Some combination of stupidity and steel hard Bolshevism yesterday compelled me to spend five hours travelling for a meeting whose useful business took about ninety minutes. Compared to the Ho Chi Minh trail and Guevara’s time in Bolivia the nuisance of a couple of people telling their callers that they were on the train is small beer.
The cabal which I attended normally meets every couple of months in London and is preparing a pamphlet for later this year and a national conference for next spring. When it meets in London fifteen to twenty people normally attend. As sure as the Earth turns someone always says “having these meetings in London isn’t fair for people who don’t live here.” This despite the fact that upwards of eighty percent of the people in the room live in the city.
At an earlier meeting the decision was taken to have yesterday’s in a major English city with excellent transport links to the rest of the country. What was the impact on attendance? Did dozens of fresh and eager new faces walk into the room saying “thanks for having this in a large urban centre roughly in the middle of England”? Hell no! Six people turned up, four of them from London, one from a nearby town and another who is so inured to travelling south that he’d rather have travelled the extra distance for a bigger meeting. Not one person from the major conurbation in which we met attended.
The lesson here is obvious. The next time some whining libertarian who never agrees to take away a task suggests having a meeting in a location which guarantees dramatically reducing the number of participants say “no”. Don’t even bother trying to explain that for even modest national campaigns it makes more sense to organise in the capital; that no bugger will turn up to a meeting in Dudley or Penzance; that the development of British capitalism has made London the biggest town with the largest number of political activists. Just say “no, that’s a bloody stupid idea that has never worked any time it’s been tried.”
Here’s a great song which makes fine use of the kazoo by a band which took its name from a place where radical meetings are less rare than useful suggestions from whining libertarians.
Liam redux 
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