THE DECREASING NUMBER of people bothering to vote in elections is not necessarily a sign of apathy or disconnectedness. That many people don’t see the point because the political parties and the politicians all seem very much the same is partly true, but the root cause is that life for most people is comfortable: more comfortable for some, less for others, but real hardship, even that of thirty of forty years ago, is absent.
In such a situation there hardly seems much point getting wound up by arguments over minor points of policy. The NHS, despite the screams of the left, is not going to be dismantled by the Tories, free (as in tax-payer funded) primary and secondary education will continue to be provided for the nation’s children, tax-payer funded subsidies will continue to underwrite the 50 percent of the country’s youth going to university, roads will continue to built and maintained, the supermarkets will continue to provide a wide range of stock, affordable foreign holidays will still be available, and cheap, decent clothes will still be on sale in high street stores. The government will take as much tax from you as it thinks it can get away with. And the BBC will continue to be left wing while claiming to be objective. And so on.
Comfortable people are not keen on having radical change thrust upon them and they’re not going to demand massive change themselves. They don’t feel the need to be continuously engaged in political discourse. They’re not impelled to get involved in campaigns or go on demonstrations or take to the streets. They’d like most things to be left as they are, please, and for themselves, their families and their country to be left alone.
Few things revolt them left more than the sight of the people formerly known as working class enjoying the luxuries of the middle classes.
All of this anathema to the left, for whom contentment and comfort are anathema. Few things revolt them more than the sight of the people formerly known as working class enjoying the luxuries of the middle classes: good clothes, holidays, cars, booze, food, nice houses, massive tvs, etc. They know that the more these people are happily sunk into the mire of consumerist false consciousness the less likely they are to vote for them because the policies they offer are as out of date as the Puritans.
That’s one reason the left get so angry all the time. They live in a safe, well-upholstered, bourgeois, liberal democracy where people by and large get on with their lives and each other, and they can’t stand it. They need permanent division and conflict to justify their existence. Everything has to be in a state of crisis so that can they set themselves up as saviours and then boss people around. The whole of the left is engaged in a variety of witch hunts to stir things up and divide people – race, gender, religion, culture, politics, “community”, and so on. There has to be change. It has to be big and they have to impose it — for everyone’s good, that is.
It’s also partly a matter of temperament. It’s the Mrs Jellby Syndrome, and the left are professionals at it. Mrs Jellby, you’ll remember, is the character in Bleak House who is more concerned for children in Africa than her own. Thomas Love Peacock had outlined a similar character decades before in the figure of Stella, in Nightmare Abbey:
Stella…displayed a highly cultivated and energetic mind, full of impassioned schemes of liberty, and impatience of masculine usurpation. She had a lively sense of of all the oppressions that are done under the sun; and the vivid pictures which her imagination presented to her of the numberless scenes of injustice in every part of the inhabited world, gave her an habitual seriousness to her physiognomy…
We’re all familiar with the Jellybys and the Stellas, and though we know that good intentions usually inspire them, we also know they’re easily blinded to the needs of those closest to them, and susceptible to the purposes of those with less charitable intentions.
Without division, conflict and poverty there is no need for a left any more. It should, as Marx said the state should do, wither away as things continue to improve. Put the left in charge, though, and they’ll still have to find something to cause aggravation about. This is the terrifying prospect facing the Labour Party now. They’re confronting the oblivion of irrelevance. You can almost feel sorry that so many of them have flipped and become followers of Jeremy Corbyn. Many of them are people who are old enough to know better. Instead, they’re behaving like men and women failing to cope with a midlife crisis and trying to recapture the excitement of youth. One thing you should learn with age is that there are no heroes, no saviours and no miracles. The real world is a compromise. The most you can usually expect of politicians is a modicum of competence. It’s a case of fingers crossed and hope they don’t rock the boat.
Corbyn has definitely introduced a sense of difference between the major parties. He’s done it in a very entertaining way because he’s a mountebank socialist throwback with ancient ideas that have failed consistently in the past and are currently failing in Venezuela. With Corbyn in charge there’d be no competence of any sort and it would be a case of all hands to the pumps. You can see what’s coming.
But finally, the most enraging thing for the left is the knowledge that when things really get tough and big changes have to be made, the dull-witted, complacent populace will get themselves off their apathy-inducing sofas and vote Conservative.
