Who Cares About Local Campaigns?

Well I do! As you may have noticed I like having people making useful comments on pieces appearing on this blog. But I do get concerned about lack of commenting too. Particularly as I notice that people often don’t comment on local reports I put up of activities in Bangor. I think this is a really big shame.

Why? You may ask. Well I think a lot can be learnt from local campaigns when campaigning on similar issues elsewhere. Local reports of events can also be a good indicator of the support for various ideas in different places.

Now I suppose the question is whether the lack of comments represents people not just reading a report (and often the ones I post are versions of articles published in The Socialist) or whether they read it but don’t think it is worth commenting?

Now as you may have realised, I am particularly interested in student politics (as in involving actual students in political campaigning – rather than engaging purely in shouting matches with the NUS bureaucracy). As such I am usually quite delighted when I can find reports of the activities of student political societies on the internet, it helps me to generalise from the situation here in Bangor to the rest of the country.

For example, I would say the willingness of students to get involved with campaigning is definitely greater than it was last year when I was a student in Huddersfield. Now this could be down to me just being in a different place, but from reading reports from elsewhere it seems to be the case everywhere on a general level. Of course the events of last week show that students at Manchester Uni and Bangor Uni have a big gap between them in terms of level of political awareness, preparedness to campaign and level of organisation.

So here’s a plea to other bloggers – more reports of your own local political activity – and if I haven’t been commenting on stuff in the past – then I’ll try and do it more often from now on.