Number 3: A political awakening
Richard Walsh explains how a debate over the August 2011
riots led to his political awakening.
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| One of the iconic images from the August 2011 riots. |
It was August 2011 and across the major towns and
cities of the United Kingdom youths were running amok. Violent battles with
police, arson, looting, disorder and mayhem were a nightly occurrence. I didn't
know it then but it would be a time that was to have a profound effect on the way I looked at the world and would awaken within me a political side to my personality that I
didn't know existed. I was 25 years old and working as a gas mains engineer with
my dad, as I had since leaving school at 16. Born and bred on a council estate
in north Liverpool, the son of an Irish immigrant, I was always proud of my
hometown and working class roots. One thing us scousers have is a strong sense
of identity and community spirit. We look after our own here, like in many old
industrial northern cities. There's nothing like being shat on from a great height by
your own government to foster camaraderie and togetherness.
Anyway, I thought I had a fairly good understanding of the way the
world worked. Not that I’d ever taken an active interest in politics, but I read
the paper most days and watched the news when I got home from work so I felt
myself qualified to discuss world affairs with work colleagues and friends down
the pub. Sometimes if I was feeling particularly adventurous, I'd even stay up to
watch BBC Question Time, so I firmly believed I had a knowledge of current
affairs to at least match most people. When coverage of the riots reached me I
felt an overwhelming sense of anger. Who did these scumbags think they were,
going out causing mayhem and vandalising other peoples property like that? The
police seemed far too soft on them, unorganised and undermanned, it looked like
a shambles to me. Get the bloody water cannon out on the little wankers, I
thought to myself. Why are we not bringing this flagrant
lawlessness under control?
Enraged, I took to social media to vent my frustrations. While
flicking through my Facebook news feed, I stumbled across a friend of mine with
a very different attitude to my own. He was making the point that the big shops
use sweat shop labour, mark their products up 3000%, employ people on poverty wages (that need to be topped up by the taxpayer) and then break their necks to avoid paying anything like their fair share of tax on their profits so good
luck to the looters! I couldn't believe his attitude. What about the innocent
people caught up in the melee? The cost to the taxpayer? These hooligans were
causing chaos for kicks, not because they were championing some justifiable
political uprising. In Egypt they riot for freedom, here its for Adidas trainers
and flat screen TVs. So we became embroiled in ideological debate over the next
few days, both obstinately standing our ground. I knew I was right but I was
also aware that there were gaping holes in my knowledge which needed filling in
with some research. I wasn't even sure what left wing and right wing meant in a
political context, I mean I’d heard of right wing fanatics like the BNP who
fantasised about rounding foreigners up like cattle and putting them on the
first boat home after giving them a good kicking but I couldn't explain what
left wing meant. We hadn't covered anything remotely political at school bar
George Orwell's animal farm and that was to examine the literary techniques
used, not the political connotations (although I do remember the teacher nudging us towards the notion that communism was bad, and can never work as
people are inherently greedy). Any other political understandings I had learnt
came from the media, either televised or the press. With hindsight, I now realise that I was very intellectually lazy during that period of my adolescence. Most of my
spare time was spent out partying, drinking, mucking around or trying to get my
leg over. It's true what they say, youth is wasted on the young and wisdom on the
old!
Anyway, determined to improve my arguments against my friend (and pull
his to bits), I decided to read the Communist Manifesto. I didn't really
understand what communism was so it seemed like a good place to start. Anytime I'd heard communism mentioned in the media it had been in a derogatory manner,
either in conjunction with
human rights abuses, paired with the message that people in communist
countries live in abject poverty while the ruling elite live in luxury or referring to some politician as a “crazy old commie”. I didn't
know exactly what communism was but I knew it was bad and that was enough for
me.
So I set to work reading the Communist Manifesto expecting to find a
few fundamental flaws to expand upon and criticise but I ended up finding much
more than that. Lots of the themes hadn't occurred to me before and although it
was written over 150 years ago I found it strikingly relevant to the modern
world I saw around me. People slaving away all their lives just to subsist while
a chosen few inherited capital and power and lived lives of luxury on the back
of others' misery and hard work. Children starving to death while food is
simultaneously wasted or stockpiled, class divisions, the value of labour. This
book got me asking a lot of questions that it had never occurred to me to ask
before. Questions about myself, my own life, my job, the world I was a part of.
Why had I never asked these questions before of my own accord? I’d always
thought of myself as reasonably intelligent, I passed an entrance exam to a top
secondary school where I was always in top sets, found schoolwork easy (although I only studied up to GCSE level), so why had I never thought about any of the
issues Marx raised, rather than just accepting things at face value and carrying on
with my life? It was a sobering thought, and really quite a frightening one. I
think the main reasons were distraction and disinformation. After spending all week
working long hours to pay the bills, in my spare time I wanted to do thing I
enjoyed, relax, watch football, go out with friends and let a bit of steam off. I never had the time nor the inclination to question
the status quo or seek out different political viewpoints and alternatives. Thus I only ever received a very narrow, one sided point of view from the mainstream
media which I had gradually assimilated into my own thoughts through continual
exposure. I hadn't searched out many alternative political viewpoints because I
had no reason to distrust the ones I was already following. I suppose I had a
subconscious trust in the integrity of the media and the uttering of politicians
and so called “experts”. You just assume that they are in their job because they
are intelligent and have the relevant education and experience to know better
than the average person, such as myself. I wasn't naive enough to believe that
all public figures could be trusted but there were systems and procedures in
place to remove people whose moral integrity was questionable, so surely most
must act to promote the common good?
After the Communist Manifesto put a crack in my rose tinted glasses I
began to search out other alternative political literature and media to clarify
my own opinions and broaden my political horizon of understanding. The ragged
trousered philanthropists, George Orwell, Ernesto Guevara, Noam Chomsky and
Seamus Milne were all valuable steps on my journey of enlightenment and before
long the rose tinted glasses were off and I was seeing a much bigger picture
than the one I'd seen before.
When you understand that governments actively try to
keep unemployment high enough to suppress wages and inflation you have a
different perspective on benefit claimants and welfare austerity. When you
understand the shocking absence of social mobility in this country and the
continuous efforts to kick the ladder away further, you can see how generations
of teenagers become alienated from a society that ostracises them and offers
them no future. You realise that from infancy our eyes and ears are bombarded by
corporate advertising campaigns, inseminating our minds with the insatiable urge
to purchase and consume to the point where we measure our social standing by the
possessions we have, the clothes we wear, the money in our pockets, the car we
drive, the house we live in. These things all too often take precedence over our
achievements, our personalities, our morals and our humanity. Little wonder
then, when you create a forgotten generation, detached from society with no
prospects, surrounded by nice things they're indoctrinated to worship but can't
afford, that they will steal them or turn to other acts of criminality to make
themselves money, when society has long since washed its hands of them. Of course
there are myriad contributory factors to the problems of society and outpourings of
violence such as the 2011 riots, but to properly treat an illness you must target
the root cause rather than just try and alleviate the symptoms with doses of
police brutality and hasty imprisonment. This was what I came to realise after taking the time to
educate myself.
Another Angry Voice has also been a fountain of great information for
me, the incisive direct journalism on current affairs was like a breath of fresh
air and the “what is ... ?” tutorials really helped me to fast forward my knowledge of
economics, which is a must if your going to back up your political arguments.
Right wing fanatics love nothing better than arguing with someone on a simply
moral agenda because they can dismiss them as hopeless idealists, as a soft lefty, who believes
in an unworkable cloud cuckoo land utopia. When you can back up your arguments
with cold hard facts and economics they can't negate them, not if they're honest
anyway. It gets really frustrating now for me personally, watching the
mainstream media consistently repeating and giving credibility to information
which is either misleading or simply not true, especially when I think of how I
was taken in. If people were more aware of the real facts, I’m sure there would be
greater resistance and hostility towards government policy, as most people value
fairness and don’t like to see others suffering unnecessarily. The beauty of the
truth is that it is true whether you choose to believe it or not. You cannot
banish it no matter how many lies you shout from the rooftops, it is always
there waiting to be found. It’s the moral responsibility of everyone who
understands the crimes being committed against good decent people in
this country and around the world to stand up and resist it, whether it is by
protesting, organising or spreading the word to others. The more people who are
helped to see through all the bullshit and lies, the greater the potential for
positive change. Hopefully with Neo-Labour now seemingly intent on distancing
themselves from the last tie they had with ordinary people, the trade unions,
the left can stop flogging the Labour party dead horse which quite frankly is
beginning to stink out the joint, and consolidate to form a new party.
I believe
the next few years will be a pivotal time in British politics and its time for a
swing back towards the left. The ever increasingly top heavy distribution of
wealth in this country is bad for the economy, and relying on endless credit to paper
over the cracks is unsustainable, as we keep finding out. It’s up to each and
every one of us to get off our backsides and make the effort to do something
positive, lead by example and build a better future for ourselves, our children
and everyone else. As Margaret Mead once said "Never doubt that a small group of
thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world; indeed, it’s the only thing
that ever has".
About the author
Richard Walsh is a frustrated political observer and social activist from Liverpool.
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