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I was a teenager in the late 1970s. I grew up in a world of ferment, a cauldron of conflict. Everyone was politicised. We’d lived through the miners’ strikes and watched Arthur Scargill usurp Joe Gormley as the voice of power in that most powerful of unions.
We had ‘Uncle’ Jim Callaghan running the country into the ground. Before him, Harold Wilson (who was almost unseated in an army-led coup – true story) and bluff, socially inept Ted Heath trying to reason with men (and it was all men) who wanted to bring on the Trotskyite revolution, not beat inflation. Everyone had a view: everyone had a philosophy. Serious political coverage on TV fed our curiosity. Newspaper ads (even the tabloids: remember the super soaraway Sun?) sold you the exclusive story on the front page, not some free CD giveaway. Schools bristled with debating societies. Universities were writhing nests of opinion, unrest and action.
On the radar of this teenager was Rock Against Racism, a spontaneous left-wing protest movement organising rallies and rock concerts around the country. There was no corporate sponsorship, no admission charges. Tom Robinson was leading the Gay Pride movement and staging impromptu concerts in Hyde Park – all free of commercial interference: Glastonbury it was not. Whilst there might have been a degree of cynicism in the punk movement at the top of the record industry food chain, it was a genuinely grass-roots rebellion at ground level. Bands like The Desperate Bicycles inspired us to mobilise and make records, a lack of talent or technical skill being no barrier. And if making a record was too expensive, then you started a fanzine or made and distributed a cassette. We heard our music from John Peel on Radio 1 or via Radio Caroline, still broadcasting from a terrible hulk of a ship off the Essex coast. What we couldn’t hear there, we broadcast ourselves. I was proud to be on a land-based pirate station that broadcast music of course, but also plays, talks, debates, political opinion and documentaries.
And now what have we got? A prime minister bestowed on us by his predecessor as a final act of revenge for criticising his illegal war and whose fingerprints are all over the almost total collapse of capitalism. We have the greatest attacks on our civil liberties ever seen – CCTV, identity cards, terrorism laws used to prosecute dogs who crap on the pavement, our data routinely shared with all and sundry (literally when its lost). We see greedy bankers making off with our money. Our government sanctions torture. The Tory right is left of New Labour and socialism has disappeared off the radar. The disenfranchised turn to the BNP who are dismissed rather than engaged.
And in the face of this, less people have political views than ever. People will say - with apparent pride - that they don’t vote. Not as an act of anarchy, but because they can’t be bothered. The rough and ready up-from-the-streets protest, the passionate swelling of public feeling has been commodified as an online blogging experience, neutered when it hits the streets as the renegade act of a militant fringe (which is considered a bad thing now!) and packaged as an activity to be conducted alone, in front of a screen and safely behind one’s front door. How can ideology develop without the heat of real debate, the sweat of action, the collective certitude that comes from mass protest? How can people who hide behind usernames conduct revolution?
We have lost the ability to fight back. There are no heroes anymore.
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