When people talk about politics within the existing Westminster framework I feel a dull thud in my stomach and my eyes involuntarily glaze. Like when I'm conversing and the subject changes from me and moves on to another topic. I try to remain engaged but behind my eyes I am adrift in immediate nostalgia; "How happy I was earlier in this chat," I instantly think.
I have never voted. Like most people I am utterly disenchanted by politics. Like most people I regard politicians as frauds and liars and the current political system as nothing more than a bureaucratic means for furthering the augmentation and advantages of polo outlet economic elites. Billy Connolly said: "Don't vote, it encourages them," and, "The desire to be a politician should bar you for life from ever being one."
I don't vote because to me it seems like a tacit act of compliance; I know, I know my grandparents fought in two world wars (and one World Cup) so that I'd have the right to vote. Well, they were conned. As far as I'm concerned there is nothing to vote for. I feel it is a far more potent political act to completely renounce the current paradigm than to participate in even the most trivial and tokenistic manner, by obediently X ing a little box.
Total revolution of consciousness and our entire social, political and economic system is what interests me, but that's not on the ballot. Is utopian revolution possible? The freethinking social architect Buckminster Fuller said humanity now faces a choice: oblivion or utopia. We're inertly ambling towards oblivion, is utopia really an option?
I heard recently Oliver Cromwell's address to the rump parliament in 1653 (online, I'm not a Time Lord) where he bawls out the whole of the House of Commons as "whores, virtueless horses and money grabbing dicklickers". I added the last one but, honestly, that is the vibe. I was getting close to admiring old Oliver for his "calls it as he sees it, balls out" rhetoric till I read about him on Wikipedia and learned that beyond this brilliant 8 Mile style takedown of corrupt politicians he was a right arsehole; starving and murdering the Irish and generally (and surprisingly for a Roundhead) being a total square. The fact remains that if you were to recite his speech in parliament today you'd be hard pushed to find someone who could be legitimately offended.
I don't want to get all "Call me Dave, I was chatting to my plumber, man of the people" here, but the fact is I'm a recovering junkie so that means I have to hang out with a lot of other junkies to keep my head together, some of whom are clean, others who are using. Hear you this, regular New Statesman reader, browsing with irritation that the culture of celebrity has just banjoed the arse of another sacred cow and a Halloween haired, Sachsgate enacting, estuary whining, glitter lacquered, priapic berk has been undeservedly hoisted upon another cultural plinth, but young people, poor people, not rich people, most people do not give a fuck about politics.
They see no difference between Cameron, Clegg, Boris, either of the Milibands or anyone else. To them these names are as obsolete as Lord Palmerston or Denis Healey. polo outlet The London riots in 2011, which were condemned as nihilistic and materialistic by Boris and Cameron (when they eventually returned from their holidays), were by that very definition political. These young people have been accidentally marketed to their whole lives without the economic means to participate in the carnival. After some draconian sentences were issued, measures that the white collar criminals who capsized our economy with their greed a few years earlier avoided, and not one hoodie was hugged, the compliance resumed. Apathy reigned.
There's little point bemoaning this apathy. Apathy is a rational reaction to a system that no longer represents, hears or addresses the vast majority of people. A system that is apathetic, in fact, to the needs of the people it was designed to serve. To me a potent and triumphant leftist movement, aside from the glorious Occupy rumble, is a faint, idealistic whisper from sepia rebels. The formation of the NHS, holiday pay, sick pay, the weekend achievements of peaceful trade union action were not achieved in the lifetime of the directionless London rioters. They are uninformed of the left's great legacy as it is dismantled around them.
Righteous rage surfaces rarely only in the most galling of circumstances, the riots or the Milly Dowler intrusion, where a basic taboo was transgressed, then we reach beneath the stagnant quotidian to the omnipresent truth within. In this case "respect for the dead", the motif upon which Sophocles's Antigone is founded.
