The Salisbury Review has not endorsed any major party in the forthcoming UK election. This is understandable. The election’s outcome will see differences in policies, but the next government will continue to eschew the biggest issues of the day (the economy, education, legal and illegal immigration, a full lockdown inquiry, post-Brexit opportunities and, er, what’s that other thing?… Oh, yes, looming World War III because politicians, generally being useless, shallow, narcissistic, career opportunists, are inadequate to the task.
The natural, indeed inevitable, disposition of the conservative is disappointment, hoping at best that some politicians might stem the rate of decline. But liberal progression is, Ed Davey-like, bombing down that water slide like an oven-ready greased goose. Its Tory-propelled momentum of the last 14 years is about to be turbo-charged by the inevitable incoming Labour government. (Who can rid their memory of Starmer and Rayner releasing an official photograph taking the knee, as was the woke fashion not so long ago?). The goose’s derrière is not going to be treated with stuffing, but with a rocket, the like of which Kim Jong Un would like to boast of.
“If voting changed anything, they’d make it illegal.” Thus speaks the wisdom of a car bumper sticker popular in America. Of course, things are changed – but these are almost always relatively minor, aggravating adjustments that are invariably for the worse, as clueless politicians tinker around with social policies, hoping to make their mark and, most importantly of all, seeming to appear as if they are actually doing something. When is the last time in the UK did we have an election that might just possibly have actually improved matters in any substantial way? Back to the 1980s and Thatcher, perhaps? (Discuss.) The 2019 Johnson win certainly did with a form of Brexit, but that was severely compromised from its start (not least by the outrageous Northern Ireland submission with all its toxic bonds to the EU). The utter contempt of the political classes for democracy was made revoltingly clear in parliament’s and the establishment’s attempts to thwart the Brexit referendum through a parliamentary coup that lasted until the end of 2019; a majority of MPs undertook a cynical strategy of permanent legislative scrutiny to block the executive from enforcing its democratic mandate. Brexit continues to be eroded on a daily basis; such as it is, is now starting to looking very vulnerable again. If it is neutered or forcibly transitioned, then the most significant expression of the popular will in decades will only reaffirm how little elections change the big issues.
Alvin Toffler called elections a “mass ritual of reassurance” which “take the steam out of protests from below” and “foster the illusion of equality”, symbolically reassuring [fooling?] citizens that they are still in command. Elections offer a form of national release for voter, but the gravitational pull of the establishment simply drags any flashes of light back into its black hole. As is commonly said: “It doesn’t matter who you vote for, the government always gets in.”
