The Early Days of a Better Nation

Tuesday, December 31, 2019



That was the river. This is the sea

Over the past few years I've more or less stopped blogging about current politics. Because Twitter, for one thing. For another, my last serious effort at political blogging was during the Scottish independence referendum. Given that I wasn't so much arguing that Scottish independence was a bad idea – though I did – but that the Scottish left had nothing to gain from supporting it, my efforts were fruitless (and thankless, but I expected that).

So if you wanted to know what I thought about Brexit, Trump, Corbyn etc you'd have to look at my Twitter feed. Even on Twitter, I've more or less stopped arguing. Life's too short and I have books to write. But I should have said more here about recent developments in Britain while they were happening.

I registered as a supporter of the Labour Party in time to vote for Jeremy Corbyn. I joined in time to vote for Richard Leonard. And I've been reasonably active locally since, knocking on doors and going to meetings. Inverclyde, the constituency where I live, used to be solid Labour and is now solidly SNP. After a massive swing to the SNP in 2015, the gap narrowed to a few hundred in 2017. We worked very hard to close it over the past couple of years and harder still in the election campaign, to be rewarded by a vastly increased SNP majority.

As for the rest of the UK...

Leave was England's Yes.

5 Comments:

We worked very hard to close it over the past couple of years and harder still in the election campaign, to be rewarded by a vastly increased SNP majority.

I hadn't looked at the Scottish results - that's a very interesting wrinkle. (Also depressing as hell, let's not forget - commiserations!) Tartan [recipients of a similar kind of entrenched nihilistic all-the-same-sod-em-all and-don't-you-dare-try-to-change-my-mind vote as the] Tories?

Happy New Year Ken. I don't Twitter of Facebook, Still go to pubs though!

Thanks Phil -

The SNP may get some of that kind of vote, but most of the SNP people I know personally are literally my own demographic - like, I've known them since school - and many I've met on #labourdoorstep are (as you'd expect given how canvassing works) former Labour voters. There's a very focused kind of disillusion with Labour.

Happy New Year to you too, Conan! Hope to meet sometime this year.

Human beings could be living like gods; instead some of us live like worms.

Five hundred years from now (if we do not destroy ourselves) there will be no countries, no exploitation, and no religion. The changes a Corbyn government would have brought in would have been small from this perspective. Small, but within months they would have produced material benefits to the poorest people in our society within months. We could not even take this small step as a society. We are pathetic. Were it not for the hope I could cope with the everyday despair engendered by forty years of neoliberalism.

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