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I tolerate this century, but I don't enjoy it.
All of the ephemera that is far too trivial to be bothered with elsewhere on this site or, depending on your point of view, a meta-commentary on it. This ephemera includes, but is not limited to art, music and literature. Most of the content here will be discussed in terms that are as abstract as possible, reality being a singularly overrated concept.
Saturday, May 07, 2005
When I described the last set of local elections I noted that the presence of a number of marginal groups like the British National Party had made voting a somewhat depressing affair. Mercifully, the ballot paper was rather more restricted this time, with only the UK Independence Party representing the more questionable side of the political spectrum. As has always been the case, my vote went to the Liberal Democrats and for the first time it proved to have an effect; it helped to reduce the Labour majority sufficiently to allow a Conservative MP in.
At one point, this might have been a consideration that would have weighed more heavily on my mind while voting. Today, the choice between the Scylla and Charybdis of two parties that are equally unworthy of government has relieved me of the need to do anything other than vote as I see fit. To a large extent, this seems representative of the electorate as a whole; with little to choose between the two main parties, voting patterns have been extremely unpredictable with no national patterns. The Labour party have been returned as a minority government that commands an alarmingly low share of the vote, while the Conservatives have failed to increase their share of the vote substantially. Instead, independent candidates have flourished, with the disturbing rise of more extreme parties (UKIP and the BNP at one end of the political spectrum, Respect at the other) seen in past elections also continuing. Of couse, I'm glad to see an increased number of Liberal Democrat seats, but it does concern that me that a party that has never quite managed to fuse liberalism and social democracy into a coherent philosophy seems to see that confusion reflected in the wildly disparate character of the seats they have won (Cambridge and Solihull).
Perhaps my gloominess over elections simply amounts to the fact that I cannot say with any honesty that I particularly share the aspirations of the majority of the population. I vote for the Liberal Democrats on issues like civil liberties and constitutional reform essentially on the basis that they are policies that would change grey and unlovely Britain rather than simply administer it in a different fashion. I found myself strongly agreeing with this comment from Momus:"I'm afraid I now feel that when I visit Britain. Whether rich or poor, successful or failing, Britain seems just wrong to me. It espouses values I don't espouse. Whatever history it might celebrate is wrong: I can never forgive it for failing to have an eighteenth century bourgeois revolution like the French one, or for failing to have a constitution, or failing to become a republic. Britain is just horribly wrong in so many ways that choosing a red, yellow or blue way of being wrong is pointless. Britain, as far as I'm concerned, is wrong in its attitude to the intellect, to sex, to art, to class, to the body, to the relationship between money and quality of life, to the relationship between work and play, to the relationship between itself and the US, or the relationship between peace and war, or between British people and foreigners, or between sunny days and cloudy days, or... well, I could go on and on, or alternatively I could just go, which is what I ended up doing.
Are any of the major political parties looking at Britain's essential wrongheadedness? What are they proposing to do about it? The answer is that if you really believed Britain was essentially wrong in its way of being, you wouldn't go into politics. You'd go into France, or Germany, or Japan, or India, or Tibet, or somewhere you felt things were less wrong... And why take the perspective that it's politicians who define a place, when it's so clearly ordinary people and their ways of being?"Labels: Politics
posted by Richard 10:39 am
