General Election 2019 - The fight for the UK’s soul

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 13^th 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.