At a recent organising meeting, the facilitator asked us all: ‘What’s giving you political hope right now?’ The silence it prompted was only broken by sighs.
Following a summer of strikes and growing union reach, the powerful launches of Don’t Pay, Enough is Enough and Organise Now!, and the fleeting promise of Conservative Party implosion, the bleak winter has arrived with bite. Prices are climbing ever higher. Government is marching ever farther right. The opposition, in name, is following suit. The austerity axe is poised to swing. People understandably feel deflated.
At the meeting, after a pause, most rallied to recall people and projects still lifting them up. It had a knock-on effect: we gave each other hope.
Drag kings and drag things
I spoke about a cabaret I’d been to the week before, where ‘drag kings and drag things’ took sharp political acts to the stage alongside laughter, pride, and joy. It was hosted by Friends of the Joiners Arms (FOTJA), a community benefit society that this year crowdfunded £125,000 and is set to launch the UK’s first community-owned queer pub. As LGBTQ+ inclusive spaces battle threats of closure nationwide, including Glasgow’s workers’ cooperative Bonjour Bar, FOTJA is a beacon.
At its Lése Majesté cabaret, Prinx Silver and king Don One brought regal realness to an audience gleefully not grieving either Liz departed. A poet in a flat cap led a chorus of ACAB: A Nursery Rhyme; abolitionist banners streaked the stage.
As LGBTQ+ inclusive spaces battle threats of closure nationwide, Friends of the Joiners Arms is a beacon
My hope did not spring from there, however. It came from the intermission, when members of a local CopWatch group led a peer education forum on stopping stop and search. Their basement corner was packed fuller than the bar upstairs, than the toilets or the smokers’ yard. Know Your Rights flashcards passed from hand to hand; ears pricked up to listen in; questions were answered with nuance and care. Not a rallying call to seated cheers, but political education gently inviting people on a night out to stand up, speak up, join a movement.
Politically primed
Meeting people where they are is a vital strategy in any liberatory fight, both polar opposite and complementary to direct action tactics. The punk feminists and Russian exiles who comprise Pussy Riot know the score. This autumn, they toured small UK venues with an astounding work of political art disguised as a ‘gig’. One hour; one ‘song’: an abridged cut of co-founding member Masha Alyokhina’s prison diary, Riot Days, sung, spoken, acted and played out over a projected collage of archive film, sketches and statements. Subtitled in English throughout, it tells the story of Putin, of Pussy Riot, of Russia’s political prisoners, of protests ongoing back home.
I expected a politically primed crowd. Clearly not all had read the bios. Some men grumbled beside me, perplexed at the avant-garde punk; an audience reading, not dancing. They stayed for the encore, though, which condemned war in Ukraine and demanded we not look away.
‘Ours is one story,’ said Masha at the end. ‘You each have your own. Freedom doesn’t exist unless you fight for it, every day.’ No intermission but another invitation edged with hope.
