General Election:2

Even before I got a degree in Politics back in 1987, I’ve always been interested in the subject, but I know that is a minority interest… I originally wrote a longer version of this that was more polemical, but then I shortened it, split it into two and tried to make it more pithy. It’s not coherent- intentionally- but I hope it helps: I find lengthy and over preachy articles hard to read and I’m getting to the stage of ‘But what do I know?’

I grew up in Leicester in the 1970s and remember the National Front & thinking as a child ‘why do you dislike my friends so much’? I thought that had disappeared from mainstream politics, but the Conservative Party seems to have whipped it up again: Reform- incorporating parts of the old BNP are taking it further. I believe that it is despicable, verging on evil.

(‘I’m not racist, but’ 2024 style)

The problem of mass immigration. I’m tired of hearing variations on this phrase that simplifies the complex and ‘others’ those who seek asylum or come here to work. It’s one of the many many reasons why I find the Conservative Party awful: they could have played the last few years so differently without making scapegoats out of asylum seekers and migrants.

(Posted on World Refugee Day: stay classy people)

‘I’m just talking common sense’ usually has the subtext of ‘I’m going to come out with a random selection of my biases strung together incoherently’, if you add ‘This is what the British people want’ you can practically hear the jackboots starting to march…

I won’t be voting for Keir Starmer. He’s not standing in my seat & we don’t have a presidential system in this country. I will be voting tactically in an attempt to unseat my MP, Rishi Sunak (see above for reasons, but I could add so many more)

The older that I get, the more I think JK Galbraith was right  : “The modern conservative is engaged in one of man’s oldest exercises in moral philosophy; that is, the search for a superior moral justification for selfishness.” As true in 1947 as it is now, but we’ve added the myth of ‘trickle down economics’ to sugar the pill.

Homeless. I am politically homeless and I never thought I would be: this year my vote is against something rather than for something- this saddens me.

I don’t know what I want out of Politics now: perhaps something fairer and kinder that doesn’t involve hurting people who are weaker or different but certainly not something that mainlines on the politics of vengeance, either left or right (although Farage, Braverman, Badenoch, Rees Mogg etc seem to be leading the way on this at the moment) . I hold onto the dream of ‘The Magnificat’ :-

‘He has scattered the proud in the thoughts of their hearts;
he has brought down the mighty from their thrones
    and exalted those of humble estate;
 he has filled the hungry with good things,
    and the rich he has sent away empty’.

Amen