Lacking hope, desperate for change: the UK towns devastated by Tory rule
There were about 30 people standing outside Birmingham Central Mosque, and they formed as diverse a crowd as the city’s population. It was food bank day: inside a portable building in the car park, a team of four spirited women were efficiently sorting through crates of groceries and handing those who had finally reached the front of the line what they needed.
As they did their work, we had a snatched conversation. “The queues are getting longer,” one of them said.
Polls suggest that voters are likely to vote for even more devastation, this time inflicted by a Labour government. There is no indication to suggest otherwise.
It's tempting to think that anyone voting for Keir Starmer's Labour party must have a long-term vacancy in the top storey, but it's not that. Most people aren't sceptics, if they were, our main political parties wouldn't exist and Keir Starmer wouldn't be a major political leader. Something else leads people to waste their voting opportunities, however flimsy those opportunities may be.
It has been said that too many people don't make connections, abstract connections between different things. An example of that would be a connection between the likely direction of a future Labour government and Keir Starmer's known faith in government by bureaucrat and his inclination to go back on anything he has said previously.
To ask why people don't make this particular connection is probably too deep, it is simpler to stick with the surface of things. The mainstream media do not pursue the obvious connection between Starmer's fashionable mendacity and his likely behaviour as Prime Minister, so the connection is not prominent in the mainstream media debate.
Mainstream media connections are sponsored connections, sponsored commercially or politically by staying on-message wherever the money or the power are. Off-message connections just aren't made and many voters are not sceptical enough to make them.
3 comments:
I've argued before that the Elite (including mainstream media) are Courtiers dancing before the Emperor for patronage.
But this time the store of patronage has been heavily depleted, which is why Sir IKEA is banging on about new commissions and regulatory bodies to generate more patronage to reward the worthy and keep them on side. When you consider also that Sir IKEA has been tricked into wearing new Identity Politics clothes that don't accord with reality then the full fate of the Emperor and his new clothes has been foreshadowed by the fairy tale.
All we need is one clearsighted boy...
For the best examples of "sponsored connections", the BBC news is a good bet. Connections grow from juxtapositions. This morning I was listening to the Today programme in the car. They were reporting on the results of the French election. First, an article on the "far right". (This morning, Tim worstall makes the valid point that le Pen is not so different from the UK Labour party of the 1940s...) Then an interview with an Iranian immigrant to France, been there 50 years, sobbing bitterly because he is so frightened at what is coming...
And as Rob Henderson points out, most of what passes for political discourse in these days consists of showing that your opponent is associated in some way with low-status ideas.
DJ - "Sir IKEA is banging on about new commissions and regulatory bodies to generate more patronage to reward the worthy and keep them on side."
I'm sure that's it, as if patronage and regulatory bodies reach a critical mass beyond which they cannot be controlled. Anyone who tries to control the problem will be ruthlessly undermined. It's not far from selling sinecures.
Sam - yes, Rob Henderson is right, it's about pinning low-status ideas onto your political opponents. This seems to attract most of the focus onto low status ideas, leaving the supposedly high status ideas relatively unanalysed because analysing them is a low status activity.
It's not dissimilar to the sceptical analysis of sacred texts, at best a low status activity and in certain cases much worse than that.
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