Time to roll up those sleeves
Well, shit.
As I write this, at 9.55 the morning after the 2015 general election, the Conservatives have won 320 seats, putting them in sniffing distance of an outright majority. Labour have actually lost more than two dozen seats.
It looks almost certain that we’re in for five years of a Cameron-led government taking a wrecking ball to what’s left of civil British society.
Just as alarming is the fact that UKIP are now the third biggest party in the country by popular vote, with 12.5 per cent of the total according to the BBC. On the fact of it, this is easy to overlook: they don’t look set to win many MPs because their support is spread across the country rather than focused in safe seats.
But that’s also deeply alarming: one in eight voters who bothered to turn out chose to cast their ballot for a party that more or less unapologetically spews division and hatred. And that support is widespread throughout England and Wales.
This isn’t the result we expected. And it’s not the result we wanted.
By ‘we’, I mean any of us who gives a monkeys about the old or the young, the disabled or the poor. About the NHS, housing or education. About the arts or the queers.
Anyone who doesn’t buy the idea that the success of a society is measured by its pursuit of a growing economy at any cost – at the cost of the security, dignity and even survival of its most vulnerable members – at the cost of the basic structures of mutuality and welfare that make it a civilised place to live.
So this election result is an upset. An upsetting upset, no doubt – but also an upset that brings hope.
It brings hope because it shows that our politics has broken wide open.
The Tories and UKIP have surged, but so has the SNP, achieving a near clean sweep north of the border. The Greens haven’t seen the surge some hoped for but they have cleared a million votes nationwide, which ain’t bad. The Lib Dems, meanwhile, have dropped off the edge of a cliff.
In other words, change can happen. Change has happened.
Just because last night’s change happens to be shitty, depressing, head-slapping, duvet-diving, gin-reaching, bile-making change, it doesn’t mean we’ve reached a new normal. More change can happen. More change will happen.
The question is what kind of change it is, and what we can do about it.
I think we can do quite a lot.
I’m not a psephologist (bless you) but my hunch is that the Tory tactic of fear-mongering, supported by much of the press, basically worked. They frightened people into sticking with the devil they know out of self-interest (if they were already rich) or alarm at the potential loss of a supposed economic ‘recovery’ whose validity is dubious for all kinds of reasons.
It was about preying on people’s fear of losing what they have – however much or little that might be.
You can get a lot done through fear. But I believe you can achieve more through hope.
I voted Labour out of hope – hope that they’d be better than the Tories. But that’s a low bar. I wasn’t counting any chickens. Even if Labour had won, I thought the best chance of real change would be to push for it from below – to try to hold Labour accountable for the more progressive aspects of their manifesto.
That, of course, seems to be out of the window. But in a way that brings clarity. With Labour, we could hope for change from the top down. With the Tories, we know we have to push for it from the bottom up.
Voting matters. It matters deeply. But if we really want to see meaningful change, it has to start with the recognition that turning out to mark your ballot twice a decade isn’t the apex of civic engagement. It’s the bare minimum.
We all see things around us going down the pan – often specific, concrete things in our lives, on our doorsteps – things that touch us at a deep, personal level.
What do we do with those feelings?
We have a choice. We can shrug and grumble. Or we can stand and act.
We can behave like consumers – accept the options on display as the end of the story, complain on social media when they aren’t to our liking, take our personal pleasures where we find them, and otherwise keep our heads down.
Or we can act like citizens – take responsibility for the part all of our actions play, whether we realise it or not, in shaping the society around us, bother to get informed about the things that make us angry, upset or inspired, and do something about it.
Something real.
Something that involves finding out about the nuts and bolts of an issue you care about. Meeting and talking to others who care too. Taking your concerns to those in authority and making them visible to those on the street.
Educate. Organise. Mobilise. Connect. Make a stink. Make a stand. And stick with it for the long haul.
It’s worked before. It worked when they wanted to sell off our forests. It worked when they wanted to throw the mums of the New Era estate out of their homes. It will work again.
We still don’t know the outcome of this election – exactly what shape the next government will take, how it will act or how long it will last.
But we know that British politics is up for grabs in a way it hasn’t been for generations.
We – the ‘we’ I mentioned earlier, the ‘we’ who want a society that gives a monkey’s – are glum this morning. It feels like a defeat. But we can make it the start of something better.
Take a moment. Then roll up your sleeves.
There’s going to be a lot to do.
