Featured Image: Euro Final Team Lists
The women’s game has taught us: always concentrate on the thing you do: the task. They won it for everyone 2-0 but then in this world yes the dividend goes to the real share holders…. a shared society where everyone can reach their highest potential. Let’s start regular local coverage of sport in the neighbourhoods of Nottinghamshire.
Authentic, real, diverse connection, network and..they’ve enfranchised us in their playing: they’ve given us back the right to vote for what we aspire to. Let’s read the stories.
What’s the future? The future is to…realise what this means for local democracy, the missing link between the local, the regional and national. We need to support parliament to make it reflect and represent more people, more of the time, make it relevant to the histories, stories and innate talent in the neighbourhoods of the UK.
14-20th November is UK Parliament Week –how to get involved
In 2022 and beyond let’s repair the cruelty of intergenerational privilege that dispossesses others to succeed routinely pulling up the ladder once people have got what they want for them and theirs. Let’s move beyond three monthly employment agency culls of staff and yearly landlord rent massive buy to let rises and evictions to a recognition of the impact this has had on the economic, mental, physical health of everyone. You hurt one of us you hurt us all. People need and want to have a social purpose and meaning, live work and grow across a long, healthy, lifespan.
Get a conversation party going. Profile people, all kinds of people, get people talking across society and soon it’ll be normal.
Everyone from the most privileged to the least privileged live in a country that has a working political system but it’s on a default spin around the needs and aspirations of the few, not the many. We need to extend its reach out to the neighbourhoods and then back to Westminster. We need to see the people from the neighbourhoods of the UK reflected in art, prints and design on the walls and corridors of the newly refurbished houses of Parliament: Westminster needs our rejuvenation and protection as much as we need it to protect our history and aspiration. The neighbourhoods of the UK deserve the same attention to detail as the prints brought back from holiday:
I think we need to know each other much better: our organisations, institutions have grown up to be big, bad, bland and toxic but leaving those jobs, as professional people have done, en masse since the pandemic to become consultants isn’t any kind of answer, it just compounds inequality and arm’s length thinking which was never based on granular data and reciprocities.
We need equitable and just organisations as pillars of the economy: we need to acknowledge and thank the people who came before us and make it ok to come from a working class white or black background, to be a woman, gay and trans: keep on digging for the diversity around us that’s made us great.
Let’s have some detail in our everyday environment that acknowledges us and the things that we feel are important: inside workplaces art, print from the local community, outside beautiful streets, pavements, shop signs that reflect the people who live here.
Women’s football is the beginning of a new era. The way everyone knew about each stage, the way the twenty six days of the tournament has been the beginning and middle of every conversation. Everyone wanted them to succeed: do and learn the tricks of each game by game event. The euro rejuvenated the post covid stadia malaise: 87,192 people watched the final. We need to follow that back into the communities of Nottingham with enthusiasm and write about the activity and the aspiration locally.
Over the last thirty years journalism has become PR -and then we’re shocked at institutional scandals around the organisations and institutions that aren’t properly scrutinised. News organisations are now revenue platforms so there’s a real need to tell, represent people’s issues, stories, aspirations, problems in creative and constructive ways that can also move democracy forward.
When you think about the emotion around the crowd as Ian Wright commentating on BBC 1 said you feel “it’s a massive occasion” but it’s massive because it’s grown organically. As a contest it has been stage managed but what the stage managers have realised is that they were moved, they felt something: this tournament wasn’t in any way just form it was in every way full of content. All the world’s a stage but we need to realise that there are so many people with something to say, to contribute: it’s time for the establishment stage managers to step back and let people grow. In local media we need to be supporting that incredible range of feeling and emotion.
It’s a precious community from a precious community.
Watching organisations and institutions open the doors to women means so much more than Sarina Wiegman with 100 caps and formidable managerial and coaching expertise, it’s not just these excellent players: it’s about keeping the doors open all ways to everyone, everywhere. We will all benefit in ways we can only dream of. Society has led the change and our footballers are giving us all permission to be the ambassadors for enfranchisement, a new citizenship in Britain. Local media could be doing this: but it’s not equipped to do it.
Paradoxically, it’s because of the uninterrupted flow to the international that we see a return to a new idea of the local IN the national and international. The women’s first move is to repay the fans, the little children, the parents who are believers: bring sport back to the streets of the UK: remember that across the world children love sport: so…what now Britain…?.
Change.
Change the supply chains that exploit young players, move away from the ruthless racist, sexist, history...
It’s time gentlemen: and to paraphrase Kate Moss …nothing tastes like acknowledged diversity: it’s the nectar of regeneration, peace and prosperity that women and commonwealth countries really could have had in UK neighbourhoods after the second world war. We all realise that now and we are shocked and ashamed at the waste of talent, life and time. More than seventy years of propaganda: a propaganda from an old establishment that was terrified of the vote, of working people, of the end of empire.
Above: 1945 Edition of Richard Lambert’s 1938 book Propaganda published by Thomas Nelson
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