We are living through exceptional times. The government agree and they’ve made exceptions to normal rules and laws, suspended competition laws to let Lloyds buy HBOS and bailed out the banks to a sum of 50 billion pounds, with a further 200 billion to be made available to them under what’s called the ‘Special Liquidity Scheme’. To top all this there is a food crisis resulting in food riots across the globe, and of course the climate crisis, Peak Oil and gas etc.
Across the UK people are organising. In London a price reduction campaign has been initiated, calling for a reduction of rising food prices at supermarkets. Elsewhere the “Cardiff Chartists” in Wales and the “Robin Hoodies” in Barnsdale (South Yorkshire) are discussing a variety of potential responses.
We have called this meeting both to further discuss the implications of the current crisis for us and potential responses here in Leeds. These could take many forms, from resisting evictions and cuts in social expenditure to joining the Price reduction campaign, or some other form of “autoreduction”.
No one quite knows how things will turn out, but it does appear that there is an opening, maybe an opportunity to re-evaluate our lives, to look at living in different ways; capitalism simply doesn’t make sense anymore. After all, exceptional times call for exceptional measures!
