In my first fumbling attempts at blogging my Indyref mental turmoil I said “hiya!” and then admitted that I’d given up on the United Kingdom before disappearing up my nether regions about my discomfort with nationalism . I’ll return to the nationalism/ist bit in due course. I want to have a wee think about why I I’ve given up on the United Kingdom as a hopeful thing.
Why not our Union?
It’s hard to know where to start. I’m genuinely struggling to begin to capture what it is that causes such a lack of faith, despair and alienation in me when I consider our British political society.
UKIP, let’s start there then. Nigel Farage, what’s that all about?
How can Nigel Farage and a party of xenophobic grotesques more suited to Little Britain than real life be polling as highly as they seem to be in England? Farage and UKIP represent a reactionary right wing political force playing on the same fears, and driven by many of the same factors, as the libertarian right in the US. Anti-“other”, anti-government, anti-welfare and anti much else. I am horrified by him but it’s important to hold onto the fact that people turn to figures like Farage when they have nowhere else to turn. They find hope or a protest when they have no way of otherwise expressing themselves. Farage and his merry band of “Littlejohns” are with us because our Westminster parties are failing to represent the interests of English people and give them a political voice, vision and future that they trust - the use of "English" wasn't a slip. I'll have a think about where Scotland is in this circus sometime soon.
As an example of this Farage-ness consider why he’s always on the BBC? Simply, because he’s different from the rest of the party aparatchiks who pollute our screens with mind shrivelling dross. He gets a reaction, he makes politics seem interesting to people who've come to hate politicians, even if it’s just to hate him. He’s an interesting, charasmatic clown. He might have the strong whiff of racism about him, but he’s more engaging and entertaining than the rest of our politicians who could (deliberately) bore the arse off you at fifty paces.
Why do people engage, react, or wake up with Farage, while turning away from his soporific political peers? Simply because he’s talking in a language that doesn’t deliberately exclude people from his conversation in the way that others do, you know the “you’re too silly to understand interest rates and bond markets so leave it to us experts” type stuff? Farage is trying to connect with and address people’s real issues. In a stinkingly blokey, xenophobic, right wing and nasty sort of way, but nonetheless he’s trying to connect and having some success in doing so. That’s a pretty damning indictment of our political process. The UK has produced a Farage because our politics and politicians are so bad that a load of us would rather pay attention to a xenophobic charlatan .
Where is Ed Miliband or any progressive, left or even social democrat voice? Even that question makes me shudder. We have a populist xenophobe rising in the polls and throwing bread and circuses at the masses and my biggest hope is in Ed Miliband. Our NHS and post war welfare state are being dismantled, sold off, financialised, commoditised, opened to competition...yada yada and I’m thinking “where’s Ed Miliband?” Bloody hell, that’s a rum do. I could spend months on where Ed Miliband is, but I think it is very succinctly captured by rembering Ed Miliband eulogising Tony Benn. Ed couldn’t bring himself to use the words “socialist” or “socialism” in a reflection on a man whose whole life was defined by those things. Instead we got a belly full of navel gazing management speak, buzzwords and key phrases. Bland, safe, unintelligent, grey, boring pap fed to us by a man who’s all of those words while he eulogises a man who was none of them . That’s where Britain, England, Westminster, Ed Miliband and the Labour party are at, right there in that nutshell. I’m to put my hopes for societal change in a man, a party and a system that cannot bear to hear words and concepts, hopes and aspirations that define me and my own personal politics. Sure many folk won’t be socialists, won’t be of the same mind as me and won’t feel the same revulsion in exactly the way I’ve described here, but I am convinced that revulsion is what they do feel. Maybe not in the same way I experience my alienation and revulsion, but certainly in a similar and related way. To put ones hopes and future in something that feels so utterly alien, not us, not caring, not even bloody human, that’s what Ed, Labour, Westminster and the UK have become for me. That's why folk turn to something as nasty as UKIP. If that's what's on offer it's not for me.
I’ll need to think about it some more.
Stevie
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