02/04/2026
Hi everyone,
I'm another one of the lower the flags team. This is a picture of me taking down a flag. It was taken by raise the flags Shrewsbury plus after they pulled down my face covering and shoved a camera in my face. They claim to have 1,000,000% proof that it is Somebody else, so they've been going to his house and harassing him but they're 1,000,000% wrong. It's my family they should be harassing.
One of the things that the flag raisers say about people like me is that we're middle class, privileged, comfortable, serving the elites and don't understand how hard life is or what's going on in the country. I don't recognise this description of my life.
My Dad was a self-employed tradesman and after my parents split, my mum raised 5 kids in a 3 bedroom terrace, cleaning other people’s houses while we were at school. I liked reading, so I did ok at school and went to university to study literature. When I finished I worked 15 years in social care, looking after old and disabled people and then another 15 years as a self-employed tradesman like my Dad, but with a student debt to pay.
You might think going to university was a waste of time and money, but I learned something. You might think left-wing, communist professors taught me to hate Britain, but it just doesn't really work like that. None of my professors were particularly left wing and some were hard line Tories.
What they taught me was critical analysis - how to read a piece of information and think, who wrote it, why did they write it, what was the historical, social and political situation when they wrote it, who did they write it for, what did they want their reader to know, were they qualified to give that information, did they have a vested interest or another reason to want their reader to have that information, did they present that information in such a way is to make their reader have a certain opinion, how did they phrase it to put across that leading impression, what information did they include, what did they not include, who published their information and gave them the platform and who paid them for their work and why, how can I use my understanding of the what's, the when’s and the why's to work out the unvarnished truth.
I speak to a lot of working class people, many of them my own family members and I hear them say that, after a lifetime of listening to the BBC and believing what they were told, they've awakened and realised it's all propaganda. Now they trust GB news because it's not under government control so you can trust what they say.
It's more complicated than that. You can't take any information you're given on trust. GB news is no more trustworthy than the BBC, less so probably. You have to discern the truth and unfortunately most people have not been taught the skills to do that. That is deliberate and it's not their fault.
Once you've learned it, critical thinking is really easy but if you haven't learnt it, you're really easy to manipulate, because democracy is a real problem for the rich, powerful, entitled and influential. The policies that protect their wealth and power are bad for us, but we have many more votes than they do, so they have to convince most of us to vote against our own interests. If you were in their shoes how would you do that?
Why not buy a newspaper or a TV channel? Tell stories every day that convince people that the reason they are struggling to get by is, not the rich who have become twice as rich in the last five years, taking all the economic growth that our hard work has created, but other working class people who are from a different race, religion, nationality, sexuality, gender, educational background, political standpoint. It's called divide and conquer and it's the oldest trick in the book. They would be stupid if they did not do this and they're not stupid.
So what do I do as a working class person with critical thinking skills? I stand up for myself, my family and every other working class person, even the ones who hate me and want to hurt me, and I resist Fascism, the domination of the poor and the weak by the rich and the powerful.
