On Saturday 10 May, while merrymakers, quite reasonably, headed off to the Spalding Flower Parade for an afternoon of fun in the sun; our party members joined Spalding Palestine Solidarity Campaign (PSC) in holding a silent vigil to remind their fellow townspeople of the ongoing suffering of the people of Palestine.
Sadly, we were not made welcome. Most people actively ignored us or were downright hostile. A handful of motorists beeped or wave in support, which gave us a smattering of hope.
The majority of drivers held onto their steering wheels with grim determination, eyes straight ahead, stiffly and actively ignoring the vigil.
A few drivers, filled with animosity, shouted expletives and hammered their car horns to draw our attention to their vulgar hand gestures.
A minority beeped to show their support. While there was little foot traffic, the majority were amiable.
One rushed past, head down desperate to avoid eye contact. Notably, a family of mum, kids, dad and gran. Granny demanded we take our flags down and go home. Her anger was palpable.
We talked about Palestinian children being starved before our very eyes, to which the response was: “My kids aren’t starving,” as they gathered speed and practically ran past us.
No one could call the people of Lincolnshire radical. This is very much the middle-English heartland of such traditional British values as racism, imperial supremacy and conservatism.
It is notable that while support for Palestine is at an all-time high in Britain, where the solidarity movement is low, the BBC narrative still holds sway. Amongst this section of the population, the default assumptions are still that ‘we Brits’ identify with the Israeli genocide and see its victims as ‘terrorists’.
But just because workers have been spoon-fed throughout their lives on a thin gruel of imperial ‘culture’ that makes them self-identify as temporarily embarrassed billionaires, there is no reason to doubt that their real economic conditions are steadily transforming them into opponents of this system – and will continue to do so.
The local paper’s coverage of this small PSC solidarity action highlighted once again the essential role played by establishment media in keeping workers distracted, divided and demobilised. One had only to look at the linked ‘most read’ articles to see what our rulers would prefer us to be thinking about (football, money, local ‘characters’). (Pro-Palestine protest held in Spalding with police saying it passed off peacefully by Andrew Brookes, LincsOnline, 10 May 2025)
The headline on the above-mentioned report said it all: the police report was taken as the sole basis for the article’s standpoint and reporting. It was clear that the author had not attended the demonstration or attempted to find out anything about it other than reporting on ‘rumours’ that it may have been connected to a delay in the beginning of the flower show.
Having mentioned this rumour, the author went on to say that it was baseless, but it is clear that the point of the story was rather to reinforce the connection in readers’ minds. In fact, the sole point of the article was to underline the potential for ‘trouble’ and (horror of horrors) minor inconvenience that might arise from any protest action. Surely better to stay at home when your government is systematically massacring innocents abroad than to cause a 20-minute traffic disruption that could temporarily inconvenience a few hundred Brits?
This approach perfectly mirrored reporting of the national demonstrations against the Gaza genocide over the last year and a half. Many national newspapers dedicated live feeds to these events, but reading them would not give anyone a sense of what was actually happening there. Huge emphasis was put on what the police said, who they scuffled with (usually a handful of fringe right-wing thugs who seem to have turned up for no other purpose than to assist in this narrative manipulation) and what charges they made when arresting people (as opposed to what those arrested and charged were doing at the time – which usually turned out to have been absolutely nothing!)
The overall impression conveyed was not of hundreds of thousands of deeply concerned and righteously angered British workers regularly coming together from all over the country to demand an end to the British state’s horrific facilitation of the genocide in Palestine, but of a hotbed of radical islamists, race-baiting bigots and terrorist plotters.
All the same, our comrades will keep going back to Spalding with the PSC, because it’s these angry, hostile and indifferent workers we need to reach out to. We need to do everything in our power to help them learn to direct their anger towards our mutual enemy, the ruling class; to help them understand that they have much more in common with Palestinians under British and American bombs than with their ‘mate’ Nigel Farage.
Time can teach. But we must help working people draw the right conclusions.
