Trouble Comin’ Every Day
Strange times. I went for a walk this afternoon: when I set out there was a hailstorm in progress and I dressed accordingly; when I got home it was relatively warm sunshine. It was good to get fresh air, though, to try and shake off whatever it is that’s been ailing me for the last few days. I’d quite like to shake it off for many reasons, not least that creativity has largely left me for the last few days.
In the meantime, votes are being counted in assorted elections throughout the country. At the time of writing it isn’t clear what the overall picture will be, particularly here in Scotland, but there’s enough to suggest a realigning in England. I don’t find this surprising. After the last UK General Election, I put up the following post:
In that post I said:
It’s trite to note that the world has changed in the forty years since I left home, and done so in many ways. One of those changes is that all of the large-scale industrial infrastructure of my childhood has gone in my lifetime, and with it the communities and cultures it sustained, including the tacit knowledge that underpinned them. My Dad’s skilled job as a technical artist is done on computer now, and his generation, that was caught up in WW2 and the reconstruction of the UK post-War, is mostly gone too. Annfield Plain Co-op is in Beamish for the tourists to immerse themselves in heritage.
As the old story has it, you can take a bicycle apart and put it back together again, possibly better than it was before; to try the same with a frog leads to catastrophic failure of the frog. Communities are frogs, not bicycles, and destroying communities has consequences. Those consequences are fatal to the political and economic dogmas of the left that were developed in another time and place. This is because, to the extent that the conceptual analysis of the ‘socialist’ and ‘Marxist’ left was ever accurate, it isn’t now.
The front row kids, with their management by measurement and quantitative analysis, entirely miss the importance of community and tacit knowledge, the memory of shared experience of family, work, service, and the death of friends and comrades. The most important things, in this context, are precisely those things that can’t be measured, quantified, tabulated, dissected and analysed by spreadsheet and Powerpoint. The same front row kids, in a different guise as the analysts and ideologues behind the current Labour Party, also miss it, because they’re often too young ever to have known it, and so are surprised when their beloved working classes don’t do as they’re told, and vote for someone else.
The left never understood why the generation that rebuilt the country after WW2 was so pleased to be able to buy their council houses in the 1980s. Dad died young in 1983, but I remember how happy he was, after a lifetime of work that never, ever paid enough to support home ownership, to own his own home. This had precisely zero to do with the theoretical ins and outs of the policy or its structural consequences for local housing stock, and everything to do with identity, aspiration, security and self-worth.
Since I wrote that, Brexit has happened and we have deal with it as it is, not how we would have liked it to have been. I dare say I’ll come back to that. Scotland is much more awkward because the early results show no apparent national pattern except that seats appear to be resolving into binary contests between the SNP and whoever is best placed to beat them. This may look different by tomorrow night, naturally. Just as corruption and mendacity seem to be irrelevant to voters in England, so years of incompetence is not an obvious impediment to the SNP.
Two points: the Rancid Sac of Phlegm’s vanity party, at the time of writing this, has not exceeded 2% of the regional vote anywhere. As regards the Labour loss in Hartlepool, the Brexit Party candidate who took 10,000 votes last time, did not stand this time. That doesn’t explain the collapse of the Labour vote, but it does indicate part of the reason.
Some links to people more interesting than me on the subject:
Suzanne Moore on Substack: Election thoughts: Patronise me some more
Josh Halliday in The Guardian: ‘Obsessed with the flag’: Labour recriminations begin in Hartlepool
Chris Clarke on Medium: Against Their Interests (nerdy)
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On the plus side, My second Covid jab is on 19 May, or just under two weeks away. For unknown reasons, Kirstin’s second injection is a couple of days after mine.
As previously intimated, the second dose marks the point at which I wind down these daily blogs and revert to the occasional post as the mood takes me. I’ll probably keep the daily ones going until the end of May then call it done. I still plan to edit them and print them off, for my own satisfaction if no-one else’s
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Music: A decade ago (There Is No Hell, there Is Only France) I wrote:
Many, many years ago, when I was a spotty adolescent at Claremont High School in East Kilbride, David Mooney, with whom I only really became friendly towards the end of my schooldays and with whom I have completely lost touch, bought in an album the likes of which I had never heard before and I was hooked immediately. The album was Roxy and Elsewhere by Frank Zappa and the Mothers of Invention.
I thought about it while pondering songs to do with elections and dishonest politicians. Son of Orange County is about Richard M Nixon. More trouble Every Day is a perennial.
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