Steve_Bamlett_blog

Describe one positive change you have made in your life

I suppose a large part of my life previously has been committed to politics, having joined the Labour Party for the first time in my teens but I suppose that my politics may have faded in my life after I left the Party. I did that after the full reality of a Starmer government became clear, which for me was well before they won a landslide of seats, without a majority of votes last year. Since then the Right have used every opportunity to renege on promises of structural change in the status quo.

The recent rescue of British Steel will help that part of the party that wants that, that part particularly allied to the current Leader, to row back further on any meaningful Green initiative. They will do it as if such a move was necessary, even unavoidable, but they will have been waiting for this opportunity all along, aware of the flimsiness of their recipe for green change.

Meanwhile local politics is haunted by a spectre – that of an ultra-right Party that has long been waiting in the wings, exploiting the most selfish interests of the populace. when it feels under threat of an impoverishment always bound to happen under Brexit Such parties fan these fears into hatred of otherness – symbolised mainly by ‘small boats’. That right wing movement has taken on the flag of the word ‘REFORM’ because no other party except the Greens wants reform and the old ‘mainstream’ parties have attempted to marginalise talk of radical green change by emphasizing the old buzzwords of right-wing Labour and the Neo-Liberal Right wing – growth and security. What Farage’s hard-right party mean by reform is the institution of a ‘popular’ government as the first step to be so sure of its popularity, that it can later abandon democracy altogether, as it fuels unrest and anarchy, just as it in the Summer riots.

In Crook the voting demographic, as a residue of the most right wing Labourism that has held power without implementing change so long that an electorate brought up in a mining district is now passive to the radical politics that were once its home. Hence, I have no belief in a great shift occurring massively in that demographic towards Green thinking. But it was necessary at least to put one’s head over the parapet, not as a ‘no-hope’ candidate, but as one who is there to demonstrate that, even if the green vote turns out to be paltry and insignificant, there are people who believe enough to give their name to what they believe. Both Geoffrey William Martin and me (Steven Douglas Bamlett) are now on the ballot paper – below see our names on a postal ballot paper – ours came today. We don’t have a third Green candidate in our ward. I am inclined to support the Independent Anne Reed with my third vote.

If you live in Crook, please vote for Geoffrey and me. We don’t expect to win but, if by a miracle, we were to do so, we would be active in prompting the rights of local people, but especially to the right for a world that can be sustained in the future: that is fair, just and hopeful. For that we need real change, real reform and not only parties who exploit these words.

Bye for now

With love Steven