So You Wanted A Rant? (Response to IP)

Sod and buggeration. As if the Expenses and the Resignations and Gordon Brown on bloody YouTube aren’t enough, the pissing BNP have just won their first European seat, and they’ve had the bloody gall and effrontery to do it in Yorkshire and the Humber - MY region.

My mother was reassuring this afternoon, when I voiced my darkest fears about just such an outcome. ‘I-can-remember,’ she said, her usual mantra when opening any conversation these days, rather like Uncle Albert in ‘Only Fools and Horses’ intoning ‘During-the-war’…

’I-can-remember, when-I-was-a-kid-in-the-East-End, when Mosely was doing his thing, the British people didn’t want to know. The British people are not extremists. I would be very surprised if the British people would give a look in to the BNP.’

One European seat does not a fascist dictatorship make, but I take it bloody personally that my Yorkshire and Humber have sent these morons to Strasbourg/Brussels. And I know what will be said: that the major parties must take the blame for disillusioning people with politics, and driving them into the arms of the extremists and blah blah blah blah blah…

No, no, and thrice no. Of course the major parties are responsible for disillusioning people. Of course they have let us down and betrayed democracy; of course the words ‘rock and hard place’ are barely adequate to describe the choice between Brown and Cameron. But if you choose to put your X in the box marked BNP, it is your choice. For all the marketing and PR the British National Party have done in recent years, there’s still enough common knowledge about who they are and what they are for people to be aware that the choice they are making is not one for freedom and justice. If you vote BNP, saying ‘the major parties made me do it’ is a complete cop out. And if you are seeking to explain the votes of others, you are patronising those voters by assuming they haven’t the minimum number of brain cells required to see the truth about the BNP.

I’ve been a Labour voter for years, but last European elections I voted for the Greens; I did so again this time, and not just as a protest vote. I could never bring myself to vote Conservative, and I frequently want to spit in UKIP’s eye. But these are the joys of living in a multi-party state. There’s a vast difference between heated and even virulent political debate, and a thug trying to intimidate you by taking close up photos while you’re leafleting and telling you they’ll be watching school gates to see which one you wait at for your children. And I’m fully aware that this is nothing compared to what many people have suffered at the hands of these idiots.

It’s sometimes said that we get the politicians we deserve. I don’t believe that, but I do believe that by and large we get the lowest level we will put up with. One of the problems in this country is that we tend to think democracy can be protected by symbols: as long as Black Rod thumps on the door of the House of Commons three times, as long Lord or Lady Somebody or Other sits upon the Woolsack, as long as everybody is ‘The Honourable’ Lady or Gentleman, all is well with the Mother of Parliaments. We don’t actually have to do anything. We don’t even have to get up off our arses and go and vote if we don’t want to. Though even the politicians realise that a totally non-participatory democracy looks bad, hence the increase in postal ballots, the proposals to allow people to vote at the supermarket or online or probably by pushing the sodding red button on the remote. No! Walk to the polling station or get someone to give you a lift or push your wheelchair or give you a piggy back, but GO! (No, I’m not saying people who genuinely can’t go shouldn’t get postal votes…)

And let’s stop using that Victorian folly, the palace of Westminster, as our seat of government. Let’s have a decent building, with enough seats for all our elected representatives, and proper office provision. Let’s agree a proper wage for our MPs and do away with this expenses nonsense. And let’s do ourselves and the House of Windsor a favour and abolish the monarchy once and for all.

And let’s teach kids at school that our democracy didn’t just arrive fully formed. It had to be fought and died for, every so often it has to be turned upside down and shaken until its teeth rattle, and this is the only way it survives. And you don’t have to have Citizenship Studies or any new complicated Ology to teach them that. The course of study is there - or should be, if it’s taught properly. It’s called History.

In twenty seven years time I shall be as old as my mother is now. Which shall I be saying: ‘I-can-remember, back-in-2009, democracy was at a crisis, but the British people decided they wanted more than the lowest level, and that was the start of the clear, transparent, flourishing system we have today.’ OR ‘I-can-remember, back-in-2009, we had a democracy.’

Well, neither, of course, because thanks to the refusal of the bloody politicians to take on global warming, we shall all be under six foot of water.