BE CAREFUL WHAT YOU WISH FOR

BE CAREFUL WHAT YOU WISH FOR

Forged in another time and place, the two major political parties have become outmoded and irrelevant. In the new millennium, both have become rudderless anachronisms, reduced to bickering and posturing and lost to the people to whom they owe their existence.

Government is a sacred trust; a duty to manage and lead the nation forward on behalf of its citizens. It’s about doing things. Past governments created such things as the Health Service and the Welfare State. They were people of vision, building something for the future. They thought in terms of later generations; of goals and purposes. They had energy and experience and were able to take a long term view, aiming for results rather than short-term popularity.

Politics has all but replaced intelligent government. It is about saying things. There is no plan, no goal, no agreement as to ideals. Instead mediocrities tinker and meddle with the achievements of the past. Born politicians, they have no real world experience, are completely out of touch with the public they are supposed to represent and have so lost the plot that the average citizen no longer bothers to vote for any of them. This is why they are reduced to childish insults and attempts to propitiate simple-minded sound-bite media.

While weak and hopeless administrations are a liability in themselves, the frustration they instil in the franchised voters has a much worse potential knock-on effect. If both main parties are almost indistinguishable and neither confronts real concerns, cynical extremists have an easy ride of it to get attention out of all proportion to their real significance.

As President Sarkozy recognised in France, anodyne, uninspired political twaddling would never get sensible people to the polling booth, while the rabid, racist supporters of Le Pen would make it through fire and flood. All he had to do was to victimise gypsies and he was sure of some support from the kind of people who thought fomenting discord and putting community relations back a hundred years would solve everything.

It is inevitable that new ‘parties’ will spring up from time to time. Maybe one day one will come along that will overcome the years of fumbling inertia. More likely, as we have seen, is that groups with an eye on the gravy train cobble together barroom platitudes into an apparent crusade based on blame and recrimination and the old, old trick of ‘divide and rule’. They will always find support, because they speak for the angry rather than the apathetic, but ultimately they won’t achieve much because their whole raison d’être is based on stopping people and things, not building or improving anything.

A further liability is that those who normally don’t bother to vote are driven to the end of their tether by Westminster’s cowardice and stupidity and decide to vote for anyone that might get the present incumbents out.

And why not?

The problem is that there is little connection, the way our ‘democracy’ is rigged, between the voter and who gets to parliament. An entirely justified metaphorical slap in the face for the psychopathic May or the shape-shifting-alien Blair is more likely to be an actual kick in the teeth for one of the only really valuable people in the whole shambles – those who toil at local level directly for their constituents and communities.

Political affiliations are largely irrelevant down here in the real world. It’s about individuals and what they do, whether they listen and respond, and to what degree they employ their energies for the good of the local community.