A Walk with Unite the Kingdom
How do we wrestle back the story of who we are as a people? As we’ve written about before, how do we do a Fred Hampton on the far-right? How do we resist the elites who profit from driving us apart by weaponising anger, to listen to those whose grievances are being recognised by the far-right and Reform, but whose problems might not be so different from our own?
‘If you want peace don’t talk to your friends. Talk to your enemies.’ - Desmond Tutu
How do we wrestle back the story of who we are as a people?
How do we resist the elites who profit from driving us apart by weaponising anger, to listen to those whose grievances are being recognised by the far-right and Reform, but whose problems might not be so different from our own?
a snapshot of the people I walked with and some provocations for “us” to interrogate who “us” really is.
some degree that council estate physicality inscribed upon the body, or what Bourdieu described as “hexis”.
The crowd is disproportionately male (maybe 80%?) and in possession of a disproportionate number of atypical bodies: the obese, the cadaverous, the built-like-brick-shithouses, the severe haircuts. At the same time they seem to have a disproportionate amount of beautiful smiles and twinkling Irish eyes.
a noticeable theme: some hold large wooden crosses, a preacher shouts at the passing crowd, “If you want your country back, come to the Lord
How confident should we be that despite the fact that we all hate Starmer, that we hate him for different reasons, with “ours” being good and “theirs” being bad?
a young black guy who appears to be on his own: someone walking past reaches out to shake his hand and says “welcome, brother” and they exchange pleasantries.
It is not my intention to gloss over the “real” agenda of the event organisers or the people they put on the stage to whip up the crowd.
I wanted to focus on the people in the crowd, or at least that tiny number of them who circumstance exposed me to over the course of the day.
These bad actors don’t care about poor and marginalised people: they are using their discontent to further their own nefarious agenda.
A small-but-increasing number of us have understood that this is no longer good enough to simply point out such problems and that we have to do better at understanding, reaching out and building trust with “them”; but in reality, very few of us do anything about this.
I heard people say in relation to the ability of the police to contain them if things kicked off, something like, “they’d have no chance”, alluding to the precarious nature of the power of the state.
When the person on the bridge said “they hate us”, he wasn’t wrong: the elites DO hate us, both those “far-right thugs” on the bridge and the “far-left thugs” in the counter-protest: to the elites we are all plebs who have failed to make a success of our lives and who they want out of the way.
surely there is enough common ground between us to start doing a better job of talking, attempting to resolve “our” differences and taking this country back for ALL us ordinary people?