[ssf] ’VOTE NOBODY

worldwarfree at riseup.net worldwarfree at riseup.net
Sun May 17 10:41:44 BST 2009


 In the run-up to the forthcoming Euro elections, both New Labour and the
BNP hope to use racism to maximise their vote. The BNP will use the
age-old tactic of scapegoating ‘immigrants’ and ‘foreigners’, and
basically anyone who isn’t white, while wooing those sickened by the
greed and corruption of the mainstream political parties. In particular
they will hope to appeal to disaffected former Labour voters who feel
abandoned and betrayed by Britain’s ruling political party. For their
part, New Labour will be hoping to mobilise anti-racists into voting for
them simply ‘to stop the BNP’, ignoring Labour’s own appalling record of
racism, and the fact that the BNP have only been allowed to grow in the
political climate they have created. They will be aided in this cruel and
threadbare chicanery, by the middle-class Left, who are clueless in their
analysis of fascism and simply see the BNP as an opportunity to recruit
gullible new members and swell the coffers of their party funds. Typical
of this ilk are the ‘Searchlight’ front ‘Hope Not Hate’, who in return
for massive funding from New Labour and its political satellites are
attempting to lead another generation of anti-racists down the blind
alley of electoralism.

For decades the middle-class Left have told us ‘Vote Labour Without
Illusions’ – or some other trite slogan. Under Thatcher, they told us we
had to vote Labour ‘To get Maggie out’. What did that get us? If anything
it got us a government that was even further to the Right. Since 1997 New
Labour have continued to shit on the poor and institute a vicious Police
State. They have completely alienated working-class people, pushed the
political agenda immeasurably to the Right, and fostered the rise of the
fascist British National Party. Ordinary people are understandably VERY
pissed-off with politicians.

The BNP are hoping to capitalise on the current ecconomic crisis by
scapegoating immigrants and asylum-seekers, and to capitalise on anger
against Westminster by mobilising a so-called ‘protest vote’ – ie a vote
for the fascist BNP. Meanwhile, the drips of ‘Unite Against Fascism’,
‘Hope Not Hate, the ‘Socialist Workers Party’, and all the other
middle-class idiots who told us to vote New Labour in the past, are
telling us not to ‘waste’ our votes! They know that working-class
communities are not going to vote Tory, do they really think that a vote
for New Labour is a vote AGAINST fascism?! This is the party that has been
bombing the shit out of Iraq and Afghanistan for years now, and locking up
and deporting refugees en masse.

It is this sort of patronising, condescending stupidity that has led to
the rise of the BNP in the first place. It is an insult to the
intelligence of ordinary people. Antifa are not calling on people to vote
Labour or ‘Respect’ to stop the BNP, we are calling on people to boycott
the whole election charade, and to get out onto the streets and combat the
rise of the BNP in the only way that matters – by Direct Action.

We can understand the contempt people rightly have for the mainstream
political parties. We can understand why white working-class communities
feel abandoned and alienated. But a vote for the BNP is NOT a so-called
‘protest vote’, it is a vote for FASCISM.

Don’t believe ANY of their lies.Don’t play the politicians’ games.Don’t
vote – Organize

’VOTE NOBODY:

‘Nobody will claim expenses’ ‘Nobody will solve your problems’ ‘Nobody
Cares’


.’VOTE NOBODY’


these were the slogans we campaigned on in a
local election in Sheffield years ago. Could this now be rolled out as a
national anarchist campaign at the next general election? Certainly we
need to do something to wrest the severely pissed off vote awayfrom
BNP/UKIP.

Not voting as a measure of poltical awareness is worthless – the same
people who cant be arsed to vote wouldn’t save you from drowning either. A
more positive reaction is needed. Vote Nobody needs to be pro-active –
write Nobody on your ballot paper – spolit votes are counted and declared
– NOBODY WINS. Better still set up rival polling stations on the day
locally where people can deposit their polling cards in a positive – and
measurable – vote for Nobody. In the eve nt of a NOBODY victory – more
polling cards for nobody than the ‘winning’ candidate – declare the area
an autonomous MP free zone and establish the mechanisms of DUAL POWER.

We need a coherent anarchist response at the next election to combat both
the BNP and the ‘Vote Labour to keep the BNP out’ bollocks we’re going to
be getting after June 4th. NOBODY OFFERS A WAY FORWARD

in the absence of
anything better.

VOTE NOBODY – YOU KNOW IT MAKES SENSE

In a wwek where a window is smashed, a garden is vandalised and vengeance
is demanded as taxpayers turn on their Westminster representatives over
expenses scandal

“We can see ordinary people going round with shotguns and shooting them
all,” said a pensioner in this industrious Berkshire town. She was so
enraged by MPs’ expenses, she said, that she was tempted to shoot the
Speaker herself.

The days when Dick Turpin reputedly rested up in a pub where this new town
now sprawls have long gone. But voters outside Westminster are
increasingly convinced that their representatives have got away with
daylight robbery.

As Keith Rogers put it in Sleaford, where Conservative MP Douglas Hogg
belatedly agreed to pay back £2,200 spent cleaning his moat: “This is not
politics. It’s theft. MPs’ allowances are more than most people’s wages in
Lincolnshire.”

When MPs returned to their weekly surgeries and other duties in their
constituencies yesterday, they encountered a landscape transformed by
revelations about their expenses. The cynicism of many voters towards
Westminster had been replaced by something much more engaged, but also far
more enraged.

Margaret Beckett, heckled and booed on BBC1’s Question Time on Thursday,
is not the only MP to have witnessed the change in mood at first hand. In
Bromsgrove, a window in Tory MP Julie Kirkbride’s constituency office was
smashed with a brick. In Rutland, where fellow Tory Alan Duncan agreed to
pay back nearly £5,000 of gardening expenses for tending the small plot
around his constituency home, a 3ft pound sign was carved into his lawn
and filled with campanula and violas.

Duncan initially reported the incident to the police but quickly changed
tack, preferring to pass it off as a joke. “At first I thought: ‘Oh no,
this is getting nasty.’ But actually they’ve been quite funny. These are
serious times but at least in the middle of it all we can have a bit of a
laugh at this one.”

But Heydon Prowse, editor of the politics and culture magazine Don’t
Panic, which was behind the stunt, wasn’t laughing. “We were outraged in
general by all the expenses claims coming out. Alan Duncan was a nice easy
target. The flowers are a nice Tory blue. We thought about it.”

The original meaning of Bracknell was “bracken-covered hiding place”, but
as MacKay and his peers found, a week of revelations left them
uncomfortably exposed to the anger of their constituents. Effusive
apologies and promises to pay back their most outrageous expenses claims
have failed to pacify the public. Voters brought up the example of the
communities secretary, Hazel Blears, writing a cheque on television and
laughed bitterly at what they perceived as an empty self-serving gesture.

“They know they’ve done something wrong because they are giving it back,”
said Chris O’Riordan, a businessman, in Bracknell. “If I said: ‘I’ve just
nicked a bottle of shampoo from Boots but I’ll give it back, am I all
right?’ I’d be arrested.”

MacKay, who stepped down as David Cameron’s parliamentary aide after it
was revealed that he and his wife, Kirkbride, used parliamentary
allowances to claim for both their homes, performed constituency duties in
public in the centre of Bracknell yesterday. He promised to call back any
disaffected voters who had complained about his two homes funded by the
taxpayer and claimed the majority of emails and calls had been supportive.
In the centre of Bracknell, however, even his most loyal voters expressed
contempt.

“If I got caught doing that, I would lose my business. It is fraud,” said
O’Riordan, who said he had just been fined £1,500 by the Inland Revenue
because he was late submitting his tax details. MPs, he said, had got away
with far worse: “They should lose their jobs. They are trying to do a bit
of damage limitation and it isn’t working.”

While the rightwing pressure group the TaxPayers’ Alliance is threatening
to launch private prosecutions against some MPs, many ordinary voters feel
the long arm of the law has proved remarkably short and weak when it comes
to prosecuting MPs. Scotland Yard has yet to confirm whether it is
investigating any of the complaints it has received against individual
MPs.

In Lincolnshire, community support officers stood guard outside the locked
gate of the constituency home belonging to Elliot Morley, the Labour MP
caught claiming £16,000 for his home for 21 months after he had paid off
his mortgage. While the Labour whip has been withdrawn from Morley, his
constituents demanded his resignation and prosecution.

“When I paid my mortgage off, I bought a bottle of champagne and a gold
bracelet,” said Pam Sargent, a retired teacher. “How on earth can he say
he did not know he’d paid his off? I hope he goes down and I hope he goes
down with a big, big bang.”

Former prison officer John Douglas said: “I shut the door on people for
far less fraud than these people have committed. They’re a disgrace. They
should all stand down, the lot of them. If he [Morley] had any honour at
all, he’d resign.”

An aggravating factor for many people is how the expenses scandal has
exposed the gulf between the Westminster elite and the rest of the
country, and the growing level of inequality in Britain. “It’s one law for
them and another for us,” said George Hobson, out shopping in Bracknell
with his granddaughter, Olivia. “What I have to live on for a month is
what they can claim on expenses for food (£400).” He said he would not
vote for MacKay again.

Sandra Smith, 67, gets by on a state pension of £99.30p each week and a
private pension of barely £20. From this, she must pay £45 in rent every
week for the council house she shares with her father. “MPs haven’t a clue
what we have to go through. They are not in touch with the real world. I’m
absolutely incensed. They send pensioners to jail for not paying their
council tax. “

Several voters mentioned not just the huge sums of money that MPs can
claim on expenses but the high wages earned by members of the media who
are charged with interrogating them, reinforcing a sense of a country
divided between a metropolitan expense-fiddling elite and the honest,
hard-working voters of middle Britain.

When Fred Binding, 90, watched the interview in which BBC News presenter
Carrie Gracie admitted she earned £92,000, he “nearly fell through the
floor”, he said.

For Binding, and many older voters in particular, the expenses scandal has
highlighted a materialistic side to society that is completely alien to
them. “It’s become a different world altogether,” he said. “The only thing
that matters is ‘me’. People are pushing others out of the way. MPs have
gone with the flow – they have thought: this is what people do and we will
join in.”

’VOTE NOBODY




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