Left Unity comes to High Wycombe

Iram Awan is the new Left Unity organiser for High Wycombe. She explains why she is getting involved.

I have never been aligned to any political party and have felt disenchanted with
them for as long as I can remember. I find them to be consistently unrepresentative
of people’s views and in thrall to corporate lobbyists.
Sometimes I feel like we have fallen down a strange rabbit hole of a democracy where
the higher up the political ladder you go the less representative it becomes of what
the people actually want. A sort of strange kind of inverse democracy where the
minority decide what should happen to the majority.

If a national poll were taken most people wouldn’t want the NHS to be dismantled,
they wouldn’t want a lowering of taxes for the rich, they wouldn’t want tax
exemption for large corporations, they wouldn’t want their local services or
libraries closed, they wouldn’t want this heinous bedroom tax and they certainly
didn’t want to go to war with Iraq. However the very things we don’t want are
repackaged and sold back to us as something we do actually want or which is right
and good for us.

Most people I’m sure want to live in a democracy which is worthy of the name and
where our elected representatives actually listen to the will of the people. What
would this look like? Maybe it would finally place people’s happiness and needs
above private profit and power. Maybe it would mean an end to divisive and cruel
policies which pit the vulnerable against each other so they don’t look up and
realise their suffering is being engendered through regressive and self-serving
politics. Maybe it would mean an end to waging war and imperialistic ventures. Maybe
it would mean an end to our weapons industry and the diverting of these funds from
the industry of death to an industry of life in the form of green technology and
renewable energy.

Long before I was born Noam Chomsky gave a lecture on the topic of Government in the
future. In this he said ‘We have today the technical and material resources to meet
man’s animal needs. We have not developed the cultural and moral resources- or the
democratic forms of social organisation-that make possible the humane and rational
use of our material wealth and power’.

It is crushingly obvious that even over 30 years later these words ring true today.
However, it is heartening that there are so many people working around the world
today to develop the cultural and moral resources to make the above possible. I
believe these resources are already here. What’s needed are the democratic forms of
social organisation to bring these resources together and make an impact on the
political and social sphere. We need to unite a fractured left movement and build a
coherent response to those in power that what we have is not what we want and to
offer something different. Maybe Left Unity is the answer and maybe it’s not. Maybe
it will form a successful grassroots movement and become a future party and maybe it
won’t. For the moment I feel it’s all we have and it’s up to us what we make of it.