Days like these

23. 16th October 2025

Numerous times during the 7 years since I committed to being “an activist” I’ve felt confused, conflicted, paralysed by the difficulty of trying to decide what was best to do; where best, surrounded by an ever-proliferating array of “bash-a-rat” challenges, to put my energy; and indeed, where best to encourage others to put theirs. I’ve always been aware of the complications presented to a broad progressive movement which has generated so many creative and energetic groups and organisations, each with differing priorities. How do we ensure that we don’t compete or waste limited resources? How do we guard against self-centredness? How can we be enabled to join forces in the right projects and at the right times? I’m convinced of the value of diversity and self-organisation and its record of  productivity at the same time as being aware of the consequent obstacles  to genuine effectiveness.

There have also been times over the years when it seemed perfectly clear to me what needed to be done. With many people and groups trying to achieve basically the same thing in different ways, it’s helpful sometimes to be able to stand back and identify exactly the right place to be pushing (or pulling), as hard as possible, all together, to make a wall come tumbling down. The climate protest campaign in London at Easter 2019 was one of those moments. So, I think, was the general election in 2024.(In the first example it felt like a wall came down, although it’s been slowly rebuilt since; in the second, it turned out that behind the first wall was a second wall a bit higher and thicker, painted a different colour. Progress of sorts, I suppose).

To me, the last couple of months has felt like a similar time. For all that there are always too many demands on the energies of a progressive activist, calling out like a crowd of enthusiastic children each with a hand raised, it’s seemed easy to spot the one with its hand raised highest: the call to support / defend Palestine and very specifically to join the protests against the proscription of the Palestine Action group. It’s not that this hand was the most ‘deserving’ of attention; it’s that the cause of a Free Palestine and the objection to our government deciding to call a a group of people holding up cardboard placards “terrorists” at the same time as supplying the Israeli armed forces with weapons to help them keep terrorising and slaughtering Palestinians en masse presented the right opportunity to push together; a place where we might get enough force and leverage to bring a wall down.

As a ‘moment’ in public / political consciousness – which continues notwithstanding the theatrics of world “leaders” now declaring that they have brought an end to what they like to call a ‘conflict’ (although it’s really a prolonged period of deliberate oppression, destruction and abuse) despite having variously encouraged, enabled and even promoted it for the last 2 years and much longer before –  the campaign against proscribing Palestine Action has seemed to represent the very obvious key pressure point at which activists might most usefully push against the wall of ignorance, lies, injustice, oppression and downright evil being reinforced daily almost everywhere you look.

Some while ago a friend of mine in the climate protest movement described to me the dilemma she felt about whether to put her energies into protesting about the failure to address the climate crisis or against the atrocities in Gaza.Thinking about it at the time helped me realise how the two ‘issues’ and several other major ‘issues’ of the time – like immigration, the wealth-poverty gap and of course war – were linked fundamentally not by practical or mechanical considerations (as in refugees from war / climate breakdown / poverty / oppression flee to richer / safer countries where they become a strain on existing resources and where ‘native’ people feel threatened by them) but by a cluster of very destructive tendencies and dynamics which is driving all of these ‘issues’ or crises – namely the aforementioned ignorance, lies, injustice, oppression and downright evil.

Looking back now over the last seven years I find it increasingly hard to understand why people in the climate protest movement claimed so loudly that our demands were nothing to do with politics. Of course I understand what this was meant to achieve but I think the strategy failed because it ignored the basic truth that you obviously can’t fix the climate crisis without adopting left of centre political positions on numerous other social, geopolitical and economic ‘issues’. The strategy made us  seem incoherent and dishonest (just like the Labour government does right now) and made it easier for people who didn’t want to listen to the uncomfortable realities we were presenting to bury their heads in a toxic mound of denial, prejudice, selfishness and rationalisation so that they could ignore the crisis and carry on with their ‘normal’ lives.

Interestingly, I doubt whether my friend would feel the same inner conflict now; and I’m also pretty sure that most people in the climate protest movement have, like me, moved way past claiming  that we are somehow ‘beyond politics’. Although this denotes that we have reached a more difficult and indeed critical point, I think the clarity is helpful. It offers all of us on the progressive side of things the opportunity to recognise that we are all indeed on the same “side” because all of the  ‘issues’ which we prioritise differently are intrinsically linked and that we had best work together to combat the well-resourced, well-organised forces of evil (within whose ranks division, diversion and in-fighting are notably less apparent) that we are up against. If we needed any wake-up call to this then I should have thought that Tommy Robinson’s recent march of right wing racist flag-waving “patriots’” or the sickening displays of international toadying to Trump at forums like the UN and at the announcement of the Israeli/Palestine ‘peace deal’ where he cheerfully claimed the decimation of Gaza as a lucrative  business opportunity for his son-in-law would have done the trick. But if not, never mind, there will be more; the alarm is on an endless snooze setting. You can’t turn if off although eventually you may stop hearing it.

Anyway, back to protesting the proscription of Palestine Action. This seems as brazen an assault upon notions of  justice, freedom of speech and the simple truth as to put it up there with the antics of Trump, Farage and Robinson or Hans Christian Anderson’s Emperor with a new cloak, and as such it seems to me the right place to push; because frankly if it doesn’t piss you off that the  government is committing huge resources to arresting thousands of people for holding up cardboard signs at the same time as being thoroughly complicit in the genocide to which those people are trying to draw attention through their protests AND then seeking to blame them for diverting police attention from real terrorist threats, then I don’t know what will piss you off. For me, choosing to hold one of the signs and sit down with it to wait to be arrested was as obviously the right thing to do as was sitting on Lambeth Bridge to await my first arrest 7 years ago.

But the thing is that this time I didn’t do it. I went through a similar tortuous process to the one I had gone through then – an extended exhausting  wrestle between conscience and reason on one side, fear and short-term self-interest on the other side, but the result was different. I didn’t do the right thing. I let the straightforward fear of the implications of having the word “terrorist” associated with my criminal record, and its theoretical and (I think) unlikely impact upon my ability to get out of this Godforsaken country into Europe whenever I feel like it (and I often do feel like it) win over, and instead of sitting quietly with a sign declaring my truth I chose, on the same day, to accompany thousands of other people on a loud Free Palestine march which got less than a tenth of the media attention that the placard protest got. Then I went to Parliament Square to sit with some of my friends who had chosen to do the right thing and witnessed them being carried or in some cases dragged away by police. I also took a bit of time off from that occasionally to join in with the large crowd of people (mostly much younger than me and therefore with more excuse to exclude themselves from the arrestable action) in verbally haranguing the police. (This may or may not have been a good thing to do, I’m not sure, but it made me feel a bit better).

Around the time of this small personal internal drama I found myself thinking that the experience might have a detrimental effect upon my motivation to feel activated to do anything much. I felt ashamed and I feared a literal demoralisation. In fact that doesn’t seem to have been the case and if anything I’ve felt a bit more motivated since to put energy into things that I feel are ‘right’ things to do and that I AM willing to do.  The guilt and shame hasn’t gone away but they are accompanied by a sense of doing what feels feasible in order to make amends; and that feels helpful, to me if not to anyone else. I don’t think the spiritual uplift comes just from the ‘making amends’ actually: I also have an inner experience that I am responding – at least in some ways that I feel willing to even if not in every way that I could and should – to the harm and abuse  that I feel is being done quite deliberately and mindfully to me and to my environment; and that too feels psychologically helpful and even necessary.

Who knows where exactly that leaves me (or you, if you’ve managed to follow the ramble above). I suppose anyway that it leaves me as an activist. Not because I’m good or noble in any way, but because it seems necessary for my own inner well-being. I think that doing less than this would feel intolerable. I’m aware in saying this that I sometimes (often) believe that just doing what feels like ‘my bit’ rather than everything I could and should do could result in more harm than good; in other words that we may avoid confronting the truth about how bad things are by making token gestures – a bit like thinking that you are effectively combatting the climate crisis by re-cycling your yoghurt pots. But for now at least, that’s how it is.

It does occur to me to think that if everyone did something like their ‘bit’ then perhaps we could get what we wanted and needed without anybody having to end up going through the repeated humiliation of being arrested for doing the right thing and ending up with a criminal record which hampers their ability to get a job / insurance / the right to travel / do something more entertaining with their free time etc. If we were all ‘activists’ to the extent that  we were actively doing the things that we could – consistent with maintaining a reasonably balanced life, employment, leisure, a decent social and family life etc –  to promote what we think is right and desirable and to challenge what we think is wrong and deplorable, then we wouldn’t have to hang a few martyrs out to dry and we’d all be happier and better off. I’m aware that might just be me trying to assuage my feelings of guilt by implicating others, but nevertheless it feels a bit true: if there had been 100,000 rather than 1,000 people in Parliament Square on the day on question, then I’d have been sitting down with my sign and we would all have been safe.

Activists don’t have to be protestors either. They can be people who are just actively seeking to build the kind of world they want by doing good stuff in their communities, with their neighbours, or in nature, or in political parties, or in the places where they work or take their leisure. I might not be correct about where and how is the right place to push right now – it’s a matter of opinion – but I’m pretty sure I’m correct in believing that we need all of us who think of themselves as “on our side”, or at least most of us (or maybe even just a lot more of us) to be active and to be prepared to collaborate in working out when and how to all push together. Talking of walls, as I was earlier, I recall the TV pictures from about 35 years ago which showed a few people chipping away at the top of the Berlin Wall. We all know that it didn’t come down in the end just because of the few of them that attracted the TV cameras. It came down through the collective endeavour of a great number of people with different individual characters and priorities who all wanted the same very important thing.

It’s also worth mentioning that not all the activists are on our side. Whilst we wait and hope, as we tend to do, for the governments we elect to do the things we hoped that they would do, the people on the other side like Robinson and his bands of thugs or Farage and his or Trump and his get busy taking seats on councils and school boards  or posting on social media or phoning radio stations or handing out leaflets to influenceable people or standing outside refugee hotels threatening to burn them down. They are activists too, remember, and they seem to be winning right now. They have leaders of whom people are taking notice. They may seem repulsive to you and me but maybe something about their willingness (in contrast to our Prime Minister, for instance) to stand up for what they want and believe in, and to say it whether or not it’s considered “ok” or  “safe” or politically wise or appropriate in the circumstances, is quite compelling to their followers. 

Another thing I did to assuage my guilt about the Parliament Square event was to enjoy, a week later, a ‘Free Palestine’ concert in Shepherds Bush put on by Billy Bragg and friends. Although my ticket money was going to a Gaza relief fund (maybe ultimately to Jarred Kushner now, who knows?) and I felt I was being supportive of the cause, I was essentially doing this for myself (although I suppose it’s undeniable that all of us there will have felt lifted and re-moralised / re-activated  by the palpable feeling of collective solidarity and determination). Although we all know that nobody is coming to save us, the longing for hero saviours seems unavoidable and it was great to see a couple of startlingly talented and energetic youngsters performing alongside everlasting stalwart Billy and the hugely enjoyable Reverend and the Makers, so watch out for Antony Szmierek ( a kind of Streets update) and Jamie Webster, who did a version of Dylan’s ‘Masters of War’ that would make your hair stand on end. Anyway, last words for now from Billy’s title song, a simple call to activism: “Wearing badges is not enough in days like these”.