Politics From The Sidelines

I noticed here that the people down at Democracy Village have put out a press release. Obviously as they are on the brink of being evicted this comes as no surprise. Reading through the release shows just how out of touch with the real world these people are. I have put some of my thoughts in response to the press release below.

Democracy Village has been an experiment in peaceful protest.  We’ve achieved a huge amount.  We’ve also made mistakes. The media has portrayed us as drunks, drug addicts, fighters and layabouts.

Here’s the truth.

We all are.

Whether you like a drink on a Friday night, smoke cigarettes, drink coffee, get angry, or can’t be bothered to tidy up, none of us are perfect. Let him who is without sin cast the first stone.

Whilst this is true there is a major difference between the people down at DV and the civilised population. The rest of us do it in the privacy of our own homes or go to places where such actions are deemed appropriate (a cafe for coffee or a pub for a drink). What we don’t do is go out and sit in the middle of one of the most historical and beautiful places in London and make a mess of it.

What we’ve done is put a microcosm of our society under the microscope, and many of you (and some of us) don’t like what we see.

What we don’t like to see is a bunch of people with nothing better to do making a home out of a piece of grass land in our countries capital.

Too many of us look the other way when we see something we don’t like; complacency is not an option anymore, we need to unite and face our problems together.

Here’s the situation that lead us to set up the camp in the first place:

Our taxes are currently financing war in Afghanistan, a country which has never attacked us, to the tune of £11bn. In so doing we’re reinforcing extremism and perpetuating the cycle of violence in an already unstable the world.

I find the term “Our Taxes” used in this paragraph to be quite laughable. I would be extremely interested to find out the total amount of tax paid by the inhabitants of DV in the last couple of months. Also incorrect grammar in a press release such as “unstable the world” shows the level of thought that these people put into their efforts.

On top of that, our troops, young men and women who are working to protect us, are coming home in ruins – those that survive their injuries are hidden from view, can’t find work and are generally forgotten; chewed up and spat out by the very country they are fighting for.

An anecdote: At the end of one of our recent Talking Circles, where all our camp members have their chance to speak up about what’s on their mind, a young man from Rotherham took the floor and told us about his brother who was in the Army.  He’d been serving in Afghanistan and had returned to the UK last December at the end of his tour of duty, only to be told he had to return to the front line due to lack of reserve troops.  A week later, this guys brother got a phone call saying his brother’s jeep had been blown up by an IED  – the guy almost cried as he explained how he’d had to identify his brother from a tattoo on his back as that was all that was left of him.  He came up to me at the end of the meeting and said, ‘This is the only place where I feel anyone cares about how my brother died.’

Whilst we sit in our living rooms watching this distant conflict rage on, we’re also facing massive cuts in public services whilst big business and government rewards themselves with our money.

Firstly it is good to know that the people down in DV consider Parliament Square to be their “living room”. This is the major problem with DV. It is nothing to do with the fact that people are protesting the war. That is their right. It is the fact that they have chosen to turn Parliament Square into their home. This cannot be tolerated.

Secondly cuts to the amount spent on public services do not by definition have to mean cuts to the public services themselves. Better eficiencies and a reduction in bureaucracy can mean less money spent to provide the same services.

We’re losing our civil rights day by day, and have sleep-walked ourselves into the world’s most surveilled society,  where anyone can be locked up with no charge for 30 days in the name of national security and peaceful demonstrators are arrested for sitting outside Downing Street.

Our parliamentarians, whether they start out with good intentions or not, are standing by or actively supporting terrible injustices at home and abroad, which have been pre-planned by undemocratic think tanks and unelected  Whitehall mandarins.

Tony Benn recently said, ‘the politics of the present is in Parliament, the politics of the future is in Democracy Village and on the streets.’

Instead of sitting around complaining when things go wrong, let’s actually make a change. We believe it’s our duty to resist injustice, and permanently protesting outside parliament is the way we choose to do that.

OK, this is just ridiculous. “Instead of sitting around complaining when things go wrong” So you believe something has gone wrong and what are you doing about it? You are sitting around and complaining about it. That is most definitely not how you change it.

We want to learn how to become more passionate and compassionate, heal the rifts that seem to be widening between our communities, and ultimately be proud of our country again.

I for one am very proud of the country I live in. The thing that has made me least proud in the last few months is DV turning Parliament Square into a squat. The sooner people are evicted from this spot the better. Come back and protest if you want but don’t do it permanently. You do not live there, go back to your homes if you have them and get back to paying those taxes you seem so worried about.

We can do it.  We must do it.  We will do it.