Important read!!
A documentary film to be released in the UK next month deals with the need for action even in democracies.
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Update on May 29:
Damon Albarn on 'We Are Many', Russell Brand and why he was wary of Tony Blair
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gQdag78QFds
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We Are Many had its premiere in London on 21 May and is released in cinemas on 22 May, meaning today.
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Chosen extract:
"Labour is still in disarray, the Liberal Democrats are nowhere, the Greens unconvincing, Ukip is eating itself alive. The SNP is the only effective opposition and that’s no comfort outside Scotland. Things can only get bitter".
(...)
"And social media makes it easier than ever to organise a protest: a generation ago, it took six months of campaigning to fill Trafalgar Square; now you can organise a flash mob in an hour".
"Unions, faith groups, charities and campaigners are taking a longer run up by calling all dissenters to gather under the banner of the People’s Assembly, with a national march against austerity on 20 June that will start outside the Bank of England.
They will want a peaceful protest, a carnival of concern: a vast version of an anti-austerity event that happened in Bristol last Wednesday and drew a couple of thousand people. It got less attention than the smaller, more angry confrontation outside Downing Street the day after the Tories came back to power, when smoke bombs and traffic cones were thrown at the police (who had come in their body armour and riot shields ready for such a clash).
Protest thrives in days like these, when there seems to be no alternative, but is it worth it? Does it work?
"Those are questions posed by a new film called We Are Many that looks back at the biggest protest in British history: the day a million people – or maybe two million – marched in London against the war in Iraq. They were from all walks of life, and many were protesting for the first time ever. The actor Mark Rylance remembers in the film that he thought he had stumbled into a different march: “I thought: ‘This must be for something else.’ Because there were all these families, people with pushchairs and babies, people who I had never seen before on these things and the outpouring of rage from the people was so beautiful, really passionate and eloquent and beautiful, people crying out and shouting.”
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"The realisation that this was not the case was a huge moment which, as the author John le Carré says in the film, has stuck in our craw ever since.”
We Are Many will have its premiere in London on 21 May and be released in cinemas on 22 May.
Amirani, a Londoner of Iranian descent who trained at the BBC, says he is one of a “huge swathe of voters who have said they will never vote Labour again because of what the party did with that war. Where do those people go?”
His answer is that they have gone into single-issue politics or campaign groups such as 38 Degrees, whose co-founder David Babbs appears in the film.
(...)
The Occupy Wall Street protest in 2013 (Getty)
"So, if you are going to protest, here’s how to have the most impact. First, make sure it’s an issue that effects people around you, not far away. Next, make a clear demand like stopping a war or raising the price farmers are paid for milk.
Get celebrity backers. Go break a window or two. Don’t hurt anybody or daub graffiti on war memorials as some idiot did during the Downing Street protest, but if you want to get noticed then absolutely do make it look as if there is chaos on the streets and the authorities can’t cope. These are the lessons from history.
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The protests are coming, but if they are ignored will we do what we did in 2003 and melt away, almost embarrassed to have caused a fuss?
“As Ken Loach says in our film, government can handle that,” says Amirani. “What it can’t handle is real organisation. Whether we will have that in Britain over the next five years remains to be seen.”
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Great conclusion.
Read the entire article of The Independent here: http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/films/news/we-are-many-the-new-movie-teaching-us-lessons-to-learn-from-the-2003-iraq-war-protests-10255512.html
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Democracy... Is it fighting against your own leaders who cannot put into place what is good for the represented...?
If so, then let it be. Stay strong Britons. We'll do our best this side of the channel as well...
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