'You're joking! Not another one?' exclaimed Brenda from Bristol in 2017 upon learning that Theresa May had called a snap General Election after repeatedly assuring the public that she wouldn't. 'I can't stand this - there's too much politics going on at the moment.' The 2017 General Election took place a year after both a referendum on our EU membership and a coup by the Labour Party against its elected leader, two years after another General Election and three years after a referendum on whether Scotland should become an independent state, so Brenda had a point. There had indeed been an unusually high number of elections and miscellaneous political exercises in recent times.
Brenda's words became one of the most widely-shared election-related videos in UK history. Even now in 2024, she is so well-remembered that tonight when I was tasked with asking the questions in a quiz league game, there was a question about what her name was and it was answered correctly - and then one of the participants said, 'She spoke for the nation!' But what exactly did Brenda mean by 'there's too much politics going on at the moment'? After all, politics is ongoing so that's not exactly a clear statement. Did she mean she wants fewer opportunities to participate in democracy? She's never given any clarifications so one can only speculate on what she meant - but I think that at the very least, we can conclude that Brenda finds election campaigns to be a deeply, deeply unpleasant experience.
It is this that I think is what caused the entirety of the UK to unite with Brenda, because we all find elections to be horrible. Particularly as Brits, we're often told to steer clear of religion and politics in polite company, and during election time we can't do that. We're repeatedly told who we should and shouldn't vote for, we struggle to understand much of it and we have to pretend that we're more informed than we actually probably are. I'm as bad with this as anyone else is - I find I spend most of my time wanting an election, and then when one is actually called I suffer from severe anxiety and find myself thinking, 'This is absolutely awful - why on earth did I ever want this?' But the 2017 election in particular is very memorable for me, in terms of both how low I was when it was called and how excited I became by the result.
In early 2017, I was at a particularly low point in my life, and when the General Election was called I was absolutely certain that Theresa May would achieve the super-majority she was expected to get, we'd lose all hope of ever improving anything and basically shit would only get worse. But obviously that didn't happen - the Labour Party did a really great campaign, and the Tories actually lost seats. I remember watching the election coverage and all the pundits were absolutely stunned. Apparently Rupert Murdoch stormed out of the room when he saw the exit poll!
Seven years on, I have noticed quite a lot of revisionism in people's recollections of that moment. Nowadays, you're more likely to hear how badly Labour performed that they couldn't even beat a Prime Minister as awful as Theresa May. My question that I always ask in response is, 'So when the exit poll results came in and all the pundits were sitting there in shock, you're saying they were in shock because they were expecting Labour to win an outright majority rather than just a hung Parliament, are you?' Because I really do not believe this was the expectation. It was not expected that by appealing to hope rather than to fear, a political party would be able to come back in a General Election when they were that far behind in the polls to begin with. Essentially, the idea was that it's negative ideas, not positive ones, that win seats.
This is generally the driving force behind nearly every political campaign I've ever seen, both in the UK and abroad. I remember in the 2016 US Presidential Election, a meme was being shared around that said: 'Donald Trump Pros: Not Hillary Clinton. Cons: Donald Trump. Hillary Clinton Pros: Not Donald Trump. Cons: Hillary Clinton.' Both of these Presidential candidates predominantly relied on people disliking their main opponent even more than they disliked them. The same thing happened at the following US election, and will most likely happen in the next one. Here in the UK, the leaders of both the Labour and Conservative Parties are relying on this for the next election. Neither Rishi Sunak nor Keir Starmer is doing anything at all to make people think, 'Yes, I trust that person. They're the person I want to be my Prime Minister.' Their entire appeal is that they are not their opponent. I have very rarely heard anyone of any political persuasion express the fact that they actually like either of them.
I find this exceptionally harmful, and I think that this association of politics with negativity has a significant impact on social discourse. Because truthfully, I don't think politics should be negative. I think it should be an opportunity to express our ideas, listen to others and find a way forward that benefits everyone. I've written a lot on this blog in the past about my partner Owen and the campaign group for the disabled he's set up in Abergavenny. All of that is political, but in an overwhelmingly positive and beneficial way. Sure, there'll be times when we disagree with each other; if we're adults, we should have the maturity to be able to handle those disagreements and talk them out in a way that is actually valuable. There'll also be times when we feel like we don't really know enough about the subject; well, the best way to learn is to chat about these things. Some of the most intelligent and well-considered opinions I've ever heard have come from people who have told me that they don't really understand what's going on. I find that they tend to understand it more than they think they do - there's a concerted effort from the media class to suggest that politics is the domain of the privately-educated rich, and that is not true. If anything, I find those people tend to be the ones who are the most sheltered.
One thing that most people in the UK can agree on whatever their political persuasion is that they don't like the first-past-the-post system - and yet it stays despite being deeply flawed, because the only people with the power to change it are the ones who benefit from it being there. I could probably write a whole other blog on what form of democracy I'd prefer instead. However, with the way that political campaigns tend to conduct themselves, it would actually make the most sense to have an inverse voting system - vote for the person you least want, and then the person with the fewest votes gets in. This isn't a system I would personally advocate, but politicians do conduct their campaigns as though it is.
The writer Owen Jones said in a recent article for The Guardian that 'there are now three certainties in life: death, taxes, and Keir Starmer becoming Prime Minister within a year'. If I was being very facetious, I'd suggest that maybe if Keir Starmer becoming Prime Minister within a year is a certainty, that by itself demonstrates that taxes are not. In all seriousness, I don't agree that Keir Starmer becoming Prime Minister is a certainty, both because of Andrew Feinstein's campaign against him in Holborn St Pancras and because I don't believe Labour is doing anything at all to inspire people to vote for them. Jones' rationale is that the Tories are doing particularly badly at the moment - and indeed they are, and maybe that will result in a Labour victory, but I don't believe that's guaranteed. The reason I don't believe it's guaranteed is that I remember the same thing being said about Ed Miliband in 2015. After the disastrous experiment with a Conservative-Liberal Democrat coalition, that should have been the easiest election in the world for Labour to walk - but it made itself so unappealing that the left-wing vote was split, and the Tories managed to get an outright majority. And now under Keir Starmer, I think Labour is even less appealing than it was in 2015 under Ed Miliband, so I don't understand why relying on the governing party being awful is suddenly more likely to work now. Essentially, I don't think there has ever been an election in UK history (certainly not since I've been alive) that someone has won purely because of the flaws of their opponents. Every single election winner has, I feel, offered something that people wanted. Even if I haven't personally cared for what that is, I can see how certain things seemed appealing to certain sections of the demographic at the time. Right now, I don't see anyone in any major party trying to be appealing in any way at all, so this is uncharted territory. Who knows what will happen?
What I can say for certain is that politics does not need to be this negative. Have conversations with people, read about things from all different sources, don't be afraid to talk about your own feelings and don't be afraid to be disagreed with. Politics in the UK, and probably in most countries, is absolutely toxic. For this reason, I think Brenda from Bristol had a point. But I also think it's shameful that she had a point. We shouldn't live in a world where people dread the occasions where they get to participate in democracy. We don't have to have that world.
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