Just found out I won an essay prize for a piece entitled ‘In Defence of Apathy’. I slightly twisted the title to say that apathy (in the traditional sense of voter apathy) doesn’t matter; what really matters is that we’re becoming a more active society.
“Like a metaphorical Jim Royle, the character played by Ricky Tomlinson in ‘the Royle Family’, society is waking from a blue screen stupor, rubbing its eyes and sitting up in its armchair. My defence of apathy is that the only apathy we’re seeing is towards traditional institutions, otherwise known as the end of deference. But this doesn’t matter since it’s being accompanied by a rise in activism which is reaching such a level that it is about to precipitate a major positive change in society.”
Read on by downloading the pdf here.
A massive thankyou to ippr, the judging panel and particularly to James Cornford for awarding me the prize.
