Election Day
12 December 2019
Tough day(s). I exhausted myself (and my knees) pounding the streets of Milton Keynes with the other Labour activists. There were hundreds of us streaming up on the morning trains out of London to marginals to boost the local party and their hard working members. Engaging with commuters on the way, making friends and sharing stories, and what a great feeling to be part of that movement. An activation in all of us responding to the demand of the moment; MLK's "fierce urgency of now". Many had been out for weeks and a few, like me, on their first day. We walked (and sometimes ran) in the freezing rain from house to house working the boards to get the vote out. But we were often met on the doorstep with bitterness, a hardness that was brittle like a body that's turned inwards, tight and hunched-over against the cold and wet. And we tried to walk tall and keep our smiles wide and let the rain slide from our shoulders. But the impulse to the insular has grown in the hinterlands of England. I can only base this on conversations but a feeling of being an abandoned and ignored minority has taken hold in those mainly white, working class areas and they have retreated into an idea of themselves as victims of a globalised world, at the root of which, is everything that sits outside that self-image; all that is foreign: the immigrant, Europe, London, etc., plurality itself; when in fact wealth, security, health, etc., are what's alien to many in the sunken streets we traversed on election day.
What is familiar though is precarious employment and underfunded hospitals and schools; and an English national politics that appears to offer little agency and few opportunities to change those conditions. An intractable present and a bleak future sees another retreat, this time to the past – full of constructed memories of better days. The nostalgia industry is one of the successes of the last two decades supported by a billionaire media that also sustains the corporate take-over of our political system. Very little I heard strayed far from the snack-sized party-pack sound-bites; the inflected cant of the right-wing piped in through TV and internet where paid for speech masquerades as free expression: Corbyn is a terrorist; they're all as bad as each other; the will of the people; take back control.
We were trying to overturn a small Tory majority of 2000 and with every listed Labour voter that told us 'I'll not vote for you' we could tell this was not going to be swinging our way. Some wards were warmer and our spirits rose with a thumbs up and a 'keep up the good work' - but in truth it was tough and soon the conversations amongst us started to be about after the election, how do we retain this spirit, this collective energy. A good friend reminded me today of this from Tony Benn: ''Every generation has to fight the same battles, again and again, for there is no final victory and no final defeat.''