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Just like the 80’s

December 3rd, 2010 · Posted by Skuds in Life/Politics · No Comments · Life, Politics

I have mixed feelings about the 80s.  I know that dreadful things happened and the seeds were sown for a lot of today’s problems but personally I really enjoyed that time.   I was lucky enough to be in what turned out to be a secure job that paid OK, I had no health problems and used none of my local council’s (Wandsworth) services.  I was properly independent: nobody depended on me and I depended on nobody else. And I enjoyed the music.

I knew what was going on and was often active in going out to protest about it.  Protesting was fun: occupying the moral high ground, being part of a group, baiting the Tories.  Quite possibly I would not be involved in politics now if there hadn’t been quite so much to get angry about back in the 80s.

A lot of what is going on now reminds me of the 80s.  I am not surprised that this is happening,  but I’ll admit that I am surprised it has happened so quickly.Only a few months into the new government and we have more demonstrations than you can shake a stick at – though the police are doing their best to shake their sticks at as many protestors as possible.  And now we have the police going undercover to gather information.  It really is like the 80s all over again.

The biggest difference now is how easy it is to communicate.  With Facebook and Twitter  you can have an event with 1000s of people organised at a day’s notice, and get real-time information on it as half the people there have some sort of smart phone with 3G internet.

The ubiquity of these services could also mean that more people get drawn into demonstrations: those not politicallty active in the traditional sense.   In the past you may have been opposed to, say, apartheid, but to even know about anti-apartheid events you had to be involved in one of the activist groups, or some other political organisation, or subscribe to or seek out activist literature and so many of the events had the same people there.

Now it is just so easy to find that there are demonstrations planned this weekend in all the major cities targeting Vodafone, Topshop, Miss Selfridges and others.  I know from the mail I received during the election campaign that a lot of people are really angry about the injustice of tax avoidance and huge banking bonuses – and that was before public service cuts, VAT rises, tuition fee increases and the rest came along.

I don’t know of anything major in Crawley this weekend – except a protest at the youth club on Saturday morning – and don’t really feel up to a trip to Brighton or London, but who knows?  Maybe this think will grow to the extent that we do have a crowd protesting in the shops here before long.   I will keep an eye on the map here where all the planned action is displayed.  Or maybe I should just start one myself?

It makes you wonder why the police bother with all these undercover infiltrators when they could just sit at home and look on the internet.

If anybody is going along at the weekend, or is going to the next student demonstration, why not read this first?  It is full of handy tips to avoid persecution by the police.

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