No worries, not interpreted as aggy at all and I share your frustrations.
I’ve been on a bit of a journey since the Corbyn project ended - I was a Labour member and I thought RLB was pretty cool. Since all of that went down I basically decided that the Labour party is never going to be a vehicle for any permanent positive change. Having any faith in them to do good things ended up damaging my mental health so I made a conscious decision to dissociate. This was coupled with some reading/podcast listening that I did that made me realise how broken our democracy is - we don’t have a choice between different political outcomes when we vote, we vote for different flavours of the same neoliberal capitalist ice cream. The actual people in charge - the capitalist class, the people who own things, what ever you want to call them - doesn’t change regardless of which political party is in charge and both parties exist to serve their needs, not ours.
So I thought what’s the point in engaging with it. I became a union rep at work and became more politically active through that - I’m doing relatively minor things but I’m helping my colleagues and it feels like I’m making more of a difference than what voting every 5 years does. I plan on getting more involved with things like refugee advocacy when my daughter is a bit older and I have more time, although I might need someone to hold me to this as I am quite lazy. I’m always on the lookout for other opportunities but they seem to be quite few and far between in my sleepy northern town. Suggestions on here are always welcome.
Just to back up c_g, my general feeling is that you have wayyyy more ability to influence things locally, and on “smaller” issues, too. I find it way easier to feel like I can influence things when I get involved with local stuff. You on your own aren’t going to change the world, but you and a few other people might be able to institute some sort of change in a particular issue that you care about. It definitely feels better than just voting.
This is the MP for one of my mates. They were telling me yesterday that Foxcroft had sent a generic email, telling people to stop emailing her about Palestine and Israel because it was preventing her from doing ‘constituency casework’. Unreal stuff - explicitly saying that genocide, displacement, humanitarian aid, etc are less important than whatever else she’s got going on. Also - who else can her constituents email about this??
Apparently two weeks she accidentally said that she ‘condoned violence’ when she probably meant condemn. Communication isn’t her strong suit it seems. Not surprised her office is getting vandalised.
That’s a shame. She was at least mildly supportive and helpful in the past. I wrote to her years ago when she was my MP to get her to help get a student from Gaza the visa he needed to study at Goldsmiths, which she did.
Keir Starmer complaining about death threats, fine that is never justified, but should be noted he never gave a fuck about left wing ethnic minority mps getting death threats, or has any concern of the death of Palestinians
Totally get this. Part of what I fear though is that if Labour truly are the “more competent” party, then the kind of policies they’re banding about could hasten out decline into a evermore divided nation between the haves and the have nots.
Maybe that’s me projecting based on what I think of Starmer, Reeves et all, but they’re bent on giving me no reason to think otherwise.
I’ve been out of the UK for a couple of years and only recently been back in the UK watching the news and I really am struck by how indistinguishable the labour MPs are from their Tory counterparts. They obviously aren’t quite as frothy-mouthed as the hardcore right of the party but they’re basically briefing the kind of lines that the coalition government were coming out with when they still had to pretend that they weren’t completely fash.
Really fucking depressing and not something that comes through as clearly just from following things from overseas.
