A chasm of difference

It's voting time, and if you're reading this you care (at least a little) about what I think. I've tried to order my thoughts as best I can, but it may degenerate into a bit of a shouty thing later on. Apologies up-front for that. Here goes.

Full disclosure: I'm pretty Lefty now, much to the chagrin of at least one person. It's a thing now. I might explain why later, but that fact may help you in deciphering what follows. To the analysis!

Voting

This is a bit of a difficult one. Voting is the very least you can do in terms of political engagement, but at the same time it's a pathetically low bar, and one that blocks most people from getting what they want. The British Public, that conservative, traditional beast, decided not to go for the Alternative Vote that was proposed four years ago.

Excuse me while I go and rock in the corner as I realise that was four years ago.

Me, four years ago. You're welcome.

So it seems, at least for the foreseeable future, we're stuck with a really poor system. There's no other way of putting this: if you have three people running, then all you need is 34% of the vote to represent the entire constituency. Sound sensible? No. It sounds absurd.

It IS absurd.

So: voting is a suck, and likely to be more meaningless the more candidates you've got running for you. The only way you can guarantee representatives who represent more than half of the people in a constituency is two-horse races. With that being said, not voting is more of a suck because:

All the bastards will vote

This is an unfortunate truth, but a valid one. The right has its fringe splinter groups, who are (refreshingly?) upfront about how much they hate people of colour, people of non-Christian religions, and people who speak any language but English. But as much they believe in their neo-fascist causes, sooner or later they return to the matronly bosom of the Conservative Party

Brr. Sorry for that visual.

But over here on the left, we're screwed for options. The Labour party is a laughable shadow of its former self; a fun-house mirror reflection. Consider: someone in the (theoretically) left-leaning party thought this would be a vote winner.

Even if you pee in it, it's still more gross on the outside.

But as discussed above: the voting system screws us. You can vote for a more Left party - Greens are looking interesting, if a touch peculiar on a few issues - but you're not going to get to the percentage you need. So it's post-Blair Labour, who are still within touching distance of the Tories, or the Tories. 

And all the Tories vote.

But alright. Suppose we all vote, and we all vote Labour (and keep that shame a secret for the rest of our lives). It's not going to help, because:

We'll still not get what we want

We don't know what we want. The Left varies from people seeking Communism, Socialism, high taxes on the rich, and a pop at power (because "[they] didn't get into politics to tax people). But there's also people who want federalism, some who want decentralisation, some who want to see a total revolution and some who want to just make things better. We can't work out what we want to do.

The Right know exactly what they want. They want to be rich. They want other people to be rich, sure, as long as that doesn't involve any of their wealth being redistributed. 

Over here, we're dreamers and thinkers and romantics. We tie ourselves in knots, tilting at the windmilll of fairness. We have a lot to change and that makes for a manifesto the size of Capital that also borrows heavily from Capital and alright we'll admit it, we're trying to make you read Capital.

There's a manga. What a time to be alive.

 

I don't speak for the rest of the Left; not least because I'm pretty new to it myself. In a way I've been heading this way in a while but in another, there's plenty more Left to learn. 

 

I hope you appreciate that joke. It took me a while.

Fairness is the ultimate goal for me; of that there's no doubt. How are we going to get there? I'm not sure yet. But I'm convinced that cutting the deficit - to the detriment of everything else - is akin to dedicating every penny of your income to paying off your mortgage.

Sure, you'll waste less money in the long term. But you'll also kill your children.

I get that this was ironic, but it fits well here.