Vote with your feet

[imomus]

There's a general election in Britain tomorrow. Am I voting in it? No. I don't even know what my electoral status is, and I don't really care. I haven't voted in a national election in Britain since... 1992? To be honest, I'm much more preoccupied with European issues than British ones these days. It's a matter of some importance to me, for instance, that France ratifies the European constitution with a Yes vote in the May 29th referendum. Whatever the accuracy of the comparison, Chirac is speaking a language that resonates with me emotionally when he calls the European constitution "the daughter of the 1789 revolution". I'm on tenterhooks about Turkey's accession to the EU, but I'm not holding my breath about Britain's adoption of the Euro. The Euro is great, but whether Britain is in or out of it matters very little.



I feel like a European and I feel like a Scot, but I don't really feel "British" any more. That national unit no longer computes for me. Call me "urbriotic": I feel a sense of place, and a sense of pride, in cities rather than nations. For the moment, Ich bin ein Berliner! Taking the train from Paris to Berlin this week I was once again struck by how a short train trip can change things more radically than any politician. The contrast couldn't be greater: Paris is beautiful, defined, dense, passionate, sexy, classical, stressful, volatile, Berlin is unfinished, amorphous, empty, relaxed, subcultural, calm, solid, stolid, serious. No politician would dare to suggest he could turn a Paris into a Berlin. Such things are beyond the power of mere humans, but any human can exchange Paris for Berlin or Berlin for Paris just by getting on a train. Trains, ships and planes, it seems, are more effective agents of political change than politicians.

Rather than voting at the ballot box, I've voted with my feet. Rather than militating for change in Britain, I've preferred to live elsewhere, to find ways of being which appeal to me more than the British way of being. It was selfish of me, I know. Life is too short, you see. Rather than beat my head against a brick wall, I've simply walked out the door. But I think I'm alienated from domestic politics for another reason: it "says nothing to me about my life". It seems unreal. Domestic politics is all about numbers. It's managerial. How much do we put into the tax rebate, how do we finance the health service and the transport system? Naturally these things have to be decided, and of course the answers will impact on the lives of the people who live in the country deciding them. But numbers seem incidental. They whirr away in the background, just like they do on my computer. Normally I don't notice them, even as I surf along, turning them into letters, or sounds, or pictures. Enormous anomalies in the numbers Gordon Brown juggles daily would make very little difference to my life, as long as the basic systems kept working.

It's the transnational issues, issues like global warming, which do matter to me, and will affect me wherever I live. But in domestic elections these issues are unfortunately downplayed, and all parties tend to say the same thing about them. They're so huge they seem best dealt with at European level anyway. And it may well be that we're seeing the last days of national-scale politics. Britain will eventually either integrate with the EU or integrate (in the unholy alliance I've called "Angrael") with the US, and only then will it be able to do something effective about an issue as big as climate change. (And obviously, you know, I hope Britain aligns fully with the EU on this issue, because the US is doing nothing about climate change.)



What really matters to me above all is not numbers, and not text, but texture: what I summed up in yesterday's interview with Marxy as "a way of being". Small incremental changes in national fortune or national policy really don't seem to matter much beside the way of being you experience when you arrive in a new land, a new city, a new culture. It's way of being which is crucial, and I believe that when you find a way of being you can live with, and you can love, everything else starts to flow in the right direction. Even when things go wrong, they go wrong in the right way. Even if people are poor and unemployed, if they have the right way of being it'll be fine. And of course the corollary is true too: if the way of being that prevails in a place is wrong, it won't matter how prosperous, peaceful or proud those people are, they'll just be richly, peacefully and proudly wrong.

I'm afraid I now feel that when I visit Britain. Whether rich or poor, successful or failing, Britain seems just wrong to me. It espouses values I don't espouse. Whatever history it might celebrate is wrong: I can never forgive it for failing to have an eighteenth century bourgeois revolution like the French one, or for failing to have a constitution, or failing to become a republic. Britain is just horribly wrong in so many ways that choosing a red, yellow or blue way of being wrong is pointless. Britain, as far as I'm concerned, is wrong in its attitude to the intellect, to sex, to art, to class, to the body, to the relationship between money and quality of life, to the relationship between work and play, to the relationship between itself and the US, or the relationship between peace and war, or between British people and foreigners, or between sunny days and cloudy days, or... well, I could go on and on, or alternatively I could just go, which is what I ended up doing.

Are any of the major political parties looking at Britain's essential wrongheadedness? What are they proposing to do about it? The answer is that if you really believed Britain was essentially wrong in its way of being, you wouldn't go into politics. You'd go into France, or Germany, or Japan, or India, or Tibet, or somewhere you felt things were less wrong. I mean, really, why be a satirist when you could be a satyr? Why be miserable when you could be happy? Why vote when you can walk? And why take the perspective that it's politicians who define a place, when it's so clearly ordinary people and their ways of being?

Comments

[jermynsavile.livejournal.com]

Don't know how much you've been following the campaign but, thinking about it all further, if there were two key themes throughout then they were Iraq and race (the issue of foreigness and whether Britain is being 'swamped'). The Iraq question is moot as the two main parties both agree on the outcome but just quibble about the process used to get there.

Race however has been on the agenda for a long time. You say, rightly 'No politician would dare to suggest he could turn a Paris into a Berlin'. But that is exactly what Britons seem to fear, that 'foreigners' have a mind to somehow steal Britishness. While racism exists everywhere this paranoia seems particularly strong in Britain (England especially). Am I wrong? If not, then any ideas why this is?

[imomus.livejournal.com]

I was listening to a conversation at the airport as we queued for a Ryanair flight. An Australian was befriending an elderly British couple. The way he did this was to assume they were right wing and to make some political observations that would allow him to bond with them, so he went for the jugular, raising two issues calculated to appeal: how Britain is better off outside the Euro mechanism, and how the Edgware Road is "like Calcutta these days". And it worked. He got the friendly response from the elderly couple, although I almost turned round and kicked him.

The irony is that I really think that three or four decades ago British people would not have rushed to make political small talk with strangers. They'd be like my father, and do backwards summersaults to avoid discussing contentious political issues, especially with strangers.

[imomus.livejournal.com]

...And, to take that thought further and answer your question, I think that Britain has changed, and it's become Nastyland, a place where it's okay to be nasty about the poor, people from different cultures, etc. And if we have to pin the blame for this change on any one individual, let's pick Mr Nasty himself, Rupert Murdoch, who owns 80% of the UK press. Who can I vote for if I don't want Britain to be "swamped" by Mr Nasty and his minions? Oh, right, nobody.

[jermynsavile.livejournal.com]

Rupert Murdoch has had a foul effect on British political life, but don't underestimate the impact of the equally revolting Daily Mail and its stable. Increasingly the news/political agenda is entirely set by these two branches of the media. If BBC/ITV decide to cover immigration 'fairly' or not doesn't matter, that immigration is the issue has already been decided by the leader writers of the Sun and the Mail.

Neither of the two parties has any incentive to limit their powers - too much to gain or lose by the battle.

[joentdothat.livejournal.com]

Interesting. Do you mean to say the the BBC doesn't have much sway in the UK anymore? I have to say, it is my preferred news source, and it's always possible to get BBC World News here in the US - even on television, surprisingly. It is broadcast on American public television (PBS) and if you have digital cable service there is even a BBC America channel.

Of course, that would mean that the BBC is becoming more influential abroad than in Britain! I think that is probably not a good thing; I wonder how long it could be economically justified if that situation were to continue?

[jermynsavile.livejournal.com]

Very true about the change in conversational conventions.

The - mistaken - assumption of shared values is commonplace: I have been engaged in conversation over the last few weeks by people who have indulged in extraordinarily negative stereotyping on the subject of gypsies, muslims (with particular venom), migrant workers from Eastern Europe and, ironically, Australians. The look on their faces when I haven't immediately acquiesced leads me to believe they think that they're on safe territory.

A bizarre aspect of this election has been the BNP's targeting of some of the Sikh and West Indian communities as allies in their campaign against muslims. With some success I believe. I have a lot of personal connections with the Asian community and am often surprised the level of racism within it. It's a bizarre world. I'm probably just being naive.

Not wrong...

[thetemplekeeper.livejournal.com]

I don't say you're wrong; but I can understand the other point of view. I come from a tiny island where about 60% of the population are UK (or sometimes other) immigrants. I now live in London and haven't been back home for about two and a half years. The reason why is that almost everyone I know, including my parents, have left; and part of the reason why they've left is because the character of the island, it's culture, has been destroyed by the wave of city-worker immigrants coming over from the UK home counties. The friendly old pubs, the interesting and interested ways of being have vanished in our town and in their wake are homogonised yuppie bars playing piped UK chart music, entire streets of chain stores, stabbings, aggressive drinking... Our language has also been pretty much killed off (only 785 speakers left in the world four years ago) over the past hundred or so years, largely by English immigrants - particularly school masters and ministers, who would punish anyone who spoke the local language in class or in the playground. We've gone from a Methodist/pagan culture to a cash-focussed, southern English C of E one in a very small amount of time... In short, where I'm from no longer exists.

That said, the immigrant population here is (1) much more varied, so no homogonisation of culture is really possible, only interesting divergence from the British norm and (2)nowhere remotely near 60% of the UK population!

So: yes, I believe it is possible for a culture to be killed off quickly through unchecked immigration, rather than to simply change or evolve; but no, that argument applied to Britain as a whole is ludicrous. Finally, and speaking as someone vaguely foreign to the ways of being over here, I think the aggressiveness of Southern England could do with some serious injection of friendliness from other places...

Re: Not wrong...

[imomus.livejournal.com]

I come from a tiny island

I'm curious now about where this island is! Sark?

Re: Not wrong...

[thetemplekeeper.livejournal.com]

Very good: though actually the problem with Sark is that there are almost no immigrants - it's still like that Mervyn Peake book! I actually come from Jersey, which is just nearby (in fact, Jerseymen originally colonised Sark) but didn't want to say that because it usually provokes the response, "ah, the tax haven," which is really annoying (not to mention factually wrong).

Re: Not wrong...

[thetemplekeeper.livejournal.com]

This (http://www.societe-jersiaise.org/geraint/jerriais.html) might satiate some of your curiosity - it's a page about Jersey written in the local language, Jerriase (which is very close to mediaeval Norman French)

Re: Not wrong...

[jermynsavile.livejournal.com]

Take your point. I think that one of the ironies is that England was never particularly shy about changing indigenous cultures - all those places that are still our "friends" after colonialism as described by our anonymous friend above - and, maybe, part of our fear is that what we did to others will be revisited. The fact is, of course, that English culture has changed hugely, particularly over the last twenty-five years or so. People worry about the borders, and don't notice the changes wrought from the inside and from a few, powerful, influences such as Murdoch (as already noted by Momus) and our other "friends" across the Atlantic.

Re: Not wrong...

[thetemplekeeper.livejournal.com]

No, I agree with you entirely: firstly, it is frightening how much unthinking crap people seem to swallow whole through reading 'papers, etc., and then regurgitate as "their" opinion (when they haven't really thought about opposing arguments at all); secondly, I think people panic ridiculously about immigration in this country - there is a dominant English, largely anglo-saxon culture, and minority cultures exist around it and will continue to do so - there is no overwhelming immigration and, probably more importantly, no mass emigration either. That is the difference between where I was brought up (where one dominant culture was replaced wholesale by another, with horrible consequences as far as I can see) and where I live now - in a wonderful ethnic and cultural mix, which is really what London has been since the 1600s.