Happy Place

I have half-written many, many entries about politics for this blog. But I can never finish them. Perhaps it is because I am a layman and I don't feel confident publishing amateur thoughts. But I don't think that's it. I think I am tiring of the need to express my political opinions in the context of the current government. And by "current government", I mean any current government (though perhaps this one in particular).

When you express a political opinion, you are trying to influence others. You are trying to push for change, whether good (left) or bad (right) (I like simplicity). You are trying to fix something. But imagine you are trying to fix a car. The engine is running, but a cylinder is misfiring. To fix the car, you turn off the engine, right? But in politics, the engine is always running. We don't have the luxury of stopping it to replace the parts.

I guess I'm saying that I much prefer designing utopias to shouting into an unresponsive blob, and I don't understand why other people aren't the same. As Labour have lurched right, the arguments about conflicting utopian visions seem to have been lost. I find it fascinating that there isn't a detailed, defining, unchanging utopia set out by each party long ago and towards which that party aims. I'm imagining model cities in glass cases, or a list of bullet points. A left-wing party might imagine a perfect future to have equal access to healthcare and education for all, and a guaranteed minimum standard of living that is not so very far below the highest standard of living that anyone has. A right-wing party might imagine a perfect future to see every child brought up by a married, heterosexual couple, or for people to have the right to pass on their financial privilege to their children.

Even writing those sentences, I guess I see why this idea wouldn't work. A utopia is a grand vision, a society that works harmoniously and where everyone is happy. The idea of a utopia is, itself, left-wing; it is based on the idea that you might not just be looking out for yourself. You can't design a right-wing utopia. Every time you write down a bullet point, you see how it would fuck up life for some group of people.

A left-wing utopia, the model in the glass case, would be an oblate spheroid, containing the whole planet. The right-wing utopian display model would be a series of small glass hemispheres over Chelsea, The Cotswolds, Monaco...

Yeah, let's fucking shout about the lethal shit that's being done in the name of financial necessity while the bankers laugh at their ridiculous stasis. But let's not forget to construct our own utopias, on paper or in our heads, in song or in dance, and let's not pollute them with bullshit compromise. Change should flow from your ideology into the world around you, not the other way around. Yeah, Labour?