Watching my country die
After the last two days, with Theresa May’s series of defeats in parliament, and Corbyn’s inability to do anything about it, the failure of anything that just happened to make any difference leaves me feeling like I’m watching my country die. Like being told that nothing can be done to save a sick relative, now all that remains is melancholy visits with grapes and chocolates, reminiscing about better days, and holding her hand as she fades slowly into the past.
Theresa May suffered the worst defeat of a government in modern times, making her technically the worst prime minister in modern history. Despite that, Jeremy Corbyn was basically powerless to do anything about it. The debate leading up to the vote of no confidence was pointless because in the end everyone just voted along party lines. They might as well have just taken the vote, and saved us all from having to listen to them huff and puff at each other. What an insult to the British people it was for parliament to play at politics, to tease us into thinking that they cared, were thinking, were considering the situation, when all along they were just walking blindly, following their leader.
It would only have taken a handful of the Conservatives who have denounced and defied their own leader to put the country before their party or their own job and vote for an election. But no.
And then May had the gall to stand up in front of the nation and blather on about doing the right thing for the country, working together, compromise and dialogue. She has never, ever done that, and won’t start now. Afterwards, the pundits interviewed the same tired line-up of egocentric wingnuts; Rees-Mogg, Fox, and Johnson waffling on about trade and politics. Meanwhile, outside the doors of parliament, the country is dying. They are fiddling as London burns.
Abroad our country is now just a joke. To Europe we are unreliable, unpredictable, irrational, and run by idiots. We are a democracy, so we elected those idiots and it doesn’t reflect well on any of us. At home our country is without leaders. The people who are meant to be attending to our education, well-being, healthcare, roads, jobs, and our future are so distracted they wouldn’t notice if we all quietly left. Parliament is like an ’80s rave, full of wide-eyed teens ripped on acid, dancing manically without realising that it is already mid-day, and the police have arrived.
A strange set of quirks have created this most bizarre situation. The UK is a democracy, yet we now have a political leader who, despite having utterly failed cannot be removed. In better times she would have been ousted or resigned. But her own party cannot challenge her for a year, and despite not even having a majority in parliament, the opposition cannot force her out because they cannot make up the numbers. The failings of our first past the post system are stark. A small group of Northern Irish fundamentalists hold the balance of power, and just used it to keep the worst government in history in power.
One way out of this, which would require someone in parliament to grow a backbone is this. The Labour party need to remove Jeremy Corbyn. He is a divisive leader who cannot even command the votes of all Labour voters. He so terrifies even the most moderate, disaffected Tories that they would prefer to keep May in power than risk seeing Corbyn run the country. He also refuses to overcome his own Euroscepticism to allow his party to reflect the views of the vast majority of its members and MPs. He is a populist, idealist, would-be revolutionary. His type, on the left or right, are never good.
If Labour could remove Corbyn and replace him with a moderate centrist, who is also a clear no-faffing Remainer, then our defunct two-party system would again offer clear choices to the people.
Labour needs someone who all Labour voters can get behind, and more importantly who moderate, centrist, Remain Tories can stomach. That is clearly not Jeremy Corbyn. Such a leader should then table another no confidence motion. It is more likely that enough Conservatives would abstain or vote against their government that it could then force an election. In doing so, Theresa May would have to resign. If the Tories then chose an arch-Brexiteer as leader, the election would solve the Brexit question, presenting two clear options to the public: vote Labour and Article 50 will be cancelled, vote Conservative and the country will immediately leave the EU. The outcome actually would represent the will of the people, as this is a representative democracy.
If the election goes the way of a hard-Brexiteering Conservative party, then so be it. The UK would drop out of the EU, and the huge economic and social upheaval would eventually lead to a new generation of voters and politicians to rise up from the ashes. If a Remain, moderate, centrist Labour party won, then Brexit is scrapped, and the real work of mending our society and addressing the reasons people voted Leave in the first place can be addressed properly, calmly, and rationally.
Until then, we are doomed to wake up every morning to find we’re still asleep and having the same nightmare, and no matter how many times we go to sleep and wake up again, pinch ourselves, and open our eyes, we will never escape it. The news will be the same. The same fringe lunatics will pontificate across our airwaves. Meanwhile our country will wither away, and only the mad and stupid will remain, shouting into the wind.
