Serial activist Carrie Banner supports the Greens, Wikileaks and Corbyn
Most of her spare time now is spent planning a "Stop the City" march, which she will attend if she can get the day off
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Your support makes all the difference.'Carrie is an enthusiastic and likeable girl," ran the headmistress's comment on her pupil's valedictory school report from St Wedekind's, "and once she finds a focus for her enthusiasms, I have no doubt that she will be able to make a really valuable contribution to the society in which she is so desirous of playing a part." It was a prophetic remark. If Carrie's zeal was kept somewhat in abeyance during her time at university, it blossomed uncontrollably once she had escaped into the real world and acquired her first job as a local government officer in Lancashire.
By chance, her appointment coincided with a by-election in a nearby constituency where the Greens were making much of the running. Carrie liked the candidate, whose diminutive size and curiously intent expression were the image of her own, and threw herself headlong into the campaign. Alas, the seat was won at a canter by a Conservative keen on "cuts".
By this point, Wikileaks was in the newspapers, and here, Carrie thought, was a cause she could wholeheartedly support. She wore a badge with the slogan "I'm Wikileaking" and at one point even attended a demonstration outside the Ecuador embassy.Yet her energies were soon transferred again. It was not that Carrie believed any of the allegations against poor, saintly Julian. It was just that, as she put it, the Wikileaks initiative seemed "rather to have run out of steam".
Happily, the area in which she lived had recently been consumed by a fracking controversy. It was all very serious, and noisy, and a wonderful way to spend one's Saturday afternoons, even if one or two of her colleagues had a habit of scrawling graffiti on the "Frack Off" sticker plastered on the rear windscreen of her 2CV as it lay in the car park.
Just lately, most of Carrie's energies have been devoted to Jeremy Corbyn, whose campaign she supported from the moment she read an article about it in a newspaper and whom she was "certain" would win. On the other hand, the Labour Party can be just the tiniest bit tiresome, always ringing up and wanting her to go to meetings when they must know how busy she is. Happily, Zak, her new boyfriend, is an anti-capitalist, and most of her spare time now is spent planning a "Stop the City" march, which she will almost certainly attend if she can get the day off.
Illustration by Silje Eirin Aure
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