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Our lame politicians give hope to the far right: it’s up to us to step forward

Posted on October 9, 2024

You need real mental fortitude to watch the news at present.  Blowhard leaders double-down on death and destruction while vying with each other to trump their respective evils. The pun’s intentional. The prospect of victory in the US for an egotist and dimwit who revels in his own breathtaking stupidity lours like a toxic cloud.  Things could get worse yet.

So I offer a shot at something like comic relief……..well, sort of.

First, if you can bear it, play this game. Steel yourself to watch or listen to coverage of the Tory leadership contest. Take a breath and then make a guess at how long it will be until Thatcher’s name is invoked. Here’s a hint: if the membership itself is involved, don’t make your estimate anything above half a minute.

If it’s any of the candidates themselves on show, adjust the rules in this way. Make it a sort of bingo competition. In any soundbite of thirty seconds, how long will it be before they bring up – in any given order – immigration, wokery and sound common sense? As a side bet, try to think up the daftest policy you can – attacking maternity pay or making date-rape jokes, for example – and see if it actually gets mentioned. You never know your luck.

Finally, and this is a bit of a longshot, sift through any of the questions put to the candidates and see if anyone bothers to ask Robert Jenrick just how much brass neck he’s got to be standing for leader when, just a few years back as housing minister, he handed an unlawful £1bn housing contract to one of his buddies over a cosy dinner.

With such villainy on display, you’ll be thanking your lucky stars that we now have in place a government for whom integrity in office is unequivocally non-negotiable. The days of insulated privilege, born of isolation from the lives of the electorate they  serve, are now consigned to the dustbin of history. Unless, of course, you’re after the big ticket, the sparkly frock, a quiet nook in which to do your revision or an unfeasibly pricey pair of specs.

There could, conceivably, be a kind of grim humour in all of this if it wasn’t so chillingly dangerous. Public confidence in the political process has never been lower. There might have been wriggle-room for an incoming government which was, indeed, trying to sort through the debris of 14 years of recklessness. To fritter that small advantage by succumbing to these hollow vanities is inexcusable. And let’s not mention the jaw-dropping folly of making your first policy announcement one that lends itself to gifs of freezing nanas.

What were once the two main political parties in the UK now sway, veer and stumble, unguided by either values or principles. Believing in nothing other than the primacy of markets, their collective ambition stunted by how things will play in a strident media, they flounder, rudderless, from crisis to catastrophe. And they nudge open the gate where barbarians are gathering.

Across Europe, populist right-wing parties gain ground as faith is lost in politicians whose sense of responsibility and service seems to have dissolved. Revelling in the politics of division and blame, the real culprits – the tax-avoiders, the petro-giants, the ‘too big to fail’ corporations, the warmongers, the climate deniers – happily collude with narratives about illegal immigration and the undeserving poor. There simply isn’t enough to go round, they tell us, while greedily satisfying their own excesses.

Think it couldn’t happen here, where all we’ve got is a jokey rump of a far-right party with fewer than a handful of seats in parliament?  History tells us otherwise. Think that a respectable be-suited squire of a party leader would never seek the support of street-fighting thugs? Don’t you believe it. It’s a pattern embedded in what’s gone before and what’s happening now.

On 7 August this year, British people took to the streets of their local neighbourhoods to send the message that fascists were not welcome there. On October 26, the cabal that leads the rabble that seek advantage when politicians fail will try to gather in London again. The stakes have never been higher. Outnumbering and humiliating them as we did in August is the duty of us all. And then turn back to the business of reminding the political class what they’re here for

For details about how to support this demonstration, go to Stand Up To Racism 

www.jonberrywriter.co.uk

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