Unfortunately the wealthy and power elites can afford to buy access to law and often attempt to buy changes in the law. The place to resist is now via the ballot box and the law courts. The alternative is revolution and mayhem. This does mean that there needs to be constant vigilance.
Recognise that you do live in a country where there is rule of law, that there will always be groups trying to wrestle more power and privilege for themselves, and that this dynamic will continue.
All the gains achieved in NI have been by negotiation, not by violence.
'Danidl', if only it were as simple as you suggest!
Firstly, I don't accept for a moment that the achievements gained in NI have been the result purely of sensible discussion and negotiation. Without the armed struggle, there would never have been any meaningful discussions.
I can think of many example, as I'm sure you can, where political change was effected only through armed struggle, often bloody civil war. Obvious examples would be France, the USA, Russia, Cuba, China but it becomes a very long list when one looks deeply enough.
It is rather fanciful to suggest that the answer to the poor and underprivileged lies in the law and/or the ballot box. Were those systems not so rigged by the wealthy elite, that might be true. Unfortunately, those remedies failed the common people in all those countries I mentioned, as they have failed us in the UK time and time again.
Negotiations have not helped the Palestinian people one bit in their struggle, nor have they helped resolve the problems elsewhere in the middle-east.
I do agree, however, with your assessment of the slogan appended to the Corbyn campaign. When sufficient numbers eventually take off their blindfolds and examine dispassionately how little, centuries of what the media refer to as monarchical democracy has given the many, then the British political system might change. It is incredibly difficult though when the very sources of remedy you suggest are all in it together and we have such a skewed constituency arrangement which is democratic in name only.
ps I had always thought that Corbyn-associated slogan sounded familiar and on reading the report of an address given yesterday in Brighton, the speaker referred to it more fully, like this:
'Rise, like lions after slumber
In unvanquishable number!
Shake your chains to earth like dew
Which in sleep had fallen on you:
Ye are many—they are few!'
It is part of the poem, 'The Masque of Anarchy' by Percy Shelley.
Tom
