UPRISINGS & APATHY: WHERE WILL YOU BE HIDING WHEN THE STORM BREAKS?

"All cards are marked

All fates will colide

The 'truth' is the truth

Or the truth is surely a lie?

Get back in your shelter

If you can't come down off the fence.

And one more question...

Where will you be hiding when the storm breaks..."

Never a truer word as spoken by Einstein

I highlight the lyrics above (last line tweaked from past to future tense!) from the brilliant hit song by 80's rock band, The Alarm because following weeks of demonstration - and with total clusterfruck of a British Prime Minister, Boris de Pfeffel Johnson, finally found by the Supreme Court to have illegally 'prorogued' parliament - this weekend's 250th anniversary of the biggest Uprising in the history of my own little island of birth, the British Crown Dependency Tax Haven of Jersey, really got me to thinking about why it is that political apathy is such a British curse?

When I say 'political' apathy I mean the undeniable reality that, for all the scenes of we hundreds of thousands who are willing to use our right to protest - such as shown in the 'prorogation' scandal, the vast majority in the UK - almost the entire adult population on Jersey - still just moan away but do nothing that is ever likely to force positive change. Even worse, perhaps, shrug and claim 'it's nothing I can do anything about'. 

Now let's spell this out straightaway. 

Be it here on the UK mainland or Crown Dependency Jersey this is, of course, precisely what the Establishment want: for it is also precisely what allows them to hang on to power. I write this blog not to just flag all of this up again; but rather in the hope that some readers may offer some new insights to both why this is so even when the 'truth' is staring people in the face. 

Even more importantly perhaps as to ask how readers think this might be remedied when everything also appears to have been tried?

Yours truly at the anti-GST rally and petition 2007? - Probably the biggest in Jersey's history

Let me drill down a bit further here. During my two terms as a Left-wing politician on Jersey prior to moving to Europe and then here in the UK, I used the slogan which still adorns my new blog today - "If you don't do politics - politics will do you!" The thinking behind its coining was simple.

People would moan relentlessly to me as a politician -day in/day out - about what was wrong regarding both political incompetence and even blatant abuse of office. About Judicial corruption (Jersey's speciality) likewise and all maner of other things from educational failings to rip-off prices of everything from fruit and veg to fuel and housing. 

Yet 9 out of 10 - particularly after the huge but unsuccessful campaign pictured above of which I helped organise - would either sink back in to apathy - unable or unwilling to take the next step of direct confrontation with the tax's government creators. Or even worse some might argue become yet another of the anonymous keyboard warriors posturing on the internet. We should do this! We will do this! They will all be out at the next election! We must take to the streets! Blah! Blah! Blah! Ad infinitum. 

Anonymous keyboard warriors - At least it's better than Trolling I suppose?

If the numbers writing this crap on Facebook, Twitter and on-line comment sections had transcended in to real action meetings would have been packed; rallys/protests likewise - the 'flaming torches' really having been lit. But they were not of course. And nothing changed. The 'If you don't do politics - politics will do you!' was about trying to hammer this truth home - not least that politics isn't just for observing. 

It was all as frustrating as it was depressing. Adults were effectively abandoning their children's futures not just their own - yet on it went. 

Perhaps the perfect example of this also exists in Jersey. For here, even faced with the expose of decades of judicial/political failings and calculated cover-ups underlying the Haut de la Garenne child abuse scandal on a truly horrific scale more than a decade on - and with a £24 million inquiry behind us to boot nothing - absolutely nothing - has changed. 

Yes, there were meetings, leafletting, propositions, we held protests - but nothing like the numbers that should have attended these ever did. The subsequent Independent Care Inquiry public sessions were actually regularly like the Marie Celeste. 

And the reason I suggest should be a warning to us all. 

Former SIO Lenny Harper - A hero to the Haut de la Garenne victims

Because beyond argument the Apathetics and the Cowards who we must conclude make up the vast majority had generally done nothing while those who had stood up against the injustice and corruption were then either picked off one-by-one (see image above) by the same long-entrenched reactionary forces behind the corruption - smeared, falsely ridiculed and even forced from Office. 

Or were simply isolated and left as a 'token' dissenting voice for the sake of external appearances - far easier now to dismiss as mere 'conspiracy theorists': I mean every Potemkin democracy needs a lone political dissident or two don't you know! 'Death without assassination' for those who would rock the Establishment boat - it's the essence of The Jersey Way, let me make clear. It helps keep the fear going. And this maybe is the true core of it all?

Can the UK with its 66 million population really be little different I ask when you consider the mass political apathy here?

A very heartening positive has occurred in recent weeks it is true. This being so many young people especially taking to the UK streets for the Global Climate Strike and Extinction Rebellion protests. Just as was the hugely improved youth turnout at the UK election of 2017 inspired by Jeremy Corbyn. 

It has likewise also recently been reported that many scores of thousands more young people are now registering to vote again in the face of Barking Boris' attempt to push us over the No Deal Brexit cliff; all aided and abetted of course by the handful of billionaire far-right parasites who control almost all of the UK's 'old media' newspapers. Could two of our elite Boris-istas really lease a lovely little Channel Island just off Sark? Surely not...

Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn addresses London Climate Strike rally

But these hopeful flickerings cannot in truth help but be tempered by sobering past experience. There really must remain the worry I suggest that so many of these young people will, after the fun day 'at the protests' and being allowed 'to be a rebel' simply return to school with their teachers; go back to the deliberate neo-liberal distractions of their mobiles, this week's fashion and 'snap-chat' etc. 

In reality it would also be disingenuous of me not to admit that the figures are also still just the tip of the iceberg of what is actually needed to make the 'could-be world' that we of a 21st Socialism /Green disposition know is needed a reality. Nevertheless I accept that we activists must hold to hope if only to avoid ending up joining the ranks of the living dead I described earlier.

What is nevertheless so hard to understand for so many like me who are politically active and who do do our best to engage and stir the political consciousness of the 'Apathetics' - young and old - remains the said staggering numbers. For I repeat - I genuinely believe that you really can only put so much down to so-called 'false consciousness' when not just activists but the cold, hard reality of poverty, depression and repression is pushing in on your quality of life from all sides?

Falsely conscious or just indifferent?

Just consider a moment to get this in final perspective. Back in 2017, and regardless of the surge of young people ignoring the relentless right-wing media lies to vote for Jeremy Corbyn's Labour anyway, there were still only 6% of the richest in the UK who stated they did not support a particular party. Then compare that with the staggering 24% of the poorest fifth who stated the same. 

And right now, even as I write, we hear that (according to the Electoral Commission) there are allegedly around 9 million people still not 'correctly' registered to vote! What will that mean and how the hell did it happen? Deliberate government ploy or mass clusterfruck - I wonder?

A final point. Some 15 years ago whilst in Copan, Honduras I shared a few drinks with a university lecturer who claimed there was Western research that suggested - in stark contrast to Latin America it must be said - that some 7 out of 10 adults would never challenge the authority of what I would term here the Establishment. 

If this was correct - and from my own experience I have to admit that I can easily accept the figure - what does this really tell us about our modern society? Does 'society' now even exist I ask at the risk of sounding like the Tin Lady, Margaret Thatcher herself?

So here's the kicker. The six million dollar question...

The events of 'Reform Day' are far more important historically than the so-called 'Battle of Jersey'

At the beginning of this post I mentioned the Jersey Uprising of September 28th 1769 (now finally recognised as a consequence of my 2012 proposition as 'Reform Day'). 

This was when hundreds-upon-hundreds of starving and angry Islanders on Jersey finally snapped and stormed the Royal Court to try and put an end to Establishment corruption led by the Office of the Bailiff and his Royal Court.  The key point in mentioning this event  is that those who took their protest 'to the very hilt' that day actually faced not just arrest or a fine - but the real possibility of being sentenced to death by hanging. 

Indeed, this is what 'acting' Bailiff Lempriere wanted.

By contrast those who should but fail to protest today, be it here on the UK mainland or Crown Dependency Jersey itself, can thankfully face no such ultimate punishment. So what I now ask readers has really happened to 'society' over those 250 years that has turned so many otherwise good and decent but cynically exploited men and women in to dormice? 

What do we really fear? Why perhaps, it must also be considered, don't so many even care about the plight of others even worse off and injustice generally enough to make a stand?

Answers on a Postcard to Dystopia. Or better by far in a comment to this blog...

Keep The Faith