Tag Archives: Black Lives Matter

Power and Influence: you either got it or you ain’t

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We the common people, you and I, don’t have the prime minister’s or the president’s ear. We lack power and influence: we’re not the CEO of large companies, obscenely wealthy or part of any religious lobby. Those in power can rely on the fact that next year we’ll have some other cause to send us out on the streets and on to social media. It will not trouble them.

Real change takes decades to achieve. It took over a century for gay people to have the rights they have today. Stonewall was not the beginning, but a milestone on a much longer journey. Protests over the summer don’t have this effect. The Civil Rights campaigns of the ’60s were only partially successful; we wouldn’t now have the Black Lives Matter movement if they had been wholly effective. Likewise women’s rights. Even the previous president of the US, who was inclined to do so, was unable to introduce greater gun control laws; the current incumbent has no interest in doing so and is, in any case, controlled himself by the gun lobby.

The place of the common people is to be controlled, regulated and herded. We’ve seen this in sharp focus during the Covid crisis. Granted safety measures have been for our own good, even if some have taken it upon themselves to defy them. Nonetheless, the advice and regulation during the pandemic has taken on the semblance of law when much of it isn’t at all, with police making criminals of individuals who have failed to comply.

Unless, of course, they were politicians, unelected advisers to the prime minister or members of the royal family. Their flouting of restrictions have been understandable and acceptable; the exception can be made for them. That’s power and influence for you.

If you or I were friends with Jeffrey Epstein and arranged through him to pay underage girls for sex, we might expect, once the law caught up with us, to serve a prison sentence. Not so Prince Andrew. He’s a royal and so exempt: power and influence.

If you or I killed a motorcyclist while driving on the wrong side of the road in another country and then flee the country claiming diplomatic immunity, we should expect to be extradited to face justice. Not so Anne Sacoolas, the wife of a US diplomat in the UK. She does not herself have diplomatic immunity, not that that should matter. Nonetheless, the Trump administration has refused to return her to UK. Power and influence.

If you or I failed to pay our tax in full, you could be sure the Revenue service would be down on us like the proverbial ton of bricks (I know this from experience when they miscalculated my tax a couple of years back.) Yet for many years Amazon, Netflix and Starbucks have either paid nothing or a tiny fraction of tax due in the countries where they make their money. Why should they? They are giants in their fields and above such petty concerns as paying full taxes – that’s for the little people, like you and me. It pays to have power and influence.

You and I probably receive, or received, a modest salary for the work we do/did. Not so investment bankers who award themselves thousands in bonuses – and occasionally millions – on top of extravagant salaries and the interest they make from hedge funds and off-shore investments. Successive UK governments in the UK, from both the left and right, have been promising for as long as I can remember to take down these ‘fat cats’ and restore some equity to remuneration. Despite the bank collapses a dozen years ago they still haven’t. Why? Because bankers have too much power and influence. One thing we’ve learnt during the covid-19 pandemic is that they are far from being essential workers. Yet they continue to receive exorbitant rewards for what they do, while genuine key workers receive far less for their crucial service.

If you or I had lost a loved one in the 417 mass shootings in the US last year we would expect and implore the government to act. But it’s the NRA that has the ear of the president so gun laws remain unchanged. Power and influence.

The Catholic church has claimed at least $1.4 billion dollars from Covid-19 relief funds: not to feed the hungry but to line their own coffers. Who, ultimately, will pay for this handout and similar ones to equally wealthy organisations? That’s right – you and I will, through increased taxes, even though the money doled out was from our taxes to start with.

You and I aren’t able to influence the government with our personal beliefs and philosophies. Religious lobbies can. In the States, a number of prominent right-wing Christians serve as Trump advisers. The president is more than willing to aid them in scaling back the human rights of LGBT people and restricting women’s freedom of choice. In the UK, Church of England bishops have an automatic right to sit in the House of Lords where they can amend and veto the decisons of democratically elected MPs.

You and I don’t have power or influence. We are powerless. We are intentionally distracted, kept occupied by the modern equivalent of bread and circuses: television, sport, shopping, alcohol, social media.

Still, next time we’re faced with an injustice, we can always take to Twitter – or to the streets – for all the good it will do us.

The More Things Change…

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This year it’s Black Lives Matter. Last year it was Extinction Rebellion. Before that #MeToo, GM crops and gun control. Every year it seems there’s a new cause for us to take to the streets, or, if we can’t be bothered doing that, to social media where we can make our feelings known. Of course, the common people – you and I – have a voice. We have greater means of expressing it, more platforms on which to exercise it, than have ever existed before. No-one in history has had the means we have to express our outrage, opinions and grievances.

But so what? Whether we take to the streets, vlog, blog or tweet, the result, it seems to me, is the same: things stay pretty much as they are. Hardly anything changes as the result of our outcry and protest. Maybe a few statues are demolished, a handful of sexual predators jailed, but ultimately there’s no lasting change. Perhaps a tokenistic law is created, maybe the media involve themselves for a short time in the issue of the day, but before very long everything reverts to the way it was: black lives are no more improved, the police go back to their former ways of behaving (once no-one’s looking any more), children continue to be abused, the environment is still in crisis, there’s another mass shooting by an idiot who’s bought a gun too easily and politicians carry on acting as if they’re above the law. There’ll be a new cause to excite ourselves about next summer. And another the year after that. Today’s preoccupation will disappear just as quickly as the latest fashion or pop sensation.

Why is this, and  why are we largely ignored when we take to the streets or campaign on social media about the things that concern us? Why does our voice count for so little? We live in democracies don’t we, here in Europe and in the States; we have a right to be heard, to be listened to and be taken into account – don’t we?

Well, no. We don’t. No-one is obliged to listen to us. They don’t even have to pretend to, unless they’re politicians running for election and then they are only pretending. Even then we don’t really have the choice we think we do; we’re told we can vote for the candidate of our choice, but we can’t; choice is so severely restricted it’s hardly qualifies as a choice at all. We vote for whoever the parties have put up for us to vote for; for a package that dresses either to the left or the right, without nuance or balanced consideration of the issues, and very often with no long term view of what we need to survive and flourish. That’s why so many fail to vote; they know intuitively that the more things change, the more they stay the same – so why bother?

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The rest of us dutifully select from an already selected few: the millionaires, billionaires, career politicians and failed businessmen who claim they have our best interests at heart, who say they can manage us and make our country great again. Once they have power they forget about us – their lives are so far removed from ours that they can’t possibly relate to the way we ordinary people live – and what the most vocal of us say we want. We think we won’t get fooled again, as the Who say in their politically astute song, but of course we will: we are fooled again, and again and again. Every time.

To be continued.

Swing Low

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This is my response to the way some in the UK have jumped on the bandwagon of the Black Lives Matter movement. I appreciate it is different in the USA.

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‘So it’s important we get out on the street and bring down the last vestiges of colonialism.’

‘Right. So how do we do that?’

‘We tear down the effigies of those who made their fortunes on the backs of black people. Colston in Bristol, Nelson’s Column, Earl Grey in Newcastle…’

‘I didn’t know Earl Grey owned slaves.’

‘Well, no, he didn’t. But he did fund a port in London somewhere and that port was used to bring in cotton. And who was forced to grow the cotton? Slaves!’

‘I see. Yet I think you’ll find it was Earl Grey’s government that abolished slavery in the British Empire, back in the 1830s.’

‘Was it? I didn’t know that.’

‘Obviously not. I agree, of course, that we shouldn’t be celebrating anyone who was involved in the slave trade, but how is vandalising statues going to improve the lives of black people today?’

‘It shows that we stand with them. It shows we disinherit our racist past, founded as it was on the exploitation of black people; on slavery.’

‘So you won’t be using sugar any more, or visiting the Tate? You won’t be drinking at a Greene King pub? Or driving your Mercedes and reading your Guardian newspaper?

‘I don’t see what that has to do with anything.’

‘No, you wouldn’t. Don’t you think Black Lives Matter, which, might I remind you, is an American movement, has been hijacked here in the UK by well meaning, largely middle-class white people with little understanding of the past? That smashing statues, boycotting Swing Low, Sweet Chariot – written, incidentally, by one-time negro slave – and anachronistically slotting people of colour into films and TV dramas, is really going to improve the lives of black people in this country today? If you do, you’re seriously deluded. We’re not a salve for your white conscience.’

‘Look, I’m no racist, you know that, but you just don’t have any understanding of what’s at stake here. Thank God there are white people like me to look after your interests. Now are you coming to this protest or what?’