Member-only story
Today is the UK’s General Election
So why am I so desperately afraid?
Today, while my American cousins are celebrating their independence from Britain, my own countryfolk and I are similarly seeking liberation. This is the second general election since I came out as trans five years ago, but this is also the first time in my adult life that I won’t be voting.
This is odd because I’m the daughter of a working class family who grew up in a northern English town made up entirely of such families who, throughout the 80s during which I was a teen, found themselves the perpetual victims of Thatcher’s reshaping of Britain from a manufacturing and industrial giant of the world into a nation dependent on the meagre largesse of a newly, and entirely artificially grown reliance on borderless financial wrangling. During the 80s the only hope my family and so many like it was the power of our vote. Then, as now, we’d had a decade and a half of Conservative policy killing us by a thousand cuts. Then, as now, we find ourselves the proud owners of fuck-all. Every promise the right-wing Conservative party ever made to the British electorate is laid plain as the base dross it always was. Then it was the promise of home ownership (at the cost of a never-since replaced social housing stock) and of owning part of the businesses in which we worked, those of us lucky enough to have jobs, which in 80s Merseyside where I grew up, and indeed still reside, was few enough of us as to constitute a cutting to the bone of our useful labour.
In recent years it was the bright, shining promise of Brexit. Brexit, for the few who missed this once-in-a-lifetime display of self-destructive stupidity, was my country’s exit from the biggest single common market on the planet. That such a move was only ever going to actually serve those who already had plenty and could amass more without the pesky regulations of the European Union, and those who believed such a move would deliver on their basest, most racist impulses just makes the move all the more evil.
That the entire gamble of a plebiscite of such magnitude was predicated on the mistaken belief that rolling the dice was worth the risk so the Tory party could rid themselves of a loathsome, and increasingly vocal, splinter party, the United Kingdom Independence Party (UKIP) makes this mass shooting of one’s own…
