LETTER FROM LONDON MAY 9th 2017

My first reaction to the exit poll was, like so many people on the left, including friends who tweeted me was a numb incredulity, this couldn’t be right. How could all the opinion polls have got it so horribly wrong? (I doubt that I will ever fully trust an opinion poll ever again). The prospect of the sonorous and self-important Paddy Ashdown eating his hat, which he proposed to do if the poll was wrong, briefly cheered me up. Then I saw the face of Labour’s deputy leader Harriet Harman and I knew that ‘we’ had lost. Exhausted I retreated to my bed enough already.

The day had started very early with an early morning day of poll leaflet drop. Two hours spent blagging my way in when the trades lock refused to open, stuffing leaflets into letterboxes and carrying a heavy rucksack filled with leaflets up the stairs of 6 and 8 storey blocks, and I was soon drenched in sweat. My admiration for postmen and women always increases when I do this sort of thing. Some people seem to have an aversion to receiving mail, blocking their letterboxs with what feels like upturned Bex Bissel carpet sweepers. If you do manage to insert your leaflet it has become mangled beyond recognition in the process.

Deliveries done it was home again for a shower and change of clothes then a trip down to Fulham to deliver a talk on George Orwell. Although in Fulham the Talk was held in with the grounds of Chelsea Football Club, in a purpose built community education hub.

To visit an English Premier League football club like Chelsea, and is to visit a modern day religious shrine. The pilgrims come to have their picture taken against a specially designed wall photograph of the team, to take the guided tour, splash cash in the club store and wonder that they are touching the same surfaces as their idols.
It is a rather cheap and nasty religion that in practice venerates the greed and narcissism of grossly overpaid individuals motivated by money who quite often no loyalty to the clubs they play for.  Orwell, no fan of sport, would have I think understood the phenomenon represented by the modern major football club, whose appeal transcends national borders. So that it is possible to see bare footed street children in Pakistan, or Thailand, wearing Manchester United football shirts. Like Victory Gin slavishly following a football team serves to make life more palatable, and, in the more developed countries, to divert attention from a reality in which you have neither power nor security.

The Orwell talk, ‘The Road to 1984’[1]proved hard work. The local community group suspicious of Orwell’s radicalism and even more suspicious, I think, about the ‘geezer’ talking about him. With considerable effort I did manage to get a conversation started about Orwell’s notion of ‘thought crime’ and the sinister growth of mechanisms for surveillance. 

I stepped out into bright sunshine feeling like a squeezed lemon. I had previously thought I might go and help further with the campaign, but with head aching and experiencing vague feelings of unease, this prospect felt as appealing as walking over hot coals. So I took the tube home and promptly crashed onto the sofa. 

I awoke, unrefreshed, at 8:30 with dialogue from the Orwell talk still running through my head.

“Animals taking over a farm, well that’s just silly.”
“Well it’s a fable, you must have heard of fables?”

At five minutes to ten I switched on the TV. At ten the results of the exit poll were released.  

I don’t want to talk too much about the results and, much more importantly, its consequences. Though I will say this, David Cameron has cleverly used English and Scottish nationalism to gain a surprise election win. Nationalism is a very easy force to harness. It is however a rare leader who can tame it. Cameron is not such a leader. The genie is out of the bottle and I think the forces now unleashed will not play themselves out in my lifetime.



[1] As a couple of people have asked me to I will be reproducing the the talk in essay form on this blog. 

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