The collision of lofty ideals & low life reality which has permeated Merseyside since Liverpool won the Capital of Culture award ( a horrendous car crash of a conjunction partly fostered, partly ignored by the local media ) hit home today with the news that the BNP are to field a candidate in the ward covering the area where Anthony Walker was murdered in a racist attack every bit as sickening in its detail as the Stephen Lawrence case in 1993 (http://www.guardian.co.uk/farright/story/0,,1746862,00.html ).
The area of Huyton is similar in many ways to my own part of Merseyside. A run-down inner-city area which is overwhelmingly white, its composition increasingly changing from industrial working class to part-time, casual workforce, lumpen in its attitudes on race, gender & sexuality. It's the sort of area where Labour has been continually in the ascendancy, though largely through default & semi-forgotten family/tribal allegiances. Lest anyone think I'm exaggerating in this portrait, I 'll tell you of my own experiences (after all, I.V. Lenin did say that an once of experience is worth a ton of theory ). Most of the people I work with revel in a sub-culture of trivia, junk media & purience, women as well as men. Casual racism is expressed in a manner which suggests it is as acceptable as comments on the weather; grumblings about management decisions which adversely affect them result not in a sudden awakening of class consciousness, but a rodent-like rush to preserve their own pathetic, miniscule patches. Makes me almost sympathetic to the bosses.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment