Big banks, including the Royal Bank of Scotland, invested heavily in BP’s tar sands oil extraction project in Alberta, Canada. The European Union will likely prevent import of the oil, after the European commission found the extraction process to be “highly polluting”. The UK government, having bailed out the bank, is however keen to see a return on their investment. So too are RBS and BP stockholders. Meanwhile, in Canada’s courts BP is struggling to prove its activities do not contravene the First Nations Treaty, and to refute the Cree people’s claims it knowingly poisoned the land.

Environmental activists, lawyers and journalists are keeping a close eye on dealings between RBS, BP, and the UK government. They have reason to suspect illegal activities are taking place, as stakeholders seek to expand tar sands oil sales to the EU and to defend BP in court. The activists need hard evidence to support their suspicions and have appealed to the public for support…

This is the real world premise of Oil City, an immersive, site-specific play produced by campaign group Platform. The complexity of the scenario, coupled with the perhaps turgid prospect of a stage-play based on secret meetings, memos, case files and jargon, has prompted writer Mel Evans to craft an unusual and unexpectedly exciting solution: audience members, or more appropriately participants, must head into the city looking for proof that RBS, BP and the UK government are breaking the law.

Meeting the Lawyer

At the performance I attended, four of us met ‘The Lawyer’ at Toynbee Studios in Aldgate. We were quickly handed suit jackets and driven to the heart of the financial sector. Following the cues of three actors, who blended into the surroundings better than any of us, we eavesdropped an off the record meeting between ‘The RBS Employee’ and ‘The BP Representative’. We intercepted ‘The Government Official’ as he attempted to smoke out ‘The Whistleblower’. We listened to ‘The Activist’ as she detailed laws broken and political pressures applied to ensure profits flowed long after the oil. Building a paper trail between cement, steel and glass, we finally exposed the dodgy dealings of RBS and BP. As ‘The Journalist’ broke the news, we patted ourselves on the back.

Oil City works because of the experience it provides. We were forced to weave through throngs of suited men and women spilling out of Liverpool Street station and striding into surrounding offices, briefcases in hand. We sat with them in cafes and watched them in courtyards, tucking into breakfast or eating their sandwiches on benches outside. With the cast blending seamlessly into the surroundings it seemed obvious that legally questionable and morally reprehensible decisions can be made quickly, over coffee, during another day at the office. The banality of the city, impossible to capture on stage, is quite terrifying up close.

This subtle message of the play manifests as a creeping realisation: oil is big business, and this is a thoroughly business-oriented world. The people involved number in the thousands, work nine-to-five, and are for the most part simply sandwich-eating cogs in an enormous, profit-driven machine. Thoughtfully timed to coincide with the G8 summit, the play implies heads of state are the wrong targets for anyone aiming to stem the social and environmental distress caused by big oil.

Picking targets

Oil City is a powerful and creative work. It also has notable faults. The Occupy movement, cited in press materials for the play, was apparently right to focus on the financial, rather than political heart of London. Yet the play emphasizes researchers, lawyers, whistleblowers and investigative journalists, rather than rank and file protesters, as the vital players in opposing dirty oil deals and digs.

The initial briefing could have been more carefully constructed – as it was, we were still trying to understand our own roles when the attention-demanding narrative kicked in. And the positivism of the ending also felt out of place, not least as we returned to a pile of real newspaper articles revealing far more depressing truths. One pitfall of interactive theatre is that participants are likely to ask questions – in this campaigning context, the lead should have been better prepared to answer them. These slight quibbles did not detract, however, from the thrilling, informative and thought-provoking experience Oil City provides. Hopefully, further performances will allow more people to take part.

Oil City runs until 21 June – more information.

For the past two evenings, in two different Washington D.C. bars, I have chatted to American friends about the death of Margaret Thatcher. Both times, I was approached by men who, upon hearing my British accent, felt obliged to share their thoughts: ‘She can’t have been that bad, surely?’ I’m asked. ‘Even if she was, these “death parties” and jokes about going to hell can’t be justified. It’s sick, isn’t it?’ Their questions, of course, were rhetorical. These strangers, having heard Barack Obama’s praise, already had their answers.

Scanning over opinion pieces in the British national papers, from the Daily Mail to the Independent, I’ve felt similarly chastised. I’ve been told, by Stephen Glover and Grace Dent alike, that people like me, ostensibly gloating over the death of a frail old woman, are childish, ill-informed, and mindlessly jumping on a ‘bandwagon of hate’. A handful of friends on Facebook are saying the same.

Through whichever medium, I’ve been struck by commentators’ lack of imagination. Theirs is a wanton refusal to see something deeper in a bevy of street parties years in the planning. The satirical words and/or ‘sick jokes’ that have flooded social media sites, high street walls and banners unfurled across Britain are meaningful beyond being mean.

The media not getting it isn’t new, but is particularly frustrating coming from self-proclaimed leftists. Dent’s depiction of ‘death party’ attendees as middle-class, feckless youth echo the dismissive portrayals used to delegitimise student protests, Climate Camp and the Occupy movement over recent years. Her argument that, if people really wanted to be heard, they would ‘work in politics’ is both outrageously naïve and a reflection of her own privileged perception of choice in modern Britain.

The rioters that set London ablaze in August 2011 received similar condescension. At best, a youth acknowledged as disenfranchised was presented as misguided and uncouth. At worse, they were materialistic, violent and idle. The keenness with which their actions were condemned was alarming at the time. It became deeply troubling, on reflection, following the heavy punitive sentencing and further cuts to civic facilities it facilitated.

Any attempt to categorise Thatcher death party attendees as one type of person is thoroughly wrong-headed. Among the people I know personally dusting off their grave dancing shoes are social workers, journalists, teachers, artists, students, doctors, lawyers, youth workers, ex-steel workers and numerous trades men and women. They are Scottish, Irish, English and Welsh. They are working and middle class.

This group includes both professional and volunteer public service workers who tirelessly hold the screws in place in the ‘Big Society’ Cameron and his ilk tout but refuse to fund. They are political people, who write stern letters to MPs, and go on solemn protests. And they see these parties as political statements, too.

Interrupting the narrative

A handful of journalists have defended the revelry, or highlighted the dangers of ‘misplaced death etiquette’. I want to go further, and whole-heartedly advocate for these celebratory outpourings.

These gleeful celebrations represent much more than simplistic macabre response to Thatcher’s abhorrent policies, viewpoints and legacy. They are in fact public, vociferous interruption and contestation of the ‘savior, leader, icon’ narrative being written by a worldwide elite.

These conspicuous, pre-planned actions prevent a dreaded alternative from materialising: While the millions who despised her sit on their hands and silently shake their heads, a state-funded, jingoistic funeral procession roles by and the history books canonise a monster.

This alternative, which remains troublingly close to reality, is the truly sickening proposition. While banal flag waving is expected and encouraged around her funeral, there is little recognition that such action is as least as political, and far more asinine than holding a ‘Maggie burn in Hell!’ placard in Trafalgar Square. Many are ashamed, not proud, of Thatcherism and its progeny, and rightfully refuse to be silent. I support their right to say: ‘Not in my name.’

These parties, as crude as the banners adorning them may be, are iconoclastic events. Their message, despite fears to the contrary is not aimed solely at Thatcher. It’s frustrating to see protesters given such little credit, as if they are unaware she was but a cog in a giant ideological machine that has only grown in influence—within and beyond her party—since her ignominious Downing Street exit. They don’t need po-faced lessons that ‘Thatcherism isn’t dead’.

It is plain to see that Conservatives tried to distance themselves from Thatcher tactically, not politically. The distain once reserved for ‘the enemy within’ is now doled out to ‘scroungers’. The death revelers know it and now—precisely because there are parties as well as wakes—everyone is talking about it.

Public celebration provides a much-needed platform for an increasingly silenced public to air their views on, at heart, political issues. It’s patronising to claim otherwise, and to overlook the broader points made. I wonder, for example, if Tony Blair is still so confident that history will judge him kindly on Iraq? First and foremost, however, collective, gleeful action shows there is such a thing as society.

Russell Brand, writing in the Guardian, reflects that Thatcher’s policy aimed and succeeded to break ‘the spell of community’. She cast new spells, of course, of individualism; of anti-immigrant rhetoric and working-class scapegoating. Through her death, those spells might be broken.

For a left that has had little to celebrate for so long, Thatcher’s death is a symbolic victory, a promise that cannot be rescinded. She was a figurehead that millions nonetheless hold responsible for years of abject misery. She became an albatross around our collective neck, and we’re exuberant to throw her off.

‘Ding, dong, the witch is dead’ is indeed a gendered slur. We would do well emphasise the line that follows instead, as an appropriate call to action for a left worn down and broken up through years of bitter disappointments: ‘Wake up – sleepy head, rub your eyes, get out of bed.’

Seize the opportunity

In each public gathering there lies opportunities to unify and galvanize anti-austerity and social justice activists into mass action. Generations and fractions are coming together to share stories, effectively mourning their own, figurative loss of life under and after Thatcher. The millions born post-1990, who have been at the forefront of more recent, swiftly quashed uprisings against austerity and the state are listening, and sharing their stories, too.

Billy Bragg says: Don’t party, organise! I don’t agree that the two are mutually exclusive. There is no need to rush through the immediate opportunity: Educate! We can be grateful for, and seize the opportunity to party, and to tell everyone why.

Anti-Thatcher sentiment is vitriolic, but not thoughtless. Anger is easily dismissed as impotent rage, when those in power claim calm reasoning is needed. But, as Audre Lorde, a true feminist icon, reminds us, anger has its uses: ‘When we turn from anger we turn from insight, saying we will accept only the designs already known, deadly and safely familiar. […] My anger has meant pain to me but it has also meant survival, and before I give it up I’m going to be sure that there is something at least as powerful to replace it on the road to clarity.’

Righteous anger spurs the ‘death parties’ planned for this weekend. Smear campaigns cannot detract from that fact. I believe they can and will be productive, transformative occasions. A revolution that starts with a party? Sounds ideal to me.

Popular films like Traffic and, more recently, Carlos further emphasise the international scale of the narcotics industry. Cocaine in particular is well understood as having severe and tragic local impacts wherever it is produced, trafficked, traded or used. Yet consumption continues to rise, across all socio-economic strata and particularly in the west. More careful examination of the issue is urgently needed.

New documentary Cocaine Unwrapped is a sure-footed step in the right direction, casting a wide net to examine the wheres, whys and hows of the trade while avoiding the sensationalism that often dogs debate.

Director Rachel Seifert mixes reportage with interviews and observational documentary footage to build an appropriately complex and layered picture of the cocaine industry. She carefully probes politicians, dealers and users alike and seemingly refuses to assert any straightforward solutions. Between the lines, however, it becomes clear where accountability for the myriad consequences of the trade might lie.

The wilful ignorance of city slicker casual users in London, revealed in voice over alone, is one recurrent motif. Elsewhere, the devastating impact of gung-ho, US-sponsored coca crop destruction in Columbia is contrasted with Bolivian efforts to respect the cultural significance of the leaf for indigenous communities – while recognising that alternative, legal markets must be cultivated if sales to cartels might lose its appeal to poverty stricken farmers. There is a strange, if unintentional, irony in the idea that commodity markets may prove a way out.

In Mexico, military incursions into towns situated along smuggling routes have left local populations abused and disempowered, an impact replicated in unemployment-ravaged urban centres in the US, where violent state-sponsored police crackdowns exacerbate cycles of crime.

Carefully unfolding and juxtaposing testimonies, statistics and images, Seifert allows the human cost of various ‘wars against drugs’ to be counted. Her film undeniably raises important points for any informed policy debate to consider, though it might have gone further in some areas.

The legalisation/regulation debate is skipped over, despite the obvious implication that prohibition isn’t working. This is arguably a sensible move, considering that any relevant discussion would require hours of screen time. Though popular among some commentators, it is an incredibly messy proposal that would require intricate, coordinated planning, deep social adjustment, the implementation of retrospective justice and international trade agreement, among a host of other conditions which cannot be taken lightly.

Addressing the issue would require the film to take a moral stance on cocaine use per se, beyond the context of lives ruined by its journey to the user. Cocaine Unwrapped, perhaps aiming not to alienate any viewers on such grounds, not least western users whose buying habits can most directly impact the trade, avoids the question.

Also largely left out of the equation are the incredibly wealthy, major cartel players, who make billions of dollars, year on year from cocaine, in addition to other lucrative criminal activities. The amount of complicity they can buy – from local police chiefs to high-ranking officials – is practically immeasurable and it is not only in this film that they seem somewhat untouchable.

It would be unfair to ask that Cocaine Unwrapped cover everything, and any frustration over what could have been said stems from the questions the film poses, rather than any shortcomings. The film offers a coherent, patient and much needed survey of a global issue in which accountability is misplaced and ignored and action regularly taken without analysis or care for the exacerbation caused. In emphasising the complexity and complicities of a global issue, Seifert has produced a film that demands to be widely seen.

‘Cocaine Unwrapped’ was premiered at the London Open City Documentary Festival, and is now being released online and around the country. For further details see www.cocaineunwrapped.com

As further conflicts ravaged the continent, Humphrey Jennings’ wartime snap-shots Listen To Britain (1942) and later A Diary for Timothy (1946) glorified community coherence in factories, barracks and suburbia. Stylistically, these were precursors to the ‘Free Cinema’ movement of the 1950s, which drew inspiration and scripts from playwrights already inspecting the cracks in post-war society.

Kitchen sink

Leading director Tony Richardson described Free Cinema as ‘independent of commercial cinema, free to make intensely personal statements and free to champion the director’s right to control the picture’. His celebrated adaption of John Osborn’s play Look Back in Anger (1959) was hugely influential and bears the hall marks of ‘kitchen sink realism’, though now seems overly chauvinistic and stagey. His later films A Taste of Honey (1961), which addresses race relations and homosexuality through a female lead, and The Loneliness of a Long Distance Runner (1961), in which Tom Courtenay’s juvenile delinquent asserts his individuality through sport, have better stood the test of time.

Inspired by the rebelliousness of Italian Neo-Realism and the French Nouvelle Vague, and liberated by the relaxation of censorship laws, Britain’s own ‘New Wave’ of filmmakers shot ‘angry young men’, along with a host of previously taboo subjects, into cinema halls. The popularity of the genre faded, however, as spy thrillers and swinging London-set art films captured the new zeitgeist of Cold War fears and the free love movement. Social realism was forced to find a new home, and became a television staple from the 1960s onwards. The BBC’s stand alone drama slots, The Wednesday Play and Play for Today, which between them ran from 1960 until 1984 gave early breaks to new names Ken Loach, Dennis Potter, David Mercer and Mike Leigh.

On the box

Some of the most vital examples of British social realism were originally commissioned and broadcast for the series, including Loach’s Cathy Come Home (1966), which stoked public outrage over the public housing system. His The Big Flame (1969) imaged a Marxist uprising by Liverpool dockers while Up The Junction (1965) made stirring arguments for the legalisation of abortion, provoking parliamentary complaints that the BBC was breaking it’s commitment to political impartiality.

The seminal 1982 series Boys from the Blackstuff was a spin-off from a stand-alone Play for Today written by Alan Beasdale. The Liverpool-set drama tackles unemployment head on and has been hailed by BFI as ‘TV’s most complete dramatic response to the Thatcher era… a lament to the end of a male, working class British culture.’ The stand-alone play format eventually faded, as channels began to invest in serials and, primarily through Channel 4, feature films.

In the 1990s, a new comedic-realism continued to probe the after-effects of Tory rule. In Brassed Off (1996), The Full Monty (1997) and Billy Elliot (2000), each part-funded by major British TV channels, male characters find self-expression in the arts while their communities struggle for cohesion and survival in the abandoned post-industrial north. Each is shot through with a mix of broad comedy and pathos, rejuvenating a genre that had been deflated by countless ‘by ’eck it’s grim oop north’ parodies. While Thatcher remained a prime target the Labour government was happy to support such ultimately feel-good fare.

New issues, new voices

A certain seriousness has returned in the last decade, where filmmakers like Andrea Arnold and Shane Meadows have made dark excursions to explore psyches damaged by loss, addiction, welfare state failure and war. It marks a departure from the nostalgic tone of Thatcher-era struggles, refiguring the genre for modern morasses.

Meadows breakthough feature 24/7 (1997) sees young hopes enlivened when a boxing club opens in a Nottingham housing project. He aim was ‘to show that, irrelevant of what situation working-class people are in, they’ll make the best of what they’ve got.’ Drawing on his own past, Meadows is adept at presenting the adult world through young eyes, as in A Room for Romeo Brass (1999) and Sommerstown (2008).

Darker themes including the emotional and psychological impact of war are explored in both Dead Man’s Shoes (2004), in which a soldier takes revenge on small time drug dealers in provincial England and This Is England (2006), where the shadow of the Falklands war looms large. The latter was made into an acclaimed TV series last year and follow ups are planned.

Arnold won an Academy Award for her stinging short Wasp (2007) before making Red Road, a slow-burning mystery addressing grief and redemption in a bleak Glaswegian housing block. Fish Tank (2009) is further evidence of her special ability to probe complex personal emotions while more broadly reflecting the disenfranchisement of modern youth. Between them, and other emerging names, the genre looks set to be revitalised.

On Monday 29 March, seven bodies were found in a car at the side of a highway in Cuernavaca, the capital of Morelos State. They had been tortured and killed by asphyxiation. After four years of “the war on drugs”, people are used to such news, and to hearing soon after that the victims were linked to organized crime – no further investigation needed.

This case was different. One of the victims, Juan Francisco Sicilia, was the son of the well-known poet and a journalist, Javier Sicilia. He belonged to a social and cultural class with enough strength to pressure the authorities and prevent them washing their hands of the case. The criminalisation of the seven was quickly halted and the case is now undergoing further investigation.

The swift action has raised concerns over official statistics. What of the 153 young people assassinated in Cuernavaca over the past three years, officially presumed to be, “connected to the drugs trade”? How many were falsely incriminated? How many had been forced to work for dealers, or murdered for refusing to? How many parents were unable to speak out, or had no platform to be heard?

With these questions in mind, a new wave of protesters, led by intellectuals and artists suddenly touched by death, are speaking out for everyone, marching under the slogan: “We are all Francisco Sicilia”.

Demonstrations sprung up in the main square in Cuernavaca within a day of the murders, with 300 coming to register their sadness and anger. On 6 April, 40,000 took to the streets. Regular marches have spun out across the state and the movement has spread through the nation and abroad within weeks. In France, US, Spain and Argentina people have already marched in solidarity with Mexico. More are planned elsewhere. “¡Ya Basta!” (“Enough!”) they shout, appropriating the Rius graphic campaign, “¡No more Blood!”

Art, music and poetry for peace

Arts have played a key role in the demonstrations, with young performers and musicians expressing their frustration and desperation through poetry, music, dance, photography and video. In the square in Cuernavaca, one after another, they rise to recite protest poetry and sing songs of martyrs. They have shaped their work to serve the protest, adjusting lyrics and performances to demand peace, even though they speak of anger and confusion:

Somebody died yesterday and I came here without knowing why.

Not knowing if it is empathy that moves me,

or sadness, or hope, or fear, or sarcasm, or black humour.

I myself do not have the courage to shoot

with a coup de grace,

he who I label

writ on his forehead:

“murderer”.

- From the poem by Leonardo De On On Vide, read in the Square, “The son of a friend died yesterday”

A forum of musicians repeats a line in various guises, which has become a mantra in the Square: “Who has taken your life away? Who has taken your like away? Who has taken your life away?…”

Wamazo, a percussionist group, performs as a firing squad in front of the Government Palace. The singer shouts in a military style: “Ready. Aim. Fire!” They group turns their back to the public and, facing the Palace, begin shooting their “bullets of sound”, shouting: “Shoot the protesters! Shoot the denouncers”.

The approach is not only a satirical refusal to fight fire with fire, the methodology that sums up the “war”. It is also a form of protection. The protesters know that they are not indicting easily defined enemies. They accuse politicians and organized criminals, who often collude or collide, alike.

In an angry, emotional “open letter to criminals and politicians” published in the national news magazine Proceso, Scilia makes the point explicitly. His call to the gangs is the first time a direct, public dialog has been opened between citizens and organized crime:

“We are fed up of you, politicians… because you only have the imagination to use violence; weapons; insults and with that, a profound disrespect for education, culture, opportunities and honest work.

And of you, criminals, we are sick of your violence, your loss of honour, your cruelty […] Long ago you had codes of honour… you have become less than human, not animal – animals don’t even do what you do – but sub-human, demonic.”

While Scilia appeals to politicians to re-evaluate their approach and think more deeply about the social context that has given rise to the trade, a position widely shared by the protestors, his appeal to gangs to return to their “codes of honour” seems perverse. Many more feel that such an suggestion is deeply problematic. The resounding feeling is that an end – not a limit – to all violence is the only answer.

A well-positioned and educated youth, suddenly aware that they are no longer safe, has begun a desperate movement to peace, born from indignation and fear over the death of a close friend of many protesting. They have been awoken to an ugly reality and are acting quickly. The challenge now is to keep the movement alive and to help it grow to invite and include other, less-protected sectors of society, where a well-founded fear of retribution for demonstrating is as hard to break as the shaky complacency that previously silenced others. As the numbers marching rapidly increases and the No More Blood campaign imagery spreads, it seems that finally, the challenge is being met.

Names have been changed upon request

The fiercely independent magazine has its roots in environmental activism. In 1989, co-founding editor Kalle Lasn was involved in campaigns in British Columbia. ‘We went head to head with the forest industry on television with our own adverts. TV stations refused to sell us air time so there was this big battle between the industry, the stations, the public and Adbusters,’ he recalls. ‘Out of this campaign we started our newsletter which then grew into a magazine.’

The aesthetics of activism are central to their outlook, and wordless sections are devoted to unusual and everyday images, from the mundane to the sublime, carefully arranged for poignant effect. Spoof ads are another vital element for the magazine’s popularity and political outlook. ‘Taking adverts and altering or answering them escalates the dialogue. Having an article about how terrible the media is is one thing, but to give people a really provocative, empowering subvert that makes them laugh and hits against the powers that be is something that the left really needs right now.’

Kick-starting a movement

Unifying and inspiring the left is what the Adbusters Media Foundation, the not-for-profit producers of the magazine, was set up for. ‘One of the things that came up really early, twenty years ago, was the realisation that the political left was [using] old style, knee-jerk politics and the same old slogans at protests. Something was fundamentally wrong, we were running out of big ideas,’ explains Lasn. ‘We want to build a movement.’

Big ideas define the Foundation, which describes itself as ‘a global network of artists, activists, writers, pranksters, students, educators and entrepreneurs who want to advance the new social activist movement of the information age’. It is the root of international campaigns like Buy Nothing Week and Blackspot open-source branding.

Media literacy is high on their agenda, making Media Empowerment Kits available to schools since its inception. ‘We see it one of our mandates to create a media literacy lesson – not just for high school students but for the whole world,’ says Lasn. ‘We sent complimentary issues to every high school in Canada, and a huge percentage started subscribing and using the magazine in the classroom.

‘A good spoof ad or TV spot that speaks back at the advertisers is the kind of provocative thing that teachers like to use and students love to see. It gets people into subvertising – even if that’s just tearing pages out of magazines or writing stuff with a big black pen on top of it.’

Another of the Foundation’s education-based campaigns is ‘Neoliberal Economics – Kick it Over!’ aiming to remind students, teachers and institutions that another economics is possible. For Lasn, the approach is vital for the movement. ‘We are trying to create a paradigm shift, from neo-classical economics to a new, biologically, ecologically driven approach. It is the sort of new vision for the political left around the world that makes a lot of sense.’

A black spot?

With their ideology posted front and centre, Adbusters has come in for criticism in one area: its own product range of shoes, books and flags. For Lasn, the true message and worth of their Blackspot anti-brand has been overlooked. ‘A lot of people don’t understand that Blackspot was an attempt to launch something new and to go head to head with a big bad company like Nike; start taking their market share, stealing their logo and doing some brand damage.’

For a non-profit, anti-corporate entity, the approach to merchandising is novel. ‘You can either look for money from big funders or you can launch your own entrepreneurial venture that’s a new way to look at capitalism, like grassroots capitalism,’ reasons Lasn. Ever keen to stress the importance of building alternatives, he is clearly frustrated by the
‘sell-out’ accusations.

‘We’ve had advertising agencies offer to pay us $15,000 for our back cover and we always tell them to go to hell. Once you start selling out and having that kind of advertising feel, it just takes the piss out of activism.’

Their latest campaign idea is Seven Days of Carnivalesque Rebellion, a grassroots-led week of international, coordinated civil disobedience set for 22-28 November. Lasn sees it as an opportunity to rejuvenate the movement.

‘We started up around the time that the Soviet Union fell and through the Iraq wars and the Bush years and even now, with Obama, it feels like the left still doesn’t have its act together; doesn’t have a vision. Some really kooky right wing people, like the Tea Party, seem to have more verve and more passion than we do.’

Throwing down the gauntlet to groups across the world, he concludes: ‘We have to come up with the big ideas that would rejuvenate the political left and put the magic back into our activism.’ n

www.adbusters.org