Saturday, June 05, 2004

The leafletting goes on...

Some points I should have raised and forgot to in my previous:

One letterbox, one leaflet. A simple strategy for dealing with the issue of multiple occupancy. You may well know there are four flats behind that door, but its not really worth littering their floor with four copies of the leaflet, they'll all get binned together. You have to trust that at least one person will actually read your leaflet when it gets picked up - they might even leave it for others to see, or show it round. Of course, in civilised dwellings, there are multiple letterboxes, one for each tenant, sometimes external wall affixed boxes - much as our French and American cousins use to avoid the need for postie people to have to walk down the garden path.

It would be nice if the local council attached these external letterboxes to its flats. Whereas in previous years I could simply scale the landings of many of the local council places, now, for obvious reasons, they have numerical key access to get into the stair wells. Of course, shifty buggers lurking behind the corner of an ill-lit stair is an issue for tenants.

So is public space, though, and I don't really feel it right that to leaflet such places I'd need to buzz one flat and ask to be let in. This gives the individual I call upon the right to deny other tenants the opportunity of receiving information that may be of use to them in exercising their political choices. This is likely as they may well be narked with me for disturbing them, or may object to getting leaflets stuck through their door.

In many ways, such council blocks are the municipalised version of gated communities, people closing down the public space in order to defend themselves from the very real threats of the world around them. Obviously, I think that such a response is in the broader scale misconceived, as the breakdown of civil society entailed in such a seige mentality exacerbates the threats and dangers - creatiung isolation and estrangement from our fellows that breed the fear gated communities seek to flee.

Without people turning up to political meetings, with little opportunity for street corner agitation and open air meetings, without being able to reach people's homes, the only public political space left is broadcast media. Broadcast media which is wholly owned and heavilly controled, as anyone watching Big borther understands and cherishes.

Final thing, here is a link from streetmap to show whereabouts I'm plying my evil trade. It basically shows Clapham Town and Larkahll Wards of Lambeth. At the last council elections, I contested Clapham Town, and received Thirteen votes...