We Need To Do Better

It’s quite difficult to maintain positivity in the light of last night’s election results. The question of “why should we care anymore, we’re clearly in the minority” has been floated around. I saw a tweet last night giving the number for the Samaritans, and talk of organising charity events for food banks and for private medical funds for when the US gets its hands on ‘our NHS’. But then I exist in a solidly middle class, ‘liberal progressive’ bubble — what was shown last night is that 46% of the voters in this country have very different views on life than the majority in my immediate circles.

The hallmark of the 2010s has been the rise of middle class condescension towards the poor misinformed fools who fall for the lies of the ruling elites with their machiavellian schemes to increase their own wealth over the corpses of the disabled and the poverty-stricken. We in the ‘educated middle classes’ cannot comprehend the mindset of those who returned a Conservative majority last night, and when we try to analyse it, we build the them-and-us narrative. I have been guilty in the past of saying that anyone voting Conservative is actively voting against their own interests, and there are many metaphors along the lines of turkeys voting for Christmas. It has often appeared to be in the last few weeks that the aim of politics isn’t to win the hearts and minds of humans with complex lives and consciences but to convince the vermin to not eat the poison which can only be seen by those higher up the chain. There is a fundamental cultural divide in this country which is only growing wider.

The Labour party were flattened yesterday, relatively speaking. The analysts scrambled for reasons, from the ‘unelectable’ Corbyn (debatable) and the ‘obsession’ of the North with Brexit to them having been conned by the lies of Boris Johnson’s misinformation campaign. It is impossible to say for certain. However, there is some truth in the statement that the Labour party relied too much on their heartlands to never sway towards the right, despite the evidence from across Europe that there is no such thing to be relied upon. We now have overwhelming evidence that we must always strive to bring people together, not just think “they’ve always voted for us, we can assume the will this time too”.

The positive antithesis to this, and something we should be celebrating, is the result of the elections in the constituencies of North Down and North Belfast in Northern Ireland. As a general rule, Northern Irish MPs don’t tend to vary in their political affiliations. This was borne out by the fact that out of 18 constituencies, 12 of them re-elected the parties who have been in control for many years. There were two shifts from Sinn Féin to the SDLP, who are still a nationalist (in favour of union with Ireland) party but aren’t abstentionist and were anti-IRA, which is nice as it increases the number of MPs actually in Westminster. However, in North Down, the old Ulster Unionist (then independent) MP stood down, opening up a vacuum expected to be filled by the DUP. This seat was instead won by Alliance, who are cross-community, and for whom this is their second-ever MP after Naomi Long was elected in 2010. There was also an incredibly rare (but predicted) swap from the DUP to Sinn Féin in North Belfast, where the Catholic community was reported to have become a majority in the 2011 census. Both of these represent the beginnings of a seismic shift on the island of Ireland. Wherever you stand on this issues of Scottish independence and Irish reunification, the fact that the patchwork of public life is beginning to shift should seen as exciting, because it gives hope that change can happen on the home front as well.

The first step to this change will have to be a change to proportional representation. Under a directly proportional system, the Conservatives would have 82 fewer seats (that spreadsheet is very much a work in progress) and we would now be in an incredibly hung parliament and some cooperation would be at hand. We can learn from the lessons of the recent past, and strive to be better, not just in ourselves but in the way we perceive others. In seeing the other as ourselves, we might finally overcome the argument for ‘strong and stable’ majority government in favour of cooperative coalition representing the range of British values.