As I write, a million words are being typed on the same subject as quickly as fingers can slam downwards, in a quest to shovel something regarding Theresa May’s election plans onto front pages around the world within the next few minutes.
The hottest of takes are being prepared, barely thought-through analysis and nuggets of partisan wisdom cracking like little gunshots onto plastic receivers and lancing up to screens for the edification of those around the world for whom Polls Are Life.
The announcement of May’s June general election is that rarity news anchors desire and dread, a moment when no-one gets the inside scoop, where journalists scrabble to speak as quickly as social media and people actually do watch history happen live on air. We were seeing political drama in raw, RGB glory as the Prime Minister made her big play to see Brexit through in its entirety.
But was anybody’s reaction one of excitement, apart from perhaps journalists and Conservative-minded political wonks, sniffing madly as they reiterate perpetually unedifying macho cliches, “scenting blood in the water” and “anticipating carnage at the polls”?
Probably not. Collectively we have in recent years been forced to trudge through the morass of inanities, lies, focus-group based policy proposals, patronising PR and promises, promises more often and with more blanket, 24-hour media coverage than at any time in history.
Our tellies, newspapers and online media have been swilling over with this mush with the Scottish referendum (2014), UK General Election (2015), EU Referendum (Summer 2016) and even with the polls of other countries from the US (Autumn 2016) to Turkey (Spring 2017). In between we’ve had the Labour election which brought in Corbyn (2015) and the chicken coup which failed to get him out (2016).
Each one is a repeat of the last, politicians dragging countless people out of their homes to win some petty political point or other, demanding that their version of Capitalism 2017 be stroked and cooed over by the public like some bratty Chelsea child after a lacklustre violin recital. May wants business as usual, Corbyn will present a “kinder” administration of capital, the SNP will continue to pretend they have a magic bullet for the pressures of global capitalism.
And while this political manoeuvring goes on Tony Blair’s food banks flourish in the absence of a comprehensive welfare State. Corbyn’s hopeless Odyssey to convince the public that his Milliband-era fiscal proposals are more palatable coming from a bearded pacifist-but-not-really continues to flounder as Big Money forces a mass working class migration out of the big cities.
Will Jezza vote for this election to happen? Most likely (Edit: yep he did), it is after all his muse. His one-armed man. His sezchuan sauce. He needs the Big Rock Candy Mountain of political “power” in the same way a crack addict needs one more, heady hit, even though the experience will kill him. Even though a Labour Parliament would simply be an exercise in miserable defeat as the capitalist class forces concession after concession, unchecked in the absence of a broader working class movement with teeth to oppose them. The myth is what drives, a lake of stew and whiskey too.
Who’s tired of this nonsense? Raise your hand, if you can.
Rob Ray
