2020 Vision Cancelled

Elmo, Lord Buckethead and Boris Johnson at the count

I was humming "Always Look on the Brightside of Life" as an antidote to Boris Johnson's landslide victory achieved on an empty manifesto, a spurious slogan "get Brexit done", duplicity and a chutzpa bourne of privilege. I was asked by my family "What will happen next?" The correct answer is "fuck knows". I have been too absorbed in politics since being recruited as child labour to deliver leaflets at election time and edit letters to the local newspaper. I then spent 40 years working for and with politicians and was able to observe the good, bad and ugly sides of politicians. During my final 14 years, I was a returning officer which gave me an insider view of who votes and how political parties gameplay elections. This knowledge makes it doubly difficult to understand the reasons why people do or don't vote and for whom if they do.

I watched agog as Michael Gove on the morning after the election acted as compere for the victory speech by Boris Johnson as the newly elected prime minister. Gove oozed sanctimonious and deprecating insults at other parties in his inimitable style before handing over to the PM. Boris Johnson uttered various promises about governing for all the people before in a performance that was more suited to 'Live at the Apollo' as he reprised his eclectic vocabulary and phrases randomly as he waffled on. It transpired that the new slogan for his government would be 'the people’s government', a fulfilment that is as likely as him serving a full term. 

With just 44% of the turnout vote or 29% of the electorate, we would be leaving the EU and spending the next few years haggling about trade deals, and immigration, pretending that the Irish Border is both there and not there,  trying to stall a Scottish referendum and making numerous announcements about investments in the north that amount no more than a fraction of the losses they have sufffered over the past decade.

Meanwhile, the Labour Party seems intent on indulging in another bout of fratricide. Changes that have been evident and needed for the past couple of years will be resisted. The broad church that everyone proclaims to want will have to wait until the tribal party officials at Labour HQ have finished genuflecting on Corbyn and other idols. Their claim that they won the arguments is derisible; they fudged the main issues like Brexit and produced a list of promises that was beyond the belief of the electorate and most of their candidates. They were reduced to fighting the election with half a dozen MPs who were either unreconstructed Corbynites or trusted members of his shadow cabinet, like Keir Starmer, whose advocacy of a second referendum could be blamed if things did not go well.

So despite being faced with potentially the worst post-war UK government in a very strong field of nominations, the opposition parties failed miserably to convince an electorate that agreed on one thing, our politicians are not to be trusted.

At a time when the UK should be setting a clear vision for the future as we approach the year 2020, we are bereft of any idea of where this will end. How will Brexit play out? Is Austerity finally over? Are we serious about climate change when we have stopped subsidising green energy and refuse to tax carbon fuels? How are we to reduce child poverty? When and how are we to provide adequate care for the elderly and vulnerable? Where are the new houses to be built to provide for young people and families who have been trapped in the iniquities of private renting? When will the government start a programme of levelling down to facilitate the levelling up that they promise to deliver?

The UK is destined to level down against other nations unless it becomes honest with its citizens and creates a written constitution. The farrago of the last parliament was all the evidence needed to tell us that our make-it-up-as-you-go-along constitution is long past its sell-by date. A new constitution should empower local democracy and vastly reduce the overbearing centralisation that dominates UK decision-making and stagnates the innovation that exists in all its communities. Parliament also needs to recognise that collaboration with other nations is the only way to effectively tackle the most important issues of climate change, trade, poverty, health and international aid. Think globally, act locally is as apposite now as when Patrick Geddes, the Scottish town planner and polymath first coined the concept in 1915.