In Conversation with Celeste Bell & Valerie Brown: Black Activism for Our Green & Pleasant Lands
‘A green economy can sustain growth, probably the only thing that can’
A cross generational talk with our guests Valerie Brown, who was interviewed in our book @EnglandOurEngland and has just ran for London Mayor in the last election for the Burning Pink Party whose mission to implement citizens assemblies and take power back to the people is a rallying call for activism, for the public to take back agency in their lives instead of handing it to the politicians. And Celeste Bell who is third generation migrant and has recently release a film about her mother, Poly Styrene of X- Ray Spexs . Poly’s belief in true liberation is portrayed so beautifully in the sublime film ‘I am a cliché’
https://play.google.com/store/movies/details?id=-80a0RWIDiU.P
London 1976 ; protests strikes dole queues rubbish piling up disaffected working class and then the black youth anger towards the previous generation’s passivism, racist graffiti . Rock against racism coming together against the Enoch Powel rivers of blood speech and the fear of mixed-race children.
Britain made great strides for female emancipation with the Suffragettes movement of the early 20th Century but radical feminist representation from people like Poly Styrene are not to be underestimated. Celeste talks about Polys influential aesthetic and art-work.
Val as a young girl loneliness and finding belonging in the fringes as she didn’t quite fit the black Caribbean stereotype. Black punks/ska mixed groups provide sanctuary for the misfits.
Polys plastics obsession and how forward thinking the Hari Krishna’s were.
Did the protest movements of today achieve anything? How Citizens assemblies can control corporate greenwashing.
The importance of young people’s involvement now but social media has their attention span ’switch off social media and switch on to the very crisis we are in’.
The importance of the generational legacy laid by the pioneer migrants as told in the book ‘England Our England’. Click link to purchase your copy.
(Music notes: Intro Lord Kitchener ‘London Is The Place For Me’ and Outro music Poly Styrene ‘Oh Bondage! Up Your’s!’)
