Let Them Have Better

Ricky D. Hale is glorious:

When I got involved in politics in 2017, I felt hope that things could get better for the first time since I was a teenager when Tony Blair was elected in 1997. But it was a cautious optimism.

The experience of the Blair years taught me not to pin my hopes on any politician because they can and will let you down in the most devastating ways.

Fortunately, I wasn’t old enough to vote for the man with a body count of one million, but I was old enough to remember the speech of the man who predicted exactly what would happen. A man who fell off my radar for a long time, but found himself Labour leader to the surprise of everyone, including himself, in 2015.

Two years of hearing his Nordic-style social democratic goals convinced me this man who put substance before style and principle before popularity was different, and if ever I was going to give a politician the benefit of the doubt, it had to be now. The alternative was to accept a life without hope.

I never considered myself party-political (people like that were weird to me), but I wanted to address issues that had left us in a permanent crisis. My involvement in politics was never about ideology, it was simply about the 99% versus the 1%. In fact, it wasn’t even about that at first, it was about better living standards. That was it.

My enthusiasm for Corbyn was not because I was “hard left” or “dogmatic” (I was the very opposite of dogmatic and had not read a page of Marx at this point), it’s because I was treated like a human being after years in a dead-end job where I needed permission to take a piss.

It’s hard to explain to middle-class centrists who love to tell me I’m wrong just what a relief that was. Imagine your head being held underwater your whole life and suddenly someone lifts you up so you can breathe. That first breath was an immense relief and I was scared of being ducked underwater again.

When you say our ideas are “unelectable”, you are telling us our needs can never be addressed, and not only is that nonsense, it’s not something I could ever accept. Imagine telling someone it’s unelectable to fight racism or homophobia, that’s no less acceptable than telling us it’s unelectable to fight classism.

In 2015, it felt like we were entering a new period in which people like me were allowed to be part of the conversation. I once assumed the problem was that politicians weren’t hearing from people like me, and while I knew many hated us, I thought others just never understood. Now that we were entering the conversation, I thought that would change.

I believed the politicians who never understood (the centre) would be happy to hear from people like me, grateful to hear new perspectives. I mean why wouldn’t they? I was a well-intentioned person who was capable of articulating the concerns of myself and other well-intentioned people. I was an expert in the working class struggle because I was living it, and instead of hearing me out, they told me I was “hard left”.

Back then, I couldn’t have told you what “hard left” meant (and still couldn’t actually) and had just assumed we would be treated with respect. After all, it shouldn’t be hard for people who consider themselves “the grownups in the room” to treat others with respect, should it?

I never dreamt of the hatred I would receive from those who I thought were on my side. I never dreamt a Labour MP of all people would publicly ridicule me, just because I asked if she would push for a snap election *cough* Jess Phillips. I never dreamt I would be called an idiot by Dom Joly (you probably don’t remember him). I never dreamt I would be seen as the enemy because I hoped I might someday have reasonable living standards. Clearly, I never understood what a monster I was.

I started a Facebook page with the idealistic goal of embracing free speech and pluralism, engaging with as wide a variety of people as possible and racking up millions of impressions. I was like a small-town kid from a Disney movie who suddenly found himself in the big city and wanted to be everyone’s friend, only to find out many people hated him for no reason.

I remember being warned how dangerous politics could be and asking myself what was the worst that could happen? I remember being called a “tankie” for saying I liked Corbyn and having no idea what that meant! I remember being called a brownshirt for suggesting we nationalise some of our public services so we could be more like Scandinavia. And I quickly discovered the attacks were not just aimed at me.

There was a coordinated strategy to crush the optimism of any ordinary person who dared involve themselves in politics, to bully them, humiliate them, smear them, even sue them. I saw good people have their names dragged through the mud with outright lies. I saw friends receive vexatious legal threats from those with deep pockets. I received threats of violence and others received actual violence. And I realised those who want change are not welcome in politics.

The working class are not allowed to have a voice. There are powerful forces who will silence us any way they can.

There is a reason both parties only consider the right wing to be working class (even though they are a minority) and that’s because those people will never call for change and will vote against their self-interest.

There is an accepted way of doing politics and that way involves ensuring people with popular ideas are marginalised. Only those with the deepest pockets have representation no matter if team red or blue wins because we are only allowed to vote for who the corporate spokesperson will be.

The so-called party for workers is saying 2/3 of the public who support policies such as nationalisation are “too left-wing”. It’s telling its members to leave because the party is never going back to the democratic organisation it was a few years ago. It’s laughably claiming to be neutral while insisting that organised labour will never have political representation again. Are you okay with this? Do you support marginalisation?/ I thought everyone understood the essential ingredient of democracy is pluralism and an attack on pluralism is an attack on democracy itself.

It’s clear as day that in the endless battle of capital versus labour, we now have two parties under the control of the 1%. We have a Labour leader who sneers at working-class concerns and sucks up to CEOs, who promised to renationalise the NHS and advocates for further privatisation, who expels people for talking to socialist publications and writes for The S*n and the Daily Mail, who boasts of his antiracist credentials and ignores racism and Islamophobia, who argued members should have more democratic say and U-turned just as hard he U-turned on pledges he made to win their vote.

We have a Labour leader who told these people “I will represent you and give you a louder voice” and then said “get out of my party”. In short, we have a Labour leader who is not interested in leading organised labour so where does the left go from here? Do we stay and fight? Do we fall silent? Do we hold our noses and vote for further corporate control? Do we start a new party? A revolution?

All I know is something has to change because you can’t disregard a huge section of society and not expect a reaction.

The left has put forward many ideas to fix this country - introducing proportional representation [why?], renationalising our public services, banning private schools [why?], rejoining the EU [what were things like when we were in it?], getting big money out of politics, democratising our corrupt media - and you might not agree with all of those ideas, but Sir Keir Starmer does not agree with any of them. Surely you must agree this is not good enough.

I’m just an ordinary person who wants and deserves better and there are millions more like me who want politicians to address our concerns, treat us with respect and do their best to solve the problems we face. We do not expect perfection, we certainly do not expect ideological purity (whatever that means), but we do expect representation.

My politics can be summed up as follows: working-class people should not be living in poverty.

If you still doubt it, then see here:

The Labour Party has announced its new strategy for dealing with a “shocking rise” in anti-social behaviour over the past year. That strategy includes tough new measures designed to appeal to people who’ve never lived in social deprivation with disregard for those who do.

Social deprivation is defined by the Dictionary of Psychology as:

1. limited access to society's resources due to poverty, discrimination, or other disadvantage. See cultural deprivation.

2. lack of adequate opportunity for social experience.

There is a lack of understanding among our politicians that those who are guilty of anti-social behaviour are so often victims themselves. Does it not occur to these galaxy brains the 30% rise in anti-social behaviour coincided with everyone becoming so poor they couldn’t afford electricity? 13,000 new police officers and patrols in every town are really going to reassure women at a time when every other cop seems to be a rapist.

When our prisons are massively overpopulated and our imprisonment rate is the highest in western Europe, you’d think the penny would drop that ever-tougher action is not going to solve this problem. The Tory approach has left us in disarray, the last thing we need is a tougher Tory approach with more investment in punishment.

I was exactly the kind of kid Labour wants to crack down on and that’s why I know their plan is unlikely to succeed, but even if it does, it won’t get to the root of the problem: poverty. They’re going to need an entirely separate plan for that, one which involves the kind of investment that will not appeal to the voters Labour is courting. In other words, it’s not going to happen so super-Asbos it is.

Now I’m not entirely against punishment, but I can tell you now that giving “community leaders” (local busybodies with a sense of self-importance) the power to hand out overly harsh punishments to me and my friends would not have made us behave better, it would have fuelled resentment and turned us into the bad lads they already thought we were.

What we needed was positive forms of stimulation in a pleasant environment with a sense of hope which would alleviate a lifetime of resentment. Growing up in the ruins of Thatcherism meant we were only going to turn out one way and criminal punishment would’ve meant we were being punished twice for a situation we never caused.

From the day our playgrounds were torn down, you could hear the shattering of windows and the laughter of children who had nothing better to do. We were loud enough for the entire neighbourhood to hear, but you wouldn’t see us stuffing sweet packets up our jumpers and blending into the crowd because we could hide as well as we could stand out.

A car park with a No Ball Games sign was our football pitch, an abandoned school was our first hideout and a corn field represented the edge of our world - a deprived estate of crumbling tarmac and thorny bushes with overcast skies and seemingly constant drizzle.

We were leaping between rooftops and tree branches before the media decided parkour was a thing because we refused to be confined by our post-industrial shithole and we were having fun any way we could. Instinct would not have let us do anything else.

We were a nuisance met with overreaction and adult fists slamming into a child’s face were not an uncommon sight. The police did nothing when a grown woman left my nine-year-old self with a burst nose, despite the evidence of my blood-soaked t-shirt. We had no choice but to be tough and we grew up into the generation that those who lived sheltered lives call “snowflakes”? What a joke.

As teenagers, we hung outside shops on winter nights until a passerby bought us cheap alcohol and we filled the subway with blood, spit and plastic bottles. The concrete walls bore our names and the ground was covered in a perilous layer of ice which stank of piss the moment it started to thaw.

It wasn’t long until green smoke was trailing through the cemetery as we wandered among gravestones like we’d just risen from the dead. Our half-closed eyes were glowing red in school classrooms until truancy became the norm and we’d vanish across disused railway lines, throwing rocks at bottles until the day police from a nearby tower intercepted us in a pincer movement. This taught us to hide better and we stayed out of everyone’s way for a while until a thoughtless match left an old warehouse in flames and our gang in search of a new hideout. So we were back to being a nuisance again.

The soundtrack of motorbike engines and electronic music could be intoxicating, but none of this was glamorous as my dead best friend would testify.

We were not unusual or bad: the hard part for politicians to grasp is we were perfectly normal kids in a bad situation and our behaviour was typical of social deprivation. No amount of parenting classes was ever going to fix that.

Clearly, our behaviour was not good enough, but ordering us to behave would have been ordering us to live a life without stimulation and accept the boredom that could drive people to suicide. Kids have needs even more than adults do and one way or another those needs are going to be fulfilled.

Don’t get me wrong, there are a few genuinely nasty kids and some dreadful parents, but for the most part lack of parenting skills is not the issue, lack of resources is. Middle-class kids don’t behave this way because their parents have the resources working-class parents don’t.

Almost no one wants to have a negative effect on their neighbourhood and they certainly don’t want to face the wrath of the law, yet people commit crimes even when they know the punishments are severe. This tells you that from their perspective, the alternative to crime is misery and almost all of these people will take a better option if it’s given to them.

We could end 95% of crime by ending poverty and if that message does not appeal to you, then I’m afraid you are to blame for the anti-social behaviour you wish to prevent. If you want people to behave better, you’ve got to let them have better.