Where next for the opposition? It isn’t just Labour that need to get their shit in order; the Lib Dems got it horribly wrong as well (although, to be clear, it is especially Labour). But they have gone from being on the back foot to not having any feet; their ability to fight back in their current state is severely limited.

Something new is needed. Something more radical than I think either party is necessarily comfortable with considering. A politics that’s not just trying to adapt to the 21st century, but that is really of it. A move away from campaigns that use the tools of social media and big data and rapid change, but that instead take on the structure and mentality of that world from the ground up.

Here. There. Everywhere.

From broad observation, there are three stages of development, a kind of systemic evolutionary path. They apply to large, complex systems and I think there’s probably a deep, possibly profoundly important reason for that. I don’t know what that reason is, by the way. I just suspect it to be the case.

But that this pathway exists is, I think, undeniable. First, things start off locally. Banks, energy generation, administration, healthcare… all of them grow from an immediate, case-by-case response to a need or set of conditions.

Over time, these individual instances of whatever it is will be centralised. Power isn’t from a generator in the basement, but a massive plant providing for hundreds of thousands of people. Banks aren’t local, independent vaults with some basic services. Software isn’t delivered directly from your laptop or desktop, but from a server somewhere.

Finally, these two approaches reach a sort of synthesis that combines the best of both: decentralisation. International banking, smart grid technology, cloud IT services. These are all examples of such end states. They represent networked, resilient systems that act on the distributed intelligence of the whole, but independently provide for local requirements.

A feature of such a system is that they’re perfect for continuous improvement. What in the IT world often gets referred to as DevOps – the integration of development activities with operational day-to-day process. You can improve small parts of the overall system to see rapid, incremental improvements that don’t disturb the day-to-day functional capacity for its users. They’re adaptive, benefit from intelligence-sharing across all stakeholders, and deliver targeted quick-win change.

And this, I believe, is where our politics needs to start taking its inspiration from. Not only does it better match the structure of our modern world – as above, so below and all that- but it is also a paradigm shift that allows the opposition to offer something genuinely different. And, just as importantly, allows them to defend against many of the weapons of our current political model.

It starts by reattaching politics to the activity of life.

The Politics of the Many and the Few

Our political system is not part of most people’s everyday life. There are a select few who live it day in, day out. They (in theory at least) understand the nuances, are constantly up-to-date with what is happening, and spend most of their waking hours doing it. They are – tellingly – called politicians.

Then there’s everybody else. There are varying degrees of interest, but by and large it is something that peaks in the run-up to elections and then fades out to background chatter. Which, if you think about it, is mental. Because politics – specifically, democracy – is supposed to be the expressed will of the the masses, the manifestation of some bodged, bickering, society-wide consciousness. Why do we only do it every few years as some sort of ideological Harvest Festival?

But for so long as it exists as the lived experience of only The Few, it does a disservice to The Many. Their interests are not properly understood. They are engaged with the process only on occasion. And, as has been demonstrated with unsettling alacrity, it means they can be easily shaped and manipulated. Because, at base level, it is much easier to lie to people who aren’t in the know. Doubly so if you are in the know.

So, we need to erase this divide. But what could such a re-integration of politics into everyday life look like?

This is something probably more easily done from the opposition benches. This is because it’s important that this starts off as a dynamic, grassroots system; not things traditionally associated with the lumbering machinery of central government. To be clear, that’s not a partisan statement; a governing party has a far great range of pressing considerations to deal with than the opposition does.

Service as a Service

Firstly, it needs to be of our third-stage of system development: decentralised. I don’t mean regional offices all implementing and communicating a central set of policies. I mean a network of points of interaction between a party and the people.

To achieve this, those interactions need to be of interest and value to the people the party wishes to engage. Not overtly political, just serving the communities within which they take place. Use party funding to drive projects that help those in the area; these might be as critical (and depressing) as food banks, or as mundane but useful as skills and education networking groups.

All these things take place as not-for-profit activities. They don’t push an agenda. In fact, they do quite the opposite; they’re open forums for understanding and learning about the needs of the community. And in working with those communities to meet those needs and overcome the obstacles along the way, a sense of partnership and trust is built. A common language develops, based around shared hopes and fears, with touchpoints in group activities that bridge the party-people (few-many) divide.

This brings it into the lived reality of communities in a way which shows intent, rather than merely says it’s something that might happen should one party hand over a lot of power. How much harder is it to fool people with fake news, spin, manipulating social media and all the other tools of a contemporary campaign, if those people know first-hand the claims aren’t true? They trust you, have worked with you, and you have given them something without having asked for anything in return.

This helps head off rampant lying as such an effective tool, undermining the attack campaigns that have reshaped our political climate. If you’re a part of something, you’re less likely to buy bullshit attempts to discredit it. If you’ve already seen the benefits of it – and they are benefits you helped to shape – then you’ll know it works in your favour.

Joining the dots

So if party affiliation is something based on engagement all the time, not just something you think about at election time, it becomes about actions over words. And this in turn makes it about ideas rather than slogans, substance rather than style. You head off your opponents and force them to respond in kind. In that sense, it’s a win-win approach that over time should drive policy towards reality, not some futile attempt at the other way around. Everything triangulates around the people and their problems.

But another issue we’ve seen over the years is how ideology fails to keep up with ever-changing reality. This is another point where the ongoing engagement links into my earlier mention of DevOps – continuous incremental improvement and change. You can avoid the situation Corbynism fell foul of, where policy-wonks and echo chambers prevent you from seeing how out of touch you’ve really become.

By doing this in a way that adds value even when you aren’t in power, your party actually helps implement its program of change anyway. Rather than governments shaping society and direction only changing with ruling party, parties shape society and governments arise out of this.

Incremental changes of this kind mean hot topics can be addressed quickly and effectively, all as part of making your case and becoming better attuned to the people you seek to serve – and eventually hope will elect you to government.

This takes the best of modern concepts such as crowd-sourced funding, community projects, DevOps/Continuous Improvement and so forth. It builds them into something akin to the old socialist idea of perpetual revolution, but for the digital age. Only it’s the party that’s in perpetual revolution – evolving alongside the electorate – and the people who benefit. This is pretty much the polar opposite of how the idea has worked in practice when tried before; political evolution that helps change the social landscape, rather than social revolutions that change the political landscape.

Meanwhile, the system is adaptive and demand-led. It uses the same principles as economic markets, the only difference being that it deals in a form of social capital a layer of abstraction away from money. But, crucially, not completely detached from it; changes within one market will be reflected in the other. Market changes feed back as intelligence to the party, rather than the party trying to understand, predict, and respond to varied and rapidly changing needs on a proscriptive basis.

In this way, we see a return of the political franchise to the people who should have owned it all along. The Many and the Few are working together, always current and able to bring about quick wins that steadily build the entire cultural and economic project into something that consistently gets better in the areas it needs to.

If it can be done in a way that is consistent and nonpartisan, it can achieve the kind of servant leadership that has long escaped our political classes. What that will mean, I can only guess at. But bringing this back to how Labour and the Lib Dems change course after their recent disastrous showings, I think it has to start with electoral reform. Without that, this model can never properly make the transition from out amongst the many into the world of the few. But if we can overcome that hurdle, we in theory have connected up development (parliamentary party politics and the activity of governing) with operations (the day-to-day life of those being governed).

So, don’t write detailed manifestos promising what you think people will need. Don’t test slogans against focus groups. Don’t stand on a platform. Bring a blank book and be prepared to learn. Listen to the slogans the people already know and are emotionally invested in. Replace the platform with a bridge and be ready to cross it with whoever is willing to build it with you.

(Oh Shite)

As anyone who reads my self-indulgent rambles can probably guess, that was not the result I was hoping for. Never before have I seen such an eager rush to dogpile into the infamous handbasket just before it sets off. Nor when so many seemed well aware of its destination. But the truth is, there wasn’t really any result I was hoping for and this isn’t the result I was hoping for the least.

There was no way I was going to wake up (read: go to bed) happy with the result, because all potential outcomes were bad. Corbyn has been awful. The people around Corbyn have been even more awful. I hate Boris, but not even half as much as I hate the people in his cabinet or whispering into his ear. And the Lib Dems ran a campaign that careened between useless to reprehensible.

The whole election is proof of the adage that to outrun a lion, you don’t need to be a fast runner. You just need to be a faster runner than whoever you’re with. On this one, Labour were a bloated corpse loaded up with hams, which waddled zombie-like towards the lion.

Rather than the result itself, my main point of despair relates to how it came about. Awful opposition that allowed the Tories to get away with murder; the result is validation of morally bankrupt behaviour. Campaigns will now be in a race to the bottom of dirty tricks, vote manipulation through calculated lie-retraction cycles, slander and general dystopian Ministry of Truth bullshit. I’m not gutted because Cretin A beat Buffoon B. I’m gutted because the one thing we as a nation just sanctioned with absolute clarity is the degeneration of politics into post-truth psyops. The only way to win is to play dirty and the dirtiest player will be the winniest.

So, really, it’s not a case of lamenting a Tory landslide. As mentioned above, it could have been worse – a small Tory minority would have meant either an ultra-hard Brexit or years more of going around in ever-tighter circles of self-harm. Or a huge Labour majority, but that was never realistic anyway. It was always going to be turds on toast, whatever the outcome. So, let’s just consider which flavour of shit we’ve all just opted for, why that one rather than any other, and what we can do about changing it in the future.

While there’s a lot to say, in terms of complexity there are really only two major factors behind this landslide for the Conservatives. One of them is the Labour Party, which I’ll cover in another piece. The other is…

Brexit

Being the exciting type I am, I put together a spreadsheet of about 120 seats that were either close marginals, target seats, or where someone of note was MP. I included the referendum result for each seat. One of the things that became clear very early on was that the correspondence between areas that voted for Brexit and areas that abandoned Labour for the Conservatives. It played a very, very, very important role in this election. I don’t think it bucked the trend in a single constituency.

But this morning Boris has come out saying it shows Brexit is the “unarguable decision of the British people”. While I think that’s precisely what the parliamentary arithmetic shows, it’s not entirely true. Firstly, it looks like Remain parties actually got a slightly larger share of the popular vote. This suggests that in a like-for-like contest – i.e. a second referendum – the results may well have said something completely different. So no, not unarguable – I think if that had been the case, there’d have been a referendum rather than an election. But the matter has now been politically determined, that is unarguable.

The damage that Brexit has done to this country is already significant. I think there are many and good reasons to think there will be more damage to come; never having had the referendum in the first place would have been the best outcome for this country, socially and economically.

But that’s really beside the point. We did have a referendum and it was in favour of leaving. Therefore, Brexit happening now seems like a better outcome than Brexit continually not happening for many more years to come. Would we have been better off remaining? Yes. Is that a realistic option now? No. So, fingers crossed we somehow end up somewhere not shit at the end of it. I’m not holding my breath.

But we are probably better off with a clear Tory majority than a very small one. And there’s another reason to think that the Conservatives having won the number of seats they have, and the kind of seats those are, points to another interesting silver lining. Because what comes next?

You are what you eat

On a few occasions throughout the night, pundits mentioned the fact that a large majority might actually result in a softer Brexit. This is because the party is no longer hostage to the loathsome charlatans of the far-right ERG, meaning Boris is able to get a deal through without having to pander to their insane Rule Britannia delusions.

And there may well be some truth to that. Certainly, if Boris has made a manifesto promise to get the trade agreement sorted by the end of 2020, moving more towards a softer Brexit would be a credible option. Do I believe he will feel the need to keep his promises? No. But I do believe he’s a raging narcissist who will desperately want to win re-election and that means holding on to the newly-won seats.

This result looks to be a paradigm shift in the British political landscape. I think that’s probably the case and hope that the relevant parties react accordingly. But what many in the Conservative movement – the party and their core voters – are going to gradually realise is that while they’ve changed the electoral map of the UK, in doing so it has also changed them. The abyss stares back etc.

So no, Boris is no longer at the mercy of the unpleasant and unsound of mind; Bill Cash can go back to just being a horrible, decomposing scowl with bones in it on the back bench. Mark Gino Francois can go back to thumping his chest about this one time he was in the Reserves 20 years ago, sticking it to The Hun in Iraq as part of an operation to save an orphanage full of oil. No; now Boris is at the mercy of communities whose party allegiance has changed – for now – but whose needs and dreams have not.

What the Tories may find they’ve just done is drag themselves back to the centre. At least, if they don’t want this to be a one-time swing. So I would not be at all surprised if things suddenly go all New Labour, policy-wise. Could Boris just keep tacking to the right? Yeah, I suppose so. But has he ever really come across as a committed ideologue about anything, let alone things that are going to make his life very difficult, such as a no-deal Brexit would? No.

Boris is an opportunist; he says what is expedient at the time and then goes on to do whatever he was going to do anyway. It’s one of the reasons I think he’s an awful person. But that sword has two very sharp edges and the far right of the party may well find him walking back from positions that are exactly those they’d cheered him on over.

And to keep the vote he has won, to do the things he wants to do and feed his ego in the way he so clearly needs it fed, those constituencies will expect jobs. They will expect significant investment, the building of new hospitals and reinvigoration of old ones, and better schools to give their children better prospects than they’ve had themselves. If they aren’t delivered those things, they are likely to go back to voting red the moment someone vaguely appealing is back in control of the Labour party.

And, in fairness: if they are delivered those things, in a way which works, then well done Boris. Dubious doesn’t even begin to cover my thoughts on that, but I’ll lay my cards on the table right now and say if he somehow manages it, he’ll deserve the credit. But even if he doesn’t manage it, he will at least need to be seen to try. And that is what is going to leave a lot of traditional, right-leaning Tories feeling betrayed.

Speaking of feeling betrayed, there’s another piece, too large to cover here, about what happened for Labour and the Liberal Democrats, as well as what comes next. But in terms of what we see immediately from the Conservatives, I think it’ll be all about hitting that end of January deadline and then using the threat of an aggressive Trump trade agreement as a stick to batter the EU with to give us what will be a slightly softened Brexit trade agreement in exchange for some trophy concessions.

 

 

 

 

Fame is fickle. One minute, you’re the talk of the town; the next, you’re Z-list trash who should be grateful for a faceful of spit. For the DUP, it was both. But dreadfulness giveth, dreadfulness taketh away, and their time in the limelight quickly passed.

For a long time they were seen by the majority of the UK as little more than political bogeymen, something scary in the woods. Northern Ireland in general is seen by many on the mainland through a lens of unsettling mystique. Near, but also alien, removed from the comforts of modern life. Like the sounds from the wood – what is that creature that communicates through harrowing, tortured yowls that sound almost like speech. A bear, perhaps?

We may never know. Because like a bear, Northern Ireland is still thought of as quite a dangerous place. For starters, everyone there seems to exist at a baseline level of anger that people from places like Surrey see as a berserk rage. This probably isn’t helped by an accent that sounds like large, leathery hands slowly putting down a pint glass and tensing. It has a kind of malevolent zen to it.

All of which is really just a matter of impression; in my experience, the inhabitants of Northern Ireland are no less friendly than anyone else from anywhere else in the UK. But within that unfair, broad-brush fiction, there’s a dark, unpleasant kernel of truth. The Troubles are nowhere near far enough in the past to be forgotten. Nor are the events that led to them. These are not to be belittled, simplified into black and white, or mistaken for something that is and could only ever exist firmly in the past.

Shit Still Happens

Bleeding out from that background of bloodshed and division, which so much of the county has worked so hard and forgiven so much to put behind them, seeps the DUP. A reminder that there is more to a bear than fur and a charming love for honey – there are other things they do in the woods, too. Things that are much less wholesome. The bear has an anus.

Under May’s overwhelming display of Strength and Stability, the DUP did very well. Suddenly not just a big thing across the Irish Sea, but a household name in the rest of the union. They got a pile of cash and sent to the Gordon Brown School of Smiling Like You’re Touching Cloth. In exchange for which, they propped up a deal that was almost identical to a deal to which they’re now (only metaphorically, so far) violently opposed.

This fall from grace means their manifesto isn’t getting the attention it deserves this time around. They’re back to being some nasty little trolls somewhere across some water. After centuries of imperial strategy that was just us sending our most repellent, fascistic pious types somewhere inhospitable in the hope they’d either claim it in our name or die (preferably both, in that order), this isn’t newsworthy. But, with the election just days away, I thought it important to share some of their key policy positions.

Disagreeing With Everything

This is the crux of all other DUP policy and always has been. There is no policy so sane that the DUP won’t disagree with it. No position so unreasonable that they won’t adopt it. But that doesn’t mean they’re dogmatic – far from it! Should that position look like winning popular support or – even worse – to have actually been fairly reasonable after all, they will abandon it in a flash.

This extends itself into their wider policy positions. Rabidly conservative big-family Catholics, riddled with homophobic, misogynistic thinking, they have tightly aligned themselves with the increasingly irreligious promoters of marriage equality in mainland Britain, where the population would be shrinking if we weren’t importing people to work for a pittance caring for a population of elderly racists. And with a local economy heavily dependent on subsidies, grants and planning initiatives driven by central government, the DUP are obviously against being part of the EU.

See If Maybe There’s More Free Money

Naturally following from that last point, Arlene Foster’s time leading the party has already seen them blackmail the UK government into giving them a 10-figure handout. The problem is, that money won’t last very long because children are expensive and Foster is reportedly eating between eighteen and twenty-six of them a day.

This means they now need to pretend to be strongly opposed a deal they were previously supportive of. In this way, Boris Johnson will be forced to give them even more free money to cover the next year or two. Meanwhile, freed of oppressive European-based Human Rights, the Feeding Nurseries can be brought back online.

It is worth noting that this is not the most obviously stupid money-spinning scheme in recent Northern Irish history. A few years ago, there was a green energy initiative whereby people could claim £1.60 in subsidies for every £1 of wood pellets they burned. Not for anything; you got paid just so long as you burned them. The author of this fantastically moronic policy – some A Foster who is clearly too much of an imbecile to ever reach a position of real power – managed to ‘lose’ half a billion in public money before something was done about it.

Just as a reminder: these are the same people who think they’re better placed to manage the Northern Irish economy than a bunch of “European bureaucrats”. With degrees in economics and decades of experience running the largest and most complex financial market in the world. Yeah.

Being So Awful That Everyone Misses Ian Paisley

It’s unclear why this is a policy, but it certainly seems to be.

The Past Was Better

One of the things the DUP disagree with most vehemently is progress. The past was so clearly superior – a position I’m sure most people who lived in Belfast through the 1970s and 80s would share – that we should do everything possible to go back to it. Not only that, but also everything impossible, too: DUP researchers are working on ways to reverse entropy, so they can literally wind the universe back to a heyday of people firebombing children in the street.

Similarly, gay people and women should get back in their respective boxes. Treating people like independently valuable moral entities, equally deserving of rights and respect, has been a disaster. Too much buying lip salve and not enough time being beaten straight in your teens by the same priest who monstrously abused you in primary school. If people aren’t divided and oppressed, how are talentless, hate-filled parasites supposed to gain a foothold from which to fritter away taxes on blatant vote-buying local investment projects?

Being Eaten By Rats

As a logical follow-on from how the DUP leadership see the world, it was proposed that they run on a ticket of everyone being eaten alive by rats. After initial objections that it sounded a bit soft, it gained quite a bit of traction by dint of being inhuman and awful in every respect and also addressing unemployment. But at the last minute it was found out that some of the rats were unmarried pregnant lesbians. Feeding them might be mistaken for endorsing their lifestyle choices and the policy was pulled. There are rumours of another go at it with locusts in 2024, but by that point we may be eating them as our primary source of protein.

Today, I was kindly introduced to a thought piece about how the Tories could win back the vote of people under 40. Or, in the  hilariously telling vernacular of Conservative intelligentsia: the young.

It’s an interesting piece, not least because it does rightly identify several of the more egregious failings of Tory politics from the perspective of us wee babbers who haven’t even hit retirement age yet. But also because, after a little picking around the edges, it’s a case-study in blind faith and brand loyalty.

The headline is, essentially, the Tories can win back young voters if they can just do two things:

1. Stop being Tories.
2. Convince other sizeable Tory-voting demographics to accept what will be wildly unpopular reforms.

This highlights perfectly the kind of paradoxical thinking that the party seem blind do. That is, if you try to promise everything to everyone, you will end up lying to at least some of them and pissing them right off. It’s not particularly new or unexpected thinking, although I do find it odd that they think it is; it’s just another rebrand of the same old schtick. For example: Compassionate Conservatism.

Back then, it was reconciling bastards with the victims of bastards. Since then, the battle lines have changed so that we now have two alliances of opportunity.

In the blue corner, it’s old people, rich people, people who own multiple properties, the more unpleasant section of the penis-owning part of the population, and people who want other people to work for them as little as possible. These are, whether you like it or not, pretty much Tory core voters. They have no problem with the existence – enablement, even – of dessicated sacks of moral effluent like Christopher Chope. They’ve got quite a lot already and would like to turn it into even more. Some of which their children will be able to prise from their cold dead hands, should they in fact get around to dying while there’s anything worth left prising from them or anyone left above sea level to prise it.

In the, well… in all the other corners, we have young people, poor people, people who don’t own any property, the more modern section of the penis-owning part of the population, the majority of the vagina-owning part of the population who aren’t suffering socio-economic Stockholm Syndrome, and people who want to work for someone else in a way which allows them both dignity and financial sustainability. These are the people the Tories need to win the vote from and, while it might seem like young people are only one of these groups, it’s actually a demographic with a disproportionate amount of overlap with the others.

Anyway, that’s enough of the high-level stuff. What about the nuts and bolts? Let’s get down in the weeds and look at the ingenious plans for making up down. Or, indeed, making right left.

Idea 1: Guaranteed Home Ownership

In some shocking news that nobody had ever highlighted as perhaps being a problem and which therefore could not have possibly been foreseen, an unregulated housing market hasn’t worked out all that fairly. The banks, landlords and construction firms have done fucking fabulously, so on the surface of things it has been a raging success. However, it turns out that if one winds down the window of one’s limo when out cruising the boroughs, it hasn’t been quite so well-received by the proles.

Labour – typically – want to solve it by putting in place rent controls and taxing ultra-rich landlords who make money for doing nothing more than morbidly wallowing in tubs of liquefied cash. This is obviously raging socialism of the worst kind and therefore something no Tory would ever want anything to do with. Nevermind the fact that notorious Communist enclaves such as New York have rent controls, nor the fact that rental-generated economic activity isn’t good GDP in any sense, merely the shuffling of bank notes from one pile to the other without the creation of any value in the process.

Thankfully, there’s an entirely non-pinko way of solving the issue. What is being proposed is some good old neo-liberal not-for-profit cooperatives. These groups of working people will gather together their collective buying-power to purchase land, which they will then take out to tender to enthusiastic construction companies who’ll totally bid each other down to build affordable homes at far below current market rates and in such a way as will completely undermine their other business ventures by dropping the average cost of home ownership by a very substantial margin. This is neither socialism, regulation, nor obviously and profoundly fucking stupid if you stop to think about it for more than 3 seconds and have the slightest understanding of how an economy works.

So, idea one summary: taking an idea that is socialism when anyone else does it, making it shitter, and spending a few years wondering why the construction companies just don’t bid on those tenders.

Idea 2: Become the party of women “again”

There are two things of note here. One should have been covered sufficiently by my cunning use of scare-quotes in the section header. The other is that they have so little in the way of ideas here that it also covers homelessness and the belief that free speech = being able to say whatever you want and not find yourself unwelcome in certain places for doing so.

As a sort of bonus 3rd point, coming straight off the back of talking about how to win back those sub-40s whippersnappers, they talk about “millennial snowflakes”. Perhaps I could write to them about becoming the party of self-awareness “again”? It seems like it’d be a perfect fit for this innovative manifesto of whatever the brain equivalent of bacterial vaginosis is.

Idea 3: Don’t make the young pay for the old

This seems to have a couple of key points. First is that young people shouldn’t expect the state to stump up the money that old people have been paying it for decades in the form of National Insurance and Income Tax if they want to inherit some of the money those old people had left over after paying for those things. Before moving on to the other points, I’d just like to simplify this for clarity: we should make it clear to young people that they don’t have to pay for old people by making them pay for old people out of money they haven’t even received yet.

This is genius. It is also not at all like the creeping socialism of taxing people to pay for welfare and public services out of money before they receive it.

Anyway, second is the idea that young people should be expected to give up the kind of personal freedom to fly the nest and live their own lives. Now, many decent people would look after an aging relative if they were able; that is great and I am in no way knocking it. But as a means of showing that Tories don’t see old people as a burden for young people to shoulder literally until the old people drop dead, insisting that they do exactly that if they want to see any meaningful inheritance is a funny one. Not Haha Funny; the other sort.

If only there were some sort of system whereby those old people could have paid vast sums of money into the state, so that later in life there was some sort of provision for taking care of them without expecting subsequent generations to foot the bill. Like homes where people could be cared for. A system where people’s wellness was… fared for? I don’t know. Just spitballing.

Idea 4: Rescue our towns

Finally, we get to an authentically Conservative policy other than “show young people we like them by rebranding the way we fuck them”: bloody-mindedly fight progress. Bursaries for people who want to start a local high street business! Incentives for people who do-up knackered old shop fronts!

How about we instead accept that the small-town high street is dead? There is no viable reverting to a pre-ecommerce world, nor would it be desirable to do so even if there were. But there are ways we could give young entrepreneurs a helping hand in starting up modern digital businesses, with a global reach and therefore potential to bring more value into the economy rather than just recirculating it and calling it growth.

We could also return some character and community to towns by regulating large corporates such as Tesco and Asda, leaving competitive space for local shops. They’ll still be up against online shopping, but at least they won’t be taking it from both ends while they try and make a fist of it. I can’t work out whether that is poor phrasing or inspired metaphor.

More importantly, preventing the big breweries from buying up all the spots for pubs, forcing generic market research line-of-best-fit family gastropubs onto every corner would be pretty good. We might see a return of pubs with character and community, rather than identi-kit seating areas around which you can sullenly sip dull beer.

Idea 5: Bring down the barriers

Be less racist, do something about uncrossable class divisions, invest in public services and state education funding. I don’t think I need to go into why this won’t be popular with the existing Tory core vote, in light of the undue control over the party currently wielded by the ERG crowd.

Idea 6: Help students out of debt

By cutting the interest on loans. Now, colour me stupid, but I’m pretty sure that was the situation for a long time and those rates have consistently gone up under the Tories. In fact, they have not only gone up, but been aggressively defended under the auspices of austerity and since being sold on to private interests who pretty much by definition want to make as much money as possible out of them.

I can only interpret this as a call for greater public funding for education and re-nationalisation of the higher education funding sector. Great ideas, I fully support them. But as the author quite clearly states, it’s really only a halfway house of undoing past Tory policy in a move towards what’s already Labour policy.

Idea 7: Tackle the gig economy

Another openly Labour-inspired idea: stop companies taking the piss with zero-hours contracts that allow them to avoid all the obligations we as a society have spent decades fighting to put in place.

But it’s a very hand-wavy reference to a major problem, ignoring the fact that anti-competitive regulations alone won’t fix it and that there’s a really simple solution that will. That is banning zero hours contracts entirely and forcing all companies to provide all employees with the same rights. Even – and this is where the idea will struggle to gain traction with Tory donors – if it means those companies don’t make as much money, reducing their market cap and making them less desirable to private equity investors.

Idea 8: Save the cost of tuition fees

If less people go to university to better themselves and their opportunities in life, less people will have to pay back astronomical sums of money that previous generations somehow magically didn’t have to pay! Inspired.

The fact that there is even the slightest flicker of hope this will be seen as preferable to the quickly-identified objection of “how come the boomers could get it for free but we can’t even get it for cheap?” is the same kind of damning insight into the mentality behind all this as the implication the youth vote is anyone under the age of 40.

Which (thank god) brings us to the end of the piece. I’ve gone on far longer than I expected or hoped to, so I’m not going to waste too much on final thoughts. I think I’ve pretty much covered most of it already. The truth of the matter is we don’t just have a problem with young people, but a rising problem with middle-aged people as well. There’s some desperate flailing around to find ways to pay for the stuff that’s needed to address this, but they all seem to come back to “young people, only let’s not call it that”.

Cynically – but I suspect accurately – I think this is because the alternative is raising taxes, investing more in society from the ground up, and making corporations pay more back into the very same communities as they’re growing immensely fat and privileged off. Which I think should speak volumes about which of the two groups will be expected to take the hit when the inevitable “sorry, we promised everything to everyone again and it turns out that still isn’t possible” moment arrives. Hint: it won’t be the blue corner.

As usual, pre-election despair has left me simultaneously wanting to write and feeling too miserable at the likely outcomes to bring myself to do so. I have half-written some party-overview stuff, but having stepped back from the campaigns for a moment and considered the meta-debate, I’ve realised they’re useless. People are either making promises they can’t keep or lying through their teeth about things they’d have no intention of keeping even if they were able to. Party platforms are therefore, broadly speaking, one of three things: lies, fantasy, or complete insanity.

For example…

George Orwell’s 1922

The Tory campaign has been especially – irredeemably, I would argue – vile and underhand. Regardless of anyone’s political views, the party should be shunned purely on a moral basis. Between pretending to be a fact-checking service during the first debate and dodging any sort of meaningful scrutiny of the Prime Minister, their disregard for decency and truth is all-encompassing. There’s no need to read the manifesto; their actions speak to the underlying truth that they will lie, cheat and bully to whatever degree they feel necessary to win. So why read a manifesto when:

1. Everything in it is entirely subject to change and is probably just a lie anyway, since there’s no reason for it not to be a lie.
2. The message of adopting this strategy is an expansion on Boris’ notorious “fuck business” platform; it is now a general “fuck democracy”, with a more specific “fuck you” strongly implied as a part of that. We should all know where we stand with that.

It has been lie after lie after lie. Not subjective misinterpretation of a set of facts; just lies. Outright, shameless lies. You don’t believe them, do you? After all this? Please? And if you do, then I really, truly want to know what you would consider persuasive evidence that would convince you otherwise. Boris turning up at your house to personally gaslight you while he steals all your ornaments and shits in your fridge?

NHS? Not on the table. Except we now know it is, thanks to leaked documents showing that to be the case. The response from Tory HQ? Nothing to see here. We have always been at war with Eurasia.

And why would they be lying so shamelessly, avoiding scrutiny so determinedly, if they were on the side of the people? Because they don’t care about us. They don’t think our opinions matter, they don’t feel accountable for whatever blatant lies they feel will be useful on any given day, and they don’t want our measly interests – healthcare, economic stability, education, basic human decency – to get in the way of them staying in power to do whatever the hell they want.

And all this despite having the indisputable, well-evidenced backing of a state media outlet in the form of the BBC – in addition to the wealthy autocrats behind the likes of The Mail and other right-wing propaganda factories. Even with that innate advantage, they still feel the need to act exactly like something out of a book which is the byword for a dystopian society where the voters don’t matter, truth doesn’t matter, and compassion and integrity are seen as weaknesses to be exploited.

This sociopathic approach to politics and the electorate should scare everyone for one reason if no other: if it works, it will be the new normal. All future elections will be fought on such terms. Who says what will become irrelevant in determining how to vote, because we won’t be able to rely on any of it being even distantly related to the truth. You can still go and cast a vote, but it will be meaningless because you will have no way of knowing what you are really voting for.

Regardless of Brexit, the economy, the NHS or anything else, a vote for the Conservatives is a vote for Orwellian politics becoming the norm in this country. That’s not hyperbole or opinion; it’s an entirely reasonable and well-evidenced conclusion, verging on being a brute fact. It is what their actions have said with far greater volume and clarity than their words ever could.

Fortunately, the other parties have been all over this and won’t let it happen.

Make surrender, not war

Hahaha, only kidding! Corbyn wasted the first televised debate by failing to take any of a number of huge, clearly signposted opportunities to demolish the Prime Minister. I mean, it is once again looking like I’m going to have to vote for him, but it’s hard to imagine a more strategically inept, argumentatively flaccid opposition leader.

Yes, he seems like a nice guy who cares about people and likes making and sharing jam. That’s good – I don’t want to undersell how good, because goodness in general is woefully absent from our politics these days – but it isn’t useful. Unflinchingly challenging lies when they’re made right in front of you is useful. Accepting that whether you want it to be or not, the centreground is where this election can be won or lost is useful. Being a bit like someone’s much-loved grandparent is not.

Labour will not lose this election because of their policies. That might sound contrary to a lot of the professional commentary at the moment, but I stand by it. If they lose this election, it will be because they have failed to take the fight to a Tory party that is so vulnerable that even a half-hearted thump would likely inflict a mortal wound on it and drive the polls in Labour’s favour. But for some reason, they seem reluctant to do that. And I can’t understand why.

But, as I said, on the basis of the above (e.g. Tories literally resorting to an Orwellian nightmare war on truth) and the below (uuuurgh), I am still probably going to vote Labour at this point. Forget Brexit. Forget tax rates. Forget the fact that it risks setting my own slow crawl towards financial stability back several years more. Because this is now a case of whatever is my best option for stopping our country becoming a shitter, poorer version of Trump’s America will get my vote. And unfortunately that means Corbyn. I just hope he wins a small majority and the whackier, more 70s student-event-hosted-by-Scargill policies get quickly dropped as unpassable.

Iiiiiiit’s… Jo Swinson’s Flying Circus

I am trying to not take this one personally. No sooner had I joined the Liberal Democrats than they switched to an innovative “lose as much credibility as possible” election strategy. First were the dishonest polling graphics. Maybe the sign of a suddenly fattened membership, with new joiners getting a bit carried away trying to be clever, I thought.

Then there was the strangely creepy presidential-style campaign, complete with police-state-esque re-education bus and awkward photo ops. A new party leader trying to catch up with the level of household recognition the competition have had several years to establish, maybe?

Along with this was a self-defeating refusal to work with anyone, the so-simplistic-it-fails position on Brexit… been burnt by coalitions, people feeling Labour’s position is either unclear or a bit mealy-mouthed, etc.

It all just looks a bit like a campaign that has been copy-pasted at random from the output of various focus groups. Does Jo Swinson need to be a household name, on the basis there is no chance of her actually becoming Prime Minister in two weeks time? Do the kind of people likely to vote Lib Dem voters want a US-style campaign? Are we never to see a coalition again, just because they did it once and buggered it up? And, most importantly, isn’t a unilateral withdrawal of Article 50 horribly undemocratic and going to really upset a lot of people?

To top it all off, it seems they’ve now embarked on a full-blown descent into the absurd; doctored emails, more misleadingly-designed campaign literature, and party members campaigning on the basis that it is okay to vote for them because they’ll never be in a position to carry out any of their manifesto promises anyway. They’ve somehow combined the worst aspects of the Tory campaign with the worst aspects of Labour’s godawful leadership model and then doused it all in very powerful hallucinogens.

All they needed to do was be not shit. By being fair and honest, sticking to the political centre, defending the NHS, and promising unequivocally to do whatever was necessary (including coalition) to ensure a 2nd referendum or customs union, they’d have picked up a lot of votes. Instead, I’m now actively discouraging people from voting for a party I’ve just recently paid money to join.

Centre voters have very few options at the moment, meaning they’re easily courted by anyone vaguely appealing. But the Lib Dems seem determined to make sure that isn’t them. Swinson’s campaign has been so bafflingly incompetent on every level that it almost seems intentional. At this point, I suspect they’ve turned a safe route to a best-ever result into a brutal drubbing that will sideline them for another decade.

So, in summary, I really hope the polls are all very wrong because if not, this country is going to be raped and pillaged in a frenzy of deregulation, privilege and lies. It might honestly be time to emigrate, because I absolutely do not want to be a part of what this is all becoming.