June 10, 2024

General election blues (or reds?)

Election discourse is getting me down. It's not the first time I've been here

General election discourse is in full swing, and on Twitter that means accusing anyone who isn't sufficiently enthusiastic about the prospect of Keir Starmer forming a nominally Labour government of wanting the Conservatives to win. Since Starmer promises to enact Conservative policies, just more efficiently, it doesn't seem like we get much choice in the matter, but woe betide anyone who expresses this sentiment. Apparently that marks you out as "far left" and privileged enough not to suffer if the Conservatives win.

I know the "far left" bogeyman is a favourite device for centrists who need a way to make maintaining the status quo sound pragmatic rather than timid. I know it's less a well defined category and more a catch-all for anyone who irritates those centrists, and I know they're supposed to be simultaneously a fringe irrelevance and a serious threat to democracy1. The accusation hardly deserves a response, but it gets under my skin so much that I'm writing one anyway.

I was 18 when Blair's Labour came to power in 1997. Despite coming from a staunchly Labour family, I couldn't get excited about the electoral map turning red that night. The Labour I'd grown up supporting was committed to socialist principles, but Blair didn't have any readily obvious principles except getting elected. He was all soundbites, slogans like "tough on crime, tough on the causes of crime". Even at 18, I recognised this as an attempt to appeal to two opposing groups - "hang 'em and flog 'em" conservatives and "bleeding heart" liberals - that would probably leave both groups disappointed.

Six months later, as a new university student, I joined protest marches against the abolition of the student grant and the introduction of tuition fees. It often struck me that my cohort, the last to benefit from grants and free tuition, was also the youngest to be of voting age in 1997. Apart from mature students, the newly introduced fees would only affect those too young to have had a chance to vote in the government that introduced them.

The years that followed only confirmed my cynicism about Blair's Labour. Supporting the Iraq war, and dismissing out of hand the millions who protested against it, was their highest profile failing, but the policy with the most devastating impact on me personally was their approach to benefits.

In the same kind of triangulation as "tough on crime, tough on the causes of crime", Labour's policy on benefits tried to appeal, not just to vulnerable people in need of support, but also to those sections of the media who believed in "benefit scroungers" and wanted to make sure nobody got anything they didn't strictly deserve. They spoke of means testing to make sure those who really needed support could get it, and I could only laugh bitterly. Becoming a single parent in 2005, I should in theory have qualified for Maternity Allowance, but a combination of my poor mental health and a house fire meant I couldn't produce the documents to prove my entitlement and so missed out. Means testing might frustrate a hypothetical scrounger, but introducing more barriers to support also made it less helpful to those who needed it most.

Spun as compassionately looking out for the dignity of the vulnerable, the drive to get everyone back into work was a huge source of stress for me. The kind of work I was most qualified for involved night work - incompatible with my responsibilities to my daughter. A course that the patronising Jobcentre advisor claimed would help me understand my options turned out to be a provider lecturing us that the only barriers to work were ones we ourselves created; meanwhile the effort of attending left me so exhausted I started shouting at pans for not coming to the boil quickly enough.

Sensible centrist commentators insisted that this was the correct direction to take, that it was a necessary step to prevent young people wasting their lives with drugs and video games, and that if Labour didn't do it, the Conservatives would do it worse. And while it's undeniable that the Conservatives, with the connivance of the Liberal Democrats, enthusiastically embraced the concept of benefits sanctions, it was Labour who laid the foundations for that.

And what of Sure Start centres, that much-vaunted initiative to lift children in deprived areas out of poverty? There was one just across the road from me. It ran music and creative play courses that were attended more by well off families from other areas of town than by the locals who were supposed to benefit from the centre, and there were advisers who answered a question about the best way to cook chicken for an eight-month-old with a suggestion that by not moving her onto mashed potato I was hindering her development. Perhaps there were advantages somewhere around the margins, but nothing that compensated for a system that had me contemplating setting up home with an abusive casual partner as the most viable alternative to destitution.

That was the last Labour government. The years since haven't improved matters either for the country or for my personal situation. Public services have been shredded by austerity and Brexit, and the media seems more interested in fomenting moral panics against various minorities than actually talking about any of the problems we face. To even begin to address the mess, we need a change of direction, not just a change in the rosettes of the governing party.

The reason I say I see no difference between Labour and the Conservatives is because neither party will fix the problems, and ignoring them will only allow them to become even worse. Far from being insulated from the damage another Conservative government could cause, I'm acutely aware of how vulnerable I am to the damage a Labour government has no plans to mitigate.

I can guess what response the sensible centrists might make to this. It's impossible to fix all the problems, so we need to perform a triage, helping those we can practically help and abandoning the hopeless cases to their fate. And I understand this, in principle at least. If I could see a good faith effort being made to solve at least some of the problems, I might be willing to accept that the ones most personal to me aren't a priority. But this pragmatic triage seems to ignore all the problems, not just mine, in favour of appealing to a handful of focus-grouped demographics.

And even if my problems aren't worth addressing, I'd like the centrists to say so straight out. Look me in the eye, or the electronic equivalent, and tell me that my wellbeing is a price worth paying to improve the lives of others. Don't pretend that my disengagement arises from privilege when it's the exact opposite.