Thinking About: Lurching to the Right

I’ve had the feeling for some time now – that the whole world seems to be inexorably and deliberately lurching to the Right. Of course here in the UK it’s exemplified by the rise of UKIP who won their second seat in Parliament on Thursday with a massive swing in their direction. It’s looking like the prediction of 5-6 seats made during the last local elections have been set far too low. The party leader himself is talking about holding the balance of power in the next, generally expected to be, coalition government. The very thought makes me shudder.

Being the contrary bastard that I am, and that people who know me have come to expect, as others move to the Right I myself am increasingly moving to the Left which, as you can imagine, produces some fiery exchanges at work. Rather surprisingly some of my colleagues (who I expected better of) seem to side with UKIP and their objectionable policies. But hey, it’s not like I’ve never been in a minority (of one) before so that aspect hardly bothers me.

Knowing a little history I suppose I should have expected the present political movements. It times of economic uncertainty and austerity the political scene tends to polarise. Unfortunately it seems that the Left have, to coin a phrase, left the building. Indeed the so-called Left AKA New Labour seem to be intent on playing catch-up with the Right and positioning themselves as Tory-Lite or the acceptable face of capitalism. Of course what they should be doing, if they had either a backbone between them or even an ideology worthy of its name, is moving to the Left to present the people with an actual choice rather than the illusion of one. Unfortunately such an eventuality is never going to happen in the Labour Party without a particularly bloody ‘Night of the Long Knives’ scenario they are singularly incapable of orchestrating.

It does actually amuse me, in a gallows humour sort of way, that the finger of blame is pointed repeatedly at immigrants when the real villains of the piece, you know, those who actually caused the collapse of the world’s financial system – remember that? – AKA the fucking bankers and stock market speculators seem to have got away with the biggest fraud in history scot free. As the number of people holding down multiple part-time jobs, on minimum wage or so-called zero hours contracts (and there I was thinking that slavery and indentured servitude had been made illegal) increases by the week we see bankers bonuses back in fashion and the champagne lifestyle acceptable again – after all they are, we are regularly told, the wealth generators who will get us out of the recession people seem to have forgotten they got us into in the first place.

Of course on the horizon, post the next general election in May 2015, in the prospect of the Conservative-UKIP coalition government pulling out of the European Union. The word stupid (even prefixed with the word fucking for added emphasis) doesn’t do justice to this aspiration. No doubt, with the terrible political education in this country, the people will speak (oddly sounding like millions of frightened sheep), and we will withdraw thereby damaging the EU in the process and setting ourselves on the long slow path to political and economic irrelevance. Living, or at least surviving, in a western version of the 3rd world country isn’t exactly how I had hoped to spend my declining years but I guess that’s how it’s going to be. I wonder if this is how it felt in Germany in the 1920’s. Hopefully I’ll never find out. Then again, if Scotland breaks away I can always emigrate there or even take up my dual nationality and move to Eire. Maybe I should really investigate getting myself that Irish passport……