The Conservatives have announced there latest policy 'revolution'. Yes, that it, the tories are now using the word revolution to describe their policies. Fair play to them - this is what clever propagandaists to: they take the language of the other and co-opt, subvert, and redeploy it's energy into their own agenda. If you don't believe it just look at the gospel of Mark or the First Pauline letters.
So the Conservatives are having a "Big Bang Revolution" And it doesn't involved their already highly publicised wife-swapping policy. It's about the deregulation of the media in order to help generate monopolies that can compete with the BBC. Because poor old ITV etc are struggling to make ends meet.
So it's a dergulation policy then? Yep! And it's about creating a liberalised market that favours the rich at the expense of the poor? Yes again! It's a revolution, apparently.
Those piss-takers at Tory spin-Q have also come up with: "Genuine Schools Revolution"; a "decentralised energy Revolution"; a "revolution to break the cycle of crime"; a "Green consumer revolution"; a "Tourism Revolution"; "London Cycling Revolution"; "Apprenticeship Revolution"; "Skills Revolution"; "NHS Information Revolution" and even - and you really couldn't make this bollocks up unless you were in big-p politics - a "supply-side revolution".
Any talk of revolution on the left or the right is suspicious because it tends to be violent or in never-never-land, or both. Perhaps that's why it's one of the safest words to borrow: it was just sitting there and nobody was doing anything with it...
The most radical people I've met have been people who aim for a constant revolution of the heart. They challenge themselves to be converted to the point of view of their neighbour, to find ways to love and understand their enemies. To make sure that those who want to get at the poor have to step over their bodies to get there.
Colin Ward wrote about the anarchist society being like "a seed beneath the snow" and Jesus talked about a mustard plant (a creeping weed of a plant) speading slowly but providing shelter. Neither of these are the posturing images of revolution that the Conservatives are about to pummel us with as they drew up to their billowing heights for the next general election.
So us ordinary folk will have to sit out another bloody (sic.) revolution: getting on with our ordinary lives of loving and living: building a new world in the shell of the old. Until this old-etonian revolutions finally realise how thoroughly redundant they really are.
Hasta la vicotoria: Siempre!
