Archive: Friday night match result: British Public 1 Big Society 0

First published April 29, 2011 at Orphans of Liberty

Katie Fraser seems to know what is quintessentially British; “the street party,” she writes in a BBC online story “is about as British as it gets”. The story is about an evident relative lack of interest in holding street parties to celebrate the Royal Wedding combined with a bit of wondering why it could ever be the case since we all love street parties so much (it has a leftist-republican twist).

Says Katie: “Despite explicit government support for the events, including the Camerons hosting their own party in Downing Street, the latest figures from the Local Government Association reveal there have been only 4,000 applications for street parties in England and Wales.”

Unfortunately Katie must be the usual BBC type otherwise she would have had a moment of realisation as she was writing the very words of this most important paragraph and she would have found the answer to the great mystery, and she could have packed up early for tea.

The British evidently don’t want David Cameron or any other government official to tell them that the Royal Wedding means that they should have a street party.

Katie knows differently. She knows that the British are politically on message with Progressive ideology, and wholly subscribe to it: “Today, street parties have become an annual summer fixture in some areas – a deliberate response to the 21st century’s fractured communities. As localism has caught on socially and politically, people are increasingly aware of not knowing their neighbours. The street party, it seems, can be the answer.”

There is a distinction to be made. What Katie is writing about is not the same animal as the Queen’s Silver Jubilee party that your mum and dad might have organised with your neighbours back in the 70s with no reference to the local council. We’re not talking about dressing up as the Phantom Flan-Flinger or a sack of potatoes in a fancy-dress competition before the adults had a bit of a disco. Katie is writing about a different kind of street party, and we know because she uses as her evidence the 150 street parties that took place in Bristol alone last year.

Now, Bristol has been championed by the Coalition’s Communities Minister Andrew Stunell as “the street party capital of England”, and apparently a “trailblazer” of street partying as a social phenomenon. So, it turns out that Bristol, with its 150 street parties a year is not at all typical of Britain. Furthermore, one of the reasons that Bristol has so many street parties is due to the involvement of Streets Alive which is a not-for-profit limited company funded by charitable foundations such as the Tudor Trust, the Esmee Fairbairn Foundation and the Rayne Foundation. Streets Alive believe in building community through the effort of organising street parties, but according to their website, they also function to engage “residents with consultations and the political system”.

Yes. It looks very much like the Streets Alive people are proper community organisers, and that the whole Bristol street party scene stinks of the Big Society, or Soviet Choir Practice as it’s known in this house; apparatchiks descending on local communities from central government to organise worshipful praise of the great leader and the new order disguised as a harmless and fun activity. (Please see Bulgakov’s “Heart of Dog”).

And let’s not forget that the concept was first imagined by Marxist Saul Alinsky as a means to agitate communities to propel agitators into positions of power. His concept came to full fruition in the States in the form of ACORN (Association of Community Orginanizations for Reform Now), who were alleged to have been involved in voting irregularities, and infamously helped guard polling stations from the wrong sort of voter the year that the Community-Organiser-in-Chief was elected as President.

Of course, our community organising is going to look different from that which took shape in America because it will be about training submission, not arousing conflict. The people who are deploying it are already in power, not looking to gain power. But they still need to consolidate because they are the Progressive elite and of a different organism to the conservative body-England. The UK government is the alien head transplanted upon a human body and so it needs to manipulate us at close quarters in order for us to accept the new culture, the new thinking, the new order percolating into society which is mainly the new value system of Equality and Diversity, the change in the justice system to enforce it and the new supremacy of the EU kleptocracy.

At the moment, our community organising looks like people from the children’s TV show Rainbow telling you to how to set up trestle tables in order to help you reach a consensus with your neighbours (according to central diktat). It’s been big in Bristol, but apparently they are having trouble rolling it out around the rest of the country.