the brilliantly leaping gazelle

Democracy is a like cocaine. When the right sort of people are doing it, it’s fine. When the wrong sort of people start to do it, then it becomes a problem.

This notion of what I’ll call ‘problematic democracy’ can be best described as the sudden involvement of a segment of the population who never normally vote and who are mobilised into doing so by a long standing perception that their concerns have been largely ignored by the established political order. This has the wholly unsurprising effect that when new parties start to to take those views seriously, or articulate views people never knew that they had, votes will pour in and the established way of doing things will be disrupted.

And being a disruptor, a vibrant newcomer elbowing their way into a place at the table is seen as a good thing. As long as it stays firmly within the world of business that is. Think of AirBnb, of Netflix, and Facebook.  Of Amazon, Google and of Tesla. 

There is nothing new about this. Napster was was a disrupter. So to was MySpace. Even McDonalds was a disruptor back in day. Even further back still, so was Ford. The brash young upstarts will all too soon become part of the way of the established way things and will, in time, be disrupted themselves. Think TikTok. Of Instatgram. Of Nudle. As it is with business, so it is with politics, only much, much slower.

The Labour party was founded in 1900, having grown out of the trade union movement and socialist parties of the 19th century, to articulate and to implement the changes needed for the betterment of the working class who then, as now were overwhelming majority of the population  So successful were they in doing this, that in all of the general elections since 1922, Labour has either been the government or the opposition to it. They disrupted to two party system, that was Britain’s notion of democracy since about 1800 where only 7% of people could vote.

So it was inevitable that when 1981 when four senior Labour Party politicians left to form the Social Democratic Party, it was soon in a coalition with Liberals – who’d been part of that old two party cabal – until eventually the two parties became one in 1988. 

But even that, disruptive as it was proclaimed to be by the press at the time, was really nothing of the sort. As with all disruptors, they quickly became part of the system system they had previously wanted to disrupt.

Even more cynical were the Greens, or too be fair, the fate that awaited the Greens after their stunning success in the 1989 UK’s European elections. Winning over 2 million votes – 15% of the vote – the three other parties took note and soon nullified the threat the Greens posed by adopting greener policies. Solar energy, recycling and other environmental issues maybe political orthodoxy now, but back then they weren’t.

Then Farrago entered the fray. Exactly when I first became aware of him I can’t recall, but he wormed his way into my political awareness, initially on the fringes of the fringes and becoming increasingly more of political force or farce, depending on your thinking about British EU membership. This culminated the 2014 European Elections, where UKIP came 1st in the UK getting over 26% of the vote.

This was the catalyst for the Brexit referendum. And we all know what happened there.

One may not like his politics – I certainly don’t – but plenty of the those who make up the ‘problematic democracy’ do and that given that roughly a third of the electorate never vote, he could certainly disrupt this election.

The idea that Farrago and his mob play on, pander to and generally engage in far-right politics only makes sense if one accepts what I maintain is a flawed assumption. That there exists a perfect set of political opinions and that they exist right in the middle of an imagined political spectrum. Who and why that assumption is seen as a given, something so beyond questioning as to be eternal is another post. But  therefore any views that fall outside of this ideal can can be called ‘far right’, ‘far left or ‘extreme’, which is technically true. But only if one first accepts the flawed assumption upon which those views are seen and presented. Yes, some of the policies that Reform UK are espousing may break with the increasingly politically centrist orthodoxy of the last few decades, but that’s what disrupters do. 

And if some of that third who never vote do, is that such a bad thing? If the concerns, interests and priorities of those who feel excluded for political life are given voice, how is that not democratic? After all, that’s why and how the Labour Party started.

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In case anyone who read yesterdays post imagines that I’m anti-trans, I most definitely am not. What I am though is pro-women.

That being the case, I can’t fathom how it is possible for any sentient adult can genuinely believe in their heart of hearts that all a man has to do to become a woman is simply to proclaim that he is, to put on a bit of make up and pretend to be one. 

Yes, I believe that people genuinely feel that they were born into the wrong body because of that, feel that profound distress. But feelings don’t trump facts, and the fact is that if you are born with a penis you’re a man, and as with lots of things in life we don’t much care for, wishing things were otherwise doesn’t make them so. 

If that were indeed the case, I wouldn’t be brain damaged. I’d much rather be in a body that could walk, one that allowed me to speak clearly and intelligibly and one that had control over my fingers such that I could type these words with something approaching fluidity. But what has happened has happened, and whilst I am in in no way denigrating people who are transgender, I am saying that despite the fact that our respective situations being incomparably different, they do exist at opposite ends of a very long spectrum.  

The wishing-this-wasn’t-my-life spectrum. 

But here’s the thing. Pretty much everyone thinks that and some with more reason to think that than others. People with a terminal illness, people in hospices and victims who suffer life-changing injuries following all manner of terrible happenings, for example. Wishing for something one knows can never happen but still accepting the incontrovertible reality one finds oneself in, incredibly disagreeable though it may be, is both healthier and more pragmatic.

Well that’s what all my therapists and counsellors have told me over the years anyway. And if I ever reach accepting the reality of my brain injury then hopefully I’ll feel better too. Until that happy day however….

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