Maurice Mcleod

Today’s newspapers show several pictures of angry protests, with vandalised statues and zero social distancing. They tell a story: of demonstrators who seemed to be alienating potential supporters and risking re-igniting the virus that is destroying the very lives they rightly claim matter. But that’s not a fair picture of what happened at the weekend. The vast majority of those demonstrating did so while respecting social distancing and without violence or destruction. I was at just such a demo. It might not have grabbed the headlines, but what happened in Tooting Common is far more representative of what happened. I’m a councillor in Queenstown in Battersea (home to the US Embassy) and was invited to speak at a small demonstration on Tooting Common.

I’ve been a lefty for long enough to be pretty familiar with the sensation of losing elections. I remember weeping in 1992 when John Major’s Tories beat Neil Kinnock’s Labour – but this time hurts like no other. When campaigning for Kinnock in 1992 and Blair in 1997, I had grave misgivings about some their fundamental political values (mine lie further to the left). But I was more motivated by trying to end 13 and 18 years of Tory rule and was willing to bat for anyone who might deliver this. These last two elections are the only time in my life that socialists like me have been able to campaign for the country to take decidedly the direction which we think really would create a fairer, more hopeful Britain.

Until recently, the Tories seemed pretty confident about next week’s election. Despite spending three and a half years blundering over Brexit, they were still comfortably ahead of Labour in the polls. In Jeremy Corbyn, they had an opposition leader denounced as a terrorist sympathiser, an unreconstructed communist, a rabid anti-Semite and — in general — an enemy of Britain. You might regard Corbyn this way yourself. If so, then it’s worth asking: if he really is so bad, why has support for Labour been steadily increasing since the election was called? Is the nation going mad — or might there be more to it? I’ve supported and campaigned for Corbyn’s type of politics most of my adult life.

When Patrice Evra and the French national football team lined up at Wembley last night, it was a moment of poignant defiance which earned an instant place in sporting iconography. I shed a tear, but I didn’t sing La Marseillaise. When horrendous things like the attacks on Paris happen, our first instincts are to offer solidarity and what help we can. And, yes, to hit back. The night after the attack, France launched 20 separate air strikes on what it said were Isis strongholds in Syria. And at home, an extra 115,000 gendarmes were deployed across France, leading to hundreds of raids with dozens of arrests.  In the days following attacks on the West, there’s often a security snatch and grab, and this time was no different.

When the first riots hit Brixton, I was 12 years old. My mates and I came from south London council estates and, while we were no angels, we certainly couldn't be described as bad kids. I can't pretend that I had any real grasp on why people were rioting but I knew it was against the same police who would stop and bug us constantly — even though none of us had either the balls or inclination to commit crime. It may sound like a tired cliche but the police didn’t feel like our protectors. They felt like more like an occupying force. And why? There were countless incidents to explain it, but one that sticks in my mind was in 1981 — the same year as the first Brixton riots.