I can never help but get excited like a child when I come back to Edinburgh. She was my first home, and she’s never once failed to make my stomach drop when I emerge from Waverley.
Once upon a time you’d have found me busking on the cobbles down at the Cowgate on a weekend or listening to The OK Social Club croon in the Royal Mile Tavern. If you know Edinburgh well enough, I definitely got fired from a bar you like.
Last weekend was a different sort of adventure, though.
A huge anti-poverty demonstration in Edinburgh
On Saturday 25 October, the city hosted several thousand passionate Scots from all over the country and beyond for what turned out to be one of the largest anti-poverty demonstrations in decades. The crowd was brought together by a metric shittonne of different organisations — from women’s rights groups and anti-racism campaigners all the way through to the Church of Scotland:
In the shadow of Arthur’s Seat, all of us desperately trying to avoid being blinded by the rare Scottish sun, the throng assembled.
By the time I landed at half nine in the morning, there were already hundreds of people milling around. Watching the steady stream filing down the hill, you could tell it was going to be a big one. What struck me most was how easily people from completely different worlds were getting along.
You know things are going in the right direction when socialists with blue hair can march next to firefighters. Maybe it’s that shared Scottish bond — that quiet frustration at being ruled by Westminster — but the unity on display was a real breath of fresh air:
Something interesting is happening in grassroots politics right now — a kind of changing of the guard — and it was impossible to miss it this weekend.
Younger and younger
Yes, the crowd was diverse, but as the march filed past, it was the young faces that stood out. Not just people in their twenties, but teenagers — bright-eyed, angry, hopeful. For many of us slightly older, we’ve realised that no amount of standing around listening to speeches is going to bring the change we need.
We can’t ask nicely anymore.
People have to demand the change they want to see and hold to account those who promise it — even if the only way to do that is with your body on the streets:
As the procession made its way through the city — up the Mile and round the corner — I’m laughing out loud to myself, thinking this is my job. I get to do this for a living. How fucking lucky can you get?
It’s hard not to get swept up in the electricity of it all. I almost feel sorry for the people standing at the side of the road, slightly flabbergasted — the Palestine flags, the shock, the horror. Such outpouring onto the streets. Why can’t you do this quietly, at home, where I don’t have to see it? Sometimes that makes me want to laugh; today it just makes me angry:
As if there’s some perfectly rational moral position you can twist yourself into, contorted in some way where you can’t see Gaza anymore. If ever you need to learn how not to give a fuck what other people think just go and stand in a group of people who think, controversially, that genocide is bad – give it five minutes and someone will come along and tell you you are wrong:
A photojournalist’s perspective on Edinburgh
I wasn’t really sure how to do this, to be honest.
Truth be told, I’m not a writer — just a camera guy who says good words sometimes.
If you want the nuts and bolts of the day, coming to me was a bad idea. But listening to Sai Shraddha Suresh Viswanathan, president of the Scottish NUS, speak on stage to the thousands who’d finally filtered into the Meadows, it wasn’t hard to see that this wasn’t about nuts and bolts anyway.
Politics now is visceral.
It’s something I’ve always thought — we on the left really struggle to tell a story without percentages and spitting out facts. And I know over 70% of asylum claims were approved after appeals, but calculators aren’t sexy:
You should be angry
For people my age this just isn’t academic. I’ve paid for 18% of the house I rent in less than two years – it’s not hard to get angry anymore. And in a world of apathy, it was honestly beautiful to see people standing in a field together – peaceful, happy, but aware and properly pissed off about it:
Later, while I was doing the rounds taking shots, I got chatting to a stilt juggler from Think Circus — a Leith-based charity that uses money from their circus shows to fund community events. Leith is a beautiful place, but it’s changed so much over the past twenty years.
We were reminiscing about the squats and artist digs that used to line Leith Walk and the people who used to live in them, pouring pints a few hours a week to pay the pittance it cost to have time to find out who they were. Where do those people live now? Maybe they’re still here, but instead of discovering they’re meant to paint murals on walls, they’re selling their lives in Tesco to pay someone else’s mortgage:
It’s a thought that’s upset me for a long time, to be honest but this weekend I realised those people still exist.
We’re going through changes
Maybe if they were twenty years older, they’d have been painting on walls or playing guitar on the cobbles, living cheap while they figured out who they were.
It’s sad they haven’t had that freedom but I’m happy for society that they’ve found themselves instead as the young people pushing this scene forward – vibrant, creative, and angry in all the right ways. It makes this slightly oldish hippy a little more hopeful for the future:
Thankyou Edinburgh; as always. It was beautiful.
Featured image and additional images via the Canary