joy cometh with the morning

Life of the party

Photo of some nice clouds

I went along to the inaugural Your Party meeting in Brighton a couple of months ago and came away trying to will myself towards cautious optimism, but only made it as far as profound ambivalence. One of the organisers was a comrade I’ve known for years and who I take very seriously, and so I was hopeful that future events might build on it. The other week I went to another Your Party meeting locally also organised by a different comrade who I also have a great deal of respect for and... it was the same meeting, almost exactly! Separated by two months, basically nothing had changed. Possibly things had degenerated a little, given... continuing developments, nationally. I'm going to describe the meeting and I'd like you to bear in mind that the following is exactly as true for both sessions, which were separated by two months.

I am probably not the target audience for the meeting format here, exactly. It was breakout groups in a big room discussing quite big topics. I don't much like breakout groups (in general, let alone in big rooms), and as for the big topics. it’s not that I don’t care about them, obviously, but the fact that this meeting was prefigurative, trying to get something in place before a national organisation was established but not in fact meant that there was lots of off-the-dome pontificating across a very broad range of things rather than, I dunno, discussion of pre-submitted proposals or something that might’ve yielded a more fruitful result. (Then again, that was what the regional assemblies were meant to be and I heard fairly mixed things about those!)

I got to see lots of comrades who I've not seen for absolutely years which was great. On the other hand... well, there was one well-known local pain-in-the-neck in attendance of whom someone once said "he'd split from himself if he could", and a lot of similar cranks. The age group split was also skewed much older, which, bluntly, didn't help with this. To be clear: this is not to say that there aren’t lots of serious, committed older comrades—there absolutely are, many of whom I know personally, were in attendance and who I was absolutely delighted to see. Unfortunately, there were also a lot of people who largely seemed to want to talk and not to listen, an behaviour at political meetings certainly not exclusive to older people, but (it has been my observation over many years) quite common to them. Brighton is a bit different to a lot of other places because it's got a longstanding strong Green Party presence (some senior members of the local Greens were in attendance—in a spirit of solidarity—which was greatly appreciated) which sucks up the youth energy. It always has, even back to when I was involved in the Labour Party, but especially now that the Greens were taking an eco-socialist turn. Even so, this was a pretty extreme split; if you forced me to guess I'd say it looked like maybe 75% were over 60.

This led to a group that is, on the whole, quite... unfocused. I apologise if this sounds unfair to those who were there; everyone is allowed their opinions, but there was so little ability to prioritise, so little thought of strategy or organisation or logistics. Everyone’s in violent agreement with almost everything that’s said but it’s all meaningless because they seem to think that our priority should be “everything”. Many seem to believe that all that’s necessary is one more speech from them and then people will really wake up.

Look: I remember some things about the period 2015-2019 very, very well. One thing I remember is that there were a lot of people who wanted to spend their time fulminating against how awful the media was and got frothed up reading The Canary and Skwawkbox or whatever. I’m trying not to blame these people for having a personality type I find annoying, but I'm sorry, I just do not have this “gets outraged about everything” gene. I know that the game is rigged! Of course it is! How have you not built all this into your internal model of the world yet? What I want is to get on with it. What I want is to build, organise, hopefully win. So many people want just to stick their oar in at meetings. I could not want anything less. I want to use the meeting to collaboratively agree a course of action. This was, sadly, not possible due to that not being the arrangements the people at the top had made[1].

I’d like to contrast this with a Greens Organise event I went to a couple of weeks back. The main focus was a panel discussion on community organising, but one of the guys who runs Greens Organise was there and gave a little talk about what they were going and what their objectives were. He seemed lucid and focused, and the questions asked by the audience were very sharp and got good answers. I think I might be coming around to the argument that they might be a more propitious vector for change.

  1. I'm not going to get into that too much but as one of those tedious so-and-sos who does think that effective organisational administration etc matters, I'm sorry, that did a lot to throw me off! ↩︎