Participatory Practice
I’m black and I’m pagan, I’m gay and I’m left and I’m free, I’m a non-fundamentalist environmentalist, Please don’t bother me.” And one of the finest examples of alliances of solidarity was during Thatcher’s vicious attack on the National Union of Mineworkers as the largest surviving organised labour union, and it almost brought her down: “Lesbians and Gays Support the Miners”, “Black People Support the Miners”, “Women Support the Miners” … Manchester’s imposing Victorian town hall opened its doors and offered a critical communicative space for the people. We organised collectively from local groups
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to international movements, meeting in identity groups, forming theory from experience, rising up to become politically conscious and determined to change the world. It was the time of new social movements: women, Black, ‘dis’ability, LGBTQ, greens and peace protesters across the world rose in solidarity to strike out for social change around identity and culture, adding ‘White’ feminist thought and Black women’s wisdom on intersectionality to the class struggle. We had a hard time making sense of it all. We needed the security of compartments, fixed boundaries rather than these new intersecting, overlapping, overlaying, fluid complexities that defined an issue in relation to its opposite. This left us stuck when we considered ‘White’ women’s experience in relation to Black women’s or ‘dis’abled people’s, or sexual preference … let alone dealing with environmental issues and class. We often found ourselves ranking each other in terms of multiple, disjointed oppressions or even locking horns or running away from the pain of it all, as we did when we tried to form alliances around women’s action, Black and ‘White’, or where it intersected with class. We didn’t have the benefit of today’s insights into ‘White’ privilege and the role of stigma as a neoliberal class project within the complexity of intersectionality … but just as Paulo Freire transformed our understanding, we paved the way for these ideas to evolve.
A missed opportunity Margaret Thatcher was leader of the Conservative Party in the UK from 1979 to 1990, and, during that short period of time, the face of the UK changed beyond recognition. The previous decade, 1968 to 1978, had been pivotal. Society was at its most equal. As Danny Dorling (2018b: 32) points out, this was a moment when we could have chosen to go down a different route, making different decisions based on values that reflect human and environmental flourishing, such as creating a sovereign wealth fund for future generations based on oil like Norway, or we could have been leaders in science and technology like Finland, 48
