The power of a hymn: YNWA

kwibuku
'remember' in Kinyarwandan

At 8am on Sunday 06^th June, I joined over 100 members of the Rwandan Overseas Liverpool Supporters Club (OLSC Rwanda) to set out on a pilgrimage to mark 28 years of the 1994 Rwandan genocide of the Tutsi people, where nearly 1 million Tutsis were murdered over just 100 days.

There was joyous singing, chanting, boozing, football (obviously), and reflection, anger, anguish and sorrow, bound up in an act of collective remembrance and solidarity, and all through a mutual support of an 130 year old English football club based over 6500km to the north north-west. 

 What followed over the next 12 hours was one of the most extraordinary days of my life.

Photo: Cedric Ujeneza

PART 1: Kwibuku

We were headed to the Nyange Parish in Ngororero District, 100km west of Kigali, high up in the stunning forested hills of the Western Sector of Rwanda. It was in Nyange Parish that saw perhaps one of the most extreme events of the genocide.

Over 100 of us, all donned in LFC shirts, flags and scarfs from over the years, piled into several buses at Iwacu +250, the Kigali bar that the Rwandan Reds have adopted and renamed the Anfield Road End/Kigali Branch. And almost immediately the singing started; a glorious combination of tradition tribal songs in Kinyarwandan, the local Rwandan language, that soared between the buses, and an outing of the modern-day LFC hymnbook: Virgil van Dyke, Mo Salah the Egyptian King, Andy Robbo, Allez Allez Allez (Bob Paisley and Bill Shankly, The fields of Anfield Road, We are loyal supporters, And we come from Kigali), and of course, You’ll Never Walk Alone.

It wouldn’t be the last time we’d sing the latter today.  

Our buses weaved their way up the mountain passes, rocking and rolling like the buses I used to get with my dad to the football when I was a kid. The beer was already flowing (10am!), everyone was smiling and singing, and after the driver revealed himself to be a Man United fan was enduring a constant friendly barrage. But the contrast between the solemnity of our destination and the joyousness of my new friends was, to someone used to the western expression of sorrow and remembrance as a private, insular undertaking, jarring. My neighbour on the bus, Claude Romeo, explained: ‘We want to be happy and talk about Liverpool FC and football and sing our songs. We will never forget why we are here, but we talk about Liverpool FC because to talk about what happened is too awful.’

Photo: Cedric Ujeneza

I experienced this quite alien dichotomy time and again after we arrived at the Nyange Genocide Memorial when, waiting to enter, the group, as one, struck up LFC songs – ‘We love you Liverpool, we do!’ I stood to one side, curious about this odd dynamic and also deeply uncomfortable about singing football songs at a place of massacre and remembrance.

Inside the Memorial we listened to a survivor of the massacre tell the story of what happened on the site we were standing on, and how she escaped the slaughter, one of the very few Tutsis who did.

While we were listening to her harrowing testimony, spoken in Kinyarwandan, a chap from the group, a man I'd never met before, strolled over to me and, unprompted, asked if I spoke English, and so began quietly translating. Albert, an English teacher in Kigali, in a low voice, whispered into my ear: 'She is saying that on April 11, during the genocide, the local mayor convened a security meeting of the area’s chiefs, which included a Catholic priest called Father Athanase Seromba. The chiefs were given directives to bring all Tutsis hiding in the area to the Priest’s church to be safe. The Tutsi people came expecting…’ he struggled for the right word in English… ‘sanctuary? Yes, sanctuary in the church.’

Photo: Cedric Ujeneza

I glanced around at the faces in the crowd, each one lost in this small woman’s gentle testimony.

Albert continued in my ear: ‘But she says the Tutsis in the Church were attacked by the Hutu extremists who arrived, they had been invited by the mayor. So the thousands of Tutsis locked themselves into the church, hoping that the church and the Catholic clergy would save them.

‘But Father Seromba ordered the Hutus to drive a bulldozer into the church, collapsing the stone walls and ceiling onto the people inside.’

At this, several people in the crowd collapsed onto the hot ground, crying out in anguish and horror, unable to comprehend how humans could commit such atrocities, their bodies seemingly shutting down in the face of a truth impossible to accept. They were helped away by compassionate friends until their cries no longer drowned out the survivor’s story.

Albert continued when the guide did. ‘Those who survived the collapse were shot by militiamen when they tried to escape. The bodies were loaded onto trucks and dumped in the nearby pits.’

Most of the crowd had tears in their eyes now, gripping each other’s hands as this kindly woman finished her story about how she had escaped. For others it had become too much, and they quietly walked away from the group back towards the buses. I realised suddenly that all this – the murder, the genocide, the hatred – all this was still so fresh in the nation’s collective psyche, was woven into the DNA of the country, that the country of my wonderful new friends had, within living memory, collapsed into levels of unimaginable barbarism, and that this simply cannot but strike the deepest of scars into the heart of every single Rwandan. And I felt a fool for only just realising that .

We were then led down into the basement of the Memorial, to the 50 coffins of preserved victims, to the piles of clothes that the victims were wearing as they were being murdered, some of the weapons used for the massacre. In one of the glass cabinets lay a few piles of dirty, misshapen coins. Albert, his voice breaking, whispered ‘This is money paid by some of the Tutsis to ensure their quick death.’

As we made our way back up, many of the group were physically supporting each other away from the basement as their strength deserted them.

(I later looked up what became of Father Seromba. He fled Rwanda after the genocide, and Catholic monks in Italy helped him change his name and find work in a town by Florence. Eight years later he gave himself up to the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda, and was found guilty of charges of genocide, complicity in genocide, conspiracy to commit genocide and extermination as a crime against humanity. He was eventually given a life sentence, and will die in Akpro-Missérété prison in Benin.)

Photo: Cedric Ujeneza

Back into the bright sunlight, OLSC Rwanda officials laid wreaths at the monument to the mass grave.

I asked Albert if it was fair to assume that people in our group might have had relatives who had died here. In a trembling voice he told me his family was from this area, and three of his uncles perished in the church. When we were later chatting about our families, he told me that he has two children. He used to have five, but lost the other three to the genocide.

After a massive hug with this stranger I had only met an hour ago, we silently filed back onto the buses with the others.

PART 2: Imfashanyo

Photo: Cedric Ujeneza

Perhaps a kilometre from the Memorial, along a dirt track, the buses pulled up again. Several survivors of genocide still lived in this little village. One was Aloys Rwamasirabo (right), who continues to tell his story at the Memorial, and who acts as a spokesperson for the other survivors in the area. He was 18 at the time. He says that he was immediately suspicious of the mayor’s call for all Tutsis to go to the church, but he wasn’t able to stop his wife and family in time from going. Instead, he fled and hid in the hills surrounding Nyange. He says that the murderers promised to spare his wife’s life if she gave him up, but she didn’t know where he was, and he could do nothing as his wife and 5 children were murdered in the church. After the genocide, he was part of the crew that transported the bodies to be buried, including those of his wife and children.

We also listened to the story of Adrian (right), one of our number from Kigali. Adrian described how a national government radio station urged Rwandan Hutus daily to get to ‘work’, the work being to kill Tutsi neighbours and friends. On his elderly parents’ orders he left his home and travelled to some remote part of Rwanda, and stayed hidden. His parents were murdered not long after he left.

These testimonies were, are, devastating, but it’s absolutely crucial that they continue to be told so people like my new Red friends, mostly in their 20s and early 30s and were either not born or were young children in 1994, can listen and bear witness. After the testimonies, the Rwandan Reds, as one, stood up and began singing to the survivors. Singing You’ll Never Walk Alone. It was singularly the most affecting, heart-breaking moment; that hoary old Carousel musical number, refashioned by Gerry & the Pacemakers to become a Liverpool FC stadium anthem, a song that had taken on new life in 1989 when the club, fans and the city of Liverpool struggled together in the appalling aftermath of the Hillsborough devastation, had become, in the voices of over 100 Rwandan LFC fans, once again a form of solidarity, of collective sorrow and support, of a determination that what they heard and saw today must never happen again, will never happen again, on their watch.

I will never sing You’ll Never Walk Alone again without remembering that moment or these people.

Cows bought & donated by OLSC Rwanda

Every May OLSC Rwanda does this, the only football club-based supporters group in Rwanda to do so. It’s not just an act of remembrance, but also one of moral and physical support. The club fundraise to buy and donate dairy cows to genocide survivors who live in poverty in remote, rural villages. A cow can give someone who has nothing a valuable and sustained income from sales of milk, manure and husbandry, and as a regenerative commodity can theoretically generate income for the rest of their life. Also, to own cattle in rural Rwandan communities places the owner further up the community hierarchy, such is the prestige of ownership.

Photo: Cedric Ujeneza

Each cow costs some $4-500 to buy and have transported to where it’s needed. The Rwandan Reds donated four cows today to four men today (right), men who looked both grateful and bemused by the whole spectacle: 100 young Kigali folk, dressed as one in the blood red of Liverpool FC, singing strange songs and giving them cows.

You can donate to the Rwandan Reds cattle fundraiser here.

 And then it was back onto the buses, and an hour drive to the splendidly-named Splendid Hotel for a buffet of curried chicken, spinach, chips and rice. And more booze. After eating, and after long discussions about Mane leaving, possible replacements, Trent at rightback vs in the midfield, the glory of Robbie Fowler, we moved to the pool area and hijacked the evening of the hotel guests enjoying a quiet late-afternoon swim, and of the poor band of a singer with an acoustic and his pianist accompaniment. 

The dancing and singing again felt therapeutic, like they/we were dancing away the memories of the day, together one last time in a united front of love, friendship and song.

Me and Albert listening to the survivor's story

As the light faded, the pianist eventually relented, pulled up Gerry on his phone, wedged his microphone up against the speaker, and turned up the volume. And for the final time of the day, before dragging our weary bodies back onto the bus for the final journey back to Kigali and to our individual, atomised lives, we sang our hymn together.

---

You can read how the day unrolled on my Twitter story

Me and Romeo

The hiiiiills are alive with the sound of me wheezing

The first thing you notice are the hills. Landing at midnight at Kigali International Airport you fly in over the pinpricks of lights spread across the rolling hillsides, deep valleys and hilltop towns, reflecting the pockets of immense suburban sprawl growing out from the bright, illuminated centre of Kigali.

I landed at 1am Rwandan time (midnight UK time) after a 13 hour flight from Manchester, via Istanbul (no, not Constantinople). I had a lovely chat with the passport/VISA control chap at the airport who, after reading my affiliation letter from the University of Rwanda, seemed genuinely pleased to welcome me to his ‘beautiful country’. Then, still in the airport, I queued up to show my UK Ready to Fly COVID certificate, and, additionally, to pay $60 for an in-country regulation LFT, the results of which were recorded on my Rwandan Biomedical Centre’s visitor health certificate. The Rwandan government are rightly taking absolutely no chances with us contaminated foreigners.

 The first morning, then, I was advised by my new landlord to head to the Union Trade Centre (UTC), a shopping complex in the centre of town, from which I can get done a lot of the bureaucracy necessary when you arrive to stay for a while in a new country: a Rwandan SIM, exchange pounds into Rwandan Francs, buy some electricity for my new apartment, and at the same time get some food in for dinner and tea. Now, Google Maps told me the UTC was a mere 3.3 km away, a distance which in the UK wouldn’t even cause a raising of the eyebrow to walk.  

So, naturally, excited and enthusiastic to soak in the sights, sounds and smells of my new East African home for the summer, off I set on foot. In the heat. On major roads congested with exhaust fumes. Up the long, steep hill into town. By the time I got there an hour later, my sight was blinded by sweat in the early morning sun, the only sound I’d heard was the honking of horns of vehicles playing dodgems on the roads, and the smell of gasoline had long annihilated anything else the immense Kigali inner-city wildlife has to offer. I had a long sit down. I understood then why taxis and motocycles (taxi motorbikes) are so prevalent here – it is just foolhardy to attempt any kind of commute by foot. 

People look at you funny.

Still, at some point the steep roads, congested streets and dirt tracks needed to be attacked if I’m going to keep up my fitness in preparation for the International Kigali Peace Marathon I rather optimistically  signed up to, held on 29^th May, just weeks after arriving (just the half marathon, though. I’m not a lunatic). 

Before I arrived here I joined the Kigali Hash Harriers running group on Facebook, which it turns out is a bunch of global immigrants and Rwandans who meet every Saturday to bowl out together on a cross-country (VERY country) trail run, through swamps, crop fields, bush, rivers, mud and even, it turns out, over infrastructure (see video). It was on my first meeting with the Kigali Hash Harriers that I met my lovely new running partner-in-crime Berni, from the UK High Commission, though unlike me who just wheezed around a 10k every so often in the UK, she is an actual fit marathon runner, so I just do my best to keep up.

Now, a Hash is where someone goes before you and marks out a trail with little piles of shredded newspaper at every junction, suggesting the correct way to run, after which us runners then follow the course as best we can. So it's a bit like a cross between an Easter Egg hunt, a sight-seeing trip, and a gruelling 10k slog. Then afterwards we all collapse into some cold, cold beers.

It’s almost impossible to run longer than 100 metres around here without encountering a hill of some sort, so I’ve staked out a 10k training course that rises and falls like the temperature of an average spring day in Britain. This is mine and Berni's attempt at acclimatising to running in the thin air at 1500m above sea level, up and down the steep Kigali slopes, for the marathon . The 21.01km of the Kigali half is going to be twice as long, and with as twice as many hills, but, right now, 10k is really as much as I can manage!

Rwanda is known as the Land of a Thousand Hills. It feels like I run up half of them every time I step out of my front door.

Give a Rwandan a cow...

Here’s something wonderful that came out of devastation that all Reds can help with.

 On the 5^th June 2022 the Rwandan OLSC (Overseas LFC Supporters Clubs) will formally remember the victims of the Tutsi genocide. In just 100 days between April and July 1994, approximately 800,000 people were murdered across Rwanda in a shocking genocide intended to exterminate the Tutsi ethnicity. 

On 5^th June, the Rwandan Reds will gather at Nyange Genocide Memorial site. As part of the ceremony, the Rwandan OLSC will also donate cows to the survivors and victims’ families.

Why cows? Cows are a valuable commodity to poor rural people in Rwanda. For some reason, Rwandans love their milk. Like, REALLY love their milk. The country has a network of milk bars, one in most villages, that people just stop in on their way to work or to meet friends. So anyone with a milk-producing cow will have a regular income over the cow’s milk-producing lifetime. And cows can be reproduced to make sure their owners’ income never runs out, and a cow to the market can also fetch a good price for the family. Owning cattle also reflects a position of good standing in their community, so a cow really can benefit a family enormously.

Here's a few good newspaper articles on what I'm wanging on about.

Each cow costs the Rwandan OLSC between £300 - £350, so do please give what you can towards the campaign. Whatever you can afford will make the world of difference.

 You can donate any amount of money at

Account name:
OLSC Rwanda Foundation
Kicukiro
Kigali
Central province
Rwanda
Postcode: 0

Bank account number: 4490385676  

Bank name:
KCB Bank Rwanda Plc
18 KN 4 Ave
Kigali
Rwanda

Bank swift code: KCBLRWRW
Bank code: KCBL
Pay code: RW
Code emplacement@ RW
Agency code: 161

Or, alternative, if that all feels a little complicated, give me a shout and you can donate via me, and I can just hand the OLSC Treasurer the money directly.

Kigali - first fortnight

 I’ve been in Kigali for a fortnight now, suffering in the heat and avoiding the mozzies, so I think it’s high time to write things down so I don’t get lost down the memory hole in the ravages of time.

When I thought I was coming to Rwanda, originally scheduled for May 2020 before the world closed down, I had contacted various networks, not necessarily for academia but just so I would know some local people there who I could meet for a coffee and could tell me the lay of the land. Informal fixers, if you will.

My first stop was, of course, the Rwandan branch of the Overseas Liverpool FC Supporters Club, or the Rwandan Reds as they’re known. After all, I was going to need somewhere to watch the end of the potentially historic 2021/22 season – League Cup already won, FA Cup, League title and European Cup all there to be claimed.

Once contact was made, I decided to chance my hand with the Rwandan Green Party. When you’re a Green, you’re part of a global family – the Global Greens, in fact. So I just contacted the info@ address on their website, and the next day got an email back from Frank Habineza, founder, President and current MP in the Rwandan parliament. Which was unexpected. He has a mighty and terrible story to tell, which I'll post about later.

I was also in touch with Germaine Hirwa, an academic a fellow member of the Environmental Peacebuilding Association. Germaine has been brilliant in helping me negotiate the bureaucratic maze that foreign academics need to negotiate in order to conduct research here.

 It’s hot here, as you’d expect, but not excessively. Even though it’s an equatorial country, Kigali is 1.5km above sea level. Which keeps the temperature relatively cool all summer (mid 20s), but also makes exercise really hard! Plus, we’re at the end of the rainy season heading into summer, but occasionally the heavens still open and a 30 minute downpour erupts.

I’ll do separate posts on each, but here’s a brief overview of the nonsense I’ve been up to so far: so far I’ve been for dinner with the President, Vie Pres and Treasurer of the Democratic Rwandan Green Party, am fully installed with the Rwandan reds at the Iwacu +250 bar, nicknamed the Anfield Road/Kigali Branch, been out running up and down the Kigali hills (much to the general bemusement of the locals, seeing a sweaty, red-faced, blue-eyed white bloke charging around the neighbourhood!) and took part in the Kigali 5k Night Run, and affiliated myself with the University of Rwanda, in the Centre of Excellence in Biodiversity and Resource Management.

 And, you know, done a bit of PhD research, too.

Cycling the UK for MS 2021

Support your local indie cyclist!

Over 15 days at the end of July/beginning of August I'll be cycling the length of the UK, from its northern most point in John O'Groats, Scotland, down to Lands' End at the tip of Cornwall.

Why?

Last Christmas my partner Zoe's mum Margaret died after suffering for 20 years with multiple sclerosis (MS), which is a truly horrible degenerative and sometimes terminal illness. In Margaret's case, her body shut down bit by bit over two decades until she was completely paralysed. Her body was paralysed, but her brain stayed as active as ever inside. I can't imagine much things worse. Margaret was totally paralysed apart from her eyes and mouth for the few years before she died. It's heartbreaking to watch someone you love die, slowly, over two decades.

To help families in the future not go through what our family has, in whatever tiny way, in a few months I'm going to cycle the length of the UK, all 1020 miles of it, climbing an astonishing 17.5km in all, raising money to combat MS with 'Bike the UK for MS'. Between 25 of us, we're targeting over £25,000 raised for MS research.

My personal target is to raise a minimum of £1 for every mile cycled in August (£1020).

This is a recent FB post from Zoe about her mum:

So please, whatever you can throw my way in these difficult times you would have my undying gratitude.

You can read more about the challenge, and donate, here.

This is personal. Thanks so much.

A Green class analysis

I’ve seen several tweets recently, by socialist activists on Twitter that I have a lot of time for, bemoan the fact that Labour are being outflanked on a variety of issues by the Green Party, despite the Greens having ‘no class analysis’. Or, as one tweet read, ‘The Greens think a class analysis has something to do with Ofsted’. Which is a funny line, but simply not true. The Greens absolutely do have a class analysis, but it’s different and more expansive that that of Labour and the traditional Left, and rarely theorised.

Ecological degradation, exploding inequality and massive deregulation are contributing globally to deepening poverty, increasing authoritarianism, and a warming planet hurtling towards a devastating collapse of eco-systems on which our entire economy, health, welfare and way of life depends. With these issues threatening planet-wide chaos, a class analysis simply cannot be confined within the narrow boundaries of industrial class relations.

A traditional class analysis is drawn from the inherent conflicts between classes produced by the capitalist economic system, as a result of one class extracting wealth from another. A green class analysis finds no disagreement with this. It simply expands the analysis to acknowledge that this same class also extracts resources for its own control and denies it to others, unless in exchange for ever-greater profit.

Climate Justice Action Network

At the heart of the malaise threatening our society, what is central to all things and all life, is relations of resource control. So a green analysis begins with the social forms of access and control over system-supporting resources, like fresh- and saltwater, arable land, crop genetics, fossil and renewable fuels, clean air, our labour, and even our daily non-work time, and asks who owns it, who controls it, who buys and sells it, and who is excluded from it. This broad framework does not begin and end with class, but instead includes how class, labour, ownership, control, processes and outcomes shape the social relations of resource production.

A green class analysis instead must begin with relations of resource use and control, or socio-ecological relations; that is, the entitlement by which individuals, households, communities and countries possess or gain access to resources within a global economy, a global economy expertly structured against the overwhelming majority of citizens. It starts at the intersection of power, politics, culture and political economy that reflect these socio-ecological relations.

This could be referred to as the Nature-Society dialectic. The dialectic that underpins a green class analysis questions how these forces impact working class, POC, LGBT and marginalised communities, and those least able to defend themselves: from individuals and households, to towns, countries, regions and, ultimately, in the case of climate change, globally: 

How can greater democracy improve the equity of resources distribution? 

How should work be valued? 

How can we prevent women and minority groups from being excluded from decision-making around resource access? 

Who wins and who loses from privatised commons? 

How is colonialism still shaping uneven access to resources and political power for non-western and non-white communities, in the UK and around the world? What can institutional reparations for the transatlantic slave trade, called for by the Green Party, look like? 

How can Green solidarity with the global feminist and LGBT movements, peace movement, indigenous movements translate into practical action in the UK?

How, ultimately, can we stop a capitalist economic system that can only exist by demolishing our planet, by exploiting our labour, and by oppressing marginalised groups?

How, and with what, can we replace it? 

These are some of the questions at the heart of green policy-making. The green analysis rests on a simple, fundamental belief: there is no environmental justice without social justice, without economic justice, or without racial justice and solidarity, here and around the world. While Labour was selling ‘Controls on immigration’ mugs in 2015, Greens were calling for new bank holiday to celebrate the contribution migrants make to the UK.

Greens see the environment as the crucible of class struggle and conflict over access to resources and resource control; air pollution, for example, kills 40,000 people a year in the UK, with people from poorer communities disproportionally affected. Decades before any other party, the Greens recognised and campaigned on clean air as a social justice issue; not just the need for clean air in general, but more importantly on the inherent injustice of wealthier people having access to the clean air working class people are deprived of.

Longstanding policies like the 4 day working week, universal basic income, the Green New Deal (which the UK Green Party helped create in 2009), a wealth tax, free university tuition, and free school meals are radical policies that have a number of consequences: improving the lives of millions of people and helping to decrease levels of the UK’s carbon emissions; allowing people a better work/life balance; ending the fear of hunger and homelessness; creating tens of thousands of well-paid jobs in the green sector; decreasing fuel poverty through free insulation schemes; ending child food poverty, ensuring that all schoolchildren receive at least one healthy, free meal a day (with the increase in attainment rates that follows). 

If the Green Party can be seen as the political expression of the environmental movement, then it should also be at the forefront of standing in solidarity with the union movement. Democratic industrial and trade union policies need to set out how a fully unionised, democratised industrial policy can re-orient the political economy away from one of simple capital accumulation, and aimed towards a democratically-controlled industrial and energy sector. This, if nothing else, is absolutely critical in tackling the climate crisis. 

Green policy to strengthen trade unions goes further than that of the Labour Party, because it also recognises that strong trade unions, woven into every industrial sector from boardroom to workplace, is critical for organised working class mobilisation. This will be crucial in ensuring that the already-locked-in effects of climate change are distributed equitably, as those effects will be suffered worse by those least able to escape or adapt.

Policies like some of these, made by Green Party members, with no influence from industrial or political lobbyists, also act as transitional demands on capitalism, calling for structural changes that place a strain on capitalism’s capacity to exploit people and nature, and agitates towards the goal of a more equal, democratic society.

The central difference between a traditional class analysis, that foregrounds employment and working conditions, and a green analysis, is that the latter expands and builds on industrial relations to include these relations of resource production.

The best example of this divergence could be found on the issue of fracking. Fracking is a dangerous and unnecessary energy process, the last vicious gasp of the dying fossil fuel industry. It devastates local eco-systems, rendering land infertile and water polluted, making tap water unsafe to drink and farms unable to grow crops. This has the knock-on effect of a loss of employment and business in the local area, which then sees population displacement as those who can afford to move away. 

Fracking sites are nearly always built in areas where poor or marginalised people live; those most unable to fight back. Greens see fracking not just as a pollution issue but, like access to clean air, an issue of social justice. While a traditional labour analysis saw Labour MPs in 2015, under pressure from unions whose members are drawn from the fracking industry, largely abstain on a vote to ban this incredibly polluting industry, Green politicians were being arrested at community-led anti-fracking demonstrations. 

A green analysis is based on four pillars of ecological action, social justice, grassroots democracy and nonviolence, reflected in a commitment to a just transition not only away from fossil fuels, but also from the UK’s arms and nuclear weapons industry. A just transition based on these four pillars focuses on providing ‘green-collar’ training and jobs in green energy and sustainable industries, which puts workers and livelihoods at the centre of the change.

The Earth is spiralling towards an ecological collapse, and with it an economic system on which a traditionally-defined analysis of class relations is constructed. But questioning the unequal power relations in the ownership of the planet’s resources, and therefore who controls not just the means of production but also the social relations of production – who suffers from resource control, and at whose hands - will be the central defining issue of the decades to come. 

There is still so much more to be done, and we will get a lot wrong along the way. But building these issues into a robust class analysis, and placing class issues at the heart of policy-making for an uncertain future, makes the green analysis, for now, the only one fit for the 21st Century.

Iranian pro-footballer refugee plays first game in UK for Lancaster reserve team

A team from the programme that I took to a
7 a-side competition. We won.

Since September 2019 I've run the football integration programme in Lancaster, organising (and refereeing) a weekly football game for refugees, asylum-seekers and native Lancastrians to come down and play together. 

Most people who come are folk from all corners of the world who just love to play, but back in January one lad turned up who really was in a different league. Turns out that, before fleeing Iran for his life, Aidin was a professional footballer who used to play in the Persian Premier League. He asked if I could help him play more regular football, and for a proper team, something more than just a once a week kickabout like our programme.

So, after a few enquiries, and after a massive COVID-related delay, Aidin finally made his debut for Galgate FC Reserves, in the West Lancashire League. I'm sure it's not quite Persian Premier League-level, but everyone starts somewhere. I was on the sidelines cheering him on like a goddamn proud father!

Here's the full story from the good people at the Lancaster Guardian.

https://www.lancasterguardian.co.uk/news/uk-news/iranian-pro-footballer-refugee-plays-first-game-uk-lancaster-reserve-team-3009372

Iranian pro-footballer refugee plays first game in UK for Lancaster reserve team

Aidin Hamouni, 22, who fled Iran and arrived in Lancaster last year said he was "very happy" after being brought on as a half time sub for Galgate's Reserve team against Coppull United Reserves.

By Nick Lakin

Tuesday, 20th October 2020, 2:48 pm

Galgate lost 4-1 at home, and striker Aidin didn't manage to score, but he said after the game that he was "very happy" and his long term goal was to play professional football in England.

Aidin arrived in Lancaster last year, and said he was forced to flee Iran because he converted to Christianity.

He played football professionally for Azar Kosar Tabriz in the Persian 3rd Division, after rising through the youth ranks of Machine Sazi in the Persian Pro League.

He has now been granted leave to remain in the UK, and started playing five-a-side football through an integration programme bringing asylum seekers, refugees and Lancastrians together for a game every Wednesday evening.

Matt Hanley, from Lancaster, who runs the sessions, said: "One day after a game, Aidin asked if, as a professional footballer in Iran, I could help find him a proper club to play for in his new hometown.

"Galgate FC has been really friendly and supportive since he started training with them.

"Like most immigrants and refugees I work with, Aidin is kind, humble and immensely grateful to Lancaster for welcoming him so warmly after fleeing persecution in his home country.

"I really hope he can establish himself in the Galgate first team soon, and after that, who knows."

Aidin said: "It was nice after a long time to be able to play my first match.

"It's been a year since I last played football. I'm very happy. I love football, it was my life and I now hope to be picked for the first team.

"Lancaster is a good city, good people, I have friends here.

"My dream is to be a big football player here in England."