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Judith Amanthis reports on how an innovative artist is pioneering methods of engaging working class communities whilst combating the far-right.

Everyone on the UK left knows why some members of the white ex-industrial working class have voted BNP. None that I know of knocks on doors in Doncaster or Dagenham, says “What can we do to help?” and talks to people. That’s what the BNP does.

Is it useful to engage in inside-left (excuse the pun) debate about whether the BNP is a fascist party? Is an elected Hitler likely in multi-racial 21st century UK? When the government’s far right immigration policy is an attempt to stem the haemorrhage of whiteness and Englishness from the UK working class anyway?

Whichever anti-BNP slogan the left chooses, one young woman is acting creatively. Artist Rachel Horne and her friends are trying to drag her South Yorkshire ex-mining community, and especially her generation, away from the BNP, but also from the British army and the drugs barons. An increasingly coercive and privatised social security system doesn’t help.

Horne, a strike baby, was born in a pit village in 1984. It’s where last month, to celebrate the 25th anniversary of the Great Strike, she organised an All Day Mining Party called Bring Out The Banners. 3000 people came, the brass band played, so did psychedelic folk bands, and Anne Scargill spoke about miners’ wives leaving their kitchens for police cells and speaking tours. Artists ran banner-making workshops. Photos, videos, miners’ memorabilia, and NUM banners became art and local history exhibition in one.

Horne, like Bob Marley, believes that to make something of the present you need to know where you come from. She first saw NUM banners drooping against the wall of Denaby Main and Cadeby Miners Welfare (the pit her father and generations back had worked down) when she was a teenager. Her immediate reaction was as an artist: their beauty and narrative power astounded her.

Then the banners’ meaning: that unity, watching each other’s backs and helping each other out, won battles for better wages and safer working conditions. Going on strike – losing pay – required collective loyalty. Helping your mate out down the pit lost you pay before nationalisation in 1946 brought in the basic wage. (But the bonus was a continuing incentive to work dangerously.) On all these marches, pickets and police battles, NUM banners were what people could see, what rallied them. None of the miners or their wives was armed. For a tightly-knit community, non-violence is a possible fighting tactic.

Horne’s videos, installations, collages, photos and drawings are about her community’s history. She takes it, distant and not so distant, to her community. She wants to create a new culture, new rituals, to replace (or substantiate) the ones Thatcher destroyed.

In 2006 she organised, in her home village Conisbrough, a day event and light installation called Out Of Darkness, Light to commemorate the 410 lives – men, boys and women – lost to Cadeby Main before its closure in 1986. She’s campaigning to get erased and grassed-over ex-colliery sites marked on UK reference maps. She’s had London art shows in which a lump of coal on a plinth takes centre stage, and got flak for it. She’s contributed to a street art exhibition. In 2007 she invited striking postal workers to a screening of her video Life And Land.

Can art be instrumental? Can it change the world for the better? Is Rachel doing art or is she just organising and talking to people? Who’ll pay her wages? Aren’t there problems with public art? Isn’t art really about making objects? Can a culture be fought for, or changed, or even healed, without a concomitant change in people’s standard of living? What’s she offering her community the BNP isn’t?

Horne is nothing if not controversial. But – she’s no fool – she believes artists like her can learn from her community’s collective creativity. She‘s trying to strengthen her enclave of the UK working class. That’s what other communities in the UK working class are doing: the Tamil diaspora, the Somali diaspora, west African women tube cleaners resisting victimisation for union organising, the list goes on. The stronger all these groups are the weaker the BNP is.

© Judith Amanthis 2009

Liam Taylor’s speech on radical democracy from last week’s Compass Annual Conference.

I must admit that I feel like something of an anomaly at this conference. Before coming here today I looked on the Compass website at the impressive list of speakers that are here: people from think tanks, from policy institutes, from NGOs, journalists, elected politicians. In other words, people who might be considered ‘experts’, people who do politics for their day job.

And I want to begin by immediately renouncing any claims to such expertise on my part. I probably know less about some of these issues than anybody else in this room. I don’t spend my days reading policy papers for a living; instead, I spend my days teaching secondary schoolchildren in east London. But I think the fact that I am here, and that my presence here feels slightly anomalous, tells us something interesting about politics, and in particular the way that our politics has become increasingly professionalized. That, I think, is a problem – and it goes to the heart of our thinking about radical democracy in this discussion here today.

Climate Camp, I want to suggest, is the antithesis of professionalized politics. We are not an NGO, with a full-time staff; we are not a political party, with appointed leaders. We are a group of ordinary people, from all walks of life, who have come together because of our shared concern about climate change, and our desire to do something about it. Each year, we set up a week-long camp next to one of the root causes of climate change, from power stations to airports, culminating in some form of direct action. In the past we’ve camped outside Drax coal-fired power station; outside Heathrow airport; and, last year, outside the coal-fired power station at Kingsnorth in Kent. Most recently, on 1 April, thousands of people converged on Bishospgate in the City of London for a day-long camp outside the European Climate Exchange, the world’s largest carbon trading centre. It’s not just about protest: it’s about building our little vision of the future, in the here and now, a vision which we develop through workshops and education, through sustainable living, and through the day-to-day practices of direct democracy.

I think it’s very interesting to be in this discussion today because democracy goes to the core of what we are and what we do. We are a completely non-hierarchical movement. All our decisions are made through a process of consensus decision-making, so that our actions are founded on the principles of genuine agreement rather than simple majority vote. This process can at times be frustrating, it can at times be laborious; but it has real value because it invests people with a sense of ownership over any decision that is taken. It also means that the process is incredibly open to newcomers; so that, once you’ve overcome the initial hurdle of working out what’s going on, you are then able to participate on the same level as somebody who’s been in Climate Camp for years. So myself, for example, I’ve only been involved in Climate Camp for the last six months: yet in that time I’ve found myself helping to develop the key messages that we want to get across in the media ahead of this summer’s camp; operating the lights at the Amnesty International lecture theatre; making toilets to be used at the G20 protests; and speaking at events like this one today.

That is a very brief introduction to Climate Camp and what we do. Now, I was asked before this discussion to reflect on any lessons that Climate Camp democracy might offer for other areas of life, including the formal structures of the state. Big question, and in the remaining time I’m not sure I’m going to be able to provide an answer.

But what I will say is that I think it’s interesting the way the question has been phrased, particularly the bit about the ‘formal structures of the state’. Because I think there is a tendency in all these discussions to focus on only one dimension of democracy: that is, the relationship between the individual citizen and the state. When the political elite talks about democracy, it is usually talking about elections. Voting is important, I don’t deny that, but that discussion only captures one aspect of democracy. By concentrating your attention solely on the state you risk losing sight of what democracy really means.

Like I said before, I’m a teacher. And I find that the basic idea of democracy – that people should have a say in decisions which affect them – is intelligible even to twelve year-olds. That sense of democracy as being about making your own choices, directing your own destiny, is something that you feel intuitively: it hits you in the gut before you understand it in the brain. And whenever I hear people talking about proportional representation and additional member voting systems and elected second chambers and all those other things, I tend to ask one simple question: ‘would any of this stuff make people feel like they have more control over their lives?’. I’m not sure that it would.

So I think we should worry less about the intricacies of voting systems and more about creating meaningful democratic experiences. And if you’re trying to find those experiences in the formal institutions of state, I’m afraid you’re looking in the wrong place. The word ‘democracy’ does not refer to a set of institutions; it refers to a process, a movement. Every day – in our jobs, in our homes, in our communities – we travel through uneven landscapes of power. For me, democracy exists at those seminal moments when landscapes of power are in some way transformed by the collective action of ordinary people. That happens within Climate Camp. I’ve felt it happen, too, in other places, such as assemblies I’ve attended organized by London Citizens. I recognize the same feeling in this description by Bolivian activist Oscar Olivera, describing the transformative experience of the struggle against water privatization in Cochabamba:

‘The apprenticeship we have gone through shows us that it is possible to construct a country in which we can make the decisions, in which our opinions count. This would be a country in which we had our own voice, where we controlled our right to speak. It would, at last, be a country in which we were actors, not spectators’.

To conclude: let’s see democracy as journey, not destination; let’s stop worrying about where we end up, and start thinking about where we begin. I think that at Climate Camp we have a very strong sense that the project of revivifying democracy does not begin with a constitutional convention; it does not begin with electoral reform; it does not begin with citizen’s juries, or people’s peers, or independent MPs, or any of the other ideas you get coming out of the political and media elite. It begins with ordinary people, like you and me, taking action on something we believe in, and transforming society by first transforming ourselves. Because democracy is not something which is given, it is not something which is created from above – it is something which is won.

Liam Taylor is part of London’s Camp for Climate Action.

As I write my first editorial it is clear that the nightmare prophesied by Searchlight and others has become a reality.

A grinning Griffin and Andrew Brons entering the European Parliament may be a sickening sight for all anti-fascists, however there is some cold comfort when the truth behind the headlines is that the BNP have gained in popularity but Griffin in fact received a fewer number of votes than he received in 2004.

Nevertheless evidence is growing that the rise of the Rabid Right in Britain is becoming less of a blip on the political landscape. On Thursday, the lesser known English Democrats secured their first major electoral win when Peter Davies became the elected Mayor of Doncaster. Davies, a longstanding anti-EU and anti-immigration campaigner got elected on the promise of limiting the mayor’s wage to £30,000, abolishing “politically correct” (read community cohesion and diversity) council jobs and cutting translation services for non-English speaking immigrants.

This has resulted in Peter Davies vowing to end Doncaster Gay Pride event, not too dissimilar to Boris’ decision to end the Rise Festival. This comparison isn’t lost on them either as their website proudly proclaims Peter Davies as “truly the Boris Johnson of the north”.

In the fog of groans about the growing and gaining Right, The Multicultural Progressive will be a voice of a new and energised multicultural Left.

We make the call not only to debate new ideas but also to inspire others to act and organise. We aim to break out and open up cultural barriers and ghettoes by incorporating a range of voices in the debate about making a different and better world for all.

To breakdown barriers, friction and diversity is needed and a variety of opinions will be embraced rather than avoided. From Centre-Left to Radical Left, we aim to present and be a bearer for social innovation, to champion social projects, community initiatives and people that are making progressive and real change in low to middle income people.

The guiding thought behind our articles and debate is how our beliefs in solidarity, egalitarianism, liberty and democratic socialism can bring about a better world.

TMPOnline will not just be a showcase for exciting projects and initiatives but also ideas. We believe that politics isn’t about chasing the gossip of Westminster village, but about the fundamental and important questions about how our society is organised and run.

In addressing those questions the new TMP Online will reflect on the contemporary issues and questions that impact multicultural Britain; on internationalism versus immigration, combining ecology and economy, and opening up ideas perceived by some as “special interest” from feminism to pan-Africanism. Tough and intriguing questions on popular culture as well as politics will be tackled.

Before I end this post I’ll leave new subscribers with a glimpse of what to expect in the coming weeks from TMP:

1) As public disaffection with New Labour and Parliament grows and as even establishment papers such as the Times calls for constitutional reform we will look at the question of what constitutes a real democracy?

2) From Church to Reggae – is black culture institutionally homophobic?

3) What shape will the defence of public services take when Budget 2009’s cuts kick in 2011 under a probable Tory government?

4) Does the politically slow response to the climate crisis mean that we should prepare for an age of austerity?

5) What and where are examples of working class communities successfully resisting the recession?

Interested in writing on this blog? Contact Justin@tmponline.org

After a long search, we have found a new editor for TMP.

Justin Baidoo is a dynamic grass roots campaigner of the new political generation. He is a former President of Epping Forest College Student Union and a former teacher. In his present day job, he is an IT professional. Commenting on the state of the world today, Justin said “I don’t think social justice can be achieved without abandoning neo-liberal economic policies and embracing democratic socialism”. A committed trade unionist and one not afraid to engage in radical thinking and thought provoking debate, he was the obvious candidate to take over TMP.

Justin has assumed full editorial control of TMP. The advisory board will of course be on hand to provide advice and guidance to Justin as needed but from hereon in, it is very much his “baby” (so to speak).

TMP was founded to provide a vehicle through which multicultural progressives can come together and explore how we can build a more fair, free, equal and democratic world. We are delighted that Justin will now be taking this project forward.

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