10 days ago
Wednesday 4. December 2019 06:13 AM
121 😍 2 ✍️
And if travel is like love, it is, in the end, mostly because it’s a heightened state of awareness, in which we are mindful, receptive, undimmed by familiarity and ready to be transformed. That is why the best trips, like the best love af
![In protest at Britain’s undemocratic electoral system and our inequitable three-part bicameral institutions of parliament, I have – much to the frustration of friends and family - only ever spoiled my ballot paper in general elections in the UK. Today I feel somewhat aggrieved that I wasn’t even able to do that.Instead, on this day, I recall the affront of an unelected member of the UK parliament addressing a room full of Yemenis in 2011 telling them they had the greatest democracy in the Arab world, hours after I’d witnessed British-trained riot police attacking peaceful demonstrators protesting against a president who had been in office for 33 years. The international community would, months later after hundreds of protesters had been killed, go on to facilitate the one-man election (yes, that’s just one name on the ballot paper) of a new president for a fixed, two-year term. That was in 2012. He remains the internationally recognised and laughably the ‘legitimate’ president of Yemen.British ‘democracy’ is an illusion. Our system is designed to thwart any attempt at true governance by the people. That we have the gall to laud this supposedly representative form of administration around the world is an insult both to ourselves and to every human being who has ever stepped up in defiance of authoritarian rule. I know many Yemeni subverters who with hindsight and given current events see their actions of 2011 as delusional or naïve. Despite the knowledge of their experience, I long for the day when we can muster at least half of their courage and political awareness to terminate the social contract we have been bound by for far too long.[The picture is from Sana’a, Yemen in 2011. The writing on the protester’s neck reads ‘ حريه ’ meaning ‘freedom’ - in a nod to the film Braveheart that centres around William Wallace and the Scots fight for independence against the English some 700 years ago. The 1990s film was surprisingly popular with and often cited by young Yemeni revolutionaries.]#ge2019 #vivelarévolution #vivelarevolution #vivalarevolución #freedom #حريه #albagubràth #albagubrath #scotlandforever #revolution #yemen #saoirse #braveheart #scotland #اليمن](https://scontent-cdg2-1.cdninstagram.com/v/t51.2885-15/e35/s320x320/72271764_105481514196314_208127129301612699_n.jpg?_nc_ht=scontent-cdg2-1.cdninstagram.com&_nc_cat=102&oh=dc98ba5e10124fa6e4e9f249e5c2a25d&oe=5E9253F0)
