#BigPowerOff
Some of you might be wondering about the usefulness of switching off as much as you can for one day, the 1st April.
A🧵
2. Power companies work on the principle that they are able to predict in advance how much energy the nation will use on a given day - even at a given time (ad break during the World Cup, anyone?)
3. By having days of action (I say "days" in the plural quite deliberately, we can screw with their economic model.
4. Making 1st April the first day of action - well, we all have to start somewhere, don't we?
5. "Why not just refuse to pay your bills?" people cry. Well, because disable people/people on benefits/low paid are already struggling to keep the minimum possible to support themselves, their families and, in some cases, their medical equipment working to survive.
6. "Why not protest on the streets?"
Well, two reasons. a) not everyone is physically able to protest, or can afford to take time away from just damn well struggling to survive to do so and b) the govt. are hammering traditional forms of protest, so we have to get smart.
7. They can lock you up for protesting, they can cut you off for not paying. They can literally do nothing if you just stop consuming. So all of us who can must switch off as much as we can on 1st April to start the ball rolling. That's not to say there can't be local protests.
8. In fact, local protests, in your own neighbourhood, with a small placard explaining what you are doing and why, are likely to be far more effective, and gain far more support locally from your own neighbours than a national, centralised protest that will be ignored.
9. So join the #BigPowerOff on 1st April.
Switch it off.
Use the hashtag
Post short clips of your action.
Start that ball rolling.
Make the energy companies understand that we will mess with them til they stop messing with us.
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1/ I cannot believe it! Sir Day-Late-And-A-Dollar-Short does it again! Conspicuous by his absence throughout #COP26 , he pops up after the ball is over to say this? Just checked his timeline and not a single tweet about climate in the past 10 days! Where is the opposition?!
2/ We are facing literally the biggest existential crisis humankind has ever known. The Paris Accords have gone, and we now have an even bigger mountain to climb than we did 6 years ago due to inaction and broken promises. (Don't suppose Keith can say much about those, tho)
3/ I, for one, am with @GeorgeMonbiot when he says the only option now is civil disobedience. Leaders in the Global North are wedded to protecting the neoliberal status quo, and their corporate sponsors in the fossil fuel and related industries. They won't make the changes needed
1. The thing is, everyone falls into the same pattern time and time again:
a) Outrage on Twitter 2) Sign petitions 3) Email our MPs 4) Rinse and repeat ad nauseam.
2. (You know I'm pee'd off if my come in paragraphs with sub-paragraphs, btw)
3. Then tomorrow or the next day it will be overtaken by some new scandal, and nobody will even remember, or if they do, will barely care.
Round and round and round it goes. Where it stops, nobody knows.
1. The Tory govt. - ably assisted by Labour, who imo under Blair were one of the worst govt's in terms of civil liberties - are seeking to push through social media legislation in the name of "safety" that, effectively, amounts to a new sedition law: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sedition
2. Free speech is not the freedom to incite hatred, criminal acts, or put people in fear of their lives. Freedom of expression is defined in Art. 10 of the European Convention on Human Rights, in the following terms:
1. Raab may be right to say that it's ridiculous for someone convicted of domestic violence to claim right to family life with his victim to stop his deportation. If (unlike Theresa May's cat story) this genuinely happened, you can bet your bottom dollar the courts rejected it.
2. But what Raab is seeking to do is take that right away from everyone - however sustainable their claim may be - on the basis of a few that might push their luck.
3. To put it in context: the right of appeal against a Deportation Order per se was taken away by this govt. in 2014. You can only appeal on the basis that it is either a breach of your Human Rights or a breach of the Refugee Convention.
1. This is my Scottish Papa, Joseph Nicol Bell - 2nd from the right in the back row. He lied about his age to sign up to fight in WW1. He was injured in the Somme.
2. He was a Labour man all his life, and worked as a forester after the war. He was in the Home Guard during WW2.
Keir Starmer was DPP between 2008 and 2013.
Some of these spy cops are likely to have infiltrated protest and opposition movements during that period.
No wonder he wanted to abstain on the Spy Cops bill.
Congratulations to @fruitbatmania
Don't support her persecutors!