Nobody Knows Anything
It may be only for this
weekend, it may be an anomaly in the polling, it may not take account of the
fearsome intelligence of local campaigning in key marginals as practised by the
dark artists of the Tory Party Machine…but what was universally assumed to be a
Dead Cert Tory Landslide in the General Election is looking like being a bit of
a nail-biter. It looks like the Tory
party have pulled off the trick, for the third time, (Better Together in
Indyref 14, Remain in EUref16), of turning an unassailable lead into a narrow
squeak…and that the hung parliament that everyone thought was going to happen
in 2015 actually might happen this time instead.
Now, bearing in mind what
happened in 2014, when one poll result set the Hearts of Oak aflutter...and
mobilised the unionists, this may just be a blip, but even if that is all it is,
it is beginning to look like “Received Political Wisdom” is fish and chip
paper. If nothing else, if Theresa May ends up delivering a majority that will
make every vote on Brexit into a constitutional crisis, leave alone a SMALLER
majority than now, which leaves the SNP anywhere near a “balance of power”
situation (a few by-elections permitting) then every single assumption that the
political classes have made about the prospect of Tory hegemony in the UK for
the foreseeable future is, like Boris Johnson and Michael Gove caught in the
headlights of their unexpected and unwanted Brexit victory last year, left
mumbling pale faced and traumatised: “Christ on a bike! That wasn’t supposed to happen!”
Brexit suddenly isn’t the
settled will of anyone anymore…the party in government can’t rely on an
electoral boost from a terrorist outrage, the Labour Party might find
themselves winning a on a Right Wing Issue like Police numbers with a Left Wing
(ish) manifesto. And here in Scotland,
we might well find that the historic “SNP Tsunami” of two years ago leaves us
with a Thatcher era number of Tory MPs with the SNP having directly replaced
Labour, virtually seat for seat, as a somewhat despised “establishment” party
of devolution…the “feeble fifty” de nos jours.
Honest to God, I’ve no
idea what’s happening. I’m thinking of
trading in the Crystal Ball for a Ouija Board.
Maybe part of it is to do
with history having a sense of humour: that the democratising advent of social
media, like the advent of printing five hundred years ago, is making the world both
more promising and more scary at the same time. Maybe Twitter and Facebook and
the demon algorithms aren’t so much (or not only) making politics less polite
and more open, but are also sealing it in a bubble of specific leisure
activity…that this hermetic form of what has always been “show business for
ugly people” is now entirely divorced, in the public mind, from the “real
world.”
Certainly, from the
Socialists in France, the Democrats in the USA and the SPD in Germany to the
Labour party in Scotland (to name only the most recent casualties) it is the
parties of Social Democracy that have suffered the most from the sundering of
the two parts of all of their names. The
Social, with all the work and housing and shopping, is over HERE…and the
Democracy, with all the politics and opinions and shit, is WAY over there on
Facebook…and paradoxically, it is the comparatively de –classed cohorts of North
London Radical Labour who find themselves, in England, wholly against
expectation, to be doing much better, at this moment, than I’m sure they ever
thought was possible.
(I don’t think John and
Jeremy had any expectation of EVER assuming the offices of state, any more the
afore-mentioned Boris and Michael saw themselves as the signatories of an ACTUAL
suicide pact for the British economy.)
People voted for Trump…and
Macron...and maybe will for Jeremy…and maybe even for Oor Nicola…not just
because they might have actually WANTED to be represented by a thuggish moron,
a slippery unknown, a retired geography teacher and a National Treasure
respectively…but because, what they hell, it’s just Facebook. Everything is unfixably crap, democracy is a
crock of shit, so we might as well be entertained…
This state of the public
zeitgeist, would be, of course, for fascists and populists, a consummation
devoutly to be wished…and if this is anything like what is going on, it
probably has something to do with the breakdown of the neo-Liberal
Globalisation project, and the consequent exposure of the moral vacuum at the
heart of it…just as Islamo-fascist terrorism does.
Global trends have local
consequences. One of them, on these
islands, has been the rise of nationalisms in Scotland and England, with what
optimists like Robin McAlpine have described as “Trade Unionism for the People”
on the one hand, and Never-Neverland pre-Suez Nostalgia on the other. Maybe everyone is voting for time machines,
either to fling us into a bright, imagined future or into the warm glow of the
imagined past. I still think of the
Glasgow Taxi Driver who told me voted to Leave the EU because he wanted to
restore Full Employment on the Clyde…”because we used to have that before we
joined.” I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry.
Maybe the present tense,
for young and old, is unbearable. Maybe there’s nothing new in this. Maybe this
discontent is a constant of our human condition. Maybe I should stop there before I get too
philosophical. Maybe, like William Goldman so wisely said about trying to
predict successful movies in Hollywood, “Nobody Knows Anything.” As a fully paid
up member of the Political Nerd Club I am probably entirely unqualified to
comment. All I know for certain about this election, this weekend anyway, is
that the way it’s shaping up is making me feel very excited and very, very old…all
at the same time.
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