Bridport Carnival: Common Sense 1400 - Red Tape and Bureaucracy 0.

Last week I attended the Bridport Carnival and torchlight procession. After all the floats with dinosaurs on and majorettes had paraded past, over 1400 people wound their way down increasingly narrow roads to the beach half an hours walk away. The vast majority of people, whether aged five or eighty five carried foot long ‘torches’ which would have made more than ample flame throwers. In an era where putting on any kind of public attraction requires a hefty tome of insurance policies, health and safety assessments and permits I was amazed that the event had been allowed to happen. The list of authorities (District Council, County Council, Fire brigade, police etc) who could have objected on safety grounds would have as long as a fully lit torch. But even as the streets narrowed and became more crowded common sense prevailed. One stupid ten year old boy did throw his still flaming torch into the hedge, but almost immediately a member of the public went over to extinguish it. Numerous lads had to drop their torch in an amusing hurry after encouraging their light to flame rather too extravagantly, but no damage was done.

Of course the event was well planned and there was an ambulance on hand, but marshals kept a low profile and the success and safety of the event was dependent on the community’s common sense as a whole. People not only took responsibility for their own actions, but also kept an eye on others and were prepared to intervene if necessary. Health and safety rules and regulations are in part a response to the breakdown in communal common sense. If enough people aren’t prepared to take responsibility for those around them then, yes, ‘there will always be one that spoils it for everyone’. The Bridport Carnival showed that it doesn’t have to be like that, but that it’s in everybody’s hands to ensure that risky public events aren’t extinguished under the weight of bureaucracy and red tape.

Nostalgia IS what it used to be.

“If you weren’t born when and where you were, where would you have liked to have been?” In the late night discussions that followed I imagined myself taking part in the student protests in 1968 Paris, when the majority believed that it was worth trying to change things and were prepared to risk their degrees and futures to do it. You can picture my pleasure when such idle dreaming found its way to the top of the charts last week through Sandi Thom’s first single ‘I want to be a Punk Rocker’.

The song taps into the richest seams of nostalgia – yearning for a lost innocence and a rose tinted affection for previous fads and trends. However Thom’s nostalgia goes a step deeper. She yearns for a time when an individual’s actions counted and there was the freedom to imagine that a completely different and better society was possible. The implication of the song now is that we’re stuck with what we’ve got and that fighting against the capitalist and mass media dominated system is futile. We were born too late and our generation can’t be change makers.

Thom may well be speaking for a generation unhappily caught up in the corporate machine of work to live and live to work, but her defeatist attitude is wrong and self perpetuating. Firstly all those punkrockers and hippies of the 1960s and 1970s are now in their 40s and 50s and running the country. You only have to look at the background of current Labour ministers to see that the leftie protest generation made it into power – Jack Straw, Harriet Harman and Charles Clark to name but a few. This generation did make huge strides campaigning for gender and race equality and against apartheid. They also campaigned against the imperialism of Vietnam and the proliferation of Nuclear weapons. It’s great to look back on the 1960s and 1970s with a touch of nostalgia, but it’s important to remember that the idealism of the 1960s contributed to and then got swallowed up by the consumer society and family breakdowns of the 1980s and 90s.

Our generation does care – it cares about making poverty history and the Iraq war and is the first generation to grow up with the environmental movement. It cares about stable families and long lasting friendships. However it doesn’t have the confidence that it’s possible to do anything about it. Adrift in a world of individualism it doesn’t know the power of and doesn’t think it has the time for sustained grass roots organised mass action. As a result people only offer shallow commitment to ‘Make Poverty History’ hoping it will do something, but not really believing that it can. This can change. We too will become the generation that runs the country, but in the mean time we desperately need to find, grow and equip leaders and change makers so that we can show that we weren’t born too late and that radical change for the better is always possible.