The Greens have given a key post in their new ruling cabinet in the London borough of Lambeth to a man who has justified violence, condemned Remembrance services as ‘insidious’ and demanded a move away from ‘kinder, gentler politics’ to putting ‘heads on sticks’.
Chessum is one of those people who make journalists’ lives worth living, with a long record of wild statements
Not content with having two of their candidates arrested for stirring up racial hatred (they remain under investigation), Lambeth Greens, who have just taken power in the South London borough, can also bring you Councillor Michael Chessum, cabinet member for the ‘economy, cost of living and empowered communities’.
Chessum is one of those people who make journalists’ lives worth living, with a long record of wild statements dating back to his days as a leader of the student protests which saw rioting in central London, the statue of Winston Churchill defaced, government buildings attacked and demonstrators surrounding and smashing the window of a car carrying the then Prince Charles and Duchess of Cornwall.
‘I don’t think I’m going to wade in and condemn violence from protesters,’ he told the BBC afterwards in 2010. ‘They’re doing it because the normal processes of democratic accountability are failing them…The vandalism that we’re seeing from the government outweighs ten times the vandalism that we see on famous public buildings, on statues.’
In an earlier outbreak of the violence, the building then housing the Conservative Party’s headquarters was invaded and vandalised, with windows smashed and protestors hurling heavy objects at police from the roof. Chessum signed a statement praising the event as a ‘magnificent show of strength’ and complaining that ‘a great deal is being made of a few windows (being) smashed during the protest, but the real vandals are those waging a war on our education system… We stand with the protestors.’ There’s no suggestion that Chessum took part in or organised any of the violence during the protests himself.
Chessum scaled further heights as president of the University of London Union, in which capacity he justified the union’s official boycott of Remembrance Day commemorations. Remembrance was, he said, ‘an event which demands the suspension of rational thought…It is insidious.’
Given all this, there was inevitably a desk with Chessum’s name on it at Momentum, the Corbynista fan club, where he built the profile to opine that ‘what the public wants is not “kinder, gentler politics” but “heads on sticks.” Labour is losing by-elections and sitting 16 points behind in the polls because it is failing to present a clear narrative for whose heads should go on which sticks.’
His reaction to the Tories’ 2019 election victory which he unintentionally helped bring about: ‘It is now almost certainly the case that the Tories and Leave have won an overall majority with a minority of the public vote.’ (As did every other government bar one in British history, Michael.) ‘This is not a moral mandate. Regard it with contempt. Resist – in the streets, on picket lines. Fight, and fight for your lives.’
Having defected, with many other Corbynistas, to the Greens last year, Chessum’s modus operandi doesn’t seem to have changed much. He promises to use his big new job to ‘organise tenants, residents and workers to build social power and demand change’.
Alas, given the inevitable compromises and disappointments of office, and the climate of violent direct action that Chessum helped encourage, the risk now arises that for a new generation of protestors he is not the Chief Activist he clearly hopes, but the despised establishment figure getting his offices attacked or his car windows smashed. That’s the problem with direct action, you see. (Indeed, as so often in that tiresome thing, constitutional democracy, the Greens’ ‘moral mandate’ in Lambeth – 36.9 per cent of the vote, and 27 of the 61 occupied seats – is quite thin, far thinner than the 2019 Tory mandate which Chessum demanded a fight to ‘resist’.)
Let’s hope nothing of the sort happens. If it does, I promise not to go on the BBC declaring that the thugs and criminals are the real victims and that they’ve only been forced to break Cllr. Chessum’s office windows because the ‘normal processes of democratic accountability are failing them’.
Asked about his statements and whether he would apologise for them, Chessum replied: ‘People resort to direct action when formal political processes fail. I’m proud to have played a role in movements which fought against austerity and for decent, quality education for all, against a government which had no mandate for its policies.’ He said the use of the term ‘heads on sticks’ was ‘clearly a metaphor’.
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