WATCHING the election coverage is like watching a Mirror World where whole chunks of reality are missing.
Some entire political subjects are ruled out in advance while others are mislaid or ignored as being “off the map” of acceptable discussion.
You are left with utter banality and a discourse of subjects often nothing to do with the country you live in but the obsessions of your neighbour. Other massive issues that affect everyone – climate; social breakdown, crippling inequality, housing – are just absent. One friend said it was not so much that there was an elephant in the room as there was no room left, only elephant.
I won’t be the only person looking at the current General Election with utter dismay, wondering why any of these political parties should be the beneficiary of my once-every-few-years “X” to mark my participation in British democracy.
It’s hard not to see them as a grim blur, a political class headed by two co-joined twins, Labour and Conservative, with only degrees of difference between them.
A dull and contemptuous consensus is everywhere, on social policy, on immigration, on Brexit: the message is the same, distinguished only by the shallow refrain to “get the Tories out”. The Conservatives face electoral oblivion, and possibly an extinction event after over a decade in office and the cumulative effect of the disastrous regimes of Theresa May, Boris Johnson, Liz Truss (briefly) and Rishi Sunak – variations of grotesque and venal rule in which they have shed their identity as “the party of law and order” (sic), or the party of competence and an “election-winning machine”.
Johnson was elected as Jeremy Corbyn (below) was under vicious attack, not just by the right-wing media but by his own party. But, in truth, much of his demise was self-inflicted. He was in many ways an utterly useless candidate, but his defeat masked a truth about the Johnson victory, born on a haze of hubris and on the wave of bizarre English nationalism which Brexit engendered, a wave which is still crashing on the southern shores.
Nigel Farage is winning this Mirror World election with his nonsense drivel and his pub landlord cosplay, taking big chunks out of the disintegrating Tory vote with his forever media presence and his dogwhistle sub-fascist rhetoric. He will be the inheritor of the entrails of the Conservative Party shattered by years of infighting, incompetence and industrial-scale incompetence.
Now, in a defensive move to offset the very worst inroads of the Reform Party (though not a party in any real sense of the word), the Tories have descended even further than before, issuing party political broadcasts suggesting that a vote for Labour would be a “red carpet” for “immigrants” flooding “our land”. Reform and the Tories are in a race to the bottom, outdoing themselves to appeal to the worst instincts of the shires.
Disgusting as these broadcasts are, they are of course nonsense, as Labour are on record as wanting to outdo the Conservatives in being “tough on immigration”.
The consensus is clear, the Overton Window of specifically English political narratives forbids the possibility of putting a positive case for immigration, as it does talking seriously about the ongoing economic and social disaster that is the fever dream of Brexit. Labour know this, and are playing by the rules.
I had abandoned interest in voting Labour in 1984, a full 40 years ago. So I didn’t need the last six months of Keir Starmer’s weekly U-turns and declarations of all the things he wasn’t going to achieve and couldn’t attempt to make me think that the Labour offering, at both a UK and Scotland level was worthless.
Angela Rayner was on my radio yesterday morning explaining that North Sea oil would be “on stream” for decades to come – shifting and gabbling as the presenter challenged her on how Labour would respond to the landmark ruling handed out this week that the climate impact of burning coal, oil and gas must be taken into account when deciding whether to approve projects, as the Supreme Court ruled (Our incredible win could change the future of oil and gas in the UK).
The judgment handed down on Thursday sets an important precedent on whether the “inevitable” future greenhouse gas emissions of a fossil fuel project should be considered.
As in so much, a cosy if, disastrous consensus is in place – in this case that the fantasy that our current lifestyle is in any sense sustainable – must be indulged, even as daily we see the oncoming ravages of climate catastrophe emerge around us. In this sense, the political systems we endure are simply not up to the job presented to them. In this sense, participation in this fantasy lends them credibility they don’t deserve.
Looking across the political parties we can see that most of the mainstream parties are riddled with donations from corporations and big business interest groups (the same is true in Holyrood as Westminster).
This is one of the reasons that the consensus extends to defending Israel despite us all watching in real-time a genocide unfold before our eyes. As with the climate crisis, with the horrors of Gaza you are left screaming: “Why don’t you do something?”
The stark answer is that they are doing something, they are doing what they are being paid to do, at best act in complicity with the Israeli forces and at worst, arm them. In a “conflict” that we have stood by and watched over the last eight months, as Israel has killed more than 36,000 Palestinians, in which an untold number remain under the debris and still more will die of hunger and disease, little is done in response.
There is no international order, the Western countries stand by – and Labour have promised nothing different.
Why should I vote for any of this?
But, I hear you say, these are straw men, we all know that Labour and Conservative are unworthy of our support – here in Scotland we have the progressive alternative, the champions of Scotland, deserving of your vote.
But after 17 years, this alternative lacks credibility. A recent National front page had the SNP explain their claim that “a majority of seats would trigger independence talks”.
Today's front page 🗞️ A majority of seats in Scotland for the SNP would trigger independence talks pic.twitter.com/dme3ESBpbg
— The National (@ScotNational) June 20, 2024
Apart from the idea of a majority of pro-indy seats being a (very) remote possibility, we know this is simply not true. The incoming Labour government has already said – in the starkest and least democratic terms possible – that they would refuse any such thing.
Michael Marra on the BBC’s Debate Night could not be more contemptuous, nor could his leader, Keir Starmer.
Last week Starmer stated: “There’ll be no negotiations with the Scottish Government on independence – even if a majority of SNP MPs are elected on July 4.”
In British-style democracy you are told plainly that it doesn’t matter what you vote, the support for a political party and the subsequent delivery of a party’s manifesto does not apply to the SNP.
Welcome to the Mirror World.
But this is not only about the intransigence of the British political system, the British state and its media, it is also about the failure of the SNP. We have already had a (huge) “majority of seats” and at no time did it “trigger independence talks”. Why now?
Love it or loathe it but an incoming Starmer government will have no – zero – incentive to do anything to change the constitution. Despite the enduring mythology that “Labour needs seats in Scotland” – it’s clear they really don’t.
Just as England elects a Tory government, English votes will decide this election. When the SNP won a landslide victory and elected an unprecedented mass of MPs, it made no difference at all.
Why vote for any of this?
I could, it’s true, act on my conscience and vote for one of the smaller parties, but as we know the first-past-the-post system renders such actions completely meaningless.
The argument against refusing to vote is that it disallows you from complaining about anything in the future. But this suggests a few things that seem deeply questionable – that the system has some validity, that your vote has some impact (briefly true in only a handful of marginals), or that somehow you are taking part – even abstractly – in some wider good called “democracy”.
As we face problems of an existential scale, social breakdown and economic inequality to an extent not witnessed for a hundred years or more in the UK, supporters of parliamentary democracy will have to work harder to convince people to take part.
It’s not just that the very claim that “political change comes from electoral politics” seems very very difficult to sustain, but the wider scaffolding of “democracy” is also under sustained attack. The very notion of peaceful assembly or protest has been largely criminalised in Britain under a series of regressive authoritarian legislation by the Conservatives (none of which will be revoked by Labour); the rule of law and the actions of the police has been systematically undermined, and confidence in the police is at an all-time low for reasons from Stephen Lawrence to Sarah Everard (below) to Sheku Bayoh.
Beyond this – and these are key ideals of democracy that have simply been cast aside – when there is system failure, crisis or disaster such as in the Grenfell Tower tragedy, the response in Britain is routine and predictable – a sombre and lengthy inquiry will be established which will rumble on for years at huge cost, publish a massive report and nothing will happen. The same pattern can be seen over decades. This is also democratic failure.
Why should I vote for any of this?
Instead of confronting the shambles and crisis inherited from the Tories, Labour tell us clearly they won’t do anything. As John Caudwell, the billionaire founder of Phones4U, told the BBC last week: “What Keir has done as far as I can see ... is taken all the left out of the Labour Party, and he’s come out with a brilliant set of values and principles in complete alignment with my views as a commercial capitalist.”
It would be easy to mark these criticisms as bad-faith politics. I just don’t like the fact that my particular brand of politics – Scottish independence as a means to transform Scottish society and break up the British state – is moribund. It is, it’s true. But the idea that you can forever refuse a vote for change, that you can run on a ticket of “CHANGE” while simultaneously explaining that you will do nothing, the idea that you can face down the climate crisis with business as usual, the idea that you can tear people out of Europe against their will, or refuse to confront the housing crisis for an entire generation – these ideas are a fantasy.
Yes, Starmer will ascend to Downing Street on a mountain of votes. Yes, the Conservatives will be destroyed – but these fundamental questions remain unanswered. As an electoral event, it will be box office, and the media that has been trained to exult in these small degrees of change in ruling parties as momentous will go into overdrive. But this will be a pyrrhic victory.
We are now in a shadow world in which the problems of late capitalism rain down on us and the solutions offered up by our political class are so inadequate as to fail to justify our support. This is what the Canadian writer and activist Naomi Klein calls the “Mirror World”, a world of culture wars and conspiracy: “In the Mirror World, conspiracy theories detract attention from the billionaires who fund the networks of misinformation and away from the economic policies – deregulation, privatisation, austerity – that have stratified wealth so cataclysmically in the neoliberal era.
“They rile up anger about the Davos elites, at Big Tech and Big Pharma – but the rage never seems to reach those targets. Instead, it gets diverted into culture wars about anti-racist education, all-gender bathrooms, and Great Replacement panic directed at Black people, non-white immigrants, and Jews.
“Meanwhile, the billionaires who bankroll the whole charade are safe in the knowledge that the fury coursing through our culture isn’t coming for them.”
In this sense, the elections are a sideshow, a vaudeville act with an array of players and voices that do little if anything to contend with the powers at play, the forces that make your world unaffordable, your society disintegrate into grotesque inequality and powerlessness the hallmark of your existence. Given this undeniable reality, why should you vote for any of it?
This is a society in deep denial, a society participating in mass avoidance. Klein observes: “At bottom, it comes down to who and what we cannot bear to see – in our past, in our present, and in the future racing toward us. Performing and partitioning and projecting are the individual steps that make up the dance of avoidance.”
One response – and it will be a deeply unpopular one – is to step aside from the charade and withdraw your tacit support for any of it.
This is not nihilism, nor is it advocating “doing nothing”, but it is arguing that our systems are fundamentally broken, that our given choices are fundamentally ridiculous and that honesty and facing reality are far preferable. There are, it’s true, a few examples of where change has come about through the ballot box, but they are few and far between.
What this election, like so many before it, offers you is the illusion of change, the idea that the fundamental socio-ecological traumas we are living though can somehow be avoided by ignoring them, or by indulging in forms of ameliorative tinkering that offer-up a least-bad option as a solution.
This is the opposite of abandonment. For generations, in different countries and continents, change, real change, has been brought about by mass movements, civil disobedience and withdrawing of consent. If a refusal to take part is a first step in acknowledging futility and misdirection, the next would be to build alternative infrastructures of power, of care, of solidarity, to begin to build moral alternatives to the charade outwith the systems that maintain control and demand obedience.
If this seems desultory and deeply negative, it’s because it is. The reality of where we are as a country, as a society, as a species, is deeply problematic, and I don’t see any reason to vote for the people presented to me on my television and on my timelines. If this is shocking or disappointing, I wouldn’t apologise but ask you to justify voting for any of them.
Too cynical? I may not be alone.
The BBC reports that during the past four elections, nearly a third of people who were eligible to vote chose not to. Trust and confidence in the UK’s politics and election system have never been worse, for very good reason.
In his recent report for the National Centre for Social Research, electoral expert Sir John Curtice found record numbers of voters saying they “almost never” trust governments to put country before party or politicians to tell the truth when in a tight corner.
“The public is as doubtful as it has ever been about the trustworthiness and efficacy of the country’s system of government and the people who comprise it,” Sir John warned.
On July 4, say “None of the Above”.
