He might have actually done one (1) good thing if he had. As it was he was another monarch in all but name, and I credit him with nothing.

The Diggers and the Levellers and the Quakers on the other hand? That's a radical tradition I wish had come to something. https://twitter.com/Hoaxfish/status/1276909082255986688
And you know, when I've seen a better response from volunteers and mutual aid groups and food banks in my ward than I have from government?

While people face starvation?

Yeah, you know what, we need a little of that radicalism back.
And I think one of the big failings of the left in Britain?

We can be bad at talking about people in terms of their *actual material conditions* a lot of the time. So we have a bit of a tendency to come off as holier-than-thou even when we're really not trying to be.
And I think building a welcoming, accessible, radical leftist movement outside of "mainstream politics" is going to be vital.

The welfare state? The NHS? The minimum wage? Shorter workweeks?

These weren't gifted to us from on high. Ordinary people fought for them - together.
And we can't fall prey to old world blues about it - the mines are gone, heavy industry, the nationalised utilities.... gone. Most people under forty have no memory of any of that at all.

This is the age of precarious employment, low wages, alienation, and exhaustion.
So not only do we need to band together, to act collectively, we have to rebuild the union movement that Thatcher and her vile ilk tried to hard to smash utterly.

And don't get me wrong here: part of what made the unions vulnerable is centralisation and a boys' club mentality.
Jealously guarding "traditional male jobs" meant excluding a huge number of women and people who aren't white - coal was always going to die an ugly death and the battleground was swept out from under us by both government and technology alike.
And to be frank as a queer woman - our struggle must be intersectional or the same will happen again. And the best way to intersectionality is democracy, bluntly, and taking the time to listen - without unhelpful white guilt, without judgement - to what marginalised people say.
We may not be able to win our demands by shutting down the coal mines and causing industry to grind to a halt as a result - but cleaners? Drivers? Delivery workers? Retail workers?

Just as vital in the modern age. And often staffed by marginalised groups.
To act as though the struggle of an worker from Sudan cleaning a hospital is fundamentally any different to a worker from Sheffield doing the same is to fall prey to being divided and ruled.

The more fissured and fractious working people are the easier we are to crush.
And the newspapers and the alt-right and all the rest of them might be screeching about "floods of immigrants" that are "stealing our jobs" - it's bullshit.

The wealthy would have us fight over a crumb while they devour the entire cake.
It isn't on us to point at each other and say "hey! their crumb is bigger than mine! not fair!"

It's on us to face down the bastards who hoard almost the whole cake, and would rather it fall to putrescence and rot than share it more equally.
Because this is as true today as it has ever been through history.

A few people are stealing what's rightfully the property of all of us. The landlords, the bankers, the politicians taking bribes to approve developments....

And there's a hell of a lot more of us, than them.
You can follow @LindsayPB.
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