Thursday 3 March 2011

There's a Lot of Miles Between Tripoli and Islington

There has been little else but Libya on the news now for what seems like weeks. Part of the reason there has been so much coverage is that news hounds love it: big news, real news, hard news, good news. I mean bad news. You know what I mean.

Remind me how it all started, could you? Was it tuition fees? Or cuts to community groups? Has Gaddafi been laying off civil servants left, right and centre?

Oh no, hold on. I remember. It's the 40 years of brutal disenfranchisement, people being made to disappear, systematic use of torture to quell dissidents of a government that controls every aspect of their lives.

Those other things, the cuts and fees and that, they were why Islington town hall was 'stormed' in some 'direct action' last week.

As you can perhaps tell by the use of language such as 'storm' these protesters are taking themselves very seriously. They sense revolution is in the air and they are the vanguard.

Yet it is not really revolution that they're after. Laurie Penny's latest New Statesman article compares the struggle of anti-cuts protesters in the UK to those opposing Colonel Gaddafi in Libya. Part of her comparison focuses on how both groups are fighting for self-determination. That the causes are separated only by scale not substance.

Utter nonsense. There is no similarity in substance either. Protesters are using rights they have to demonstrate their unhappiness at their government's action. In Libya the government can not truly be called 'their' government as neither they nor any other resident had anything to do with its formation. I nearly said citizen instead of resident but that would imply they have rights which they do not.

In fact, if you were a bit of a wag there's a different comparison you could make. The protest groups in Britain are 100 per cent certain that their cause is just and that everyone agrees with and loves them. This means they are justified in taking whatever action is necessary to win. Who in the Middle East does that sort of self aggrandisement compare with?

In reality the protests in this country are about maintaining the status-quo. A status-quo that led to Britain having a massive budget deficit that could no longer be maintained once the world economy collapsed. Whether your vote for the Lib Dems was miscast or not (as of course it would have been under any electoral system) more people voted for them and the Tories than for Labour. Not that Labour wouldn't have been cutting away at expenditure either. They just decline to tell us where.

Being able to accept electoral defeat is part of living in a democracy. Campaign in the meantime and in a few years you'll be able to vote once again.

In Libya the people are braving terrible danger to try to gain the right to vote. That is the fight for self-determination.

But still, who cares? That's just my point of view, which I'm as free to write here as Penny was free to write her's in the New Statesman. And protest all you like. Go to council meetings, make your voice heard. You're allowed.

While doing so try to remember that this is the right that people in Libya are fighting for. Not a policy issue. If they lose the survivors won't be able to do anything about it. You will. You just have to wait till the next election. As there will always be another election in this country you could say that you can never be completely defeated.

How's that for solidarity?

No comments:

Post a Comment