Sticking to our instincts and principles probably won’t kill us
IT’S BEEN said many times by many people. Party politics purely for the sake of it has largely failed this country. Failed it for years.
These old-hat attitudes get particularly boiled up when the election stew gets shoved in the oven.
The party-geeks love times like this. The scramble for the posh seats chucks out whatever is left in the character of British politics, rather like one of those supermarket trolley-dashes that were once all the rage.
Think about the partisan games that we are witnessing today. This nonsense surely has finally run its course of usefulness, if indeed it ever had any usefulness.
The question really is whether we as a society can be bothered to demand better. Peel back that unfortunate cloud of Brexit (which was never intended to be a party issue at all) and the perpetual blame-games that will again waste the first half of any new Parliament, and we find pretty much the same old snarling and growling that has taken us precisely nowhere so far.
We simply don’t want to agree with anyone do we?
We just want our side to win the election, and we are prepared to go to extraordinary lengths to get our way.
Something happened to chase off that delightfully old-fashioned domain of casting one’s vote with a bit of happiness, a tad of pride and a bucket full of personal belief. Those traits stepped into the wide jaws of party-politics to convince us that this is no longer the best way to behave at election time.
Instead, let us convince our fellow citizens that they stand a better chance of getting what they really want by voting for someone they don’t want to win. The partisan truck is overflowing on this stuff like never before, and it’s doing great harm.
Yes, party-politics of the tribal blend has held back this country for long enough. Put enough people off and they will stop listening. Scare enough people and they will run for cover, but confuse enough people and you are onto a winner. Or someone is.
This isn’t good enough anymore, even if indeed it ever was good enough.
British democracy, far from perfect even when functioning as intended, is still but a distant, unreachable dream for most of 21st Century mankind. If it was intended to be designed like this, then we wasted a good chunk of our history telling people to copy us.
It’s a bad and failed campaign habit to wander around sniffing out every whiff and silly chance to get our chosen tribe around the big fire. Sticking to our instincts and considered principles probably won’t kill us, even if it loses us the election this time.
The grand alternative is to allow those party strategists to don their hairy election vests and tell us to pick the winner as we would pick the winner of the village Victoria Sponge competition.