As nothing has been happening in the world…..
Posted on July 30, 2024
…….this blog has been quiet for the last two months.
And now it’s almost impossible to know where to restart. Its purpose has always been to take aim at the stupid, the selfish, the violent and the self-aggrandising – all of whom seem intent on making the world miserable and unfair. The choice of potential targets is just too vast.
So maybe it’s appropriate to start with the faintest glimmers of hope. United States citizens will now be spared the grotesque choice of two breathless old men huffing and puffing for high office. Quite how it came to this is as baffling as it is dispiriting. What that spectacle looked like to someone in their teens, anxious, very properly, about climate disaster and an already incomprehensibly cruel world, is almost impossible for many of us to imagine.
Here at home, voters eventually decided that the Tories and their leaders didn’t have our best interests at heart, that they weren’t just a bit of laugh – and that they had to go. It’s a worry that so many think that a privately educated stockbroker posing as a man of the people might yet have something to offer (he’s a bit of a laugh as well, you know) but, like I say, we’re searching for glimmers here.
Which bring us to the election outcome. Do I know any marginally well-informed person who thinks that Labour can and will bring about the societal transformation that my grandchildren will need? Of course not – but like many of us, I’m just enjoying the respite from the shameless lies, obfuscation and self-serving venality that almost became normalised in the last 14 years.
Eventually – and it’s the hope that kills you – someone will have to stand up and say out loud that our only priority has to be the stewardship of the planet we inhabit and that this, and only this, should inform how we deploy our enormous knowledge and expertise. And to be brave enough to say that if you’ve got plenty of money, be grateful for your own good fortune and now give some of what you don’t need to other people who do.
Like I say, glimmers. Glimmers of glimmers, really. In the meantime, there’s the backdrop of war, a burning planet and public discourse dominated by blowhards, liars and warmongers. And yet there continues to be resistance. People march weekly in their tens of thousands to call for peace – even though they hear themselves dubbed as hate-mongers. People go to jail for frantically trying to alert us to the dangers of a burning world – even though they’re the ones who get dubbed as disruptive. And people still campaign and lobby and refuse to give up their cause…..
……and so this is a massive hats-off to the family of Kelso Cochrane (pictured) who, after years of relentless pursuit, finally got to the bottom of his murder by racists.
And here’s a word of linked explanation. This blog has been quiet not simply because it has been paralysed into inactivity by world affairs. Four years ago I began my own pursuit of justice for Oswald Augustus Grey, a 20 year old from Jamaica who was the last man to be hanged in Birmingham in 1962. It’s a story I told in Brutish Necessity. It’s an incomplete tale and I knew that almost as soon as it was published – but it won’t be soon, and that’s why the blog has been quiet as I continue to dig away! So keep tuned in as more will be revealed in time.
And in the meantime, there is always the most important of life’s unimportant things – sport. My book From Azeem to Ashes, about English cricket’s struggle with race and class was released earlier this summer. A respite from the world, even though there’s no such thing as politics-free sport.
A period of quiet on the blog maybe, but there’s plenty in an unquiet world to keep us all paying attention. Watch this space.
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