Bradford MayDay 2011

In Bradford May Day also marks the Birthday of the 1in12 club, a locally run self-organised space, which has been active for 30 years. The Mayday celebrations were arranged, in an organisational sprint lasting only a few weeks, by volunteers from the 1in12 club, Raise The Roof (a staging and facilities enterprise which grew out of Bradford Festival), Bradford Playhouse, Bradford People’s Coalition Against The Cuts, and a range of interested individuals. 

More coverage: photos [1] and coverage last years May Day in Bradford [2].

Click on a thumbnail for a slideshow view

In a testament to the powers of goodwill, positive thinking and insane optimism, dozens of folk gathered early on Sunday morning to erect two stages, a solar powered sound-system, a maypole, numerous flags, some market stalls which had been sweet-talked out of the council, and an outpost of the 1in12 Bar, bedecked in anarchist flags and supplying local vegan hand-pulled ales and bottles of their own 30th anniversary “Revolting Ale”. Other stall-holders represented various local campaigns and interest groups, and hungry festival-goers a had choice between local curry, pizzas hot from the oven, and some bizzarro rhubarb cakes in the bar area.

Entertainment on the stages came from a range of local talent, meanwhile around the site maypole dancing sessions were intermingled with radical medics offering to carry punters to the first aid tent in their adapted ambulo-wheelbarrows, whereupon the customers would be relieved of their credit card details, in a macabre theatrical foreshadowing of the impending privatisation of the NHS.

Meanwhile, the giant Monopoly game could not be deployed due to the prevailing wind which, at times, was enough to blow chairs over. This was a shame as it was easy to forget that we were just a thin fence away from The Hole, that massive piece of Art Concret designed to remind us all of the follies of the build-and-rent property bubble psychosis. Someone in a top-hat chasing a steam-ship around the desirable property locations of Bradford and district would have added to the arts spectacle of that whole contradiction. Festivities one side, rubble strewn wasteland on the other, 18mm of decorated plywood in between.

Across town, the Bradford Puddle (know to its handful of admirers as the “mirror pool”) is mid-construction. Appropriately, the plans to have a march around the Hole and The Puddle in a morose reflection on vanity-public-planning-syndrome were, themselves, called off half way through. Instead the traditional march between Infirmary Fields and the centre of Bradford took place, to ensure that the political dimension of Mayday was not lost amongst the jollity.

Numbers on the march were impacted as so many hands were needed to make the event in the “Urban Garden” function. But the infrastructure-monkeys contributed in their own way to the politics of the thing, not just by a physical display of how things could be in a society based on co-operation, consent, mutual-aid and respect, but also by providing the stage space and “situation” for some interesting speeches and announcements.

At one point someone from the local UK Uncut group announced an “event” was about to occur in town, and invited the festivals attendees to join in.

Later, Zana Kurdistani gave an impassioned account of how 50 million Kurdish people are divided between five nation states to which they feel no affinity, and within which they suffer exploitation and oppression. And, he went on, no one knows about this continuing injustice due to the failings of the mainstream media to report on these matters.

Staying on the heavy stuff, Ben Mussanzi from “Centre Resolution Conflicts – Bradford” spoke about the Minerals Wars in the Democratic Republic of Congo, memorably holding up a mobile phone at one point, sayng “don’t keep buying a new one of these every year!”. He spoke of the impact of the wars on civilians, the killings and the rapes, and spoke about the work their organisation is now doing in conjunction with Bradford Rape Crisis.

Off the stage, but on a similar theme of post-colonial fall-out, attendees were remembering that 28th April this year marked the 30th anniversary of the death of Bobby Sands, first of the 10 H-block political prisoners to die in that campaign www.indymedia.ie/article/99072

And, back at the sound-desk, the solar PA guy was explaining lengthily about the parallels between human exploitation (as a labour resource, with the basis of the campaign for an 8-hour day being, in effect, a call for sustainable and respectful use of this resource, against the desires of the property-owning class to just use it up and damn the consequences) and the need to find ways to have events like Bradford Mayday without consuming thoughtlessly and wastefully the finite (and depleting) fuel resources which allow for the comparatively easy lives a some of us enjoy in this hemisphere.

Let’s raise a glass of Revolting Ale to Mayday 2012

Contact email: imc-northern@lists.indymedia.org