Hi ,
There are a lot more people who love our communities and desperately want a fairer, more equal society than there are people who agree with Elon Musk's dangerous remarks about violence at last weekend's "Unite the Kingdom" rally.
It's sometimes hard to believe that – and certainly after the leader of the opposition refused to say that Musk saying "fight back or die" was a call for violence or something worth condemning, it's a little harder – but every bit of evidence we have says that it's true that there's more of us than there are of them. The fear that communities in London expressed about Saturday's rally was the same fear that people all over the country have felt after the riots last year or this year's summer of flag vandals, but it's also been matched with an outpouring of support. We do still have each other.
This week in Brent, we were lucky to have a wonderful reminder of how strong our communities can be. As part of our London work, our incredible organiser Maeve Slattery has helped train a group of community reporters in Brent as they document one of London's most diverse and unequal boroughs.
They've organised themselves into a group called 1 in 32 and turned hundreds of hours of interviews, workshops, and community meetings into a genuinely incredible film about inequality in Brent. Using the words of people in the community, it tells a story about the way the social fabric people used to rely on has been deliberately worn down by austerity and privatisation; the way people have seen community centres and services disappear; the suffocating feelings of not having any space and intense precarity that results.
But it also showed communities working tirelessly to make everyone's lives a little easier. Community kitchens, sports clubs, and gardens literally fill any gaps they can find, from temporary leases at sites marked for demolition to squeezing in allotments between development sites. Even many of these, like Granville Rec, are threatened with closure. People loved the communities that sprung up and the more equal societies in miniature they created. And they were desperate for the space to make that change across Brent, if they could get a more equal share of the wealth and power in our society.
We left the first screening, at the Lexi Cinema in Brent, feeling like not only was a more equal society possible, but that it would be impossible to imagine any other kind of future than a more equal one. 1 in 32 plan many more screenings, including a public one next Thursday at Parlour in Brent, before making the film available online.
I hope you forgive such an earnest newsletter, but right now we need to be more earnest than ever. We need solidarity and community to fight the crises we live in now, and our society is structured intentionally to isolate and atomise us as much as possible. But than can be overcome in Brent and all across the UK.
Read more from the community reporters: |
