Just to offset any complaints from those who think they are on the Left: both my parents are from hard Left constituiences. Which included Communist coucillors & a Communist MP, who would have objected to the censorious attituide of the post modern Left. Some inlaws were part of the Trotskyite union attempt to remove Labour PM Harold Wilson. Direct ancestors on the Irish side led various political parties, revolutions/uprisings & paramilitary groups. All that is a bit more than going for a stroll on a sunny Saturday with a placard
So one of the things last year that had me swearing at the news like a normal sane person was the Leicester East sweatshops. Labour MP who backed Corbyn (who with a load of reservations I did vote to make leader & voted 2017: for DWP,housing etc reforms). Labour,ILP,Workers Congress etc their foundation was abolition of exploitation of all forms but the Leicester East cllrs have been silent for decades. Unlike the women who played a central role in the earliest stages of what later became the Labour Party through their opposition to their employers exploitation.
The councillors will know owners of these sweat shops. Espousing a couple of Socialist principles doesn't make them Labour; they are traitors to Labour & the Workers; Claudia Webb & predecessors did nothing. The Colston statue was similarly revealing: it should have been in a museum decades ago.99% wouldn't have known what the statue was until last year's bandwagon meant some found a conscience that wasn't stimulated by more contemporary outrages.
In Bristol there is an example of forced labour,slave labour, inc. mass killings of Africans & Asians. But the protesters ignored all that to focus on a lump of bronze. To get selfies to show on the Net how moral they are, the protesters went past Barclays Bank which has been convicted for supplying money to horrific regimes in recent years, & there will be others.
Not even something as small as fly posting over the bank's or other intituitons windows of their crimes. Neither them nor Corbyn's MPs have said a single word about what happened to my neighbour,other cases or the many other discrimination or violence occurring. A black mother nearly gets knifed in front of her 3yr old: silence & nothing done.
Same MPs, so called 'activists', academics on Twitter, opinion writers (that's not journalism) have a melt down because Dawn Butler's car was stopped. Being traumatised for months,living in fear & the affect it has on her child & the many other victims of racial, sexual or domestic violence,abuse or police failings or excessive use of police powers, repeatedly get little to no media or activism support. Maybe its because there isn't a good photo or media opprtuntity to accompany it. Some of the feminist groups & show what can be done, they are dynamic and continue to do fantastic work.
The bank is only half a mile away. There's even a Wetherspoon's between to go & celebrate in! Which was obviously frequented on their way to Colston. Well he's off to a museum now where he belongs. Not going to support iconoclasm because if you destroy & erase all easily accessible references, then the past is reduced to a vague "bad things happened" (which is what dictatorships of whatever type do) without understanding the details or if there are ambiguities to make society confront its current failings, limitations or conceit that its moral
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