Dear Friend, ...

[coldjwplay]

An excerpted hand-written letter, addressed personally to me, from my local Lib Dem candidate:

"Most people agree that the Labour government has been a grave disappointment. Local people have a clear choice - on May 7th either I will be our new Lib Dem MP or we will have a Labour MP. No other result is possible. At the last General Election, this

Comments

[coldjwplay]

I should clarify that it was a hand-written letter than had then been scanned and printed. But it was definitely a scan of a hand-written original, rather than a computer handwriting font - it was too erratic to be otherwise (there was even one bit where she'd started writing an 'e' and changed it to an 'a' halfway through, leaving a funny 'a' with a line through it!). Given the Lib Dem surge conventional wisdom has it that Islington South should be a safe seat for them, since Labour only took it by so few votes last time - but, intriguingly, close analysis of the voting intent figures in the opinion polls indicates that almost all of the Lib Dem increase has come from the Tories, with Labour still pulling in the same sort of figures that they were a few months ago when the Tories were hitting 40% and the Lib Dems were languishing in the teens, and this means that taking Labour seats where there are few Tories votes to pick up may be a bigger challenge for the Lib Dems than many people expect.

I can see very well why the Lib Dems seem like a progressive option. My worry is that they are far too unreliable - in practice at the local council level, they are all too willing to enter coalitions with the Conservatives and to slash public services. What's more, simply by virtue of being so extremely wealthy (the Lib Dem voter base and its leadership is far more skewed towards the elite AB social grades than the Tories, let alone Labour), as well as their ideological commitment to liberty instead of to equality, the Lib Dems are prone to see markets and privatisation as a practical solution even where they are not (i.e. almost everywhere, says this old socialist).

What irritates me is the assumption that the Lib Dems are different. If people were voting for them purely on the basis that they were no more shit than the other two, then I would disagree with but understand it, but many people who have no real idea about Lib Dem policy or history have fallen under the illusion that they are "better", especially when it comes to corruption - but the single biggest funding scandal of recent years, convicted fraudster Michael Brown's siphoning to the Lib Dems of millions of his stolen money, gives the lie to that.

In short, I don't trust the Lib Dems and I have got myself annoyed that so many people are trusting them so blindly.

On the Tories, it is absolutely no consolation at all. That is a deceptive whisper in the ear that the Tories would love you to believe, because nothing can make up for the devastation that they (probably abetted by the Lib Dems) will wreak upon British society in the next five years or more. When social security has been dismantled and replaced with haphazard provision by religious charities with a neanderthal social agenda (aka "The Big Society"); when our state schools have all been handed over for nothing to be run by evangelical groups; when gay people are herded into Philippa Stroud's church to be cured and the incoming Home Secretary gets his way and bans them from staying in guest houses; when these things happen the probability of the Tories' defeat at the next election will not balm any of the scars on our body politic.

But hey, at least the media and the electorate will be able to be proud of having paid more attention to the leaders' haircuts, ties and wives than to their policies. In the depths of the biggest economic crisis in eighty years, with environmental apocalypse looming over us and in the middle of our bloodiest military campaign since WWII, that the three biggest things in this election campaign have been, in ascending order, SamCam getting preggers (my balls retreat into my body at the thought of Dave pounding away), a bigoted old woman being called a bigot in a private conversation, and a pretty boy demonstrating his amazing grasp of policy and statesmanship by looking into a camera and calling people by their first names says more than I can bear to hear about our society.

[colesey]

Testify, quite frankly. I basically agree totally, without wanting to sound like a sop. My only difference is a personal one, I think. After all, I fit the ideal demographic criteria to be one of Cameron's chums, and I also live in a fairly secure Conservative constituency where the Lib Dems are the only threat. So it's sometimes less acute.

The media has been appalling, much of it getting more and more hawkishly right-wing while the rest simply stands for less and less. Unfortunately I feel that where the public are aware of policies it's meaningless at best.

Heavens above. £3 a week to be married. Who isn't psyched for Cameron's Britain?

[coldjwplay]

"The media ... simply stands for less and less."

This. Take the Indie and the Graun - what do they stand for today? The quality of the Guardian's reporting has plummeted over the last couple of years to the point where, for all that I still read it, it's almost just a lifestyle magazine; the Independent is a stablemate of the Evening Standard, which I think needs no further comment. The Times is a shadow cast by a puppet whose strings are in the firm grip of Murdoch. And The Mirror is just a tabloid. And yet, despite being so pale and sickly, they cast their deathly pall over everything, preventing the possibility of anything new emerging. Here is how bad the situation is: I've taken to buying Private Eye for the news, as well as for the gags, because nowhere else do I feel confident about getting the serious stories that speak truth to power, the most unattractively mundane but important stories. And the media connive in the transition to a single, Presidential talking head because it's easier to construct a narrative around the myth of a person than around the complicated reality of economic and social forces. How can a detailed story about the causes, consequences and possible resolutions of post-industrial social decay compete with the narrative of a hero-figure decrying "Broken Britain"? How can an intricate and boring comparison of the competing manifestos compete with a fresh face on TV telling a visibly old man that he's past it? Another problem - and another reason why the media encourage it - is that this "One Leader" syndrome is sympathetic and conducive to right-wing politics, because it is in right-wing, rootless politics that the cult of the "Great Leader" is most important (and yes, I include late Soviet Communism in that). When you have no groundswell of support due to community involvement and support for ordinary people and their lives, you need a totemic hero to rally people around. Indeed, the sign that a left-wing movement has gone native, corrupted by power, is in its need to project one single, dominant leader. A leader whose personality overwhelms, in public at least, every other influence in the movement. Nick Clegg's recent apotheosis is but one example of this.

On your situation, sure, I've no objection to the Lib Dems taking Tory seats. One suspicion I have is that the Lib Dems are chameleons, influenced by the political company they keep: when they are around progressives, they are encouraged to live up to the best of their ideals; when they are around conservatives the opposite happens. This makes it all the more important for there to be at least a rump of left-ish politics, to remind them of what morality is. Everything else aside, and though the coming years will be horrible, once they arrive there's no point weeping for them or giving up. If a PR system does get installed, and especially if Labour are on their knees, there is an opportunity for a genuinely socialist alternative to emerge, either from an original source or by reclaiming control of the Labour heritage, if it isn't too tainted. Hell, we'll bloody NEED to start sorting out a real socialist alternative, because the far right aren't going to stop advancing and the Tories and Lib Dems are the last people to stop them, with their enthusiasm for legitimising them through interaction. Again, the Lib Dems' instincts are right on the far right - i.e., that they're dangerous and immoral - but they need to be protected from their own enfeebling liberalism. Liberalism can be welcomed as at least an improvement over conservatism - but not as a sufficient replacement for socialism. We can still make progress, with hard work. And big social advances, once won, have tended to prove difficult to undo entirely.

[coldjwplay]

The £3 a week to be married is hilarious in how pathetic it is. There's no way that even that can really be afforded, and yet the Tories use it as a symbol, a dog whistle to show their faithful that they still believe. Again, the media idiocy means that this is never questioned, because dissecting the complex and insidious socio-economic processes that underlie the penalisation of single people is harder and less interesting than dissecting the relationships of the "leaders" with their chief possession, their hausfrau. And even the other parties daren't knock it too much, lest the febrile media atmosphere results in them being denounced as "anti-marriage". The air is of meaningless gestures, nods and winks without real commitment to a decisive course of action. Take the Lib Dems' attitude to Trident: by mentioning it vaguely they guarantee the sympathy of everyone who opposes nuclear weapons, but they keep their real intention of spending the Trident money on a whole new generation of medium-range nuclear weapons on the downlow - except when they talk to conservatives and defence enthusiasts. The Tories tell us that they back the laws banning discrimination against homosexuals - but their shadow Home Secretary says that he wants owners of "guest houses" to be able to refuse service to gay people, as if this is all entirely consistent. All three parties bicker about fractions of fractions of increases and decreases in the fraction of tax that National Insurance makes up (a stupid, cynical tax to begin with), flashing generous hints here and austere clues there, a revue of burlesques keeping the customers satisfied.

And your last point is desperately necessary, too. "Socialism" as a swear word! The people who tell you that the National Socialists were socialists because they called themselves so, but for some reason aren't so enthusiastic about the extension of that logic to the German Democratic Republic; the people who rant about "ZANU-Lie-Bore" and above all the sale of the fricking gold (no one likes to mention that those sober and serious Swiss did the exact same thing at the exact same time). It should be confined to America, but British rightists, ever keen to adopt the latest reactionary trend from across the pond, have adopted it as their own. This netborne contagion is a spillover from the American "Culture Wars". It promotes a morbid fascination with militarism and the literal defence of the realm, always a good sign of empire in decline. What is the benefit of idolising soldiers as "heroes"? What makes a soldier's work more worthwhile than the work of a nurse or teacher, or, fuck, than the work of a grocer or a call centre employee? I'd rather John Smith was answering the phone in a call centre in Newcastle than murdering freedom fighters in an Afghan poppy field. This returns us to where we started, with the ubiquity of the "hero" narrative. It is at its heart a fascist doctrine, of the merited victory in direct individual conflict of the strongest, the bravest, the purest. (It's no coincidence that superhero literature is so associated with capitalist America, nor that its greatest leftist exponent, Alan Moore, wrote Watchmen and V For Vendetta, both scathing attacks on egotistical individualism.) A hero is a myth that supports the oppressive ideology of meritocratic supremacy, and because in its narrative final success and power are so inextricably tied to merit and morality the connection ends up working backwards too, that the successful and powerful must therefore be meritorious and moral - much as conservatives claimed that being US President "proved" that Bush was intelligent and good (though I don't see many of them applying the same logic to Obama). A socialist does not have idols - "No saviour from on high delivers / No faith have we in prince or peer", as the Internationale puts it - and can't support the colossi who bestride our world, and so must be destroyed. But the End of History is proving difficult to grasp for the Americans, as it did for Stalin's Soviet Union before them (prompting from the international Trotskyite opposition the principle of Permanent Revolution), as it did for the Pax Britannica, ad infinitum - and long may it stay so.

[colesey]

I don't think I can offer anything insightful or developed enough to be a worthy response! Really, yes, it would be a quite wonderful piece of melodramatic theatre were it played out in any other place.

I struggle to stifle a laugh when you mention THE GOLD. I think if Nigel F'ing Farage got his hands on a million pounds, he would spend it all on gold and lie in it all day like a dragon. They love their gold! It's so tactile, such a handy understandable thing.

Like when Cameron and Osborne trot out the old analogy of "families up and down the country... good honest working people... know that when money is tight you have to scale back... one has to make sacrifices... and it is better to do it sooner than later." And one can only marvel at their cheek, really, because the only thing we don't doubt is the Osborne family budget is but a couple of orders of magnitude away from our national kitty.

My local Labour PPC boycotted the traditional electoral hustings, held by the Salisbury Churches group, because they'd invited the BNP. I feel bad not voting for the chap, but where there's a chance, however slight, to oust a Tory...

It's probably fortunate I won't have access to a TV in 24hrs time.

[coldjwplay]

Do you think that Farage's plane crashed because it was weighed down by all that gold?

I am not looking forward to tonight.

[colesey]

And also, dear me, the horrors of the internet! This awful thing that we've imported from the states where people rove around decrying anything that looks like 'socialism'! Heaven forbid we should embrace the socialism, no COMMUNISM of Obama and his lackeys. Haven't these idiotic leftists got it through their heads that we have reached The End Of History yet? My nomination for most unwelcome development of the century, internet-borne spread of this idiocy, this absolute allergy to anything but the market.

[prolefood]

As a resident of the states I can readily agree. Anything remotely resembling centre-left thought is quickly labeled "socialist" to which no worse insult can be applied in this country. All must be sacrificed before the altar of the market. ;)