Did someone mention an election?

Hooray for the rugby world cup! The atmosphere in Auckland is fantastic, supporters from all sides are partying no matter the results and the ubiquitous car top flags fill the streets with colour. There's no doubt that it's a fun time to be in New Zealand, but what happens when it's over?

The other night over dinner an interesting point regarding the timing of the upcoming general election and the RWC was raised by our host. Yes, there is an election coming up. You may recall a few adverts and mail drops about it back in July, equally you may not. All mention of the election has been replaced by footage and articles about rugby matches, rugby players, rugby players wives, rugby fans and anyone in a rugby shirt or holding a rugby ball. The tsunami of RWC coverage has washed away any hope of proper political debate in the lead up to the general election and as the tournament progresses it will only get worse.

Flicking through Sundays newspaper a quick count puts RWC articles at 10 and election articles at 4, one about a poll awkwardly mixing rugby support and politics qualified as both. This count does not include stories from the 18 page renamed sports section, now called 'Rugby Heaven' that came with the paper. That is, no doubt reserved for repeats of the front page stories of the All Black's latest victory and pictures of Zara Phillips.

The press are understandably excited about rugby, there is no doubt it sells, and I would expect that National are pretty enthusiastic about it too (as Labour would be in the same position). A happy, distracted population gives a government little to worry about in an election year. A lesson learnt and well executed 2000 years ago by the Romans with their own, bloodier form of pre-election games.

Whilst an event that distracts an entire population is a good way of encouraging a smooth ride for the incumbent party there are some risks involved. What if something goes awry? With the Beehive taking control after Auckland Council's fumble on the opening night they have put themselves firmly in the firing line. To avoid getting shot they appear to be willing to spend their way out of any potential risk, a plan which looks likely to see them through the rest of the tournament relatively unscathed. At least until someone looks at the accounts. A worse scenario is, like an Emperor's prize Gladiator being defeated in the arena by a lesser opponent, the All Blacks don't win. With the nations hopes pinned on victory any goodwill will quickly fade and the predicted $39 million deficit will suddenly become a popular topic of conversation right before the election.

Even with this seemingly unlikely occurrence National will probably be safe this time around. A recent Gallup Poll puts them in a commanding lead with 61% of support and Labour don't look like much of a threat with Goff at the helm. It looks likely that we will have to wait another three years to assess the political repercussions of RWC 2011. What we can be sure of is that as long as there are silver ferns on the chests of the men raising the cup on October 23^rd no one will care what happens on November 26^th until it's far too late. 

Tiny Ruins & Artisan Guns – 18th June 2011, The Wine Cellar, Auckland

Having failed to get tickets for the Tiny Ruin’s album launch the night before it was a relief to find a second night had been arranged due to popular demand. As was expected the dilapidated sofas of the Wine Cellar’s back room were overflowing and it was standing room only by the time Artisan Guns set got going. Despite having sacrificed their headline show to accommodate the demand for Tiny Ruins it was clear that crowd were here as much for them as for the next band.

 Artisan Guns

A mismatched looking bunch of grungy, hipster, skater chic with a Jason Schwartzman look-a-like, channelling the wobbly headed joy of Mickey Dolenz on drums. The look, or lack of it offered a relaxed stage presence which was complimented by the sometimes uncomfortable inter-song banter, private jokes and throw away lines mumbled into or often off the microphone which set off small ripples of laughter from the front rows, but were often lost by the time they reached us at the back. Beach Boy harmonies with a Steve Malkamus drone and loose but confident musicianship combined the slacker attitudes of the 60’s and 90’s together with genuine warmth and charm. Clearly worthy of the headline show they were originally scheduled for Artisan Guns are way above the indie pop label they are bound to be stuck with, cerebral, witty and warm, they are what all those “generation x” garage bands of the 90’s could have been if only they had possessed some self awareness and a sense of humour. 

In true Wine Cellar style, Tiny Ruins (Hollie Fullbrook) had to wait for one of the members of Artisan Guns to replace her on door duties before she could start setting up for her performance. This extended change over gave me an opportunity to queue for the one men’s toilet available and check out the newly re-furbished bar. Whilst it looks more open and cleaner it has reduced the beer options to two choices or bottles. For a pint drinker this is most distressing, but with a name like The Wine Cellar I'm not sure what I I was expecting beer in the first place.

  

 Tiny Ruins photo by Georgiebird

Before the show began I had no expectations, I had been persuaded to attended by a friend and when I asked “What are they like? “ the only answer offered was “Mellow”. It was Saturday night and I hadn’t been out for a while, a couple of glasses of red at home and a few quick beers during Artisan Guns set had not geared me up (or down) for “mellow”. Mentally I was prepared to listen to three songs, give them a chance, then make my excuses and go to the bar, I was fidgety and impatient. Then Hollie started singing and for the next 45 minutes I only moved when requested to by someone trying to squeeze their way to the toilet. A singing voice that is a warm soulful blanket of lazy vowels and a Joanna Newsome meets Emily Smith accent silenced the crowd for the entire set. Her unique vocal charms are enough to add depth to what could be a twee fest of singer-songwriter self indulgence. But the dark accompaniment from the band and clever lyrical journeys push this even further away from anything remotely saccharine. Alex Freer (the same Schwartzman look-a-like from Artisan Guns) dispensed with his Monkees impression, and sat still and controlled occasionally keeping time on tambourine and bass drum or, with the help of the bands beautiful and subtle bassist, built atmosphere and added darker, deeper shades with the marching bass drum by his side.

References to Southland and road trips conjured up images of some the stunning scenery New Zealand has in abundance whilst references to the true stories of a South American priest’s ballooning exploits and ballet dancing traffic cops in Eastern Europe reveal a taste for the absurd and an eye for the inspiring and comic moments often missed in a world filled with news of tragedy and disaster.

Beautiful, distracting and charming, from the first note to the last my initial fears of being bored by mellowness were banished and replaced by the involuntary, and possibly gormless grin of a person completely transfixed. I was so distracted that my beer remained almost untouched until the end, a rare achievement indeed!   

Check out Tiny Ruins here: www.tinyruins.com

Check out Artisan Guns here: www.artisanguns.com

 More on The Wine Cellar here: http://www.viewauckland.co.nz/pubsandbars/wine-cellar-review-58843.html 

Burqas, niqabs et la Terreur.

The French government are at risk of scoring a terrible own goal with this week’s ban on the wearing of the niqab and burqa in public. Their notion of laïcité, seems to have developed into an altogether greater beast over the last few decades. The original belief in the separation of church and state ran both ways. Religion could not influence governmental practice and government could not influence religious practice (as long as it operated within the law). In 1989 the focus moved from the influence of religion itself to the influence of individual’s religious beliefs as restrictions on overt religious symbols being worn in public schools were brought in. This week’s ban is a result of that ideological shift and shows a growing tendency for the government to focus on one side of the secularist argument whilst ignoring the religious freedoms the same argument is designed to defend. France is a secular country and so those within its borders should abide by secular laws, and whilst secularism is worthy of defence these sort of reactionary laws have more in common with religious doctrine then true secularism.

The question asked by all of this is can you force someone to be free? The French should have a clearer understanding of the answer than most thanks to the “enlightened” behaviour of Robespierre and his unsuccessful attempts to guillotine everyone to freedom during his reign of terror. So, will forcing people to disregard their religious dress make them freer? Will it make them more accepting of secular notions of religious and irreligious tolerance? Will it make them more French? The short answer is no, if anything it risks breeding resentment amongst the minority who feel that they are having other peoples beliefs imposed on them without just cause.

The other end of argument is that the burqa is used to oppress women and this is by no means an invalid point. The use of clothing and rituals to restrict women under the guise of religion is a hateful act and one that should not be tolerated, but can the French government claim to know the inner thoughts and desires of every woman who puts on a full face veil in their country? The choice to wear this type of religious clothing comes from one of two places, the individual or their immediate community/family and this ban does nothing to confront the underlying reasons women have for wearing it. The paradox is that far from freeing women from their textile bondage the law restricts the personal freedoms of those who chose to wear the veil and risks making house bound prisoners out of those who are forced to do so.  Not a desirable outcome for either party.

The only way to influence people’s personal freedoms is by offering choices, the variety of choices only a free, secular society can really offer. To force beliefs on people is counterproductive and often has the affect of making martyrs out of behaviour which would otherwise have faded naturally over the course of time. With an estimated 2000 women wearing the burqa or niqab in a country with a Muslim population of 7 million and an overall population of almost 70 million this is not a mainstream trend or one on the rise. The low numbers also mean a more pragmatic approach may have been to encourage the wider Islamic community to confront the issue of female oppression from within and so influence the minority without the need for ineffectual and inflammatory legislation.  

By passing this law the French government have not only gone against the secularist notion of neutrality towards religious practice but have opted for the altogether more dangerous notion that the government knows best. At the same time they have made a public martyr out of an already unpopular and declining cultural phenomenon which risks transforming this symbol of female imprisonment into a totem for the religious and personal freedoms of a far wider community. Beliefs cannot be legislated out of existence; they must die a natural death or we risk injecting them with new life and prolonging the suffering for future generations.

Terry Jonestown Massacre

The impressively moustachioed, yet seemingly intellectually challenged pastor Terry Jones has been threatening to burn a Qur’an since last year. Finally another pastor friend of his, Wayne Sapp, has carried out the threat with Jones standing by no doubt grinning and playing with himself as the kerosene soaked pages were reduced to ashes. Jones had a fair idea of what the result of this action would be, he had already backed down from burning a Qur’an himself after being advised that it could put American lives at risk in Afghanistan and other nations with large Islamic populations. So why he thought another pastor carrying out the same act in his presence wouldn’t have the same affect is astonishingly naive or disgustingly negligent and certainly incredibly cowardly. Either way the man was complicit in an event which he knew could, and did result in the deaths of innocent people half way across the world.

As hateful a figure as Pastor Jones and Sapp cut, are they the real villains of this piece? Their knowledge of the possible outcome of their actions makes them incredibly reckless and surely lays some responsibility at their feet, however we in the West live in a world of free speech and even freedom of actions, to a point.  These freedoms have been won over centuries of struggle, both physical and verbal so should we be restricting our words and deeds to appease individuals in countries which don’t share our view of freedom?

Arguably the greatest intellectual and political leap forward occurred in Great Britain at the time of The Enlightenment. As a nation we shunned the shackles of religion and acquired a new found freedom to question, mock, ridicule and insult beliefs that previously had been deemed, well, sacred. This freedom resulted in a change of attitude, a freedom of expression and a freedom for the individual to choose their own beliefs and so their own path. No longer were people persecuted for their beliefs or their lack of. The result was a great advances for the political, philosophical and scientific landscape and so for society as a whole. Without these freedoms we would not have progressed as a nation at the speed we did. This process has been stilted by some of the more recent laws affecting freedom of speech in the UK but that is a discussion for another time, essentially the Great British public and those in many other Western nations are blessed with more freedom in speech and deed than others in the world. So, when the people of a newly formed or semi-formed democracy believe that an insult or action in a far off land which neither physically hurt nor inconvenienced anyone is an excuse to start killing innocent people it should set off alarm bells both for us in the West but also within the host country. Democracy and freedom of speech cannot exist without each other and neither can exist if insulting someone’s beliefs is a crime.

There have been two very similar, yet equally different cases to this in recent years. Firstly the publication of Salman Rushdie’s book the Satanic Verses caused such a furore amongst staunch Islamists that the Ayatollah Khomeini saw fit to issue a fatwa against the author and those involved in publishing the book. Whilst Rushdie himself went into hiding and seems to have come out of the whole affair with no lasting damage to his health or career, others weren’t so lucky. A Japanese scholar and Muslim convert Hitoshi Igarashi who translated the book into Japanese was stabbed to death in 1991 for his minor role in the books life. The Italian translator survived a similar attack the same year and the Norwegian publisher of the book barely escaped an assassination attempt a couple of years later. Not content with individuals the fatwa has also been blamed for the Sivas massacre in Turkey in 1993 where a group of radical Islamists, angered by the presence of the Turkish translator of the book, Aziz Nesin, attacked a gathering at a cultural festival in Sivas. The result was 37 people dead due to a book published five years previous.  A book which was seen to offend a god that, if you believed in him was surely far stronger and more important than the idle mockery of mere mortals.  You’d be hard pushed to find a liberally minded Westerner who would question the motives of Rushdie when writing the book. Was he deliberately taunting the Muslim world or was he merely an artist who was being subjected to threats of death for a legitimate work of literature? Either way it was clear to most that the treatment he and those around him endured was outrageous and disproportionate to the words he had written.

The next example would be the one that bridges the Rushdie/Jones controversy gap in many people’s minds. The cartoons of Mohammed printed in a Danish newspaper in 2005 caused a worldwide outcry as well as protests and death threats issued to those who had published, or who might dare to reprint them. The reason this straddles the two issues is because the cartoons were printed with a clear idea of the controversy they would provoke. The Danish paper, Jyllands-Posten, which printed them, did so deliberately to invoke a debate on the subject of self censorship in supposedly free countries due to the fear of offending people with religious beliefs. The newspaper may have been naive or trying too hard to be provocative but they certainly weren’t being racist or Islamophobic as some claimed. That said there are clearly more intelligent and less inflammatory ways to provoke such a debate.

Now we come to the current issue of Pastors Jones and Sapp. Unlike Rushdie they knew they would be stirring up controversy and possible violence when they burnt a Qur’an and unlike Jyllands-Posten they weren’t trying to start any debate on the subject of Islam. Instead they held a very one-sided mock trial and then condemned the religious amalgam of tree pulp and ink to death for “crimes”, which are as yet unspecified by the media. Apparently, less than 30 people witnessed the event yet thanks to media reports which condemned Jones and Sapp for their actions and the potential backlash, at the same time as they helped spread news of the event to parts of the world where the backlashers would be readying their weapons. So, there are clear differences between the actions of a couple of bigoted and ignorant pastors, a controversy stirring newspaper and a much celebrated writer but each of their actions has resulted in violent repercussions from the less moderate quarters of the Islamic world. Words and deeds which caused no physical harm to an individual or group have been responded to with protests, death threats and in two of the cases the murder of innocent and unconnected individuals. 

If Pastors Jones and Sapp are to be held accountable for their actions then we also need to hold the media responsible for reporting their behaviour as they clearly understood the potential offense such reports would cause. In fact they stated as much in their reports of the events that had previously only been witnessed by less than 30 people.  These questions can only be answered by the US judicial system which I strongly suspect will have nothing much to say on the matter. The bigger question is should we in the West be willing to adapt our laws on freedom of speech and action  (as we already have) or to self censor to accommodate the disproportionate reaction of a minority of religious fanatics in countries with radically different social values to us?

We have formed a legal and political system over many generations that awards us greater personal freedoms than most and we should be willing to defend it from threats within and without. Jones' and Sapp's actions are indefensible in the sense that they were deliberately inflammatory and derive from an equally bigoted and close-minded standpoint as those who murdered the UN Staff. They are however defensible in the sense that they are not illegal in the country they occurred and they didn’t directly cause harm to any of the individuals who claim offense. They are also not in any way on a par with the actions of those people who murdered the UN staff in Afghanistan.  What we should not lose sight of is the fact that we live in a society where it is not illegal to burn a religious book or to write words that might offend someone’s religious beliefs and this is not only a good thing but it has helped shape the legal and political landscape we all take advantage of. If we wish to keep these freedoms then we should be very wary of compromising them even if it means defending actions we might find distasteful in order to protect the greater liberty we all enjoy.     

365 project

It's nothing new but it's new to me. To reinvigorate my interest in photography I've decided to attempt a 365 project, taking and posting a new picture everyday for a year. The pictures will be posted on my flickr page here: http://www.flickr.com/photos/stevewheadon/sets/72157626311490716/ and I'll occasionally post my favourites up here.

Update: Citing work commitments and laziness I failed to keep up with. These are sample of some of the pics that came out of the attempt though. 

Somethings are best left unseen

 

Toured out

Chicken & Mushroom

New tour, new boots

Madman

ANZAC Hall, Featherston

Hat

"The only security of all is in a free press”

The wikileaks leaks have been, er, leaking for a while now with media outlets over the world happy to divulge any titbit of interesting information whilst also happy to condemn Julian Assange as an enemy of the US. Personally, I’ve been equally two faced in my reaction to the leaks. I was brought up to believe in the importance of the freedom of the press and free speech in a free society, but I learnt as I got older that some things are kept secret for good reason. I saw films and read books about espionage and about the intelligence battle to win the Cold War. Too much loose talk gives the Ruskies the upper hand and all that. This acceptance of secretive governments evolved from military secrets in the time of war (cold or otherwise) to include governments and government departments in peace time and to both in these times of terrorist attacks. So what if the government is telling us little white lies, it’s no doubt in our interest, after all it could put us and everyone else in the West at risk if we all knew the truth, wouldn’t it?

I assumed that as adults we all understood that governments lied to us and we were mature enough to accept it as a necessary part of living in a free society. They have to lie to protect our freedom. Then I read this quote from the White House regarding the leaks:

“Such disclosures put at risk our diplomats, intelligence professionals, and people around the world who come to the US for assistance in promoting democracy and open government. By releasing stolen and classified documents, WikiLeaks has put at risk not only the cause of human rights but also the lives and work of these individuals.”

Most of it struck me as serious and worrying, people’s lives are being put at risk just because someone wants to shout “I know something you don’t know!” over the internet, we must take this seriously. But what really stood out was the line about promoting “democracy and open government.” It made me chuckle, the irony of a government statement claiming that telling the truth was putting at risk the countries ability to promote the value of telling the truth. Then I thought back to my initial reaction to the leaks. When had I started to believe it was acceptable for democratic governments to hide the truth from their voters? I pondered this for a little while and read a few of the leaks.

A fair number of them seemed harmless enough, little white lies or hidden truths to make diplomatic encounters easier. In fact many of them seemed like the kind of thing the US would be happy to divulge if they didn’t feel the need to play the diplomacy game. A bit like someone smelly overhearing you referring to them as “Stinky Joe” behind their back, yes it’s embarrassing but in the end they will either wash more often or they won’t talk to you again, either way you won’t have to smell them anymore.  Others were less harmless and showed the true extent of America’s influence on other nations. For most this isn’t news but it makes interesting reading to see how diplomats interact with each other.

It was then that I remembered this quote by former President of the United States of America, Thomas Jefferson:

"The only security of all is in a free press. The force of public opinion cannot be resisted when permitted freely to be expressed. The agitation it produces must be submitted to. It is necessary, to keep the waters pure." 

It was these words that reminded me of my youthful beliefs in the importance of a free press and it was these words that brought me full circle back to those beliefs. My argument that we were mature enough to accept government lies was the wrong way around. We’re mature enough to accept the truth so governments should stop patronising us.

Governments demand our loyalty and obedience but forget that it is the people who should be demanding the governments to be honest and faithful with the powers we have granted them. The whole nature of democracy relies on openness, without knowing the truth how can we make informed decisions when we reach the voting booth? Governmental secrets essentially hold the electorate to ransom, they undermine the very essence of democracy and threaten our personal and social freedoms.

This is not on the scale that many countries suffer by any means, we are lucky in the West to live in the most open societies there are but we’re moving away from this openness all the time. The White House statement shows the full extent to which hiding the truth has become acceptable. At no point did the US government accept the notion that hiding the truth might be undermining their ability to spread the idea of open, democratic societies around the world. No, that was being undermined by those exposing the truths not by those truths being hidden in the first place.

We don’t live in a utopia where people can be trusted to do the right thing all the time, we don’t live in a society where the right thing is always the most popular thing either but we do live in a world where it has become the norm to lie about the smallest of things for fear of being misrepresented or of upsetting people. The media holds some blame but the liars hold the most as the media would have a lot less to expose if lying wasn’t so endemic in our system of “open” government. Removing the scandal of lies from a story would result in less excitable reactions from the general public and media.  “We are going to invade Iraq because we want to establish a platform for western influence in the oil rich region to protect our oil supply for future generations” would have not sat much better with the electorate than reasons given for the invasion of Iraq but it certainly wouldn’t have sat worse once it was exposed that we had been lied to. The lies make the scandal, with the truth there is no scandal just tough choices and open and honest debate.  

We must now sit and wait to see how the world deals with the man at the centre of this whole affair. Assange is at the vanguard of a new age of the press and the free flow of information. He didn’t steal the documents but he did publish them, has he committed a crime and if so isn’t every other media outlet that published the cables equally guilty? Does freedom of the press extend beyond US borders or do those rights only exist if the information stays within sanctioned media outlets? If so can that truly be seen as free?  More questions keep cropping up all the time and the answers won’t come for some time, if at all. All we know for sure is that the way the press works has changed for good and now we must wait to see if the world can catch up.

How to motivate a student

Sometime in 1998 a number of signs went up around the campus of my university. The signs called for action, or inaction to be more precise. A student sit in protest was being organised to make clear the population’s disgust at the Labour government’s plan to abolish student grants. The problem was that most students didn’t feel that much disgust and what disgust they did feel was masked by the fact that we had our grants already and no-one was planning to take them away from us. The real victims were the future generations of students who were either too busy studying for their A Levels or too young and uninterested to know what was going on.   A few days after the posters went up and were duly ignored an addition was made; “£1 a pint from 2pm to 4pm”. We were now interested.

In my teens I was an idealist, I wanted to go to Uni, grow my hair long and fight “the man”.  I had visions of mass movements, student sit ins and hippy girls with free love on their minds. By the time I got to King Alfred’s College, Winchester I still had the visions of hippy girls with free love on their minds whilst the other thoughts had drifted back into a section of my mind labelled “Can’t be arsed.” It wasn’t that I’d stopped caring about the world, more that the world seemed to be getting on ok. In September 1997 the UK was suffering from mixed emotions. The excitement of New Labour had yet to fade and the mass hysteria over the death of Princess Diana was only just beginning.  I was neither much of a Labour supporter nor caught up in the death of Diana, and nor were most of my peers. We were doing what any sensible adolescent does when there is no visible threat to their way of life, we were getting drunk.  So when the grant issue came around our revolutionary zeal had been drowned by a mix of snakebite and black and hippy girls with free love on their minds.

Skip forward to 2010 and the Conservative government are back in, student funding is back on the agenda and the city of London is alight with protest. In 1998 grants went and in 2006 tuition fees were introduced in without too much of a protest. In contrast this year’s announcement of a planned rise in tuition fees from a cap of £3000 a year to a cap of £9000 a year has caused a shit storm that is unlikely to calm quickly. Why is the situation so different to that in 1998 and 2006?

As implied above I’m more of a mental protester, I like the romance of it all but rarely find the energy or enthusiasm to divert from my daily activities to take part. Only once have I felt so strongly about a situation to muster the energy and will to do so. On 15^th February 2003 I hoped on a bus outside the Bell Inn on Walcot St. Bath and travelled to the capital for the largest anti war march the city had seen. I picked it carefully, I have grown cynical of direct action and of most mass movements over the years and didn’t want to align myself with a cause just because I was angry, I wanted to really know why I was there. My feelings were that two fold; the reasons for war we, the public, had been given were lies or distortions of the truth and therefore the government had no right to order our troops into battle and the long held belief that we were the good guys and the good guys never fired first. I felt we only had one opportunity; I was not prepared to protest once the invasion got under way as I believed a half finished war leaves greater dangers in the world than a one that, whilst unjustified, reaches a definite conclusion. In the end we seem to have been left with something in the middle.

The day was an experience I’ll never forget, not least because being amongst that many people is overwhelming in itself but also because it gave me an insight into the workings of mass demonstrations. Amongst the anti-war banners there were also related and not so related banners being handed out to anyone who would take them. The Free Palestine movement, the Socialist workers party, various anarchist movements and even a couple of anti-capitalists were all there handing out banners to people who looked too keen to look like they cared about something to bother reading them first. One of the most blatantly opportunistic banner pushers of the day was The Mirror who had printed thousands reading simply “Stop the War” with their logo emblazed above.  These were being handed out all over the place and were the most easily recognised banners in the crowd, not least due to their numbers and conformity but also due to bright red background their logo is printed on.

After the invasion of Iraq a little more of my naivety dropped away, I realised that the invasion was already inevitable by the time we took to the streets and that mass protest is relatively easy for governments to ignore when it the message is diluted by other causes. As far as the country was concerned I was in a minority. The nation had rediscovered its taste for protest and over the next seven years they became even more popular and often more violent. The G8 and G20 protests looked like they were becoming more of a day out for the clubless football hooligan than the starting point of a serious debate about current global economics. The number of groups involved in these protests blurred the water so much it was impossible to work out what they wanted. Anarchists have long been stereotyped as directionless and disorganised rather than a serious left wing movement based on an agreed manifesto. These protests only helped fuel these stereotypes as they seemed to lack any clarity and direction.

The rebirth of protest coincided with the rise of scepticism. Injustices, perceived or real, perpetrated by governments in the western world has caused anger and confusion for many. Information on supposed conspiracies and more provable atrocities spread by the internet has empowered a generation to believe they know more about what is going on than the government would like them to. The collapse of the global financial sector has shed light on the truth that the world leaders aren’t infallible and all knowing, but flawed and human and as such often wrong.  All these feelings have helped forge an angry generation.

People are angrier now than they were in 1997, and with good reason. The world is a more dangerous place then it was back then. I’m not just referring to the threat of terrorism but financially it is more dangerous, hedge funds are trimming themselves and the river of endless credit is suffering a drought. All pretty scary, but all solvable. The democratic process was designed to give people a voice, an opportunity to air their concerns and do something about them. That voice was not so much stolen but certainly hushed on May 12^th 2010 when Nick Clegg, leader of the Liberal Democrats announced his party would form a coalition with their ideological enemies the Conservatives.

The one power we have in a democracy is to vote for our elected representative. On 6^th May 2010 that’s what 29,691,780 people in the UK did. 10,703,754 of them for the Conservatives, 8,609,527 for Labour and 6,836,824 for Liberal democrats. Due to the ideological leanings of the separate parties it could easily be argued that around 15,500,000 people voted against the current Conservatives government, that’s not including the three and half million who voted for other minor parties. So when the Liberal Democrats decided to form the coalition there were a fair number in the country that felt hard done by. Not only was a party taking power on an incredibly slender majority but almost seven million people, myself included,  felt like they had just had their democratic right to be heard ignored. The questions arose were the Lib Dems throwing away their ideological beliefs for a chance at power or had they figured it would be easier to change the system from within? After just five months in office the truth sadly seems to be the former.  The move by the Liberal Democrats to form the coalition put a government in power which is politically and ideologically disconnected with a majority of the electorate. As if to exacerbate this disconnection the very same government has charged itself, through a mix of economic necessity and ideology, with the job of making some of the most drastic economic cuts the country has ever seen.

So it is with a renewed scepticism of the political process and ever increasing anger and fear of the ruling elite that the true heirs to ideological protests of the past have taken to the streets of London. No longer are students merely content with drinking the bar dry but are highly politicised and motivated by the knowledge that a life in debt to the government is not an enviable one.  The protester numbers themselves are not as big yet as those of the anti-war movement or the G20 but the support and anger for them from the working and middle classes seem to be greater than either. Their strongest weapon and their most likely downfall is the support that they are receiving from non-students. As the protests grow their greatest challenge will be keeping the message clear and un-muddied by the hundreds of other issues currently leaving people feeling disenfranchised. If they can manage this in the same way the poll tax protesters did in 1990 they may achieve some sort of victory, if not then they risk becoming another violent curiosity like the G8 protests which whilst they are condemned, seem to be mostly ignored by those in power.

So the quiet years are over as it seems a winter of discontent is upon us and where was I when all this began? Sitting in a half full bar ignoring the slogans and information around me and trying to drink as much as I could before the prices went back up to £2 at 4pm.