May Day
May Day
It was not so much an ‘invented tradition’ as a suddenly erupting one. - Eric Hobsbawm.
It’s May Day tomorrow, a proud internationalist, socialist day of action and celebration. It is also, appropriately, a day that will see protests across Britain against the Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Bill, described by one QC, speaking to Big Issue, as “the biggest widening of police powers to impose restrictions on public protest that we’ve seen in our lifetimes”.
I commend these protests to my readers. But want to write about a much stranger phenomenon, that of the anti-protest - people taking to the streets to demand things stay exactly as they are.
I find this idea so absurd that I wrote a sketch about it. It’s a bit of a work in progress, but you get the general idea.
The young men in the photo above are who inspired the sketch. Now, given that photo was taken in Newcastle, I don’t expect these lads were there for much longer than the time it took to unfold their trestle table and pose for the camera. And yes, there are only four of them, and yes, they are from Turning Point UK, the Trumpian, Faragian, murkily funded right wing student organisation.
There is something plainly absurd about having got everything you ever wanted, politically and ideologically speaking, over the past forty years, but still feeling the need to pull on your best pair of jeans and run the risk of being milkshaked on the streets of some North East City. It feels like a wind up, and probably is, at least on some level.
Other people fighting for the Status Quo are the anti Low Traffic Neighbourhood protesters, who were out and about in London last weekend, bravely taking to the streets for the right to, erm, continue driving wherever they want. These people have also been backed by Farage, who knows a populist grift when he sees one.
Protest is something I associate, in its broadest terms, as a mass act of “punching up”, as we say in comedy to describe who best to target with humour: those with power.
So when I see wealthy car owners demanding the right to continue to poison the air, or misguided young men doing their shit internet memes IRL, I feel like… guys, this isn’t for you. You already have everything else. You don’t need this too.
What next: landlords taking to the streets to protest? If that happens, then we’ll truly know we’re living in some dark, pointy-bearded alternative history and we’re waiting for Kirk, Sisko or Marty McFly to drag us back to the proper timeline.
MJ Hibbett of Stratford writes
In the last newsletter, I wrote about the various options of what to do with the doomed Broadmarsh centre in Nottingham, and was quite mean about the redevelopment of the Olympic Park in Stratford. I did this despite knowing that a) Mark was a subscriber, and b) he lives in the former Olympic village and Is A Fan. Whoops. He has kindly allowed me to publish his ROBUST defence of the area’s regeneration here:
I must VERY STRONGLY disagree with your description of the Olympic Park as a “non-place”. I know this is what a lot of people hoped it would be, but having lived in it for nearly eight years I can assure you it definitely is a place, and has become much more so over the course of the last year when we’ve all been stuck within the postcode.
A lot of media reports about the area seem to confuse “new” with “soul-less” but this is the same sort of grumbling hatred of change that a) enthusiasts of brutalism come against and b) makes people go on local facebook groups and complain that everything was better in the old days before modern things like antibiotics and literacy.
I lived in the East End before and after E20 came to be, and while what’s here now isn’t perfect it’s a hell of a lot better than the stinking piles of old tyres that were here before. It’s also come on a long way since that dreary sneering bourgeoise Guardian article of four years ago that keeps getting quoted. What I’m saying is come and look at it some time, we have a HERON and everything!
Having said that it IS mostly owned by Qatar, is run by gits, and doesn’t have a post office!
Very interesting about Broadmarsh too - I for one support it being completely knocked down but then, as a true Midlander, I support that for Nottingham as a whole!
I will take up Mark’s offer, visit Stratford, have a pint, and write about it in a future newsletter. I will also not rise to his comments about Nottingham. He has already destroyed Peterborough, after all.