available to us now, imagine what we could do with the resources of government. Imagine them showing, not just telling.
Oh well.
There’s been a lot of telling this last week. A negotiation by mass email and tweet. (Can we please stop using X?). But it’s not their party, it’s ours; that’s the point. It’s up to us to decide if it’s over before it started or not.
And we have better stories to share.
Steve White & The Protest Family 