What possible benefit is there in acknowledging the existence of the British National Party by turning out to protest against them this coming weekend?
As much as the media love to scaremonger by warning of a very right-wing tide coming to sweep away politics, we are still talking about a party which will do well, at its zenith, to scrape a million votes nationwide in a general election. The whole democratic process seems skewed so much in favour of red or blue (with yellow ballast in the lean years) that any would-be gatecrasher discovers the first-past-the-post system is their undoing.
It isn't for me to arrogantly point out the error of other people's ways: those whom I tutor would be able to fully reciprocate. You might not have an irrational fear of Muslims (for that is what it is) but you lack x, y and z, hence you are no less human than us. Where I wrote about the preservation of the cat in the cat, now I argue that I seek to extinguish the man in the man.
All the above has occurred to me since the weekend; yet so too do I realise that I might be generating excuse after excuse to avoid doing morally what I feel to be correct. This is hardly new, of course: I elected to attend a dreary goalless draw at home to Derby instead of travelling to London to abuse the Pope in September of last year. Instinct told me that giving some to Benedict was the only choice, but familiarity and cowardice held me to the stultifying beat of routine.
Speaking truth to power does not, of course, begin and end with a public display of excoriation or support. I eat neither KFC nor McDonalds, and yet have never felt the urge to join in anti-animal cruelty or anti-capitalist demonstrations; nor have I protested about the ease with which one can begin a libel case in the English courts. As with religion, some beliefs are better practiced in private, and yet I feel unconvinced that being uncomfortable with racists is one of them.
Morally, I ought to be there at the weekend, in the names of the Australian and Zimbabwean muses of the past; in the names of my friends from Ghana and Iran; in the name of the woman whose parting gift was to ask me to write for her. All would theoretically attract the interest of the British National Party should they ever gain significant power, and I must express my disquiet on their behalf.
Yet England is no Egypt, where an ancient and fossilised leader can be unseated in 18 days of protest, the contagious revolution spreading across North Africa and Asia to terrify the old despots. Here, millions poured into the streets to protest against an illegal war, with the outcome that it went ahead anyway.
I am, then, voiceless, castrated as far as politics goes. Any sound I make goes unheard, like the tree falling in the forest when nobody is around to hear its death. Yet still there is purpose, even pleasure, in the act of vocalising, and it is to this notion that I must reconcile myself to before Saturday, else I shall never get out of bed.
