Protest seems pointless these days.
There were demonstrations all over the UK against the bedroom tax, the benefits cut that will take food out of the mouths of poor people. The Government responds by blithely awarding a £5 million a year increase in allowances to the Windsors, the family with most spare bedrooms in the land. The only protests this Government will listen to are of the anti-European Union or pro-foxhunting variety.
It was different on Red Clydeside when people like Mary Barbour were about. She is the lady Glaswegians are getting ready to celebrate with a statue and a campaign to inform schoolchildren about her achievements. She protested against slum landlords in Glasgow during the First World War. The women fought extortionate rents at home while their men were fighting at the front. Mary Barbour's Army organised a rent strike which brought Glasgow to a standstill. When shipyard and munitions factory workers downed tools, the Government pass a rent restriction Act.
There is no such recourse these days, unless anyone has some bright ideas. I find hope in Barcelona where they are good at protest. With huge unemployment and growing homelessness they have to be. The Government does its best to undermine protest. Organisers are arrested. Protesters are portrayed as vagabonds and layabouts. When the indignados – the angry ones – took over Spain's public places in May 2011, many participants were the urban anti-sistema flotsam and jetsam. Young people with identikit dreadlocks, full metal facial adornments, a dog, some kind of musical instrument and a desire to set up camp in a city square or build a treehouse. They were dubbed perroflautas, literally dog-flutes. The joke rebounded on the authorities with the emergence of another protest group, the yayoflautas, grandpa-flutes.
These are yayos, or grandparents, who pursue civil disobedience because they want their grandchildren to have what they had: jobs, houses, and an education. The yayoflautas are a bolshie lot of guerrilla grandpas and grannies. Clad in bright yellow waistcoats, armed with whistles and pot lids to clatter, they prevent evictions. They sit in offices of errant banks and Government buildings. They take over buses, plaster them in placards and turn them into mobile protest vehicles. Bus pass holders of the world unite.
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