In an age when all of the information in the world is available on the device in one’s pocket, it seems extraordinary that the mistakes of history might be repeated, that the same things would be believed. Read the history of Europe in the 1930s and there is a deep sense that there is an inexorable process. It is like watching a play when you know there is a tragic ending coming, but there is nothing that can be done to change things because that is what the script dictates. There is a desire to call back over the decades, “No! Stop! Don’t go that way!”
Politics was about appearance, not substance. George Orwell’s 1935 novel A Clergyman’s Daughter captures the essence of a populist, philosophy-free politics, as his character encounters a by-election campaign.
. . . between the lanes of people, the Blifil- Gordon car was moving at a foot-pace, with Mr Blifil-Gordon smiling richly, first to one side, then to the other. In front of the car marched a detachment of the Buffaloes, headed by an earnest-looking little man playing the trombone, and carrying among them another banner inscribed:
Who’ll save Britain from the Reds?
BLIFIL-GORDON
Who’ll put the Beer back into your Pot?
BLIFIL-GORDON
Blifil-Gordon for ever!
. . . The Blifil-Gordon car, having rounded the pump, was now wending its way back, still accompanied by its troupe of middle-aged Bacchantes. Mr Warburton, his attention caught, paused to scrutinize it.
‘What is the meaning of these disgusting antics?’ he asked.
‘Oh, they’re–what is it they call it?–electioneering. Trying to get us to vote for them, I suppose.’
‘Trying to get us to vote for them! Good God!’ murmured Mr Warburton, as he eyed the triumphal cortege. He raised the large, silver-headed cane that he always carried, and pointed, rather expressively, first at one figure in the procession and then at another. ‘Look at it! Just look at it! Look at those fawning hags, and that half-witted oaf grinning at us like a monkey that sees a bag of nuts. Did you ever see such a disgusting spectacle?’
Mr Warburton, with his silver-headed cane, was a man of independent means, able to pass through the turbulent times almost unaffected by what is happening around him; few people have such a luxury. Even Orwell, writing in 1935 and aware that the times were unsettled, could not have imagined the cataclysmic events that would end the decade. Were Orwell writing eighty years later, what story might he write of the present times?
I hoped the Tories would’ve realised that relatively small changes would’ve made certain they could sideline that rump of the party that are of the Roderick Spode followers hue. But since those very policies have lost Scotland and they’ve not done a darn thing to abate them I suppose I was being a tad wishful.
You see I think that the current political divisions in the UK are unsustainable. But that for both Labour and Tory’s are too greedy to realise they are a in a tail wagging the dog scenario.
The decision in 1979 by the Conservative Party not to join the Christian Democrat group in the European Parliament seemed prophetic of their intention to retain its ties to the old class structure