Familiarity & Contempt

Ben Wildsmith

The feeling that everything is on the point of collapse has been with us for a long time now.

We peeked into the abyss in 2008, when capitalism as we knew it hit the skids. The political impact, though, took longer to feed through, eventually manifesting through the Brexit referendum in the UK and the rise of Trump in the US.

Since then, governance in what we used to call ‘The West’ has been characterised by wild electoral swings that have seen outrageous characters benefit from the public’s desperation to see something substantive improve in their lives.

The future is unpredictable to an extent we have never experienced. We are currently tipped to have a Reform UK government next, but a victory for the Greens is a viable possibility now too.

Whilst these two parties are irreconcilably distant from each other ideologically, they are united by the one factor that nearly all voters now insist upon: neither has governed before.

That sentiment amongst voters has been growing for a while. Plaid Cymru’s strong polling here can be seen in that light, and Reform UK’s popularity has seemingly been dented by an influx of ex-Tory MPs.

Farage MkII, Rupert Lowe, launched his own party yesterday as an insurgent alternative to Reform and, according to a snap poll, registered 10% support immediately.

The public’s contempt for familiarity is such that Reform is in danger of appearing too established without so much as tasting power.

If we have become destructive as electors, though, who could blame us? The political class has presided over declining living standards for us and skyrocketing wealth for investment class. Our work is worth less, whilst our lives cost more.

That is exactly the scenario that we elect politicians to correct – the entire point of tolerating them in the first place.

There have been nine Chancellors of the Exchequer since 2008, and Rachel Reeves is the latest to concur with the rest that nothing substantive can be done to ease conditions for the working stiff because the bond markets won’t allow it.

That isn’t democracy, it’s the delegation of oligarchy to politicians whose loyalties are not so much biddable as pre-determined. It is a sham, and we all know it.

For the thick end of twenty years, the UK public has played along, voting for two parties that both act as if widening inequality is an act of God, rather than a consequence of policy.

Now, though, with the world’s political and financial elites emerging from Epstein’s quagmire joined at the hip, the game is surely up.

This is some proper fall of Rome shit, isn’t it?

Self-interested

‘Petie’ Mandelson is no surprise, really. This strange, self-interested figure would inspire hypervigilance in anyone not so power-blinded as to be useful to him. He’s exactly the person you’d nominate as a friend of Jeffrey, isn’t he?

But he’s just the obvious problem. What’s led us here are all the supposedly virtuous figures who claimed credibly to speak for us but who allowed themselves to be silenced. If you want to upset anyone on the left just whisper, ‘Noam Chomsky, eh,’ in their ear and watch them wince.

The river of compromise flows from Epstein Island all the way down to your local Labour MP voting for welfare ‘reform’ because, you know, markets.

When somebody like Mandelson is a power broker in an organisation, that’s how it ends, with every last minion corrupted in his image.

So, they are on their way out, the lot of them, and they still can’t see why.

There are two types of people in the world: 1) Those who think Wes Streeting is popular with the British public. 2) The British public.

Unfortunately, the former group includes most of our political class including, crucially, political journalists. They are trapped in some version of the Japanese Imperial Court where 13th Century dialogue persists and none of us can visit.

The rejection of what’s been is the only solid factor in western politics now.

20th Century individualism 

We are moving out of one age and into another. 20th Century individualism is being confronted by the need for cooperation in the face of climate change, new technology, and the growing realisation that the way we have lived has made us unhappy, ill, and diminished.

Those peddling a return to the past are not only promising the impossible, but the undesirable. Fictional chim-chim-cheree visions of 1950s Britain, as touted by Lowe and Farage, are no more authentic now than when John Major started hallucinating spinsters cycling to church and village greens, despite having grown up in Brixton.

It’s not politics, just cheap storytelling and it will fall apart on contact with reality.

Whatever we are heading towards in the long-term is a long way from appearing on our ballot papers yet.

The future is not yet born, it seems. In the meantime, our job is to insist that not one inch of democratic ground is taken from us by shysters. When the new idea arrives, it would be better to vote it in, than fight for it.