So, it’s here at last, the election we seem to have slogged towards through all the circles of hell Dante didn’t have room for in his Inferno. A sopping Sunak stood at the Lectern of Gravity and sort of whined a bit. And when is it to be, Rishi? Oh – the fourth of July? Why, that’s Independence Day, the most American of all days. Well, to coin a phrase, it figures.
Patriot games
For all their love of flags, the Conservatives’ chief aim in the past 14 years has been to turn this country into Little America. Not the good stuff. Not Yosemite and Mork & Mindy, not the Underground Railroad and Jaws. No, the America they have in mind is one where every last speck of existence is sold off to corporations and private equity for ruthless, unaccountable plunder.
The examples are wearily familiar: excrement in our seas and rivers – and now even in our tap water – thanks to private water companies slavering for dividends; abysmally unreliable privatised trains with the highest ticket prices in the world; ditto buses; stamps the price of a carton of milk from Ocado.
Then there’s welfare: children are passed around private ‘childcare’ corporations as nameless £100,000 commodities; children (again) turn up at casualty in agony because there isn’t a dentist for miles; and, in our sinfully underfunded NHS, people die waiting for care that should be everyone’s by right (and was, just a decade ago).
It’s getting harder to remind people that the “family silver”, as Harold MacMillan called it, used to belong to us. With public ownership came responsibility, or at least a certain sense of connection. Things didn’t always work that well, there were huge inefficiencies and failures, but when those problems were ‘ours’, we were in a position to fix them (whether that always happened is another matter…).
Sell, sell, sell!
Well, we can’t fix them now. The heirlooms have been auctioned off, and the dealers deal the remains of our water, rail, buses, post, and the rest, like baggies of snort down a Barnsley ginnel. All value, all benefit, is lost to us while the profits and subsidies gurgle away down the drain of private equity. Nothing works and nothing is done about it. Ownership is opaque. No one is responsible.
And that’s not the worst of it. We’ve seen, all too painfully, where this way of doing things can lead: to a government, in a pandemic, getting the nation’s essential PPE from dinner-party acquaintances – for multiples of the going rate – and not caring a toss whether it works or not.
Darker still, in its way, is the gradual leeching of the profit-or-be-damned mindset into so many aspects of British life where it shouldn’t belong. Once upon a time, we tried to draw a line and say: ‘No one falls below that’. Traditionally, that line was higher in the UK than America, but ideological gravity has pulled it ever lower, so that avoidable hunger, homelessness and destitution are increasingly commonplace experiences here.
As Martin Luther King said about the America of his day, it’s “socialism for the rich, rugged individualism for the poor”.
Who thought all this was a good idea?
It’s ridiculous, isn’t it, to swap something that more or less works for something crap that costs you a fortune? How did they sell us a pup like that in the first place?
The answer is probably quite straightforward. It’s like any sales job. You get people all excited. You flatter them, butter them up, tell them how clever they’d be to buy these magic beans. It’s all about the emotions. If it’s politics, of course, you throw in a directorship, a donation, but when it comes down to it, the decision to buy the aforementioned crap always hinges on how the ‘mark’ feels.
And who has the world’s most advanced, weapons-grade capacity to get people buying things by ‘feel’ that are absolutely bog-all use to them? Why, the mighty corporations of America, of course!
A very slick con-job
A photograph was published recently of a group of British politicians on a trip to Washington. A couple of them were fairly prominent – a former party leader and a former (somewhat short-lived) prime minister. They visited the Capitol and had their picture taken on the steps and in the corridors of Congress. And looking at those pictures you could see: they were like children. They seemed small and starry-eyed, vulnerable, a bit giddy.
Put another way, those ostensibly hard-nosed operators were like me, aged about seven, if I’d suddenly been able to run inside the telly and meet Mork. They looked as if you could have sold them anything.
We know how it goes. It’s been well documented. There’s dinner somewhere lovely, flattery at the think-tank, a couple of soft-ball interviews, then they come back and vote the magic beans into British law. And after a con-job that slick and well-rehearsed, they may very well believe they’ve done something in the best interests of their country.
For better, not worse
But the evidence they have done no such thing piles ever higher. A decade and a half into the latest incarnation of this delusion, we stand chin-deep in a slurry of corporate cant. And we deserve better than that.
To put it in the language of my own generation: they promised us the Six Million Dollar Man and all we got was this lousy Sasquatch. Well, it’s time to release him back into the woods and get on with rebuilding something that might not be shinier, or faster, but that belongs to all of us again.
Keir Starmer is going to win. For the sake of his exhausted, plundered nation, he must make this fourth of July a first step towards independence from that big, bad, and not very British idea – that money trumps everything else.
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