Struggling to Engage

Update, 09/06/17: I am so happy to be wrong about my Corbyn predictions in the post below.

The UK is leaving the EU. A surprise general election has been called. Events are moving faster than ever before. It should be an exciting time. I should be watching the news, and eagerly reading the broadsheets. Yet for some reason — despite remaining fascinated by politics— I’m struggling to care.

A colleague struck up a conversation in the kitchen the other day about politics. They’d been told that I’d finished a degree last year and they’d wondered what my views on the election were. For the first time in a while, I struggled to answer. I mumbled something about how “a lot was happening these days” then just wandered off with my coffee in hand.

The current standard of debate is so far below the bar we should expect of our media and political class it’s quite honestly difficult to take it seriously.

Corbyn is a nice enough man with a long history of being on the correct and moral side of the argument, yet his every mistake is pored over in great detail by the media, making it hard for anything he says to gain traction. In a party filled with stuffed shirts parroting the same old centre-left policies, desperately and hopelessly attempting to appeal to Tory and UKIP voters who would never vote Labour — and driving away their natural supporters to boot — his election (and re-election) was inevitable.

Corbyn’s tenure as the party leader also goes to show just how much power the tabloid press in Britain still wields, despite the significant amount they have ceded to social media and various clickbait peddlers. If the Sun and Mail throw enough shit, some will continue to stick. Corbyn’s own gaffes, lack of coordination amongst his team and party infighting do little to help his campaign avoid becoming a mere sideshow, sadly doomed to failure. It is thought that this election may destroy the party, but the divisions currently threatening this have long been present (Miliband just about managed to keep things at bay, to his credit, despite floundering in a similar way). The only bit of positive news is that it can hardly get worse once this is all over with.

The Tory party on the other hand looks to gain big from this election, due more to the fractured and sclerotic opposition parties than through their own competence. Their history of keeping internal division at bay by bottling-up their dissent has also been of benefit during an EU referendum which could​ have otherwise caused a major rift.

Support from the media also helps them significantly, with May holding a bizarre and completely unjustified reputation as a “safe pair of hands”. Labour policies derided by the tabloids as loony-left nonsense not so long ago (such as the cap on energy bills) are lauded when proposed in an almost identical way by the Tories. There are very few ways to fight this kind of batshit hypocrisy.

Then there’s Brexit, which I have no doubt will be a massive act of economic self-harm. It is rather a bizarre spectacle watching a prime minister gradually implementing something that not a single living prime minister thinks is a good idea, including herself. She may well emerge eternally damaged by the negotiation process, but she’ll have plenty of time to try and recover, and she can always blame the EU for anything which goes awry. The public are also likely to let their patriotism blind them to the harsh realities of the withdrawal process, and forgive a multitude of sins. However if Labour doesn’t get it’s act together following Corbyn’s inevitable resignation in June, May could find herself in the job even longer.

Seismic things are happening to the country. Yet the standard of debate continues to scrape the barrel. There’s an obsession with trivial minutiae which only becomes more pronounced as the years go by: do they look silly when eating a bacon sandwich? Did they bow down sufficiently when stood at the Cenetaph? Can you drink Costa Coffee and still be working class?

Who — I ask in utter desperation — gives a flying fuck.

There are huge and pressing issues facing the UK in 2017. The housing crisis, a struggling NHS, an epidemic of homelessness, the effects of benefits being treated as low-hanging fruit when cuts were forced on councils and Whitehall departments, along with increasing economic and wage stagnation since the 1980s, to name but a few. Immigration is still blamed for everything despite being a net gain both to society and the economy on almost every metric you could measure against, and even the left is afraid to say it for fear of offending an increasing xenophobic electorate.

Politicians and commentators spent much of the coalition government talking about how Labour had plunged the country into debt, yet the Conservatives spent vastly more than the previous labour government ever did and this garners the barest mention in our current discourse.

This is partly a result of the breakdown of the divisions between left and right which has occurred over the last decade or so. The natural appeal which each party held within a related demographic of voter (by class, locality, age, etc) has ceased. It seems hard for anyone to lay out a coherent political doctrine these days either from the left or the right. Ad-hoc politics seems to be the new norm.

For all these reasons and many more, I find it increasingly difficult to care about what is being discussed during this election cycle. When we start talking about political theory again, when we start talking in detail about proposed policies and their effects, when we start talking about how to make the country a better place through spending and laws and the various other changes our politicians can make using the power we elected them to wield, rather than a stream of empty rhetoric, perhaps I’ll care once more.

As for the opposition: when they can propose a workable solution to the problems of contemporary capitalism (Corbyn’s mild and somewhat confused social democracy simply doesn’t cut it), when they can set out a vision of a different Britain, then I’ll campaign for them.

Until then I’ll be here, keeping my head down and wishing it would all go away.