We'll be singing when we're winning

[dolorosa_12]

We left the house in the early, sun-drenched hours of the morning to cast our votes when the polls opened at 7am. Our polling station had a queue outside the door, which I hadn't seen in previous elections, and took to be a good sign. I wandered back around 8pm (with two hours remaining before polls closed), and the place was still doing a brisk trade, with a queue, and family groups of voters continuing to arrive on foot (often while walking the dog) or pulling up in cars. As I turned to walk home, I was followed all the way by a middle-aged couple who were talking earnestly about how they'd researched various tactical voting guides online in order to ensure they voted most effectively to remove our useless Conservative MP.

The other good — and hilarious — sign was that, at 10am when I went to buy groceries, Waitrose was already partly sold out of bottles of champagne and other types of sparkling wine. (Possibly the peakest of peak upper middle class sentences ever written.)

In the end, it wasn't even close. The exit poll at 10pm predicted the Labour landslide that all the previous surveys of voters had all anticipated, and I literally burst into tears of relief. And then we sat up, watching the coverage into the early hours of the morning, watching the losses roll in and Labour's lead grow. By the time Jacob Rees-Mogg and Liz Truss (the latter in the most ungracious manner imaginable) lost their seats, I was delirious with exhaustion, but glad I'd stayed up to witness it. We collapsed around 8am and fell asleep at last, just as my sister in Australia was texting me wanting to dissect the vote.

My tasks yesterday were to vote, to clean the bathrooms and toilets in our house, and to put out the garbage for collection.

The metaphors write themselves.

There will be time enough to handwring about the rise of the far right (which, to be clear, has translated into four or five seats and a second-place vote share elsewhere that while worrying, is something that can be neutralised by the new government if they are sufficiently focused and effective in policymaking that has recognisably positive concrete effects on people's lives). There will be time enough to start complaining that the current iteration of Labour is insufficiently left-wing for the tastes of its voting base. Right now, I don't want to hear it, and I particularly don't want to hear any sentiments along the lines of 'the lesser of two evils' or 'they're all the same': anyone who truly believes such things hasn't been living in this country for the past fifteen years.

That toxic sludge of a 'government,' that pack of grasping, petty, vindictive, narcissistic, unserious, malicious incompetents is gone. We have outlived them!

Let us have this moment of cathartic celebration. We voted for it, and we deserve it.

Comments

[edwardianspinsteraunt]

I absolutely agree - I came of age during Corbyn's tenure as Labour leader, and most of my friends are still enormous fans of his and were very glad he got back into parliament on Thursday; but the more I look back on those years, the more inclined I am to be critical. He would certainly have been a better option than Johnson et al, and I agreed with him on a lot of points of domestic policy; but it's painful to think how 2016 might have gone differently with a committed pro-EU Labour leader who was willing to work with Cameron on the Remain campaign. I've also heard worrying things about his willingness to excuse (or even condone) authoritarian governments like Russia and Venezuela purely on the grounds that they're anti-Western, although I don't have the mental or emotional capacity to investigate that further just now. All of which is to say, I find it incredibly frustrating that his fans still dismiss any honest criticism of him as mainstream media scaremongering, and I've found it isolating to be the only one in my circle not wanting him back as Labour leader, little though I like Starmer. It's refreshing to hear that I'm not alone!

[dolorosa_12]

He's terrible on foreign policy — what you're saying about Russia and Venezuela is just the tip of the iceberg — the issue is that he's the type of leftist who is just reflexively anti-USA, and is incapable of recognising imperialism when it doesn't come at the hands of western Europe or the US. The Syrian opposition loathe him, Ukrainians loathe him because he keeps bleating about a 'ceasefire' there (which would only benefit Russia, which had previous 'ceasefire' agreements with Ukraine that they violated by ... starting the fullscale invasion in 2022, and most Ukrainians are categorical that they don't want a ceasefire, as Russia would immediately use it as an opportunity to rebuild its military and invade again from a position of strength), he's repeatedly given interviews on Iranian and Russian state media, and if I recall correctly, Corbyn has also made statements that verge on genocide denial when it comes to the wars in the Balkans in the 1990s.

I have to imagine that he would have been better at handling the pandemic than Boris Johnson, but I think when it comes to every single other major challenge of the past decade, he proved himself incapable to the task, or would have been actively harmful if he'd been in power (in the case of the UK's response to the fullscale invasion of Ukraine). And, as I say, he is unelectable as a Labour leader seeking to lead a government: capable of electrifying the Labour base and piling on votes in constituencies in London, other big cities, and university towns, but completely unable to broaden his appeal to build a broad voting coalition in a big enough number of seats to actually get him elected. His supporters have rewritten reality so that the elections of 2017 and 2019 — which, let's not forget, he lost — are somehow staggering vindications not just for left-wing policies, but for Corbyn personally because they 'went to the election with the most progressive Labour manifesto ever' and got a really high percentage of votes (clustered in a small enough number of constituencies for it not to matter).

Anyway, these people have made Corbyn their whole personality, and I'd rather spend this post celebrating what we have — which, let's be clear, is a miraculous and staggering electoral comeback by the Labour Party after they were consigned to oblivion in 2019 (to the point that I thought it would take two or three electoral cycles before they would return to office) — so I will stop ranting about him.

[edwardianspinsteraunt]

Absolutely! Corbyn is not a serious force in politics anymore, and we must work with what we have and push the new government towards legislation and policies that meaningfully improve people's lives and actually fix things.