By Daviemoo
I’m so tired of seeing people I respect attack each other.
I don’t care any more what side of leftist politics you sit on. I really don’t. I don’t care if you’re so far left you want us all to live in perfect rainbow harmony or if you think Starmer really is a (the dreaded word) centrist and support him regardless. This is beyond a joke.
Right wing politics aligns on the core axis somewhere of “we are better than/more entitled to things than others”. That’s as simple as I can make it. Money, health, safety, equality and rights- right wing folk seem to believe that they have more of a right to these things than those of us not born the same or on the same political axis as them.
I’ve quite literally seen right wing folk saying that left wing folk should be censured from their protests because they are country betrayers, fascists etc- all the while ignoring actual fascists whose values fall perilously close to them on the scale. Rather than fighting a worthy battle it’s about censuring normal political differences- not fascism.
There though, is the irony of being left wing.
Left wingers won’t, can’t, just leave a difference on the scale alone. It seems to me, as someone who counts himself far enough towards the left that I’ve cheerfully said Westminster probably wants to put a hit out on me, that people I find myself equivalent to on the left will lash out at people who are closer to the center. Do we agree on all points, no. Do I think it’s appropriate to send everything from abuse to death threats to them? No. Do you really count yourself as some paragon of mythical leftist virtue if you’re telling someone you think is a centrist that they’re disgusting? Congratulations- your award for best human, I’m sure, is just stuck in Christmas transit.
I have bit my lip over and over and over with people I respect when I see them attack people I also know are good, caring and passionate about making our politics better.
Do I think some of my friends are as far left, as progressive as me or others? No. Does that matter in the grand scheme of letting people learn and grow? Fuck no. I can talk to people about the benefits of socialisation or public ownership if we have common ground to go from. I can’t talk to someone who doesn’t think healthcare is a human right because that’s an insane viewpoint.
If you want everyone to agree with you and fuck the rest, you’ll stay stuck in the same place, your club getting more and more exclusive all the while getting smaller and quieter as you oust people for not believing in that ONE thing that you do, isolating yourself further and further from a mass of people whose views are closer to, but not perfectly in line with your own. You may learn things from them, but you can take it as a chance to impress on them why how YOU feel is the right path. Leaving someone behind because they’re not a carbon copy of your own views is – lets be frank- ridiculous.
I’ve said so many times I don’t like labour’s current leader. But I’ve also said I’d choose a sentient shoe over the Conservatives. Under them we’ve had:
-The encroaching loss of our right to protest
-160K deaths and counting from coronavirus in the UK
-A huge corruption scandal which fits in to PPE lobbying and massive overspending of public funding on already rich people to make sub standard life saving equipment
-A health secretary more bothered about porking a mistress than saving lives
-A PM who thinks his racist, sexist, homophobic remarks can be under rug swept by using the useless label of “context”
-A Home Secretary who has bullied staff out of their jobs and has quite literally broken international law
-A government who created a practically fraudulent report on systemic racism’s existence in our society
-Legislation that threatens to monetise and curtail our voting rights
-A Justice Secretary who wants to SCRAP the human rights act
-Food/energy crises due to their own wilful negligence
-A rise in hate crimes that is unprecedented and terrifying to the LGBTQ+ community
-A health secretary who, for populism, threw off any safeguards against a dangerous virus
-Deteriorated national relations as the government threatens to isolate us from any of our allies through sheer pig headedness
So read this list and ask me whether I care that the alternative is centrist? Ask me whether I think this is preferable to a government who will make minimal changes I’m in favour of? I’ve said it til my throat hurts but I’ll take a centrist government over THIS!
If you can still make the case that it’s what you want OR ELSE in the face of a government gleefully walking the line towards fascism then perhaps your privilege is something you need to question.
Equally I’m tired of the delineation in the center- you don’t need to hate Corbyn to be effective in politics. Corbyn meant a lot to many of us and I firmly believe he’d have done his absolute best to make us a better country and would have made sure we weathered covid better than the tories – I mean, how could he have done worse. In my eyes Corbyn is a good but flawed man who has an army of people indignant at his mistreatment- ironically a lot of his abusers would support him if they hadn’t been fed on a diet of salacious lies, exaggerations and hit jobs by a press paid to demonise politics set up to help them.
Ultimately though we are where we are in UK discourse right now and revisionism and factionalism in UK politics is leading us down a very long, twisted path to end up where we are again- with a tory majority, with 46% of us- a minority- exerting their wish for power on a nation divided by ideologies that can- should- be discussed in harmony.
But I know i’m not the only one who thinks it’s this simple: if you want to keep arguing amongst yourself as our real enemies continue their plans to fuck up voting rights, strip our ability to protest back, remove vital parts of education that make people kinder, smarter, MORE than just uneducated daily mail swilling gammons- by all means keep going. Keep attacking each other, keep belittling ideas for how to better our lives, our country, the world- does it feel good to think you’re the most moral, the smartest, because you GET IT in a way the “other side” doesn’t? Shock- there is no “other side” but the tories, and they’re stood watching you all argue.
But when the guns fall silent and you’re all stood looking in confusion at an enemy on a tea break and your own side’s bloody bodies, ask yourself whether your moral posturing, or your pathological need to belittle other people’s politics was worth it.
Politically Enraged 