Louisa Parry » politics

Quiet stroll

louisa — Sun, 24 Sep 2006 14:48:52 +0000

John, Gianni and I joined a couple of friends in a quiet stroll through Manchester city centre yesterday.

By “a couple of friends”, I mean upwards of 20,000 and by “quiet”, I mean we had ringing in our ears for about an hour afterwards.

It was a good day though. John took photos with a selection here.

Recycle This!

louisa — Thu, 27 Apr 2006 11:55:22 +0000

John and I have a new little project. It’s called “How can I recycle this?” – http://www.recyclethis.co.uk.

It’s a community-driven site, coming up with creative and fun ways to reuse and recycle various bits and bobs from around the home and garden. Each week, there will also be a green dilemma to discuss because we constantly find ourselves in a tangle about which out of two green or ethical options are best.

As it says on the site’s about page, we decided to set it up after eating a big pile of pistachio nuts. There we were, enjoying the sodium high but at a loss about what to do with the leftover shells. We thought there must be a million uses for them but we just couldn’t think what.

The design isn’t finally finalised yet but we thought we should get going on it since the content is the important bit.

Anyway, go over and leave some suggestions!

Flowers

louisa — Fri, 25 Nov 2005 23:50:27 +0000

I grew up in a house filled with flowers and greenery: there were dozens and dozens of plants around the place and as far as I can remember, fresh flowers of some description around the house each week. For a while, my mum worked in a florists and my dad has always been a keen gardener so the flowers either came from the garden (in season) or via my mum’s job. Plants and flowers felt like home.

Needless to say, I’ve always tried to replicate this in my post-home living situations. When I moved out into my first student house, I took a bunch of daffodils from the garden to christen my new vase in my new room and I’ve always tried (wherever possible) to have green-facing windows (to the trees in the cemetery in the flat in Liverpool to the trees in the park now). Living here, I’ve always tried to fill the house with plants and I get sad everyone time one dies after failing to survive the cave-like conditions we face (hurrah for being north-facing). We’ve still managed to keep a few though: some leafy green ones in the kitchen, along with a rubber plant and some cactus-wannabes; some actual cactuses in the living room; and some orchids and Trevor, a yukka type plant that Katherine gave me for my birthday this year in the bathroom.

Until recently, we used to have cut flowers quite a lot too. Buying them for myself, I tended towards the cut-price-in-the-market-at-4pm-on-Saturday fare whereas John liked buying me bunches of big white lillies which looked beautiful (sometimes for a fortnight or so) before dropping their pollen everywhere. I liked them: they brightened up the place, made it feel less like the scruffy cat-filled dump it usually is and in the case of lillies, gave off a pleasant smell (which is always helpful in a scruffy cat-filled dump).

Then I saw the film “Maria Full of Grace“. It’s a very good film about how people get involved in drug trafficking and the consequences of it and I would highly recommend it (although the end is a bit unrealistic in some ways). Anyway, at the start of the film, before all the drug trafficking starts, Maria (along with most of the people in her community) works at a flower plantation and packing factory and it just drove home to me what goes into getting me a bunch of flowers in November.

I hadn’t been blind to it before but after seeing the first 20 minutes or whatever it is at the start of that film, I realised I couldn’t be part of that industry anymore. To grow the flowers, vast tracks of land has to be given over to polytunnels, which require heating (when the weather doesn’t provide), huge amount of water (to prompt quick growth) and chemicals (to keep the bugs down and to increase the shelf life of the plants – and they need it, since they’ll be shipped hundreds of miles for their final “display”). This stops the land being used for supporting the local community (in any way bar financial – and the finance isn’t great) and greatly reduces and pollutes the water table. The chemicals, in both the water and in the air for workers, can cause health problems which are execerbated by shocking working conditions. And then there is the cost (to the environment) of the transport to get them to us before they start to die. I thought about it for a while and decided that my house smelling nice for 10 days wasn’t worth it.

I have nothing against plants – as long as I know where they’ve started their life (if it wasn’t with me) – and I certainly wouldn’t have a problem with flowers if someone had grown them in their garden and wanted to share the joy, but no more cellophane wrapped bouquets for me now.

I know it’s not a lot and I know my life is far from guilt free in terms of my consumption but I’m trying, I’m trying…

(These links give more details about what’s happening and about specific campaigns – I don’t know how up to date they are though)

Six people arrested then released

louisa — Wed, 23 Nov 2005 13:08:24 +0000

“Police hunt three over PC killing”

“Five men, all Somali, and a woman were arrested in London over the weekend and brought to police stations in West Yorkshire but have all now been released.”

The men have been released so why does it matter that they’re Somali? Could it be that emphasising their nationality/race allows people to kick up the illegal immigrant debate again (even though they’re not necessarily illegal or immigrants)?

And also, why should their gender matter? In every report about the group I’ve read, they’ve consistently made a note of the fact that one of the group was a woman. Why does it matter? It just helps maintain the idea that only men kill people and that’s just dangerous. People kill people. Six people were arrested and now released. That’s all that’s required.

This report is just an example: the BBC are far from alone in their reporting in this way. I also don’t think it’s deliberate on behalf of the journalists (or the sub-editors and editors to let it through): it’s just used so often, without thinking, that people stop thinking. It’s inherent. People only state to someone’s race or religion when it is different from their own and because the vast majority of institutions in this country are white- and Christian-(or pseudo-Christian)-led, we hear about “black suspects” and “Islamic terrorists” but not so much about white ones (they’re just “suspects”) or refer to Christian fundamentalists for those fighting from Protestant/Catholic positions. The constant repetition means skin colour and non-JudeoChristian religions get tied to negative words or acts in our minds and that helps us form a bigger, negative, view of our world. Either everyone’s race and religion should be stated or, preferably in my opinion, no-ones – because most of the time it has no bearing on the case and doesn’t really matter.

But it’s ok, because Tony’s said that any suggestion that people in this country are oppressed because of their religion is “rubbish” and we’re “at least as good” as the rest of Europe on promoting equality. Yay for Europe!

Be Nicer, Please

louisa — Thu, 03 Nov 2005 00:13:37 +0000

I marched against the BNP this morning. Well, when I say marched, I mean I stood around in the cold for about four hours and yelled “nazi scum” several hundred times but saying “marched” is so much neater.

The demo was organised by Unite against Fascism and Yorkshire and Humberside TUC to counter the support the BNP were scheduled to provide for leader Nick Griffin and Mark Collett during their a preliminary hearing for their upcoming trial. They’re up on multiple charges of inciting racial hatred, related to the BBC “Secret Agent” documentary about the BNP shown last year.

We arrived at the Leeds Crown Courts at about 8.30am and planted ourselves inside the hippy enclave. There were, perhaps, about 50 people on each side and about 100 police. We bought some badges and chatted to the people running the stall for Unite then stood further into the “crowd”. The amount of people there was disappointing; even the steady trickle of newcomers didn’t swell our numbers to any considerable degree: sure, there was more of “us” than “them” (and that was the most important thing) but not enough to give me a huge level of confidence.

Then the students arrived. When I described it like that to John in a post-protest analysis session, he said it was wrong to say that as it downplays everyone else’s involvement: he’s right because at the same time as the students arrived, lots of other people did too (predominately Union groups and the lovely Mister SleepyKev) so it wasn’t just the students that did it but, sheesh, their arrival was impressive. Picture the scene: a narrow alley way between two multistorey buildings. On one side a group of the “master race”, uniformly white and so intelligent that they’re holding aloft a banner featuring a George “big fat leftie” Orwell quote (ie, them), and on the other side, a rag-tag bunch of hippies, punks and commies, some of whom were NOT EVEN WHITE (us). We had been there for about half an hour, trading chants and jeers, but from my perspective, it felt like we were just going through the motions. Then a slow cheer went up from our side. Past the BNP, at the other end of the street, a procession rounded the corner, led by a banner proclaiming they were the Leeds Student Assembly Against Racism. “Woo!” we said, thinking ‘ooh that’ll double our numbers’. And they kept coming around the corner. It wasn’t just University of Leeds students, student groups from all around the region: they had gathered at the students’ union and walked down together from there. And still they kept coming around the corner. My guess, and I’m not great at guessing this type of thing, is that there was at least a couple of hundred of them (if I’m wrong, my figure is probably lower than it was). The cheers that went up from our side were deafening – particularly our chants joined with those of the new populace.

As I said, that really downplays the involvement of all the other groups that arrived at the same time but in my mind, that was when it turned into a bigger! better! louder! protest. We, about a thousand of us by this point, stood and chanted for about four hours in total and didn’t hear anything back from the other side. We didn’t know whether this was a matter of acoustics or whether we were truly shouting a hell of a lot louder than then: at one point, Kev and I walked around the block so we were at the other end of the street, behind the BNP; we were very pleased to hear that you could hear all of “our” chants, even though “we” were further away and we couldn’t hear anything coming back. While up there, we walked by a policewoman explaining to two other random women what was going on; she said, and I’m only paraphrasing very slightly, “the students have come out against the BNP” – and you thought *I* was focusing on the students’ role too much.

So anyway, we were there and vocal for about four hours. It rained. It was sunny. We booed. We cheered. I got sore legs and feet. It was much like any other small peaceful protest that has ever happened really. Oh, and John took lots of pictures.

At about noon, we did actually march – but only for about two minutes – from the Crown Courts down to the Art Gallery for the lunchtime rally. Trade union leaders – and a couple of people from Unite – spoke but we were cold and hungry by this point so we bailed after about half an hour. The rally was more public though and it attracted the attention of more passers-by (the courts are further out of the centre and the only people not involved that knew about the activity were the solicitors gawking out of their building across the way).

The political canvassing by leftist parties was more obvious at the rally than during the rest of the protest (and that’s not to say it was missing earlier on either) and it really bugged me. From my student protesting days (protesting as a student rather than protesting about them), I developed a very thorough loathing of the SWP and similar organisations and today didn’t serve to quash my attitudes towards them. Unite against Fascism aims to bring together a broad spectrum of groups from across the left and centre of the political spectrum – but the only people canvassing on the day were the far left: if (new) labour or the lib-dems had been so blatant, I’m sure people would have been annoyed. I realise such protests are their (the far left’s) main recruiting ground but I found it annoying: at the rally, speakers were doing their turn and the recruiters were just circling, seemingly oblivious to the event. Maybe I’m reacting more to it than I should because of my issues with them in general but it just seemed .. rude.

It is these issues with the far left that have kept me off the streets and getting involved with any organised hoohah for the past five or six years. That and a combination of laziness and my overriding political framework being firmly based in cynicism. But I’ve realised of late that I do really care about what’s going on in the world and being cynical isn’t really helping: I just end up madly frustrated and it makes me want to drown things. I have two options: either stop caring or do something to about it, just so I can feel that I’m at least trying to help. With a partner like John and a non-negotiable interest in the world around me, I can’t see the former happening any time soon without, perhaps, a lobotomy so I have no choice but to go for the other option. I’ll be there again in January when Griffin and Collett’s trial starts. I’ll just wear more comfortable shoes next time.

(Oh, the BBC wrote a short story about the day but it is barely an article – the only “news” it presented was that we were there and even then it was inaccurate as they were far too many police to allow for any “clashing”. Bah.)

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Post-1945 British history: two books

louisa — Sat, 24 Sep 2005 13:51:17 +0000

By coincidence, I’ve read two books on about British social history since 1945 back to back recently. (Actually, I read the excellent “The Lovely Bones” by Alice Sebold in between but I was ill and got through it in less than a day so it didn’t really feel like a long break between the other two books.)

Anyway, the books I read were “Our Hidden Lives: The Remarkable Diaries of Post-war Britain” edited by Simon Garfield and “Windrush: The Irresistible Rise of Multi-racial Britain” by Mike Phillips and Trevor Phillips.

I’ve read the latter before, a couple of years during one of my library-going periods, but the former was new to me, so that first.

“Our Hidden Lives” is what I wanted when I picked up the good-but-fake Diary of An Ordinary Woman by Margaret Forster a couple of months ago. This book features the real Mass Observation diaries of five people from 1945 to 1948 and kept me enthralled from St Petersburg to Leeds Bradford and beyond (well, around Leeds).

I’ve read quite a lot of British and European social history in the 20th century, particularly centred around the Second World War but for some reason, probably a lack of good books immediately to hand rather than anything else, I’ve not really read a lot about the immediate post-war period. When we studied cultural history at university, I seem to recall the bad stuff from the era (rationing, strikes) was tagged onto the end of the WW2 lecture and the good stuff (start of welfare state) was included with the “New Look” consumer-driven positive 1950s. I don’t remember studying those difficult years on their own so this book introduced me to a lot of the specific details from the period for the first time.

It is a fascinating read – history told by the people as they were living it rather than written about by academics then/later or even told by the primary sources fifty years after the fact – and because it’s written by the “normal” people, it is a very accessible easy read unlike a lot of history books I’ve read over the years.

Some of the attitudes in it are shocking though. I knew there would be racism from having read about the wider period before (including my previous reading of “Windrush”) but I didn’t expect the anti-semitism, particularly as the revelations about the Holocaust came to light. It was strange to hear people claiming to be socialists/liberals but then making suggestions on par with the idea that ‘Hitler didn’t go far enough in wiping them out’. I refuse to accept these views under a “that’s just how people thought then” proviso but it _is_ part of our cultural history so it’s interesting to think about how such prejudice and scapegoating has shifted (whether the shift is onto another cultural group or it’s just moved underground: the prejudices are still there but “hidden” for the most part, and potentially even more dangerous).

If “Our Hidden Past” is a snapshot of experience, then “Windrush” is a three-hour epic movie that all the mainstream cinemas ignore but which is a huge success on the independent circuit. It covers the history of West Indian immigrants (and their children later born here) in Britain since WW2, told in the most part by the people themselves. Because it is covering thousands of people’s experiences over 50 years in 464 pages, it has to summarise a lot of the day to day stuff (almost whole decades are dismissed in a few paragraphs); instead, it focuses on specific incidents which can be seen as pivotal to either how the community is treated or how it thinks of itself.

It is these incidents which alarm me most about this book. These incidents – usually featuring unjust deaths or shocking discrimination and leading to large scale protests or in some case riots – have happened in the last 50 years (some in my lifetime) but that I haven’t heard about outside of this book. I’m thinking about (to name just a few of them) the 1958 Nottingham and Notting Dale ‘riots’, the death of Kelso Cochrane, the Bristol bus boycott, the Mangrove Nine trials and the horrific fire in a house in New Cross in 1981, which killed 13 young people and seriously injured several more. (I would have posted links for them all but even the internet let me down when it came to finding thorough information about this events: I’ll see if I can rectify that on Wikipedia later).

I’ve have been lucky in my formal history education as my teachers tended to choose relevant (mostly 20th century) history rather than focusing on kings and queens and the like – for example, for my GCSE, we looked at Vietnam, apartheid and South Africa, the Arab-Israeli conflict, Hitler’s rise to power, the social history of Nazi Germany and the history of the civil rights movement in the US from 1850 to 1970(ish). I attribute my interest in social history and general knowledge about the state of the world to this sort of education. I started me looking at primary and secondary sources and questionning how the media: so really, I was very lucky. But still: two years after I was born, 13 teenagers died in a possibly racist attack, and later that same year, Bristol, Brixton, Toxteth and Moss Side then in cities across the country erupted in what have been dubbed ‘race riots’ but I was not taught about these things. I knew about the Toxteth ones from jokes and comments throughout my childhood (since they were reasonably local and my dad was working in the area around the time) but it was only when I moved to the area for university and started to explore the history through other means that I learned they were not an isolated incident and to claim them as “black against white” riots (like the ones that happened in Nottingham and Notting Dale in 1958) is both inaccurate and insulting. Still though, I know all about Charles and Diana’s wedding from that year so that’s alright.

The examples of institutional/governmental racism are also shocking. A big smile crossed my face when I read a formal statement by Attlee in 1948 defending the newly arrived Windrush passengers’ right to their British nationality and right to settle in this country. Yay, I thought, a Prime Minister making a very strong point about inclusion and rights for a group vilified by the media and the large part of the population. But then I realise why he had to make that statement: it was a reply to a group of MPs who thought that the West Indians, many of whom had fought for Britain during the war and were coming over to help rebuilding the country, thought the West Indians didn’t have those rights. That wiped the smile off my face. As did the countless accounts of police racism (beatings, harrassment, unwarranted arrests, the Sus laws, shouts of “nigger, nigger, nigger, oi, oi, oi” from the police in back of ‘snatch’ vans during the Moss Side disturbances in 1981) and the fact that neither the Prime Minister or the Queen sent condolences after the New Cross Fire until six weeks (and much prompting) after the event (but they responded instantly to a similarly deadly fire in a nightclub in Ireland just a few weeks later). Really, words can not described what needs to be said about this. (Literally – my backspace key is practically worn out from deleting all the different variations of that sentence that I started).

I’m not claiming that “Windrush” is the definitive book on the subject of post-war West Indian/black experience in Britain (it’s rather London-centric and probably displays other biases that I’m too honky to pick up on) but I’m going to use it as a starting point. Other books I’ve read on the subject have been more academic in focus (eg, Paul Gilroy’s work) whereas because this is mostly made up of transcriptions of interviews with people that were there, it, like “Our Hidden Past”, is very accessible. There is no excuse for people not to read this – or at the VERY least, explore the BBC resource related to it (http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/society_culture/multicultural/windrush_01.shtml).

Decadence

louisa — Wed, 10 Nov 2004 10:56:19 +0000

My boss has started eating “luxury” yoghurts every day with his lunch. I suggested to him that it is a bourgeois dessert and consequently, he will be first against the wall when the revolution comes. He accepted this with aplomb, as any man eating creamy Lactobacillus bulgaricus would. I then suggested that Bush would eat luxury yoghurts, which caused him to put down his little plastic spoon and announce that such a suggestion was going too far.

I’m sure Bush would only eat luxury yoghurts when he had company and Laura made him so he didn’t look stupid in front of the Prime Minister of Norway or whatever: most the time he would prefer those Fruit Corner types with either sweets or a toy in the corner. He’d probably choke on the toy though.

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