Lovely!

Splendid affair all round, marvellous scripture dear fellow. I feel I know you from somewhere.

I too attended the London Fields festival. It was very badly organised (sound quality attrocious) and performed a function for a narrow section of the community (mostly young adults, mostly white, mostly identified within the broadly anarchist culture etc etc).

What's fabulous about Hackney is that there is radicalism amongst the amazingly diverse community. Many pensioners, for example, come from long-standing radical traditions (you'll still find many who fought at Cable Street, for example). The Black, Asian, Kurdish and other communities have strong progressive and radical traditions. Many of the much-despised 'middle-class' Hackneyites, are actually the Rock against Racism generation grown-up and active in their communities, trades unions etc - and they haven't necessarily sold-out on their youthful idealism.

For myself, I can't physically deal with a lot of street-style activism as, with my fortieth birthday approaching, I'm recovering from a major operation and spilling bile over the internet instead. I also these days hugely doubt the political efficacy of standing in the street yelling 'who let the pigs out'.

I do however suggest a course of simple action for all radicals in South Hackney.

Vote for the Cecilia Prosper the Socialist Alliance candidate at the election. More than that, get others to turn out. We are due to be represented by Brian Sedgemore, a New Labout apologist, and the election will in no way reflect the depth of radicalim in the constituency. OK, she won't win, but the simple act of voting and encouraging others could give Tony and his fellow Tories ('cos that's what they've become) a bit o a fright.

Incidentally, I'm not a paid up Trotskyist or member of a party.

We may well live in the most radical constituency in the country - the separate elements, though, need to communicate with eachother!

You just couldn't help yourself, could you? You just couldn't resist attempting the spurious link between direct, spontaneous confrontation by local people, concerned about their own communities, acting on their own behalf, and the robotic instinct to instruct, recruit and toe the party line.
There is an obvious irony here. You claim to be an SA supporter, though not a 'trotskyite'-type party member- someone who just happened to come on line because of a recent Hackney event.
You seem to apologize for what you are not, a member of a vanguardist party that wishes to deaden the impetus for local community organisation, self-management, and delegation of control from the bottom up (beyond the influence of party hacks).
And yet in spite of this, ie the fact that you are non-aligned, you want us to vote SA, presuming that the majority of us reading your words have any desire to vote in the first place. Your insight into the miserable reputation parties like the SWP have when it comes to leaping from one bandwagon to another, depending, of course, on where potential recruits lie, suddenly goes by the wayside. (The SWP are aware of their own mediocrity -hence the attempt to pretend that the friendly orange of 'Globalise Resistance' posters is not the red of their own dodgy output)We should still vote SA!!!... a not so unholy alliance of disgruntled old Labour/SWP and the party that give us Tommy Sheridan and Steve Nally ESQ who threatened to reveal the names of certain poll tax 'rioters'- people not unlike those who gathered outside Hackney town hall last Saturday night.

The Socialist Alliance candidate for Haringey once acted as the prosecution lawyer for a union boss who sued one of the union members for slander. The action was successful and the defendant lost his job.
Fuck the S.A., Fuck the S.W.P, Fuck their front groups, and Fuck the election.
None of these things are worth our time or energy.