Recently – a mere 26 months ago – I wrote about the decline of Western neo-liberal democracy. I know that because I just re-read the piece, having totally forgotten where I’d left off.

I’m glad I did, though. The events that have recently beaten my brain like an opinion-stuffed piñata are disturbingly similar in tone.

For a politics junkie – even a somewhat-recovering one like me – the events of the last few weeks of British politics have been like high-grade fentanyl.

But what do they mean? I’m doubtless not the only person asking myself that. It’s equally probable my answers are no better than anyone else’s. However, writing them down helps me think them through, so I thought I’d share it with everyone. Lucky you.

Anyway.

Last week, Liz Truss finally made contact with reality. A stoppable force meeting an immovable object. It was an experience apparently so traumatic for her that it triggered an uncharacteristically rational reaction: she immediately quit.

Which is geat, but begs two fundamental questions: how did we get here and where do we go next?

The Price of Huboris

As I might have touched on before, I think western politics has become severely disassociated. Ideology, hubris, and confirmation bias have spawned a writhing knot of problems, all competing with each other for the title of One Big Thing that we can all blame for why everything is so shit.

After years in opposition, the Conservatives returned to power with a renewed image. Seemingly having learned from what caused their downfall over a decade before, David Cameron ousted a floundering and directionless New Labour government on a platform of ‘compassionate conservatism’.

It wasn’t actually a bad idea, particularly in the still-hot afterglow of the 2008 financial crisis; a synthesis of fiscal prudence and new-found consideration to those who bear the uneven brunt of collective hardship. At the time, it seemed like a recognition that while we weren’t all in it together, we should be.

Unfortunately, that impession didn’t last long. Ill-tuned austerity measures quickly made it clear that some of us very much were in it together far more than others. Internal party politics were transformed into national schism – and in the view of many, self-mutilation – in the form of Brexit. Divisions between pragmatism and idealism paralysed our politics for several years. ‘Policy’ in the sense of “collective program of change” was replaced with ‘policy’ in the sense of “one issue over which everyone is ready to kill each other”.

This was a huge problem, regardless of which side of the Brexit debate you were on. Functionally, we didn’t have a government that was governing. For three years.

But eventually, one side won out. We had an election. Labour put forward someone’s well-meaning but painfully out-of-touch uncle, recently dragged from his allotment. The Tories put forward a bloviating sockful of monomaniacal porridge. It was only ever going to go one way.

Likewise, it was no surprise to anyone with even the tiniest crumb of insight when Boris entirely failed to keep a lid on his own inherent dreadfulness. But by then, he’d helped one fringe of the party – the same fringe as the referendum had been intended to keep in check – to win. Their ideas were the best ideas. Everybody said so. They had a mandate. It was huge.

Sound familiar?

The Idea-ocracy

When everything fell apart, many of us watched our despair dissolve into despondent apathy as it became obvious that same fringe would seize power. Liz Truss was a Trojan Horse built of glass and shamelessness, pushed up to the gates of reality by the now-ennobled far right of the Tories. The same people Cameron’s Compassionate Conservative and ill-judged referendum had meant to reduce to the irrelevance which they surely deserve.

And this was because Liz Truss was steeped in the same stuff as those who’d originally pushed for Brexit. They didn’t want freedom for the people. They wanted freedom to practice their own neo-Randian economic theories of disaster capitalism and unfettered market opportunism.

What had happened was there’d been an ideological snowball: the success of conservatism outsing Labour, it then freeing itself of coalition governance, the far right of it hammering through Brexit, and the resounding defeat of Corbynite Labour ensuring that was a very hard Brexit. They were unstoppable. It wasn’t whether the Tories should be in power; it was which part of the party was contributing the most to this relentless success. For them.

None of this had anything to do with how things were going in the real world. It can’t have had, because things had been getting ever-more-rapidly worse for years. It was just ideas, being bounced around in the echo-chamber of the parliamentary Conservative Party – occasionally checking in with the even less-grounded groups like the party membership – and being spat out in the form of legislative agenda.

This is, in every aspect of any significance, memetics. Not just ideology, but idea-ocracy: government by whoever’s ideas excited the greatest response from a tiny, self-selecting portion of the actual electorate. Shut out all the other ideas and just see which one of a small pool manages to out-compete the rest.

And that’s how we’ve got here. Ideas that aren’t checked against reality might well be very stupid ideas or very good ones. The idea you should run a country based on ideas that haven’t been checked against reality is definitely a very stupid one.

The world isn’t a thinktank. The free exploration of ideas is good. The free implementation of them without scrutiny is not.

We’ve Had Enough of ‘Experts’

The ideas behind what we’ve been plunged into – Trussonomics, libertarian free market economics, Chicago-School disaster capitalism – are just that: ideas. They aren’t theories in any scientific sense, because there’s no prior testing or attempt at falsification. We can’t even envision any remotely credible conditions in which they could be tested.

The closest they’ve got to being trialled aren’t exactly shining examples of supporting evidence. For example, while Chile saw a massive macro-economic boom when many of these ideas were implemented, those same changes drove what is now the most extreme socio-economic inequality of any OECD member state.

Being generous, they’re mere hypotheses, with us being the lab rats upon which they’re being tested. Being less so, they’re a toxic broth of self-interest and blind faith. But because the people behind them have talked about them a lot – mostly to each other – we must accept those people are ‘experts’. The Institute for Economic Affairs, the Taxpayers’ Alliance, and the self-identified members of the Chicago School of Economics itself. Throughout their ‘consultations’, nobody in these exclusive lobbying groups ever breathed anything but each others’ farts.

Meanwhile, actual experts have been villified and ignored. For years, they’ve been warning of the exact things we’re now seeing. Indeed, right up until she finally threw in the towels – her own and those of her two main appointments – Truss and her clique of ideological sycophants were deriding these experts as nay-saying control-freaks. Evidence has been pushed into a corner, lest it interfere with agendas cooked up in the self-satisfied, steamy heat of glorified private members clubs.

So, it clearly isn’t working. Hasn’t worked. Never was going to work. But what now?

More Experts, Please

We need to get back to reality. Our politics needs to be once again rooted in the interests of the people which it exists to serve. Those people need to have access to reliable, clear, fact-based information to inform those interests. Create a society of Citizen-Experts; not academic theorists, but informed and invested stakeholders.

This is such a basic, formulaic expression of what politics should be that it’s a matter of great dismay that it even needs stating. Writing it feels like an exercise in platitude.

But at the same time, it is true and it is most certainly not the status quo. We don’t need revolutionary ideas that will reinvent society, rushed through via shock & awe. We need considered, progressive, informed decisions that are focused on long-term improvement for everyone, rather than short-term political gain or recklessly testing the wishful thinking of lobbyists.

It didn’t work with Marx, it hasn’t worked with Freidman. Societies and economies do not and cannot adapt that quickly, no matter how much bunce opportunists and speculators might make along the way.

And beyond anything else, we need an election. Any discussion of mandates, regaining trust, repairing reputations or anything else of the sort is sophistry without one. Because, if we’re going to start out as we mean to go on, we should be testing our ideas before going forward.

Currently, the biggest and most pressing idea of all is that the Conservatives have the backing of the nation to continue governing it. If our democracy isn’t broken, the Conservatives themselves should trust that mechanism.

And if it is broken, well… we know whose watch that happened on.

It’s with an acute sense of despair that I’m increasingly convinced Donald Trump is not only going to have another term as president, but quite possibly a third as well. It is starting to seem inevitable. I hope I’m wrong, but to explain – at great length – I’ve tried to piece together my reasoning below.

Note: this is not only of the scattershot quality of my usual rambles, but also profoundly not funny. So if you came here thinking “hot shit, Steve has put out another one of his uniquely hysterical topical rants”, I’d recommend turning back now and perhaps seeking professional help. On the other hand, if you’ve got any interest in political philosophy and how we ended up living in a poorly-written parody of our own society, grab a snack and buckle up.

West is Best

Francis Fukuyama released The End of History and the Last Man in 1992. Contextualising the rise of liberal democracy and fall of communism, it was a major success, widely regarded by many as a sort of collective celebration of the twin successes of democracy and capitalism. We had, with the fall of the Soviet Union, the liberation of Eastern Europe, and the close transatlantic intertwinement we call the West, finally ‘won’ history. Everything to come was just bookkeeping.

As with most political philosophy, a lot of words were used to make this central point: liberal democracy is the end point of social, political, economic, and cultural evolution. All of history has been a slow, bloody progression towards this. It therefore follows that extending such a system to encompass the entire human race is the last step towards a kind of utopian Best Possible World.

Yes, there might be long periods of regression, but fundamentally we would see a trend towards (specifically) US-style liberal democracy as a final state of political enlightenment. Everyone else couldn’t help but fall into line with this model and, in the interests of the human race, it would be better that this happen comprehensively and quickly.

It was a desire to advance the whole planet to this idyllic state of post-history that underpinned much of (particularly US) foreign policy throughout the 1990s and 2000s. While it descended into a mocking trope, there was genuinely a sense that the solution to problems such as those found in the Middle East at the time was simply ‘more freedom’. If those people were freer, everything else would follow.

Freedom Isn’t Free (and Cannot be Given)

There were three key problems with this thinking. First, it fell foul of exactly the same kind of naivety as seeded the eventual collapse of Communism; that when freed from external pressures, people will gravitate towards rationality, compassion, and fairness. Not only does history show quite clearly that this has never really been the case, but it also assumes that the only external pressures on a society stem from its form of government.

This leads to the second – and most easily missed – problem. That is: there is only one sort of freedom and liberal democracy naturally maximises it. In fact, there are many things to be free of and it has become increasingly clear that liberal democracy may well severely exacerbate some of those things. The biggest being the fact freedom in general may well lead to exploitation at the (mass) individual level. Your living in poverty is justified by my freedom to make enormous profits.

We ignored the fact that these pressures can be just as great as those imposed by the state. It was a strange disconnection between government and society, as if the former is the sole source of problems in the latter. Or, perhaps, it was a childishly optimistic belief that we had found a system that wasn’t zero-sum, where we could have winners without losers and the height of the wins would not deepen the depths of the losses.

Thirdly and, to be honest, blindingly obviously, is the fact that people tend to dislike having anything imposed on them. Yes, their current government may be imposing all sorts of shit on them already, but it is their government. Your government coming along and imposing something else – even if under the aegis of that something else being better – is no less an imposition and, importantly, is a culturally external one.

Anyway, aside from a number of avoidable disasters and atrocities, the damaging implications of this kind of thinking for the West took a little longer to manifest. They can be summed up fairly neatly in two words: hubris and complacency. The Western world had ‘completed’ socio-politics and was now in an unassailable position from which it could generously spread the Good Word.

There is one other very important implication of all this, which helps to fuel that complacency: there is no progression from liberal democracy. Events still happen, but History does not, because it lacks any social or political future state into which it can unfold.

The Last Man

Back in the good old days when George W Bush was the worst president in living memory, some sort of conservative-evangelical nadir from which we must surely rebound, opposition to Western exceptionalism was not focused on what we were, but on how we were going about spreading it to everyone else. There wasn’t much question that we should promote liberal democracy in the form we were practicing it. It wasn’t suggested there was anything more on the home front than the odd wrinkle which needed smoothing out. That we were arrogantly feeding the festering rot that would bring about our own demise was certainly not a popular view on either side of the political centre. However…

An unwillingness to address the inequalities of liberal democracy has lead to widespread suffering, discontent, and disengagement from political reality. Governments have been reluctant – either out of self-interest or fear of perceived heavy-handedness – to grapple with problems such as voter turnout, media bias, or holding elected officials to meaningful account when they fall short of the high standards to which they should rightly be held.

This in turn has led to endemic disenfranchisement in a system that is not only reliant on but justifies itself through people being engaged, informed, and invested in the outcomes of political decisions. Usually but not always via elections. It has also allowed media bias to turn into mass manipulation via deliberate misinformation. And as a reflection of the very inequality that fueled this fire in the first place, it has enabled the political elite to exist in a bubble where accountability and consequences are abstract concepts. Want to lie to win an election or sway public opinion? Go for it. Nothing bad will happen to you. In fact, you can get out of it by just telling another lie. Nothing bad will happen to you for that, either.

The public front of this is the two faces of Fake News. On one side of the coin is the real fake news, which is to say lies used to shape public opinion. On the other side of the coin is the concept of fake news, which is used to undermine the real news when it looks like it might itself shape public opinion in a way not to your liking. This used to be called propaganda, but we don’t call it that anymore because to do so would be to draw painfully sharp attention to the fact we are not free. That we in fact exist within a perpetual Orwellian loop of incrementally better-sanitised oppression.

Which brings us to the Last Man, the archetypal human being best adapted to thriving at the End of History. In the cartoon version of this world, as painted by Fukuyama and co, such a person was an educated, ambitious, enlightened missionary of The Truth. In practice, the Last Man is privileged to such a point as being unaccountable no matter what their actions, opportunistically dishonest whenever it suits their narrative, and fundamentally hostile to the very idea of a well-informed and actively engaged electorate. Their ability to remain above the law is dependent on a combination of preventing as many people as possible from voting and ensuring those that do are as misinformed by propaganda as possible.

… And the End of History

It doesn’t take too much of a leap to work out to what the above alludes. In Donald Trump and the general rise of populist nepotism in the West, we are seeing exactly that evolutionary tale unfold. By being unwilling to staunchly, impartially defend the system, we have destroyed it. And that is something increasingly blamed on the American population, for allowing this to happen.

But the reality is not so simple as that. Firstly, any population which is already at risk of manipulation is by definition already ill-equipped to defend itself against it. There most certainly is a case for scathing criticism of those in the US who’ve deliberately and systematically undermined concepts such as evidence, accountability, and equality. That is not in question. But it’s also important to understand that many of the people who voted for Trump did so as victims rather than perpetrators.

Blaming people for not voting when they can’t afford – or even get – the time off work to do so is asking them to put an abstract ideal over the wellbeing of them and their families. Expecting people who grew up indoctrinated into violently polarised identity politics to just turn off those fundamental, life-long beliefs and act impartially to defend the system isn’t realistic. Especially – and this is the foulest trick the US political system has pulled on its own voters – when the violently polarised identity into which you were born is one which was taught you the system is your enemy.

Secondly, the rest of the West has sat idly by, unwilling to intervene. Nobody here has placed sanctions on the US as it has descended into a nightmare of propaganda, economic exploitation, and terminal Stage-4 Imperial inequity and decadence. The very top-most members of the elite have not faced personal asset-freezes, travel-bans or other consequences for their now monumental abuse and defilement of liberal democracy. Yet, had these people been from Iran or Russia, exactly those measures would have been taken.

So, while bemoaning the fact the US is being consumed by a poison of its own concoction, we’ve done nothing to help avert it. Indeed, we’ve been slowly administering it to ourselves, our unwillingness to act on those challenges at home implicit in our refusal to address them elsewhere. Suicide nets around Chinese mega-factories are greeted with abhorrence, when really the key difference between that and the most impoverished workforces in the West is we allow ours to go and kill themselves at home. Russia’s shameless interference with elections on both sides of the Atlantic are decried but not investigated or properly addressed, because doing so would make it harder for our homegrown despots to do the same. But don’t worry, because we’re a liberal democracy and therefore just somehow better than those places. The same rules don’t apply. Somehow, the problems with them are greater than any we might have here.

History is Written by the Victors

All this, with some degree of irony, just highlights the truth of the oft-repeated claim our understanding of history is inherently exceptionalist. It started with the Greeks and Romans, then evolved to the Western liberal democracies of Europe and the US. Everyone else, by this view, is just dragging their feet, lagging behind, lost in the socio-cultural foothills.

But the Fukuyaman end of that history has turned out to not be an evolutionary apex; it is a dead end, an illusion that distracts from the real end of history, whereby the rest of the world finally forces itself into our narrative and reveals that deception. We are left staring at the uncomfortable fact evolution favours multiple branches and that the one we’re on has left us poorly placed to survive and seemingly unable to adapt.

Our incessant, uncritical consumption of media has been the proverbial lead in our water. Confirmation bias has amplified the negative news about how other places are terrible, while reinforcing the positive news that we’re doing things just great. Pretending there was no enemy within, we have allowed it to blossom and flourish, in turn exposing us to the enemies without. They don’t care about truth, freedom, equality, compassion or anything else once held to be liberal or democratic.

But, watching us over recent decades, the regrettable truth they see – and we have not – is that we don’t either. Which is why the president of the United States can brazenly admit he wants to underfund the postal system in order to help him win an election that, under anything like fair and free circumstances, he looks certain to lose. It is why he is surrounded by a party that will excuse anything and everything he does, up to and including rape or avoidable mass casualties, in order to cling to power. And it is why the rest of us are, really, just tutting and shaking our heads about how bad things are next door as a distraction from the fact the exact same things are happening at home.

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.

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.