It gets worse before it gets better

 The sheer amount of horror coming out of Palestine is now so great that I find I'm pretty much unable to consume it all. The videos of the destruction of Al-Shifa hospital are so sickening that there aren't even words to describe it. I cannot physically get my head around how any human being is capable of this level of cruelty.

This isn't the first time horrors as great as these have occurred in the world - however, I think it is probably the first time that they've occurred on such a public scale. I've seen this situation described as 'the world's first live-streamed genocide', and I think that's pretty accurate. Astonishingly, the Israeli forces aren't even pretending to be following international law (or maybe they are, and there are things happening that are even worse than what we know about, but if that's the case it makes me wonder how bad it's actually possible for things to be). The reasons they're so brazen about it I'm not entirely clear on - they're either so strongly preconditioned that they truly believe that what they're doing is right and they aren't ashamed of it, or they've become so accustomed to the world's tendency to let them off the hook that they simply can't even be bothered to keep up any semblance of respectability.

I find myself in quite a difficult moral position over all of this. Here in the UK, I've been really heartened to see so many people prepared to stand up to Israel - I've been involved in Free Palestine campaigns for ten years, and I haven't seen widespread anger on this scale in the past. For the first time, it feels as though we're getting somewhere - at any rate, our Government and opposition have had no choice but to row back on their reluctance to call for a ceasefire, even though they still aren't even close to doing what is needed. I am optimistic that in the near future, Israel will be held account for its appalling and disgusting actions. However, I know that this is only the case because of how bad it is, and how much it's becoming public knowledge. Further activism will occur only when it gets worse. And if things start to improve, I'm concerned that public action will dip back down again, when it needs to be consistent and sustained.

This is something I've been wondering about in a more general sense recently. I've just finished Aldous Huxley's Brave New World, which is set in what is arguably a dystopia (although some may present it as a utopia); where people are kept so content by being given superficial things that they never have the motivation to create any kind of social progress. Our own world is far closer to George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four - everything is in a terrible state, everyone knows that and many people are quite rightly deeply unhappy and cynical. Personally I think this is a preferable state of affairs because dissatisfaction is part of the key to having a movement; but the downside to that is the amount of suffering that takes place in the meantime. Is any amount of suffering worth it if it makes people prepared to stand up for what is right?

The answer isn't yes and it isn't no. I do believe we're moving in the right direction with Israel and Palestine, but I could easily be wrong about that - we may be moving in no positive direction at all, and even if we are it shouldn't be like this in the first place. There is nothing positive whatsoever about great suffering, not even if good things are created out of it - but that does not mean that we should shy away from creating good things out of suffering.

The same is true the other way around. I was reading an article the other day (I can't remember where it was) where someone lamented the fact that climate activism in the United States is nowhere near as strong and powerful as it was a couple of years ago. The reason for this, the person argued, is that Joe Biden has been stronger on climate policy than Donald Trump was, meaning that there's a perception that the war is being won and therefore that the pressure can be reduced a little. This is intensely dangerous, because although Joe Biden is a bit better than Donald Trump, that really isn't saying very much and withdrawing upon making a few minor victories could result in a worse state of affairs in the long run. The person who wrote that article was arguing that eventually, taking into account the amount of political activism each set of circumstances are likely to entail, climate policy might end up being better if Donald Trump ends up winning the Presidency again later this year than if Joe Biden gets a second term. As an activist, this creates an absolutely impossible situation. It means there's nothing you can reliably campaign for.

I can't give a creditable solution to this dilemma - all I can say is that there is a balance to be struck somewhere, and the worse things are the more likely it is that people are going to be motivated to change them. But the opposite is also true. I believe that hope and momentum are also essential for good activism. I think everyone has experienced the feeling of wanting to change something but feeling so dejected by the state of things that they don't see the point. I know I've felt like that myself - every progressively-minded person has. But I hope it creates some kind of optimism to remember that everyone in history who has ever achieved something had their days when they thought, 'Is this really worth it?' I'm not a religious person, but I do think that a big part of the appeal of religious texts is that it's reassuring to remember that people thousands of years ago felt the same emotions, hopes and fears as we do. They're a universal part of the human experience, and they aren't going to change.

So get out there, and change the world. Clean up rivers and beaches. Write articles bemoaning our descent into fascism. Donate to charities campaigning for a ceasefire in Palestine. Look into who your local parliamentary candidates are, and support the ones who don't just go along with their party status quo. And if things just feel like they're turning to shit, remember - the worse things get, the more likely it will be that there are loads of other people who feel the same way you do. I don't think there's ever been a period of time since I've been born that has quite as much of a window of opportunity as we have right now - a time when people are unhappy enough to want things to change, but we're still having enough success to have momentum. That moment will not last forever, but we have it right now. Let's utilise it.

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The importance of having activism in stories

 This blog comes with a shameless plug for a major project I've just launched, but let's take a moment before we get to it.

'Helly Johnston is miserable. Her mother is thinking of marrying again, but Helly doesn’t want a stepfather, certainly not this one. She sobs her way out of the classroom all the way down to the cloakroom and the depths of despondency. There, forceful Kitty Killin comes to the rescue.

Kitty’s not known for sensitivity or tact, but she’s been through it all herself - her mother married the silver-haired, chocolate-bearing, goggle-eyed Gerald. Kitty begins to unfold her tale of how her mother seems so changed by Gerald’s presence, of how her little sister takes to him at once, and how Old Goggle-Eyes remains a perpetual thorn in Kitty’s side.'

That is the blurb on a novel I listened to on cassette when I was about seven or eight, the first of many 'parent gets new partner that child can't stand' stories that dominate children's and YA fiction. The story is called Goggle-Eyes, it's by former Children's Laureate Anne Fine, and it won the Carnegie Medal and the Guardian Children's Fiction Prize.

Now, you might be thinking, 'This is meant to be an activism blog, why is George recommending a children's book?' Well, because I re-read it in my twenties, and I realised that the main plot line of the sisters, their mother and their obnoxious stepfather is just a smokescreen. In spite of the title, the blurb and the promotion, this is actually a book about nuclear war, weapons and the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament. The story is set in Scotland in the 1980s when the CND movement was particularly strong in Scotland, and if you read the book as an adult you can see that there's a political undercurrent running right the way through the narrative. The girls' mother, a nurse in a hospital, is an important member of the local CND branch, and regularly participates in calls to action against nuclear weapons. Her daughters, main character Kitty and younger sister Jude, have been brought up in and around this movement and have got to know their mother's activist friends, and Kitty herself is clearly becoming increasingly aware of the importance of the movement. And the reason why Kitty takes such an immediate dislike to her mother's new partner, the crux of the plot, is because he's actively opposed to this movement. His presence is a threat to everything Kitty is growing up to stand for, and she cannot understand why her mother, who feels as strongly about these issues as she does, wants to spend her time with him.

The current edition of the book has an afterword by the author Anne Fine, where she talks about her own history of activism and her thought process behind the book. As I expected, her need to tackle the issue of nuclear weapons and activism against them came first. It was after attending Greenham Common Women's Peace Camp in 1981 that Fine had the idea to write this into one of her books. However, she stresses the importance of not just lecturing readers, so she had to turn it into a personal story about real characters as well. She invented the sisters, their mother and their new stepfather, turned them into a thriving family and set it with the backdrop of a world living under fear of nuclear war.

When I was a child, I wasn't exactly consciously aware of the political backdrop of this story - I was more just entertained by the characters' day-to-day lives in the same way I would be in any other story. However, I think something of this must have gone in subconsciously. When I re-read this book as an adult I got shivers down my spine, because so much of it resembles the kind of work that I've grown up to do. Like Anne Fine, I like to write stories that are about original characters, who have lives and interests and personalities that you can get into, but that are all influenced by the sociopolitical zeitgeist of the time.  More importantly, I think it's really important to tell stories about the lives of activists. Activists in stories are often depicted as what tvtropes.org calls a 'Soapbox Sadie' - defined as 'A character, often a child or teenager and almost Always Female, who cares deeply about all worthy causes. She wants to protect the environment from polluters, prove that women aren't inferior to men, and Free the Frogs. If she's the main character of the show, she spends a lot of time struggling with her idealism and whether it is too unrealistic. Soap Box Sadie is usually a post-hippie, the type of girl who would have been a hippie had she not been born in the wrong decade. Sometimes she's updated to the more recent counter-cultures of the time like emos, goths, hipsters, etc.' Examples of this kind of character include Hermione Granger in the Harry Potter stories when she goes off on one about the house-elves, and Lisa Simpson about various causes at various points in the show's history. And even that's assuming that they're depicted positively at all - in many stories, they're just depicted as slightly unhinged extremists.

Rarely do you have characters in stories who have their own lives and identities, are going on their own personal journey, but also are aware of the injustices of the world and aren't afraid to speak out about them. This is something that my partner and I have tried to do in our TV drama Square. We define Square as 'a TV drama series about the world today, the lives of many people living in Bristol and the bewilderment of spending your life trying to achieve something'. The main characters have lives, relationships, affairs, job interviews and lots of other personal stories, but they're all linked by wanting to do good in this world, and much of the story is set within the backdrop of Bristol's anti-war activism scene. We created this format in 2018 and then spent several years trying to develop it and turn it into something. In 2021 we created a pilot off the back of a crowdfunding campaign, which I will embed below. Since then, we've continued to try to turn it into a full series, but unfortunately the entertainment world has proven absolutely impossible to break into. It's bad enough at the best of times, but when your format rocks the boat as much as ours does, it sometimes feels like you'd have more luck buying a lottery ticket.

Happily, we aren't giving up. Particularly taking into account how terrible things are in the Gaza Strip and how important it is at the moment to have really good stories about anti-war activism, we've decided to try to fund the series ourselves. We are doing this by putting our pilot episode online and then taking pre-orders for the full series. This is not a crowdfunder, it's a pre-order - when we've made the full six-episode series, we'll sell it at £10 per episode or £50 for the whole series in one go (this is the equivalent of getting one episode free). So at the moment, we're taking payments until we've raised enough money to make the whole thing, and the people who have already paid will obviously get immediate access.

Although doing it this way is going to be incredibly hard, I'm also really excited about it because there's something beautifully meta about this. Our story is about grassroots people trying to achieve something off their own backs, and that's also what we're doing with our means of creation. If we pull this off, it will change the way the industry works - much of the time, people in the industry behave in a really arrogant, bullying way because they believe that you need them and that you'll take it. I really hope that much like the #metoo movement made great strides at reducing sexual harassment within the entertainment world, this will have a similar outcome and create a world in which people who want to create something special are treated with more respect.

Here is our pilot episode - it's 50 minutes long.

If you'd like to support us to make a full series, the pre-order form is here - there's a lot of information on there as well about how we came to be doing this work and what we hope to achieve with it.

It would mean so much to us if you'd help us out - I do truly believe that telling stories is the best way of changing the world for the better. Storytelling exists in every culture in the world, it unlocks the imagination and it makes people dream of something better. And having dreamed it, they start to demand it. Let's do this together.

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A lot of the time, basic human decency is enough

 I was very upset this week to read this story about a primary school in Scotland where parents have been offered versions of their children's class photos without the pictures of certain children, including children with cerebral palsy or additional complex needs. From reading into it, it seems that even the parents of the specific children concerned have been quick to stress that this wasn't the school's fault, but entirely the fault of the external photography company, Tempest Photography.

It's obviously extremely disturbing that in 2024, a photography company still believed that this was acceptable behaviour, and I'm immensely glad that the school, its pupils, the pupils' parents and the media are holding it to account. As bad as this instance was, it would seem to be a one-off, and the fact that it's caused such outrage is, I think, a sign that we're making great strides forward in recognising disabled children and wanting to treat them equally (I think in the past, such an attitude would have been shrugged off, and perhaps children with disabilities would have been barred from taking part in the photography session in the first place).

There is nowadays a lot of talk about positive representation of people with disabilities in the media. I agree with this, although I do believe that this often doesn't translate into creating actual decent services that include them (I've written about this on previous blogs such as this one). Although I have witnessed services for the disabled crumble to pieces under successive neoliberal administrations, I am at least satisfied that regular folk on the ground are keen for their disabled friends and family members to be recognised and treated with respect and dignity. However, I also feel that there is a consistent misunderstanding as to what this means, and I'd like to spend a few moments discussing these misconceptions.

When I was at University, a friend of mine with a severe learning difficulty invited me along to a group that they went to. I went to it, and on the wall was a poster with tips on how to treat people with learning difficulties. The tips included 'Don't bully them', 'Include them' and 'Try to be nice to them'. I can't remember all of them, but I remember finding that poster immensely patronising. I remember talking to one of the people who was running the session about this, and pointing out that there was not one single item on the list that I didn't think was just basic human decency that should be afforded to everyone. She was interested in what I had to say, and I felt she was taking this on board.

It was this instance that made me think that a lot of the ways in which we discuss people with learning difficulties is based in the idea that they should be some kind of exception to the ruthlessness of the world. To be told to 'try to be nice' to a particular person because they're particularly vulnerable suggests that we aren't going to try to be nice to them just because they're a human being. This whole model of disability rights is based around the idea that the world is horrible, as are most of the people in it, so the most we can hope for is that some of the people who are struggling won't have to experience how horrible it is because we'll take a moment to smile at them and pretend that everything is okay. This is not only extremely condescending to anyone who has one of these conditions, but also ignores the fact that lots of disabilities are invisible, everyone can suffer, and everyone deserves a bit of compassion in their life.

As I've written about previously, my partner set up a community group in Abergavenny called The Gathering, which aims to restore some of the services for adults with learning difficulties, disabilities and mental health problems that have been cut in recent years. The group still has a long way to go before it can be truly inclusive to the members of the community who have the most severe needs, but as a new project is absolutely thriving - every time I pop by one of the sessions, there's an enormous group of people there smiling and having a good time. One of the most important things about it is that no one has to qualify for anything to attend. As long as they aren't behaving in an abusive way or anything, anyone is allowed to drop in, by themselves, or with a friend or family member or a carer - they don't have to explain why they're there, or be assessed and judged to be vulnerable in any way. This is a big part of the model of needs that I'd like to see adopted more widely - that of people striving to be there for one another and help one another, without necessarily knowing or understanding why that person needs help. You don't need to be an expert on someone's condition to be able to help them.

In fact, I sometimes think that being an expert on someone's condition can be actively harmful, because that may cause them to be seen as a condition rather than as a person. My partner has also written a novel called Vulnerable Voices, which is inspired by his time working in care (although it is fictitious). The main character in it is a boy in his late teens called Ellis, who finds himself volunteering with the disabled after finishing school mainly because he's not sure what else to do and falls into it by accident. Within the story, Ellis proves far and away the most adept character at understanding what the service-users need and helping them to sort out their lives. It's told in the first person from Ellis' perspective and he himself doesn't particularly realise how exceptional he is at this work - but it's him not realising that makes him so exceptional. Because with his unassuming nature, his lack of self-consciousness and his enjoyment of cheesy pop culture, Ellis is just there, talking to people exactly as he'd talk to anyone else and not thinking twice about it. For the service-users, who perhaps are more used to being othered and talked down to even by those who mean well, this could be a rare moment of normality in their lives. I think this is something that we could all do with remembering - you don't have to know details about someone's life or think that they're a radically different kind of person to you, because they probably aren't, and sometimes a kind word or a thoughtful gesture is enough.

One more thing... we may talk about 'learning difficulties', but it's important to remember that we can't access other people's brains and we don't know their level of understanding. There's a young man whose family is involved in our disability rights campaigns whose family often brings him to the council meetings - he's a wheelchair-user, is unable to talk and has extremely complex needs, and to look at him I think a lot of people's natural assumptions would be that he probably doesn't really understand. And perhaps he doesn't - I don't know him well, and I wouldn't know. But I remember watching him at a meeting once, and thinking, 'What if he does actually understand everything? What if he's able to follow it all, and is frustrated by the fact that he can't communicate this to us?' This is a moment that I've never forgotten, and ever since I've always tried to talk to everyone, no matter who they are, with the expectation that they have just as high a level of understanding as I do, even if they can't show it. Because for all I know they might do, and it's disrespectful to their dignity and intelligence to suggest anything less. Someone once told me that it's ableist to assume that someone else has the same capacity that you yourself do... but I think the opposite is true. I actually believe it's ableist to assume that they don't.

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My love-hate relationship with the Green Party

I'm from Bristol, which has a very prominent Green Party presence, and I'm the son of quite a prominent Green Party activist, so I grew up in and around the party and have been introduced to quite a few of their most high-profile politicians, such as their first and only MP Caroline Lucas. Their current co-leader, Carla Denyer, is someone who I used to stand with on picket lines before she was a politician - back in 2011 we got barred from Costa Coffee together when we protested against them forcing their way in on Gloucester Road (I was going to link to my blog at the time about that, but having given it a re-read I'm embarrassed to! It's in the archives if you want to find it - I apologise in advance for how incredibly cringe it is!)

Suffice to say, I have an awful lot of respect for the Green Party. I've campaigned for them, I've signed their petitions and I've voted for them at the vast majority of elections and democratic exercises since I've been old enough to vote. I also suffer from great anxiety and fears connected to climate change, so the Green Party's priorities are usually my priorities. But having a lot of respect for someone does not make them immune from criticism, and there have been quite a few times that I've also had quite a bit of scepticism about Green Party activity.

2019 was the year that I started getting a bit frustrated by the Green Party, having previously really appreciated their take-no-prisoners attitude towards the right-wing establishment. But when we had a really strong left-wing movement led by Jeremy Corbyn, I felt that this was often undermined by the Green Party. Corbyn was making all the same socialist arguments that Caroline Lucas had been making in Parliament for years, I felt that this was a really opportune moment to build strong alliances with Labour, but I felt the Green Party did not take them. If anything I felt that the Green Party allowed the Tories to dictate the terms of the conversation, continually taking the bait over Leave vs Remain and avoided focussing on the issues that actually mattered. This culminated in Caroline Lucas proposing a completely nonsensical cross-party consensus of all-female anti-Brexit MPs. I was very confused by exactly how this had come about - to this day, I'm still not clear if this was actual Green Party policy that had been voted on at conference, or Lucas' own vanity project. I wasn't clear why this matter had been turned into a gender issue - a lot of the MPs who Lucas approached about this consensus seemed to have been chosen purely because they were female and anti-Brexit, even if their voting records had been profoundly anti-socialist and anti-environment. Also, if Lucas wanted to make this about identity politics, it backfired when it was pointed out to her that all of her handpicked female anti-Brexit MPs were white. I say this as someone who's met Caroline Lucas and has generally been very impressed by her in the House of Commons, and to be fair to her she did later hold up her hands and admit that she'd messed this one up. I found that very refreshing, because most of the time we just hear them bluster around things and pretend their present positions are what they've always held - it's so incredibly rare to hear a politician say, 'I got this wrong and I'm sorry', and it showed an extraordinary level of honesty and integrity on the part of Caroline Lucas. Nevertheless, I still don't know what she was thinking. I feel the time she spent on that project could have been spent forming alliances with politicians who were actual socialists, rather than prioritising being anti-Brexit and being female. I think if she and the Green Party had been a bit more strategic here, it could perhaps have done a better job of overcoming the likes of Theresa May and Boris Johnson.

Come the 2019 election, I felt the Green Party continued to be more focussed on being anti-Brexit than on anything else, which resulted in them seeming more chummy with Jo Swinson and the Liberal Democrats than with Jeremy Corbyn and Labour. I found this an exceptionally harmful and damaging decision, for a few reasons. Firstly, although I voted Remain in 2016, I can respect the fact that the UK voted to leave the EU, and that continually campaigning against a democratic vote is not a good look (I'll also acknowledge on this that I said the opposite for quite a while after the Brexit vote, and campaigned to reverse the outcome. I'm not a hypocrite, but I'm capable of changing my mind and in hindsight I can see that I was wrong - our focus should have been on making sure that all our rights and opportunities were protected after Brexit, and if we'd done that maybe we wouldn't have had such a destructive Brexit as we eventually got). Secondly, I'm of the generation that supported the Liberal Democrats under Nick Clegg in 2010, and we were let down when he took the Lib Dems into coalition with the Tories. The protests over tuition fees at that time were the start of my becoming so politically active in the first place, and Jo Swinson was a part of that Government. She expressly ruled out ever supporting the socialist principles of Labour at that time, but she did not make such a rock-solid commitment to not working with the Tories. I didn't trust the Liberal Democrats then, I still do not trust them now, and the fact that the Green Party tried to make alliances with them was the main reason why, for the first time ever in 2019, I did not vote Green. I voted Labour, for my local incumbent Thangam Debbonaire, in spite of the fact that my friend Carla (the now co-leader) was the Green Party's candidate and in spite of the fact that I hadn't been very impressed by Debbonaire in the past.

On reflection, I believe I was wrong to vote Labour, and I've discussed this before. Thangam Debbonaire has proven a big disappointment, and until I moved out of the constituency last year I regularly wrote to her with various frustrations I had with her actions. I believe that I should have swallowed my pride and voted Green, in particular because the issues I had with the Green Party in 2019 were not Carla Denyer's fault (I don't know if she even approved of them). I've been delighted to see Carla become co-leader of the party - truthfully, I can think of no one better.

Having said that, I'm still not desperately impressed by the Green Party's tactics for election. It was recently announced that at the next election, for the first time, they plan to stand a candidate in every constituency seat in the country. I'm very glad to see them standing in more seats, and given how poorly both Labour and the Conservatives are performing at the moment, I genuinely hope to see them win more than their sole seat in Brighton Pavilion (which Caroline Lucas is standing down from anyway). However, standing in every seat in the country is in my opinion a complete own goal, and fails to take into account the circumstances of each seat. As I've written about previously, I believe that party politics is dead, and I'm a big supporter of OCISA, a campaign group that seeks to stand really good socialist independent candidates against establishment politicians - most particularly in Holborn St Pancras, where Andrew Feinstein intends to stand against Keir Starmer. If the Green Party would get behind campaigns like Andrew's, it would go some way towards making up for the fact that in 2019 they failed to support what was at the time a valid socialist alternative. If the Green Party seeks to split the anti-establishment vote in constituencies like these, I believe this could become a major obstacle towards their goal of climate justice.

Actually, my problem with the Green Party is the polar opposite of my problem with the Labour Party. My issue with Labour (its present incarnation anyway) is that it is run as an absolute top-down endeavour, where no one is allowed to express any opinion other than those which have been sanctioned by the leadership. The Green Party has the opposite problem - the politicians who represent it vary hugely in quality. As long as someone believes in taking immediate action on climate change, their views on other things can be wildly different from one another. Through our campaigns to improve services for the disabled in the Monmouthshire area, my partner and I have interacted quite a lot with Green Party councillor Ian Chandler, and I've written in the past about the difficulties I've had with Councillor Chandler's attitude, which has often felt quite dismissive of the needs of the most vulnerable (to be fair, they do now seem to be a lot more supportive of my partner's work than they have been in the past, so I'm really hoping something has improved there). But it's indicative of my point that although action on climate change and environmental matters generally is quite rightly the Green Party's core aim, that is not enough. It's possible to be in favour of these things, and still have views that harm the most vulnerable. In particular, there are some kinds of environmentalist whose views can slip into what is called 'eco-fascism' - the belief that the world is overpopulated, and that in the interests of dealing with climate change it would be good if large swathes of humanity died out (which is incredibly unfair, as the people who stand to lose the most from environmental degradation are those who have done the least to cause it).

Am I in support of the Green Party as a political organisation? Yes. Will I vote for them again in the future? Probably. Do I think it stands to improve a great deal under its current leadership? Absolutely I do - I have great respect for Carla Denyer, both from knowing her personally as a human being and from her political work, which includes causing Bristol to become the first city in the UK to declare a climate emergency. I don't know as much about Adrian Ramsay as I do about Carla Denyer, but I have faith that he's a very good person as well. However, that does not mean that the Green Party is always run especially well - in fact at times, I think it's been run abysmally. If something is worth doing, it is worth doing well, and the Green Party's work is more worth doing than that of any other political party in the UK.

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Social media is the worst thing about modern society. It is also the best

 I was having a conversation with one of my best friends earlier this week about the nature of modern society, and I challenged my friend to name the best and worst things about modern society. We didn't get as far as the best thing, but my friend was quite quick to state social media as one of the greatest perils of the way we live now, and naturally being a very active social media user I leapt in to defend it! Although I should clarify that I don't love social media that much; I can very much appreciate its flaws, and I also think the overall quality of it has degraded quite a lot since I started using it in the late 2000s. But I continued to think about this conversation for a while afterwards, and I actually realised that social media is the answer to both questions. It's the best thing about modern society, and also the worst.

According to the Internet, I'm at the very end of the 'millennial' generation, being born in 1993. I always think my generation is quite interesting because we were the first to grow up with the Internet being commonplace, and yet it was also new enough that we can easily imagine a world without it. On reflection, I can see how frightened the generations before us were about the fact we were growing up with the Internet - anyone born before about 2010 can remember being told, over and over again, that we must not, under any circumstances, give out any personal information about ourselves to people we'd met on the internet, not even our real names. I sometimes wonder if they knew back then that they were fighting a losing battle on this, or if they still felt that it could be controlled - whichever one it was, clearly the entire generation took no notice, and within a few short years we were setting up our profiles on Facebook and Twitter, and connecting with people.

I was 14 when I got my Facebook profile in 2008. Now being 30, I've had it the majority of my life, and although I will admit to not always finding it quite as satisfying, I'm still just as active a user as I was when I started out. The reason I don't find it quite as satisfying is that for the most part, I think social media has stopped being user-generated - I like to use it to communicate with friends and keep up-to-date with how people's lives are going even if I go a bit of time without talking to them. This doesn't seem to be what social media is really used for anymore - the majority of things that come up in my feed are paid promotions, the majority of which have very little relevance to me. I also have serious concerns about things like data mining, artificial intelligence training and the fact that the nature of social media is that we are not the consumers, we are the products. All of this is true, and it's harmful.

But having said that, I think it's become quite trendy to bash social media. In fact, I actually think that bashing it is a way for us to justify our continued use of it, almost like how we might feel guilty for buying something on Amazon when we know it's harming an independent business - 'Yes, I do it because it's easier, but I don't like it, honest!' I think this is almost more harmful than continuing to use it in the first place, because in addition to potentially causing harm to someone else, you also grow an increasing amount of dissatisfaction with yourself and your own behaviour. So I'm going to go out on a limb and say that actually, I really enjoy my social media presence. I enjoy it to a limit - I don't intend to spend any more time on social media than I already do, and I think I'm unlikely to sign up to any more social media sites other than those I'm already signed up to (hence why I don't have Instagram or TikTok) - but being part of these communities has enriched my life greatly, has caused me to meet new and amazing friends that I'd otherwise never have known, and caused me to reconnect with people I'd long since lost touch with. It has also caused me to have some professional opportunities which I wouldn't have known about were it not for my online contacts.

More to the point, my use of social media has been really beneficial for my involvement in social and political activism. I've got to know when protests are happening largely through Facebook. I've got involved in communities like OCISA, through which I'm campaigning to unseat Keir Starmer, largely through Facebook. I've used Twitter to put pressure on politicians and public bodies. I've learned when important votes are taking place in the House of Commons. I've had online petitions shared with me. I've participated in debates which have caused me to have more core knowledge of subject matters than I ever would have done otherwise. I've shared memes and raised awareness of things during election time, and more besides. And it's largely because of this kind of thing that in 2017, Theresa May and the Conservatives lost their majority in the House of Commons, after being predicted a super-majority in the early days of their campaign. That would not have happened if the mainstream media was our only source of information - it came from user-generated content, and most importantly, our willingness to talk to one another.

The user-generated content aspect has largely died out since 2017, and I think the unexpected result of that election is a big part of the reason for that - the Conservative Party paid social media companies like Facebook a lot of money to target users with dark ads, and the fact that high-quality user-generated content was able to make those dark ads largely defunct surely resulted in a lot of complaints from extremely powerful people. In any case, it is far harder to get people to see your own personal posts now than it was then. But talking to people is something that hasn't died, and this is the point I want to make. It often feels like we're living in one of the most dystopian parts of history there's ever been, and maybe we are, but at the same time, never before has it been this easy to communicate with people we have never met, whose experiences are entirely different to our own and who are geographically a long way away from us. I believe that networking with these kinds of people is absolutely vital for 21st-century life, and that's it's something we should value.

If we're people of privilege, it's hard to quite put ourselves in the shoes of those who aren't - we may know logically that lots of people haven't been as fortunate as us, but if they aren't directly in our circles we don't have that much of a glimpse into what their lives are like. Interacting with these people on social media can be beneficial in that regard. And if we're not people of privilege, if we're oppressed and miserable, it's very easy to think that we're the only ones. But if we can see other people who are in the same boat, it's far easier to speak to them and say, 'Shall we try to do something about this?' And perhaps we can do. So then it's still beneficial.

Here is a list of things that I do not believe would have happened were it not for social media:

-The result of the 2017 UK General Election

-The Arab Spring movement

-The #metoo movement, which has significantly changed our approach to intimacy in the entertainment industries

-Increasing acceptance of LGBTQ+ relationships, and demands for equality in this

-Increased awareness of climate change, and more abilities for groups like Extinction Rebellion and Just Stop Oil to form and evolve

-Greater understanding of the context behind global issues like the terrible things currently happening in Palestine

-An ability to reach out to friends if we're struggling with mental health (this one is particularly personal to me because it was something that I found very helpful when I was a teenager, and I know it got a lot of people through the 2020 pandemic)

And yes, acknowledging this does not mean that it's perfect. It is far from perfect - it's run in an overly-capitalist way, by an extremely small group of very powerful people, and there are many things that I would change about the way it operates given the chance. But the comparison I would make is with coffee-houses. I have many issues with companies like Starbucks and Costa Coffee, but that doesn't mean I'm against the existence of coffee-houses generally - in fact, given the opportunities they create for community cohesion, I think they're a positive thing to have on our high streets. I feel the same with social media. Having a lot of issues with the ruthless corporatism of it (which we should have) does not mean we need to object to the technology being there, or that we need to avoid it. I think it's something we can work with, and form our own personal moral compasses about. And I also think that, even if we haven't yet reached a world where our media isn't owned by the powerful, we are so incredibly privileged to live in a world where they don't always create the content we consume. This is something that, if we're going to change the world (hopefully in a socialist way), we are going to need.

I'll just conclude by saying that one thing I've heard quite a lot, from people of many different persuasions, is that conversations online have a tendency to get more heated than they do in person. The justification given for this is that when you're hiding behind a screen, it's easy to detach yourself from the fact that you're talking to a real person, who has feelings and will be affected by what you say. And there is some truth in that, but, like with whether social media is the best or worst thing in society, the opposite is also true. I find that I am a far more thoughtful and considered person online than I am in person. The reason for this is that in person, if someone says something that annoys you, it's easy to get cross with them, and that can lead to having a falling-out and perhaps no one learns anything. But online, if someone hits a raw nerve, you don't have to show them anything more than you want to. You don't have to respond straight away, if you're not ready. You have the time to make yourself a cup of tea, re-read what they said to make sure you didn't misunderstand it, and think about how you're going to write a response which is polite and diplomatic but also doesn't shy away from the truth. I've found this to be a really positive thing for my communication skills, and also for my general control over my emotions. Of course, like everything else about social media, it's a matter of whether you actually choose to use it in that way.

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The overwhelming negativity of politics

 'You're joking! Not another one?' exclaimed Brenda from Bristol in 2017 upon learning that Theresa May had called a snap General Election after repeatedly assuring the public that she wouldn't. 'I can't stand this - there's too much politics going on at the moment.' The 2017 General Election took place a year after both a referendum on our EU membership and a coup by the Labour Party against its elected leader, two years after another General Election and three years after a referendum on whether Scotland should become an independent state, so Brenda had a point. There had indeed been an unusually high number of elections and miscellaneous political exercises in recent times.

Brenda's words became one of the most widely-shared election-related videos in UK history. Even now in 2024, she is so well-remembered that tonight when I was tasked with asking the questions in a quiz league game, there was a question about what her name was and it was answered correctly - and then one of the participants said, 'She spoke for the nation!' But what exactly did Brenda mean by 'there's too much politics going on at the moment'? After all, politics is ongoing so that's not exactly a clear statement. Did she mean she wants fewer opportunities to participate in democracy? She's never given any clarifications so one can only speculate on what she meant - but I think that at the very least, we can conclude that Brenda finds election campaigns to be a deeply, deeply unpleasant experience.

It is this that I think is what caused the entirety of the UK to unite with Brenda, because we all find elections to be horrible. Particularly as Brits, we're often told to steer clear of religion and politics in polite company, and during election time we can't do that. We're repeatedly told who we should and shouldn't vote for, we struggle to understand much of it and we have to pretend that we're more informed than we actually probably are. I'm as bad with this as anyone else is - I find I spend most of my time wanting an election, and then when one is actually called I suffer from severe anxiety and find myself thinking, 'This is absolutely awful - why on earth did I ever want this?' But the 2017 election in particular is very memorable for me, in terms of both how low I was when it was called and how excited I became by the result.

In early 2017, I was at a particularly low point in my life, and when the General Election was called I was absolutely certain that Theresa May would achieve the super-majority she was expected to get, we'd lose all hope of ever improving anything and basically shit would only get worse. But obviously that didn't happen - the Labour Party did a really great campaign, and the Tories actually lost seats. I remember watching the election coverage and all the pundits were absolutely stunned. Apparently Rupert Murdoch stormed out of the room when he saw the exit poll!

Seven years on, I have noticed quite a lot of revisionism in people's recollections of that moment. Nowadays, you're more likely to hear how badly Labour performed that they couldn't even beat a Prime Minister as awful as Theresa May. My question that I always ask in response is, 'So when the exit poll results came in and all the pundits were sitting there in shock, you're saying they were in shock because they were expecting Labour to win an outright majority rather than just a hung Parliament, are you?' Because I really do not believe this was the expectation. It was not expected that by appealing to hope rather than to fear, a political party would be able to come back in a General Election when they were that far behind in the polls to begin with. Essentially, the idea was that it's negative ideas, not positive ones, that win seats.

This is generally the driving force behind nearly every political campaign I've ever seen, both in the UK and abroad. I remember in the 2016 US Presidential Election, a meme was being shared around that said: 'Donald Trump Pros: Not Hillary Clinton. Cons: Donald Trump. Hillary Clinton Pros: Not Donald Trump. Cons: Hillary Clinton.' Both of these Presidential candidates predominantly relied on people disliking their main opponent even more than they disliked them. The same thing happened at the following US election, and will most likely happen in the next one. Here in the UK, the leaders of both the Labour and Conservative Parties are relying on this for the next election. Neither Rishi Sunak nor Keir Starmer is doing anything at all to make people think, 'Yes, I trust that person. They're the person I want to be my Prime Minister.' Their entire appeal is that they are not their opponent. I have very rarely heard anyone of any political persuasion express the fact that they actually like either of them.

I find this exceptionally harmful, and I think that this association of politics with negativity has a significant impact on social discourse. Because truthfully, I don't think politics should be negative. I think it should be an opportunity to express our ideas, listen to others and find a way forward that benefits everyone. I've written a lot on this blog in the past about my partner Owen and the campaign group for the disabled he's set up in Abergavenny. All of that is political, but in an overwhelmingly positive and beneficial way. Sure, there'll be times when we disagree with each other; if we're adults, we should have the maturity to be able to handle those disagreements and talk them out in a way that is actually valuable. There'll also be times when we feel like we don't really know enough about the subject; well, the best way to learn is to chat about these things. Some of the most intelligent and well-considered opinions I've ever heard have come from people who have told me that they don't really understand what's going on. I find that they tend to understand it more than they think they do - there's a concerted effort from the media class to suggest that politics is the domain of the privately-educated rich, and that is not true. If anything, I find those people tend to be the ones who are the most sheltered.

One thing that most people in the UK can agree on whatever their political persuasion is that they don't like the first-past-the-post system - and yet it stays despite being deeply flawed, because the only people with the power to change it are the ones who benefit from it being there. I could probably write a whole other blog on what form of democracy I'd prefer instead. However, with the way that political campaigns tend to conduct themselves, it would actually make the most sense to have an inverse voting system - vote for the person you least want, and then the person with the fewest votes gets in. This isn't a system I would personally advocate, but politicians do conduct their campaigns as though it is.

The writer Owen Jones said in a recent article for The Guardian that 'there are now three certainties in life: death, taxes, and Keir Starmer becoming Prime Minister within a year'. If I was being very facetious, I'd suggest that maybe if Keir Starmer becoming Prime Minister within a year is a certainty, that by itself demonstrates that taxes are not. In all seriousness, I don't agree that Keir Starmer becoming Prime Minister is a certainty, both because of Andrew Feinstein's campaign against him in Holborn St Pancras and because I don't believe Labour is doing anything at all to inspire people to vote for them. Jones' rationale is that the Tories are doing particularly badly at the moment - and indeed they are, and maybe that will result in a Labour victory, but I don't believe that's guaranteed. The reason I don't believe it's guaranteed is that I remember the same thing being said about Ed Miliband in 2015. After the disastrous experiment with a Conservative-Liberal Democrat coalition, that should have been the easiest election in the world for Labour to walk - but it made itself so unappealing that the left-wing vote was split, and the Tories managed to get an outright majority. And now under Keir Starmer, I think Labour is even less appealing than it was in 2015 under Ed Miliband, so I don't understand why relying on the governing party being awful is suddenly more likely to work now. Essentially, I don't think there has ever been an election in UK history (certainly not since I've been alive) that someone has won purely because of the flaws of their opponents. Every single election winner has, I feel, offered something that people wanted. Even if I haven't personally cared for what that is, I can see how certain things seemed appealing to certain sections of the demographic at the time. Right now, I don't see anyone in any major party trying to be appealing in any way at all, so this is uncharted territory. Who knows what will happen?

What I can say for certain is that politics does not need to be this negative. Have conversations with people, read about things from all different sources, don't be afraid to talk about your own feelings and don't be afraid to be disagreed with. Politics in the UK, and probably in most countries, is absolutely toxic. For this reason, I think Brenda from Bristol had a point. But I also think it's shameful that she had a point. We shouldn't live in a world where people dread the occasions where they get to participate in democracy. We don't have to have that world.

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How it came about that my partner is planning to stand as an independent MP

Quite a short blog today, but a personal one.

My partner is Owen B Lewis, and truthfully he's one of the most amazing people I've ever had the good fortune to know. He's the writer of two fantastic novels, The Waterfall Warrior and Vulnerable Voices. He's exceptionally good at anything practical, and has the ability to cut through the drivel and just crack on with achieving an objective. In the time I've known him, I've witnessed how Owen is always able to recognise when someone is struggling or vulnerable in any way, and has the intelligence and drive to fight for them to be able to get the support they need.

If you follow this blog, you'll probably have seen my posts regarding our work in South Wales (and if you haven't, please do check them out). As a general summary, in late 2022 we learned that Owen's former place of work, Tudor Street Day Centre in Abergavenny (formerly known as My Day My Life) had not been re-opened since lockdown, leaving many local disabled people with very little day-to-day support. Owen took this argument to Monmouthshire County Council, and it's still ongoing - but rather than spending all this time arguing with people, he decided to set up a community group called The Gathering. The Gathering has proven extremely popular with disabled people, their families and their carers, and we've had interest from quite a wide geographical range - reinforcing the fact that these services have been cut to the bone all over the place. The battle isn't over yet as we're still in need of a better location than the one we have, but there's a lot of talk behind the scenes about how to improve things.

Both our local Tory MP David TC Davies and the Labour parliamentary candidate Catherine Fookes have been openly supportive of the scheme. It's been lovely to have such public support from them; however, we have talked a lot about what it could mean for the next election. As I've written in many previous blogs, I'm extremely sceptical about both the Labour and Conservative Parties, and truthfully I don't believe either of them deserve to form a Government (irrespective of my opinion on the local candidates). Owen shares my views on this. It has occurred to us that with The Gathering proving so popular, people in the new constituency of Monmouthshire may take this into account in the way they vote - and if so, it may be beneficial to give them the chance to vote for the independent person who actually set up the whole thing, rather than the Labour or Conservative candidate who's been supportive but might not have been that actively involved.

When Owen told me he was planning to stand as a Parliamentary candidate, I was asleep. We'd been talking about it for a few weeks, Owen had previously ruled out the idea, but then he came back from the gym and woke me up by saying, 'George, I've decided - I'm going to do it.' I'm incredibly excited about this. We are aware that it's exceptionally difficult for independent candidates to win elections - but then, these are exceptional times. Public trust in politicians is at an all-time low. It often feels like there is no one to vote for who actually represents our views. This is especially true with recent events in the Gaza Strip; there is unequivocal support amongst the public for an unconditional ceasefire, and both major parties have dragged their feet over it. My opinion is that they drag their feet over everything, locally and nationally. They dragged their feet over support for the disabled until Owen got his act together and started sorting everything out.

From having observed the Westminster political system for several years, it largely seems impossible to reform - but I've also spent seven years, both before he became my partner and since, watching Owen consistently achieve the impossible. When we met, he proved to me that he was more capable than me of producing theatre, in spite of the fact that he had no experience at the time and I'd spent three years at University learning to do exactly that. Since then, he's never stopped doing that. This time last year, people thought that Owen made a lot of noise but no one had faith in him to set up a scheme like The Gathering - and yet here we are, and it's going from strength to strength. There is no one I trust more to shake things up, in a way that benefits ordinary people rather than the rich. He's not an establishment politician, and he's not like George Galloway in the sense that he doesn't seek fame or personal glory. Owen is someone who is humble enough to listen to regular folk, and assertive enough to stand up to anyone who gets in the way of accomplishing something special.

Two weeks ago, we met Andrew Feinstein, who is hopefully going to stand against Keir Starmer in Holborn St Pancras. Andrew was very encouraging of Owen, and it was a really inspiring evening. I'm really excited to see what other independent candidates might stand against establishment politicians, and I'm looking forward to being part of this kind of campaign in Monmouthshire.

But we need your help as well! At the moment, we're still fundraising for the £500 deposit that Owen needs to be able to get on the ballot paper. Here is a link to Owen's crowdfunding campaign, where you can read more about him in his own words. At the time of writing, we've raised £125 of the £500 needed (which is positive, because the crowdfunder has only just gone up). Deposits are refundable if the candidate receives more than 5% of the vote, so if you declare your name on it you could potentially get your money back later as well.

Thanks for your help if you can. Let's do this!

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