In
America, they have come up with a name for everything going down at
the moment. The Floyd Rebellion.
Not the Floyd Protests.
Rebellion.
A
rebellion against the Status Quo. A rebellion against the endless,
wall to wall propaganda A rebellion against the swaggering power of
the hated 1%.
Could the murder of a guy none of us had ever heard of in a place thousands
of miles away really be the cause of walls starting to come tumbling
down right here, right now? Surely not?
Maybe we should rewind
the clock all the way back to 28 June 1914. Ring any bells? A complete
nobody called Gavrilo Princip got lucky and managed to assassinate a semi nobody called Archduke Ferdinand on a Bosnian side
street and the rest, as they say, became history.
If
we bother to take a few minutes of time out, there are all sorts of
boxes starting to get ticked. Right here and right now. Which all
leads me to wonder if we are seeing the first knockings of the
British Revolution of 2020.
Box
number one. The big one. The one which needs to be ticked before any
rebellion or revolution can get properly underway. Basically, you need two key
ingredients to create a human fertiliser bomb to blow things apart.
You need a whole bunch of severely pissed off and angry young people from the
poorer parts of town. Then you need a whole bunch of students who are
every bit as pissed off and angry as their counterparts from the
schemes and the tenements.
These
two groups are not natural bedfellows. It takes something special to bring
them together. To give them a common cause. A shared banner to march
under. A way to see each other as brothers and sisters. To straddle the class divide.
Usually
this common cause is found when a tiny number of utterly corrupt people
at the top of the tree behave badly enough for millions of young
people to say you know what, enough is enough. Time to march. Time to
own the streets. Time to tear it all down.
In
Russia in 1917 it was all about the war. A fumbling, inept Tzar
surrounded by similarly inept ministers and cronies was killing off hundreds
of thousands of woefully equipped Red Army soldiers as a result of their
bottomless incompetence.
The
1% demanded sacrifice and patriotism. The 99% ran out of patience and
finally said 'screw you'. Tzar Nicholas pulled all the familiar
levers and ordered his attack dogs out onto the streets to thin out
the mobs with carefully placed machine guns, only for the attack dogs
to say 'screw you'.
Much
the same thing happened on the very same Russian streets in 1992. The
old guard of the Politburo had no more luck with unleashing their
attack dogs that Tzar Nicholas had seventy five years earlier.
In
1968, two killings and one disgraceful war brought the ghettos and
the university campuses together. The slaying of Dr King and Bobby Kennedy provided the spark to light up the powder keg created by the
Vietnam War. The young people of ghetto were sick of being drafted to
serve for 13 months in a far away charnel house. The young people from
the universities were appalled by the sight of Vietnamese civilians
being char grilled by napalm strikes.
In
1917 and 1992, the walls came tumbling down.
In
1968, the walls just about stayed in tact. But only just.
So
what about 2020? Have we reached a similar place? A similar moment in
time? A moment when young people from both sides of the tracks
suddenly come together to feel their collective power?
Maybe
we have.
Once
young people suddenly find themselves marching in step, another
ingredient is required to turbo charge the situation.
Heroes.
More to the point, varieties of John Lennon's brand of working class heroes. Men and women
who suddenly emerge from the 99% to get right into the face of the 1%. Some
of these heroes make their names over many years. Their legends are a
long time in the making until their moment finally arrives.
Leon
Trotsky. Rosa Luxemburg. Martin Luther King. Nelson Mandela. Lech
Walesa. Vaclav Havel. Steve Beko. Jerry Rawlings.
Others
come out of nowhere. Like the guy who stood down the Chinese tank in
Tiananmen Square. Or the monk who burned himself to death in Saigon.
Or the market trader who did the same in Tunisia. Or Rosa Parks taking
her seat at the front of a Deep South bus.
OK.
Time to check the boxes.
Pissed
off young people from the poor side of town? Oh yeah. We've got them
by the million. Young people in our modern ghettos with postcodes
which guarantee long term unemployment and bully boy police. Stop and
search in Hackney doubled in April as the Met Police took predictable
liberties with the new lockdown rules. No wonder the residents lost
their collective rag when they watched the evening news showing pictures of
thousands of white people being left to their own devices on the
beaches.
Pissed
off students? Same story. Before Covid 19, £30,000 worth of lifetime
debt was more often that not rewarded with a job in Costa Coffee and a
box room in an overcrowded hovel with fungus on the bathroom wall.
Now even the job at Costa Coffee looks like a pipe dream. Finally
students are having the wool ripped from their eyes and seeing
they are little more than victims of an epic Ponzi scheme. They take
on tens of thousands of pounds worth of lifetime debt to pay Vice
Chancellors £500,000 a year and predatory landlords hundreds of
pounds a month for box rooms.
Heroes?
I think we can tick another box. As yet, we don't have any long time
in the making heroes cut from the Trotsky/Mandela cloth. But we are
starting to see some unexpected heroes.
Heroes
like Patrick Hutchinson. You know, the Black Lives Matter protestor
with a face carved from granite who hoisted a Millwall FC supporting
fascist onto his mighty shoulder and got him out of Dodge. The
pictures snowballed into a worldwide phenomenon.
Heroes
like Marcus Rashford, a young mixed race lad from the wrong side of
the Mancunian tracks who leveraged his fame as a Man Utd centre
forward to humiliate Boris Johnson into a shambling U turn.
The
corrupt Tory Government met the Black Lives Matter protests with a
well worn playbook. Rally up the right wing press and brand those out
on the streets as thugs and low life hooligans with a touch of dog
whistle racism thrown in.
Well
Patrick Hutchinson and his crew shot them down in flames.
The
corrupt Tory Government met Marcus Rashford's plea for poor kids to
be fed with a contemptuous wave of the hand. Who do you think you are
to tell us what to do? A footballer? Really? It's time you learned to
know your place young man. It's time you went back to kicking a ball
around.
Except
it wasn't. They picked a fight with a young man who was way more eloquent
than they were. A young man with moral fibre they could only dream
of. A young man with absolute right on his side. And in less than 24
hours, Johnson crumbled like a high rise block in Aleppo hit by one of Putin's barrel bombs.
And
all of a sudden people are starting to see the corrupt Tory
Government for what it is. Inept. Pathetic. Totally reliant on daily
propaganda from what they were foolish enough to believe is a tame
right wing press. But it seems the tame right wing press isn't so
tame after all. The right wing press has put Patrick Henderson and Marcus Rashford front and centre on their front pages.
Covid
19 has put the Tory Government into a tail spin. Johnson's woeful collection of yes
men and women have proved utterly incapable of any kind of
competence. And north of sixty thousand have paid with their
lives. So far. Johnson and Co have dished out fat, multi-million pound contracts to
their cronies in Serco and Deloitte and their cronies have banked
the cash and completely screwed things up.
'Twisting
and turning in the widening gyre,
The
falcon cannot hear the falconer.
Things
fall apart.
The
centre cannot hold.
Mere
anarchy is loosed upon the world.'
Well
things are certainly starting to fall apart. And the centre is slowly but
surely loosing its grip.
Mere
anarchy? Maybe. It will all depend on the last box being ticked.
The
young people have hit the streets and started to feel their power.
All they need now is a goal. A target to aim at. Something achievable
which will completely transform their lives.
Will
they find it? You know what, I think they just might.
Ladies
and gentlemen, I give you 'The Rent Strike'.
Rent
is a common grievance shared by young people from both sides of the
tracks.
The poor kids are sick of over paying for rotten social
housing in the ghetto. They are sick of Council waiting lists which run into
decades. They are sick of never getting the chance to move out of the
bedrooms they grew up in.
The rich kids are sick of being ripped off
by landlords in over priced university towns. They are sick of seeing
the housing ladder being pulled up far beyond their reach. They are
also sick of never getting the chance to move out of the bedrooms
they grew up in.
Rip
off rent is a thing they share. A common purpose. A common goal. And
what is the answer to being charged rip off rent? Simple. You stop
paying rip off rent. And if enough people simply stop paying rip off
rent, then there are not enough bailiffs in the land to handle all the evictions. And there are not enough police officers in the land to
back up the bailiffs.
We
saw a bit of this in Spain at the height of the Euro crisis.
Government austerity measures meant an axe was taken to old age pensions.
Slashed pensions meant millions of old people couldn't afford their
mortgage payments and the banks sent out bailiffs to dump the old people
out onto the streets.
Except things didn't go as planned. Young people came together. They called themselves the 'Indignados'. They worked it out. If a young person's granny found the
bailiffs at the door, all she had to do was make a call to her
grandson or granddaughter. The grandson or granddaughter put her
address into a ready made WhatsApp group and within minutes the
bailiffs would be backed off by a crowd of over a hundred. The
bailiffs called the police and the police said thanks, but no thanks.
And very quietly the banks gave up on even trying to evict pensioners
from their homes.
If
a rent strike starts, it will spread like a bush fire. Will there be
enough police to stop it? No chance. And slowly but surely, young
people will start to realise the beauty of their actions. A
successful rent strike will lead of a huge crash in the cost of
British housing.
An
average British house logically should be worth three and a half
times the average British wage. As in £25,000 x 3.5 = £87,500.
Instead the average British house right now costs £215,000. It is
the bubble to end all bubbles and a rent strike will burst it in a
big way.
And the longer the strike goes on, the further house prices
will fall. In fact they will fall all the way down to a place where
young people can suddenly get themselves onto the housing ladder.
It
if a 'win, win' plan walks like a 'win, win' plan and quacks like a 'win, win' plan, then it almost certainly is a 'win, win' plan.
I
reckon they might just do it. And then? Then the 1% will suddenly be
reeling. The Stock Market will start to nosedive. Banks will stare
into the abyss. The old order will start to fall apart piece by
piece. And over the the long months of summer, we might just make our
way to the place where the last box waits to be ticked.
If
Johnson calls out his attack dogs, will they obey him? Will British
police offices and soldiers be willing to take to the streets to
defend the ill gotten gains of the 1% and their corrupt, useless
puppets in Whitehall?
Will
they make like the attack dogs of the Communist Party of China in 1989
and dutifully open fire on thousands of young demonstrators? Or will
they make like the attack dogs of the Communist Party of the German
Democratic Republic in 1989 and say thanks, but no thanks.
Not this
time. Not for you lot. Screw you.
We
might just be about to find out. I'm an optimist. I think our police
officers and soldiers will make like their East German counterparts
and stand back to watch the walls come tumbling down. I don't think they will be ready to shoot young protesters in the name of Boris Johnson and his big money puppet masters.
We
could be about to live through some pretty exiting times. We could be
about to live through the British Revolution of 2020.
We'll see I guess