The UK
is fighting for its very soul as a General Election like no other will
determine the fate of the country not just for the next five years but for at
least a generation. Pulled in distinctly
different directions amid the most tempestuous political times, the electorate
must choose between darkness and light as never before.
The
choice should be clear but we live in the most complex and divided times in the
shadow of a nine-year long government that has chipped away at every possible
faultline to divide the population culminating in the hate-filled rhetoric of
the EU Referendum played out on a field of lies, misinformation and unbridled
emotion over reason.
The
Conservatives stoked up hatred towards the sick, the disabled, immigrants and
the poor even before the referendum and that referendum let the genie out of the
bottle because scapegoating had become an everyday matter of fact in political
discourse. Closeted racists and bigots
burst out of hiding, emboldened by the over-the-top ranting from Eurosceptics using
the well-worn trope of ‘othering’, painting a picture of the UK being fine if
it wasn’t for those damn dirty foreigners but providing no real evidence for
their worldview.
I’m not
suggesting that ordinary people who voted to leave the European Union are
stupid, just not paying attention or are easily swayed by highly emotional but
factually deficient arguments. I’m also
not suggesting that all Leave voters are racist bigots, however, the truth is
that all racist bigots voted to leave the EU.
It is
against this backdrop that the current General Election is being fought, a
society that is fractured, hate-filled and has been made to distrust experts
and put their complete, unwavering and uncritical faith in the words of
politicians who make pronouncements on subjects they have no knowledge of but
are delivered as fact.
We live
in a topsy-turvy, post-Truth, fact averse, fake news and propaganda world in
which Boris Johnson can literally and blatantly lie with every movement of his
lips and people not only forgive him, they believe every single lie as if it is
the Word of God. The gullible
electorate, or at least a significant number of them, believe Johnson won’t
sell off the National Health Service to Donald Trump post-Brexit or that he’s
actually trying to get a deal with the EU when it’s obvious to anyone actually
paying attention that his actual goal is a ‘No Deal’ Brexit at the end of 2020.
On the
other hand, people are all too willing to believe that Jeremy Corbyn, a
life-long anti-racism campaigner is a racist and a terrorist sympathiser
because he met with members of proscribed terrorist organisations in the open
in the name of peace whilst forgiving, or most likely ignoring, the secret
talks with those same organisations made by members of the Conservatives while
they were in government. Some people are
also so gullible as to forgive or ignore the fact that the Conservatives have a
former IRA member in their ranks.
Jeremy
Corbyn is a man who’s attacked when he’s right and attacked when he’s even
slightly wrong. Maligned and smeared by
the Right-wing Press, which is most of it, attacked and insulted by the
Conservative benches and, most shamefully, many on his own party’s benches
because he has dared to take the Labour Party back to its Socialist roots after
over a decade of being moved to the Right.
The irony is that the policies that have been proposed by Corbyn’s
Labour not only have a great deal of public support but are actually less
radical than they first appear if you look at them from a truly Left-wing
perspective; it’s only because of the enormous shift to the Right that Labour previously
took that they look radical. The
policies have even been given the thumbs up by leading economists although will
anyone listen to them when the electorate has been conditioned to distrust
experts?
It is
the very fact that Corbyn is dangerous to the vested interests served by the
Conservatives and the assorted agents of neo-liberalism that he is smeared on a
daily basis because he wants to empower the worker, protect the vulnerable and
reframe political discourse in a more caring manner that might just change the
UK for the better. Yet, despite this and
despite the fact that his policies are well-received by the public, people still
refuse to back Labour because the smears against Corbyn have made him toxic to
many outside his supporters.
And
this brings me neatly back to the start of my train of thought, the fight for
the UK’s very soul. The choice is clear –
a Conservative victory and the path of darkness, a dystopian future where life
is cheap, human rights are a thing of the past and the NHS is a long-forgotten
dream or a Labour victory and the path of light, a caring society that benefits
everyone, where what are considered to be British values are revered as they
should be and the stench of hate and despair is blown away, not an unachievable
utopia, just a better society.
I’m a
misanthrope with an extremely low opinion of Humanity but I’d still prefer the
latter to the former.
By the
13th of December we will know for sure which direction the
electorate has decided the UK should take.
Will it be darkness or will it be light?
The answer will determine whether we deserve to survive as a society or
whether we should fall.
