The Platform looks back at a year of horrors and honours – and the lessons we have learned
Let’s not pretend we were ready for the year to be over. We’ve been clinging onto the hope for some closure – for a moment of comfort – but instead, we’ve been hanging off the brink of a cliff, pushed over by the flooding waters of the past year and dealing with the messy, baffling consequences at the dawn of a new one. Unfortunately, for many, this has been quite a literal experience with rising waters hitting parts of northern England, Scotland, Northern Ireland and Wales in recent days.
Here are a few of the key moments we had to swallow in 2015 and what we’re probably still digesting as we enter 2016.
1. We’ve only lived about eight months under the current Tory government.
It feels a lot longer, right? The Conservatives returned to Downing Street in May 2015, leaving a lot of us anxious. Finding the light is going to be a major task of 2016.
“The prospect of another five years of creeping paranoia and scatter-gun analyses of entire cultures and religions leaves me concerned and unnerved. But all this is counterbalanced by the feelings I get within my classroom. When you see a room full of people working and interacting together, crossing the bounds of race, religion, and the crushing millstone of history in such a dynamic way, it’s hard not to be moved.”
David Richard Gilbertson in ‘Observations from the Classroom: Moved, Humbled and Ashamed’ on 14 May 2015.
2. The NHS definitely needs saving.
This was the year that we realised how much we take our National Health Service for granted, and BBC’s Call the Midwife sweetened the deal. Junior doctors took to the streets as Health Secretary Jeremy Hunt called for new belittling job contracts for workers.
“Once the ethos of the NHS falls, the passion of the workforce will also fall. Your employees, Mr Cameron, are exhausted. Strip them of their morale, and you are left with little more than a skeleton of the National Health Service that was the pride of this country for so many years.”
Sarah Jawad in ‘Dissecting the Future of the National Health Service’ on 16 May 2015.
3. The climate has changed.
The recent COP21 United Nations conference on climate change emerged in the wake of the November Paris attacks, so the spirit for change could have been quashed. However, the thousands of people who were banned from the climate rallies, including the Pope, left their empty shoes in the square at the Place de la Republique in the French capital instead.
“Droughts and floods, mass extinction of species and a rise of pests, coral bleaching and acid rain, deforestation and desertification, hurricanes and tornadoes, rapidly shrinking ice caps and rising sea levels… the list goes on and on. We know that climate crisis is causing catastrophic detriment to the biosphere.”
Nandini Uppluri in ‘The Climate Crisis: A Civilisational Wake-Up Call’ on 12 April 2015.
4. The European Union is a bit of a bully.
After the elation of a near-absolute majority in the January 2015 elections, the left-wing Syriza party in Greece, led by Alexis Tsipras, was denied loan extensions and left to deal with crippling austerity measures. This led Finance Minister Yanis Varoufakis to resign in July during a referendum. Greece has now agreed to a new bailout in exchange for reforms they are gradually implementing.
“Without restructuring and debt relief, the debt will grow more, to 200% of our economy. It’s a myth that we caused the Eurozone crisis by overspending. Greece is 2% of the European economy. Even if all Greeks had been partying for five years with champagne and caviar, we could not have created this crisis.”
Dr Marina Prentoulis in ‘Battling the Banks: Syriza and the Search for a New Europe’ on 13 July 2015.
5. Black lives really don’t matter in the USA…
Just a few days ago, to huge international outcry and little surprise, it was announced that the Cleveland officer who shot 12-year-old Tamir Rice will not face charges. It’s been a heavy year for the #BlackLivesMatter movement, as the final death toll of young black men rose to 1,134 in latest figures.
“Domestic violence and gun laws have been trending topics on social media in the U.S. over the course of the past year, particularly with regard to questions of victim-blaming, as in the case of Janay Palmer and Ray Rice, and with regard to Florida’s controversial Stand Your Ground law, which has been linked to the violent shooting deaths of Trayvon Martin in 2012, and Jordan Davis in 2013.”
TD in ‘Domestic Injustice: What Marissa Alexander’s Case Means for Survivors of Violence’ on 27 January 2015.
6. But black female bodies really do.
It has been another year of women struggling for airtime – or shall we say, basic rights. On the showbiz level, Jennifer Lawrence spoke up about the gender-based pay gap to loud applause, while Chris Rock recently retorted with, “’If she were black, she’d really have something to complain about.”
“Editorial agendas have informed journalism through the fetishisation of black womanhood. In the African-American context in particular, the public and socio-political voices of African-American female discontentment are often overlooked in popular black music and culture. Black women in the entertainment industry are forced to re-inscribe stereotypical performative identities to make sense of their gendered identity and doing this within a racial context proves to be the most challenging.”
Bushra Ferjani in ‘Policing Black Women: Capitalism’s Violent Assault on Hip-Hop and Civil Society’ on 24 August 2015.
7. Donald Trump is actually for real.
The man who has been the comical hyperbole of white supremacist America for so long is actually a real person with a real following – and with the most shocking fantasies planned for his presidency. We’ll try hitting the game’s restart button if the latter comes to fruition.
“But what are the policies of Donald Trump? We know his stances – he’d repeal Obamacare, shut down the Iran deal and chuck out any existing gun control measures and believes that global warming is a ‘hoax’ – but little of what he concretely plans to do to ‘make America great again’. He boasts about his foreign policy in much the same way: ‘I will be so good at the military, it will make your head spin.’”
Talib Visram in ‘Wet Hot White Supremacist American Summer: The Donald Trump Campaign’ on 29 September 2015.
8. Justin Trudeau ticks all the boxes.
Canada’s new prime minister could be the man to save us all. He’s been making headlines for all the right reasons including the creation of the most equal and inclusive cabinet in Canada’s history. Too glossy to be true? 2016 will tell.
“Part of the magic behind Trudeau the Younger is the broadness of his appeal. He is liked across Canada. And in a country as large as this, that statement is more significant than you’d think. The country’s national motto is “From Sea to Sea to Sea” since few countries border three oceans. The distance between Vancouver, the major centre on the Pacific coast, and St John’s, a major centre on the Atlantic coast, is about 5,000 kilometres.”
Cody Redekop in ‘If Justin Trudeau Can Unite a Country As Big As Canada’ on 28 October 2015.
9. Everyone needs a Jeremy Corbyn kinda guy in their lives.
The Conservatives have been severely infected by the Corbyn panic and didn’t hold themselves back from sending out an email to their members about the new UK national security threat, while the party’s leader David Cameron lumped him in the same sentence as the “terrorist sympathisers” on the eve of the Syria vote – and was subsequently asked to apologise at least 12 times. The panic has percolated down to many national newspapers too. But the honourable gentleman has not been shaken and will not comment on anything but policies, policies, and only policies.
“Corbynmania is a reaction to the snobbish elitism that has poisoned the Labour party ever since Tony Blair’s era. Whatever one thinks of Corbyn’s policies, at least everyone knows what these policies are. Rent controls, railway renationalisation, government spending, scrapping tuition fees: he repeats them over and over, crystal clear, straight and unpretentious, to anyone who will listen to him. He ignores no one.”
Joshua Luke Williams in ‘How Labour’s Snobbish Elitism Resulted In Corbynmania’ on 7 September 2015.
10. Poverty can be eradicated.
We need to discharge ourselves from the entrapment of language around poverty if we are to truly eradicate it. This means questioning the power structures in place.
“Our analysis reveals a nuanced picture – where many great ideas about gender equality, seeking harmony with the natural world, and efforts to bring human suffering to an end, are prominently included as desired outcomes of this process (showing how civil society organisations really are making contributions in a democratic way). And yet, at the same time, because politics has been removed from discussion, the increasingly unpopular neoliberal agenda remains fully in place.”
Joe Brewer in ‘This Is Why I Say Poverty Is Created’ on 14 November 2015.
Best wishes for the new year, from all of us.
Image from: http://business.financialpost.com/fp-comment/paris-missed-99-of-climate-change
