A year ago I was a victim of the recession. Truth is I still am. I'm earning less money than I was 9 years ago (and I hate to think what that means in real terms) and tomorrow I get to pass judgement in the election. I've felt very disengaged with politics for about a decade and a half. Yet this is a time when, more than in a good while, it looks like it could matter a great deal to participate and engage.
I spent the mid 90's dropping out and being a student. I got involved in all aspects and became something of a student agitator. I wouldn't call myself an activist as I always acted quite independently and didn't pin my political colours to the mast. I fought on the identity politics platform and to protect the principles of Free Education. This was something Tony Blair wanted to erradicate. By filling the National Union of Students with Labour yes people, getting the conference to agree that the princple wasn't something anyone wanted any more. If you want to know more about this, drop the MP for Glasgow Hillhead a line as that man, Jim Murphy, presided over this. I've never forgiven Tony Blair for this, and I never will. For me getting rid of the principle that education is free, at point of access, to all be they young or old, is a worse crime than the Iraq war. It has consigned future generations to years of crippling debt spending longer to get a degree and having to take work when they should be studying, just to make ends meet. If anything made education a place for the "haves" over the "have nots" it was that.
The truth is that the Labour Government haven't done half as much for this country as they would like to have done, and much less than they would have us believe. Giving a mandate to them would seem wrong as they have to accept at least some of the responsibility for the state of the nation's finances and the recession. It may have been steeper than anyone predicted but that does not mean you can absolve yourself of all responsibility. The seeds of destruction were sown under their watch.
So for the opposition. Apparently it's time for change. I'm definately not convinced in the case of Daaaaaaaaaaaave Cameron and his posh boy Conservatives. This is the party which has one ex-leader looking after Foregin Affairs and another formulating its social policy through the Centre for Social Justice which has to be one of the most perniciously disturbing organisations currently operating in this country. The centre's policies are very old Tory as is there approach to Europe. Cameron's viewpoint is to go in and debate vigourously with the leaders over getting the best deal for Britain. Yet his MEPs flounder on the edges with homophobes and holocaust denying fools of the right. It's a bit like watching the pushmi-pullyu from the Dr Dolittle books trying to go in both directions at once. All would be a shame - even amusing - if this wasn't our future national wellbeing that was at stake. There is something fundamentally not new, or fresh here. I suspect a wolf in Thatcher's clothing lurks just below the surface. With a soundbite friendly set of policies they seem to have culled from some old Daily Mail headlines this is a dangerously thin attempt to grasp power, and it's not convincing.
Which brings us to the Liberal Democrats. This election has dispelled the fact that Nick Clegg is Cameron-lite thanks to some combative forces. There are some great ideas here. Not renewing Trident is an excellent idea, but too often the detail shows that the truly radical idea may not be quite all it seems. It's as if they are scared to actually follow the conviction to its conclusion. The tax ideas are sound and this is the party with more than one ex-city boy amoungst its front bench number. Yet there are some doubts still as to what will happen.
This election has produced the possibilty of one truly revolutionary possiblity. The end of the first past the post electoral system. If we want a great change in our country, I could not think of a more beneficial and long term one than this. Only one party doesn't support this and their idea to shrink the number of seats and give people the chance to recall their MP is a bit like giving an old banger of a car a new paint job and trying to pass it off as new. This is breathtakingly arrogant. For politics to mean something to people they have to feel like their vote really makes a difference. It's easy to do: give them a system that clearly indicates their vote put someone in the House of Commons and not the lottery currently on offer where not bothering almost seems like a valid standpoint. That's a very sad state of affairs for our so-called democratic system.
So go vote, express your opinion. There's faults with all politicians and, as the old saying goes, "No matter who you vote for, the Government always gets in" yet your voice has probably never been more important than now.
Thursday 6 May 2010
Thursday 21 January 2010
365 Days Is A Very Long Time
A year is a very long time in life, I feel for Barack Obama, I really do. When he was conducting his campaign I worried about what the results of it would be. The central platform of his winning was hope, which is a very, very dangerous thing to build upon.
Hope is, after all, a very intangilble thing. Emotions should be a part of politics. The trouble with the election of Obama, is they became the whole. His actual ideas are pretty good. The original healthcare reform he proposed was something truly different, and put meat on the bones of all that hope. His approach to Guantanamo, and to the War On Terror both smacked of a kind of sense not seen in the White House for a good while.
Then there are problems. The only significant change was in the presidency. The senators, governers, and the like haven't really changed all that much. Obama wasn't elected with the kind of change in the political make-up that we'll see by May of this year in our own Government. The consequence being that there have been compromises to the Healthcare bill making it something very different to the one he wanted, the numbers of troops in Afghanistan has risen and the intentions to leave at whatever time seem somewhat optimistic at best.
That's the trouble with hoping for too much. You can often end up with less than very little. I know this, I'm writing this from my friend's flat, earning about half the money I was a year ago, doing the kind of work I stopped doing about 8 years ago, just trying to get by. A year ago I was planning a move to Croydon to be near to my work. A good job which - although not exactly secure by any means - looked like giving me a springboard to something better. How wrong I was.
I wonder what President Obama is thinking today, he's lost the absolute majority he had and any future policy decsions will require the kind of negotiations his team thought they had trounced after the elections back in 2007. All that seems such a long time ago. Such is the nature of hope.
No doubt he'll survive and find some kind of way to manouver his way through this. He really doesn't strike you as the kind of person who can't. It's that kind of quality he'll need to move forward. Optimism is the key. As for the American people, it's a different matter.
I was talking to someone about this very subject last week. In fact I've talked about it a lot recently. The worst thing you can lose is your sense of hope. Without it nothing in life is good, and nothing seems worth the effort. It's a very dark place to find yourself. Yet there must be a lot of people in America who are feeling that. The city may have recovered from the recession - at least a little - but it's the greedy self serving incompetents who caused it who are still gambling away, still demanding a bonus, and still costing ordinary people their jobs, livelyhoods, and - worst of all - their hopes. They arrogantly threaten all kinds of things if they don't get what they want like the greedy children they are. That's the image that people in both America, and the UK see as the symbols of the time.
Yet, like my own situation, there is always a way forward, and a way out. In Obama's case that is at the ballot box. His mandate has been erroded at the heartland of Democratic politics with the loss of Edward Kennedy's old seat in Massachusetts. That can be repeated everywhere, it's the consequence of building up people's hopes. They raised the expectations even higher by adding their own making the result somewhat inevitable. The measure of how good a president Barack Obama really is begins now.
Hope is, after all, a very intangilble thing. Emotions should be a part of politics. The trouble with the election of Obama, is they became the whole. His actual ideas are pretty good. The original healthcare reform he proposed was something truly different, and put meat on the bones of all that hope. His approach to Guantanamo, and to the War On Terror both smacked of a kind of sense not seen in the White House for a good while.
Then there are problems. The only significant change was in the presidency. The senators, governers, and the like haven't really changed all that much. Obama wasn't elected with the kind of change in the political make-up that we'll see by May of this year in our own Government. The consequence being that there have been compromises to the Healthcare bill making it something very different to the one he wanted, the numbers of troops in Afghanistan has risen and the intentions to leave at whatever time seem somewhat optimistic at best.
That's the trouble with hoping for too much. You can often end up with less than very little. I know this, I'm writing this from my friend's flat, earning about half the money I was a year ago, doing the kind of work I stopped doing about 8 years ago, just trying to get by. A year ago I was planning a move to Croydon to be near to my work. A good job which - although not exactly secure by any means - looked like giving me a springboard to something better. How wrong I was.
I wonder what President Obama is thinking today, he's lost the absolute majority he had and any future policy decsions will require the kind of negotiations his team thought they had trounced after the elections back in 2007. All that seems such a long time ago. Such is the nature of hope.
No doubt he'll survive and find some kind of way to manouver his way through this. He really doesn't strike you as the kind of person who can't. It's that kind of quality he'll need to move forward. Optimism is the key. As for the American people, it's a different matter.
I was talking to someone about this very subject last week. In fact I've talked about it a lot recently. The worst thing you can lose is your sense of hope. Without it nothing in life is good, and nothing seems worth the effort. It's a very dark place to find yourself. Yet there must be a lot of people in America who are feeling that. The city may have recovered from the recession - at least a little - but it's the greedy self serving incompetents who caused it who are still gambling away, still demanding a bonus, and still costing ordinary people their jobs, livelyhoods, and - worst of all - their hopes. They arrogantly threaten all kinds of things if they don't get what they want like the greedy children they are. That's the image that people in both America, and the UK see as the symbols of the time.
Yet, like my own situation, there is always a way forward, and a way out. In Obama's case that is at the ballot box. His mandate has been erroded at the heartland of Democratic politics with the loss of Edward Kennedy's old seat in Massachusetts. That can be repeated everywhere, it's the consequence of building up people's hopes. They raised the expectations even higher by adding their own making the result somewhat inevitable. The measure of how good a president Barack Obama really is begins now.
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