Opinions

Tanya generously bought me a new subscription to the LRB for my birthday. The lead article in the latest edition is about Syria, which I read. And now I know about Syria. My policy towards the middle east has always been to maintain a level of deliberate ignorance (a bit like the Americans), because it seems whatever happens in that region turns into a quagmire deluxe. How can we know if the west should sell arms to the rebels or not? Leaving people to die under a vile regime is appalling, but arming insurgents hasn't worked so well before. I have a lot of opinions on a lot of other subjects, and having to have one on the middle east as well makes my mind hurt - and so much of received opinion turns out to be wrong. The Labour government of '45 wouldn't allow immigration into Palestine, even concentration camp survivors and Jewish refugees, which seemed an incredibly anti-Semitic policy. However, with hindsight, it seems most sensible.

We celebrate la Resistance and the Suffragette movements, but both were terrorist organisations, using violence for their political aims. Whereas I would say that the men who killed Lee Rigby had severe mental health problems. You don't start a holy war with a machete. I suspect that the IRA wouldn't even consider those two useful idiots.

Whilst the EDL were rubbing their grubby hands together at the thought of an increase in Muslim-hatred, UKIP have tried to keep their distance. To be fair to Farrage, UKIP’s MO is to halt immigration from Europe, rather than attempting to terrorise people who already live here. However, some people blame “the Poles” in the same way they blamed “the Indians” twenty or so years ago, which is when the BNP first started winning council seats. UKIP has fed into people’s fears (whipped up by the right wing press etc) and people’s fears feed into UKIP, thus they’ll focus on eastern Europe immigration rather than ex-colonies immigration, seeing as the BNP has already got that section of the populace. UKIP’s target market is the “I’m not racist but….” brigade.

I watched a Smiths documentary to celebrate the 30th anniversary of their first single and it struck me how much they wanted to change people's minds. They wanted to influence lives. You could say the same about Thatcher or Atlee. Of course Atlee and the 1945 Labour government failed to do everything they wanted (at one point, they intended to nationalise haulage which seems crazy to modern, post-privatisation ears). But in six years, they invented the welfare state and set the political standards for forty years. Nye Bevan said that to convince doctors of the NHS's value, he had to "stuff their mouths with gold" but nowadays, most doctors are against the Coalition's privatising NHS "reforms". Bevan changed the culture of medicine. For every Smiths there's a (picks random name from dartboard) Kasabian, who just want to be in the biz, and for every Bevan there's a Miliband, who seems to have very vague convictions, who want to be in power and will flip flop around issues to appeal to the most people, rather than doing what the Labour party (should) believe in. They change to appeal to the electorate rather than forcing the electorate to change their stupid minds about immigration, the public sector, etc etc. Because both major parties' purpose is now to capture most of the electorate (or rather the electorate in the marginal seats: as 0.067 of a voter, no-one cares about the likes o'me), they move closer together. Even the increasingly fascistic Tories (I'm just waiting for Pickles to announce that the disabled are "useless eaters", or the BBC to do a docu on our glorious leader, Dave) have tried to appropriate the centrists with the marriage equality bill. The irony is that as both Labour and the Tories try to occupy the middle ground, the more people think that all parties are the same and tend to vote for chancers like UKIP. And then, even more ironically, because Lab and Con (I'm leaving the Libs out of this, as they'd be best left out of most things) believe that the populace are down on Europe and/or immigration, they adopt those policies as an attempt to kill off UKIP.

Anyway, I don't believe that more than a handful of those new UKIP councillors will be re-elected next time. The BNP went from 55 to 2 councillors in 4 years as people realised what a bunch of fuckwits they are (the BNP fielded 99 candidates in this year's local elections and won 0).