Unity

Last Saturday, Stand Up to Racism and XR shared a space to demonstrate - amicably but separately. Today both, along with the Living Wage Campaign, the Tenants Union, the Community Education Group, the Windrush Group, trades unions, the Oxford Kurdish Association, Rhodes Must Fall, the Palestine Solidarity Campaign and several other groups all joined forces under an 'Oxford Unity' banner to march from East to central Oxford - with a short stop with speeches in the High Street for Rhodes to look down on us all. How much more powerful it is to recognise that environmental destruction, racism, worker exploitation, the defence of colonialism, and housing and educational inequity are all the tail of one coin with the wrong head on the other side.

I'm trying to think of other times in history when a fragmented opposition to the elite has started to see that rather than each other, there is a much greater enemy, which the self-serving, deceitful, money grabbing coup that calls itself our government most certainly is. Uniting feels powerful and I hope it's not just that today's sun has gone to my head.

I dipped out of the march for a short while with two others when we saw a group of police officers around a man on the ground who'd been arrested and handcuffed. I took some photos to make myself seen and the police told me that he wasn't part of our demonstration. 'No,' I said, 'but he is a fellow human being'. We left when the police van arrived to take him away.

Extra, Sheikh Ramzy, Imam in Oxford. We have often occupied the same space and it still pleases me that he shares a homophone of a name with the 100th Archbishop of Canterbury, Archbishop Ramsey. Unity, eh!