Some times the unexpected happens

Last week I wrote about the proposals to remove section 3 of the Equality Act and amazingly enough following a defeat in the House of Lords, the minister in charge,  Jo Swinson announced that she was U-turning. Of course I told my children that this was as a direct result of my blog post ... but I really wonder why it was possible to get a change of heart on this from Minsters and not on other issues  like cuts in legal advice for discrimination complainants, the destruction of the National Health service or the Bedroom Tax to name but a few.

Did it make a difference that the proposals were being debated in the middle of a series of local authority elections? Did it make a difference that the removal of section 3 would have potentially had not only national but international implications. Whatever it is I really wish we could bottle it.

The merit of pounding the streets

It's been a tough week or so, emotionally with death issues around. One of my strategies about dealing was trying to stay focused on what's important and trying to stay busy. I've been doing a bit of delivery of late in Spencer, Dallington and King Heath. I was eased into it through a request from the Neighbourhood Manager to deliver the neighbourhood newsletter. Given the amount of casework I still get from that part of the town I thought it maybe was time to start acting like a councillor in the better sense of the word. I did get quite a bit of feel good walking around as people came up to chat about the forthcoming elections. Going to ponce a cup of tea after delivering is always a good idea. I dropped into a local residence in Kings Heath to be told that the Tories had been paying for their election leaflets to be delivered in St. James. The poor kid who had been saddled with the task has been telling folks the leaflet “Was just wrong!”. Having never read a political leaflet before, the beleaguered Tory leafleter commented that it just seemed wrong to scrap National Insurance so that the health care could be purchased privately. Who says young people don’t have the right political instincts!

The Challenges of next summer

Over the weekend, there seemed to be part campaigning, part attending a Searchlight seminar in London. After putting out the best part of 2000 Labour leaflets in Kings Heath with colleagues from Northampton South CLP and a neighbouring one, it was a bit strange going to the Searchlight seminar.

When it comes to anti-fascist campaigning, for quite some time it has seemed to me that there are those people who go to meetings and talk about anti-fascist campaigning and those people that do it. For those people that go and talk about it, it does seem to be significant time and effort in discussing why we are where we are.

For those of us involved in local anti-fascist work, often it feels quite a lonely place to be, with fairly minimal support nationally and people often looking for someone to blame when things go wrong and people wanting to take the credit when things go right.

Next summer with County and Euro-elections with a guaranteed BNP presence in both, a group of us are trying to pull together a meeting on our approach to this. Up to date our activity has been very localised, however the euro-elections present us with a far different challenge. With the last combined UKIP and BNP vote at the last Euros of 26% and the BNP polling in the mid-20ies to 30%, it's a factor that needs to be treated even more seriously than before.