Transcriber: Célide Peña Reviewer: Ariana Bleau Lugo
Hello everyone.
Over the past year, the past eighteen months,
there's been a incredible flowering of political activity
in all sorts of places: online, on the streets,
sometimes even in tents.
And, you know, I wanted to pose the question here
of why is this happening?
And why so many people are now getting involved in politics
in its wider sense than they were before.
I can't give a comprehensive answer to this question,
but I can at least tell you what happened to me.
Now, my background is as conventional as you like.
I grew up in a very middle class family, in Dorset.
Books were important, we listened to a lot of radio --
I'm very aware that my experience growing up
is not the experience that everybody had during the '80s.
But I certainly came out of my childhood feeling --
and there's a picture to make you all slightly more sympathetic to me
than you would be otherwise. I hope that works.
I thought that was important, here you go --
I certainly came out of my childhood with a sense of security
and a sense that I lived in a country
where everything basically worked relatively well,
and everyone had a decent chance under the law,
and, if you worked hard,
that hard work could probably be rewarded,
as naive as that may sound.
But I don't think that's uncommon,
to grow up in this country
and have those kind of expectations.
So, from that point, I went to university
I more or less obeyed, followed the rules, more or less.
And partly because of that,
maybe because of the early exposure to literature, you've seen that,
I ended up working in publishing.
Ended up with a nice job,
working in a company with people I liked,
more books than I could ever possibly read,
international travel.
You know, I was doing relatively well.
So in a certain sense,
Naomi, what is it that you have to complain about, really?
And I would love to come to you and say
that what changed things for me was
as a result of a detailed economic examination
of the state we are in
and, you know, in concern for
the people who were younger than me
were having a tougher time than I was.
And although I was aware of all those things
that's not really what did it.
What changed things for me
was something very, very specific.
It was what was happening to a young Welsh-American soldier,
in military detention in the States.
And Bradley Manning who, two years after his arrest,
is still awaiting trial in the States.
You know, he's accused of releasing
diplomatic and military information to Wikileaks.
You probably already know this.
At that point, he was detained
in a very tough regimen of solitary confinement,
which made it seem very much like
he was being punished before coming to trial.
And this is something that UN special repertoire on torture
would agree with me on, incidentally.
And I can remember reading the article,
which alerted me that --
and I can remember still
the very profound impact it had on me,
the sort of visceral sense that this wasn't right.
And it shouldn't be allowed to stand.
And as well as that visceral sense,
I was also struck by the fact that,
because of his British connections,
his mother is Welsh,
Bradley spent a lot of his teenage years in Wales,
that the British government should be doing
a bit more to help him than it was at that time,
which was nothing.
And although I didn't realise it at the time,
or fully appreciated it at the time,
once you have a deep sense that something is wrong,
and an inkling of what you might do about it
then you have a campaign.
So I started doing something really straight down the line,
and middle of the road and conventional.
I started writing letters.
I wrote letters to MPs, I wrote letters
to other people I thought might be able to help.
And then I moved online,
and I started doing what I now know
are the basic elements of any online campaign.
I made my case online,
backed it up with evidence,
started talking to and convincing people
who were talking about similar kinds of things,
then talking to and convincing people
who were talking about less similar kinds of things,
but there was a connection, building up
a network and a broad coalition.
I started contacting people in the media
and people in politics
and other people with a public presence
who might be able to help.
And only once all of that was in place --
and it was a great network of
really varied and experienced people
who had much more expertise than me
and knew a lot more of what was going on than me --
that we worked together and organised an event
on the ground, at the most politically opportune moment.
We succeeded in bringing
the British dimension of Bradley's case
to the front pages of national newspapers.
And with the help of Ann Clwyd,
we also took into Parliament,
and challenged the Foreign Office directly,
at which point they were forced to do something about it.
And I would like to think that bringing
this aspect of Bradley's case
to the floor was helpful.
And it came in a context of a lot of activism happening,
not just in the UK,
also in the States and accross Europe.
And at the end of April last year,
Bradley was moved to improved conditions.
His pretrial process is still going on, incidentally.
And it's something that deserves more attention
than it usually gets.
But what I took from this experience was --
actually I was having a very profound realization:
that you can have an impact
on a political story which is taking place
on the widest, biggest stage you can imagine, really,
with very, very limited resources.
I did most of what I did
with a Wordpress blog and a Twitter account,
both of which are free.
At a certain point in the process
it became useful to have a phone,
but I never needed an office.
And if I looked at what was happening
elsewhere, at this time last year,
I can see that realisation taking hold
in a much broader way,
with lots of different people.
Which brings us neatly on to Occupy Wall Street.
And even though the precursors of Occupy are—
you know, you can look back
and you can see it and it's kind of obvious,
there are online activists in the States, making it
a difficult transition to doing things in the real world.
And, of course, this amazing thing
that happens in Spain. We have hundreds
of thousands of people out on the streets.
For some reason, it's the presence of people
saying, "We are the 99 percent",
and putting down tents in the heart
of New York's financial district,
that really seems to change things.
And it releases a lot of energy.
And at that point something happened in New York.
It's almost inevitable.
There's a feeling of inevitability
that something's going to happen in London.
I find out about the London plans
in the way as most people do.
I stumbled across one of the five different
Facebook pages, which were going:
"Hey, let's do something in London",
and a couple emails later
I'm part of a group of people sitting around the table
thinking, "OK, how can we make this happen?"
And, you know, we had no idea,
we thought that something was going to happen.
We had no idea how.
We had no idea that we were going to end up
outside Saint Paul's cathedral for five months.
For one thing, you are aiming to occupy outside the Stock Exchange.
And I'm not gonna say that everything that happened
during that time was perfect,
but I think there're definite parts of it that--
interesting, significant and show us how
the political engagement is changing,
and how people's engagement with politics
is going to change, going forward.
And the first thing I'd like to point out
is that it all happened incredibly quickly.
The preparatory period to the 15th of October
only took a couple of weeks.
And as I said, there was a real momentum
that drove us forward during this time.
But even when the occupation started,
on that amazingly sunny Saturday,
within 72 hours,
the whole basic infrastructure
of a small village was in place:
shelter, food, sanitation, legal support, Internet.
It was all there.
And none of this had to be consciously directed.
I think we'd made provision for a generator
to turn up for day two if we managed to stay overnight.
But everything else just happened.
And it happened because everybody had a sense
they were working towards the same thing,
a common idea of what we were doing.
And so you didn't need a hierarchy to tell you:
"Do this, do that, do that".
And when you have that sense of solidarity,
everyone is working towards the same thing,
horizontal organization is incredibly efficient.
I'm not sure we would've been able to do what we did,
had everyone tried, had we tried to direct it.
So that's that.
The other thing that really stands out for me about Occupy
is that people started organizing,
as I say, around a common idea.
And that idea of --I'm watching my time run out --
that idea of the 99 percent.
And this feeds into the needing to use
social media to do this kind of thing,
both for the speed and also simple ideas
travel very quickly on online media.
But there's another dimension to this,
which I think is worth thinking about.
And it's that Occupy never asked
that everybody had all the answers.
It merely asked that you understood
that certain questions were important.
Occupy Wall Street in one of the statements
put this very well:
"If you identify with the aims of this movement, then it is yours."
You didn't have to sign up to a programme to join Occupy.
You merely had to understand that "We are the 99 percent"
is something I identify with, I identify strongly.
And I may not understand necessarily
why I want to be there on that Saturday and join you,
but I think it's important I'm going to do that.
So it's in the nature of broad based movements like Occupy
that you bring in people who, like me,
a short time before had been an accidental activist
or a first time activist.
And is that limiting,
lowering the barriers to participation,
and not being programmatic about what people should do,
enabling people to come and work it out for themselves,
which I think, gives us a route forward.
Now one of the hazards of being involved with
something like Occupy is you occasionally get people
assuming you have, accusing you of having
some kind of ulterior motive.
And at this point, I'll be straight with you:
I do have an agenda.
And what I would really like is
for ordinary people to understand
the power that they wield,
and maybe don't appreciate.
Because we can all,
specially given the resources
now at our disposal, which are
more accessible and cheaper than ever before,
make an impact, make an impact on the world.
You make your case and back it up,
and talk to people and broadcast what you think,
and make the right links.
I've called this talk "How I became an accidental activist",
but I think that, ultimately, we want
to break down this barrier between activism
and just being a citizen.
In the same way we can see now it's a mistake
leaving politics up to the politicians.
I think it would also be an error to leave activism
or political activity outside Parliament,
outside places like this,
to people who do it all the time.
It's really a responsibility of all of us
to stand up and do something.
Even if you don't have the answers,
raising the questions is incredibly important.
And I think only by doing that
can we really base the stands of our democracy.
Thank you very much.
(Applause)