A Rant About What’s Been Done To My Country

I like being British.

I like Doctor Who and rolling fields and quirky old bookshops. I like the BBC and the NHS.

But this country is currently embroiled in what the internet has christened the omnishambles. Sure, Britain has seen scandal and controversy before, but boy oh boy, this last few months has been the gift that keeps on giving when it comes to the systematic dismantling of public trust in… Well, in anything really. Because frankly, this country is now run by moral invertebrates, so parasitically enmeshed into ‘the System’ that removing them seems impossible. The next election has never seemed so far away.

I mean, the phone hacking scandal was bad enough in and of itself, but then the Leveson enquiry started uncovering the connections between the media hacks behind this and the Government. And it’s all very chummy, all garden parties and supportive text messages between high-ranking politicians and the Murdochistas. Meanwhile hundreds of people have had their phones hacked, and for what? Cheap, unimportant tabloid gossip that the general public lapped up without asking how some of these stories were obtained.

We can vote against some of these people, of course, but then they just get into bed with each other and form a coalition. I never thought voting for the Lib Dems would lead to the sneaking privatisation of the NHS and a rise in student fees. But that’s what we’re getting.

But hey, we’re all in it together, right? We’re all in it together as millionaires close our libraries, cut benefits to our most vulnerable, cut a swath through the public services we rely on.

I don’t have a problem with millionaires. I have a problem with millionaires saying “we’re all in it together” as they progressively turn the screws on people, as they fuel the demonisation of the disabled. Add to this riots, in which communities burned while MPs went on holiday, and the fabric of British society is feeling very fragile and vulnerable indeed. And we fight, like rats in a sack, which bankers threaten to screw the economy again (and make money when they get caught), while the festering sores of things like police corruption (check out the Daniel Morgan case for a truly horrifying example of this) continue to poison the country.

And those responsible are still there, still smug, still displaying a complete lack of contrition or regret over what’s happening.

And I have no real idea what we can do about it.

UK Council Elections 2012

So, the UK council election results are in, and, overall, Labour are the big winners of the night (at the moment, not all the results are in) with 1093 councillors. They were also the only party to make gains – everyone else lost seats, and lost big, with the Tories and Lib Dems losing something like half their councillors. As it stands right now, it’s looking like a textbook hammering.

But then estimated turnout was around 32%, which is what bothers me. At what point does turnout drop so low that we can’t be said to have a functional democracy anymore? It can’t be much lower than a third of the adult population, surely?

But I sympathise with many who didn’t vote. I don’t believe this was down to apathy, but rather a significant number of people just not finding anyone to vote for. After all, you’d be hard-pressed to say that political discourse in this country is inspiring – at the moment it basically boils down to Murdoch and no money.

The counter argument is that if you can’t find anyone to vote for, there’s always someone to vote against. This tends to be my current philosophy, but it’s hardly inspirational – yes, it stops the racist bigots clawing their way to power, but what happens once they’re out the way. It’s necessary, sure, but it doesn’t paint an intriguing picture of the future. Beat the bigots and you’re left with a sense of relief, but relief will never be as powerful as hope.

I don’t know. I’m no pundit. But we can’t go on like this, floundering for someone to vote for and letting our national cynicism triumph over any possibility of change. Because it looks like, this time at least, voting has made a difference; maybe not a difference you or I are fundamentally inspired by, but a difference all the same. That’s got to be worth anyone’s vote.

Snowpocalypse Now

Britain, Britain, Britain: Home of Churchill, Nelson, the Industrial Revolution, the winning team of the 1966 World Cup. Take a look on the back of a pound coin and what do you see? That’s right, a lion, rearing up to rend his enemies asunder.

(And also a unicorn, which is basically just a pointy horse. I don’t know what to do with that.)

And yet there’s something about our national character that falls apart when it snows. I mean, it’s not like we’re in the middle of the Sahara, where a few inches of snow would probably be an End Of The World portent. We’re a damp wet island where it snows once a year. There’s no excuse for this mass hysteria.

Okay, I’m aware this is a grumpy old man rant, but with good reason – I’ve just driven 40 miles through Snowmageddon and the weather wasn’t a problem. The real problem? Other people.

I mean, it’s wet, it’s dusk, but some drivers still seem to think that headlights give you hemorrhoids. Still, at least they compensate by driving up your exhaust pipe. You can’t help but see them when they obviously want to get intimate with the stuff in your boot. Letting the concept of stopping distances enter their lives would be nice.

And then there’s the guy who starting hitting his horn because, shock horror, I gave way to someone on my right at a roundabout. I appreciate I might have been able to sneak in, traversing a wet, snowy road as I did so; I’m also aware that there are things called ‘multi-car pile-ups’, which are very bad and take up the valuable time of the emergency services.

And don’t get me started on pedestrians. Especially the one wearing a big woolly hat and a tracksuit. This is the reason the UK is number one in Europe for people getting frozen alive in freak glaciers and defrosted in the future.

But I’m home safe and the central heating is on and no-one’s going to put me in hospital now.

Unless they drive into my living room whilst tailgating my house…

The Stories We Tell

Okay, I admit it – my last post was grim, grimmer than I like to be. I know I’m a born pessimist but I try to fight against it, but I guess I couldn’t help it – a bunch of political maniacs are threatening the world economy, people are getting murdered in the streets in Syria while, parallel to this, people in London are riotting so they can nick DVDs, and someone near where I live has been messing with roadsigns so that diverted traffic is getting lost. Frankly, some days it’s not worth getting out of bed.

But then I read a couple of articles, one by my friend Sudge about living life between the bookends, the other a devastating New York Times critique of Obama’s inability to promote a narrative. All this got me thinking.

We’re a storytelling people, all of us; we tell ghost stories around campfires, we watch soap operas, we testify in church and pull together 140 character storylines on Twitter. Narrative is hardwired into us, and we always find a way to paint animals on cave walls.

And so what we may have here is a complete failure to tell a story that matters a damn.

Think about it – the rioters in Tottenham and Brixton rioted for… what? Despite there being two potential narratives that coild resonate (“Community rebels against police brutality”, “Poverty-stricken youths rebel against an uncaring society”), you can’t help but think there’s no greater message than “Smash stuff up and steal things”. In the absence of a grassroots story we often turn to leaders – let’s face it, Hitler and Churchill were experts at this, even if they were at opposite ends of the World War II spectrum. We don’t have anyone with that storytelling ability – Obama’s fairly bad at it, but at least he’s present, unlike UK leaders – it’s all very well trying to weave a tale of the Big Society, but before you can do that, you need to pay your dues working with smaller societies.

Meanwhile, London is rioting, and some people are trying to figure out if Twitter or Blackberrys are the story, as opposed to the medium through which those stories are told. No-one has much of an idea of what’s going on, or why people seem to want to destroy their own communities.

No-one knows what the story is.

Maybe the reason for this is that we’ve become accustomed to people telling our stories for us, rather than us grasping the nettle and creating our own narratives. We’re told that our jobs are vulnerable, that our old age will be spent in poverty, that things like healthcare and libraries and security or optional extras rather than fundamental human rights. And we’ve either gone along with this or reacted against it in ways that undercut the good within any alternative narratives.

So how do we tell a better story? Collectively, I don’t know. I’d say it begins with treating each other with love and respect and decency, by building our communities together, by living to create and build up rather than destroy and tear down. But that only goes so far when, as we’ve seen in London, people are willing to burn down their own communities.

Yesterday saw the start of the Jewish festival of Tisha B’Av, a day on which the Jewish community remembers and reflects upon the disasters that have befallen it over the years. That seems instructive somehow, because for all we can lament everything that’s happened in the UK, we need a time to reflect on the crises we’ve seen but, more importantly, we need to uncover how we got to this point in the first place. People don’t hack mobiles or burn restaurants on a whim. And we won’t get to that point by passing laws that promote greater levels of random stop-and-search or that penalise Twitter – there’s a quote in this article from the Telegraph that goes “memory is far better than the law”.

We need our Tisha B’Av moment, to express a lament for the disasters befalling the UK at the moment – the poison of the phone hacking scandal, the explosion of rioting, the panic of the Stock Markets – and then, most importantly, construct a new narrative. And maybe that’s got to be based in loving our neighbour, because the problems that face us aren’t failures of law or economics so much as failures of a common humanity – if we marginalise people, if we see loyal workers or phone-hacked celebrities or disenfranchised young people as collatoral damage resulting from unstoppable cultural forces then we’re dead in the water.

We need a new story; one that we’re proud to tell, one that makes us not only proud to be British but that makes us capable of being in community once more.

This is the UK in 2011

This is the UK in 2011.

We riot on the streets of London, ostensibly to protest police brutally, but partly so we can loot HMV and nick some DVDs.

We hack the mobile phones of the families of murdered children.

We know this is wrong, but we still support Murdoch because the Sun has good football coverage and Sky has the rights to all the good American shows.

We go on holiday, even when the city we’re supposed to govern from erupts into violence.

We consider libraries expendable. We then moan that the workforce isn’t clever enough.

We have government, media and police colluding with each other to further their agendas, either through corruption or stupidity.

We then wonder why no-one respects authority any more.

We still think it’s a necessary evil to shoot or blow up people in another part of the UK.

We handed over the media to Murdoch, music to Cowell and our high streets to giant supermarket chains.

We then complain that they all suck.

We blame The Other for an alleged increase in crime.

We therefore support groups who hate The Other.

We then watch these groups commit crime, which should be ironic, but maybe it’s okay when white skinheads do it.

We know it must be 2011, because we’ve all got mobiles and Twitter, but we still act like it’s the darkest depths of the 80′s.

We used to make stuff, but then we realised it was easier to ship it all to places with less bothersome labour laws.

We don’t like jokes about foreigners or disabled people (unless they’re ‘ironic’, in which case they’re hilarious).

We want to make redundant those people who we once trusted to provide services that add value to our communities.

We then listen as millionaires brand this as a way of making poorer communities better.

We watch in horror as the Stock Markets fall.

We then embrace our inner materialist and say money is all that matters.

We’ve been ranked 33rd in Europe for home broadband speed, 6th in Europe for drug deaths and highest in Europe for teenage pregnancy.

We then moan about Europeans because apparently they don’t know what they’re talking about.

This is the UK in 2011.

We really need to look at ourselves.