Another election. I can hardly contain my excitement. I was only the other day thinking to myself “what this country needs, Steve, is another expensive, cynical distraction from the fact our elected officials are incapable of doing what we ask them to do or even what we don’t ask them to do but they say they’re going to do anyway”. You’ve probably thought the same, albeit with a different name in place of mine. Unless you’re also called Steve, in which case: hi Steve!

Anyway.

Nobody wants an election. Not the Prime Minister who called it. Not the leader of the opposition who supported it. Definitely not the electorate, who have to vote in it. Major political events in this country have taken on the same character as natural disasters or the endless stream of Disney live-action remakes; spectacular to watch, but a justifiable source of dread and despair.

Which is why the Tories have gone with the “a vote for anyone else means two referendums next year” line in their campaign. Like everything else they say, it’s a pretty transparent lie. But still: god please anything but more things to vote on. Can’t we just live in a dictatorship for a while? It doesn’t even have to be benign. We’ll be unlikely to notice the difference.

But it isn’t just that people don’t want an election. They also aren’t really sure what to do with one. Half the country consists of people who have no bloody idea who to vote for and are getting migraines trying to figure it out. The other half is the usual democratic tarpit of brand-voting zealots who’ll vote for their favourite colour right up to and beyond the point where it has a swastika emblazoned across it.

On which moderate, nuanced note we get to the point of this update: I’ve joined the Lib Dems. Without wanting to make this about me, it’s important my vast and discerning readership are aware. That way, the incoming flurry of semi-literate not-quite-libel about the parties and individuals involved is on a clean slate. And I also want to talk a bit about why.

Status Quo: worse than just dad rock

The current situation is not a failing of just the Conservatives. Sure, they’ve been particularly vile of late. They are wholly responsible for that. But it is also a failure on the part of Labour; they have not mounted a successful opposition. They have failed in this so spectacularly that the Tories have been goading them into an election. That might turn out to be hubris on their part, but it paints a picture of a government completely unafraid of the opposition.

Which means the real problem is a failing of the status quo: Tory versus Labour. Forming the basis of every government for a century has made them complacent. Thinking that the answer to this situation is red or blue is to miss the point: the answer to this situation is to put an end to that complacency.

What that requires includes (but is by no means limited to):

• Showing them that it is no longer a given one or the other will be at the steering wheel. The Lib Dems are best placed to do that, both in terms of raw numbers and political positioning.
• Ending First Past The Post and adopting a grown-up voting system that isn’t kept around solely to maintain the status quo. Neither of the old guard parties are going to do that. Especially important if we lose Scotland from the union.
• Restoring the political centre and making sure there’s a party occupying it. A party on the left, a party on the right and a party in the centre is a far more stable system than two parties that oscillate wildly between the centre and extremes.
• Bringing compromise politics into the mainstream by killing off traditional one-party majority rule. A party in the centre can work with moderates on either side, which by implication means they also temper the impact of the fringe.

All of which said, where I live is a blue stronghold with the Lib Dems a very distant 3rd. Realistically, my vote won’t count no matter who I cast it for. But if everyone thought that way, we’d not need elections at all, which means I am considering biting the bullet on this one.

A Corbyn government would be bad. Really bad. It might be too bad for me to bring myself to vote for. But a hard Brexit would possibly be worse. I also don’t think Labour can swing a straight majority, so am kind of hoping they’ll be forced into a coalition or Confidence & Supply agreement with the Lib Dems and/or SNP. That would likely see a referendum followed by a disintegration of the cooperation agreement, leading to another election. That’s a scenario I could get behind. So maybe I will vote tactically and back Labour.

We live in such times that I believe the above scenario is the best open to us right now. Worst outcome averted, I could then properly get behind a Lib Dem campaign that aimed at lasting change. But, in the midst of a house fire is not the time to start worrying about your general level of fitness; just get the hell out of there so you’re alive enough to lay off the pies.

Ten years ago, we were in the midst of the expenses scandal. MPs were doing little and taking a lot. We have – superficially, at least – addressed the “taking a lot” part. But in terms of earning their crust, parliament still seems plagued by a lack of compromise and an unwillingness to make the hard choices. Many people would argue our continued failure to actually leave the EU is an example of this. While I think there’s more to that particular situation than such an argument implies, I can’t honestly disagree with its underlying principle. It needs to change, because otherwise this is the new normal.

Forcing MPs to work to get things through is good. The deadlock over Brexit has been frustrating, but it has been a positive because it has moved us away from people lazily working with people who broadly agree with them already. That isn’t representative democracy. That’s tyranny of the minority. To put an end to it, vote tactically to avoid a hard Brexit and then come and join me in centre. It is yellow.

I won’t bore you with how unfathomably terrible I think the new cabinet is. Suffice to say, we now live in a post-merit world where people are rewarded not on their competence, but on how festering and morally septic their unguarded id has become.

So now we have Priti Fucking Patel as Home Secretary. A woman whose only other success is the degree of useful idiocy she has managed to achieve. And Michael Gove – the poor man’s Michael Gove – stands out like a single solid, healthy turd floating in an ocean of explosive diarrhea.

Anyway, that wasn’t what I wanted to bore you about. What I wanted to bore you about is an ancient secret that I’ve just discovered and nobody else apparently knows about. It is the secret of compromise.

The reason we have Boris – the reason we were always going to end up with Boris – is because there was no real opposition to stop him occurring. Labour have offered no meaningful obstacle from the outside and the Tory moderates haven’t put up much of a fight from the inside.

Which probably has Tory moderate and Labour supporters reading this going “what are you on about? They’re doing everything they can to oppose this nonsense!”. But, only, if you think about it… they aren’t. They are doing everything that want to do. Everything within their comfort zone, perhaps. But not everything that could and need to do.

Labour aren’t because a large part – but far from the entirety – of the party thinks Corbyn could be a great Prime Minister if only people understood his position better. There’s two problems with this.

First, he would need to properly articulate and then stick to some positions. Mumbling a lot of positions that are obviously noncommittal and designed to be walked back at the first possible moment is not a failing of the electorate to understand you. If anything, it is a profound success of the electorate in doing exactly that.

Second, it just isn’t true. Corbyn appeals to the far left and, to a lesser extent, the medium-left. The left that is still pretty pink in the middle, but doesn’t have any blood. Probably because it’s all vegan nowadays. But the idea that an electoral majority of this country can be won over to this mid-far left ideology is utterly farcical. I’m fairly left-leaning and the idea of Corbyn – or more importantly, the Leninist vampire cult around him – running this country is a horrible one.

But Labour activists and membership won’t accept this. The fact that Corbyn can’t even unite his own party, let alone the nation at large, is talked down as some sort of conspiracy. Instead of offering a compromise candidate who could actually win and advance their cause to some degree, they insist on everyone letting Len McClusky pat them down for loose change before bed each night.

So, no external opposition to stop the Tories. And internally, the Tory ‘rebels’ are oblivious to the irony of why they can’t get more done. An irony which, in this situation of all situations, should be deafening to even the already deaf. Because, unless they are willing to leave their party and deprive it of a majority, why should the leadership care? Brexit will happen the hardest of possible ways unless Boris and Co. genuinely believe their detractors will walk away and sink the whole thing.

How do I know this? Because that is their own strategy with Brexit. It is their language. It is how they operate. They won’t compromise unless forced to. And the only thing that will force them to is other people learning to compromise between themselves. Tory MPs leaving the party to which their only attachment is emotional; Labour giving up their messiah in exchange for someone who isn’t utterly repellent to everyone to the right of Fidel Castro.

The truth is, people don’t tend to change their minds much and when they do, most of them won’t do it based on facts or logic. They’ll do it based on feelings. Trying to win people over based on ideology is the work of decades of sustained cultural change at the very least. Doing that by outright attacking their current mascot – or even thinking that it is the mascot that you need to defeat – will never get the result you want.

If the far left could accept that the rest of the country doesn’t want their socialist revolution, they could have won the last election and none of this would have ever happened. Now things are more desperate than ever and, based on past form, I suspect them to double down on the denial and make an even bigger mess than they already have.

Until people remember that democracy is about finding a middle-ground that suits pretty much nobody but offends the most of them the least amount possible, we are stuffed. Because it isn’t about winning over people to your cause. It is about pushing for your cause to be represented within – not completely in control of – the body of governmental decision-making.

The only thing that happens when you do that is you turn the race into who can be the most extreme. And the problem with doing that is that the people who are the most extreme are, by definition, extremists. And thus we no longer have a functioning democracy and the ruins of the one we did have are about to be pillaged by talentless narcissists.

So can people please stop banging on about how No-Deal or Corbyn or whatever is what the country really wants and perhaps stop to find out what it is the country does really want? Even – and I can’t stress this enough – when it turns out that what the country really wants isn’t what they personally really want. Because compromise, like charity and bouts of norovirus, begins at home.

Our democracy is broken. This shouldn’t be a surprise to anyone by now. Looking back on it, it shouldn’t have been a surprise to anyone in the first place. But c’est la vie, as we soon won’t be allowed to say for fear of deportation.

Unusually, I’ve been almost lost for words. I’ve wanted to write about it but I’ve found it hard to muster the willpower. And really, we’re so far into theatre of the absurd now – where would I even begin?

For the first time in my life, I’ve started to question whether I even want to engage in politics. Some days I think I should get involved directly in some way. Others, I think voting is just a Pavlovian response to seeing a polling booth. My options are all bad or irrelevant.

We live in a two-party state, which is really a one-party state with very polite revolutions every decade or so. Labour or Conservative, take your pick and then resign yourself to years of buyer’s remorse.

But Brexit has made it all so much more obviously awful. The conduct of parliament in general and the Conservative Party in particular has left me torn between shame and despair. I cannot – and will not – vote for a party which has behaved as the Conservatives have over the past several years. Not now, not ever.

But do I want to vote for Jeremy Corbyn, who may go down in history as the only British party leader worse than Theresa May? To empower John McDonnell, who outright scares me? No, I do not. They’re fighting 40 years in the past, oblivious to the modern world and its economic realities. The Labour Party in its current state may mean the demise of our political system.

However, at this point that could be our only route to progress. I feel like that our politics is so rotten and toxic, pushing it to breaking point might be the only way forward. It cannot be saved. All prolonging its existence will do is magnify the damage it inflicts. 

Whips & Chains

I don’t see any other way to escape a system where extremists can manipulate the party system to such an extent. Jacob Rees-Mogg and Bill Cash, Jeremy Corbyn and John McDonnell; these people should never be able to hold this much influence. They’re relics of history, a waning generation that refuses to let go of the issues of its youth. And in doing so, they become unable to deal with those of the present and future.

The reason they do have this sway is the party system. So long as people act out of party interest, the tail will be able to wag the dog. And a large enabler of this is the party whip. Because when we get down to it, every vote should be a free vote. The people who elect an MP do not do so just to have their votes voided by those of the party leadership’s constituents. In what way is that a representative or democratic?

So the whip must go. Parties must be free to let histrionic ideologues throw their toys – and, hopefully, themselves – from the parliamentary pram. Which means a small majority must not be something so valuable as to be worth protecting at all costs. On which note, a quick segue: isn’t protection of party above all other concerns a defining tenant of communism and totalitarianism? All hail Theresa Mao. 

To fix this Sisyphean limbo of cyclical one-party-state-ism, we need to get used to the idea of cooperation and coalition. The best way to ensure this would be vote reform. Proportional Representation would deliver this model of government as the norm.

But the barrier to this is like getting turkeys to vote for Christmas: why would either party give up the reasonable expectation of near-absolute power of governance? How about: because the also give up the risk of near-absolute powerlessness in the process. Even when out of power, they would have something of a say.

No representation without representation

As things currently stand, we don’t even live in a tyranny of the majority; it’s a tyranny of the minority. Proportional Representation would go a long way towards addressing this. Ending the whip system would ensure there was a straighter line between the ballot box and the dispatch box.

Arguments would be won through evidence, argument and negotiation. Legislation would be enacted through compromise. This way it would better represent the many and varied interests that make up our rich social fabric.

If we are going to talk about voter enfranchisement, why not address it by making sure the vast majority of people who didn’t vote for the current government are also represented? Indeed, it would address what seems – from the outside at least – like creeping disenfranchisement within Westminster itself, on the opposition and back benches.

And finally – for now, at least – it would make room for accountability. Each MP could be held responsible for their actions by their constituents, as those actions will have been freely chosen. Parties will be expected to compromise or they will find themselves outside of the coalition selection pool, deemed too intransigent and dogmatic to work with. These are the structural changes we need to escape this downward spiral of farce.

Garbage In, Garbage Out

Those are what I see as the bare minimum changes. They’re a tiny fraction of what’s needed, but they seem like a good place to start. But they won’t resolve the current bugger’s muddle.

The reason we can’t resolve this Brexit catastrophe is because we don’t have the tools to do so. The hooting from the fringes carries far more weight than the reasoned debate and genuine willingness to compromise of the cross-party majority. We’ve mixed a broken version of Direct Democracy with a broken version of Parliamentary Democracy.

And we asked a question that, at a semantic level, was “Do you want things to stay exactly as they are now or be literally any option other than that?”. We then treated votes for the latter as a homogeneous mandate for self-destructive humiliation and widespread impoverishment.

Unsurprisingly, this hasn’t gone brilliantly. 10% of parliament is convinced that 25% of the country voted unanimously to press the big red button. A further 10% of MPs think the votes probably weren’t for quite that, but are worried what will happen to democracy if we admit we aren’t a functioning one.

The remainder of parliament seem to have fairly reasonable positions across the rest of the remain-leave spectrum. But they’re being ignored because the Tory party is a neurotic mess and Corbyn couldn’t mount a rocking horse, much less an effective opposition.

Perhaps the only person to really benefit from it all is Mark Francois, who has somehow oozed his way into the limelight. I guess plummeting standards and competitive idiocy have carried him to heights that being a ghastly little prick who looks like a cheap cocktail sausage never could.

A new politics

The point is, we’re in a chicken/egg situation. I think the only way we can escape it is as follows.

First, we revoke Article 50 but with legislation passed to have another referendum in 5 years. Ahead of this, there will be commitments to implement Proportional Representation and then have a General Election using it. The whip system will be abolished and all parliamentary business following that election would be free votes on every issue.

And then parliament can debate what the question opposite ‘remain’ should be. It can then have definition, born of compromise, in an environment that is representative and accountable for its actions.

At which point, I almost wouldn’t care what the result was. Because we’d have achieved something even more valuable: we’d have fixed our political system and made it fit to resolve the challenges of a modern democracy.

Life as a grown-up person is busy. So busy that I’ve had too little time to write about the ferris wheel of fuck-wittery that has been the last 6 months of Brexit. But after the past week, I’ve decided I need to make time.

We are now in a land without map, all landmarks of familiarity finally lost beyond the horizon. The old rules seemingly don’t apply here. Except sometimes they do. Ditto the new rules, which is all the more impressive when you consider the fact they were made up in full knowledge of the old ones.

As a politics junkie, I can only assume this is what scientists would feel like if they accidentally cracked open another universe. What strange physics would they find staring back at them? How would they begin to translate them into anything meaningful? And physics guys – I wish you the very best of luck: it is as exhilarating as it is confusing.

It all started with Theresa May’s second attempt to get her deal through parliament. The deal was a free vote for Tory MPs, which was intended by May to 1) make her look democratic and 2) prevent an even bigger backbench rebellion breaking out. This… well, it didn’t.

This is largely because, in the context of reality, (1) is like giving the Reichstag a lick of paint to make it look more inclusive. More on (2) in a moment. Unfortunately, this was all lost on the Prime Minister. She has long abandoned reality in favour of somewhere less at odds with the details of her self-belief.

Then a Tory backbench MP – who were being allowed a free vote on the understanding they not misuse it by expressing the wrong opinion – tabled an amendment to the deal. The amendment simply stated that not only should we not allow no-deal to happen on 29th March 2019. We should not allow it to ever happen at all.

Caroline Spelman was the person to submit the amendment for selection. Once it had been selected, Tory party whips made it very clear she was completely free to choose to retract it. She had never even meant to submit it in the first place. That was her free choice. Entirely up to her to choose to do that.

I can only imagine their surprise when she then tried to retract it. And I can only imagine – and do, with great glee – the look on the Tory leaderships’ faces when John Bercow told her she couldn’t. Other people had signed up to the amendment and any one of those could move it for a vote if they wished.

You could almost hear Yvette Cooper smile to herself. The amendment passed.

Theresa Democratic Freedom May responded to this by revoking the free vote for her MPs. Clearly her MPs were going to take this ‘thinking for themselves’ much more literally than she’d intended it. So, they were now on a three-line whip to vote against the deal. May’s own deal. The one she was furious they’d already voted down by a landslide just weeks before.

This didn’t just cause a backbench rebellion. It caused a frontbench rebellion as well. On a three-line whip. Against the PM’s own motion, because of an amendment one of her own MPs had accidentally got voted through.

Being a member of cabinet and voting against a three-line whip is astonishing. It doesn’t happen. It’s… like being given an ankle tag for antisocial behaviour and then live-tweeting your journey on the way to murder your defence counsel. Or ordering veal sashimi at a vegan restaurant. It’s metaphorically and almost literally equivalent to squatting down to drop a log on your boss’s desk. While they’re using it.

It’s a very black and white situation, is what I’m trying to get at. Sometimes backbenchers will buck the whip, but to an extent that’s almost what they’re there for. Even then, very rarely a three-liner.

And… nothing happened. One person resigned, I guess because they foolishly assumed normal rules would apply. But nobody was fired. No-one. That’s not “the Prime Minister is having trouble controlling her party”. It’s “the Prime Minister has entirely lost control of government”.

In the end, May’s deal failed even with the amendment. But the point is, she has no respect from and no power over her own party. If she was facing anyone other than Jeremy Corbyn as opposition, a vote of no confidence would already have been called and won. We’d be having a General Election.

But no. And that was just last week. There’s a part two: the tale of the hero John Bercow, a man whom I sincerely hope is immortalised in statue. Not just for his services to sense and democracy, but also to poetic justice.

But that’s too much for one update. I’ll be back later with more on that. And maybe some guesses at what happens next. Hint: fuck knows.

As per my last update, here’s a look at some candidates who might stand against Trump from the Republican side of the wall fence. I can’t see any of them beating Trump in a straight-up contest. This is because most of the Republican party are power-crazed scum who won’t risk a known winner against an unproven candidate. The best hope is they’ll either split the vote or whip up so much animosity to the right of the spectrum that they’ll make things easier for the Democratic candidate.

Interestingly, they mostly seem to be fiscal conservatives. I don’t know whether that’s part of their common cause against Trump but if so, it’s depressing. It’d be nice if the Republican party weren’t so far gone that some of its members objected to Trump’s plentiful and appalling crimes against behavioural standards and basic respect for humanity. But it is, so there aren’t, and we might as well start dropping the bombs now.

John Kasich

As things currently stand, Kasich has gained a bit of a reputation for wanting to stop the entire US political system becoming the laughing stock of the world. The fact this makes him stand out against his peers is one I’ll leave just here for your further consideration.

While the usual rules of existence are suspended, he’s not a far-right lunatic. Should reality suddenly reassert itself, please refer to the following waiver:

John Kasich is a raving maniac who wants to reduce re-distributive taxes while increasing regressive taxes that cause disproportionate suffering to the poor. He thinks people should be able ‘teach the controversy’ in the science classrooms of the education system he’s privatising, letting children decide (under often immense parental pressure) between whether things are best explained by facts or magic. This is presumably to bring it into line with the prison system he has already privatised, and which if he had his way would be filled with people who’ve had backstreet abortions. All this would be made possible by banning any sort of unionisation rights in the public sector, thus bringing down employment costs for unscrupulous private providers so they can submit unfeasibly cheap tenders for government contracts.

With that said, he may be the best hope the Republican party has of escaping the nightmare that is Donald Trump. Why? Because he is one the few Republicans who still has a spine. He seems to genuinely despise Trump and hasn’t been overly shy about it.

He does have cross-bench credentials on some issues, notably firearms and (weirdly, considering his other views) healthcare. This is likely only going to play well to the narrowest of the political centre though, as he fell out with the far right (not shooty or racist enough) and anyone but the most conservative of Democrats is likely to consider him a Tea Party shill. He might pick up independent and libertarian votes though, which in some states could tip the balance enough to matter.

In his favour will be brand recognition amongst Fox News viewers. This is a key Republican voting-block, so his time spent hosting his own show on the channel is likely to be a big help. Again, as with a lot of the other points here, it’s likely to have the opposite impact on potential Democrat-leaning voters because it’s comparable to having co-hosted Bestiality Today with Hitler.

He’s struck some conciliatory tones on gay marriage, voted to restrict assault rifle availability, and supports a very non-Trumpian approach to undocumented migrants. His whole political stance seems to be one of purely fiscal conservatism and very little current interest on social issues. This is likely a mild-to-moderate positive from the centrist perspective, but I suspect the negative impact it will have on the religious fruitcake vote will pretty much neutralise this gain.

One big negative to all parties will be his association with Lehman Brothers at the time of their collapse. He has somehow tried to explain that despite being Managing Director at the time of their collapse, he wasn’t aware of or involved in the events that led to it.

The challenge for Kasich boils down to one basic equation. His ability to attract some traditionally non-Republican voters isn’t great enough to offset the losses he risks amongst hardcore religious conservatives. He won’t be picking up any anti-establishment votes from either side of the fence, so this leaves him needing to find a core and enough of a swing vote to suggest he’s capable of a convincing presidential victory.

Jeff Flake

Another fiscal conservative, Flake is a bit less nuanced in terms of his appeal. He’s a straight-up conservative with very little appeal to anyone who considers themselves even vaguely Democratic-leaning.

This obviously means he doesn’t have a lot of pulling power when it comes to potential swing voters. Equally, it means he is less likely to lose the kind of religious right votes that Kasich will struggle with. In this sense, he’s more of a traditional Republican candidate.

His voting credentials include:

• Very anti-ACA (Obamacare)
• Pro-life
• Pro-gun, albeit with the caveat he thinks people who have been declared insane as part of a criminal prosecution relating to violent crime shouldn’t be able to buy guns. Because America is a country where that isn’t the default assumption.

In terms of Democrat-friendly stuff, there isn’t a whole lot. He broke from party lines to say he’d prefer a Democrat won an election than a sexual predator. But that’s only worth commenting on because the rest of the Republican party is by now so morally defunct that they wouldn’t prefer that.

He also recently insisted on an extra week before the Kavanaugh vote to allow for a further investigation. While nobody else in the party had the spine or integrity to push even this far, it does smack of symbolism rather than actual ethical commitment. He still voted for the nominee after it all, so obviously his conscience didn’t keep him up all night.

Perhaps one interesting facets of him running is he might try and slip into being the spiritual – as well as literal – successor of John McCain. It is possible we’ll hear McCain’s name invoked by any Republican resistance to Trump, so it’s plausible this may carry some weight.

Finally, two other facts that could be relevant. Flake is a Mormon and I don’t really know how that sits within the American spectrum of religious moonbattery. Secondly, he has an incredibly punchable face.

Ben Sasse

I haven’t heard much about Sasse before, so a lot of this is necessarily first-impressions-y. And those first impressions are that, by the light of unholy buggery, Ben Sasse is smart. His degrees have degrees. His PhD is in being qualified as fuck and his thesis was titled “My Brain Could Eat Your Brain: The Ben Sasse Story”.

Beyond that, it seems he is mostly a very traditional conservative; he’s very religious, he like guns, he dislikes gays, and he is mostly interested in economic growth. I’d say he’s the outsider of the group, as while he’s been a critic of Trump, he doesn’t seem to have the same level of actual hatred of the man as the others we’ve looked at. As someone with a brain, he despairs that his country is being run by someone who largely goes without one.

But, that said, I’m not very sure what else it is Sasse finds so disagreeable about Trump. So, he’s a fiscal conservative with good religious credentials, but probably too ivory tower to win votes from Trump’s base and definitely too Republican to get any of the waving Democrat vote. In fact, I can’t help but wonder whether his ire is based on the fact that the views of an obvious moron are consistently similar to his own.

One last thing I do want to mention is that he seems to have some weird views. He’s an anti-consumerist fiscal conservative who seems to think the economy will boom if everyone lives by a puritanical work-for-work’s-sake creed. What these people then spend their money on or what motivates them to earn it, I’m not entirely sure. It sounds a lot like working yourself to death for no gain, just to die rich and leave your money to kids who will do the same damned stupid thing.

We are a little over 2 weeks from the US midterm elections and about the same over 2 years away from the next presidential election. Most cycles, that would mean the candidates would start posturing about 6 months from now. But this isn’t most cycles.

It’s not exaggerating to say the 2020 race started the day Trump took office. There are three groups who’ll be making their opening their bids over coming weeks, if they haven’t already. These are:

• The Democrats
• Anti-Trump Republicans
• Trump himself

There will be all sorts of names touted for the first two groups, some of which may be more serious than others. However, there are also some key runners who it’ll be worth watching. If I get time, I’ll do a run-through of all these groups. For now, I just want to have a look at the Democrat A-listers.

Probably the biggest names here are Bernie ‘Make Them Pay’ Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, and Joe Biden. A likely addition to this list is Michael Bloomberg, thankfully the only ex-Mayor of New York in the running this time around.

Conspicuous by her absence, I don’t think Michelle Obama will run in 2020. If we’re talking 2024, I think that will be a very different story. I’m also ignoring what I’ll disparigingly refere to as ‘novelty’ candidates, like Avenatti. Stormy Daniels’ lawyer will be in it for the limelight and subsequent book deal, but I don’t think there’s a chance in hell of him making a serious bid for it.

Bernie ‘Professor Farnsworth’ Sanders

Obviously he’ll run. He was a furious geriatric before Trump won an election. By now he must be so pissed off, there’s a good chance he’ll turn up to the primary debates in a 300ft mechanised dinosaur suit that breathes carbon-neutral fire.

He’s going to have a good run and I’d be surprised if he didn’t make it to the final two. That said, I think he did as well as he could on the last run and won’t make it all the way to the candidacy itself.

There’s a line of reasoning that he’ll be able to rally disenfranchised anti-establishment voters who went for Trump last time. I think that’s ignoring how vast a distance there is between them on basically every other issue. Yes, the anti-establishment drive is currently a powerful motivating factors in politics. But “I’ll vote for an admitted sex-pest and probable psychopath” strong? Then swing towards a guy who disagrees with him on literally everything? I don’t think so.

Like Warren, Sanders is up for re-election in this year’s midterms. However, unlike her he won his last election with a 47% lead. He could afford to lose a full 20% at the ballot box and still have a straight majority for Vermont.

Elizabeth Warren

Until today, I thought Warren was a contender for strongest candidate. Without wanting to get too reductionist about this, I’m going to. She has:

• Academic accomplishments
• Some cross-party economic credentials
• A vagina

This means she has strong appeal to people who like Obama, swing-voters and anti-Trump independents, and Hilary supporters. Much of the US (the bits that don’t vote Trump) is ready for a female president, which will bring pressures to bear that shouldn’t be underestimated. She’s articulate and passionate.

But… she’s fucked it. She has engaged Trump on his own terms. She’s now engaged with an argument over facts with a man who has no regard for facts. He will lie, he will belittle, he will launch all sorts of challenges and attacks. And because she’s started to respond, she has two options: respond in kind or lose.

There’s an adage that I believe to be entirely true: never argue with an idiot, because they’ll drag you down to their level and then beat you with experience. Warren has started the argument. The publicity will now show her either losing (bad) or turning into Trump (worse). The former mobilises his base, the latter keeps her own at home in disgust.

With a majority of less than 10%, polls are likely to get her scrambling to hold her seat in the upcoming midterms. If she doesn’t win that with a resounding (ideally larger) majority, her shot at the White House is probably done for.

Joe Biden

Please. Please, Joe. Not only would I love to see Biden as president, I’d be a very happy man just watching him run a campaign. He has very little time for idiots. He considers his (potential) presidential opponent to be the Sultan of Fuckwits. He’s witty, erudite, and generally extremely likeable.

More importantly though, he’s got plenty of other, less subjective things going for him. He isn’t rich, living a notably modest life and having no investment interests of any kind. That keeps him away from Wall Street. He’s Catholic, which is specific enough to impress the (worryingly large) fraction of the electorate that care about leaders with ‘real’ religious affiliation. His record with the blue-collar vote is pretty good, which gives him some traction against a perceived Trump stronghold vote across key states.

The negatives? It’s all-too possible that he’ll say something that can be spun into a disaster. His relationship with Obama is a double-edged sword, likely to please many but also enrage others. He hasn’t won a ‘normal’ Senate election since 2008, which while he took with a nearly 20% margin was still a long time ago. I also think there’s a chance he might just… not run. He should. And he’s been making some of the right noise. But I just get this feeling he might wave it away.

Michael Bloomberg

He’s rich. Really, really rich. He has the kind of money that makes Trump writhe with insecurity – over $50,000,000,000 and counting. In the political environment of the United States, that gives him a lot of literal buying power that make him a realistic prospect.

He’s (sort of) a political outsider, but the kind that has experience: he’s never been in the Senate or House, but as 3-term mayor of New York will be seen to have earned his wings. During this time, he was a registered Republican and then Independent. Now looking to make a name for himself bringing the Democrats ‘back to the centre’* he should have strong swing-vote appeal.

On possibly the most interesting note, he has perhaps unparalleled capacity to troll Trump into full self-destruct mode. He ran the city Trump only ever boasted about influencing. He is the kind of rich that Trump wishes he could prove himself to be. He has won actual majorities in elections. He even shares the coughcoughcough honour of being endorsed by Rudi Giuliani.

In the very least, he has the potential of being a really interesting candidate. I think a big drawback for him will be that he’s very establishment, which means there’s likely to be a bruising primary run between him and Bernie “88 miles per hour” Sanders. The Democrats have a tendancy to end up buggering their presidential election odds due to a combination of brutal primaries and fudged messaging. That could be a danger for Bloomberg. But, on the other hand, fifty billion dollars. So let’s call it a toss-up and see how it goes.

Summary

I’ve missed loads. There will quite possibly be as many as a dozen Democrats running for the candidacy. In some cases, the outcome of the midterms will be the deciding factor of how far their bids go. For others, it might be how they respond to Trump’s playbook. I think the above are the most serious contenders from one of the three sides of the fence.

Who’ll win? At this point, I don’t give a shit. I’d be happy to see a slice of reformed ham elected if it meant Trump was out of office. But in the next couple of weeks we will see who sees themselves as contenders and (perhaps more importantly) who Trump sees as a threat.

*Only in the US could they be considered to have ever left it. Unless you take the reasonable view that they never reached it, due to still sitting significantly to the right of the centre throughout their entire political history.

I broke a toe once. If you know me, I’ve probably regaled you with the story before. If you knew me at the time, you will definitely have heard it. And there’s the story of the scar on my arm, from when I was drunkenly mucking about with a very sharp knife. Or the one on my brow, from where I drunkenly fell down a flight of stairs straight into a radiator.

Then there’s the classic about how I did my back in, jumping off what was either a huge sand dune or a small cliff. I was sober for that one and it was the worst, so I view the other injuries as proof I learned that lesson. A bit late, as it had a huge and lasting impact on my life, but I’m calling it a deferred success.

What you might not have heard is the story about those stories. Why I was drunk so frequently, and to such an extent that I kept injuring myself. Not the back – that was just garden variety stupidity. But the reason behind the rest? I don’t tend to talk about that. But I’m happy to embellish and retell the story of how I broke two of my toes. What a world we live in, eh?

And that’s the reason World Mental Health Day is an embarrassment to our society. We shouldn’t need it in the way we do. I’m happy to tell the story about licking a tent and getting dysentery, shitting myself half-to-death in a campsite toilet until a French doctor stabbed me in the bum with a needle.  But I don’t talk about my me. That’s much too embarrassing.

We don’t have a World Shit Yourself Inside-Out Day or a World Broken Bones Day. Everyone does those things at some point. Everybody knows they suck. We’re okay with them. And the bigger scary things like cancer get their own day, to remind people that there are others less fortunate than them, struggling with some awful circumstances. These we talk about and spend serious money trying to prevent and cure. And the less severe stuff we can even brag and joke about. Breaking those three toes is one of my finest anecdotes.

World Mental Health Day isn’t like that. Its main purpose isn’t to remind others; it is to try to convince the people who suffer mental health issues that it is okay to talk about it. Their own. The stories that they don’t share. The stories that might be the story behind all the other stories. The ones they seek to hide or excuse or minimise.

I’m lucky. I have a great family, an inspirational and phenomenally patient wife-to-be, amazing kids, and life now is very different for me. I am not alone, and I can afford to choose not to talk about things that make me feel uncomfortable. I can and do when I need to. I’m extremely fortunate to have such a life.

But we shouldn’t live in a world where we need to tell people it’s okay to talk about their pain. It’s very far from fine that in any given year 25% of people suffer alone because there’s so much shame attached to suffering any other way. It’s reprehensible that mental health services are so underfunded that any talk of ‘breaking point’ is firmly in the past tense.

As a society, we spend millions on treating physical ills. If I were to guess, I’d say this is because we’re all aware that at some point we will die. Most people would like that to be later rather than sooner. They are to some extent or another afraid to die. But what about those who think sooner might be a welcome relief?

The truth is there are tens of millions of people in this country who are afraid to really live. The thing that scares them most is themselves. And by stigmatising them into remaining silent, we’re forcing them into an existence where ‘themselves’ is all they have.

It’s the same invisible social contract that means I can laugh over the story of the time I broke eight of my toes, but I don’t talk about the hourless, minuteless, boundless nights, the fear and panic and weird mania. Or the fact that while it’s obvious by this point that the story about my toes might not be strictly true, people might not stop to think the same about the one with the knife.

If you need to talk, find someone to listen. Even if you only do it so others can feel more confident in doing so themselves. I can all but guarantee you that the people who love you desperately want you to, even if they don’t know that yet.

You can read more and donate to Mind here.

There is more than one kind of tragedy. They have a taxonomy, a scale.

We can zoom out from them and see an ever-growing pattern of tragedy. Depending on how we view it, one event may be understandable as more than a single tragedy. In fact, rarely if ever do we see a truly isolated example.

What has happened in Las Vegas is one of these. It is an atrocity in its magnitude, but the horror is just as great when you zoom in as when you zoom out. Each individual death is a tragedy. The whole set of events is a tragedy. The circumstances that brought it about and the response to it are just a parts of a much larger story, itself tragic.

At the time of writing this, it still isn’t known what provoked Stephen Paddock to devastate a Las Vegas music festival. It may not ever be known. In many ways, it doesn’t matter. Of course, in many other ways it does matter. I’m not dismissing those ways. But for now at least, I could offer only unhelpful speculation.

In the ways it doesn’t matter, there’s more to be said. In one area in particular, I think there’s too little being said, too quietly. This is thanks to the NRA’s favourite political chaff; it’s not the time to talk about politics, we shouldn’t seek political capital from such horrible circumstances, let’s just come together while feelings subside. Don’t politicise their deaths.

It’s a singularly unpleasant and dishonest argument.

What it does is shut down debate at the time debate would most likely harm the NRA’s interests. It is an indirect admission that if the question is asked when people are looking at it most keenly, the conclusions they’ll reach aren’t one the gun lobby like very much. It uses what is decent in people against themselves. It’s like retroviral evil.

Of course, they will come back later and shamelessly politicise it themselves. One of their favourite arguments at this point is the ‘good guy with a gun’. The attack in Vegas is another example of a good guy with a gun failing to stop an attack. As are all the previous attacks. There’s a notable lack of examples where a good guy with a gun actually ever has stopped an attack. I’d have thought the NRA would be shouting these from the rooftops, so their absence strikes me as suspicious.

The absurdity of that should be obvious to anyone who isn’t outright brainwashed by far-right propaganda. The problem isn’t that there aren’t enough guns in the right hands. The problem is there are too many guns in the wrong hands. That’s why more US citizens have been killed by domestic gun violence than every war the country has ever fought. It’s why after 275 days of 2017, there had been 273 mass shootings in the US. It’s why there have been half a million Americans killed by domestic gun violence in the past 18 years.

But we shouldn’t be getting to that stage of the argument. The arguments are still bad, but they should never get the chance to be taken off the shelf. The debate shouldn’t be shut down by virtue-signalling shills for the firearms industry in the first place. Yes, now is exactly the time to discuss it. We absolutely should be politicising it. Why? Because that is what politics is for.

The US is a country born of violent revolution. That was the capitalising of political power off the back of many deaths. It is a country united following a very bloody civil war. Should the north have won the war and then left the Confederate states to continue undisturbed, out of respect for the dead? Maybe slavery should have been allowed to continue, as it wasn’t the time to talk politics.

If it isn’t to bring about changes that protect its people, why should governments have any political power at all? If preventing genocidal levels* of deaths isn’t a good reason to act, what is? Looking at the evidence, the answers seem to be things like “gay marriage”. I wish I hadn’t asked. Maybe the terrible illiteracy amongst the far right has conjured up tales of the fearsome Unabummer.

For some context, let’s look at 2014 – recent enough for relevance, long enough ago for accurate data. In this year there were 4,605 deaths from influenza. Isn’t it grossly offensive to discuss healthcare changes in light of all those people who’re dying from flu?

For the same year, there were 12,571 gun deaths. Some might say that 2014 wasn’t an outbreak year and we spend to prevent those. Well it wasn’t an outbreak year for gun deaths, either.

Over 100,000 people seek medical treatment for gunshot-related injuries every year. It costs nearly $2.5 billion dollars in healthcare to treat them.

During 2016, the NRA spent just over $50 million in political donations. For every $1 they spent, Americans with health insurance pay at least $50 on increased premiums. Yet NRA members are up in arms – often literally – when they’re asked to pick up the tab for others. Usually for being selfishly poor or born with health problems.

This level of violence isn’t normal. None of these attacks have been prevented by other people having guns. None of these people have been brought back by respectful silence on the cause of their death.

Allowing lobbyists to influence politics to protect their own profits, all at the cost of the country at large, isn’t normal. Those profits don’t go to the victims or their families. It’s laughable to think they ever will.

So yes, we should be talking about it now. Right now. There should be a screaming match in Congress over it. Laws should be changed. Not just to restrict access to guns, but to restrict access to politicians. If lunatics find it harder to get guns, there will be less heavily armed lunatics on the streets. If lobbyists find it harder to reach politicians, there will be less heavily bribed lunatics in government.

The true believers won’t understand or even consciously process a single word of this. They don’t care.

And while they continue not caring, tens of thousands more people will die.

*If this sounds hyperbolic, it isn’t. Estimates of the deaths attributable to the Armenian Genocide sit between 600,000 and 1,500,000 over around a decade. This isn’t all that far from the 500,000 over 18 years referenced earlier.