Long before Jeremy Corbyn became Labour’s accidental leader, gifting Boris Johnson a landslide victory in the 2019 general election, I was fond of using the term A Better World Is Possible. A new middle class luvvie support group called Momentum came into life with the sole aim of propelling Corbyn into office. ‘A Better World Is Possible’ was their byline and the rest, as they say, is history as Magic Grandpa crashed and burned. A worse world came to pass. Thanks, Jez. But I stand by my original view, with less capitals: a better world is possible.
Under David Cameron and Nick Clegg, followed by Theresa May, Boris Johnson, the ludicrous Liz Truss and, finally, Rishi Sunak, Britain really did feel broken for the simple reason that much of it was. Nothing seemed to work and everything was broken. Hate figures from the far right of politics, from Suella Braverman via the nicotine-stained man frog Nigel Farage to the serial criminal Stephen Yaxley-Lennon, who calls himself Tommy Robinson, amplified the Broken Britain agenda. You cannot walk down any street in the UK without being mugged, there are huge no-go areas from everywhere from Birmingham to Chipping Norton and as you will know, we all have to live under Sharia Law. Oh, and there are pot holes on every single road in the country. We’re doomed!
Well, we’re not doomed really, are we? As I look out of the window of my man cave, I see the beginning of yet another beautiful, sunny summer’s day. Kids are outside playing, people are walking their dogs and, incredibly, wishing each other “good morning”. It all seems completely normal to me. It’s almost as if some people want us all to believe Britain is broken for their own cynical, nefarious purposes.
The far right basically makes a living out of trying to make us all angry, with the active assistance of their friends in the gutter press. Only Farage and Yaxley-Lennon can save us from oblivion, basically by being beastly to foreign people, including people who were actually born here, presumably people like me, who have shitloads of ‘foreign’ DNA and are not really British at all, certainly not ‘pure’. Purism is an interesting concept since World War II came about primarily because of the demented views of a fascist dictator and his desire to kill Jews.
I have reservations about the term multicultural because, at least to me, it’s too broad a term. Of course, I happily embrace all different cultures as long as they exist within a secular state, where no one gets special privileges through their religion, or whatever so, for example, religious folk cannot be allowed to kill animals for their meat by methods which are extremely cruel, as happens with kosher and halal meat. And children are not subject to sexual abuse by way of circumcision. Apart from that, live and let live, right?
I see no signs of societal collapse, as the far right seem to be not just suggesting, but aiding and abetting, describing as the country as being “ready to explode” and “A powderkeg”. Sure, some of the more intellectually challenged of Yaxley-Lennon’s coked-up fan boys are happy to get out there and set fire to hotels housing desperate refugees and asylum seekers, while the man himself suns himself in Tenerife (if you are in Costa Adeje, do look out for him), but in reality most of us have other things to occupy our minds, few of which involve in throwing rocks at coppers. We might be pissed off by the lengths of NHS waiting lists, which are now falling, the continued failings of Thatcherism like the privatised industries ripping us off and charging us the earth to line the shareholder pockets and, yes, the pot holes which reached epidemic levels under the Tories, but slowly and surely things are getting better. At a more glacial speed than we might like but a better world is not only possible, it is beginning to happen.
The doom-mongers would love you to believe their dystopian tales of societal collapse are true because, and here’s the rub, they want you to believe that only they can save our country (or save are country, as some might say). Deporting everyone who is not pure English, cutting the hands off thieves, capital punishment for people installing solar panels – these are the sort of things that will restore our country to the sepia-like perfect existence our forefathers enjoyed; a world that, in truth, never existed. But tell a lie often enough, and then tell even bigger lies, has worked well enough for Donald Trump and that, Farage and co, will work over here.
And maybe it will work over here if we let it. If we want the voices of fear and loathing, not to mention pure hatred, to succeed, then always need is to join the peddlers of division for a little casual hooliganism and thuggery. Some will because they always do, but I’m banking on a kindler, gentler life because a better world is possible. It’s there all right, but only if we want it.
