I listened to this after Charlie Kirk’s death, after George’s interview and wondered how can we help?
I think the way ordinary people can help change this culture is through visualising what it is they want to represent see and restore.
A new political party could be called The Franchise.
What’s missing that’s what’s been lost in the last forty years because we’ve run the country as an unaccountable supply chain rather than a country: hence so many harms: Infected blood, Stephen Lawrence, precarious jobs, privatisation of housing, denial of access to employment, deaths in custody, deaths in transit, post office, hillsborough, Windrush, Grenfell, Waspie women, sewage etc etc
The aesthetics of the supply chain culture are dark and dystopian as a norm and it’s like to assert its power in the authoritarian lock down it wants it will own town centre buildings and leave them empty so it adds to the picture it’s creating a feudal picture in the heart of all of our city centres that nurtures crime, nurtures harm and homelessness in its doorways because it’s offshore with a permanent income from all the assets it owns including all the council houses it bought up and now rents out at ten times a fair rent.
Parliament grew out of all our histories and should be brought back into a call and response with all of the neighbourhoods, towns, villages, parishes, counties, districts, boroughs, regions: reconstruct it rehabilitate it as a modern, accessible place that reflects us all and our histories visually on the walls, corridors of parliamentary offices that people work in and walk through every day: reduce bureaucracy and focus on the purpose of democratising our country.
When we think about free speech the Oxford and Cambridge versions of understanding who Charlie Kirk was I’d say one thing- Cambridge as an institution turned up for inclusion while I’d say that Oxford is a massive gesture machine where it struck me that the Charlie Kirk team had done masses of prep and networking: it felt like a scene from the film the social network: it seemed like there were quite a lot of his friends controlling the space (a kind of very well prepared almost pre-loaded space) while Cambridge seemed freer, uncolonised, if you like and that was the reason that Cambridge could land it’s punch so yes it’s right Charlie Kirk was the kind of evangelical brand we all know so well in the UK: the embedded post war Jehovah’s and American churches who used to do genealogy and who hide in plain sight in every UK neighbourhood but it is a form of regressive colonialism because of its US conservatism that stands against neighbourhood self determination and rights in the UK: it was ever thus and is terrified of democracy.
So we’ll done for all you’re doing for us all: we all deserve better than threats against young people by historic giants of conquest masquerading as ‘an individual’ with an interest in freedom of speech is our universities real threat and we need to realise this and demand our own modernisation which naturally involves localisation and accountability to all the people who make up every neigbourhood including university neighbourhoods in the UK
