There’s a lot of talk of protest in the news. A lot of things to protest.
It takes me back to December 1976 when all we armband anarchists laughed uproariously at the news that a lorry driver had become so incensed by the Sex Pistols swearing on TV that he kicked in his brand new £380 set.
Jason Holmes, 47, was furious because his eight-year old son Lee had heard the word f**k, a word now bandied around school playgrounds and the rest of society like a term of endearment.
Johnny Rotten’s disdainful reply – “hasn’t he heard of the off switch?” – showed a pragmatism very much needed in 2021.
Another of his battle cries – “anger is an energy” – comes to mind most days. Sometimes it feels like there’s enough of it around to power the National Grid.
And for 2021 there is no off switch.
Famously, when Marlon Brando was asked what he was rebelling against in The Wild Ones he countered: “What have you got?”
This is how it feels to be 62 years old in 2021 and to read that 265 Tory MPs have voted to allow raw sewage to be dumped into waterways across England and Wales.
These MPs include leading Scottish Conservatives Andrew Bowie (West Aberdeenshire and Kincardine), Alister Jack (Dumfries and Galloway), David Mundell (Dumfriesshire, Clydesdale and Tweeddale) and their leader Douglas Ross.
WATCH: Untreated sewage was released into Langstone Harbour, Hampshire for 49 hours.
Photographer Chris Pearsal, who captured the footage, tells #BBCBreakfast ‘it needs to stop’. https://t.co/Fk7BeZrc2z pic.twitter.com/8lcNHB86qh
— BBC Breakfast (@BBCBreakfast) October 26, 2021
Even defrocked former Health Secretary Matt Hancock voted to pump raw sewage into rivers. You couldn’t make this up.
Protest isn’t what I’d planned for this age
Little wonder that, 45 years after punk’s apparent threat to overthrow western civilisation, I find myself getting my 16-hole Doc Martens boots ready every time I watch Newsnight.
(Except now, at the age of 62, it’s not so much the accidental death of an anarchist that prevents me from kicking in the screen but the mild arthritis in my big toe.)
Previously, getting to the age of 60 was something you didn’t need to worry about until it happened.
You’d look forward to coasting into retirement, knowing you’d paid your dues, your taxes and your pension plan, and that everything would be ok.
You knew that even if you were going nowhere, you’d at least have a decent library book to read along the way.
Try finding a library that’s open now.
Sixty seemed as ancient as the Latin they tried to teach us council house kids at school.
Maybe they hoped to make mini Rees-Moggs out of us Lochee tykes, but growing up in a tenement with an outside toilet made me forever a socialist.
And Latin wasn’t much use when Mum made us hide behind the sofa when the insurance man came to collect his money.
Today when we should be coasting to retirement we’re still metaphorically hiding from a government who are supposed to be leading and protecting us.
The raw sewage vote is just the latest signal that they’re not on our side.
Rights to protest are under threat
I assumed I’d be living in a better world, a fairer world by now.
That’s not the case.
And that has never been so apparent as right now when the 7.3 million of us aged between 60 and 69 are at increased risk of severe illness and death from Covid 19.
No one seems to care. Not least the Prime Minister whose much-vaunted libertarianism isn’t quite so apparent when you want to have a protest march and have to worry about being arrested.
In my youth I marched for freedoms which are now again being eroded; gay rights, women’s rights, abortion rights, Rock against Racism, Greenpeace and CND.
How ironic is it that now, at a time when I want to march again, it’s against a government that is trying to clamp down on our right to protest, despite opposition from UN experts and human rights groups.
It was already tough out there in terms of civil liberties.
In 2020 police had to apologise to a woman after they told her to cover up an anti Boris Johnson T shirt, claiming the garment was in breach of part of the public order act.
It wasn’t, and this is why I proudly wear my Pam Hogg T shirt calling Boris Johnson and Dominic Cummings names that are sadly unprintable here.
It’s puerile but also intoxicating – such is the power of dissent.
Raw sewage vote is why I still speak out
Wearing a T shirt doesn’t achieve much but at least it helps you feel you have a voice.
And in an age where bias is so omnipresent, that’s important.
Social media is the same. A spat on Twitter is just the new, cheaper version of kicking your TV screen in.
That’s why I enjoy following activists on there and why I relish calling out lies and manipulation.
In the absence of taking to the streets every little helps.
I’m proud to be of a generation who fought.
And at the age of 62 when I should be easing into retirement, it’s more important to me than ever to keep fighting for what I believe in.
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