(Image of Ossett town centre, June 2017).
There’s clearly so much at stake. During the last 14 years we have experienced a horror show, and despite the potential epochal collapse of the Conservative Party, the path before us is far from reassuring.
But I just cannot find something that pushed me forwards for so long: my political pulse.
Where did it go?
Half way through these 14 years, exactly 7 years ago, we almost had a government that pledged to bring about the kind of 21st century we once expected in those childishly optimistic moments of the late 20th century.
A collective energy had built around the unexpected Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn and even when the Tories under Teresa May managed to cling to power after the 2017 GE, there was a sense that the near future was on our side.
I have never been as directly politically engaged as my conscience suggests I should. An adult life devoted to thinking about the state of the world, making art about the state of the world has been matched by an inability to know how to be, both with others and with myself.
From my observations the average political activist doesn’t make themselves, but is made – often by where they end up in their early adult life, what community they become an adult in, university or otherwise.
Likewise the politically disengaged are made and do not make themselves, by the same factors, or, more so, by the lack of them.
I found myself in the middle, literally. Between larger towns and cities where I would more frequently come into contact with politically active bubbles. And the more politically disengaged culture of the people I grew up around and still lived around.
This political disengagement was formed in two stages. The first was that a lot of people were traumatised by the post industrialisation of the 1980s, especially round here, because of the Miners Strike. Secondly, the design for life had shifted massively. New build housing estates encouraged us to focus more on the nuclear family than the community, and retail parks encouraged the same.
Around this time, my political mind was formed from personal distress, a deep questioning born from an inability to cope in my own skin. It was born in isolation rather than collectively.
It certainly strengthened my thinking and artistic direction, but it didn’t necessarily do anything to strengthen any sense of being part of something; I found the heated disagreements that would erupt with people I’d grown up with, or the disdainful reactions to my residual provincial town lifestyle habits in more urban bubbles eventually too stressful without a support network to ease it.
To deal with this, I found myself perpetually trying to square circles and circumvent divisions. This was aided at the time by an almost Millenarian conviction that a more just and equal world was coming, which would brush all minor differences away.
I, like many, have yet to properly recover the person I was before the 2019 general election and the conditions during the pandemic eviscerated any conviction that a better future was imminent . I could never have imagined the 2020s would have felt quite like this.
I, again, also like many, have felt more isolated and cut off since the aforementioned events. Whether it is a lack of ability to go where I once went, mentally and physically, or just a kind of brain damage caused by losing faith, I no longer find it easy to feel my political pulse.
With this in mind, the election next week feels pretty much like laying in bed, knowing you have somewhere important to be, but not being able to motivate oneself.
And I want to be. Christ, whatever happens, to likely see the back of 14 years of Tory rule, horrible nasty rule, should fill my heart. I want it to. But at the moment I don’t feel anywhere near the amount that I want to and know I should do.
John B Ledger 