It has, so far, been a long and dreary week. Too little sleep, too much coffee, too much joyless crawling over news sites and social media, looking for somewhere to cling. It feels a bit like those times when you jump into the sea off jagged rocks, then when you try to get out you realise that the surge and swell are rather heavy and you can’t grab hold to climb out again, and boy aren’t those barnacles sharp?
Only you didn’t jump, you were pushed, by a horrible, rumpled man with blond hair. And once you were in the water, he snuck off back to the hotel for a nice, dry game of cricket with Lady Diana’s brother.
Meanwhile, there you are, bobbing around, getting scratches, a mouthful of sea water here and there. Just as you are getting the odd foothold and beginning to think you may find your way out, here comes Maria Eagle with her boat hook to lever you back into the choppy seas. Arghh you think, get a damn grip! It can’t be that bad! And you make a heroic grappling motion that seems to offer some hope, but as you valiantly pull and heave yourself upwards, you hear the sound of someone apparently from Momentum making death threats and you sink back into the water thinking flipping hell, is it really worth it? What’s over this way? But the beach looks a long way off and there is Michael Gove paddling in his underpants so, let’s not go there.
Ok, the simile is wrung out now, but it is none the less a tragic predicament. It is almost brilliantly tragi-comic. A work of bombastic genius. Co-written by David “career-defining..er, I mean country-defining” Cameron. A man who has been given so much in life and gotten away with so much more that it makes my head spin. Last week we had the unedifying sight of this man, whose ferocious careerism led us into the referendum in the first place, lecturing Jeremy Corbyn on what was or wasn’t in the National Interest. It would be funny if it were’t so rottenly symptomatic of the mess we are in.
Meanwhile, Labour. What to think of that mess? That it is a disaster is clear. So, some try not to drown, others scratch around in the flotsam. We have the two main parties (no, let’s be honest, all the parties are at it one way or another) doing a dirty muddy shuffle in the thin and grimy layer of ‘opportunity’ that got washed in with this tsunami of disaster. Way to go politicians.
I believe (as it stands today – who knows after another week of news site crawling…) the only option is to take the Greens seriously for once (only kidding, they have some truly great policies) and bring all of the progressive parties, (the diverse elements of progressive parties too) together to campaign for a one-off government who will introduce proper proportional representation. The last week, if it has done nothing else has surely shown us how patched and poor our system of governance is. Having two parties be the only beneficiaries of the voting system means that they have to struggle to contain such different elements. Hence the current utterly un-helpful in-fighting. Labour, let the Blairites go! They can do some probably Christian Democrat thing. Parliament may be forced to accept the odd outsider, and, happily for the environment, the odd Green or three. And perhaps, in a Parliament that was more literally representative, the people who felt such anger that they voted for Brexit without kind of meaning it, wouldn’t feel so distant from the levers of democracy.
Anger is a mightily powerful, and usually horribly pointless force. Clearly, one of the main causes of the anger we have seen as evidenced by much of the comments out voters have made, is the brutalising, dehumanising force of austerity. Such a sensible word, such a humiliating process. It will be an age before the country becomes wealthy enough to undo what damage has been done to the economic security of so many, but perhaps a sense of a greater stake in the make-up of Parliament, the idea that a vote does actually matter and does actually count for something, will go a small way to healing the damage.
Lou Allison
