Five reasons why Black Friday is an international disgrace

 I have never participated in the celebration of consumerism known collectively as Black Friday. Ten years ago, I'd never even heard of it. It's been celebrated in the USA since 1952, but is a far more recent thing in the UK, only really starting around 2013.

The origin basically seems to come from the fact that in the USA, Christmas is the next major holiday once Thanksgiving is over, and Black Friday is traditionally held the day after... marking the beginning of 'Christmas shopping season'. Thanksgiving is an American holiday commemorating the Pilgrim Fathers, and has very little significance the rest of the world over. The reason Black Friday has crossed over to the UK (and many other countries as well) seems to be down to two things: 1) The rise in online shopping; and 2) Because Asda, which is owned by Walmart, decided to participate and it went from there.

I think the whole thing is foul, and I will not participate. Here are five reasons why I feel this way:

1) It's a celebration of consumerism

I don't tend to buy many Christmas presents. I don't really ask for people to buy them for me either. If someone would like to buy me something, that's up to them. And if I do buy something for someone, it's usually because I've seen something that's made me think of them, or that I know they could really use. I hate the formality of gift-giving. A gift is a non-essential special thing that you do for someone, a moment to demonstrate that you value their presence in your life and that you're interested enough in them to know what they want/need. It is NOT an opportunity for relentless marketing, advertising and selling for huge corporations to get a nice bottom line at the end of the year. The Christmas shopping season is a horrible, cynical attempt to cash in on people's kindness to one another.

People with small children are the greatest victims of this, because much of the marketing is aimed strongly at children. We have a cost of living crisis; I know anecdotally of people who can barely afford to eat, but still somehow manage to scrape together enough to buy their child the latest gadget. And how can you not, if their child is being led to believe constantly that this is how a good parent shows love to their child?

2) It's utterly hypocritical

This is more in relation to the American side, which I don't personally have much connection to, but it needs saying. The meaning of Thanksgiving is in the name - it's to do with being thankful for what you have, spending some much-needed time with your loved ones. This is the antithesis to our consumerist culture, and is an attitude that we urgently need more of in every culture. And then the next day, everyone dashes out to embrace consumerism even more wildly than they did before. What happened to being thankful for what you had?

3) It actually causes people to spend more

You know, we're in a cost-of-living crisis. If there's something you badly need, I won't begrudge you waiting until the day when you might happen to get a few quid off. But here's a great deal for you: if you don't buy it, you get 100% off! Yes, I know, almost too good to be true. There's a serious point here though - a lot of us could probably do with living more frugally, using fewer of the planet's resources, and if you don't need it, the cost being reduced is not good enough reason to buy it.

I've seen personally that it can actually cause selfishness. I used to be a door-to-door charity cold caller, and I will always recall the number of people who, in 2017, couldn't sign up to charity because, they claimed, they'd spent all their money in the sales. If you can't afford it, fair enough. But if this is about saving money, why are people suddenly more hard-up after it than they were before?

4) It can get physically dangerous

Just look at these. I'm a bit loath to share this link as the website talks about it in quite a flippant and humorous way - but every single year, there's some kind of report of a fight or someone getting hurt as a result of the Black Friday rush. That's not even counting abuse to retail staff.

5) It's bad for the environment

You know, Cop27 is over, and as usual it's Cop-Out 27, with very little in the way of commitments to phasing out fossil fuels. If we're going to do anything about this global warming thing, looks like we're going to have to do it ourselves. A festival celebrating consumerism and greed is not conducive to that. At all.

Thankfully, I've seen a lot less Black Friday stuff around this year anyway. I'm not sure if that's because the world is waking up or if it's because the cost of living crisis has got so dire that people don't have the time to think about purchasing useless items even if they are on sale, but it is at least welcome.

If you want to get some new stuff, why not take a visit to your local charity shop? Bring a bunch of your old junk whilst you're at it as well.

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I will not vote for someone hostile to immigrants

'We are not the country of Nigel Farage and Tommy Robinson. In the coming weeks we must take the fight to those who challenge our values. Labour is an internationalist party and always will be.'

Keir Starmer, 2019

I had a fairly idyllic childhood in urban Bristol. I happened to grow up living with huge numbers of different people, probably from about 10-15 different countries (that's a rough estimate - not sure I can remember them all!) I had friends from pretty much every different class background, and I went to a secondary school so racially diverse that in some of my classes I, as a white person, was actually in the minority. It's only been during my adulthood that I've come to realise how privileged I was to grow up like this. It's given me the advantage of being able to relate to all kinds of people without seeing them as fundamentally different kinds of humans - which is something that most of us do, even if we don't like to admit it.

In my early twenties I was a student at the University of Essex, and it was this experience in particular that made me realise how flawed my view of the world had been. I had grown up naively believing that whilst incidents of racism still happened, it was predominantly all in the past and that we were swiftly moving in the right direction - even the President of the United States was a person of colour! Then I moved to Colchester, and this optimism died quite quickly. I had to walk past this extremely racist political poster every morning on my way to Uni:

Colchester is a garrison town, which tends to lend itself to quite extreme right-wing opinion. I remember a conversation with someone once where I told them about my experiences of sometimes being in the minority of white people at school, and their reaction was, 'Wow... didn't that make you feel weird and uncomfortable?' I was quite shocked by this at the time, but thinking back it actually says a lot about our knowledge of our own inherent racism; that person must have known, deep down, that the life of an ethnic minority person is often quite miserable largely because of the racist majority, therefore they presume that anyone in any minority group must feel that way. Whereas the reality, of course, is that if you grow up in a diverse community, you know nothing different and the idea of feeling uncomfortable for that kind of reason just doesn't occur to you.

This is not even taking into account that during the time I was a student, there was a lot of discourse within the media about EU membership, culminating in the 2016 EU referendum. There was a great deal of noisy opinion being shared about this by my fellow students, and the Leave vote happened a week after I graduated. I was distraught. Then later that year, the supremely racist and extreme-right Donald Trump was elected as President of the United States. I was distraught again, but in a bit more of a cynical way - I'd come to expect it by this point.

I don't wish to speak badly about Colchester, because I did make some very close friends there - it was simply that living in that town caused me to realise that far from my perception that I'd arrived just in time to see racism disappear from our culture forever, I'd just happened to grow up in one of the very few progressive bubbles that happen to exist from place to place. This is not a Colchester thing - it's a thing that exists overwhelmingly across the UK and the world at large, and I just happened to have grown up not really witnessing it. I consider myself really fortunate to have had that - but it also made me very naive, and seeing a bit of the rest of the world and the attitudes of the people who live there was an important wake-up call. We still have a fundamentally callous and racist society, and this is reflected in the attitudes of our politicians.

This week, the leader of the Labour Party Sir Keir Starmer gave a speech at the Confederation of British Industry (CBI) where he said, and I quote, 'our common goal must be to help the British economy off its immigration dependency. To start investing more in training up workers who are already here' (you can watch the speech in full here). Steve Topple of the Canary points out in this article that Starmer may as well have said 'those bloody foreigners coming over here and stealing our jobs'. There were other points to this that I will go into shortly, but it's worth pointing out before I do that this kind of rhetoric is so problematic that even Nigel Farage has endorsed it, saying that it's straight out of UKIP's 2015 manifesto (let's recall, the manifesto that ultimately caused then Prime Minister David Cameron to promise a referendum on EU membership, turning an immensely complex issue into a slapdash yes/no question, and we've lived with the consequences ever since.)

Farage does acknowledge that Keir Starmer may not have meant what he said, and I have no idea if he did or not. Politics is such a dirty game at the moment that I don't think we can rely on nearly any politician to tell the truth at any given time. This article from the BBC highlights the incoherence of Starmer's position rather well - he knows that in reality, reducing immigration would be a disaster waiting to happen. He's trying to pander to two demographics people at once - firstly, figures in big business who rely on cheap labour from immigrants, and secondly, typical Conservative voters, who most likely have racist tendencies and are hoping to hear a politician promising to get rid of all those foreigners (promises that right-wing politicians have been making for decades, and it still hasn't happened). There are two problems with this: the first is that as I said above, these two positions are completely incoherent, which isn't a good look for a party leader; and the second is that these two demographics of people are probably the most destructive to our society, and by pandering to either of them Starmer is proving himself to be a cynical and morally corrupt human being. The choice should not be between a) getting rid of all the foreigners or b) using the foreigners as cheap labour. Both of these positions are actually pretty racist in themselves, in that they remove the agency of immigrants and consider them to either be a nuisance or a means to an end.

I wrote the other day about how I consider Labour to be an extremely racist party, in some respects even more so than the Tories. I do not say this lightly, as I have seen how badly racist the Tories are, and I don't want to water that down at all. But for quite a few years now, Labour has been trying to out-Tory the Tories on some things. I will remind you of this mug that some genius thought it a good idea to bring out in 2015:

Remember, they lost that election very badly, and the reason they lost it badly is because this kind of thing doesn't fly. People with these kinds of horrible opinions will just flock back to the Tories (especially when the Tories are emulating UKIP). Meanwhile, this kind of rhetoric will turn away anyone who actually wants us to embrace immigration and to treat these people as legitimate human beings who are welcome here.

But even worse than the racist attitudes is the cynicism involved. Look at that quote I've put at the top. Just look at it. It was only three years ago that Keir Starmer said that. In as little as 1,291 days, Keir Starmer has gone from publicly decrying the kind of attitudes espoused by Nigel Farage to being commended by him for echoing them. And this is not an isolated incident either. Labour lost the 2019 General Election largely for being seen as sore losers for calling for another referendum on our EU membership or lack thereof. This was the only major difference between this manifesto and the far more successful 2017 one, and Starmer was the Shadow Brexit Secretary at the time, meaning he is largely to blame for the outcome. It's quite staggering to see someone so opposed to UKIP's ideals that he'd call to reverse the electoral decision UKIP was heavily involved in creating go to actively peddling the same kind of shocking rhetoric.

Keir Starmer has no consistent political viewpoints. He blows in the wind, aligns himself with whoever appears to be powerful at the time and has absolutely no shame. As Owen Jones points out in the video below, Boris Johnson may have been an awful Prime Minister, but at least his bid to become Conservative Party leader was honest; Keir Starmer deliberately misled the Labour membership about what kind of leader he was going to be, and has ridden back on all of his ten pledges. Whether he actually holds racist views, I cannot say without knowing him personally - but he is trying to align himself with people who do. This is dangerous and highly concerning.

I'm going to finish with a rather good video from Owen Jones concerning exactly what causes the current issues regarding immigration and skilled workers (which is a valid concern, even if the solution is unethical and won't work anyway) but before I go I'll just clarify why so many foreign people choose to come to the UK, as opposed to other countries. The reason is that they mostly speak English. And the reason they mostly speak English is that historically, we invaded their homelands. When we spread our language around the world as effectively as we have, the consequence is plenty of people choosing to come where they speak the language. And personally, I don't have a problem with any immigrants coming here whatsoever - but if anyone does, they may want to get involved in climate activism, because we haven't even scratched the surface of how many refugees will be trying to escape their home countries when climate change really takes hold.

I will not vote for anyone who is remotely hostile to immigration. It's harmful rhetoric, largely untrue and deliberately misrepresents the causes of people's problems.

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The expansion of Bristol Airport

Note: Much of the information in this blog has been taken from this article in the Bristol Post by Green Party co-leader Carla Denyer, although I've re-written it in my own words.

 At Cop27 in Egypt, the Secretary-General of the UN, António Guterres, warned that 'we are on a highway to climate hell with our foot on the accelerator'.

It probably isn't necessary for me to outline exactly how and why that's the case because I think most people already know it all (although if you don't, there's tons of information online if you can bear to read it). From what I've seen, Cop27 is shaping up to be just like Cop26 - less action on fossil fuels, lots of talks of 'historic' agreements and a lot more of what Greta Thunberg calls 'blah blah blah'.

I want to talk about something more immediate, which is the proposed expansion of Bristol Airport. I live in Bristol and have flown from Bristol Airport in the past (although, apart from once in an emergency, I have not flown since 2015 as I cannot ethically justify it in the middle of a climate crisis). Bristol Airport has been pushing to expand its capacity for four years now, there have been campaigns to stop this from happening from the beginning and in 2020, North Somerset Council listened to the objection and rejected the planning application.

This was then overturned by the Government's Planning Inspectorate (which, incidentally, demonstrates how little power local councils have these days over corporations... corporations know how to play the game, they'll appeal up to the top of Government and the top of Government tends to side with them over locals and elected officials). In early November, an appeal was heard at Bristol Civil Justice Centre arguing that errors were made in the Planning Inspectorate's criteria, and the result of that is still awaiting. I took part in a protest outside the courtroom on the first day of the hearing - I was actually part of a choir of singers to raise awareness of this issue.

This campaign really matters, for a number of reasons. Firstly, it sets a precedent. There are many other airports in the UK looking to expand their output, who are eagerly awaiting the outcome of this particular case in the event that it helps to justify their own expansion. Secondly, it says something about Bristol's role as a city. In 2018, Bristol was the first city in Europe to publicly declare a climate emergency, thanks in no small part to local councillor (and now Green co-leader) Carla Denyer. I'm really proud of the conscientiousness of many of the people here in Bristol, I think it's something that much of the rest of the UK could learn from and I hope we can lead from the front in saying 'No more airport expansion' - not just here, but across the rest of the country and the world at large.

Finally though, I'd like to address the obvious discrepancy between the way we talk about transport in general. The idea of the 'personal carbon footprint', which was quite prevalent when I was growing up, has pretty much been debunked now. As I said above, I've only flown once since 2015 - but sometimes I think that the only thing this has really achieved has been avoidance of my own guilt. Save for exceptional circumstances I will not fly again until I'm sure that we've dealt with the worst of the damage and that flying can be morally justified (if that's ever the case, that is) - but is anyone truly better off as a result of me making that decision? I don't think so. I think the same number of flights have gone over the last seven years as they otherwise would have, which is quite dejecting.

This is because we emphasise two things at once which are impossible to square with one another. We encourage people to fly less often - and yet we also promote unregulated growth, which means increasing numbers of flights going. These two things are impossible to work together. Airports do not meet demand; they create demand. To truly deal with the pollution caused by air travel, we need to agree internationally that only a certain number of flights are allowed to go per year, and stick to this. If we did that, it would be easier for people to go on holiday, guilt-free. There's nothing wrong with taking the odd flight; the planet can cope with your occasional foreign holiday. What it can't cope with is the super-rich buzzing around on their private jets every week.

It's the scale of this problem we need to sort out - and this is why Bristol Airport must not be allowed to expand.

I'd also like to express my concern with the fact that damaging the environment is not in itself illegal. The case being heard in court is purely in relation to errors being made in the Government Inspectorate's process - nothing to do with the enormous amount of damage that airport expansion would cause. The latter seems to me to be far more important, and it seems that our laws are out of touch when it comes to protecting our collective home.

If you're worried about climate breakdown and its effects, I very highly recommend the YouTube channel ClimateAdam. Dr Adam Levy is a climate scientist, and very good at explaining what's happening and how you can help, in a way that is neither too complacent nor too despairing. I've only discovered his channel quite recently, but I've found it so helpful to keep myself informed of things.

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The UK Labour Party is fundamentally racist, impotent and sinister

Hello! Been a while, hasn't it? I've really had my hands full the last few months with professional commitments, despair over the ever-more-volatile state of the world and personal decisions for my future.

One of the things I've been doing recently is considering carefully the state of the UK opposition. I feel like I've been doing that pretty much every day for around ten years now (I kind of miss the days before I knew what the opposition was). One of the things primarily on my mind when I set up this blog as a lowly 17-year-old angry about tuition fees was that 'I hate the Government. EVERY Government.' What I meant by that was that I believed even then the old aphorism that power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely, and that anyone who comes to power is likely to experience the same effect. Do I still believe that? 'Yes, but...' is the answer. I think that in most cases that will be true, however I also believe that there are enough people in the world who wouldn't be corrupted by being in a leadership position. Jeremy Corbyn is one of them - I believe that had he become Prime Minister in 2017 or 2019, his general code of ethics would not have changed very much by being in that position. That is just my personal opinion; I could of course be wrong.

However, for better or worse he did not become Prime Minister. I still feel quite sad about that sometimes, but I also think it's better to move on and look to the future (something that us Corbyn-supporters are often accused - unfairly in my view - of being unable to do). However, I do need to say that if Jeremy Corbyn had been elected, irrespective of my personal views on him, things would still not have been brilliant. Far from it. Why? For the simple fact that Labour is a TERRIBLE party.

I've seen enough of the world of politics by now that I'm quite desensitised these days. Not that much shocks me. However, I admit to being very shocked by Al-Jazeera's three-part documentary on the UK Labour Party, The Labour Files. You can watch Part 1, Part 2 and Part 3 on these links, and I strongly recommend doing so. It largely deals with the party's reaction to Corbyn's election as leader - but it's about so much more than that. It details how the opinions of people were deliberately misrepresented for cynical purposes; how personal details of campaigners, including things as sensitive as where their children went to school, were leaked to people with no right to that information; how incidents of racism amongst the staff were deliberately covered up; and so much more besides. Have a watch if you haven't already, but I warn you, it makes for grim viewing. It's immensely disturbing the levels of harassment that the Labour Party put sometimes quite vulnerable individuals through (and sometimes entire constituencies in a 'guilt by association' kind of way).

The message that I took from this is that the Labour Party is incredibly racist. The rules regarding leadership candidacy have changed recently (presumably to prevent any socialist ever getting in again); the current rules would have precluded every person of colour who has ever stood for Labour leadership from standing, as well as four of the six women who have ever stood (including Rebecca Long-Bailey and Lisa Nandy, the two women who stood last time). To put this into perspective, the current Conservative Prime Minister is a person of colour, as were quite a few of the people who stood in July's Tory leadership race. Far be it from me to point at the Conservative Party as a beacon of progressive politics, but it's arguable that we have actually reached a point where it's easier to be a woman or a person of colour in the Conservative Party than it is in Labour!

Jeremy Corbyn's leadership of the Labour Party was absolutely dogged by accusations of anti-Semitism. Another thing that us Corbyn supporters are often accused of is turning a blind eye to anti-Semitism, so I want to make something else extremely clear. Anti-Semitism in the Labour Party exists. It existed prior to Jeremy Corbyn's leadership, it existed during it and it continues to exist now that he's gone. I was a bit too naive during the 2015 election period to recognise the anti-Semitic characterisation of Ed Miliband; but on reflection, I do not believe there would have been anything to say about the way a non-Jewish leader had eaten a bacon sandwich. Under Jeremy Corbyn's leadership, the complaints procedure was deliberately sabotaged by Labour's senior staff, making it harder for Jewish people within the party. Under the current administration, huge numbers of Jews have been suspended/expelled from the party allegedly for anti-Semitic behaviour. Although I do believe it to be possible to discriminate against one's own oppressed group (women can be misogynistic, black people can be racist, gay people can be homophobic) I have never before heard of people persecuted ON THIS SCALE supposedly for oppressing people who share their own protected characteristic. This seems to me that the definition of 'anti-Semitism' has been redefined by the Labour Party for a political purpose (largely by people who aren't even Jewish) and that there is a 'right' and a 'wrong' sort of Jew depending on a political belief. If that's the case, it is one of the most disgracefully racist things I have ever heard of.

This is not even taking into account the other various forms of racism present in the Labour Party. Diane Abbott (who received almost half of all abusive tweets to female MPs during the 2017 election campaign) highlighted in this article that she received no apology nor any reassurance of any action being taken after the Forde Report revealed much racism and misogyny aimed at her by party staff. Apsana Begum, the first hijab-wearing MP, has experienced such extreme levels of systematic misogyny and racism from Labour Party staff that she had to be signed off sick for her mental health - and even then, Labour initiated a trigger ballot process during her time off to potentially cause her to lose her seat. There has been no apology from Labour for this behaviour, nor any recognition that it has even done anything wrong.

It's also worth noting the reticence from the Labour Party to support strike action. UK workers are facing increasing demands on their time for very little pay, and have been for some time. Rail workers are striking, as are nurses. Quite rightly so. Does the Labour Party (a party largely founded on union action) support these strikes in the slightest? No, it doesn't. It even went as far as to deselect MP Sam Tarry (the then Shadow Minister for Buses and Local Transport, as well as the partner of Deputy Leader Angela Rayner) after appearing on picket lines. If the Labour Party cannot even back workers standing up for their rights and fairer pay, something so crucial to its identity that it's referred to in its name, it's very hard to see what it actually stands for.

The fact that the UK Labour Party is in such an awful state is particularly bitter right now, for two reasons: 1) Because in such awful times we desperately need it to be better; and 2) Because actually, the Government is falling apart at the seams. We currently have the third Prime Minister we've had THIS YEAR. We've gone in less than sixty days from massive tax breaks to incredibly high tax hikes. The Government has run out of ideas. It has no objective other than keeping itself in power until the next election. It should be a foregone conclusion that it will suffer a thumping defeat at the next election whenever it comes...

Except it isn't. Because with Labour in such a dire state, the only way it can win an election is if people think, 'Well, they can't be worse than the Tories!' And, to be fair, it's entirely possible that Labour will win like that, with the Tories being as dire as they are. But what happens after that? Do we trust a party with such an economical relationship with the truth, with a history of such racism and misogyny and a profound unwillingness to stand up for working to really do anything to deal with the huge challenges the UK and the world faces today? Particularly with climate catastrophe on the horizon?

If Labour wins the next election, all that will happen is mild amelioration for a couple of years. During which time the Tories will rebrand, eventually get back in and the whole process will start over again... except even worse than that, because I believe (although this is just personal opinion) that Labour is now even worse than it was during the Tony Blair years. Anyone relying on the Labour Party to sort out their problems is in for a very bitter disappointment. I'm sorry to be so cynical, but this is the truth.

So, what can we do? Here are some ideas if you're feeling depressed (it's a depressing subject):

1) Think very hard about who you're voting for. Remember it's not just about the party or the leader, it's about your local candidate and whether you have faith in them to represent you in Parliament. I will not vote Labour next time because I do not have faith in my local candidate - however, there are still some Labour candidates for whom it's worth voting. The website They Work For You is a brilliant tool to determine whether a certain candidate is or isn't worth supporting - loads of information about their votes, speeches and general Parliamentary behaviour to determine if they represent what you want. If you don't have a decent Labour candidate, research your other candidates... we have an awful electoral system where most votes don't count, but if you have to vote for someone who won't win it's still worth it in some respects. If it's a closer call than expected, your local candidate may feel that they have to take on some of the characteristics of their opponent in order to win again next time.

2) Find a way of protesting. Protesting doesn't mean you have to sit in the middle of the M25 (although I admire people who do that, and they'll most likely be the subject of a future blog). Even if it's just trying to keep a day centre open in your community, that's still activism. Help with someone's rent, sign petitions, find something you can do to make someone's life a bit easier... we have to look after each other because we simply cannot rely on the state (ANY of the state) to do it for us. Even if you know an activist who's experiencing a bit of burn-out, a cup of tea and a chat can work wonders for someone's ability to carry on when the going is tough. (And just a note - a year ago, nine activists were jailed for telling the Government to insulate Britain. Now, the Government has pledged £6 billion to help do just that. Direct action does work.)

3) Don't despair. It's really hard not to sometimes, and I'm as guilty of that as anyone. But it isn't productive. So many times in the past people have felt similar to this, and so many times we've come through it. Someone once told me that the reason human beings have survived so long is that we're really quick to adapt to new circumstances - but we cannot ever imagine ourselves out of our present ones. If things are going badly, we cannot ever imagine them going well again. If things are going well, it feels like all the bad stuff is in the past and we've won. The truth is, we never win and we never lose, because things fluctuate, always have and always will. Just because things are bad at the moment, doesn't mean it's impossible to come through it and change things. It being impossible is what they want us to think. Don't fall for it.