I rode the train to London a couple of weekends back to join a rally. And let me say, it wasn’t like the Hungarian revolution of 1956.
Wearing my old Palestinian kafiyeh might give me more of a pause today than it would have ten years ago, thanks to my Prime Minister’s continuing belief that the group Palestine Action poses a special terror threat to the UK, but at no time was I expecting to face tank shells with a broom.
I’ve had that briefing from Paul Mason about what a bastard tear gas really is, yes. But, honestly, there were way more feds in stab proof vests that leafy spring day in Bournemouth a year or two back – I’ve heard drones telling me to uncover my face more in the middle gardens across from Tapas Plus than I have in the capital.
We don’t all want the same future. Couldn’t have it if we did; you have your journey ahead of you and I have mine and we’re both mainly waddling forward unsteadily hoping things work out on the genial side of a gulag or finding a growth in our lower intestine. I think we can all come together around those hopes and most others if we sat together in a Green King local and really listed it all out.
But I’m conscious of those different visions when I put myself out on the street with other genial progressives to stand against things. Seeing me in a crowd with Palestinian flags or trans pride flags or Green Party flags or Stop The Far Right flags will annoy one or two of the folk in my life. Because they care about their country from a different perspective on a couple of things. A perspective that thinks we should stop calling them The Far Right because they might get a few things done at last.
Things like speeding up the bankrupting of a few local authorities and alienating half the country, presumably, but hey, different perspectives.
This is all about the story we think we are in. The different stages of grief that it may be changing. That personal story was written into us, chanted into us, beamed into us and most of the time I’m not so sure we notice who’s doing it, even when it’s us.
But it can make us face tanks with nothing more to hand than a broom.
There is this idea, that words are spells – that what we say out loud changes the world we’re in. Call it psychology, metaphysics or woo, it’s not a bad mental health practice to try – especially when we show up together to stand for better futures.
Footage of Harry Potter actor Rupert Grint at a filling station, raising a fuel pump nozzle over his head like a wand and shouting “expensive petroleum” is not what I mean. Though it is a little emotionally alchemic on the front line of the cost of living crisis.
No, I mean that we invoke things all the time with the meaningful noise we erupt from our throats constantly. And with the meaningful signals we broadcast into the ether. Flags and statements of protest on cardboard are sigils – visual incantations. They transmit things to us and call us to spend our irreplaceable time taking them into ourselves and wooing us to let them change our world.
The March Against The Far Right was not an unpleasant day out in London. It was a lovely spring day too, I may only ever protest in fine weather from now on. Half a million people walked from Green Park to Downing Street and it wasn’t heavy-handedly policed. I saw no counter protests from GB News subscribers and the effort to count my body part of the presence only cost me a one-way train ticket. In fact, it ended with sundowners on the river with my sister and brother in law, so it was hardly a flicker of difference to my usual lifestyle.
But, as someone I’d follow into socialist battle anywhen, Bob Hill, said to me in a similarly leafy afternoon at Chaplins yesterday: “It shows the bullyboys they won’t have it easy.” And that’s the simple point, I think.
Many people who’d have a similar world view to me found it a big encouragement. The rise of the Green Party’s voice was a clear part of the energy; it is deeply heartening to listen to people who get that the problems we face are one thing – asset class economics – and the responses are all expressions of love. Love is a verb.
But. Those sigils.
Right now, the most organised thing that progressive kindness can reach for is the mechanisms of old leftism. Densely typographed messages like policy strategies and chants that don’t suit quiet personal nuance. So much of the vibe was joyful and sunny, everyone understanding that they were representing another facet of the one systemic challenge we are all being oppressed by. But all around me, all day, were the names of the people I don’t want to have in my consciousness.
What are we doing parading with forests of the names of those oppressing us? Everywhere I looked, those names. The names of the violent, predatory, life-destroying, nervous system-wrecking, nature destroying, trafficking, abusing, shouting, corrupting, dividing, hellscaping players we most of us want gone.
What are the visions of tomorrow, the names we love, the new songs and stories of us we could be carrying aloft, resonating through our bodies in public, filling our eyes with?
I think we are on a path to breaking the spells of the billionaire illusionists. I do. The prolonged wildness of the US warfare against reality, the Zionist warfare in the Gulf, the techbro warfare against social wealth is effectively imploring us to wake up to our own magician’s ability. To speak out, practice up, embody and project the future we really want. Something like that has broken through in Hungary at last, where another one of those names thought themselves out of reach of community power.
It didn’t cost me much to show up for what I hope for, a future where we’re free to be ourselves and explore what it means with public and private confidence. And I won’t spend most of my time at rallies in any future. I want to spend my time encouraging and sharing words that expand our worlds and bring alive the possibilities. I want to fill people’s ears with the energy-changing frequencies of music.
It can feel pretty magic to pluck up courage to show up ready to sing and find a choir around you. So let’s write the new chants, the new rooted calls to community, the new declarations of future, and see who joins in.
A few impressions from the streets in the film below.
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