We’ve had an election.
I use ‘we’ quite inaccurately because there wasn’t any voting in our area on this occasion. A lot of people assumed there would be, maybe because all the hype and build-up to 7th May had almost given the impression of an actual General Election. Certainly the newly-appointed Mayor of Hackney (I didn’t even know that was a thing, how many Mayors does London need?) seemed to think she was on her way to Downing Street with her speech.
Inevitably (or grimly (or depressingly)) the real story is that Reform has done well. VERY well. Which, to be honest, isn’t really all that surprising. What infuriates me (or frustrates (or enrages)) is that the two ‘main’ parties never seem to want to properly debate anything with Reform. They only ever dismiss them as ‘populist’ or make personal rather than political attacks or even simply cry ‘racist!’ and move on.
I’m not sticking up for Farage or Reform (or populism or racism, just to be clear) but there’s something bizarrely obstinate about Labour and/or the Conservatives wanting to label every voter of another party as racist. It certainly doesn’t strike me as an obvious way of getting those voters back on side.
I’ll be honest, and I know it’s a controversial claim nowadays, but I don’t think the UK is racist. Yes, there are no doubt some racists but they are, ironically, a minority. If the whole country was full of them then, well, I think we’d have noticed by now.
What I do think the UK hates, even more than potholes, is people jumping the queue. So when Farage & Co stir things up by claiming, for example, that the majority of small boat migrants are young men who don’t appear to be fleeing any sort of persecution, but who are nevertheless housed, fed, and funded – when they say that, people object not because of race but because it offends their sense of fair play. Nobody objects to a system that lets in genuine asylum-seekers in fear of their lives (well, OK, the racists probably do, I expect that’s just the sort of thing that drives them nuts – but other than them, nobody objects) but when somebody is cheating the system, that’s a different matter.
When, say, voters find themselves homeless and their councils won’t help (but instead write to them to say they’ll be fine sleeping rough Woman facing eviction told she would cope living on the streets – BBC News) then I don’t think it’s that unreasonable, or unexpected, that there’s anger about people stepping off a boat onto the Kent coast in the morning and being put up in a hotel by teatime.
Now maybe I’m just very simple, but either all that is true (Reform would certainly like us to think so) or it’s not. Surely the role of government is, if it’s untrue to refute it; and if it’s true, to fix it.
But no, they choose option three: ignore it. So of course Reform are doing well because even though they’re not actually going to transform the country by being in charge of Barnsley District Council, inevitably people are going to vote for the party that says they’re going to change things (even if they don’t necessarily believe they will) rather than the party that doesn’t even say it’s going to try.
Starmer’s mob seemed to wake up Friday morning as if they hadn’t expected this – wittering on about hearing the message and knowing there’s work to do. We all could have told them months ago that there’s work to do (and then some). Maybe if they’d done it back then it wouldn’t have been such a disastrous result..?
In a few years’ time, unless they engage with the issues as opposed to ignoring them, they’ll wake up one Friday morning to find Nigel Farage (Re)forming a government. No doubt they’ll look gormless, shocked, as if nobody could have seen it coming. No doubt they’ll talk about lessons to be learnt. But no doubt they won’t take any responsibility for having allowed it to happen.
And in the words of (God help me) Liz Truss: That Is A Disgrace.
Andrew Curnow's Ramblings 