Team Blue, Red or Orange? Who cares!
Should you go Team Blue, Team Red, or Team Orange? Does it particularly matter? The same effluent will flow out the pipe of government.
One wonders what it might take for the current Government to get a well-deserved spanking. It seems that the Conservatives have done badly, but not as badly as they either expected or deserved, in the recent local elections.
Admittedly, on the excitement scales, local elections rank low; somewhere around train-spotting and the study of the great crested newt. Electing people who should probably be nowhere near the levers of power is never an appealing prospect, particularly when the choice between them is so meaningless.
Should you go Team Blue, Team Red, or Team Orange? Does it particularly matter? The same effluent will flow out the pipe of government.
We have a Conservative Party which has no instinct to conserve. Instead, it does its best to demean and destroy. Its advocating for stronger borders remains as convincing as the Zimbabwean space programme. Its energy policy stridently undermines self-sufficiency and burdens us with ruinous costs.
It is committed to the deity of Our NHS (one of history’s greatest false idols) for whom no sacrifice is too great. Abandoning the idea of self-reliance, the party has become the most fierce advocate of the bloated, sclerotic state. In the culture wars it is pathetic, occasionally being brave to define what a woman is, but by-and-large letting the rot creep unrelenting throughout the nation’s institutions. The list goes on.
So basically, they are the same as the other two main, equally dispiriting, parties. With a political elite all drawn from the same mediocre crowd (anyone who spent more than a few minutes at a university political society will know the type to a T), none of this is surprising.
This most people already know. The problem – and it is not an inconsiderable one – is that there is no alternative. Not in the sense that there is no feasible alternative direction that could be taken (you will find no smug, complacent liberal teleology here) but rather that there is simply nobody else to vote for.
Such is the great stitch-up of modern politics. While contender parties can come briefly to the fore, occasionally blasting whichever think-alike, do-alike clique sits atop the pyramid, they soon melt away back into irrelevance. Vote for who you want: you’ll get the same chumps anyway.
I am pessimistic that anything meaningful will change any time soon. People, it seems, are terrible at seeing into the future. It’s the same reason why the nation’s waistline is so huge: we gorge ourselves today, not thinking too much about the massive coronary tomorrow. Our politics is not much different: sweet treats and cakes today, to hell with the consequences.
Things will inevitably change, but what state they will be in when they do, I cannot say. It will take some crisis or other for anything other than just playing forever with the margins. Yet, much needless damage and avoidable catastrophe will take place until then. As such, the only recommendation is to look after oneself, and to find meaning and comfort in the things around you, and fight the good fight when you can. Most of all, have patience. After all, when the world has gone mad, but they think you are the clown, there is not much else to do but wait.
If there is one good piece of news from the elections, it is that the SDP won their first council seat in Leeds for thirty-four years. I have, for a long time, been unsure which horse to back in the small-party games. Increasingly, the SDP seems like the strongest contender, with a convincing party platform and an image seemingly untainted by some of small-party politics’ more eccentric individuals. Still, in a world gone mad, the road ahead will not be an easy one.
