Barking’s been in the news, with the success of the British National Party (BNP) in local elections, aided and abetted by local MP Margaret Hodges who suggested the BNP had a case to make. No doubt we are now going to get a big group of folk who know better, holding a big meeting in Barking, talking big ideas, with a big solution. Personally I just want to go to the free music gigs which are inevitably going to happen too. I mean you don’t want to have to take this stuff seriously. If you did you’d need to bus in someone radical like my Coby Smith from Memphis to talk about community politics, Paulo Freire’s ‘Pedagogy of the Oppressed’, and dealing what’s inside people’s heads and having a shared vocabulary to express that. Yeah, see, ha.

But there you go, me sending up big ideas and big solutions like I know. Of course you could boil it down to the politics of love, but then that would require knowing what love is in the 1st place. I did try and make a symbolic gesture yesterday in front of the TV crew outside Barking station by picking up a red sweet that had been dropped on the pavement, and putting it in the contiguous waste bin. But that necessary subtlety is wasted too. No wonder I laugh when people talk about ‘normality’. It’s like (Groucho?) Marx laughing when someone talked about bourgeois morality? It’s a lock, it’s seriously funny.