A Controversial Brand of Politics
“If voting changed anything, they’d make it illegal.”
So said Emma Goldman, who would surely have allowed herself a wry smile upon seeing the choices we’ll be getting when we next head to the polls in May.
Currently the largest protest vote is being carried by a troupe of clowns so far to the right that even the Tories distance themselves from them.
And that leaves us with the same old choice between the lesser of two evils. Unless you vote for the Liberal Democrats, but does anyone know what they stand for any more?
To be sure, the situation hasn’t deteriorated much from my first experience of voting in a general election in 1997.
As a Macclesfield lad, the Tory incumbent Nicholas Winterton was elected with a thumping 20,000-plus majority.
My vote was about as productive as Tony Blair’s stint as Middle East peace envoy.
Enter Russell Brand and his call for a revolution.
Up until two years ago he struck me as the epitome of everything I thought was wrong about talentless celebrities. But then I read a string of articles he penned which transformed my view, including on drugs and Thatcher.
I have interviewed many drug users and so to learn about his descent into addiction, his ability to recover from it and the daily battle he still fights against it all chime with stories I hear from the people I am privileged to meet and write about through the course of my job.
His view on drug legislation and his role with the Green Party’s Caroline Lucas in highlighting the law’s deep-rooted failings are well-formulated.
Moreover, his analysis of Thatcher’s death beautifully illustrated that she reaped what she had sown.
He described how she watered roses in her dotage accompanied by only a copper because her dysfunctional, atomised family had deserted her and that this mirrored the vision of her divisive, destructive policies.
Brand added: “All of us that grew up under Thatcher were taught that it is good to be selfish, that other people’s pain is not your problem, that pain is in fact a weakness and suffering is deserved and shameful.”
Brand had my attention, and followed it up by his entertaining spats with Jeremy Paxman and US talk show hosts.
Even his book Revolution at least flags up the efforts of genuine revolutionaries — people like Naomi Klein and David Graeber, whose books detail the damage being wrought by capitalism together with the perils of leaving the allocation of scarce resources to the market’s whims.
So will I be heading to the ballot box with a spring in my step or fomenting revolutionary struggle?
In the pages of the Morning Star, Harry Smith, the 91-year-old Labour Party activist who took the party conference by storm, pointed out that “anyone who suggests we might get to a revolution in Britain is a nutcase.”
Smith lived through real austerity, lost a sister due to inadequate healthcare before the NHS was created and fought fascism.
I can only learn from his experience. I also have friends in the Labour Party, have deep respect for several of its MPs and instinctively feel it ought to be the party for me.
But I cannot help but feel that Labour, in its current form, is wedded to neoliberalism. I am not.
Brand’s scattergun approach to politics does leave him open to ridicule, but I’d stick up for him on whether he’s in it for the long haul or not, and on the nature of his impact.
Countless celebrities lead lives hermetically sealed off from the reality of the debt-burdened existence led by millions. Brand is at least standing up for what he believes in and anyone who can lead a new generation to Graeber, Klein and co is alright by me.
And just look at who Brand upsets — the Daily “neofascist”?Mail, Telegraph and the Scum all hate him. That surely means he is doing something right.
Arguably the nearest Britain got to a truly revolutionary movement was Chartism during the 19th century and even that never amounted to what the French would regard as a serious tilt at power.
I can hardly envisage a situation in which, as much fun as it might be to have a go, we are en masse going to switch off Strictly Come Dancing and actually get out on the streets to turf the government out.
But that doesn’t disguise the fact that voting for the current crop won’t change anything either.