My long COVID prevents me from doing a lot. However, I’ve always wanted to feel useful and some limited improvement recently caused me to set up a Meetup group.
The group appears like it is a “sandbox for people in the Midlands”. It isn’t. I merely set the boundaries of the pre-Norman Kingdom of Mercia to ensure I understood what I’m talking about and to not try to run before I could walk: after all, the SNP stays in Scotland whilst the LibDems are heavily concentrated in the SouthWest.
https://www.meetup.com/mercia-politics-to-revive-midlands/ is the group. You must be a Meetup member to contribute but it has free membership option. If you have ideas come contribute.
The only rules are that this group is “an extension of my living room”: bigotry and “Mercia is for certain ethnicities” will get you an inst and permaban. No 2nd chances.
I am perfectly aware, with a LOT of my paternal side of the family hailing from East Midlands and areas going East to the coast, that funding for a large influx of people has been awful. I say influx because I’m just as annoyed at influx of “white Brits” from posh areas buying up land and property as I am at immigrants who don’t integrate. But government, whether local or central, are the main “baddies”: money for GPs, Hospitals, Schools, Social and Health Care Auxiliary Services, along with a whole host of services have been TERRIBLE. Thus people living there feel “left behind” and it breeds resentment. I aim to discuss POSITIVE solutions to this that don’t rely on the “simplistic dog whistle calls” used by Reform UK, The Conservative Party, and Increasingly, the Labour Government.
The YouTube intro to the issue is here
I’ll post more when it comes to future topics but this is just a flavour of “where I’m coming from”.
First session 5.30pm (British Summer Time; 4.30pm GMT) on 2nd July. You must be member of Meetup (minimal requirements) but if my experience of logging in to others’ Meetup groups is anything to go by, you CAN use use the MS Teams link (provided on the day) to log in without having a MS account.