Thai Political Prisoner: “I will sacrifice my liberty, but not my humanity!”
Editor of Red News and Thai Political Prisoner: Somyot Pruksakasemsuk
Somyot Pruksakasemsuk is someone who has been deeply engaged his life in social and political movements since he was a teenager, first as student activist in the troubled time of military rule of Thailand in the 1970s. After the crackdown of military coup on student in 1976, many of them fled to the jungle and later back to active engagement in social changes in all sectors. Somyot has been tireless in the work of supporting the empowerment of the workers’ movement and the establishment of democratic trade unionism in Thailand since then.
I have been fortunate to be able to work with him closely with supporting the workers struggle in Thailand and also the democratic struggle in Nepal in the last few years ago. Regardless of any shortcoming we have as human beings who have not attained perfection, we cannot avoid of making mistakes in life.
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‘Knocking seven bells out of each other…’
By Majeed Neky
Having stood in the recent local elections and still catching up on sleep, I’ve spent more of my last few weeks than I’d have liked defending the coalition (a colleague even suggested that I allocate ten minutes for general abuse about the actions of ‘my’ government at the start of each day, just to get it out of the way). My arguments have been pretty similar to those already aired here. ‘New politics’ it is not, certainly not from my perspective. Having defended the government to people on the left, the right and the centre with equally little success, it doesn’t feel like Punch and Judy politics has ended – just that the Lib Dems have been inserted into the middle like the traditional string of sausages.
My petty troubles aside, the inevitable cracks in policy and, it seems, equally inevitable scandals shouldn’t distract us from a deeper point about the way that politics is conducted. This is something that I’ve been thinking about for a while, as some of my previous posts at http://whorunskingston.wordpress.com will evidence, but it came back to me sharply after last week’s Thirsk and Malton parliamentary election. With the Conservative win there a fairly foregone conclusion, press interest centred on the adversarial campaigning of the coalition partners, with Radio 4’s Evan Davis asking ‘How can they be knocking seven bells out of each other one day and then go back and be loving each other again in Cabinet?’
Why is this more than just a tricky operational problem that will interest electoral anoraks of the future? Because the answer is quite simple: the people doing the seven-bells-knocking aren’t the same people who are in the Cabinet. Granted, this is pretty obvious – but the coalition arrangement has thrown the disconnect between the professionalised political classes and the interested amateurs into sharp relief, and it’s not a problem that’s going to go away under a majority government.
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