‘When there is despair, the people from the far right take advantage. We must say that another world is possible and necessary.’
Ken Loach, May 2016
I included this quote in a blog post here last May (2016). One year on and the quote feels particularly pertinent in relation to how people chose to vote in this year’s snap election, called by Theresa May. It certainly feels relevant enough to share again, anyway.
It’s just four days on and there has already been much analysis of the 2017 election results. In simple terms, it seems to me that people have had enough of austerity and cuts to our public services; large numbers of people turned out to vote for a very different vision of society. Theresa May as a result didn’t get the majority she needed to press ahead with her austerity measures – the desire for ‘another world’ as articulated above by Ken Loach, feels palpable.
Last year, Ken Loach openly criticised the UK’s existing welfare system in his acceptance speech at the Palme d’Or awards for his film, ‘I, Daniel Blake.’ His attack on what he described as the government’s ‘dangerous project of austerity’ was a very public one and became widely distributed on social media.
My ongoing ‘Bread and Roses’ work was created in response to the 2015 General Election result; it has gone on to reflect the ‘dangerous project of austerity’ as coined by Loach and acts as a visual reminder of the impact of neglect.
The full blog post can be read here:
https://www.a-n.co.uk/blogs/keeping-it-going-1/date/2016/05
It’s less than a month since I made a decision to take a bit of a back seat from writing this blog. I really thought I would, but we’re living in such an extraordinary period of British history and I felt compelled to get back here to document what’s been going on.
These are fascinating, remarkable times, as outlined in Anthony Sheldon’s morning-after election analysis in The Telegraph:
‘The General Election on Thursday was the most extraordinary in British history since modern elections began in 1918. We’ve had some exciting votes, from the closer than expected result of 2010 to the transformational victories of Clement Attlee, Margaret Thatcher and Tony Blair in 1945, 1979 and 1997. But I’ve known nothing like 2017 in the dozen elections I have lived through since February 1974 for sheer unpredictability, drama and emotion.’
I’ve also added an update on “Bread and Roses’ on the latest page of my website which can be read here:
