Compromise is needed for a progressive future

There seem to have been a lot of anniversaries recently. 100 years since the partition of Ireland, 40 years since the Brixton Riots, 10 years since Amy Winehouse died. 

I don't remember the partition of Ireland in 1921! But my Dad used to talk about it a lot. He was born in Tipperary in 1921. Imagine being born then, there. Just when things were really kicking off in Ireland. If you haven't come across it, there's a weekly programme on BBC sounds called "Year '21". It's a programme which charts the history of 1921 in Ireland, week by week. It's a fascinating listen. Presenting the history from different perspectives. There's contributions from the descendants of some of the key participants. There was one episode which referred back to an incident in Dublin in 1920, which I remember my Dad talking about when I was young. It was the original "Bloody Sunday". There was a coordinated assassination of a number of British intelligence agents in the morning. In the afternoon there was a retaliation by the British Army. They killed a number of people at a Gaelic Football match. One of the teams involved in the match was from Tipperary. One of those killed was the captain of the Tipperary team. Imagine that? It would be like the Captain of Newcastle United being murdered during a match. The captain of the Tipperary team would've been very well known - a local celebrity. On top of all the other bad things that happened in Tipperary itself, no wonder my Dad had a pretty strong view about the rights and wrongs of Irish history. When I was young, in the 1970s, as we watched events in Ireland,  the Irish community in England was on the receiving end of a lot of anti-Irish hostility. The "Year 21" programme illustrates how longstanding some of the different perspectives about Ireland are and how history resonates with current events. If you've ever got into a discussion with anyone who hold very strong views about the situation in Ireland, it's very difficult to persuade them to change their minds about anything.

I do remember the Brixton riots. I was still at school. Before the riots there was a fire at a house party in New Cross when 13 young black people died. The suspicion was that the fire had been caused by a racist firebomber. The incident was pretty much ignored by the press and establishment. "13 dead, nothing said". Shortly after the fire, there was an explosion of anger in the riots, which spread to many other inner cities. Antagonistic policing, the sus laws, poverty, unemployment, racism. The Scarman report talked about all these issues which contributed to the causes of the riots. A riot is the language of the unheard said someone who knew what he was talking about. In the aftermath of the riots, perceptions of the underlying problems definitely changed. 

I love Amy Winehouse and her music. Hard to believe it's 10 years since she died. I listened to her album Back to Black a lot when it came out. She didn't care what people thought of her. She just said: my music is my music, if you like it fine, if you don't like it, it doesn't really bother me. In a musical sense she was uncompromising. That's what I liked about her.

The thing that kind've links the way I was thinking about these 3 anniversaries is compromise or the lack of it. For Amy Winehouse the fact that she was uncompromising was good as it produced amazing music. Music is one thing, but life and politics is another. When the riots engulfed Brixton and other places in the 1980s, they were party precipitated by a catastrophic lack of compromise on the part of the police and the establishment. Ireland - well, if anything has been learnt over the last 100 years, peace will only be built on compromise.

For those of us who want to see more progressive politics in Hexham and a non-Conservative MP, how much should we compromise to achieve that? To have any hope of unseating our Tory MP, a broad electoral alliance is going to be needed. It won't be enough to be "anti-Tory". Such an alliance would need to coalesce around some kind of common ground. From the centre-right, centre, centre-left, soft-left, hard-left, ultra-hard left, some kind of unity will be needed. Is that possible? I hope so. Otherwise we are not going to get very far.