Hi. Twitter Simon here, beginning to wonder if the fall in (aways mild) abuse I receive when sticking my nose in might have anything to do with the new profile picture. I'd love it if people thought I was actually a lawyer from this. Who wouldn't love being mistaken for a lawyer?
NO FURTHER QUESTIONS etc. But why was this headlining my twitter side-bar last night? What even is "Nine News"? Ever since I read a couple of months ago that a Trump mega-donor had bought a "sizable stake" in the site, I've become very threat-level-hey-now about what it promotes, and so when I returned from last night's quiet walk to see #londonriots trending, I checked the hashtag and indeed most tweets accompanying it were wondering why it was trending as there hadn't been any riots. I did also see footage of the anger in Whitehall. Sure. But I'd witnessed that before, any weekend over the last two years in which I'd been down to do a bus tour and the Brexiters had had one of their "marches" - not marches so much as a crowding into the Wetherspoons as early as possible to drink and drink and wander around with a flag and hurl abuse at buskers, looking for fun or a fight or a fun fight - and I would stand there hoping that London might be a cure for this, and that the racists - I saw their banners and I saw their caps, these were racists - would see how alone they were. But anyway, yes, I saw last night on twitter yesterday's outnumbering of the police outside Downing Street, and I saw some commentators express "boggled minds" that this "brutality" was in response to a shooting on another continent, and I tappity-tapped in my little lawyer's wig a reminder to those commentators just what Downing Street had been up to for the past four years plus: the Windrush scandal, the "Go Home" vans, "pickaninny smiles", "letterboxes", and the much discussed "hostile environment", and hoped - again, hoped - that these protests might illuminate what that blithely bandied-about phrase "hostile environment" actually meant, and how instantly intolerable everyone should find it. Here's another hostility:
"Ending freedom of movement". And a Union Jack. As I wrote on Monday (okay, Tuesday morning) us pinky grey men never really have to think about "freedom of movement" anyway. I suspect this tweet knew exacty what it was doing though. Division aways benefits the Right, which might be why so much government messaging seems purposefully designed to ruffle liberal feathers. But while I still believe Fascism Thrives On Division, and while I still suspect the PM, and definitely POTUS, would rather see a civil war than their own resignation (for the same reason Hans Gruber blew up the Nakaomi Tower) I'm also very happy to see pressure applied, proper pressure, because no police officer was charged with anything until people marched. Also I'm not sure what we're seeing here is Division. I hope. After the December election I decided to turn this blog into a Politics/Anxiety tag-free zone, because the increasing shittiess of all things seemed such a given I wanted to spare anyone who came here any more (also I still had plans for a series of Time Spanner in which an avatar of the demiurge, President Guff Goofy, declared a zombie apocalypse saying "you know who the zombies are", and I was saving up my politial anxiety for that), but that was six months ago, and now there feels something like a tugging at the monolith, slow work, but potentially effective, an awakening of care, which I find invigorating, and it needs to be kept up. So I remain a remoaner. I looked up what I'd been doing during the last #BlackLivesMatter protests in 2015. I'd voted for Corbyn. Again, I'd been hoping for an awakening of care, but we know how that turned out - care became discredited, and those who'd spent their entire political lives attempting to orchestrate a more just environment became synonymous with bullying and intolerance. So this probably does have to be led from the bottom. And while I have Santa's knee I'd also quite like a government intent on kerbing the manipulation of democracy through online misinformation rather than one led by gamers seeking to become a world leaders in it. That seems another fair demand. And finally, here is my favourite twitter interaction for a while. Elizabeth Jackson's not cowed by a wig. It's important to remember this is also an option.
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