This week, Pieces travelled across London to vote, and look what happened - we now have BNP representatives in Europe for the first time. Brilliant. Almost as heart-warming as the news that the Tube will basically not exist for two days this week. Why can't they strike like they do in Australia, where instead of closing things they let people in for free over the strike period? Imagine, a strike that actually made people happy and got them on the side of the strikers...
One of the advantages of delaying this week’s Piecespeak (I would love to be able to blame the Tube strike but a] I do this from home and b] it didn’t start until after I finished writing this. Never mind) is that I get to do one of two things: either point anyone who didn’t see Nick Griffin getting pelted with egg at a self-organised press conference outside Westminster in the direction of this video, or remind anyone who did just how good it was to see him literally get egg on his face at last.
Fun as it was to watch an arsehole get peltered with righteous anger and abuse, this was the perfect illustration of the contradictions facing anyone who seriously opposes extremist parties. You’re damned if you do and you’re damned if you don’t. Do you ban them from the political process, or censor their broadcasts and policies? Then you’re just instigating the same discrimination you’re trying to prevent. Do you leave them to it and try to ignore them in the hope that they’ll either just go away or that noone will care about them? Well, nice idea but this just leads to a bizarre kind of press martyrdom, where the BNP campaign along the lines that they’re being unfairly marginalised – and they would be under those circumstances. Not very democratic. The view taken by Unite Against Fascism, the organisers of today’s protest, is that they are justified in trying to silence the party, because the BNP’s aim is to silence the views of those they hold grievances against. But if you have even the smallest, most wavering belief in free speech and the power of people to make up their own minds, you have to believe in the right of any political party, no matter how unsavoury, to express their views and present their proposals for ways of running the country.
See, there’s no way out! And it sucks because not only are a lot of the possible ways of making extremist parties very counter-productive in the sense that they serve to fuel their ‘discrimination’ fire, even more of them actually provide amazing publicity, that they clearly relish. Does Nick Griffin actually get a strange kind of pleasure hearing people calling him a wanker in the street? Probably – at least it means they know who he is and it might get him a slot on the news. Would the BNP have got any TV coverage today if their amateurish press conference on a patch of grass hadn’t been ambushed by protestors? Probably not.
At a party recently, I was talking to an old friend about ways to stifle the rise of parties like the BNP, UKIP (just as an aside, how can anyone, no matter how disaffected, take a party that chooses bright garish pink as its colour seriously??) and in Europe the NPD and FN. The best he could come up with was the idea of introducing intelligence tests before voting, to ensure that noone under a benchmark IQ would be able to have a say in the selection of the Government or local Councillors. I know, I know, not exactly a great solution, and we could go on for hours about what’s wrong with ignoring the very people who probably most need to be heard by political ears. But what it does show is that if that’s the best idea a pretty intelligent, insightful person can come up with then any kind of solution must be pretty damn hard.
In any case, most political historians seem to agree that what’s really alarming about the results of last week’s elections is not the rise of the Right across Europe (troubling though it might be), but the total collapse of the Left. In almost every voting country there’s a lack of support among traditional Left voters, and because the nature of ‘the working class’ has changed so much since the last major continent-wide political shift, there may never be the same support base that parties of the Left have enjoyed up to now. And if that proves to be the case, what happens to political choice, balance and liberal democracy? Who knows. But we’ll probably still be able to get crisps and a drink with our sandwiches.
This week’s Piecesounds is a lot of fun: crazy homemade synthesisers, funk freakout Beatles covers, ridiculously high notes and mega key-change spectaculars all over. Lovely. Click the link below to hear all of this, and more! Not much more, but still.
- David Bowie – Speed Of Life
- XTC – Making Plans For Nigel
- Silver Apples – A Pox On You
- Company Flow – Silence
- Run-DMC – Jam-Master Jammin’
- Allen Toussaint – Goin’ Down’
- Gregory Isaacs/The Revolutionaries – Leaving Dub
- Camille – Money Note
- The Staple Singers – This World
- Eddie Hazel – I Want You (She’s So Heavy)
- The Pretty Things – Baron Saturday
- Stevie Wonder – Something To Say
http://open.spotify.com/user/blownawish/playlist/11lSGbNl671Prg5Ct37imL
Next week: something even deeper. Maybe.
Pieces x
No comments:
Post a Comment