Ch-ch-ch-changes
I have a backlog of things to write about here; I’m going to get the General Election out of the way first.
I spent all day on Thursday 4th working at a local polling station. I got there just before 06.00 and got home around 22.45. I really enjoyed it, although I underestimated how tired I’d be when I got home. The two main things I was worried about – the first election in Scotland requiring ID and my task of receiving (or rejecting) postal votes – weren’t big issues at all. Almost everybody who turned up to vote (earliest at 07.00, last at 21.56) brought appropriate ID and we were busy throughout the day. Most voters were cheerful and determined, more than outweighing the one or two who were taciturn bordering on rude.
My plan was to get home, have a nap, and see some of the results come in, whisky in hand. In the event I was so tired that I got home, had something to eat, and slept for 10 hours. I woke up to find that both the Conservatives and the SNP had been stuffed, trussed and roasted like Christmas turkeys.
Good.
It wasn’t the Tory wipe out many of us wanted, but I’ll settle for their humiliation. Fingers crossed that the SNP get their just deserts at the next Holyrood election.
As for what happens now with the Starmer administration, my view is that there are no major policy areas, domestic or international, that should not be recast as a matter of urgency in the context of uncontrolled climate change. This is also the context for rebuilding social institutions near-destroyed by the Tories, institutions that ought to provide some resilience and mitigation in the face of current and coming climate change impacts. The incoming government must also have strategies in place to respond to the Russia/N Korea/China axis and the slow collapse of the USA.
There is no logical way that any such objectives can succeed unless the government pursues a strategy of strengthening ties with Europe.
It remains to be seen whether Starmer’s Labour are up to the job – I don’t think they were put on the spot about *any* of the above during the campaign: serious discussion of climate change and Europe was carefully excluded from all public debate by the big players, perhaps because they don’t grasp it? Lobby correspondents, generalists all, certainly don’t grasp the bigger issues. Discussion, such as it has been, has revolved around ‘Green’ issues in the abstract and the political/industry fiction of Net Zero. That has to change, if only because reality is likely to force a change in the lifetime of this Parliament, so best start now.
In the meantime, I don’t think our media commentators have sufficiently grasped what a paradigm-shifting event the new Parliament is. Most of the ‘informed’ analysis I’ve seen has continued to use the conceptual language of the old paradigm despite it now being redundant. This is true for the Right, shell-shocked by the scale of their rejection, and the Left, furious that Labour under Starmer won.
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