Christine Armstrong interviews Zoe Williams

👋   / carmstrongldn  

Article: http://www.jerichochambers.com/less-o...

Where’s politics headed? Zoe Williams believes now is the time for The Resistance.

Citing the long tail of a crisis - with the financial collapse of 2008 delivering up our current political maelstrom almost ten years later – she surveys the perilous state of party politics (“the paucity of both options”) – and what it might give way to. The business-as-usual, or politics-as-usual, approach is under strain. Beneath a veneer of normality, we’re living with the catastrophic threat of Brexit, a government with no plan and a failing opposition, the sort that votes for Article 50 despite "not knowing what it means".

Where is the shining light? She despairs of Corbyn - “we hoped he’d be a John the Baptist figure who’d fluff everything up for Jesus, but he’s not” - and floats the idea of a “Government in the National Defence”: an alliance of those willing to take a stand. She believes while everything Blair said was right, someone else needed to say it, citing a description of his intervention as “like taking childcare advice from Gary Glitter…”

With a nod to the trenchcoats of ‘Allo ‘Allo!’ she calls on us to Be The Resistance. “Mobilise as the people that you are…”: go to meetings, host a Huddle, create new cultural entities, seek out new political leaders, look up Crowdpac, and work to bridge the gap between politics and civic society.