Grassroots

So, there I was, two weeks before the general election, getting excited about the opinion polls for the eight East Sussex seats. Set to buck the south-east Tory trend, the county was on-course to be a multi-coloured ribbon of red, yellow, blue and green. The reality, of course, was different: the Lib Dems lost Lewes and Eastbourne - curiously the electorate rewarded the Tories for downgrading maternity services and closing A & E in this town - and Labour failed to take Hastings and Brighton Kemptown. The only bright spots were Labour winning Hove and the Greens holding on to Brighton Pavilion. Otherwise, East Sussex is as blue as the rest of southern England.

It’s not all bad, though. Labour came second in the seat of Mid Sussex, Nicholas Soames' fiefdom covering the West Sussex area around Haywards Heath and East Grinstead. This may seem like the sound of straws being clutched at, but Labour has been a distant third in every general election since the seat’s creation in 1974; this result is seismic. It has made me realise that, for any left-leaning person, if Cameron’s lazy Thatcherism is to be truly opposed, only Labour can do it. It is a broad church, other anti-Tory parties are not: the Green Party has barely broken out of single issue politics and, whilst smaller parties on the left are excellent at local campaigning, their electoral performance is a token. A friend in Gloucestershire told me he realised, as he campaigned unsuccessfully for Labour to re-take the seat of Stroud that was lost in 2010, that any anti-Tory position other than Labour is a luxury: we cannot afford to argue the purity of our political positions whilst people are victims of the bedroom tax, cuts in council services and the tearing apart of the hard-fought-for social safety net.

However, it wasn’t the hope of the Mid Sussex result that made me finally re-join Labour, the party I have always voted for, was active in in London during the 1980s but was last a member of in the 1990s: I filled out my application before the recent elections. I had been questioning the terms of my political engagement for a while - thinking of not voting, having faith only in trade unions, flirting with the Greens – but when the notice of candidates for the local district council elections was posted in my area, it became apparent that in a large number of the 35 wards there was little democracy on offer. In my own ward there was a choice between the existing Tory councillor and a UKIP challenger; there were similarly limited options elsewhere and, in a few wards, sitting councillors were standing for re-election unopposed. Labour fielded candidates in only 15 wards, mostly in towns, and the Greens only 7. How can this be allowed to happen, we cried, throwing up our hands? Well, we had allowed it to happen. If there is no alternative political activism at the grassroots in the countryside, there can be no alternative in the democratic process. Two quotations were running through my mind when I went to the polling station to spoil my district council ballot paper: the writer David Runciman’s aphorism, “only politics can save you from bad politics” and Podemos' leader Pablo Inglesias’ observation that, “if the citizens don’t get involved in politics, others will”. It was time to stop pontificating and get active.

We are now trying to build a Labour Party branch in my village – seven members and counting – with the modest aim of making sure there is always a Labour candidate on ballot papers. More importantly, it is vital that other views are always heard, even in these conservative rural areas, and that people are reminded there is only one political party wedded to the founding principles of our fair and modern society: the NHS, comprehensive state education, affordable homes and employment rights.

True Colours

It being the run-up to the county council elections, there has been a smattering of leaflets coming through my door from political parties. Mostly they are the usual tired platitudes that local politicians think the electorate want to hear. The UKIP address, however, stood out for being at best misleading, at worst disingenuous as it implied that 40% of new housing in Sussex would be occupied by "immigrants". I sent a couple of emails to Wealden UKIP complaining that they were guilty of irresponsible scaremongering on the already contentious issue of rural housing development.

I had no replies to my emails but eventually received a hand-delivered letter from the candidate himself. It is quite staggering in its revelation of the party's true colours. I include it here in full, exactly as it was written:

“Dear Mr Watson,

Sorry for any confusion regarding immigration, with the numbers already here and them that may arrive one has to consider the growing population, especially when they seem to be breeding more than the natives, you are right in saying development is a contagious local issue, and we should be building for the local need, the water, the sewage and infrastructure are not up to coping with all they market houses they want to build, there are people moving out of London to get away from the immigrants in their area, so we don’t get those from Eastern Europe moving to East Sussex, but it is, but not always, the over spill coming here. Please fine enclosed a manifesto you may fine of interest.

Yours sincerely…”

If he was only guilty of comma splicing, malapropisms, appalling grammar and thinking the word “find” is pronounced and spelt “fine”, I would write him off as a harmless buffoon. But the ease and openness with which poisonous racism is used – and the misplaced confidence that it would be reciprocated by an elector - is astounding. I am sure we have known all along that UKIP is a lounge bar BNP – just look at their leader - but posing these days as a serious political party, I would be amazed if they expect their candidates to spout this sort of bile on their behalf; or am I being naïve? I have copied the letter to UKIP's central office, so I’ll find out…

Never Mind The Ballots

It's that time of year when the form to renew your entry on the Register of Electors drops through your letterbox. You might just be wondering whether it's anything worth registering for. At the General Election in May 2010, for the first time in my adult life, I didn’t vote. My sixteen year-old self would be pleased with me. That sixteen year-old used to hand write labels bearing slogans such as “Whoever you vote for the government will get in”; and, in a corruption of a Bertrand Russell quotation, “If voting changed anything it would be illegal”. He used to stick them on buses and trains as part of a sketchy grasp of anarchism derived from a Sex Pistols song – disobedience and anti-authority were the order of the day. If he wasn’t eligible to vote in 1979, he had long been by the time of the following General Election; he duly put his ‘X’ against the longest suicide note in history, Thatcher having convinced him that she must be voted out. At any point in the following years, my adult self would have been appalled at the idea of not voting. That adult dismissed non-voters as having disallowed themselves from a point of view - he even advocated compulsory voting.
In recent years, I have voted with a heavy heart until, in May last year, I finally decided that there was no-one I could vote for: a collection of centre ground parties with each other’s policies or single issue fringe parties peopled by splenetic weirdos. Not a real radical vision to be seen anywhere; not an idea that might close the widening gap between rich and poor; not an aspiration beyond the narrow life of ‘choice’ for ‘hard-working families’; the leaders, a collection of career showroom dummies. (How dare the hapless Gordon Brown be awkward and grey, have a strange grin and poor eye-sight!) Since then, Ed Milliband has completed the line-up of forty-something Oxbridge educated, career politicians with thick hair and winning smiles. And if they all look like salesmen and accountants in their ubiquitous navy suits, they kind of are. Voting is presented like a Which? magazine consumer test of vacuum cleaners; not for the common good but what is right for you. Every idea or policy is subject to a cost benefit analysis: if it doesn’t pay, it doesn’t work. The bean counters have truly taken over.
It’s not just me, the whole country could not make a decisive choice from what was on offer; which is why we have the coalition government, the very embodiment of the insincerity of career politicians. Two parties, supposedly ideologically opposed, turn out to be indistinguishable from each other and prepared to sacrifice anything to sniff the mantle of power. The Tories, pleading austerity to cloak their good old-fashioned ideology of hatred of the weak, dragging along a willing hostage to fortune; the Smilesian self-help of the ‘big society’ as a cover for the abdication of responsibility to provide the cornerstones of the Beveridge/Atlee model of the civilised state. Meanwhile from the sidelines, Labour heckles the sort of Blairite policies of the new government (creeping NHS privatisation, fixed-term council tenancies) that it wished it had had the brass neck to go through with in the previous thirteen years. And the price the Liberals are being paid for their complicity in this Vichy government? Some ministerial positions and a referendum on the Alternative Vote system – not even the Single Transferable Vote! If we voters struggle to make a first choice, what good is a second choice? AV was proven to be an alternative that neither pro nor anti electoral reformists desire. Whatever the system, voting now merely props up the privileged MPs, who in turn prop up the bankers that none dare turn out of the temple. When 17 of the 23 cabinet members are millionaires, it is clear that elected power is the desired gift of the man who has everything. Socrates’ idea, that those who seek power should be the very people prevented from acquiring it, spurs me onwards in my rediscovered, nascent anarchism: we should seek no dominion over others, but instead have responsibility for, and co-operation with, each other. Party politics and voting do nothing to alleviate the random and absurd nature of modern life; taking an existential approach, realising that we can shape our own lives despite a context that we have no control over, emancipates us from the ballot box. There is nothing wrong in not voting when there is nothing to vote for. Elections are a farce, be free, don’t vote.