‘Sleepy John’ has had his eyes off the ball.
I’m not as sharp as I was in the 2010s (although, who is?)
Wounded and winded by the personal and political over the last 5 years, improvements to my general quality of life as I entered middle age became the only real priority.
The mental gymnastics involved in trying to understand why people in my milieu think and vote as they do, in the hope to make some sort of progressive bridge, contributed to the aforementioned injury.
I instigated participatory art projects with my friends in an artist-led collective, to try to do my best to circumvent the trigger labels, and to ask how people really felt about life. It was a DIY project that received little attention, but I saw it as contributing towards a memetic grey matter of information that was slowly transforming the world over social media – and, as violent as the dialogue was on the senses, it was undertaking the impossible-yet-necessary from the bottom up.
How old that all feels…
Yet, I’ve awoken this week to find out that Farage’s Reform party are getting close to overtaking the Labour Party in the voting intentions for Barnsley North, the constituency where I live.
The title quote, playing on the famous quote attributed to Marx’s interpretation of history, feels the most adequate to the current situation.
I will hold my hand up and say that I had sympathy for some of the motivations for voting Leave in the 2016 EU referendum.
It was ugly, it was racist, but it was also justifiably angry at a political orthodoxy that presented everything as being fine, when it clearly wasn’t for many people, for many reasons.
That this dissent was easily activated through racism, through scapegoating immigrants, was just as much the fault of culturally liberal politicians and institutions who endorsed inclusivity and tolerance whilst subscribing to the economically right-wing agenda (neoliberalism) that is at the root of so many of our problems.
Brexit was and has been a tragedy.
Reform is its return as farce.
Around the time of the 2016 results, I genuinely thought that the racism and xenophobia could be deactivated if a politics that genuinely served people, and moved away from an economic system that was tearing up the social fabric around us. This never happened: the main progressive alternative was demonised and the general population gaslit into believing it ‘unelectable.
The farce of Reform is the farce of not learning from our recent past. Both the electorate, who cannot see that Farage is nothing but a wrecker in the service of disaster capitalism, and the political and media establishment who did everything they could to prevent an alternative that may, may, have just tended to needs that are once again being exploited.
John B Ledger 