What's your message?

Mainstream media outlets and commentators are complaining that the Occupy Movement has no message: "They don't know what they want", they cry. Of course this is not true and if there was a single simple change they'd probably be dismissed as naive and simplistic.

I wonder if the media in Jesus' time complained that he lacked a coherent message. Certainly 2,000 years later people are still unclear as to what exactly the Kingdom of God is about or where it is.

Jesus was interested in the questions, the parables, the dilemmas of his age and in presenting them to the 99% so that they could discover their own solutions.

Just before our last General Election I was invited, along with the other deacons, to a dinner at the Bishop's house. As we ate he casually turned to me and said, "So I hear you're telling people not to vote." This was a wonderful way to light the blue touch paper and watch the fireworks go off!

Among the comments and questions from those around the table I was asked what I would replace the current system with. I suppose I could have said a Swiss cantonement, a federation, Total localism, or any other thing that took power from the elite to the people. But I resisted that totalitarian urge within me. Because I know I don't have the answer.

The answer to the question 'If not this, what else?' lies in the space between I and Thou. It will emerge from our situations not from our text books. I don't want a blue print for a better world. I want to turn my mind to a parable, as the psalmist says. I don't want to be the answer but I want to be part of a generation that is willing to live the questions.

I also want corporations to stop buying politicians. ;-) 

Ciaron O'Reilly - Election Campaign Ireland 2011 (part 1)

The shocking truth about the British general election...

..and perhaps elections in general in the hard core of Empire.
The opinion of the voters did not matter.

It is hard to believe for someone from one of the many countries in Europe where coalition governments are the rule and not the exception that anyone would consider that a party representing 36% of the electorate would be more entitled to govern than two parties, together representing more than fifty per cent of the voters. "Gordon Brown has been voted out." Oh no, he has not. If the Liberal Democrats would honestly believe Labour would work on proportional representation, then Gordon Brown stays as prime minister. He will have a bigger mandate than the other man. Get used to the idea of coalitions, in Wales, Northern Ireland and Scotland (in reality) they are the rule too.

But all this belongs to the spheres where the United Kingdom would be no longer an annex of some of its former colonies in North America. Much more telling than all the talk about the voting system is the panicky media noise about what really matters about the election.
How will the markets react, that is the most prominent question.

Either "the markets" are a natural phenomenon, like a volcano that is getting angry and will explode since its special god is not pleased with the outcome. The Market as an idol that wants reconciliation.

Or "the markets" have got something to do with human beings. What kind of human beings, and where do they reside?

Answer to the latter question: not particularly or mainly in the UK.
Just like in Greece, probably Spain, Portugal and whichever country is next, the voting public does not matter.
"The markets" matter. They are demanding stable government.
The kind of government that deals with welfare, schools and war, lots of war. War is healthy for markets.

Oh, and police. The Most Important Selling Point of all the main parties is that they are bringing out so many cops into the streets. Markets seem to like that too.

You see, I am not particularly the anti-voting kind of anarchist, and I am sincerely pleased about the first Green MP. I was a member of the Green Party in NL until they took a turn to the right after which they disappeared altogether. (And I am a bit infatuated with Caroline Lucas, I confess). PR, which will give the Greens and others more opportunities, can stop the rot for a short while - and yes, the racists too will have more opportunities, but why only think of them when considering PR?

However, the story of the Importance of Markets rather than the voting public is the final démasqué of what only can be called now parliamentary democracy on its dying bed.

Considering the alternative to parliament is no longer something for some vague future beyond a horizon that inevitably keeps fading. Rather than talking about voting or not or propagating voter apathy it is time to seriously consider the alternative(s).
It may already be too late.

Voter Apathy: Our only hope

One of the things that has amazed me about responses to my not voting in this election is that some people have chosen to be offended. There is a moral outrage. Quite a few people have said they think it should be illegal not to vote. In effect they are saying I deserve to be fined and if I don't pay I should be locked up. My crime would be refusing to comply with a system which is:

1. Unjust.
2. Creates political apathy
3. Creates losers.
4. Disenfranchises the majority.
5. Allows people to abdicate responsibility for the decision made in their communities.
6. Selects people to fund and organise violence against me and people in distant countries.

1. Unjust.
This system is unjust most obviously because it is a 'first past the post' system. But if that doesn't rig it enough, the boundaries mean that there are huge disparities in numerical representation. The New Economics Forum have published an index of an adults notional vote. The theory is flawed in that it relies on some fairly circular arguments: If 75% of people want a party then your vote doesn't count because it's a safe seat? One could argue that it has counted, you wanted that party. Nonetheless they make a good general point that voter power is a real postcode lottery.

2. Political Apathy
People talk about voter apathy as though it's a bad thing. Yet the only reason the three biggest parties began this election talk about reform is they fear voter apathy. You can protest the government; you can kick them out; but if you really want to scare them: ignore them. The angst in this unjust system is evident all around, people worry about far right parties that would get in if the model was more fair: all this tells us is that people are using voting as a short cut to deal with racists and fascists. So rather than challenging bigotry and violence where we find it in everyday life we vote once every five years and pretend the evil doesn't exist because it has been smothered by the first past the most: the seeming moral majority. If refusing to vote is 'voter apathy' then voting may often lead to 'political apathy'. I feel certain that the suffragettes did not simply fight for democracy so that we could make do with something so absurdly symbolic as 'the vote'. The story is not over.

3. Losers
Christians are to love one another. Not only one another: Christians are to even love the enemy. How unChristian then to vote against the wishes of other people. To put all this energy into trying to silence the views of a fellow citizen. The aim of a general election is not to find out the will of the people but rather to set up a competition with a stolen mandate as the prize. Voting creates losers and I can't believe that the Jesus-community is called to create losers.

4. Disenfranchises the majority
More than half of all votes will count for nothing in parliament. They will be, in effect, rejected. MORE THAN HALF. Not only that, but a fifth of the voters hold the balance of power in their marginal constituencies: and within those constituencies more than half the votes are thrown away. That suggests that less than ten percent of votes really matter in our current system. Even if this was not the case: the system locks us into a combative mode of government where party-politicians seek to disenfranchise one another.

5. Abdicating responsibility
Decision making, consensus building, and community organising are hard work. We vote because we choose not to do this work. This may be because we're too busy but we're often busy earning the money that pays the people who have taken our decision-making ability away from us. Meanwhile the richest keep their money and buy power at a fraction of the price because they don't have to vote. The majority get a free vote once every five years. Well, you get what you pay for. The minority spend hundreds of thousands on buying the MPs that we leave to get on with it on our behalf. 80% of Conservative MPs are members of a Zionist lobby - their biggest backer - and the Labour party aren't far behind. Refusing to vote can have a powerful psychological effect: it causes one to ask how else one might get power and what better world might be possible where this crazy machine stops being oiled by the ballots. Emma Goldman famously said, "If voting changed anything they'd make it illegal." So why isn't those who abstain who are having criminalisation waved at them?

6. Violence
This is a simple dilemma for the Christian who thinks voting might be moral. The Matthew tradition tells us that Jesus taught his followers not to resist violence by force/violence (Matt. 5) 'antistenai' if you're interested in the Greek. Some translators have it as 'don't resist evil' but this is too weak a translation. But either way - violence is out. Governments use our taxes to fund wars, and not only wars - all three big parties (yes, including the liberal democrats) advocate some form of nuclear deterrent - weapons that are deliberately aimed at civilians, that harm generations of innocents, that destroy all biological life in a given area. If I vote I am consenting to this violence being done on my behalf. If I vote I am saying I want my rights preferred to those of others because they live within different abstract borders. And I want my nation's rights to be defended with violence against the rights of any other nation. No wonder the politicians fear voter apathy but voter apathy is the only real hope of real change we really have.

How I will be voting in the 2010 UK General Election

This run-up to the general elections has made me feel reasonably reminiscent, though not necessarily in the fondest of ways. I am reminded in particular of last summer's European elections, which as everyone knows by now were conducted by proportional representation, ie, smaller parties actually had a real chance of gaining seats to represent Britain in the European Parliament. If the emphasis on getting out to “use your vote” was always high in different elections, it seemed especially so in 2009 when it seemed that the neo-fascist British National Party, who had up to this point only really been a minor threat on the fringes of the political radar, were now likely to gain hideous prominence.

And yes, worst fears did come to pass as the BNP gained their two seats, one of them being in my own region of the North-West. For well over a month up to that point, I had personally been agonising over whether I was going to vote or not. If someone had asked me not even three months earlier, I would have been firm in my resolve: I do not vote, because my primary allegiance as a Christian is to the Kingdom of God, and not to any of the kingdoms of this world. At the time, however, as public concern began rising so did mine rise along with it, particularly as I was working alongside asylum seekers and refugees, and therefore alongside persons who stood to lose the most if the BNP ever had a significant say in the running of the nation. It seemed like there were few options left but to fight fire with fire: I went to the ballot and voted for the Green Party, not because I believed in them or felt allegiance to them, but because I felt they were the most effective option to keep the BNP from gaining seats. My gesture was one of protest rather than pledge, of mere damage control and nothing more.

After the results, as I listened to the woes of others who saw the low-voter turnout as the principal cause, I couldn't help but think about the ways in which the mainstream political parties have failed the people living under them. To paraphrase a good friend of mine, the BNP is effectively a monster of the government's creation, albeit an inadvertent one. It was, after all, the Labour government who took this country to war in Iraq and who have since contributed to the militarisation of that nation as well as the bombing of its citizens. Similarly, it is the Labour government whose policies on immigration are abhorrent to the extent that people seeking asylum are subjected to an oppressive legislative system, in some cases even being locked up in detention centres without word of warning or reason. While all this happens, this government has for the last 13 years consistently failed and abandoned the poorer communities of the UK; housing deprivation and unemployment soar, and within the recession the hot topic of immigration is utilised as a political scapegoat. “British jobs for British workers,” an explicitly racist phrase now appropriated by the BNP, originated as a Labour Party slogan.

It might sound like I am going off on an overly-cynical rant. Others might tell me to be more optimistic and own a political voice which addresses these issues. It's not just that, however, it comes down to this: I simply do not believe in centralised power of any form. I have good friends who are intending to vote Labour in this election to try and keep the Conservative Party out. I understand this position, I even respect it. To my mind, however, they are but two sides of one coin. For the reasons I have outlined above and more aside, I simply could not in good conscience vote Labour, and I consider that to be deeply personal, due to how much that government has hurt those who were (and still are) very important to me.

To extend this further to take into account other political options; well, on a purely pragmatic level, this first-past-the-post system of ours tends to void the significance of other votes cast for smaller parties, which is a sad sign of the broken electoral system in the first place. On an ideological level, however, none of these parties represent me, and it really is as simple as that. I say this not with a heavy heart, but as someone who did take their fight to the ballot box and was afterward able to fully appreciate it for what it is: a concession to the powerlessness of the general public. Moreover, no elected government could stand for the values I personally hold as a follower of Christ: of nonviolence and the perfect justice of people brought together into fair and equal relationships with one another. No government could legislate that because it would fail at the very moment of trying. Political seats, militarism, policing, and arms trading are all signs of uneven, oppressive, and subjugating power.

I do not consider voting, in and of itself, to be an effective drive for social change. To me, this comes from other areas which are far more prominent and powerful: from social movements, campaigning and lobbying networks, trade unions, cooperatives, community organisations, churches, direct action, civil disobedience, and more aside. The potential for powerful social change comes from people, not from government, and I believe that is a principle which has manifested very clearly and consistently throughout history. Voting can sometimes be a means to an end, but it is not nearly any substitute for revolutionary tactics.

So after all of this rambling, the question is, am I going to vote in the 2010 UK General Election? Well, yes, I am. With a spoiled ballot, expressing very clearly and literally that I am voting for none of them at all.

Car Scrapping: With Capitalism you just can't waste enough!

The Government is following in Germany's footsteps by offering UK subjects the chance to trade in their old car - must be at least 10 years old - and get £2,000 off their new one courtesy of UK Plc.

There is some bullshit going on here. Surprise, surprise.

This is not good for the environment, since cars tend to have a higher carbon footprint in their making than in their life-time of use and the scheme does not insist on consumers buying less damaging cars anyway.

Also, like all good capitalism schemes this one will benefit the richer at the expense of the poorer. Aspiring middle-class folk will get to buy a nicer car than they can otherwise afford and the poor will no longer be able to buy a car because there will be no cheap old cars to buy.

Up yours poor people! Hello Middle-England Vote-bank!