A Load of Old Ballots

You would be forgiven for having not noticed that earlier this month on June 3rd polls opened for the European Elections. National turnout for this less-than-spectacular event was a mere 34.7%, locally this figure was even lower with just 32.33% of voters in the Yorkshire and Humber constituency bothering to vote (that’s down 10.25% on the previous Euro elections).
Such an embarrassingly low turnout (embarrassing for the politicians) show just how uninterested ordinary people are in the elections and to be frank, why should people be interested? This might be the world’s only elected international representative institution but everybody knows it serves only as a rubber stamp for the unelected bureaucrats. How can a directly elected parliament be useful when it is subservient to the (unelected) European Commission who draft all EU laws and have a monopoly over any legislative initiatives?
Much was made of the UK election results, especially here in Yorkshire and Humber as well as the North West, due to the fact that the fascist British National Party managed to scrape a seat in each constituency. Politicians were quick to denounce the success of the BNP claiming, among other things, that the BNP were “racist” and “do not deserve to represent this country” (Gordon Brown). We at the Fargate Speaker had no idea that the criteria for representing this country was that you must not be racist and
accordingly we will be notifying the other successful candidates in the Yorkshire and Humber (one Lib Dem, one UK Independence Party, one Labour and two Tories) that they cannot take their seats.
Ex-National Front leader Andrew Brons winning a seat for the BNP here in Yorkshire might be a big kick in the balls to us anti-fascists, but when all the main parties are clamouring over themselves to introduce ever-harsher border controls, defending police racism and scape-goating Muslims in order to justify their many Middle-Eastern wars, it’s not a surprise. In fact the UK was not alone in electing fascists, all over the EU the far-right made significant gains, notably in Italy and Austria, this was complimented with a significant right-ward swing right across the EU with the centre-right making significant gains in France, here in the UK, Portugal, Poland, Spain and Italy. Naturally this is of some concern, but with turnout across the EU at an historic low of just 43% (this is particularly low because some EU member states such as Belgium and Luxembourg have compulsory voting), in some states this figure was as low as 19.6%! (Slovakia) – this is testament to the fact that ordinary workers right across Europe (rightly) have no interest in these elections. We at the Fargate Speaker also have no interest in who rules us and we won’t jump on the liberal anti-fascist bandwagon of ‘vote anybody but the fascists’, we believe in tackling racism and conservatism every day, not just at election time.

Fargate Speaker 2 - TESCO 0

The Fargate Speaker is proud to report that once again the plans to develop a TESCO in the Commonside area have been defeated by massive community opposition. This is not the first time that TESCO have attempted to get their grubby hands into this area with similar plans being proposed (and defeated) in September 2007. The Fargate Speaker was part of the latest effort to defeat the new proposals with over a thousand Fargates distributed amongst local residents. This special issue highlighted TESCO’s poor record on workers’ rights, its environmental performance and jobs for local people. Over 2,000 residents registered their objections to the plans.
Characteristically the local political parties were eager to exploit community interest in this. With both councillors from Labour and the Lib Dems this time publicly voicing their objections to the proposals. This is despite having already supported similar plans across the city including a store in Spital Hill that also faced local opposition.
This is also obviously not the end of the story and TESCO is not likely to give up this easily. TESCO normally has such a high success rate with these planning applications because the alternative is a derelict site falling into disrepair. This does not have to be the case. Initiatives such as the Common Ground Community Garden in Reading have proven hugely successful in bringing people together behind a common goal and creating something of real value to the area. This may seem an impossible task but it doesn’t in fact take much to have an impact – a few garden tools, some eager hands and a bit of organisation. We don’t have to wait for the council to render a decision – let’s take the decision ourselves now!

Fargate poses the question - Where’s Wally?

Remember those awkward Sunday dinners when your senile old nan (bless her cotton socks) would start to put the world to rights? She’d moan about how the “darkies” no longer knew their place and good, honest prejudice against gays, lesbians and immigrants had disappeared from our workplaces. It was (apparently) political correctness gone mad. Now imagine that your senile old nan just became mayor of a northern town.
Introducing “the wally from Donny”, English Democrat and new major of Doncaster Peter Davies. Now we’ve seen our fair share of useless politicians here at the Fargate Speaker (after all what politician isn’t useless by definition?), but this guy really takes the biscuit. Not only is he a complete fuckwit, he is actually bad at being a complete fuckwit. A so-called “crusader” against “political correctness” his first official interview was a tour de force of cutting edge issues and expert statecraft… When asked what “PC jobs” he intended to slash in the council he responded, “the things that are usually advertised in the Guardian” (why not just go the whole hog and ban the Guardian?), when asked if cutting translation services would be illegal - “I dunno” and finally if he knew how much money was being spent on funding apparently costly “minority events” (that he intended to cut) - “haven’t got a clue”.
Now you don’t need to appeal to a judge to tell you that getting rid of translation services is wrong, it’s blatantly stupid. Perhaps he’d prefer if we return to the
age-old traditions of shouting loudly and gesturing wildly at those foreign types. English after all is far clearer when it’s bellowed by a bigot. This is not even to mention the fact that more job cuts are hardly the help that communities hit by a global recession need. The jewel
in Davies’ crown has been his recent plans to cut the town’s Gay Pride, where he received a sound drubbing from the local gay community, and was forced to u-turn on his commitment to end the event.. We can only hope that not only does this wally get lost, but also that no-one will ever bother to find him.

Plus much more inside …

Electronic copy available here -  http://www.yorks-afed.org/images/FargateJulAug.pdf