general election 2024...

I started writing this in a café yesterday (18 June) and seemed to recall that 18 June was a general election day many years ago. Having subsequently checked with Wikipedia, my vague memory proved to be correct. Funny how you remember such things – although the fact it was my first time voting in a general election might have spiked my memory (1970)! Edward Heath was PM.
Ironically, 54 years later, if the imminent election had been scheduled for this September, it would also have marked granddaughter Iris’s first time of voting. Sadly, she’s missing out.
I’m afraid that I’ve tried to avoid general election coverage this time around.
None of the parties… or their leaders… or their policies enthuse or encourage me. I cannot believe that, at a time of acute Climate Crisis, there is so few environmental issues being discussed.
Somewhat bizarrely, I’ve read three ‘political’ books since the 2024 election was announced (by Shirley Williams, Jon Snow and Rory Stewart). They’ve all been insightful in their way – particularly Rory Stewart’s. Stewart (former MP and Conservative government minister… and a member of the Labour Party as a teenager!) in his book ‘Politics on the Edge’ is quite revealing about the way we are ‘governed’. I could quote extensively from his book, but the following two extracts will illustrate the state of things:
“Cameron’s government continued to be an elective dictatorship, propped up by the quasi-secret service known as the whips. While most MPs spoke publicly and loudly, facing the opposition benches, the whips hid behind the Speaker’s Chair, and their gaze was turned not to the opposition benches but inwards to their own, whispering and scribbling down examples of loyalty and insolence, helpfulness or foolishness, to report to their chief…” and how Stewart “hated how politicians used the pompous grandeur of the Palace of Westminster to pretend to a power they did not have, and to take credit for things they had not done…”.
It may just be the ageing process(?!), but I don’t think I’ve ever been more depressed by the state of the country and the way we are governed than I am now. For so many of us, the (first past the post) system is broken… an individual’s voice goes unheard… your vote is very unlikely to matter. Politics, these days, seems to be all about power and prestige – with governments run by a relatively small group of career-focussed MPs (many of them public-school educated - in 2019, two-thirds of cabinet ministers were public school educated) with all parliamentary votes strictly controlled by the Party Whips. There are exceptions, of course, but self-interest seems to be high on the list of their priorities. Lobbying your own MP is likely to have very little effect of what policies are actually adopted.
But don’t you worry your pretty little heads because, if you’re lucky, disgraced former prime minister Johnson will write to you encouraging you to vote Tory and, of course, Mr Farage has pledged that he will “run for PM in 2029”.
Is this REALLY the best we can come up with?