I'm sure we all know what's happening across the water. For five weeks, "yellow vest" protests have gripped France as decades of austerity, tax rises and attacks on workers boil over into blockades, demonstrations and violence on the streets. The French police, protectors of the French ruling class, have responded as police always do - with beatings, gas and armored personnel carriers bearing the flag of everyone's favourite industrial-financial cartel, the European Union. Still, the French aren't a people to take this sort of thing lying down, and every week they've been back on the streets - angrier, more prepared, and more demanding.
Of course, no self-respecting protest movement goes uncopied, and, since the middle of November, movements trying to catch onto the yellow vests movement have popped up in Italy, Bulgaria, the Benelux, Germany, and even as far off as Jordan and Iraq.
And, now, famed local nonce-catcher Cheyenne O'Conner has put together a Facebook group to encourage us Beans to get our jaunes câsaques (Jérriais for "yellow jackets") on and get out on the streets! In a post from the 15th of December, she writes:
"Time to get off our arses and start doing something about the issues we have on our island.
We are going to pick 5 big issues to protest. We will need one person standing for each issue.
This can be any relevant issue on the island, Rental prices, wages, childcare and so on.
If where going to make this big we have to do it properly, we have to discuss the problems and make this massive."
Well, lar-di-da, people in Jersey standing up to the ruling class! Not often we see that, now is it?
Even if the involvement of local fascist Ciaran Gettens has got my alarm bells ringing (this time, my man's informing us of how "unwelcome" he feels if people speak Portuguese around him - you'd almost think he's a racist!), the poll O'Connor has set up to determine what the new movement's goals will be has turned up a few interesting results. Top, of course, is higher sentences for paedophiles - unsurprising on an island where paedos can get away with a couple of months in La Moye for plotting to groom a child - with some others being lower rents on social housing, a £10 an hour minimum wage, abolition of GST on essentials and a general legalisation of cannabis.
They're no revolutionaries, our jaunes câsaques, but I find this whole thing pretty interesting nonetheless. £10/hr, abolition of GST on essentials, lower rents - these are all things we've all been pushing on for ages, but no-one's yet organised into a cohesive movement. O'Connor's jaunes câsaques have the potential to bring together a big section of Jersey society which austerity and Parkerism have left badly pissed off. As I write, the group on Facebook has 500+ members, and growing, with a couple of half-decent left voices taking their forms in Jan McAllister (the woman behind this), "Phil Example-Card" AKA Phil Renouf (local libertarian socialist, direct democracy activist and architect of a bright idea from a few years back to establish a "Jersey Pirate Party" as a part of the international pirate politics movement) and the man, the myth, the legend, John McNichol, a Reform Jersey candidate from May's election and a committed socialist and anti-imperialist.
I'll definitely be keeping an eye on this.
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