Cracks in the Wall

1979 saw the arrival of a hardline Conservative government, on a mission to dismantle the post-war consensus since 1945. They succeeded. All mainstream politicians now are card-carrying members of the orthodoxy.
The Right slashed and burned their way through housing, education, railways, airways, gas, electricity, water, phones and above all gave the banks a a free ride.
1989 cemented it with the fall of the Berlin Wall and the departure of the failed Soviet machine. There were no challengers.
For another couple of decades, the clarion call of the Lady from Finchley held true: TINA or There Is No Alternative.
Today, we know that idea was bogus.
All the privatised utilities did not spur ‘competition’ and lower prices. They just made vast profits over a captive consumer. Richard Branson made money, but at our expense.
The foundation has always been the banks and the City of London. They are now on life support and we are feeding the saline drip, weakening our bodies in order to keep them alive.
And how grateful they are.

The main political parties are still stuck in the 1990s. For a moment in September 2008 and in March 2009, they panicked. They had second thoughts.
But now the printing presses are running across the world – $12 trillion in support (so far) but then who’s counting…… the politicians and bankers have recovered their nerve.

The politicians can lie about wars
They can lie about the economy.
They can lie about their expense claims…….

They are as arrogant as the bankers.
They believe they can just carry on as before.
The mantra of Mandelson resonates in their ears. A few bullet points on a powerpoint presentation, a few one-liners and a couple of buzz words are all that are needed to hoodwink the voters.
If that does not succeed, then let APATHY wipe out the opposition voters.
The more a citizen disconnects from the Democracy network and remains merely a consumer, the more powerful the political parties become.
All the politicos need do is use clever software to target some voters , street by street, ward by ward and constituency by constituency…… just like supermarkets do when they decide to move into a neighbourhood.

Fortunately for us, we can see that like the Berlin Wall, their wall is weak at the foundations. We can make the cracks before we pull it down.
The end of the decade will look a lot different than the start.

We have moved from TINA at last …… we now need to break our chains of APATHY….. and then only can we break down their wall.
2010 will see the arrival of the smaller political forces, both on the Left (we call it Green here) and the Far Right.
At long last a contest of ideas will become the dynamic for this decade. Some beautiful; some ugly.
We cannot tell the difference between Hedge-Fund-friendly New Labour or the Conservatives or the Lib-Dems.
But Alternatives are now sprouting.
We are not talking about fun conferences and ‘another world is possible’ talk-fests, funded by the corporate institutions where people could apparently attain power without contesting for it. A cul-de-sac.

Politics is reappearing once more.
Splashing a bit of green here, a couple more CCTV cameras and some cheap talk attacking bankers with one hand, (while handing over a blank cheque with the other)……. this will no longer do.

David will replace Tony (Gordon was an aberration and will join Major as the Grey Pair of Forgotten Faceless Frontmen).
Nick Clegg will stick his head above the parapet, only to see it slapped down.
The mainstream media will dress the election up as ‘change’.
The rest of us will not be fooled.
While we cannot prevent this masquerage for now, we can send a shot across the bows. If we persuade enough people to wake up from apathy and walk a few miles in an anti-war march, a few more miles on a war for a million Climate Jobs and a few yards to a polling booth and mark an ‘X’ for an alternative party…… we will make some cracks in the wall.
This is a decade long road. 2010 is just the start of this journey.
When the Polish Solidarity campaign started in 1980 in shipyard of Gdansk in Poland, nobody envisaged the fall of the Berlin Wall less than ten years later.
The impossible became possible. Dreams became a reality.
We are now at the beginning.
G20 and Copenhagen have revealed the bankruptcy of the mainstream politicians and bankers.
The status quo will not remain.
The wall will come down. This will be a decade filled with hope. There will be an alternative. And it will not be stopped.

Farid Bakht

Advertisement