AND FINALLY
What I’d write on a stone tablet
OBVIOUSLY this isn’t a political column, although as a young journalist I reported from all over the British Isles for the Left-wing New Statesman. During both 1974 general elections I pushed my baby through Clapham streets, piles of Labour leaflets stacked in his pram.
I marched with him at a Yorkshire Miners’ rally and my little boy ‘met’ politicians across the spectrum, too. This was our life. Looking back, those seem like easier, gentler times.
Without social media we were protected from the worst excesses of rabid disagreement. It was deeply depressing, in the run-up to this election, to have to take up arms on Facebook against those who asserted (arrogantly, insultingly) that ‘nobody with a conscience could vote Tory.’
And how equally dispiriting to realise that Labour-supporting, creative people I respected could vilify this country and all it stands for. And then the way they spewed bitter rage at the result they didn’t want!
Honestly, I’ve grown sick of challenging the ‘four legs good, two legs bad’ kneejerk bleating of people with no respect for democracy, or for the ‘people’ whose aspirations they despise.
Me, I’m from an ‘ordinary’ background and that’s why I’m sick of the virtuous hypocrisy of champagne socialism.
What’s this got to do with an advice column? Well, it made me reflect that my shift from just-left of centre to just-right of centre is not unconnected with this job. I wonder if being an honest and (I hope) compassionate advice columnist cures you of believing the panacea of progressive politics.
How could you go on being brainwashed by abstract ideals when proofs of the opposite come in every day?
When you’ve made a study of flawed, messy human nature? When you see how people can refuse to try to make situations better, because (deep down) they prefer to be angry and miserable — validated by the chip on the shoulder?
Yes, people are imperfect and no one party has all virtue on its side. Let’s write that on a tablet of stone.
Bel answers readers’ questions on emotional and relationship problems each week. Write to Bel Mooney, Scottish Daily Mail, 20 Waterloo Street, Glasgow G2 6DB, or e-mail bel.mooney@dailymail.co.uk. A pseudonym will be used if you wish. Bel reads all letters but regrets she cannot enter into personal correspondence.