As mentioned at the start of this post – A way forward? 16.5.23 – everything we did with our sister project, Grassroots Alternatives, was under constant review. Well, it’s had its last review. The Grassroots Alternatives blog has now been archived. We’ll try to explain the reasons we’ve chosen to do this. We’ll also explain what’s gone and what’s staying on the now archived blog.

Trying to transfer the Grassroots Alternatives project from where we used to live in the south of Essex to the Avon region where we now reside was always going to be a bit of a gamble. This was particularly the case given that there’s a long established activist scene in the region, and it could be said that we were trying to gatecrash it with the transfer of Grassroots Alternatives.

We’ve given it nine months down here in the Avon region and we’ve not gained the traction we felt was needed to carry the Grassroots Alternatives project forwards. Life’s too short to spend time and energy on a project that isn’t going forwards. Nine months is long enough to try and get some traction – it’s time to call it quits and move on.

There has always been a close association between The Stirrer and Grassroots Alternatives. You don’t need us to tell you that we have a bit of a ‘reputation’ as a result of our maverick take on issues ranging from gender identity politics, lockdowns and Covid restrictions through to the ‘great reset’ and the conflict between Ukraine and Russia. A take that hasn’t exactly endeared us to a number of activists and groups in the region.

As you can imagine, if there are activists in the region who don’t like the take The Stirrer has on a range of issues, any public distribution of the Grassroots Alternatives paper always had the potential to be more fraught than we would like, particularly in Bristol. Life really is too short to have to put up with that.

As the Grassroots Alternatives blog is now an archive, there are a few changes. The major one is that The Directory has gone. This was the page where we had a list of a range of grassroots projects, resources and campaigns that we started to compile when we moved down here last summer. Given the close association of Grassroots Alternatives to The Stirrer, there’s probably a chance that some of the projects and groups we had listed would not be happy with our linking to them. To avoid any friction, we thought the best and fairest course of action was to completely delete The Directory.

A number of posts referring to The Directory and the paper have been deleted. We’re going to review the remaining posts and there’s a good chance some of them may be re-posted here on The Stirrer. The Memes and Posters pages will remain – these have proved to be quite popular! Some of these may be transferred here on the The Stirrer. As the Grassroots Alternatives blog is now an archive, the Posters and Leaflets pages will remain.

It has to be noted that what has happened with Grassroots Alternatives does not affect any of the practical, community focused projects we’re involved with. Work on those will carry on:)

The only way Grassroots Alternatives would have had a chance was to have really reined it in on this blog. Given the slog and aggro I’ve had to go through to get The Stirrer to where it is now, there was no chance of that ever happening. Particularly for a project that was struggling to gain traction. Now Grassroots Alternatives has been archived and there are no more papers to distribute, the upside is that any of the remaining constraints on The Stirrer have now gone:)