You’ve seen all the reasons why you shouldn’t, but some of you are still voting for the Conservatives on Thursday aren’t you?
I mean you’re not proudly displaying it on your Facebook profile banner like the Labour, Green or even the Brexit Party voters, partly because you’re a bit worried about the backlash, but even more worried about being asked to explain your reasons.
Because you don’t really know why you are voting for them. You know you really hate the certain Leader of another party for reasons that have already been long debunked, but you repeat them like catchphrases. You barely know the names of the leaders of the other parties.
You do know you “want Brexit done” as they’ve convinced you that’s the most important issue right now. More important than hungry kids and you struggling to pay your bills despite working 60 hours a week. They’ve told you that Brexit is the reason these haven’t been addressed even though they’ve been in power 9 years and the referendum wasn’t till 2016.
You’re voting for them because you believe them when they say the reason they haven’t delivered Brexit it is someone else’s fault even though they have had 3 Prime Ministers and 3 years to do it.
You refuse to believe the NHS will be sold under post Brexit Tories. Even though you were recently given documents and video evidence of them saying they would. Because you accepted Johnson’s “it’s a lie, we’re not” and never even bothered to ask for an explanation of what the documents and videos were about, if not a move towards an American based insurance system.
Because even though he was proved to have stood in front of the fucking Queen of England and lied to her face, you still don’t think he will lie to you.
You hate austerity and the stories about disabled people being forced to go to assessments. You think it’s awful people with mental health problems are waiting so long to get help, often dying before they ever do. You’re disgusted by child abuse going undetected because of fractured police and social services. It breaks your heart seeing homeless veterans on the streets. Not so much the homeless junkies though, because you haven’t figured out yet that they usually ARE the adult survivors of undetected child abuse and traumatised veterans. I mean they are literally the same people. But you’ll get there.
I’ve been speaking to some of you. You all have a few things in common. You’re not bad people, but you are drenched in the politics of despair. You’re not voting Conservative because you are passionate about their policies, or because they give you hope. I see this in people voting Labour, Green, Lib Dem and yes, even the Brexit Party.
You’re voting them because you think the absolute drudgery around you is “just the way things are” and that life is hard and we just have to accept it.
None of you make any connection between government policies and the hardships you are currently facing.
One of you works in social care and emphatically told me it was “Conservatives all the way” because “Corbyn is a terrorist sympathiser”. An hour later you were sobbing at your desk because of your ridiculous, crippling case load and lack of support and resources. You are becoming more unwell because of your anxiety over work and still can’t see you are about to vote for the people responsible for that. You are one of the women who have been fucked over for your pension, yet you are about to vote for your own children to be working until they are at least 75 and have some vague belief that the reason for this is the bankers crash and 9/11..
But don’t worry. If you get your way and Johnson remains in number 10, and all the things that you told us was just ‘scaremongering’ start to come true, we won’t gloat. What on earth would there be to gloat about? We won’t tell you this is your fault, because it isn’t, mostly. Politicians spend millions upon millions to manipulate us into thinking our voting decisions were made of our own free will and the Conservatives have had more money than all of them to do this, because a lot of people with more wealth than we could ever imagine are shitting themselves over receiving a fair tax bill right now.
But we will fight. We will defend you and the kids living in squalor, the disabled and vulnerable people dying because of austerity. We will fight for the minorities who will face more racist attacks, including the Jewish people who you pretend to care about right now because it gives you a ‘virtuous’ reason to oppose Labour until you will promptly forget about them and the very real threat of antisemitism once the election is over. We’ll still fight for the homeless growing in terrifying numbers and for our NHS as we start to see the slow introduction of charges, which you’ll be fine with by then, because they will have convinced you it’s for the best.
We will fight for your family’s future, quite simply because you won’t and we always have. It’s not that you don’t care and certainly not that you don’t love them enough, but you still- even after all that- won’t be capable of seeing that the people sat in Parliament have a direct effect on your life and will destroy your family’s future. That will be the fault of someone or something else, far away that we can’t name or see.
You’ll take the piss out of us and fling “do gooder” around like that it is supposed to be an insult when we fight these things. Because it doesn’t matter what you think of us. We know that every civil liberty we have was fought for by ordinary people and we will do it for ours and for yours.
Because we all deserve so much better than this and we will fiercely dream it into existence.
“punk food bandita”
