Peoples Republic of South Devon

The Circle of Strife

June 14th, 2008

posted by Jess Sains

As I have mentioned before in my weekly ramblings for People’s Republic of South Devon, when a student of politics (if you can ever stop being such a thing once you’ve started…) one of the questions that kept me pondering throughout my four years of marked study was the circular nature of politics, or whether such a nature existed, at least.

This week David Davies, the Shadow Home Sectary and Conservative MP for Haltemprice and Howden, resigned his position and seat in protest at New Labour’s victory on the 42 day detention vote in the Commons. He says it infringes of British civil liberties.

Now, apart from including the word ‘British’ this sounds a distinctly airy-fairy, Amnesty-Internally, wishy-washy lefty statement, doesn’t it? And here is the major, frightening issue facing people of my generation – old enough to have lived in the Thatcher era as children and seen the state of the country at that time, but young enough to mostly have been teenagers and adults during the Blairite era – are the Tories now more left-wing than Labour? Is anyone left-wing at all? If there isn’t a political split between our major parties what is left for the electorate to decide on, to vote about?

I stayed up all night to hear the results come in in 1997. I dragged my sorry self out of bed again, having headed up there at about 5:30am after dancing when Portillo fell to Twigg, to see the Blair arrive at Number Ten. I hoped. Oh how I hoped. I hoped that they were just faking the grinning, the spinning and the middle-ground; that now in power they would reveal themselves as lovely, lovely lefties after all.

Eleven years later and I am now older and… cynicaler. The landscape of British politics has changed so greatly since the early 1990’s that it is no longer recognisable. I don’t blame this all on the Blair, Campbell and Mandie, either, the beginnings come from Kinnock’s leadership. The foundation for the removal of Clause IV and the rumblings of ‘one-member-one-vote’ appeared in the lead-up to the 1992 election. If Labour had won that election, things might have been different, the old party faithful might have reared up again and prevented some of the things that were pushed through being pushed through, but in the utter dejection of defeat in came John Smith and out went Socialism…

The rest is, as they say, history. The future, however, is a topsy-turvy type of place. The Tories have principles and don’t ask questions for cash, their leader is more likely to be seen (when the media is about…) with his family or on a bike than sinking the Belgrano. New Labour is more likely to be pushing through a piece of legislation where by ever adult person has to wear a camera, surgically placed in their eye for the rest of their life, because if we are not terrorists or paedophiles we should all be happy to have cameras in our eyes for the safety of our children…

Only one thing remains constant. The Northern Ireland Unionist parties still have a casting vote that holds a lot of power in Westminster. Everyone else in Parliament is huddled round the centre ground like a flock of frightened turkeys as the fox draws near. And then they wonder why people don’t want to vote, when there really isn’t that much to vote on any more. Who has a better smile, David or Gordon? Who is ‘greener’ of the two? Then we, the great British public, get accused of being celebrity obsessed no-brainers because we are told that we shouldn’t be voting on smiles.

Well, then, give me something to vote on. Give me a left, a right: give me a bloody choice. Give me something to get my teeth in to, because even I, a politics geek through-and-through, can no longer see the point in there being more than one party. But, unlike Winston, I don’t love Big Brother yet, either…

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