Hi Everyone!
I hope that you were able to celebrate the holidays within the health restrictions and, if you're receiving a UK State Pension, despite your unjustly frozen pensions.
I had an interesting conversation over the holiday period that inspired this email. I was talking to someone who was a part of a group that was campaigning to have Pete Evans' Facebook Page shut down. You may have seen reports of the success that they recently had with this, e.g. https://www.abc.net.au/news/2020-12-24/pete-evans-facebook-page-banned-over-coronavirus-posts/13012458
What impressed me was the amount of work that they put in over a long period, monitoring his posts, reporting the problematic ones to Facebook, and writing to Pete Evans' sponsors to let them know when he had written something that included some misinformation. Because they'd been doing this for a long time, this meant that when he finally posted something really bad, Facebook and the sponsors were primed to take action.
It seems to me that this is the sort of effort that we are going
to have to put in to get our pensions unfrozen. We need to keep
the pressure on, all the time, so that when an opportunity does
present itself, things will happen.
So is this something that you're prepared to do?
As I explained when I took over from James, due to my health problems I'm not able to put in a lot of effort campaigning. I can manage the administration of the group, and I've updated the web site https://www.britishpensions.org.au/ so that it is easy to add new pages if anyone wants to write something, but that is about as much as I can manage. So if you want change, it is going to be up to you. And it's not as though there are lots of us in this group. One of the advantages of moving to Google Groups is that I can now see the email addresses that are bouncing and there are about 300 of them. That means that there are only about 300 active email addresses that the group messages go to. So if you can do something, we need you!
Could you please have a think about any skills that you have that might be useful in getting our message out there. Things like
and anything else, including money, that might help us
communicate with people.
And think about any contacts that you have, both individuals and groups, that might be useful to us.
If you've got some ideas about things that we could do, think
about what skills you need to do it, and then let people know.
If you're not sure what you could do, have a look at this free Open University course on campaigning https://www.open.edu/openlearn/money-management/management/business-studies/campaigns-and-organisations/content-section-0?active-tab=description-tab I haven't done it, so I can't say that it's really good, but it says that it only takes 2 hours, so hopefully a few people here can do it and report back.
Once you've got through that, if you want to go deeper, there are
sites like
that have more resources.
If we want change we're going to have to work for it. So what
could you do in 2021?
Paul