Ugh. The Election as a Picked Scab, Democracy as a Gone Thing
That election was so grim. Terror attacks, rank manipulation of objectivity, kids lying helplessly on hospital floors; it sucked. The worst people that want to do the worst things are now in a position to do them in the worst way. We might have just seen the end of any meaningfully left wing, parliamentary opposition, let alone government for years. The whole thing is stupidly terrible, stupidly bad and in tall towers, grey, sad buildings, under cold, hospital lighting this morning, in job centres, under-funded prisons, council estates and in the unvoiced mayhem of immigration removal centres, the whole thing must be felt as something dark and squat in the corner; a bleakness, a heaviness.
It’s proof. It shows what the insidious, self-sustaining power of capital can do; it shows how appeals to neutrality will always legitimate and cede power to the right and that the liberal notions of free press, honest governance and voting are just bits of frayed cloth, furnishing an absence we call democracy. How is it that the majority of people support more funding of the NHS, yet we just voted in a party that legitimately, provably has been in talks with the US over drug prices, has presided over the longest waiting times in NHS history and whose plans to deal with this are literally, literally nonsense? Why are less than ten billionaires, advertising censors only interested in profit, and lame spies intent on furthering racist foreign policy goals allowed to demarcate the limits of free discourse in this country and create a political atmosphere in which an oppressive and violent status quo is rigorously defended as the only viable reality (and yes this includes The Guardian)? 88% of online ads by the conservative party were found to be demonstrably false, while 0% of labour ads were, but why is ‘General election 2019: Ads are 'indecent, dishonest and untruthful'’ the BBC’s headline and why is it shunted away to the technology section? Why is taking a position against nuking millions the one that needs to be defended in interview and not the other way round?
You will read a million think pieces, hear a million arching, self-satisfied takes from breakfast couches about how this was a ‘Brexit election,’ but the media are not outside the reality they report on, they help create it. What made it a ‘Brexit election,’ as if any election that involves millions of people voting for different reasons could be an ‘anything’ election, was because the Conservatives, with the slobbering and pathetic help of the media and those other guys called Liberal Democrats, made it that way by refusing to understand or meaningfully engage with Labour’s Brexit policy and repeatedly brexiting the discourse. Whether Labour’s policy was good or not became irrelevant, because it was always already bad and Brexit was always already, absurdly the thing. The particularities of an economic union came before the lives lost at Grenfell, or in Yemen to British bullets, or in an industrial park in Grays, Essex, because of the banal cruelty of Theresa May’s decision to install heat censors at the border. Having the tax on your 80k-a-year salary go up slightly became more important than ensuring free healthcare to those that need it, creating a greener future and scrapping the classist and ableist brutality of Universal Credit. The deliberate increase of the chances of death, the vain humiliation of the poor, the homeless, the overworked and crowded out, all of this for the sake of profit and property and the fact that the word ‘billionaire’ does not sound as unjustifiably ridiculous as it is.
The whole thing needs to go. It’s too much. What are we doing this for? The only reason for society is that, as a collective, our skills and time and resources and empathy, can ensure the survival of the individual, so why are we doing a thing that severely and unequally jeopardises that prospect? From first-past-the-post and the millions of voters entirely disenfranchised to our relationship to work, to the strange and inconsistent principles we have decided to organise ourselves around: nationalism, private rent, the freedoms which include being able to choose from twenty different toothpaste brands, but exclude the ability to protest and hold your exploitative employers to account, even as labour productivity and profits increase for them and real wages bottom out. Politics has abstracted itself from what its there for, only referring to itself now – whatever Boris Johnson says only tells you that he’s Boris Johnson and he’s saying a thing and look at his messy hair; Jeremy Corbyn becomes framed as a figure to like or dislike not someone who has put forward a set of policies to agree or disagree with. People become political utensils. You can literally write a book about Jews controlling the media now and the chief Rabbi will talk about the ‘poison of anti-Semitism’ infecting the other party (never mind the fact that the Rabbi is a wealthy man that stands to gain from a tory government and has a known history of just loving himself some Conservative PR thankyou very much, while many low income Jews will have everything to lose from this tory government, although James Cleverly will dog whistle that all Jews are rich and a monolith at you until you don't believe in them). You can have the publicly owned news corporation doctor videos on your behalf and uncritically repeat whatever you want. You can ignore climate change, you can lie, can fib, you can do all of this now. And you will still be Home Secretary.
But we know this. They know we know this. They don’t care because we don’t act on this. We just vote, then we go to work, then we’re tired and we moan and then we vote. We have to now understand that voting is one of the least politically effective acts available to us and has been for a while. A vote is so easily coerced, so easily misread into being a mandate for anything. A vote is nothing to all the efforts of UK capital. Its modern role is simply so politicians can appeal to a moral absolute, a Greek sovereignty which is beyond criticism and doubt. If they believed in the system they pay lip service to, they would not lie to, gaslight and supress the electorate. Our democracy is thin air in a ghost costume. When you stand alone in that polling booth, think about how unspecial it feels, how the pencil is just a pencil and the bit of paper with a load of names on are just names. You would think it feels powerful to drop it in the box – your democratic right – but it doesn’t. It’s just filing.
I’m not saying don’t vote. Do, do, do vote. But: when you next get the chance to in five years time and your choice is between Boris and some piece of white bread in a Labour rosette with a smile like moist cardboard and a grey face, what actually will you have done in those five years to prevent and mitigate what’s coming? Something should be the answer. General strikes, riots, boycotts, protests, re-politicisation of the workplace, the ward, the bus-stop, any messy thing that upsets the false veneer of rationality and order that we all uphold, that allows landlords to clad buildings in lighter fluid and still ask for half your income (hey, you don’t have to start dying everywhere, stupid), lets policemen be acquitted for actual, actual murder [CW] and forces you into working minimum wage on Christmas fucking Eve just to live (no wait, its surprisingly beneficial actually) – we actually cannot let the NHS go, we cannot let children grow up in poverty, refugees get deported and the homeless population rise. There is a place for any effort that stops those things happening, otherwise there is no point in doing this whole thing at all.
But importantly: care is now a political act. It sounds earnest and limp, but looking out for each other’s mental health, spending your free time helping your community, volunteering, donating your money, making sure that woman slumped on the street is okay, looking for resolutions to problems which do not involve the police, supporting your LGBTQI friends, your Muslim and black or minority ethnic friends, reaching out, smiling at service workers, making choices which are better for the environment, for the Global South and for the happiness and meaning in our day-to-day existence all just doubled in importance. Care is now the political act. It shouldn’t have to be, but it is. If we lose our NHS and our social security, if rent controls go, if unions go, care is all we will have. The whole thing is stupidly terrible, stupidly bad; it sucks wholly, but now more than ever we need to leave the half-shadows, the dancing shadows of the ballot box and smell the reek, the actual stench of this whole foetid thing. Be with each other.
Written by Tom Goodyer
A graduate from Bristol University, my interests include pointing at the camera every time and writing creative non-fiction (I know lol) with redundant colons when I'm not working for the man (the man is currently Simon Wolfson). Here's a super crazy fact about me: I've never seen a BAE Systems factory that I didn't hate to all hell!!