This week I have mostly been being tired. There are three main reasons for this.
1: My cat is a twat and wakes me up at stupid hours for the mega cat lols of it.
2: I stayed up to watch the election
3: I have too much work to do.
Using crude maths, I can only therefore blame 33.33333333333333333333333333333333333333333333333333333 (recurring) percent of my tiredness on the bane of capitalism because the rest of it is clearly my fault. I don’t have to have a cat and I didn’t need to stay up to watch the election.
I love elections. I find it really weird how some people can go to bed and not think about it. How can you ignore all the numbery speculation and the moments of dramatic reveal? How can you not immerse yourself in the maps and charts? What about all the names of places? It’s a bit like the classified football results crossed with a weather forecast but also some kind of mad game show.
I don’t think I’ve ever been particularly excited about who wins an election. UK politics doesn’t really generate much radical thought. Jeremy Corduroy is as crazy as it’s ever got in my lifetime really, and his big idea was to give people a free AOL CD so they could have some internet but that was too crazy, so he had to be binned off and replaced by a man who hasn’t got any ideas at all.
The main question this time was: ‘Is a man with no ideas is better than some lads with really bad ideas?’ and the answer was ‘yes – bring on the fella who isn’t going to do owt’
I did get a tiny bit of kip – I fell asleep for a bit and woke up to Liz Truss losing her seat which was a reminder that a lack of ideas can be preferable to bad ideas and overall I felt slightly more optimistic in the morning than I have done for a bit as it’s actually mental as fuck that we’re dealing with not only the fall out from Covid, not only war in Europe and the existential crisis of Gaza, not only the restructuring of post Brexit but also the fact that someone deliberately broke the economy just for the hell of it.
Here’s the main things I thought about during election night:
1: It’s mad how much time people spend on the telly talking about the tactics of political parties as opposed to any kind of ideology and/or policy.
2: Kwasi Kwarteng is a surprisingly amenable man. He has the look of a bemused fella who decided to try and fix his own car and took all the bits apart and then chuckled at his own incompetence and wandered off for a pint leaving a big pile of broken mess. Every now and again, he opens the door to his garage and looks at it and thinks ‘Oh Kwasi, what were you thinking?’ and then goes and reads a book about some stuff that happened 300 years ago.
3: There must be loads of people in the country who are neither a politician nor a media commentator who could say intelligent things about politics but the public voice is always limited to things like ‘I feel sorry for Rishi because he did well in Covid and he’s doing his best’ or ‘I think it’s time for a change’ or ‘I was going to vote for Labour but I’m going to vote for the Reform because they came round and the Labour one didn’t’
It’s as if there’s a clear desire to present ‘the people’ as a malleable and generally thick group of people who don’t really have any thoughts about anything.
4: There’s also a real nastiness to it all that really undermines any sense that anything could be meaningfully debated. There’s something really quite weird going on when the winning party are widely praised for their strategy of ‘not saying anything about anything’ that brings the idea of democracy into a sharp and uncomfortable light.
5: Even though nu-nu-Labour are shit, it does feel better to have them in charge because, generally speaking, you look at some of them and think ‘they’re a bit more normal’ which is something I suppose.
6: I could have probably written something better than this, but all my political ideas generally lead me to a place where Britain ends up basically like Albania or something and I’ve accepted I’m not the man to lead the country.
7: That said, I (and lots of other people) do have ideas about stuff and things and it is striking that in an age of mass participatory media we have a curious contradiction. It is far, far, far easier than it ever has been to consult people and yet we are in this political moment where we seem utterly devoid of any new thoughts beyond ‘send the buggers back’ which isn’t really a new thought and has been the obvious destination point for fucking ages cos stuff is shit and when stuff is shit, that’s always where things lead.
In conclusion, this isn’t the best piece I’ve written. The cat woke me up again this morning because I forgot to put his regulation 8 tons of biscuits out overnight and at some point he ran out of them and thus, cos he’s a fucking greedy bastard he had to wake me up at the earliest possible moment and therefore my thoughts are all muggy and tired.
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