Confronting "White pride" in Swansea

On Saturday 9th March an extreme right wing National Front (NF) held a 'White pride Worldwide' demonstration in Swansea. This won't be "what's wrong with White pride worldwide" that's another article which its intended audience wouldn't bother reading.

Members of the NF consider it an achievement to be born with white skin, which says more about them and what they have achieved than it does about political theory. Unlike the English Defence League (EDL) or British National Party (BNP) they have no qualms about being seen as overtly fascist and directly racist.

On the day of the counter demo I arrived in Swansea early; I went to meet with others and walked around town. 400 Unite Against Fascism (UAF) protesters were in a steel pen opposite another empty police pen reserved for the fascists a few hundred yards away. The Antifa group I met had very different tactics to those of the UAF, as a movement Antifa believe inconfronting fascists directly. This was quite a task as Swansea was absolutely crawling with police that day. There were tens of riot vans, police on horses, hundreds of police patrolling the city and a few plainclothes police were spotted too.

Food is a right not a privilege

You can go on a march, sign a petition or fight the police but my favorite form of protest against capitalism is to hand out hot homemade soup on the streets for free to anyone and everyone.

Food Not Bombs is an all-volunteer global movement that was born out of the anti war movement in the USA in the 1980s. By now it has groups all over the world and these loose-knit group of independent collectives serve free vegan and vegetarian food as a protest against war and poverty.

If governments and global corporations around the world spent as much time and energy feeding people as they do on wars, no one would be hungry. Food Not Bombs' ideology is that corporate and government priorities are biased towards allowing hunger to persist, even though there is more than plenty of food being produced. To demonstrate and highlight this issue, a large amount of the food served is surplus food from shops, bakeries and markets that would otherwise go to waste.

Kicking back in austerity Britain

When the Coalition came to power in 2010, the knee-jerk reaction for me was to oppose them with everything I had. So I did what I normally do in times of crisis: pick up a guitar and criss-cross the country trying to raise merry hell playing at both gigs and protests. This is documented in the Picket Line Party project I released earlier this year.

Looking back, I was riding a wave of strikes, demonstrations, and protests that in some ways crashed and burned. I did too. Now, in 2012, the day-to-day indignities of the cuts continue, but the media-grabbing events of the likes of Occupy have turned into localised struggles to save jobs and services. This is a good thing, but the fight back is proceeding at a much slower pace than is necessary for any reversal of our collective fortunes, let alone a radical re-wiring of our society.

The question for me earlier this year was: what to do about this all now? My response has been to come up with the "Kicking Back In Austerity Britain tour"; a night of hard-hitting, socially engaged acoustic music in collaboration with Gail Something-Else.