On this site I dubbed the last election in 2019 as the ‘election of illusions’. The main illusions were that brexit and boris would be the answer to all our dreams. Instead, they became the stuff of our nightmares. Even the great English voter seems at last to have woken up to the scale of the disasters created or exacerbated by a hapless bunch of ever-changing toxic Tories since 2019. The sheer level of incompetence, moral sleaziness and corrupt greed displayed by the Conservatives has been difficult to credit.
With their ship utterly wrecked, the Government desperately clings on to the resulting flotsam and jetsam as it drifts helplessly towards the impending whirlpool of electoral doom, from which no amount of voter suppression looks capable of saving them. Meanwhile, thoughts turn to the coming general election.
This time around, it’s clearly going to be a zombie election.
The dictionaries tell us that a zombie ‘does not notice what is happening’. The political class, media and most voters wander around blithely ignorant of what’s actually going on. Or if not ignorant dangerously complacent. Or if not complacent, just dangerous. There will be a lot of things the politicians hope we won’t notice in this election. For example, the creeping privatisation by stealth of the NHS, the way the public estate is being quietly flogged off, the erosion of democracy or the deliberate creation of more inequality. But the major thing they trust we aren’t going to notice is what’s happening to the world outside our insulated little bubbles.
Since the 1950s the amount of carbon in the atmosphere has risen from just over 300 parts per million (ppm) to over 420 ppm to reach levels well beyond those of the last 800,000 years. The result is growing climate chaos and knock-on impacts on the planet and the other species that share it with us. Or in many cases used to. As carbon hangs around and takes centuries to dissipate the climate can only get warmer. And warmer. And …
Meanwhile, we’re stubbornly continuing to stoke the fire. At the time of COP 1 in 1995 six gigatons of carbon were being added to the atmosphere every year. By the time another document of well-meaning verbiage was being spewed out by COP 28 in 2023 carbon emissions were over 37 gigatons a year. There’s still no sign of carbon emissions falling, let alone getting anywhere near the rapidly receding ambition of ‘net zero’.
But let’s ignore this. Most politicians unite in soothing us with business as usual and mindless growth of our extinction economy. Voters yearn for normality and security, not realising that normality is undermined by the everyday lives they lead. But zombies have ‘no energy’. Few are left with the energy to confront our looming existential crisis. Or even discuss it. And certainly not during an election.
Zombies ‘act without thinking’. Don’t expect to see much thinking in our zombie election as TV, press and social media do their job to busily distract us with trivia. Zombies also ‘attack and eat humans’. The Tories have been doing a pretty good job of this since 2010, at first aided and abetted by the Lib Dems, funnelling huge wads of cash into the hands of the super-rich, which often includes themselves.
Zombies act ‘as if unconscious’. This presumably includes those Labour tribalists who persist in their endearing belief that the authoritarian centralists who now run British Labour will reverse the process of looting the public sector, immiserating the poor and destroying the natural world. LOL is the appropriate response, I believe.
Zombies move around ‘as if … controlled by someone else’. The political class has long been captured by fossil fuel interests and the other beneficiaries of the extinction economy. But all of us zombies stumble around while being controlled by capital and the logic of profit-making, the real conspiracy that hides in plain sight.
But hey, let’s just party on, parrot profound statements quarried from two minutes ‘research’ on Google and make our decision on who to vote for based on how they eat a bacon sandwich or some other equally important criteria. Elections these days are just a branch of entertainment so settle back and enjoy the coming idiocies.
Kernowpolitico: notes from the periphery 