Resistance is Futile

Let’s begin with a couple of bold assertions:

1.       Nigel Farage is what happens when your political parties are rotten and disconnected from the people who are expected to vote for them.

2.       Ed Miliband is what happens to a political party and its leader when everything about your parliamentary party has to be geared towards winning a few hundred thousand votes in key marginals, across mostly the midlands and south of England. Allow me this further ranty type observation on Ed, he’s an injection molded, soulless  manifestation of a “leader” that media analaysts and party strategists think certain sorts of voters won’t want to hang. So are Dave and Nick.

Farage and those injection moldings we have as party leaders are politically connected. The politics of our union offers Ed Miliband, David Cameron and Nick Clegg as leaders we’re meant to believe will identify what’s wrong with our British world and put it right, or at least have a good bash at doing so. That’s the sort of thing an ideology used to give us in quick cultural shorthand – “a political party believes society has X problems and must do Y in order to make a better future that will look like Z”. In very broad terms that used to translate as Labour will pursue “socialist”/social democratic type policies, the Tories will support business and try to veil their inherent racism, and the Liberals will be nice – sort of Greens without a purpose.

Well the Liberals lost their niceness, the Tories stayed the same and the Labour party became the Tories with cheaper suits. There is no vision, no future, no way the world should be, just a bland acceptance that capitalism is a natural law of the universe and the best we can manage is leaving soulless clones to fiddle with its levers.

Ed Miliband tells me he’ll freeze energy prices or give transport companioes a jolly big row and I find myself screaming at the telly “but I want you to nationalise them!”. You might not be screaming the same thing, but I know you’re screaming, right? Right. And Ed’s the one I’m supposed to like.

Then there’s Dave. Dave tells me the NHS is safe in his hands, does anyone believe him? Anything he says? Trust his motives? Feel some bond of kinship or sense of fellow-traveller on the good ship UK? No me neither.  I’ll leave aside descriptions of the telly-watching/responding scene when Dave’s on. Rest assured it’s not pretty. 

Lastly of course there’s Nick. I can’t remember experiencing Nick Clegg in any way whatsoever since he replaced that decent sounding bloke with the red hair. When Nick tells me anything I fail to care. He’s the neutrino of the political world, except I don’t despise neutrinos for being so weak and poor at interacting – top physics gag there. Yass!

Those are the leaders of our main UK political parties, our supposed vehicles for hope and change.   Seriously, does anyone believe they’re capable, or even remotely interested in big change? I can’t be alone in thinking the three of them, and currently their parties, could not be further from the sort of thing I want or feel is necessary in terms of representing my political life and aspirations.

And when our leaders, their parties and our whole political system lets us down this way? Cue Nigel Farage as a walking, talking two fingered salute to the British political establishment. He captures the same rancour, pissed offness and spite about the world and what it does to us as the London riots (other cities were available for rioting activities too).

Nigel Farage is a riot, and not just in the photo mugging, blokey, jokey, smokey,  down the pub sense either. He’s a physical embodiment of the outburst of “free speech” we saw when London kids rioted. Farage just lets older people smash and burn their “town”/England in a “fuck this” political sort of way. It’s lashing out, it’s blaming others, it’s visceral and raw. What it really is though is bloody worrying if I am expecting Ed Miliband and the Labour party to sort it out by painting a vision of the future that gives hope.

Goodness that’s a bleak picture I paint. If only there was some political mechanism I could use to change things.

Stevie