the brilliantly leaping gazelle

The most depressing thing about the way in which the entire political class and their fawning sycophants in the media reacted to George Galloways’ electoral victory in Rochdale the other night was that it reminded me of how they’d all reacted after the Brexit vote. With an almost tedious inevitability, there was the same anguished newspaper headlines, the same acres of newsprint opining at length about what it said about Britain, about how it was a sad day for democracy, even down to the PM giving a speech outside No.10.

The statesman like thing to have done would’ve been for Loafer to be gracious in defeat and to admit that whilst he had lost, democracy had won. To position himself was a staunch defender of the democratic ideal, that how he felt about the result was ultimately of no consequence. But no. He somehow managed to conflate Galloways victory and the beliefs of some of the people who supported him as evidence of “our democracy itself being a target”

The thing is, it’s a teensy-teensy bit cheeky for Loafer to even mention democracy being a target, given the obscenely undemocratic way he became PM in the first place, in an act of political chicanery that would’ve made even Kim Jong-un blush. He is to democracy what Prince Harry is to reticence. At least his predecessor, Letttuce, was elected, even if it was only by 80,000 Conservative Party members. The last PM to be elected because of an actual general election was Boris’s Johnson, back in 2019.

Secondly did any Cabinet Ministers travel up to Rochdale to support the Conservative candidate Paul Ellison, especially after the Labour candidate was withdrawn? The media were all too aware of the potential for a Galloway win, most obviously because it allowed them to pontificate upon how disastrous an outcome this would be, so it follows that Loafer and Co were aware too. So where was the one time only coalition of all three main parties suspending business as usual and uniting behind a common cause to defeat Galloway? And instead of sounding all high and mighty about putting country before party like all politicians are always testiculating about, maybe actually doing it?

Galloway won Rochdale thanks in part to a low voter turnout – 39.7% as compared to the 60.1% in 2019 – and of that he only managed to 40%. Basically, 12,335 votes. Essentially if the main political parties couldn’t be even bothered to show up, then why should the voters? Worryingly, a couple of candidates whose names appeared on the ballot paper but were withdrawn before the election itself nevertheless managed somehow get a combined total of nearly 3,000 votes. And that leads neatly onto another threat to democracy.

Politicians themselves.

They are increasingly out of touch with the everyday concerns of the people they claim to serve, hardly a surprise when one realises the huge disparity between them and rest of the population. In 2019, research revealed the sheer scale of this grotesque reality. 44% of Tory MPs, 38% of Lib-Dem ones and 19% of Labour ones went to to fee paying – private – schools, as compared to 6% for the rest of us. It gets worse, as most of the Tory ones – 61% of that 44% – are in Loafer’s Cabinet, and 45% lot of that went to Oxbridge.

Less than 1% of the rest of us do. Unsurprisingly, this disparity stretches into the upper echelons of the civil service, the media and business.

No wonder then that a kind of group-think takes place, one that allows an echo chamber of ideological conformity to flourish and for dissenting opinions to be seldom heard. And that danger to democracy extends to the judiciary; senior judges being the most unrepresentative group of them all, with 67% attending private schools and 71% graduating from Oxbridge, with 11 of the judges on the Supreme Court thusly educated. Puts the legal challenges to Brexit into a harsher light, to say nothing of the Supreme Court unanimously ruling that Boris’s Johnson had “unlawfully” prorogued – suspended – parliament for five weeks. Effectively thwarting, albeit temporally, his ability to carry out the wishes of the majority of the UK population

Much like the Brexit vote, there was a lot of scare-mongering by the commentariat and grim predictions of doom that were better suited to Macbeth, but that didn’t prevent the shocked disbelief and abject bewilderment of the entire political class when the lower orders actually used democracy to be actively involved in their own lives. Possibly not enough of them made full advantage of that possibility in Rochdale, but whose fault is that? That’s one of the great strengths of democracy, which is why the right to vote was very begrudgingly and even more incrementally broadened to eventually encompass all citizens. Just as people are sometimes contrary, often unpredictable and frequently unfathomable, so too can be election results.

And as I pointed out in a previous blog, Galloways self-professed and ruthlessly focused targeting of Rochdale’s Muslim population may well have been distasteful, but from another point of view, a brilliant piece of strategic thinking, one which all of the other parties have always used. Indeed election night analysis almost fetishises the possibility of marginal seats being lost to a rival party, often cutting away so we can see the winner bask in their fleeting moment in the spotlight. And with an emboldened Galloway eyeing up marginal seats – 25 of which have majority of less than 1,000 – the results may not be to everyone’s liking, but isn’t that the point of democracy, losers consent?

To quote Forest Gumps’ mum ‘Life is like a box of chocolates, you never know what your gonna get.’