General Election 2024

Finally, it’s all soon to be over. Soon, fourteen years of Tory hegemony will be over. In this year when half the world’s population will be voting in a national election, we’ll finally be ending this chaos and returning our democracy to normal.

In 2001 I couldn’t quite yet vote — though if our new government had had its way earlier then I would have been able to. In 2005 though, I felt a lot like I do now. The result was all but assured, much as we tried to make it exciting. We would be getting normalcy.

As a late teenager who’d grown up in poverty and who’d joined the Labour Party as soon as I was able to, I proudly voted Labour even knowing it would mean more of boring old normalcy. I knew even then that normalcy was better than what had come before.

That was perhaps unenthusing at the time, and I admit my anarchist heart yearned for more at the time, but now the prospect of normalcy feels exciting, even revolutionary. Normal is so distant in our memories that some folks don’t even believe it can be achieved anymore. Chaos and crisis is all they see and all they see as possible — even and especially the young, who’ve known nothing but this seemingly endless period of tragedy heralded by Cameron and Osborne, Johnson and Corbyn, Truss, and Sunak.

For me, the return to normal feels like a breath of fresh air after emerging from a coma. The promise of a return to competence and civility, the pursuit of good outcomes, and an end to the corruption and sleaze all appeal. A new period of national healing as we end the era of spite and cruelty and culture war nonsense that’s torn us all apart feels to me like seeing a sunrise for the first time in more than a decade.

For all my partisan zealotry, a liberal is — to borrow the phrasing of Conor Cruise O’Brien — incurably, what I am. Alongside my fiercely held views on free expression, self-determination, and the rights and dignity of the individual, I love our institutions, our constitution, and the rule of law that underpins our great liberal tradition. It’s been painful seeing them all perverted by the Tories these last years, and I am very ready for a new period of national renewal that will see them repaired.

Democratic

I thought this country was democratic.

A Reckoning

The polling looks extraordinary. Labour enjoy nearly double the voter intention of the Tories, tantalisingly close to the ever-elusive 50% milestone. The MRPs suggest we’re looking at nearly 500 seats in what would be the biggest electoral victory in Parliamentary history. As Labour’s renaissance under Starmer brings us to this unheard of nirvana, I still can’t help but feel a little bit like it’s not quite enough.

I feel like our new period of national healing needs to begin with a reckoning, an accounting of the crimes and follies that we’ve been made to endure at the hands of the Tories. They should be properly judged for all the damage and suffering, despair and decline that they’ve inflicted on us. They must not just be beaten; they must be defeated. This must never be allowed to happen again.

They should face a defeat so great as to make even the Corbyn disaster — itself responsible for much of this calamity — pale in comparison. They should be wiped out and made to know in no uncertain terms that Britain rejects them outright for what they’ve done and for what they promise to do.

If utter destruction of the oldest political party on the planet proves too lofty a goal to aim for, we should at least aim to ensure that they suffer the indignity of being made to sit as the third party in the House. Imagine a circumstance in which Starmer’s Wilsonite government sits opposite a Liberal Democrat opposition. The country would be well-served by right-wing market economics on the opposition benches, while ushering in a new liberal consensus on social issues that would end the culture wars — which have resulted in too many disgusting outcomes that I am certain would not have been achievable were the Tories not in power — forever.

The Other View

For all my enthusiasm, I can’t ignore all the complaints I see from those who would prefer my party be more like it was when it allowed and enabled the worst and most damaging governments in our history to unleash hell on the country unopposed. Where I get excited about a hugely ambitious programme to decarbonise the national grid in just five years, they are happiest decrying a leader committed to nationalising the rail operators and expanding workers’ and trade unions’ rights as ‘right wing’. While I am happiest poring over poll tables indicating we’re on the brink of ending Toryism forever, they are most ecstatic at some validation for their ridiculous ignorance from a meme website that’s been ridiculed online for more than two decades.

They look at my party’s renaissance, brought about by repositioning it back to where the party had always been (excepting under Foot and Corbyn) as the political wing of the British public, which brought me back into its fold after I left it during the Corbyn years, as a very bad thing. To them, the utterly unprecedented circumstance that seems likely to deliver us the biggest victory in our political history is one of simple happenstance.

They don’t see it as the outcome of the simple and timeless strategy of courting voters, of trying to appeal to and persuade them, of accepting a pluralism of views, of simply trying to win more votes and more seats than the other parties. They don’t see a Herculean effort to repair the party that outclasses even Kinnock’s decade-long venture to achieve the same. They see it as pure luck, something that’s occurred out of the blue, that any other leader could have achieved it.

How it must hurt to see it just magically materialise absent any deterministic cause like this for Starmer, and not their guy.

Pulling Left

A number of participants at the 2023 Festival of Chariots in Cardiff pulling the chariot leftward.

Five More Weeks

For my part, I’m keen to enjoy this wonderful, magical election. It’s been 19 years since my party won one, and this one promises to be much more exciting than that election. Every day I wake up to see what new Tory calamity is unveiled, what insane policy and what new Sunakian embarrassment will entertain me. In between, each new poll reveals yet more hilarity, as Labour does better and better and the Tories worse and worse — much to the chagrin of both Tories and the weirder parts of the left.

I’m ensorcelled, enthralled, utterly enamoured by this historic moment — and utterly intolerable too. We have five weeks more of this to go and I’m going to enjoy every second of it.