Annihilation Day

England (and the rest of the UK) Expects Everyone to do Their Duty

In two days time, the British electorate will finally get the chance, not merely to throw a Conservative government out of office, but to deal a potential death blow to the Conservative Party. The first of these possibilities belongs to the normal wheel-of-fortune of British politics, in which long-serving Tory governments finally become so brazenly corrupt, incompetent, and exhausted that even the people who voted these governments in can no longer stand them.

The second is an entirely new opportunity, that neither I nor many people of my generation ever expected to see. After all, we are talking about the most successful political party in the Western world, a party that has won eight out of the last 11 elections, and which has been power - alone or in coalition - for more than eighty out of the last 100 years.

Yet now here it is, after one of the worst electoral campaigns in its history, poised, according to the polls, to embark on a bleak journey through a political wilderness as barren as anything British Conservatism has ever known. For all of us who are painfully aware of the Conservative Party’s political ruthlessness, campaigning acumen, and ability to continually re-invent itself, the current campaign has been staggeringly and even bewilderingly inept - a fever dream that sometimes feels as if everyone responsible for it has stumbled on bad street drugs.

Not long ago, it would have been impossible to imagine a Tory MP betting on his own defeat, or a Tory Prime Minister who flew home early from a D-Day anniversary and could not even summon up the courage to sack employees and ministers betting on an election that he called, and whose concept of public debate was based on shouty interruptions and petulant disdain.

Who, even a few years ago, could have predicted that a Conservative electoral campaign would produce failed school projects like this?

Or this?

There was a time when someone who knew what they were doing would have told Sunak that this was not what he should be doing. But now such people no longer exist in the party which only five years ago won a majority that ought to have sustained it in power for at least two or three terms.

The most obvious explanation for this stunning collapse is the man who became prime minister in 2019. Admirers of Boris Johnson - and there are still more of them around than there ought to be - like to attribute his grubby implosion to a ‘witch hunt’, a ‘coup’ or the supposedly trivial preoccupation of the media and the public with ‘cake’ as a distraction from the serious business of government. But Johnson’s downfall was actually the clearest demonstration of how far his depraved administration had strayed from any conventional notion of serious government.

Many people - including Tories - warned beforehand that Johnson was unfit for office. It was entirely in keeping with Johnson’s career trajectory that his administration was brought down by the indolence and moral incontinence that gave us a tawdry version of the Masque of the Red Death acted out by the Tweenies, played out in 10 Downing Street with a supporting cast of non-entities who owed their presence there to their loyalty to him. Simon-not-on-the-Case once called Johnson’s administration a feral government, but Partygate was really a continuation of Johnson’s Bullingdon Club by other means - all takeaway booze, karaoke, pub quizes and vomit on the carpet.

In normal times that would have been bad enough, but coming out of the pandemic it constituted a savage mockery of the sacrifices made by a population that largely followed the rules Johnson’s government imposed, without realising that those who introduced them did not feel not bound to follow them.

This debacle was followed by the smirking stupidity and reckless fanaticism of the Truss/Kwarteng tandem, before the Tories inflicted yet another dreadful prime minister on the country in order to avoid having to face the electorate. One after another, these were administrations that covered the nation in shame and dishonour, and trampled on the most basic notions of accountability, honesty and basic competence that make democratic government possible.

For the last two years, Sunak’s hapless administration has tied his government’s fortunes to the Rwanda policy - an immoral fantasy that has no prospect of succeeding even in its own sordid terms. Now, Sunak has finally placed his government’s head in the slavering mouth of the British electorate, without even having giving his cabinet a chance to comb its hair.

Such ineptitude is jaw-dropping to the point when it almost defies rational explanation. Many commentators have pointed that all these post-2016 Tory governments have been Brexiter administrations. They were governments that came to power by promising, in different ways, to deliver the undeliverable and realise expectations that could not be met, following a referendum whose practical consequences few of them understood or appreciated, with negative implications they were too cowardly or dishonest to recognize.

In this quest to make a silk purse from a sow’s ear, it was necessary to eliminate or dismiss any residual expressions of what Karl Rove once called the ‘reality-based community’ within the Conservative Party in order to Get Brexit Done. And so it was that the fanatics, liars and grifters took over the Tory Party and reduced its once formidable electoral machine into the political equivalent of Hal the computer in 2001 A Space Odyssey, .

But this intellectual and political corrosion was already evident before the Brexit madness overwhelmed the Tory mind. Serious governments do not risk their country’s economic and political future by reducing its options to a yes/no referendum. Cameron agreed to this in an attempt to fend off his party’s extremist fringes, only to see it taken over by them.

Good riddance, you might say. Except that we have all been living with the consequences of this insouciant selfishness. In the New Republic, James Robins has written a devastating summary of the social ruin that successive Conservative governments have inflicted on British society since 2010 - and also during the Thatcher years. The near-collapse of the NHS, child poverty, food banks, wage stagnation, municipal bankruptcies, deindustrialisation, underinvestment in public services, inequality, nepotism and corruption, the gratuitous social cruelty of austerity - all these are the consequences of 14 grim years that have finally reached the point , when even Tory voters now flee from the party that onetime did they seek.

The Centre Cannot Hold

This ought to be a cause for celebration, and perhaps it would be, if the main political opposition party was able or willing to offer a genuine alternative to this cascade of calamities. It is more than a little unsettling and disheartening, given the scale and depth of our self-inflicted national wounds, that the main beneficiary of the Tory collapse is a timid right-wing Labour Party that barely dares say boo to a goose - except when it comes to its authoritarian purging of the left.

Starmer’s admirers like to present the turnaround in his own party’s fortunes as a testament to his political skills, and they aren’t entirely wrong. But his ruthless and often cynical purges have transformed Labour into a party that is in its own way, as hollow and soulless as the party it is preparing to defenestrate. Because elections are win by appealing to voters from outside your political comfort zone, it is equally true that the systemic failure which underpins our succession of political failures cannot be overcome by temporary electoral coalitions based on shallow notions of stability and managerial competence.

Even if the polls are correct, and Labour gets its majority, the UK is likely to remain firmly trapped in the neoliberal vice that has squeezed it to breaking point over the last four decades, in part, because no Labour government will attempt to challenge it. In pointing out these limitations, I am not adopting a sectarian or ideological position. I don’t agree with the ‘don’t vote Labour/vote for a real socialist’ sloganizing.

I hope Corbyn wins in Islington and that Faiza Shaheen takes Chingford and Woodford Green. I hope the Greens do well, and the Liberal Democrats too. I hope Reform does well - well enough to weaken the Tory vote but not gain more than a handful of seats. But if voting for a real socialist means voting for George Galloway, I’ll pass, thanks. And in most cases, voting for a real socialist means, in terms of its practical outcome, that you get a Tory. After the last 14 years, that is a luxury this country can no longer afford.

Nor is it much use arguing that Labour are as bad or even worse than Tories. No one can say that, at least not yet. Even a right-wing Labour Party has to answer to constituencies and organizations that the Conservative Party can’t reach, and which make it possible to exert political pressure on the leadership to be better than it wants to be.

At the same time, no voter is obliged to accept Labour’s anaemic alternative to Tory misrule and simply shrug their shoulders. Progressive government requires courage, vision, and a willingness to fight the fights that must be fought. If democratic politics can’t provide concrete improvements in people’s lives, address common crises coherently, and strengthen the bonds that make democratic society possible, then voters will turn away from democratic politics and fall into the embrace of political predators whose interest in democracy is perfunctory at best.

This is already happening in country after country. A few decades ago, few people would have imagined that the party of Abraham Lincoln could have become the corrupt, treasonous, conspiracy-riven madhouse that it has become in little more than a decade. After the turmoil of the Brexit years, it would be naive and foolish to discount the possibility of a similar outcome here, let alone rely on illusory notions of common sense and moderation as supposed hallmarks of the British national character.

Already, Farage is circling the Tory ruins with his usual cunning and malevolent charlatanry, staging Trumplike mass rallies and espousing fake-victimhood to stab-in-the-back voters who still want their country back and can’t understand why their Brexit feast has turned into a dog’s breakfast. It’s not for nothing that Farage has focused on Clacton - one of the most deprived areas in the country. These are the waters that he will try to walk on, blazer and striped suit and pint in hand, flush with someone else’s cash, and reader, it’s not because he cares about the people of Clacton.

No one should be surprised that Leave voters are now appealing to the same man who did so much to bring about the Brexit they voted for, and now find, they don’t like. He will never take responsibility for its failure, and nor will they, because living in the land-of-someone else’s-fault means never having to say you’re sorry, whether you’re a voter or a politician.

At present, Reform UK Party Limited - a name to set any nationalist heart on fire - is poised to scrape up some 16 percent of the vote. That might only gain them a few seats and hasten the Conservative Party’s collapse. But if Labour wins and then fails, then we could well be looking at a very different political outcome in five years time, much like the one that Macron is experiencing right now.

Labour’s own resurrection is a symptom of the same volatility that can also bring down a Labour government, and usher in something worse. And it’s precisely in these unpromising circumstances, that we have the right to demand more from our politicians.

Because whatever doubt or disgust you or I may have about the Starmer project, we can still vote tactically to hasten the destruction of the Conservative Party, and we should take advantage of that opportunity wherever it presents itself. Rarely has a political party deserved oblivion as much as this one, and if you can’t feel hope or optimism about Labour, then remember that there will never be any hope at all under this party-of-the-damned.

So if you can’t vote with your heart, then vote as an act of vengeance and just retribution. Make it a dish served up cold. Vote through gritted teeth. Vote for all those who died during the pandemic who might have lived if a different government had been in charge. Vote because that same government handed out millions to their mates through the VIP PPE lane.

Vote for the 2.99 million people who used foodbanks last year, who should have had enough money to feed themselves. Or the 1,560 people who died between 2014 and 2017 within six months of being found fit for work. Vote for the library you don’t have; for the hospital appointment you or someone you know can’t get; for the patients who died because ambulance services are on the verge of collapse; for the youth services that were cut by 73% percent between 2010/11 and 2019/20. Vote for the 82-year-old cancer patient who slept in a hospital corridor for 46 hours while waiting for a scan.

And if you still have any doubts, and want to sit this one out, think of the procession of hard-faced liars and incompetents who have passed through our tv screens these last few years and imagine them in power for even another day. Remember Cromwell’s message to the Long Parliament in 1653:

It is high time for me to put an end to your sitting in this place, which you have dishonoured by your contempt of all virtue, and defiled by your practice of every vice; ye are a factious crew, and enemies to all good government; ye are a pack of mercenary wretches.

The current government is no less factious, no less mercenary, no less injurious to good government. It too, has become ‘intolerably odious to the whole nation’ and we desperately need to be released from its suffocating grip. We need the party gone that has inflicted these calamitous governments on a country that should have known better, and which has discovered - too late - what Conservative Britain means in practice.

What comes next remains to be seen. It may very well disappoint. But for now, there is only one thing to be done. Go down to the polling station. Put your cross in the box. Do it with a song in your heart or scratch it out with a bitter taste in your mouth.

But do whatever it takes to get rid of this contemptible rabble. Settle back on the sofa, and watch the seats fall, one by one. And when that’s done, we can fight the fights that must inevitably be fought, and bring what pressure we can on the next government, and see if it is still possible to build a society that can live up to its better instincts, after so many years of succumbing to its worst.