A VAST CRISIS. EMPOWERED YOUNG PEOPLE OUT ON THE STREETS. A CORRUPT AND INEPT GOVERNMENT IN WHITEHALL, NEW HEROES EMERGING... I WONDER IF WE ARE SEEING THE FIRST KNOCKINGS OF THE BRITISH REVOLUTION OF 2020?

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